James Goldsmith; Wall Street Raider Founded British Political Party
James Goldsmith, swashbuckling Wall Street raider, political maverick and one of Europe’s wealthiest and most colorful figures, died Saturday of a heart attack after a long struggle with cancer, his lawyer said. He was 64.
The billionaire, who held joint French and British nationality, was surrounded by family members at his villa near the chic seaside resort town of Marbella in southern Spain when the end came.
“It happened in the night, in the small hours of the morning,” attorney and friend Samuel Pisar said in Paris.
A saddened Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister, called Goldsmith “one of the most powerful and dynamic” people of their generation. French archconservative Philippe de Villiers, whose 1994 campaign for the European Parliament was bankrolled by Goldsmith, a staunch and outspoken foe of closer European integration, eulogized the billionaire-turned-politician as “a visionary for whom each world problem was a personal concern, and an entrepreneur who knew what earning a penny meant.”
Through canny and often daring deals on both sides of the Atlantic in food processing, retailing, publishing and stock trading, Goldsmith built a fortune that is now estimated at $1.7 billion to $2.4 billion.
“If you see a bandwagon, it’s too late,” was his motto in business. As one of the savviest corporate raiders during Wall Street’s go-go 1980s, he was not afraid to take enormous chances--for example, borrowing $660 million in 1981 to buy Diamond International, a U.S. wood products company, when interest rates had soared to 20%.
His life was a roller coaster ride of successes and failures. But in 40 years, he amassed wealth estimated by a British business journal in 1994 as the seventh-largest fortune in Britain.
His personal history was as flamboyant as his public persona. Goldsmith was born in Paris on Feb. 26, 1933, to an Anglo-Jewish father, Frank Goldsmith, a Conservative member of the British Parliament, and a French Catholic mother, Marcelle Mouiller.
His first job was that of a waiter at the famed Ritz Hotel in Paris. At 20, he eloped with Isabel Patino, daughter of a Bolivian tin magnate. Less than a year later, she died in childbirth. He then married Ginette Lery, a Frenchwoman, but openly flouted social conventions by keeping an aristocratic mistress in London, Lady Annabel Vane Tempest Stewart, whom he visited on weekends. He wed Lady Annabel after his second marriage ended.
Goldsmith, who was elected a member of the European Parliament in 1994, spent a reported $32 million of his own money to found a political party in Britain that campaigned this spring against further integration in the European Union. Europe, Goldsmith direly predicted, was on the way to becoming a “new German empire,” and too much power had been put in the hands of the European bureaucrats in Brussels.
The Referendum Party won more than 800,000 votes but failed to gain a single seat in the May 1 parliamentary elections that Tony Blair’s Labor Party won by a landslide. Running in the Putney district of southwest London, Goldsmith failed to get 5% of the vote.
Goldsmith had first suffered cancer of the pancreas in 1985. News reports said the cancer resurfaced and that he was receiving chemotherapy during the British campaign, but the illness was kept secret. Last month, he was reported to be critically ill in a French hospital.
Goldsmith’s General Occidental food group, the first building block in his fortune, became one of Europe’s largest at the end of the 1970s after it bought the U.S. supermarket chain Grand Union. For his services to British exports, he was knighted by then-Prime Minister Harold Wilson.
Goldsmith also made a foray into publishing, most notably buying the French news weekly L’Express, which he turned into a mouthpiece against the Socialists. But in July 1987, only months before a stock market crash, the prescient Goldsmith unloaded most of his empire, which then included L’Express, several other French publishing houses, Grand Union, Diamond and a petroleum drilling company working in Guatemala.
He rapidly became one of the continent’s leading critics of the 1992 Maastrict Treaty on European political and economic union, and also crusaded against the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which he labeled “pure madness, a crime,” because it allegedly undermined European industry by lowering barriers to U.S. and Japanese imports.
In three marriages, Goldsmith fathered three sons and three daughters, one of whom, Jemima, is married to Imran Khan, the former captain of Pakistan’s cricket team and a politician.
