James Goldsmith - Personal Life

Personal Life

Goldsmith was married three times, and was claimed to have coined the phrase: "When a man marries his mistress, he creates a vacancy." However, the phrase was coined by Sacha Guitry. His first wife, whom he married when 20, was the Bolivian heiress Maria Isabel Patiño, 17-year-old daughter of tin magnate Antenor Patiño and the 3rd Duchess of Dúrcal. When Goldsmith proposed the marriage to Antenor Patiño, Patiño is alleged to have said, "We are not in the habit of marrying Jews", to which Goldsmith is reported to have replied, "Well, I am not in the habit of marrying Indians." This story, if true, is typical of Goldsmith's humour. With the heiress pregnant and the Patiños insisting the pair separate, the couple eloped in January 1954. The marriage was brief. Rendered comatose by a cerebral hemorrhage in her seventh month of pregnancy, Maria Isabel Patiño y Goldsmith died in May 1954; her only child, Isabel, survived and was delivered by Caesarian section. She was brought up by Goldsmith's family, and was married a few years to French sportsman Arnaud de Rosnay. On her father's death, she inherited a large share of his estate. Isabel has since become a successful art-collector.

Goldsmith's second wife was Ginette Lery, with whom he had a son, Manes, and daughter, Alix. In 1978, he married for the third time; his new wife was his mistress Lady Annabel Birley; the couple had three children, Jemima (born in 1974), Zacharias (born in 1975) and Benjamin (born in 1980). Zac and Jemima have both become much reported upon figures in the British media; in 2003 Ben married heiress Kate Emma Rothschild (b. 1982), daughter of the late Amschel Rothschild and his wife Anita Guinness of the Guinness Brewery family. Speculation about Goldsmith's romantic life was a popular topic in the British media: for example, in the press, there were a number of claims that James Goldsmith was the father of the family friend Lady Diana Spencer, due to his friendship with Diana's mother, and later with Diana.

After his third marriage, Goldsmith embarked on an affair with an aristocratic Frenchwoman, Laure Boulay de la Meurthe, with whom he had two more children. He treated Mrs de la Meurthe as his wife and introduced her as such during the last years of his life. Goldsmith died at 64 of a heart attack brought about by pancreatic cancer.