FOR Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of disgraced media tycoon Robert Maxwell, it was an exquisite moment of triumph and redemption.

As she sat in the front row of Fashion Week’s Ralph Lauren show, all eyes were on her and the man at her side: Britain’s Prince Andrew.

As necks craned to see, as cameras flashed and motor drives whirred, the favorite child of the former New York Daily News owner smiled regally and quietly savored the attention.

Just a short time ago people spat the name Maxwell — if they spoke it at all.

Now, the public gesture of friendship by Britain’s most eligible royal was a signal to the world that the once reviled Maxwells were back. And beautiful. And 39-year-old Ghislaine is their public face.

“Ghislaine couldn’t have done in Britain what she has achieved here. Every step would have been scrutinized and criticized,” said a family friend.

“She has kept just the right profile. Being out with Prince Andrew was a startling social coup. It made everyone stand up and take notice.”

IT IS nine years since Robert Maxwell disappeared from the deck of his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, into the inhospitable waters of the Atlantic.

He left behind a media empire in ruins, crushed by debt and pillaged by his own avarice. He had looted $600 million from the pension funds of his employees in a vain attempt to keep the empire afloat, and thousands of families would suffer as a result.

It is widely assumed that Maxwell committed suicide rather than face the inevitable consequences. An inquest called it an accident. Either way, he left his seven children to shoulder a heavy burden of ignominy and shame.

Incredibly, they have rebuilt another fortune on the smoking ruins of the first.

Robert Maxwell saw himself as Britain’s Joseph P. Kennedy, the patriarch of a dynasty that would wield financial and political power on a global scale. Like Kennedy, he expected much of his children and pushed them hard.

“He would interrogate them at the dinner table about history or geopolitics,” said a once-regular guest in at the sprawling Maxwell estate in southern England.

“He could reduce them to tears if they didn’t know an answer. He could be a cold man and the temperature in the house dropped noticeably when he was there.”

The colder he was, the more his youngest daughter tried to please him.

Maxwell even dreamed that he might one day forge an alliance with the Kennedys by marrying Ghislaine to JFK Jr. The two became close friends and remained so until Kennedy’s tragic death last year. Ghislaine has also been a guest at a number of Kennedy weddings and family events.

GHISLAINE was sent to Marlborough, one of England’s top private schools, and to Oxford. Maxwell made her director of a British soccer club and set her up with her own fiefdom, a company that supplies corporate gifts.

When in January 1991 he bought the tottering Daily News and rescued it from oblivion, she was sent to Manhattan to be the advance guard for his foray into New York society.

A few months later he was dead. Of all his children, she took his death the hardest. She was unable to accept her father’s guilt and likely suicide and insists to this day that a dark conspiracy of Mossad renegades and Sicilian contract killers took his life.

Ghislaine was already suffering emotionally. A long, passionate affair with Count Gianfranco Cicogna, the dashing scion of the aristocratic clan that owns the Ciga Hotels chain, ended painfully. She had hoped to one day be his Contessa.

In a short space of time she had lost her lover, her prospects, her share of the family fortunes and her beloved father.

“There’s a story that the Maxwell name was so detested in London that she had to walk around in a blond wig so people wouldn’t recognize her,” said a prominent New York socialite who has known Ghislaine for several years.

“She was being treated like Marie Antoinette there. She wisely realized she had to make her life in New York where her father was less well-known and people care more about what you can do than who you used to be. She was like one of those European princes who have been deposed. But she had no title — and no money!

“The most obvious way out of a jam like that is, ‘Find a rich husband, darling, and quick.'”

Ghislaine wasn’t entirely penniless. She lived off an inviolable trust immune from the family’s financial difficulties and this yielded an income of about $100,000 a year — enough to ensure that she would never starve.

After her father’s disgrace, even that caused resentment. When she was spotted flying on the supersonic Concorde to New York there were critical editorials in the British press about her lifestyle.

Ghislaine took a $2,000-a-month apartment on the Upper East Side and began working selling real estate. One thing the collapse of her father’s empire couldn’t take away from her was the rich network of wealthy and influential friends she had made in a lifetime of privilege.

She used them now.

Within a year of her father’s death she was dating immensely wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein. He provided a platform for her return to public prominence and filled the emotional vacuum in her life left by the death of her father.

EPSTEIN is an enigmatic figure. Rumors abound — including wild ones about a career in the Mossad and, contrarily, the CIA.

Some have said he was once a concert pianist. He seems to deny nothing and admits even less.

“He told me he was a spy hired by corporations to find major amounts of money which had been embezzled,” said one of Epstein’s former girlfriends, diet guru and former TV personality Nicki Haskell. “He made it sound very glamorous.”

Epstein made his fortune as a righthand man of Leslie Wexner, founder of The Limited, the retailing giant that owns Intimate Brands, Victoria’s Secret, and Bath & Body Shop.

He now runs an investment company, J. Epstein & Co., and the walls of his Madison Avenue office drip with six-figure works of art.

He is fond of expensive toys — of which Ghislaine might be termed both his favorite and most expensive.

Among his other trinkets: a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud in which he sometimes parades around Manhattan.

As well as owning one of the largest and the last great mansions of the Upper East Side, Epstein has built a $3million, 26,700-square-foot hilltop mansion in New Mexico, one of the largest homes in the entire state. For a yard, he purchased the 10,000-acre Zorro ranch once owned by the state’s former governor, Bruce King.

He shocked other New Mexicans — even the rich ones — by having supplies of New York rye and authentic bagels flown in to the private airstrip on his hacienda and by covering his bed with designer sheets that cost a reputed $600 each.

“Jeffrey is a fun-loving character, but he can be demanding and critical and sometimes eccentric,” said a friend of the couple. “He can be impatient one moment and solicitous the next.

“He’s very charismatic. I wouldn’t say Svengali, but he does get what he wants, usually. He and Leslie Wexner are very, very close.

“He is very, very rich and as much as he enjoys making it, he seems to have no problem spending it, either. He has provided Ghislaine a lot of the security and confidence she was missing when her father died and she has provided him with a lot of prestige.”

GHISLAINE’S siblings have also been busy rebuilding the family’s financial fortunes.

The source of much of their new wealth is The McKinley Group, a California company founded by Maxwell’s twin daughters, Isabel and Christine.

Named after North America’s highest mountain, the company developed a high-tech Internet search engine called Magellan. It was profitable but inevitably, after a while, started to lose customers to Yahoo.

The Maxwell sisters sold out to a another Internet search-engine company, Excite, for about $18 million. When Excite was sold last year, the value of those shares had risen 1,000 percent.

An Israeli e-mail company, CommTouch, hired Isabel as president while Christine launched another Web business, an Internet publisher named Chiliad.

Meanwhile, Maxwell’s sons, Kevin and Ian, rounded up private investors in the United States to create Telemonde, a company involved in the complex business of buying and leasing telecommunications bandwidth. The company went public last year but has suffered setbacks in its efforts to make an impression on the Nasdaq stock market.

Even so, this was not enough to prevent a social comeback — at least in Britain. The whole posse is profiled in the April Tatler; the cover line reads, “The Maxwells Are Back … and making another fortune.”

Robert Maxwell was fond of warning his children: “Confidence is like virginity. You can only lose it once.” His children, however, appear to have recovered theirs.