Goldsmith

Prologue

THE letter was short but relatively sweet. 'Sir James [Goldsmith] regrets that his commitments at present mean that he will not be able to meet you to discuss your forthcoming book,' it ran. 'He is appreciative of your approach to him.' The interesting thing about the missive is that it was not written on Goldsmith's letterhead but on that of Britain's leading firm of libel lawyers, Peter Carter-Ruck and Partners. It was vintage Goldsmith: the iron fist in the velvet glove.

In his lifetime he did everything he could to prevent publication of this unauthorised biography. The authors were warned at the outset that one of his first moves would be to assign private detectives to delve into their backgrounds and political affiliations. Members of his family were instructed not to speak, with the perceived threat that to do so would mean being left out of his will. And friends were warned not to cooperate. The pressure eventually told on the publishing house which had commissioned the book in the first place. Citing its fear of a costly libel action that publisher pulled out of the deal, paying the writers their advance in full.

What no one but Goldsmith and a handful of confidants knew at this stage was that he had only a matter of months left to live and he was determined that a work over which he had no control should not turn out to be his epitaph. According to one member of his circle, there was even talk of paying the authors half a million pounds to lay off. In the event, Goldsmith died a month before the book's planned release date in August 1997, satisfied that he had resolved the matter.

But, by now, the writers had an intriguing book on their hands. They had travelled the world to investigate their subject in his various habitats and, despite pressure from Goldsmith, scores of friends and enemies, associates and rivals, had spoken out about the workings of the Goldsmith empire. Even a handful of independent-minded relatives had broken ranks and told their stories of life within the family. What emerged was an extraordinary portrait of a remarkable man. Suddenly publishers were interested anew. In the wake of Goldsmith's death, an updated manuscript was completed and this book is the result.

The man who made a fortune from a spate of company takeovers in the US was used to having things his way. His new career in politics may have brought him back into the limelight but it made him, if anything, even more sensitive to unauthorised probing. And with good reason. Few public figures led a more colourful existence than Goldsmith. In Britain, he attracted controversy in the '70s for a ruthless approach to the companies he acquired in his bid to become the housewives' favourite in the supermarket sector. At one stage his Cavenham holding company dwarfed Tesco and Sainsbury's. In the '80s, he sent tremors through many an American boardroom on his way to becoming one of the most feared corporate raiders in the US. Meanwhile, his high-profile private life was proving equally fascinating. In the years following his first marriage in 1954, he produced eight children by four different women.

It is a maverick style that was obvious from his very earliest days, when even his school friends realised that he was no ordinary mortal. 'There was a kind of precocity to Jimmy,' says Tom Stacey, who was in the same house at Eton as Goldsmith. 'I was at university with Rupert Murdoch later and I had exactly the same feeling about him. Their stage was bigger than ours.'

The Brylcreem bounce evident in Goldsmith's leaving photograph from Eton was replaced in later years by a bald crown ringed by distinguished grey and first diabetes, then cancer, robbed him of the prodigious energy that had seen him through many an arduous boardroom battle. At six feet four inches, he had considerable physical presence but it was his force of personality that left the biggest impression. Few who were fixed by the icy stare of his piercing blue eyes ever forgot the experience. It reminded one of the P.G. Wodehouse character whose gaze 'could open an oyster at 50 paces'. Friends recall bellowed greetings from the other side of the room at parties; television interviewers testify to his slash and burn approach to questions; and business associates still marvel at his grasp of a balance sheet.

Almost to the end, there was no sign of a waning in his legendary sexual powers. 'My father's idea of complete heaven was a harem,' wrote his daughter Isabel, shortly after his death. While remaining married to his third wife, Lady Annabel, he continued to conduct a very open affair with Laure Boulay de la Meurthe, an aristocratic Frenchwoman 18 years his junior, and even these relationships did not preclude outside dalliances. There was the occasion at a party held by Lord Rothermere in the Austrian city of Salzburg when he took a fancy to a Greek soprano who was entertaining the guests. The next day she awoke to the heavy scent of flowers: Goldsmith had bought practically every red rose in the city and had them delivered to her room. During his Paris days he frequented an establishment run by the notorious Madame Claude and such was his prowess that he gained a reputation among her girls as a 'bon coup' (loosely translated as 'good lay'). Screenwriter Laline Pauli, who was once a house-guest of Goldsmith's, certainly found him a man of appetites: 'I believed him when he said that if he should find himself alone, in a strange town, unmarried, it would be a matter of a few hours before he would remedy that terrible situation and that he honestly could not imagine existing without a woman.'

Goldsmith's life has been public property since the '50s, when his elopement with Isabel Patino, a teenage Bolivian heiress, made headlines around the world. Her tragic death just four months later and the subsequent high-profile custody battle over Isabel, their daughter, only confirmed his image as a popular hero. He went on to earn international renown as a risk-taking tycoon. As he himself once said, 'If the next takeover comes off, I could be as rich as Croesus, or I might be as poor as Job.' But his reputation took a battering thanks to his polygamous lifestyle, his predatory business practices and a bitter legal feud with the satirical magazine Private Eye.

Having made his pile, Goldsmith turned his energies away from his commercial interests. First he resolved to change the world as an environmental activist but, rebuffed by elements of the Green establishment, he decided to concentrate on another cause, making the politics of the European superstate his battleground. To promote his views, he founded political movements on both sides of the English Channel. He sat as a member of the European Parliament for a French constituency from 1994 till his death and, in the UK, he used his own vast resources to establish the Referendum Party in an attempt to force the government's hand on a plebiscite on European integration. He clearly felt the need to prove himself on the greatest stage of all. 'There are certain families who bring up their children with leadership presumption,' says Tom Stacey. 'In that respect they are natural movers and shakers and if they see something they care about being messed around with they will do something about it.'

Following her marriage to Imran Khan, the former Pakistani cricket captain, Jemima Goldsmith has emerged as the star of the younger generation of Goldsmiths. But a question mark hangs over which of Goldsmith's sons has inherited his potent brand of drive and flair and is best qualified to take on his mantle in the financial sphere.

His oldest son, Manes (by his second wife Ginette Lery) who, in the normal course of events might have been tipped for the succession, was running a tobacconist's in Twickenham at a time when he might have been expected to be being groomed to take over. Goldsmith was always fiercely protective of Manes (known to the family as Frank) who was diagnosed as a severe dyslexic and sent to the sports-oriented Millfield School.

While no one doubted Goldsmith's devotion to his first born son, it is clear that the boy was not considered dynasty-perpetuating material. And the creation of a dynasty is something that was very close to Goldsmith's heart. For centuries, the Goldschmidts - as they once were - had been poor relations to the Rothschilds, Europe's leading banking family. By the time Sir James's branch of the family arrived in England at the turn of the century, however, they were wealthy enough to buy a 5,000-acre estate at Cavenham in Suffolk. But it was Goldsmith's success that represented the best chance for generations for the family to emulate the Rothschilds' achievements. Indeed, by 1974, Goldsmith had earned a much-coveted place on the board of the Rothschilds' French bank. What he sought then was a successor from his own bloodline with the wherewithal to follow in his footsteps.

In choosing the name Zacharias for the baby presented to him by his then mistress Annabel in 1975 - one year after the birth of Jemima - Goldsmith made no secret of his expectations: the name means 'a boy with a future'. He was at pains to make him a legitimate heir and to this end, three years later, he divorced Ginette and married Annabel, his lover of 14 years. She went on to have a third child but if Annabel thought his birth would mark an end to her husband's breeding, she was to be proved wrong.

Goldsmith went on to father another two children, by Laure, a relative of the Comte de Paris, the pretender to the French throne. But while Goldsmith showered her with all the perquisites of a rich man's consort, there...