James Goldsmith
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Sir James Michael Goldsmith (February 26, 1933, Paris, France - July 18, 1997, Benahavis, Spain) was a British billionaire businessman and founder of the Eurosceptic Referendum Party.
Born in Paris, he was the son of luxury hotel owner and former Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Maj. Frank Goldsmith and his French wife Marcelle Mouiler, and younger brother of environmental campaigner Edward Goldsmith. James Goldsmith dropped out of Eton College in 1949, observing: "a man of my means should not remain a schoolboy."
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[edit] Business
His business successes included winning the British franchise for Alka-Seltzer heartburn relief medicine and acquiring the Bovril company.
He was also notable as a greenmail corporate raider; in the 1980s he made $90 million from his attempted hostile takeover of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. One result of this was that Goodyear's missile technology was sold to the Chinese. Goldsmith retired from business dealings in 1987.
Goldsmith is well known for his legendary legal attack on the magazine, Private Eye, who referred to him as "Sir Jams". In 1976 the billionaire issued over sixty libel writs against Private Eye and its distributors, and nearly bankrupted the magazine. This story is detailed in the book Goldenballs!. In 1977 he bought the French weekly L'Express.
Oliver Stone's 1987 film Wall Street featured a British billionaire financier, Sir Laurence Wildman. This character is widely believed to have been modelled on Goldsmith.
[edit] Politics
Goldsmith was a close friend of Lord Lucan, the aristocrat who was famously suspected of murdering his family nanny before disappearing completely. Goldsmith, Lucan and their fellow friend the zoo-keeper John Aspinall were gambling companions in the 1970s. It is believed that they discussed the possibility of violently overthrowing the troubled government of Harold Wilson and replacing it with a dictatorship. [1]
In the mid-1990s, he was a major financial backer of a leading Euro-sceptic thinktank, the European Foundation.
[edit] Referendum Party
Goldsmith founded the Referendum Party, which stood candidates in the 1997 general election. Part of its was that Goldsmith mass-mailed thousands of homes with a VHS tape expressing his ideas. It has been suggested <ref>http://www.geocities.com/sirjamesgoldsmith</ref> that he made plans to broadcast nationwide to the UK during the election from his own offshore pirate Referendum Radio station.
In the 1997 election, Goldsmith stood as a candidate in the London parliamentary constituency of Putney, against Tory cabinet minister David Mellor.
Goldsmith stood no chance of victory, but the declaration made for one of the most memorable moments of the entire election - Mellor lost his seat to the Labour candidate and was subsequently taunted by Goldsmith (who clapped his hands slowly and chanted "out, out, out!") and other candidates.
Mellor correctly predicted that the Referendum Party was "dead in the water", and it effectively died with Goldsmith when he succumbed to pancreatic cancer just weeks later, aged 64.
[edit] Personal life
Goldsmith was married three times, and is believed to have coined the phrase: "When you marry your mistress, you create a job vacancy."
His first wife was the Bolivian heiress Maria Isabel Patiño, the 18-year-old daughter of Antenor Patiño and his first wife, the Duchess of Durcal, a member of the Spanish royal family. With the heiress secretly pregnant and the Patinos insisting the pair separate for good, the couple eloped in January 1954. The marriage was tragically brief. Rendered comatose by a massive cerebral hemorrhage in her seventh month of pregnancy, Maria Isabel Patiño de Goldsmith died in May 1954; her only child, Isabel, who survived, was delivered by Caesarian section.
Goldsmith's second wife was Ginette Lery, with whom he had a son, Manes, and daughter, Alix.
In 1978 he married for the third time; his new wife was his hitherto mistress Lady Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart, daughter of the 8th Marquess of Londonderry; the couple had three children, Jemima (born in 1974), Zacharias (born in 1975) and Benjamin (born in 1980).
After his third marriage, Goldsmith embarked on an extramarital affair with an aristocratic Frenchwoman, Laure Boulay de la Meurthe, with whom he had two more children.
Goldsmith died in 1997 of pancreatic cancer, aged 64.
[edit] References
- Communist Propaganda Apparatus & Other Threats to The Media, by Sir James Goldsmith - a booklet containing his statement to the Media Committee of the Conservative Party at the British House of Commons, 21 January, 1981. (The Conservative Monday Club distributed this booklet).
- Ingrams, Richard, Goldenballs! London, 1993, by Harriman House, ISBN 1-897597-03-7
- The Mayfair Set, a 1999 BAFTA Award-winning documentary series by Adam Curtis describing how buccaneer capitalists were allowed to shape the climate of the Thatcher years, focusing on, among other members of The Clermont club, James Goldsmith.fr:James Goldsmith
