Remembering Jimmy

ONE of the greatest pleasures of my life has been my friendship with Sir James Goldsmith, who died last week. There was no sadness about Jimmy, even at the very end, when pancreatic cancer had spread. He refused painkillers and kept a clear head. The jokes never stopped, nor did the wide-ranging discussions, anecdotes and all, on everything from the history of the Zulus, to NATO expansion, to Louis XIV. Jimmy was an expert on history, philosophy, and politics -- in the case of politics, adding practical experience to book-learning. The last British campaign was enlivened by the way his piercing blue eyes would twinkle and he would gurgle with delight whenever he wrong-footed an opponent.

He was only 64 when he died, but he had packed several lifetimes' worth of action into those years. His father was English, and his mother French, and he was brought up in both countries (as well as the United States, Canada, and the Bahamas). Although Jimmy's father, Major Frank Goldsmith, had been a Member of Parliament before the war and was a hero at Gallipoli, his family's German roots made him a political pariah in wartime Britain, and so he went to France to make his fortune as a manager of posh hotels. He succeeded, though not on anything like his son's eventual scale, and was able to send Jimmy to Eton. At 16, Jimmy ran away, declaring that he was too big to stay in school, and took up a life of gambling at Oxford. He joined the army at 18, in return for his father's paying his enormous gambling debts.

In 1954, Jimmy, at age 21, eloped to Scotland for a Gretna Green wedding with Isabella Patino, her father, a Bolivian tin magnate, having tried to stop the marriage. This produced a famous repartee. Patino: "Nothing personal in this, Monsieur Goldsmith, but in my family we do not marry Jews." Goldsmith: "True, Senor Patino, but there have to be exceptions. You see, in my family, we do not usually marry Red Indians."

Isabella died giving birth, and Jimmy fought a winning battle against her family, who tried to take his baby daughter from him. He then plunged into business, starting with nothing. It took him approximately twenty years to become a multi-billionaire.

Jimmy was a dominating presence wherever he went. His method of hailing taxis was characteristic of him. He would stand in the middle of a crowded and rainy Soho street and shout: "Taxi! Big tips!"

Although he lost his hair when very young, he was extremely handsome, tall, slim, and very well groomed. Women adored him and he adored women. He married three times and had numerous mistresses. (Yet another Jimmyism: "When you marry your mistress you create a job vacancy.") He was loyal, in his own way, to all of them, and all of them were loyal to him. He had eight children by four different women, and never have I seen a more closely knit family.

But it was his genius for friendship that distinguished him the most. I have never known anyone who loved his friends more and was loved more by them in return. Even men who were bested by him at the gaming tables or on the fields of love would have died for him, and he for them.

Jimmy was a brave gambler, even a reckless one, and mostly a winner. We used to stay up night after night in Aspinall's private gaming club, playing chemin-de-fer. The sums were enormous, the atmosphere electric. Jimmy was next to me one night when I drew an eight to the nine of the present King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, and he followed me into the bathroom where I went and threw up. "Don't worry, my dear fellow," Jimmy said. "You'll get it back." Then he returned to the gaming room and pulled what is known as a coup royal, passing his bank after six coups, bancoing it, and winning.

Jimmy was a political player in both Britain and France. For a number of years he acted behind the scenes in bankrolling various anti-Communist organizations, and in paying for the legal defense of journalists who told the truth about fellow-travelers.

In 1994 he entered politics in his own right, winning election to the European Parliament from a French right-wing party. He took it as his mission to expose the waste and bureaucratic tendencies of the European Union. As a polyglot European he was the arch Euroskeptic. He scorned the surrender of "sovereign power, which has passed to 17 unelected and unsackable commissioners, the greatest transfer of power in peacetime, and it took place under a system of organized secrecy."

When Jimmy entered British politics last year -- creating, bankrolling, and leading the Referendum Party -- he was a dying man. The grueling campaign undoubtedly shortened his life. Although undergoing chemotherapy, he traveled up and down the country with his usual unalloyed enthusiasm. On election day he received close to one million votes.

Even while riddled with cancer and in great pain he never once complained, and he died like a Caesar. He gathered his large family in his beautiful Ch"teau de Montjeu, in Burgundy, bade them farewell one by one, and flew off to his property in Spain, where he died later that same day, in the bed in which he was born. He had called me the day before to say good-bye. He sounded cheerful, although very weak. It was I who broke down. I shall miss him more than any other friend I ever had. As the ancient Greeks used to say, "Farewell, dear friend, and may the earth that covers you be soft."

COPYRIGHT 1997 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning