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Goldsmith can be ruthless in his pursuit of profits. "There is a lot of internal rage in Jimmy," says John Train, a New York financier who knows him well, and Goldsmith himself acknowledges, "When I fight, I fight with a knife." Yet he is rather different from the standard buccaneer. When Ivan Boesky moved uptown from Wall Street in 1985, he rented a suite of offices in the same building that housed Goldsmith's New York headquarters, 630 Fifth Avenue, and then asked for a meeting. "He spent most of his time telling me about all the contributions he was making to charity," Goldsmith recalls. "That put me off right there." He refused to have any further business or social contact with Boesky, and when Boesky subsequently admitted to insider stock trading, Goldsmith remarked of his neighbor, "Boesky crawled out of a drain."
Goldsmith is fiercely anti-Communist, extravagantly so. "Jimmy believes," says an old friend, "that the KGB is using the global media to destabilize public opinion and spread lies." Goldsmith is just as fiercely critical of the business establishment, which he calls corpocracy. Big companies, he says, are in league with big government and big unions to stifle change and progress. "With the return of the Democrats to power over both houses of Congress," he says, "you are once more suffering the outrages of that triangular alliance."
And then there is AIDS. Goldsmith repeatedly brings it up in conversations. He believes it threatens to kill most of the human race -- "it could be up to 98% of mankind." This champion of individual enterprise urges that the U.S. join with the despised Soviets and "pool their resources in a massive research effort to find a way to prevent the spread of AIDS." "The thing about Jimmy," says Olivier Todd, whom Goldsmith fired as editor of L'Express for favoring the Socialists in the 1981 election, "is that he's an English eccentric in the best sense of the term. He's sometimes downright reactionary, but he is also ferociously anti-Establishment, left, right and center."
As he looks ahead, Goldsmith sees grim possibilities. He thinks the U.S. leaders may be "surrendering their economic power to Japan and military power to Moscow." But then doubts recur. He clutches again at his amber and gnaws on the butt end of a cigar. "I used to be so sure," he says. "Now I'm in a period of total lack of certainty."
What will Goldsmith do with his billion or so in these uncertain times? Perhaps Goldsmith himself does not know. "He's very superstitious," says a colleague who knows him well. "He won't open an umbrella inside the house. He believes in luck. He believes in fate. From all that has happened, he has good reason to."