Luck, be a lady tonight. When Jimmy Goldsmith's first son was about to be born, in 1959, he insisted on getting a private room at the best clinic in Paris, even though he didn't have any money to pay for it. Then he went to the Travellers Club on the Champs Elysees and found a rich man whom he could entice into a game of backgammon. "He finally got me out of the clinic," says Ginette Goldsmith, whom Goldsmith married four years later, "with his winnings from that game of backgammon."
Their son Manes is 28 now, working in Mexico City for the Mexican national football team, and Jimmy Goldsmith, officially Sir James Goldsmith, is not exactly penniless anymore. His net worth is estimated to be more than $1.2 billion, including holdings ranging from the Grand Union grocery chain to a publishing house in Paris to some oil wells in Guatemala to about 2.5 million acres of rich timberland in Washington, Oregon and Louisiana. And because he liquidated most of his French and British holdings in recent months -- "I've got my bundle," he likes to say in these postcrash days -- he has $300 million in cash and short-term securities. That success not only makes him a potentially major predator in today's markets but gives him the freedom to lecture the world on his views.
Goldsmith also still has Ginette, after a fashion. Now 51 and divorced ! since 1978, she lives in one wing of Goldsmith's Tudor-style Paris mansion, originally built for the brother of King Louis XIV. In the other wing of the same estate, across a courtyard bright with impatiens, lives Goldsmith's companion, Laure Boulay de la Meurthe, 36, a slim beauty with waist-length brown hair, and their four-year-old daughter Charlotte. De la Meurthe is the editor of a monthly style section in L'Express, the weekly newsmagazine that Goldsmith controls. There is also Goldsmith's legal wife Lady Annabel, who lives in a Georgian mansion outside London, where Goldsmith spends a few months every year. Asked how he manages to keep three menages (there are seven children in all) in such a state of contented coexistence, Goldsmith said, "Money helps."
Goldsmith not only likes making lots of money, he likes spending lots of money. "I don't understand people like Warren Buffett," he says of the parsimonious Nebraskan financier, "who pride themselves on living in their first house and driving a used Chevy to work, despite being billionaires." Aside from Goldsmith's Paris home and his town houses in New York and London -- all filled with antique furniture, paintings, statues, silk hangings -- he has just acquired a 16,000-acre hideaway on northwestern Mexico's Gulf of California. "It's the most beautiful place I've ever seen," he says. "It's got the sea, mountains, rivers, lakes. Most of the land is being turned into an ecological reserve, so we can bring back the animals that have always lived in that forest. But I'm building a house there, and I'll be able to give a house to each of my children."
Goldsmith is eating quail as he speaks, washing it down with a vintage claret. He is entertaining a visitor at Laurent, an elegant one-star restaurant off the Champs Elysees. He happens to own the place. He bought it on impulse more than ten years ago, after a late-night party there.