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She was by now pregnant, but just before the birth, she suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Shortly after the baby was delivered by Cesarean section, she died, at 18, having known Jimmy less than a year. The grief-stricken widower went on a short trip to West Africa, and when he returned, he found that the Patino family had kidnaped the baby, claiming Jimmy was an unfit father. He went to court and got the baby back.
Despite Goldsmith's youthful reputation as a scapegrace playboy, there are other patterns here: a determination to do exactly as he pleased, an insistence on living well, a readiness to fight anyone who opposed his wishes, a willingness to take risks, a confidence that more money could always be found. Such patterns, combined with shrewdness and luck, make a success in business all but inevitable. His pharmaceutical business grew rapidly, too rapidly. At one point, he was on the verge of bankruptcy, then discovered on the day that his notes came due that the Paris banks had all gone on strike, thus giving him time to raise more money.
He invaded Britain in 1957, gained control of the British food company Bovril in 1971, reorganized it, moved on to the U.S. in 1973, acquired the ailing Grand Union chain for $62 million, reorganized it, launched a raid on Diamond International, began eyeing St. Regis, the Continental Group, Colgate- Palmolive, Crown Zellerbach, Goodyear Tire & Rubber, Pan Am. He operated through a network of Panamanian and Caribbean holding companies, all ultimately controlled by an organization called the Brunneria Foundation, headquartered in Liechtenstein and entirely owned by Goldsmith and his family.
"People in America were willing to work much harder than in Britain," Goldsmith says, rubbing a lemon-size piece of amber as he paces up and down in an almost bare penthouse office, which overlooks the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. "Most people forget that America's strength is not its culture but its ideology, and that ideology is freedom."
Goldsmith's takeover strategy was simple. His targets were almost invariably old companies that had strayed from their original purpose through diversification, acquired too many senior managers, and were selling at a good deal below their breakup value. He would break them up, sell off the odds and ends, streamline the core and move on to the next project. Goodyear, which Goldsmith tried to acquire last year, provides a good example. The company's original purpose, he told a congressional committee, "was to build better tires, cheaper, and sell them harder," but it diversified into oil and gas, started building an expensive pipeline, dropped $214 million and was losing tire sales to the South Koreans. Goodyear survived only with the help of favorable legislation, and when the battle was over Akron's mayor expressed the local sentiments by saying, "We kicked that slimy bastard out." But Goldsmith ended with a profit of $93 million, and Goodyear adopted many of his ideas for a return to profitability.