Sir Jimmy's Cross-Channel Fiefdom

He is a tall, balding, staccato-voiced multimillionaire--an adviser to statesmen, head of a transatlantic food conglomerate and a director of three great European banking houses. With a French wife and two children in Paris, and an openly acknowledged mistress. Lady Annabel Birley, and two children in London, he lives a heady cross-Channel version of Captain's Paradise. Sir James Michael Goldsmith, 44, juggles all this and just about everything else with the aplomb of a crack gambler --which he also is. His latest gamble, to become an international press lord.

After an unsuccessful bid to buy the Sunday Observer, Goldsmith established a beachhead in British journalism last January by paying Press Baron Rupert Murdoch $3 million for 35% of the non-voting shares in London's Beaverbrook newspaper chain, which includes the ailing daily Express. Sunday Express and Evening Standard. Now Sir Jimmy has struck at the other end of his London-Paris axis: for $6 million he has purchased a 45% share in L'Express, France's largest newsweekly. The magazine's founder, gadfly Publisher-Politician Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, and his family will retain 55% of the magazine's shares; but J.J. S.S. has given up the board chairmanship, and Goldsmith, as chief executive officer, claims he will have effective control.

Sir Jimmy says he was invited to buy into L'Express because it needs both cash and pizazz. Servan-Schreiber, 53, had used his magazine as an ideological soapbox for President Valery Giscard d'Estaing --whose centrist political strategy was badly mauled in last month's local elections (TIME, March 28). Largely because of the magazine's predictable politics and occasional drabness, some readers have shifted to a sprightly, aggressive rival, Le Point. While L 'Express still sells .twice as many copies as Le Point, circulation has slumped by some accounts from 614,000 in 1972 to about 555,000 today. Goldsmith's first priority at L'Express is to reverse the decline in circulation by restoring the journal's credibility and vigor. "My arrival liberates the magazine to be able to criticize," he says.

In part Goldsmith views L'Express as an opportunity to educate himself about publishing so that he can later apply what he learns in Britain. So far he has no editorial control over the Beaverbrook papers, but his nonvoting shares (which he recently increased by another 5%) could become enfranchised if a law affecting stock ownership and backed by both the Tory and Labor parties should be passed.

Welfare State. Goldsmith argues with messianic fervor that Britain, "the last bastion of genuine entrepreneurial capitalism," has strayed too far down the road toward welfare-state egalitarianism and has forgotten excellence, hard work and the need for a talented elite to run things if the economy is not to go smash. Should Britain's economy crash, Goldsmith feels, democracy would expire in the wreckage. Part of the trouble, he believes, is a "cancer in the British press eating away at its guts." This cancer causes the more strident popular journals to attack pillars of the British system from the monarchy to the moderate politicians of both right and left. Goldsmith himself was attacked last year when Private Eye, a popular satirical weekly, suggested that he was obstructing a police investigation into the disappearance of the Earl of Lucan, accused of murdering his children's nanny. Private Eye has since conceded that its story was inaccurate, but Goldsmith is still suing for criminal libel, which could land the editor in jail.

World Headlines. The son of the late Tory M.P. Frank Goldsmith, a Rothschild relative who owned hotels in France, Jimmy went to Eton, then turned playboy, gambling for high stakes at London's gaming tables. At 20. he made world headlines by eloping with Isabella Patino, 18, daughter of Bolivian Tin King Antenor Patino. After Isabella's sudden death from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1954, Jimmy bought a pair of pharmaceutical firms and went into business.

In 1965 Goldsmith founded Caven-ham Ltd. which, through canny acquisitions, has become Europe's third largest (after Unilever and Nestle) food processor. Extending his empire, he then purchased Grand Union, the U.S. supermarket chain. Two years ago, he became chairman of Slater, Walker Securities Ltd. when his friend Jim Slater, because of some freewheeling deals in the Far East, was forced to resign--driving one of the hottest investment companies of the 1960s to near collapse.

Goldsmith rather enjoys some of the criticism leveled against him; for example, that he is a "meteor" who does not play by the rules of the financial community. "If it's too easy to be a meteor, there wouldn't be any natural selection," he says. "Obstacles have to be constantly put there. If I got to the top I'd have every intention of putting the obstacles there for the fellows behind." As for his dual households, he says: "Nobody can accuse me of humbug."

Some observers believe that Goldsmith wants to emulate Rupert Murdoch and create a publishing empire in the U.S. Jimmy denies it. "I'm not American, and I think people must wage war in their own country; one stands and fights where one is." That means war on two fronts since Goldsmith, whose mother was French, has dual nationality. So far, of course, he is only positioning himself for the battle.

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