It is not just that Annabel Goldsmith was born a lady and Jordan, well, wasn’t; nor is it that Goldsmith was a good girl rather than a good-time girl, for today’s special guest has provoked so much scandal she could have kept Max Clifford on a retainer. Instead, Annabel has endured because, like the club, she oozes class.
And, to be clear, not merely the class that comes from her old man, the 8th Marquess of Londonderry, or muckers such as the late Diana, Princess of Wales; this is about character, style and steeliness. A surgically enhanced model might now trade in one husband for another here-tonight-gone- tomorrow wastrel further up the Premiership, but Annabel Birley (as she was) had the sense to bolt with one of the most brilliant entrepreneurs on the planet: the late, great (and often bad) Sir Jimmy Goldsmith.
In widowhood Annabel, 72, is the matriarch of this über-glam dynasty. And having interviewed most of them, I can attest to the family charisma. While many stinkingly rich families are dysfunctional, the Goldsmiths stick together. Before my date with mama, Zac — the Conservatives’ king of green — rings to beg, charmingly, that I don’t stitch her up; Lady G’s daughter, peachy Jemima Khan, has also been on the blower, instructing mama not to talk about her relationship with Hugh Grant.
I am summoned to the family house in Surrey. I say “house” but it looks more like a village. It is virtually in London yet is surrounded by the greatest luxury trinket of all: space. Formal gardens give way to parkland and woods. Estate agents must come just to drool and dribble. I am buzzed in (tradesman’s entrance) to a menagerie of dogs and servants. Lady G glides through the chaos to shake hands, handsome and immaculate, announcing that one of her ���five and a half dogs” (she shares one with Jemima’s two boys) is trying to eat the pool man. She is not overly concerned.
There is something rather disgraceful about Lady Goldsmith; I warm to her instantly. She recalls distracting a Lady Smithers while Goldsmith’s old mongrel Copper impregnated Smithers’s prize pedigree: “I could see this out of the corner of my eye while this terrible old snob was telling me her dog was going off to stud and how the puppies would be worth hundreds each,” she confides. “Copper was very potent.”
Advertisement
Our lady has just written a book about the wanderer she took in — no, not Jimmy; Copper the canine — which could have been excruciating but is surprisingly jolly. It recalls him being kidnapped to Brighton, taking a cat on a bus and becoming a regular at a local pub.
But we have come to hear about Goldsmith’s life not about her dogs. Passing the great staircase, I am drawn to a picture of an even grander pile, her family ancestral home up north: “I can’t bear to go back,” says Lady G. “The grounds are full of new houses owned by people like Kevin Keegan.”
They just don’t make aristocrats like this any more. Jemima has just spoken of her sense of guilt for being born with too much bunce. Does Lady G share that concern? “Not really,” she puzzles. “I do my bit. I am not ostentatious. I look after those who have worked for us. I support just about every animal charity you can think of. There are lots of people who are a great deal richer.”
What’s this: keeping up with the Rothschilds? “I was brought up in great houses but I was never spoilt. It would be £5 for Christmas; we weren’t little rich kids. My father never had any money as, embarrassingly for him, he only had an allowance.”
Later she admits she feared that after her sons Zac and Ben inherited so much they would go off the rails, but is proud Zac became an environmentalist and “Little Ben, Ben” a tycoon “with a finger in every pie like Jimmy”. Lady G, who had three children with her first husband, Mark Birley, the founder and owner of Annabel’s, and three more with Goldsmith, says her rule for parenthood is “don’t interfere, though it is hard. I know that would make them go the other way”.
Advertisement
She quizzes me about what I make of Zac; this is one proud mother: “I was a hands-on mother and I am a hands-on grandmother. We go on holidays; I talk every day. I’m not judgmental about women who work, but I was so besotted with my children I never wanted them out of my sight.”
Perhaps she is so constant with her children because Jimmy was so inconstant. Lady G married him after conducting an affair while still married to Birley. Intriguingly, she wonders if she made the right call: “David Frost had me on his show once and almost went as far as you with his questions, though not quite. I meant to say by nature I was a one-man woman instead of which I said ‘I’m a one-woman man’, and came back to find the family in hysterics.”
Suddenly she looks serious, as if deciding that after all these years she may as well answer properly: “If things had been slightly different I think I would have stayed with Mark. But I wouldn’t have had these wonderful, magical children I had with Jimmy. People think I behaved disgracefully, but it wasn’t quite like that.”
Was it a mistake to bolt from Birley? “It is enormously sad to see this great strong man in a wheelchair; he is not at all well. I am always told, ‘He never remarried because he is still in love with you’ but,” she says, eyes clouding, voice thickening “we are just very good friends. I think he does love me and I love him.”
Would she remarry? “Christ no. I am too used to doing my own thing. Besides, I am much too old and it might not fit in with the children.” Then again, marriage for Lady G has never been entirely conventional. Her union with Jimmy prompted his notorious observation that marrying one’s mistress creates a vacancy; a vacancy he swiftly filled. But Annabel says, “I could have travelled more with Jimmy but I couldn’t bring myself to leave the children. That was my mistake.”
Advertisement
But then she would not have wanted, like the Queen, to have left the young Prince Charles for six months then shake his hand at the quayside. “No, but I think you’ve chosen the only example you could against the Queen. While it must have been extremely difficult for him (Charles), what is written isn’t quite accurate; she didn’t have a choice, she had to go on that tour.”
Was Jimmy similarly misunderstood? “In his own way,” she emphasises the words, “he was a good father and — mad though this must sound — a good husband; very caring. And so good to talk to.” She pauses: “I still miss Jimmy. I loved his take on things. I long for him to appear one night at the end of my bed just for a second so I could ask about an event of the day. What would he have made of everything following 9/11?” He was indeed compelling: Annabel, at random, quotes his view of visiting the countryside: “After 24 hours every blade of grass becomes an enemy.”
Far from being an incorrigible socialite, Annabel insists we have her wrong: “My bliss is staying at home and looking like an old mess.” Dear reader: she is expensively suited and even more expensively coiffured. She also bursts with gossip from Sandra Howard’s book launch the night before, disclosing that the wife of the former Tory leader was denying her novel was raunchy.
“When Annabel’s opened I had to go,” Lady G insists, “but I had never been a nightclub person. It was exhausting as I had to be up for the children.”
For a gal so gilded there are hints, even in this lightest of canine-themed books, of a melancholy streak. Annabel writes how Copper comforted her after her 30-year-old son Rupert drowned while swimming off the west coast of Africa in 1986: “Rupert was my first born and it is not something you get over. If you have a child so young he becomes like a brother,” she says. “He was very special, one of those golden boys, brilliant, incredibly good looking, funny. I can still fall on the floor laughing reading one of his letters.”
Advertisement
While flying to Kenya for a family holiday in 2000 she narrowly avoided another tragedy. A mental patient burst into the cockpit of the British Airways jet she, her son Ben, Jemima and her two sons were flying on and the jet plunged 17,000 feet.
As a result, she hates flying and has passed the family’s Spanish estate to Zac and Ben. “And I am the least terrified in the family,” she says. “Jemima is terrified. Ben is the worst: he has to be pretty well knocked out. Now if a plane hits turbulence I will virtually be in tears.”
So what did she think as the plane plunged? “It was the terrible shuddering. That and knowing you are going to die. It was only by divine intervention we survived.”
She studies the photo of her dead son. “I felt my family all around me were so young; I’d had my life but there were three generations of us. Even Zac is pretty terrified: he was sitting in Mexico hearing news flashes with his entire family on board. “Ben was behind me saying: ‘Oh Mum, we are going to die’. Even though we were upside down I tried to take my seatbelt off and turned round to say in this slurred voice: ‘We are not going to die’ .”
Lady G knew how to cope in adversity. After an idyllic early childhood her mother died of mouth cancer at 47 and papa “became a total alcoholic. He couldn’t live without her so he set out to kill himself. We found ourselves without either parent really and Jane, my elder sister, brought us up”. Though home became a dark dream, she always cried returning to boarding school, missing her mother. As she says with magisterial understatement, “Life became a little more difficult.”
Advertisement
Was this why she married so young? “Maybe,” she ponders. “I just think I was mad about Mark,” she laughs. How has society changed since those nights of champagne and dancing? It is less “graceful”, but perhaps reminding her daughter that press intrusion is hardly new, she recalls she was confronted by a wall of paparazzi at her (first) wedding: “It was so unusual to be marrying in a register office, aged 19; everyone thought I must be having a baby. If you are well known and going to be photographed, do it with good grace.”
Ah yes. Critics put her in the dog house for that early marital disgrace, but actually, whether roaming or staying home alone, she has never lost her grace.
Copper: A Dog’s Life by Annabel Goldsmith is published this week by Little, Brown, £10.99