By WENDY LEIGH

Last updated at 23:02 18 May 2007

On the wealthy Upper East Side of Manhattan,

80 well-connected guests gathered in a grand

£6 million town house to celebrate the opening of a new shop belonging to designer Allegra Hicks, granddaughter-in-law of Earl Mountbatten.

The night before the party, the hostess

had been inundated with calls from disgruntled socialites, irked that they hadn’t received an invitation.

The hostess greeted their objections

with her customary charm, but remained

unmoved. As always, her list had been

carefully edited, and she intended it to

stay that way.

Among the select few were Hollywood

star Matthew Modine, Kennedy family

member Mrs Anthony Radziwill, Peggy

Siegel, PR consultant to the stars, and

Julie Janklow, heir to a literary dynasty.

There was a Rockefeller on the list, as

well as the inevitable countesses,

billionaires and New York luminaries.

The

guests spent the evening sipping vintage

Dom Perignon champagne from cut

crystal glasses before toasting their hostess

— the woman whose immaculate society

credentials had drawn them all together.

As the glasses of such an elite set were

being raised in her honour, she must

surely have felt as if she had finally made

it in New York.

After the toast, she

took the guests into the townhouse’s

imposing library. There, they were

confronted with yet more evidence of

how seriously their hostess took the

social pecking order.

She had stuck fake spines on the books,

with titles referring to her best friends.

According to an eyewitness, this led to

something of a scramble among the

guests as they struggled to see if they had

made it as one of her book titles:

"There

was ferocious competition between

guests as they compared how far up the

friendship pecking order they were."

So just who is this superstar society

hostess who has New York’s rich and

talented clamouring for admission to her

inner circle?

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None other than Ghislaine

Maxwell, the youngest daughter of the late newspaper tycoon and

fraudster, Robert Maxwell.

It was in 1991 that Maxwell

plunged from the deck of his

£15million luxury yacht — a 180ft

vessel named Lady Ghislaine after

his daughter — and soon

afterwards it was discovered he had

stolen £440 million from the Mirror

Group pension fund.

Ghislaine’s reputation, like that of

the rest of her family, was in tatters.

As it became clear that Maxwell’s

employees had lost their pensions

because he had raided them, any

member of the Maxwell family seen

living the high life provoked

contempt and fury.

Ghislaine soon caused outrage by

being photographed boarding

Concorde while at the same time

publicly speaking of her financial

struggle — her father, she lamented, had

left her only an annual £80,000 trust

fund to live off.

She compounded the error when

she maintained she could not

understand why people felt anger

towards her.

Increasingly, she was

seen to be resolutely

unsympathetic to Maxwell’s victims and,

astonishingly, sought to defend her

father’s behaviour even after it

became clear he had defrauded so

many of his employees.

Before long, there was the

inevitable speculation that she was

living off stolen money and Ghislaine was said to have taken to

wearing a disguise in Britain to

avoid recognition.

But it was a different story in

America, where Ghislaine found she

could do as she pleased — and

over the years she has taken full

advantage of this attitude.

As her

party for Allegra Hicks shows,

Ghislaine has now managed to

manoeuvre herself into the very

heart of New York’s business and

Hollywood elite.

But given the straitened

circumstances she complained of, the

crucial question is: How has she

done it?

The answer almost certainly

comes in the shape of a once

glamorous American billionaire financier

named Jeffrey Epstein — a man

now waiting to stand trial in Florida

after being accused of paying

underage girls for tawdry sexual

encounters.

Epstein, it seems, took Ghislaine

under his wing when she arrived in New York a broken and lonely

woman and helped her not

only back on to her feet but also

to become one of the most

sought-after members of the city’s

social elite.

Ghislaine, 46, first met Epstein,

54, in New York in 1991, the year of

her father’s death and a time when

she was said to be desperately

lonely.

She was instantly attracted

to him — a man as flamboyant,

dominant and rich as the father she

had just lost.

In no time, she was appearing at

Epstein’s side as the "celebrity"

guest at the opening of a glamorous

Manhattan restaurant. She was

also a regular guest at his Upper

East Side apartment.

Very soon, a

friend reported that "her

dependence [on Epstein] is pretty total".

At one time, there were even

rumours they would marry.

Epstein provided for Ghislaine a

life of glamorous parties, exotic

vacations and well-connected

friends.

He showered her with gifts:

£300 bottles of champagne, grand

holidays and offered her the use of

his mansions and seven cars.

Together, they lived life to excess.

But most important, Epstein

helped Ghislaine forget her past.

Through him, she began to build a

respectability in New York that would have been impossible in

London, where Maxwell’s crimes were

less easily forgotten.

Epstein was not, however, altogether

straightforward. He may have been a

firm fixture on the social scene but he

had, to say the least, an opaque

professional history — a little like Robert

Maxwell.

He is rumoured to have worked either

for the Israeli intelligence service,

Mossad, the CIA or even both.

On one

occasion, he arrived in London at the

home of a British arms dealer bringing a

"gift" — a New York police-issue

pumpaction shotgun. "God knows how he got it

into the country," said a friend.

He has been described as a one-time

maths teacher at a private school for girls

and as a concert pianist. More recently,

he has been given the vague title of

"property developer".

And while his assets include a £3million

Palm Beach mansion, a 26,000-acre

Mexico City estate and a priceless

Picasso, the exact origins of his fortune

are not clear — although through his

company, J. Epstein and Co, he manages

the fortunes of around 15 clients with at

least £500million in assets.

But while he indulged Ghislaine

financially, Epstein — like Maxwell — could

be cruel.

"He is a strange man," one

friend is reported to have said early on

in their relationship.

"Not dislikable but

difficult to understand. He can treat her

very well or very badly. He can be

impatient, demanding and extremely

critical of her. At the same time he is

kind and protective."

Ghislaine was madly in love with

Epstein — and said to be desperate to

marry him — but Epstein would not

commit himself and openly dated

other women.

Inevitably, their romance fizzled out

but Ghislaine remained firmly in

Epstein’s life.

Ghislaine is said to have

repaid him for his kindness to her when

she first arrived in New York by

introducing him to high society and

potential business clients through contacts

she made during her school days at

Marlborough, and through her father’s

illustrious friends.

Thanks to Ghislaine, Epstein partied at

Sandringham and Windsor with Prince

Andrew, and attended a birthday party

for the Queen.

Thanks to Epstein, Ghislaine scaled

the heights of New York society. It has

been a very successful partnership.

But he is not the sole reason for her

success. Just as her father in his heyday

was feted by high society and dubbed

"the Bouncing Czech" because of his

resilience, so she is every bit as steely.

The similarities between Robert

Maxwell and Ghislaine are striking. Like

her father, Ghislaine has verve and

energy but above all she shares his

lethal brand of charm.

Even Maxwell’s

enemies have been forced to concede

that he had an unbridled charisma

which was in part responsible for his

success.

"She is able to entrance anyone she

chooses. She is very manipulative and

winds people round her finger," a friend

reveals.

However, it was not until Maxwell’s

death that she began to exhibit her

father’s ambition. Ghislaine had always

preferred socialising to working.

Yet

when left with virtually nothing after

her father drowned, she came into her

own.

Boarding the yacht with her mother

Elisabeth, shortly after her father’s

death, Ghislaine appeared

griefstricken, yet totally in control.

Wearing a

red tartan suit, she coolly walked into

her late father’s office and — according

to journalist John Jackson who is said

to have witnessed the scene —

shredded all incriminating documents on

board.

Ghislaine denies this ever took place,

but Jackson has never retracted the

claim.

If true, those documents were the key

to Maxwell’s financial empire and

Ghislaine, astutely, was making sure they

would never come back to haunt the

Maxwell family.

In the aftermath of his death, she was

defiant in the face of the criticism and

jibes levelled at her father — such as

the joke made by a Maxwell employee

that, on the morning he left for the

boat, he was "buoyant".

Like Maxwell,

who never betrayed the fact that his

empire was crumbling, Ghislaine was

adept at masking her emotions.

But today, just as Ghislaine’s social

cachet is enjoying an all-time high, her

association with Epstein threatens once

again to mar her reputation and even to

destroy all she has achieved.

Epstein is due to appear in court in

November following an 11-month

undercover investigation by police after

the stepmother of a 14-year-old girl

claimed she was paid £150 to give him

an erotic massage at his flamingo-pink

villa.

The underage girl is said to have been

taken there by an 18-year-old student,

Haley Robson, who told police she was

recruited at the age of 17 to provide the

billionaire with a nude massage for a fee

of £100 — and later was asked by

Epstein to provide him with a series of

young girls.

While Epstein has robustly denied the

charges, friends have rallied around

him, including Donald Trump, who

once said:

"He likes beautiful women as

much as I do, and many of them are on

the younger side."

Jeffrey Epstein’s life may be about to

crash as resoundingly as Ghislaine’s

father’s once did. If convicted, he faces a

lengthy prison sentence.

And while no

longer romantically involved, Ghislaine

and Epstein are still inextricably bound

together socially and in business.

So what will Ghislaine Maxwell do if

she is once more faced with the man in

her life losing everything? The answer is

simple.

Born of a tyrannical, dishonest

but charming father whom she never

deserted, Ghislaine will inevitably stand

by her man.

No matter how reviled, or disgraced

Epstein finds himself, friends of

Ghislaine are in little doubt about her

loyalty to him.

And judging by her past

form, she will survive — even if Epstein

doesn’t.