James Goldsmith
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Image:James goldsmith.jpg Sir James Michael Goldsmith (February 26, 1933, Paris, France - July 18, 1997, Benahavis, Spain) was a British billionaire businessman and founder of the Euro-sceptic Referendum Party.
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Business
Born in Paris, son of Maj. Frank Goldsmith a luxury hotel owner in France and the U.K. and a former Conservative M.P. and his French wife Marcelle Mouiler, Goldsmith dropped out of Eton College in 1949, observing, "a man of my means should not remain a schoolboy." 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. He retired from business dealings in 1987. In the mid-1990s he was a major financial backer of a leading Euro-sceptic thinktank, The European Foundation.
Goldsmith is also well known for his legendary legal attack on the magazine, Private Eye, who refer 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!
Referendum Party
The party stood for the United Kingdom general election, 1997, as part of which Goldsmith mass-mailed thousands of homes with a VHS tape expressing his ideas. It has been suggested (see [[1]]) 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 however correctly predicted that the Referendum Party was "dead in the water", and it effectively died with Goldsmith when he succumbed to pancreatic cancer a few months later, aged 64.
Family Life
Goldsmith was married three times. 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 yet another extramarital affair with an aristocratic Frenchwoman, Laure Boulay de la Meurthe, with whom he had two more children. Goldsmith is believed to have coined the phrase "When you marry your mistress you create a job vacancy".
Goldsmith died in 1997 of pancreatic cancer, aged 64.
His daughter Jemima was married to cricket legend Imran Khan and had two sons with him, but they ultimately divorced. His son, Zac, is married to Sheherazade Ventura and has two children. In 2003, his other son, Benjamin, married Kate Rothschild of the Rothschild family and they also have a child.
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 House of Commons, 21st January, 1981. (The Conservative Monday Club distributed this booklet).
- Ingrams, Richard, Goldenballs! London, 1993, by Harriman House, ISBN 1897597037