Did Jemima’s womanising father leave her addicted to philanderers?
Russell Brand. Hugh Grant. And now a twice-divorced PR playboy
THERE is something supremely elegant and tasteful about Jemima Goldsmith. With her glossy, blonde, A-list hair, perfect figure, those doe eyes and classy but sexy clothes, she is among the most sophisticated and in-demand women in London.
Wasn’t she a vision in white broderie anglaise at a film premiere last week? And she left the whole room weak at the knees in top-to-toe black lace at a fundraiser for the Soho Theatre last month.
Yet there’s one question being whispered about her in social circles. What is it with her and her taste in men?
Following her divorce from politician and cricket hero Imran Khan in 2004, fragrant Jemima has dated a succession of chaps who, to put it bluntly, could be seen to be punching above their weight.
There’s actor Hugh Grant (caught in flagrante with a prostitute, subject of a famous police mugshot, various love children), comedian and social irritant Russell Brand (recovered sex and drug addict with a penchant for orgies) and now here comes paunchy, 52-year-old, twice-divorced, PR man Matthew Freud.
For some reason, Jemima finds a ‘wrong ’un’ — to use her own words — irresistible.
Freud, it recently emerged, fathered a baby with an unnamed mutual friend in the dying years of his marriage. His former wife, TV executive Elisabeth Murdoch, only found out about the child while they were divorcing in 2015, and was, naturally, appalled.
Friends immediately leapt to his defence, gushing how regretful he was and how the love child was a ‘symptom’ of the unhappiness in the marriage, not the cause of it.
But despite a career in PR that has netted him a fortune of £160 million and counting, Freud has arrived in 42-year-old Jemima’s life trailing a less-than-perfect reputation.
Ten years Jemima’s senior, he had actually met Elisabeth when both were still married, and she was expecting her exhusband’s baby.
Before taking up with Jemima, whom he has known for years — both are members of the Chipping Norton set, which includes David Cameron and motoring journalist Jeremy Clarkson — Freud used to hang out at favourite celebrity haunt the Chiltern Firehouse, with fellow bachelor hotelier Andre Balazs, and was dabbling with society beauties including Mohamed Al Fayed’s daughter, Camilla.
While some find him ‘charming’, others say that his self-assurance is ‘obnoxious’.
Indeed, Jemima’s ex-boyfriend Hugh Grant punched Freud square in the eye in Annabel’s nightclub in 2010. The cause of the fracas was, apparently, a rather greasy quip by Freud to the effect that Jemima had ‘ traded up’ when she briefly dated the film director, and Madonna’s ex-husband, Guy Ritchie two years earlier.
Although their liaison is very much in its early stages, Freud is said to be ‘rather smug’ that he’s now dating her himself.
To be fair to Jemima, she does seem to know that people are gossiping about her odd taste in men.
Last Halloween, sharing a picture of herself in fancy dress with a bloodspattered clown attached to her back, she wrote: ‘I’m falling for him. I do love a wrong ’un.’ It would be difficult to disagree. After a nine- year marriage, undertaken with creditable sincerity and ending in an amicable divorce, it is perhaps easy to forget what a startling choice Imran Khan was back in 1995.
He was 42 to her 21, and had cut a swaggering romantic swathe through the nightclubs of Mayfair and Chelsea.
She was a shy heiress with a passion for designer labels.
They met in a nightclub when she was on a break from her studies at Bristol University. Within a few weeks, they were married — for him she converted to Islam, learned Urdu and moved to Islamabad.
Some felt that the marriage was an attempt to escape the shadow of her father, the late Sir James Goldsmith, a notorious philanderer who was absent for a lot of her childhood.
It seems she had to fight for his attention, and often complained how she was ‘always the last to know’ what he was doing.
Many believe her father’s atrocious treatment of women may lie at the root of her appetite for ‘bad boys’.
He fathered eight children by four women and appeared to have not a shred of remorse about his betrayals, once famously saying: ‘When you marry
‘I’m falling for him, I do love a wrong ‘un’
your mistress, you create a job vacancy.’ It may also explain her reputation as a very highmaintenance girlfriend.
Her first boyfriend, Joel Cadbury, heir to the chocolate dynasty, remembered her as a young woman prone to furies.
He was apparently once dumped on the hard shoulder of the M25 with his bags after an argument. He said that she was the ‘least docile’ woman he knew.
Another pal, the writer Richard Ingrams, remarked that she reminded him of Nicaraguan firecracker Bianca Jagger, the surly ex-wife of Rolling Stone Mick.
Yet their divorce, which Imran said was largely as a result of geographical problems, has been a model of harmony. Imran remains involved with the boys, Sulaiman, 19, and Qasim, 17, who go and stay with him in Lahore in the school holidays. He stays with Jemima’s mother, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, when he is visiting England. He even leapt to Jemima’s defence when, last year, she was dragged into a particularly nasty spat with his second wife, the weathergirl Reham Khan.
When their marriage collapsed after only ten months, a cousin of Reham’s accused Jemima of spreading stories about her, which Imran vociferously denied. Imran has never breathed a bad word about Jemima, nor she about him. Given the dignified way she and Imran had conducted their marriage and divorce, when she embarked on her relationship with Hugh Grant around six months later, many were left puzzled.
Famously pompous and selfrighteous and keen on golf, fast cars and the attention of young women, he’d exited a long romance with actress Liz Hurley, and came to Jemima’s arms with a large dose of scandal in the shape of that encounter with prostitute Divine Brown, in a car in Hollywood, in 1995.
No wonder her family never considered him quite good enough.
They dated for nearly four years, but the break-up was a protracted affair. In a rare moment of indiscretion, she said in 2008 she had dithered before ditching him.
She told Vogue magazine: ‘I’ve even found myself waiting for “a sign”. The watch given to me by a boyfriend when we first met packed up at the point at which the relationship had clearly run its course. ‘I took it as the clear signal I needed that our time was finally up, though of course I’d known that for months. Easier this, than to take responsibility for the decision myself.’
Post- Jemima, Grant went on to have an extraordinary private life, which includes the fathering of four children by two women.
Jemima moved on with a rumoured short fling with Guy Ritchie, with whom she remains good friends, attending his wedding last summer.
A two-year love affair with literary agent Luke Janklow followed. She also dated film executive John Battsek for 18 months in 2011.
But the period of respectability didn’t last. Her weakness for lotharios came to the fore again in September 2013 when she started to date Russell Brand.
An odd couple, they were, however, utterly besotted with each other. He went to her country house in Oxfordshire and they had a date at a Vietnamese eaterie in Hoxton and a pub in Marylebone.
They were seen ‘grappling’ on a sofa at Matthew Freud’s house at a party after the GQ Awards (yes, it is a small world).
One guest said: ‘ Russell made a beeline for Jemima and they started to make out on the sofa in full view of the whole room. None of us had a clue that they were dating until that point. It was embarrassingly passionate. I heard that Matthew had to ask them to break it up and get a room.’
Jemima had first met Brand — a recovering bulimic, drug addict and sex addict — in 2007 when they were both guests of a charity, the Hoping Foundation, which works for the benefit of Palestinian refugee children.
She was still with Hugh Grant, and Brand was in the middle of a dizzying sexual free-for-all with multiple casual partners and glamour models. When asked how many sexual partners he had in a set period, he told his inquisitor to count the days. ‘Work out how many days and, here’s a simple rule, triple it!’ he grinned.
However, the spark between Jemima and Russell remained.
She asked him to write a piece for the New Statesman, of which she is associate editor, in 2011, debating the existence of God. And the flirtation finally ignited into a relationship two years later.
They broke up in September 2014, but not before her name was dragged into a sordid affair, involving Brand and a Hungarian masseuse.
Hungarian-born Szilvia Berki had been hired in June 2014 to give Brand a massage as a birthday present. She said that Jemima had offered her £500 to travel to her £15 million country home, Kiddington Hall.
However, the massage was never delivered, and Ms Berki made a complaint against the couple to the police, saying they’d ‘treated her like a prostitute’.
She eventually lost her case against the couple, and was landed with a £50,000 legal bill.
And now comes Jemima’s romance with Freud — fabulously rich, charismatic, sociable, but with obvious fidelity issues.
It’s a description worthy of Sir James Goldsmith.
Has she finally found the bad boy she’s been looking for all along?
Sir James had eight children by four women Her new man is charismatic, with fidelity issues