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James Goldsmith

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

James Goldsmith as he appeared in his Referendum Party’s mass-mailed video tape, March 1997.
James Goldsmith as he appeared in his Referendum Party’s mass-mailed video tape, March 1997.

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.

Contents

[edit] Early life

Born in Paris, he was the son of luxury hotel owner and former Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Major Frank Goldsmith and his French wife Marcelle Moullier, and the younger brother of environmental campaigner Edward Goldsmith.

James Goldsmith attended Eton, but dropped out in 1949, observing: "a man of my means should not remain a schoolboy". On leaving he presented his housemaster with a set of gramophone records, who then thanked him and said that he had misjudged Goldsmith. In the process of handing them over Goldsmith dropped the fragile records (they were 78s) breaking them in the process.

[edit] Business

James' father Frank changed the family name from Goldschmidt to Goldsmith. The Goldschmidts, like their neighbours and relatives the Rothschilds, had been prosperous merchant bankers in Frankfurt since the 16th century. James' grandfather Adolph came to London as a millionaire in 1895.[1]

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 Loral Corporation. 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" and in Goldsmith's Referendum Party period as "Sir Jams Fishpaste". In 1976 the billionaire issued over sixty libel writs against Private Eye and its distributors, nearly bankrupting the magazine and almost imprisoning its editor Richard Ingrams. This story is detailed in Ingrams' book Goldenballs!. In 1977 Goldsmith bought the French weekly L'Express and between 1979 and 1981 published the UK based news magazine NOW! which ultimately failed to sell sufficent copies to survive.

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 concerned that Britain had been a victim of a socialist conspiracy and that communists had inflitrated the Labour party and the western media. [2]

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 campaign was that Goldsmith mass-mailed over five million homes with a VHS tape expressing his ideas. It has been suggested [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 correctly predicted that the Referendum Party was "dead in the water", and it effectively died with Goldsmith who passed on shortly afterwards.

[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 tin magnate Antenor Patiño and the Duchess of Durcal, a member of the Spanish royal family. When Goldsmith proposed the marriage to Antenor Patiño, Patiño is reported to have said, "We are not in the habit of marrying Jews", to which Goldsmith is reported to have replied, "Well, I am not in the habit of marrying Indians." 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

  • 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.
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