With brother Charles, Maurice Saatchi ran the world’s biggest ad agency. He and his wife, Josephine Hart, were an 80s power couple. Then his life fell apart when she died.
"We'll see you at 11.30am," says Lord Saatchi. His wife, Josephine Hart, died 11 years ago and it is clear that I will be meeting them both. The co-founder (with his brother Charles) of the biggest advertising agency in the world and Margaret Thatcher's political guru spent seven years eating a breakfast of grapefruit segments with his wife at her tomb after her death from primary peritoneal cancer. He still talks to her all the time, "but she doesn't answer". Now he has written an extraordinary book about reuniting in heaven. After reading the 120-page novel Do Not Resuscitate twice, I am not sure whether we will be meeting at his house in West Sussex or at the pearly gates where the book is set. To an outsider he may sound like a reclusive multimillionaire deranged by grief, but Maurice Saatchi writes lucidly and beautifully about whether he should be allowed into heaven as an impossibly rich man who taught the world about negative campaigning, but who loved his wife passionately and beyond reason.
The vast iron gates slowly open and the raked gravel scrunches as I make my way up the winding drive shrouded by laurels and rhododendrons. A view to his wife's mausoleum in the woods suddenly opens before me and beyond is their 19th-century folly, all high walls covered in ivy, gothic turrets and a castellated roof. There are no signposts – "I had the house removed from Google Maps," he tells me. But the name Josephine Hart has been etched into the lawn. In the hall, her fur hats are lined up with her boots and umbrella. I feel as though I'm entering an F. Scott Fitzgerald story.
The house is all immaculate cream carpets and walls, beige sofas and hundreds of dark red roses, changed each week by staff in uniforms. Saatchi is on the staircase, being photographed in a silk shirt, white trousers and sandals, blinking out of his vast tortoiseshell glasses, surrounded by tapestries. He has a dozen identical shirts. The 76-year-old looks frozen in time, a relic of a divine existence as a 80s legend. But he suddenly comes to life and offers me a drink.
A kind housekeeper materialises with a pot of tea and an espresso for Saatchi as he waves the photographer and his assistant goodbye. Then we step into the library he has created for her: thousands of her favourite poetry books and plays are arranged around photographs and portraits of his wife propped on easels. I met her years ago, an extraordinary woman who commanded parties while her clever husband charmed guests from Helmut Newton to Sir Elton John.
There is a full-size cutout of her smiling as she saunters across the Place Vendome. Carved in stone are the words, "Shall we dance?" from the musical The King and I, and first-edition books are displayed opened at her favourite passages. In the centre, a clock is set at 1pm. "Why?" I ask. Saatchi does nothing by chance. He shows me a note, "1pm or never," framed above the fireplace but won't elaborate. It's the beginning of his love story, told in three simple words as always. "She was late," is all he tells me. They were married for 27 years so he must have forgiven her.
Next door, perfectly preserved, is her study, with publicity for some of her Poetry Hour events mounted on a plinth and framed posters for her books, Damage and Oblivion, described as masterpieces by the poet Ted Hughes. On the other side is a 20ft wall of Post-it Notes from Hart to "M", thousands of them, all life-affirming and generous, a gift she left for him most days. There are also 1628 letters buried with her in her mausoleum. Did he ever write to her? "No." It seems strange when he says he loved her so deeply, but he's not an easy man to fathom.
We wander out on to the terrace, surrounded by more statues. Hart only ever wore black and white with dark red lipstick, Saatchi explains, and the house mimics this monochrome simplicity.
"Houses are dangerous to fall in love with, they require a part of your soul," she wrote, but this house is now a manifestation of Saatchi's love for his wife. "We are soulmates," she once told me. Her friend Iris Murdoch said she had a huge capacity for love, having lost three siblings as a child in Ireland, but it was Saatchi who consumed her attention. "A man of quite exceptional perseverance, patience and dogged determination."
The book, I say, feels like an elaborate fantasy and the house is like a set for an Orson Welles film. It's surreal. "But it's true." he says, "When I arrived at the gates of heaven it was worse than at Heathrow, queues, delays, overcrowding." In his novel, Saatchi falls while in the House of Lords, is discovered by Black Rod but slips into a coma and dies. The book is about his trial to see if he has achieved enough to be allowed to enter the world of the immortals. The jury, he suggests, includes Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Sigmund Freud, Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy and he is grilled by the prosecution about whether he tried to change the world for the better.
We settle down to discuss his life. His childhood, he says, was "deeply normal and boring. I had a very happy and nice upbringing." He is the second youngest of four boys and his Jewish family moved from Baghdad to Finchley, north London, in 1947 when he was 1, finally settling in Hampstead. But Maurice and his brother Charles, the art collector, could never be called normal. They both, he admits, always wanted to be world no 1 and their mother encouraged them. "She was obsessed with us, but aren't all mothers?"
The two middle children planned to take over the world. "Advertising was the most exciting industry and we knew we were good at it. Our mantra for Saatchi & Saatchi was 'brutal simplicity of thought'. We realised early on the beauty of simplifying an argument to its essence. It's a talent." In print, this sounds arrogant. But when Saatchi says it he sounds amused by his own vanity.
He had already met Hart – she was his boss at his first job, at the magazine company Haymarket Publications, where he learnt his copywriting skills. "She was four years older. The first time we met we were both already married. But we knew without a doubt immediately – it only took two pairs of eyes and it was instant and irrecoverable. We tried to be friends but became lovers after my note asking her to meet me at 1pm. She was totally in charge and always will be."
Their wedding was in the Marylebone register office; their honeymoon was in Paris. He thought through every detail. "I bought a Bentley and had my assistant bring it across the Channel and take us to the Ritz. We stayed in the Hemingway suite. We repeated that for 27 years, with the same tables at the same restaurants and the same orders. I have tried doing it since her calamitous death," he says. "But it wasn't the same."
Hart was, he explains, "staggeringly important" to Saatchi and his brother taking over the world of Mad Men advertising. "To accomplish anything great in the world, in any field, you need a partner and friend who supports and encourages you and tells you how marvellous you are. Both men and women need that in order to have an impact as well as find any kind of happiness. That couldn't be my brother; it was my lover."
Hart, Saatchi says, convinced him he was a fabulous person: "I increasingly believed in my own brilliance." But she also, he admits in the book, called him "a selfish, self-centred, egocentric narcissist". That's quite harsh. "Yes, that was also her opinion of me. It is true. But I feel that most human beings are like that. They can be both self-obsessed and aspire to change the world."
Would he have sacrificed his career for her? "There was no conflict as my love wanted exactly the same for me as I did myself. 'If you want to be world king, dear, I'll help you,' was her view. She was immersed in writing her books and her love of poetry." How did her son, Adam, and the son they shared together, Edward, fit in? "Children are the centre of everything," he says, but refuses to elaborate.
I'm not yet sure he's convinced me of his worthiness for heaven; there are other obstacles to overcome. He has been on rich lists so long, it must be hard to empathise with the poor, hungry and dispossessed also huddled at the gate. Has he ever cooked a meal for himself? "No." Been to a supermarket? "Not that I remember." Driven a car? "I drive round the gardens." What is the most mundane domestic chore he has done? "I don't do domestic chores." Have you ever dusted? "Definitely not." Or washed up? "A plate once, I think. You could say I've been spoilt."
How could he go to heaven if he is so divorced from the woes of the world and only wanted a beautiful life for himself? "I did believe that in both advertising and politics, I was making the world a better place."
Okay, so let's take his advertising campaigns. He created the Silk Cut ads, with a slash of purple silk, which were brilliantly memorable, but cigarettes cause cancer, so doesn't he feel guilty? "You represent your client as best you can." He could choose his clients. Didn't he have morals and standards? Would he work for Putin? "Actually, I had some sympathy with Russia before this horrible war they launched. But no, he wouldn't be a client. I love the way President Zelenskyy has been so brilliant with his PR – he has weaponised it. I do admire him."
And what about his attempt in 1987 to take over Midland Bank – wasn't that just greedy? "That was a serious turning point. The attempt to take over the biggest bank in Britain in your 30s was considered a step too far. It did serious damage. But we were obsessively interested in globalisation and we thought we were indestructible."
So how can he square all this? "I thought very hard about how to help the least well-off and when I became chairman of the think tank the Centre for Policy Studies, I wrote a pamphlet saying poor people should stop paying tax. I think I convinced the Tories to raise the basic income tax threshold. It made more difference than all the money I could give to charity, which I do as well."
So why did he help the Conservatives, not the Labour Party? He has a bust of Lenin in the garden, so he must admire him. Did the Tories just ask first? "No, I always felt the only party that could solve inequality was the Conservative Party. British politics can be summed up in two sentences: Conservatives are efficient but cruel. Labour is caring but incompetent. I like efficiency. This, of course, is where Boris Johnson and Liz Truss went wrong: being inefficient and cruel is calamitous. If the Labour Party has the brains now to focus entirely on competence, they will win."
In 1979, he taught the world how to campaign with a picture and three words: "Labour's not working." Later, this came back to haunt him with Brexit, when Johnson employed the same tactics: "Take back control"; "Get Brexit done". He grimaces. " 'Labour isn't working' is the poster of the 20th century. It took me five minutes but in some ways it is as much genius as poetry. You are trying to capture in a few words human feelings and emotions. But you have to believe in what you are saying," he says.
He admits he is again sounding smug, so I say he has been accused of being responsible for turning all elections in Britain into vicious, negative briefings. "I am a naturally optimistic person but nine of the 10 Commandments are negative. Politics is adversarial. You are in the ring; you are going to be hit. There is only one thing to do: hit your opponent with a blow that knocks them out. If you can't cope, you can't be in politics."
Maybe he should offer to help again – he was once party chairman. "I'm over helping prime ministers." He agrees the party is now in a death spiral but believes the problems are far deeper than an argument over personalities. "The last time I saw Margaret Thatcher she came to lunch and this concentration of power now in a few companies is the opposite of what she wanted for the free market. She thought that from competition would come better quality and more variety. But it hasn't worked out: most industries are now global cartels. Customers have become irrelevant. Big companies like Facebook and Google are now worse than big government. They have no accountability. It's so disappointing. I think the world is waiting for the next generation to emerge and challenge the new orthodoxies."
I'm still not persuaded that either his advertising career or his political legacy would help him to enter heaven. But his love may be enduring. After Hart's death, he managed to change the law to speed up the chances of curing cancer with his Medical Innovation Act 2016, which allows doctors to experiment more with treatments. "The treatment for Josephine's cancer, and the mortality rate, was exactly the same as it was 40 years before," he says. "I knew I needed to do something."
Hart's death sentence, he tells me, came out of nowhere. "There were no clues she was ill. She went on the Today programme to talk about poetry and she'd had this stomach ache for a couple of days, so I suggested she might as well see a doctor before we went to the country for Christmas." The doctor thought she looked fine, but suggested she was checked by a specialist and sent her for a scan. "It all seemed good. There were lots of people in gowns, only they came back and she didn't. So, I went to find someone to ask. I stopped a doctor and said, 'Do you know what has happened to Josephine Hart?' He looked away and said, 'Yes, I'm dealing with her. We found some stuff.' To which I said, 'What stuff?' He told me to go back to the waiting room." When Hart returned, they asked the couple to go to another address in three hours' time at 5.30pm. "We wandered up and down Marylebone High St in a daze. Then we went into the room and the doctor said, 'Malignant. Advanced. Inoperable.' The consultation lasted two minutes. We left at 5.32pm."
It was 14 months between diagnosis and death, he says bluntly, but then his voice drops. "She was destroyed by the operations and chemotherapy, and so weak. It was all so destructive." He looks shattered. After her death he found it impossible to comprehend how the brutal treatments for cancer couldn't have improved for so many years. "I talked to the greatest oncologists and professors in the world to try to help Josephine but there had been so few breakthroughs. Josephine's body was completely destroyed but they couldn't agree whether it was the treatment or the cancer. Her bosoms were turned into raisins, her perfect legs were turned into elephant trunks, her arms looked like a heroin addict's ... There was so little choice in how to help her. At least this law might help others."
He knows he now appears eccentric. "Edna O'Brien said to me, 'You have built a beautiful shrine.' We lived here for 27 years – 10 more now – we created this garden together and I went to have breakfast with her at her tomb for seven years. That's 3072 miles [4944km] I walked to see her. I don't know why I eventually stopped. I still go sometimes and there is a place for me when I die."
What else does he do? "Apart from admiring myself in the mirror? I still talk to Josephine all the time. There's only one problem – total silence and I can't fill in the blanks."
In his bleakest moment, although Jewish, he went to see the Dean of Westminster to ask him what heaven was like. "Most people would say there are no such spaces as heaven and hell; they are all nonsense. You are put in the grave, buried or cremated, there's a reception and then you are gone. But I do believe in heaven now and I'm not alone: there are four billion Christian and Muslim believers. I just don't think there is a void after death or I couldn't go on."
Did he ever think of ending it all, I find myself asking too bluntly. "The dean told me that suicide is regarded as a sin and if you do it you will never be reunited. I think about Josephine continuously, I don't know if that's rare or completely normal for couples who are separated, but I live to see her again."
He has finally reorganised her clothes and catalogued them. "It's taken me 10 years ... It was my original intention to put all her clothes in our tomb as she was so well dressed. We loved going shopping together. But in the end, there were 14 wardrobes so they won't all fit."
He has also started to socialise more again. "I had a revelation as an unhappy widower. I tried to go to parties and people would always say, 'How are you?' And I would say, 'Fine. How are you?' And they would say, 'Fine.' I'd be trapped in these conversations but it's very stressful to keep up that level of gaiety when you're sad. So now when they say, 'How are you?' I say, 'Terrible'. To which there is only one question, 'Why?' To which my reply is, 'My wife died 10 years ago and I'm finding it hard to get over.' Or if someone says, 'Hi Maurice, I haven't seen you for ages. What have you been doing?' I just say, 'Sulking.' The marvellous thing about this is that people can look over my shoulder and excuse themselves, but it has also produced some wonderful conversations, when people have opened up about their own losses and I have realised that I am not alone in this insanity."
Some people, he admits, say it's time to move on, "but for some of us that will always feel like an act of betrayal". He was lucky to have loved so deeply. "This feels more like a tragedy."
We've chatted for two hours; both of us are exhausted. "Lunch?" he says, and I assume we'll have a sandwich. Instead, two very cold martinis arrive, swiftly followed by two more and we drift in a daze into lunch which has been laid in the old chapel, exactly as it once was for Saatchi and Hart's meals together. We start with the most perfect canapes I have ever eaten, arranged on a silver tray. He knows how to entertain. She once broke his glasses, he says, when she thought he was flirting with a beautiful woman in the south of France. "She never needed to be jealous," he tells me. Next there is a cheese souffle, then an immaculate risotto with tiger prawns, and finally chocolate mousse and petits fours with mint tea. I leave as it's getting dark.
They had both created an idyllic life, flitting between London, West Sussex and France, high on poetry and politics, besotted by each other. No wonder he is still so discombobulated. "Life isn't working," he says, and of course it will never be the same without her. "Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive," Hart writes at the beginning of her most famous novel. Saatchi is damaged. "It's a disaster," he says, "a calamity, a catastrophe, even though I can pretend to sound optimistic. Josephine was right when she said in hospital, 'Our life is ruined.' Then she was in a coma for three or four days. I remember the moment her breathing changed and she died."
He's still devastated, distraught, perhaps a little deranged, but he has grabbed life by the throat and lived an extraordinary life and one day I hope they will be reunited.
Do Not Resuscitate, by Maurice Saatchi (Eris), is out on November 5.
Written by: Alice Thomson © The Times of London