Jimmy Goldsmith

CHAMPAGNE before dinner in the Hollywood Hills in the early 1990s. Two sleek, though now slightly elderly, corporate hawks stand by the window regretting that they have never swooped on General Motors together. The bosses at GM are “timeservers” and “pygmies”, the two startlingly tall men observe with English disdain; it would be doing a public service to toss them out. Of course, jobs would have to go, but there is a fortune waiting to be unlocked. Eventually, Gordon White (the master-mind of the America side of the Hanson takeover machine) admits the truth: “You just couldn't do it. Washington, the American establishment: there would be the biggest bloody outcry ever.” “But that would be the best bit,” smiles back Jimmy Goldsmith.

This story can be read in two ways. For many it will offer yet more proof that Sir James Goldsmith was the devil incarnate: the lack of concern about “the little people”, the contempt for elected politicians. This was a financial wheeler-dealer who, they say, made his billions by greenmailing companies, not by building them, who treated women like chattels (“when you marry your mistress, you automatically create a job vacancy”), and who tried to buy his way into politics with his somewhat-xenophobic Referendum party, which failed to win a seat, and lost him his deposit, in the last British election.

Others will grin. Leading Gordy White off for a tilt at GM would have been entirely in character for a man who hated establishments (one of his finest hours was humiliating a pride of American senators after they dared to question his attempted takeover of Goodyear), who abhorred hypocrisy (he made no secret of the mistresses), who stuck by his friends (like White, who died in 1995), and who feared nobody. Who else would have refused drugs to alleviate the pain of the cancer that eventually killed him—or died attended by his whole family, wives, mistresses and all? To be sure, this was a predator, but then so are most of the nobler beasts in the jungle.

Although capable of charming himself into most circles, Sir James was always an outsider—part British, part French, part Jewish, part Catholic, and never really any of them. He first attracted attention as a schoolboy at Eton, where he won £8,000 (a small fortune then) on the horses. In 1954 he eloped with Isabel Patino, the daughter of a Bolivian tin magnate. (“My family does not marry Jews,” her father harrumphed. “Normally my family does not marry Red Indians,” the 20-year-old beau retorted). A few months later, Isabel died after giving birth to the first of his umpteen children—and the devastated young playboy threw himself into business.

As a businessman, Sir James was not just an asset stripper. He had a hand in creating several businesses, among them Cavenham Foods and Mothercare. He turned around many more, including the Diamond International timber outfit and the Grand Union supermarket chain. Apart from his boundless appetite for risk, his main strength was his sense of timing: he sold most of his assets shortly before the 1987 stockmarket crash. Less admirably, he was a frantic user of shell companies, offshore trusts and other tax-dodging paraphernalia.

Like many buccaneering pirates, Sir James (he was advanced for a knighthood in Lady Falkender's notorious “lavender list”) had a paranoid side. In the 1970s he tried to destroy Private Eye after it suggested that he had helped whisk away Lord Lucan, a gaming friend who had allegedly murdered his nanny. This fury seemed strange, emanating as it did from a man who had always made it plain that he regarded friends as more important than policemen. He had a habit of seeing Marxists everywhere, even at this newspaper, and he professed joy when a journalistic foe died. Old friends who visited his retreat in Mexico joked that it was all “a bit like Dr No” (the estate was protected by a spooky private army). Richard Branson, who jestfully pushed his host into the swimming pool, was not invited back.

It was perhaps this side of Sir James that came out in his political foray. Though he had always been interested in public affairs (his father was an MP; his brother, Teddy, is a prominent environmentalist), attacking the European Union and free trade seemed odd causes for such a cosmopolitan figure. In 1994 his L'Autre Europe won 14% of the vote in France and he was elected to the European parliament. The Referendum Party, into which he put £20m, began as a crusade to force a referendum on Europe in Britain, but became something of an ego trip. His party political broadcast—a solo performance, complete with mad staring eyes—struck some as demonic. At the election count in Putney, the London constituency where he stood, a man who in private was always a model of courtesy, came across as a schoolyard bully, baying for the blood of his Tory opponent.

Friends insist that some of these excesses were caused by the illness then ravaging his body. They are probably right. Nonetheless it was a sad end to the career of a maverick correctly described by his old friend Margaret Thatcher as one of “the most powerful and dynamic people” of her generation.