Ghislaine Maxwell Getty Images

It’s amazing how many people I know crossed paths with Ghislaine Maxwell, and how none of them want their names published. There’s the woman pal who met her in the Eighties through that quintessential playboy Robert Hanson and says, ‘Ghislaine ran with a fast crowd. She was more like a man than a woman, and that’s why men liked her. She was sharp and witty, and a night owl. She always bought the most expensive clothes – but had absolutely no taste.’

There’s the Marlborough contemporary who remembers her being ‘rather up herself’, though he admits to having ‘had a huge crush on her’. She was sporty, he says, and ‘rather good’ at hockey; he can remember her father coming to boom encouragement from the touchline.


And there’s me, who met Ghislaine Maxwell twice and even got her to do some work for me. The first time was in New York, where I was staying with a friend in 2009. My friend had been invited to Ghislaine’s for tea; and having interviewed her brothers Kevin and Ian in the past, I was curious to meet Cap’n Bob’s daughter. So we rocked up at her enormous brownstone on the Upper East Side, where we were shown to the first-floor drawing-room by an inscrutable maid, who told us that ‘madam’ would be with us shortly.

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The decoration was kind of brash: a big cream carpet, a colour-scheme of royal blue, red and black, ornamental china everywhere and a couple of samurai armour-suits on the wall. The maid returned and offered us refreshments (buttery biscuits, as I recall) and we waited in the oppressive silence. If there wasn’t a clock ticking too loudly, there should have been.

Ghislaine Maxwell, 2006 Getty Images


The minutes passed, my friend grew increasingly cheesed off (‘So rude!’) and then ‘madam’ appeared – polo neck, dangly earrings, trousers – and explained in her standard-posh accent that she’d been writing an important email in her study upstairs. She sat down in her high-backed armchair and she was imperious, a little bit like Gladstone addressing Queen Victoria as though she were at a public meeting. You certainly wouldn’t call her engaging. She banged on about the parlous state of our oceans, told us how she’d been on several expeditions to discover the extent of their degradation and, with a laugh, told us that she now had a pilot’s license for deep worker submersibles, as well as helicopters. Fun? Not much.

The next time I saw her was Christmas 2013, at a party in Hampstead. Uninvited, she’d arrived on the arm of a master-of-the-universe type; she was wearing a brown, fleece-lined aviator’s jacket and a black leather mini, and she was much jollier than she had been four years earlier. We were in a group in the dining-room, drinking champagne, and she was handing out cards for the foundation she’d started that year: the Terramar Project, which aimed to gain legal protection for the high seas. One wag looked at the card and said something like,

‘You Maxwells seem to love it underwater’, and she guffawed like the rest of us. I seized the moment and asked if she’d write a free article about Terramar for a website I was editing, and she said, ‘Sure, mail me in the New Year.’

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I did, and she delivered a well-composed piece, leavened with a few personal revelations. (As a child, she’d been a Donny Osmond fan until she switched her affections to Jacques Cousteau; she began diving aged nine, when she would collect shells and ‘discover imaginary islands’.)

The following paragraph stood out for me: ‘I have been collecting skills and certificates forever. It started with the first star I was awarded at school for good behaviour, and was followed by many more, along with awards and other things I could hang in the loo. I “qualified” as a magician’s assistant and pool lifeguard. I learned to bake cupcakes, crochet and speak new languages. Most people grow out of this stage. But for me, it has become a challenge: I have to learn something new every year.’

Interesting, but something was missing – that ‘underwater Maxwells’ joke. So I asked if she’d pop it into the text. Big mistake. She swiftly sent a stiff missive to the effect that I could forget the whole thing if there was any reference to her father.

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It wasn’t always like that: an old chum of her brothers told me about a disastrous date with Ghislaine, during her university days: ‘The family were very well-known in Oxford, so I booked a restaurant in the country to avoid prying eyes. I needn’t have bothered. All she talked about was her father: how great he was, how great it was to be his daughter; how she loved reading about him every day in the papers. And all in a very loud voice.

‘By the end of dinner, the whole place was silent. All the diners – and the staff – were listening in.

This article appeared in the November 2019 issue of Tatler


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