Mysterious Media Baron Brings His Road Show to the Big Apple

When publisher Robert Maxwell’s French twin-engine Ecureuil helicopter is heard approaching the roof of the London Daily Mirror, his prized British tabloid, Maxwell employees often spread news of his arrival with a revealing lack of affection.

“The ego,” word passes, “has landed.”

Last week, at long last, it landed on the American newspaper business.

The Czech-born war orphan who rose to become one of Britain’s richest and, to some, most grandiose characters--he is a symbol of such ridicule to others that Queen Elizabeth II reportedly began calling her household spaniel after him--today published his first edition of the fabled New York Daily News. He won final approval from the paper’s unions and completed the sale of the paper from Tribune Co. on Wednesday.

The Daily News was, in the end, a newspaper no other publisher wanted. The proud, brawling tabloid has floundered financially for more than a decade, and, in the past four months, a strike between its unions and its fed-up owners has driven away most advertisers and halved its circulation--now, at best, about 600,000.

For Maxwell, though, the bloodied and aging News still holds two enormous attractions:

First, it gives him a highly visible presence in America, something that has eluded him despite his extraordinary fame and wealth in Britain. In the United States, he owns the Macmillan publishing house, Official Airline Guides and the Berlitz language schools, but several attempts at buying more high-profile American properties, such as supermarket tabloids, CBS magazines, Scientific American and Doubleday, have failed.

Second, even though Maxwell, like other media barons, says he dreams of building one of the world’s half-dozen global communications empires, nothing quite seems to suit him as well as being a newspaper publisher.

His style indeed seems distinctly 19th Century--more reminiscent, say, of the idiosyncratic and aggrandizing political crusades of William Randolph Hearst than it is of today’s less well-known, profit-oriented executives at such media corporations as Tribune Co.

He travels with a personal photographer, and for his birthday each year, his French-born wife of 45 years, Elisabeth, gives him a bound volume of the newspaper clippings that mention him.

In interviews, Maxwell likes to explain that his motivation for his relentless drive, his dictatorial manner, his 17-hour work days, is not making money but exercising power. He even still personally approves all editorials in the Daily Mirror.

Some who know Maxwell offer a third, less charitable, explanation for his desire to own a struggling American newspaper.

“I think the reason he bought the Daily News is, it is a lot of fun going over and having a scrap with a lot of unions, and seeing if he can salvage something and get a whole mess of publicity in the process,” said one longtime observer of Maxwell in Britain who requested anonymity.

Maxwell himself never responded to numerous requests for an interview. While he has not discussed publicly his reasons for buying the News, he has said he wants to mold it after the paper that Joseph Medill Patterson founded in 1919, which was aimed at a hypothetical immigrant common man whom Patterson called “Sweeney.”

Whatever Maxwell’s motivation, the News now becomes the latest acquisition in an international empire with offices in more than 26 countries, including seven British newspapers, book publishing companies, scientific publishing, satellite communications, magazines, data storage and retrieval, record companies and Britain’s largest printing company.

Maxwell built the empire after World War II by striking a deal with a German scientific publishing house for exclusive worldwide rights to export its back and current issues. Before long, he had similar contracts with most of the Eastern Bloc.

In 1981, he bought Britain’s largest printing company, BPC. In 1984, after numerous attempts to become a newspaper publisher had failed, he finally bought the Mirror Group Newspapers, whose six papers included the Mirror.

In these ventures, Maxwell took struggling enterprises and helped turn them around by drastically cutting staff. He halved the work force at BPC and cut it to a quarter at the Mirror.

But it is the man and the many mysteries about him, more than the corporate holdings, that has engendered the publicity, and at times the ridicule.

One mystery is how he came to England.

He was born Jan Ludvik Hoch to peasant Jewish parents in a Hasidic community in Czechoslovakia. When World War II came, his parents were victims of the Holocaust. Maxwell survived, though how, as attorney John Mortimer wrote in the Sunday Times of London not long ago, “is in some doubt.”

Maxwell says he “led Czech volunteers” out of his homeland and across Europe to France. With the fall of Paris he came to England, where he joined the British army and won the country’s highest military medal.

Along the way, he used several noms de guerre: Ivan du Maurier, Leslie Jones and finally Ian Robert Maxwell.

And he speaks 11 languages. Or six. Or 10. Or nine. Depending on which profile one reads.

“His past seems almost too exotic to be true,” wrote journalist Margareta Pagano in the defunct Sunday Correspondent. “The oft-repeated tales from his past--such as ‘The Escape From the One-Armed Prison Warder in Yugoslavia’ or the ‘Lady Tobacconist in Sutton Coldfield Who Taught Him English in Six Weeks and Whom He Never Saw Again’--raise more questions than they answer.”

Another mystery is his finances.

Most of Maxwell’s funds are sheltered in a private foundation in the tax haven of Liechtenstein, and he consistently refuses to disclose details--including who controls it.

“Nobody really knows where his private money comes from and who actually provides the cash,” said Derek Terrington, a media analyst with UBS Phillips & Drew in London.

One Tribune Co. executive said the key part of its negotiations involved “making sure he really had money.”

Fortune magazine last September listed Maxwell as the third-richest man in Britain, with an estimated net worth of $2.28 billion. But Terrington calculated that, at the time, he had debt of $1.9 billion, which he has now reduced to $1.5 billion.

And Business Week now reports that Maxwell’s debt could be as high as $4.6 billion and that a third of his stake in his publicly traded Maxwell Communication Corp. has been pledged as collateral.

The air of suspicion about his finances is added to by “the Scandal,” an incident now 20 years old but still dogging him.

In 1969, Maxwell tried to sell his publishing house, Pergamon Press, to financier Saul P. Steinberg, who eventually sued, charging that Maxwell had inflated the company’s value. The British government agreed, declaring that Maxwell “cannot be relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company.”

Maxwell lost the company, his Labor Party seat in Parliament and paid Steinberg $6.25 million to settle the lawsuit.

And he won the nickname “The Bouncing Czech.”

But Maxwell, undefeated, bought Pergamon back in 1974 and rebuilt his empire larger than ever.

Perhaps another reason for the mystery about Maxwell is his own penchant for saying things that are easily found out to be not completely accurate.

In discussing his finances in 1987, for instance, Maxwell told Business Week that he had “gone out of equities into government securities” well before the stock market crash of Oct. 19.

It wasn’t true, the magazine discovered. He had sold $26 million in securities, but, as a footnote in Maxwell Communication’s annual report revealed, he had retained $562 million more, which had lost 15% of their original value.

Similarly, in trying to develop business ties with newly opened Eastern Europe, Maxwell told the Independent last year that “I did no business . . . at all with the Iron Curtain countries” before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But the clippings from Maxwell’s own Daily Mirror contradict that. In 1985, for instance, the Mirror reported that he had met with Todor Zhikov, the president of Bulgaria, and “just struck a huge deal with the Bulgarian government to help update the country’s printing and packaging industries.”

Maxwell also published a series of biographies of communist leaders: His forward to Zhikov’s biography said it was intended “to give the English-speaking reader the opportunity to learn of the heroic struggle of the Bulgarian people to free themselves from German occupation and to build a prosperous and happy nation under the leadership of the Bulgarian Communist Party.”

What will Maxwell do with the News?

“He is very good at buying assets from people,” said Terrington. “He is very good at doing the next thing, which is getting the costs down quickly. Everything else is open to question.”

History suggests that he will try to reduce staff and rebuild the business with a new cost structure. His one attempt at publishing an upscale American-style paper, the European, is too recent to know its financial success, although some British analysts suggest that it is exceeding some expectations.

One problem may be a lack of understanding of the United States. During talks with the unions, Maxwell at one point told reporters: “As Yogi Bear said, nothing is done until it is it done.”

The assembled media assumed he was referring to baseball philosopher Yogi Berra’s quote: “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

But then again, for now the paper’s unions are taking Maxwell at his word.