Salman the Smug: As Rushdie's ex-wife pens a deeply unflattering memoir branding him cruel, vain and sex mad, why do young beauties keep falling for him?

Padma Lakshmi has written a revealing account of her eight-year relationship with Salman Rushdie

Naive as she admits she was back then, Padma Lakshmi couldn’t understand why a world-famous, best-selling author took such an interest in her when they met at a lavish New York party thrown by media queen Tina Brown in 1999.

Admittedly, she had been a stunningly beautiful lingerie model, but at the age of 28 she was struggling to move into acting and get her first cookery book published.

The feted author was Salman Rushdie — a Booker-Prize-winning literary giant, not to mention a glamorous global fugitive and champion of free expression as he stood up to a fatwa from the hardline Iranian government.

He was also married with a two-year-old child, but before the evening ended, the owlish novelist had extracted this young woman’s phone number.

This was purely in the interests of research, he assured her, into the experience of fellow Indians living in the West.

Seduced by his ‘greatest weapon, his words’ and flattered by his persistence, Lakshmi — then living in Los Angeles — began a telephone relationship with Rushdie, who was living in London under Special Branch protection.

It soon developed into a physical affair, consummated in his Manhattan hotel room on their very first date.

She woke ‘with a start’ at 3am, she recalls, mortified to find herself ‘naked in a married man’s bed’ and sneaked out of the hotel. Still, she was smitten.

Rushdie is India’s answer to the fabled writer Ernest Hemingway, she said this week. She felt at the time that ‘he was the best thing that ever happened to me by a mile’.

Although she claims she vowed to stop the illicit affair, Rushdie appeared to have no such qualms and reassured her his marriage — to his third wife, Elizabeth West, a publishing assistant — was on the rocks.

And so they became a prominent couple on the New York social scene, despite the death-threat hanging over him for the offence he caused Muslims with his novel The Satanic Verses.

Rushdie’s very open existence in Manhattan prompted criticisms in the UK, where British taxpayers were footing an estimated £1 million-a-year bill to protect him.

Judging by his public appearances, the women have come thick and fast in the years since. They have included the model Pia Glenn (left) and actress Olivia Wilde

But Rushdie, who basks in the social limelight, and his new girlfriend wanted to be seen out.

A year into their relationship, he announced he was getting a divorce. What followed was the most colourful chapter in the life of a novelist whose fine literary achievements have long been overshadowed by his more shabby romantic ones.

Lakshmi, the 45-year-old host of a U.S. reality TV show, Top Chef, has now written an excoriating account of their eight-year relationship. Undoubtedly, it will incense the famously prickly and egotistical Sir Salman, who was knighted in 2007.

In Love, Loss And What We Ate, she portrays him as an insecure and insensitive spoilt baby, requiring constant praise, feeding and attention, not to mention ‘frequent sex’.

Particularly woundingly, she claims that the not so gallant knight of the realm was so selfish that instead of showing concern for a serious medical condition that made sexual intercourse painful for her, he dismissed her as a ‘bad investment’.

According to Lakshmi, the early years of their relationship had been blissful.

She was ‘young, star-struck and love-struck’, and Rushdie — who is now 68 — bought a house in New York where they lived together, splitting their time between Manhattan and London, where he had two children from previous marriages. Although he took her tea and toast in bed every morning, she was left in no doubt that he didn’t consider theirs to be a relationship of intellectual equals. For example, despite letting her read newspaper articles he had written, usually while sitting in his lap, she said that ‘anything but my gushing approval would be ignored’.

Intimidated by his erudition, Lakshmi would rehearse funny stories to tell him on her way home.

Lakshmi met Rushdie, pictured here in 2006, at a New York party thrown by media queen Tina Brown in 1999

Also, she was so ‘terror-stricken’ by high-powered literary friends she would retreat into the kitchen at their dinner parties — unnoticed by her husband as he held forth at the head of the table.

After five years together, they married in 2004. However, Lakshmi admits she failed to realise what their unromantic honeymoon portended for their marriage.

For Rushdie insisted it include one speech-making detour to Barcelona and another to attend a red-carpet event in Cannes to help the PR career of his son Zafar — the product of his first marriage, to the literary agent and arts administrator Clarissa Luard, which ended in 1987. (His second wife was the American novelist Marianne Wiggins, from whom he was divorced six years later.)

Lakshmi admits she was keen to establish her own identity beyond being the famous writer’s eye candy. And so she obtained more TV work, which meant she no longer had the time to wait hand and foot on him. Inevitably, Rushdie became resentful, petulant and jealous, she says.

When she told him delightedly that Newsweek magazine was putting her on the front cover for an issue about the ‘New India’, he churlishly responded that the only time the magazine had afforded him the same honour ‘was when somebody was trying to put a bullet in my head’.

On the other hand, when — every year — Rushdie would plummet into a mental decline after the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to a writer other than himself, it was his loyal wife who would have to console him.

Each time, she recalls, he’d say, ‘Yes, many great writers never get the Nobel’, before reciting, without irony, a list of much more talented writers: ‘Marcel Proust, James Joyce . . .’

Rushdie’s self-centredness made itself felt most woundingly over his wife’s worsening medical state, she recalls.

Other beauties linked to the best-selling author include campaigner Topaz Page-Green and model Riya Sen

New York socialite Melissa ‘Missy’ Brody reportedly became engaged to Rushdie, while Rosario Dawson is another actress that has been linked to the writer 

Lakshmi was suffering increasing menstrual pains, which were actually an undiagnosed condition called endometriosis, in which womb tissue grows outside the uterus. The agony was so severe it could leave her hunched up in bed for days. It also made sex incredibly painful, but the ever-libidinous Rushdie simply assumed she was inventing an excuse for their lack of intimacy.

Denied sex on the night of their second wedding anniversary because she said she was in such pain, he acidly commented: ‘How convenient for you . . . what is it this time?’ Later that night, she had to be rushed to hospital, but even then Rushdie fretted only about his own unsatisfied sexual needs, she says.

As she underwent a series of surgical procedures, in desperation she asked her doctor to ring Rushdie and explain she wasn’t just making excuses.

On one occasion, Lakshmi returned home after a four-and-a-half-hour operation with tubes in both kidneys and stitches in four major organs. Rather than stay and look after her, Rushdie left on a trip the following day, informing her that ‘the show must go on’.

Their relationship in general was deteriorating, says Lakshmi, because she was maturing into a woman who no longer had time for a demanding and moody husband. They would argue increasingly frequently and passionately, with Rushdie storming out of their bedroom to sleep next door only to charge back in ‘like a rhinoceros up on its hind legs’ to continue the row with ‘lethal eloquence’.

On one occasion, in London on New Year’s Eve, Rushdie appeared to let slip exactly how he viewed their marriage when — in front of a friend — he described his wife as a ‘bad investment’.

Devorah Rose, a young aspiring socialite, was involved in an online spat with Rushdie

Eventually, says Lakshmi, her guilt about not being able to play the devoted wife was over-ridden by her ‘outrage’ that, even after all he had seen and been told of her medical condition, Rushdie still couldn’t hide the disappointment in his face when denied his conjugal rights.

When she told him she had seen a lawyer about a temporary separation, Rushdie said she could have one, but it wouldn’t be temporary.

They filed for divorce in 2007, little more than three years after they had wed.

Her account amounts to a devastating character assassination — and yet some were taking Rushdie’s side this week. Lakshmi is clearly a social climber who admits in her book to having had at least one lesbian encounter.

Could their marriage have been one of convenience on both sides, one in which she got the fame she craved while he got a beautiful woman in his bed?

In which case, say sceptics, what did she expect if Rushdie thought she wasn’t keeping up her side of the bargain? That’s a supremely cynical view, and certainly not how Lakshmi paints it in her memoir.

That said, her romantic life post-Rushdie only strengthens the impression that she is a woman instinctively drawn to rich and influential men.

Her next serious relationship was with the billionaire Ted Forstmann, 30 years her senior and who once courted Princess Diana. While still seeing him, she also started a relationship with Adam Dell, an immensely wealthy venture capitalist. When she became pregnant, Lakshmi initially wasn’t sure which of them was the father.

Rushdie has also written about their marriage, and not in the kindest terms.

In his 2012 memoir, pompously written in the third person, he claimed Lakshmi ‘broke his heart’.

But, he added, she was also guilty of a driving ambition ‘that often obliterated feeling’, and a ‘majestic narcissism’ that left him unsure ‘whether to bury his head in his hands or applaud’.

He also criticised her ‘frequent moodiness’, ‘brattish “model behaviour” ’ and frequent coldness towards him. And it was she and not he, says Rushdie, who made the running in their affair after he had resolved to stay faithful to his wife.

Sir Salman told me he had no comment on his ex-wife’s book, but she claims he has told her she is entitled to her say.

Unfortunately, in the ‘he-says she-says’ war of words, Rushdie suffers a significant handicap. A string of other glamorous young women have also attested to the unchivalrous streak that lurks behind his wit and erudition.

Lakshmi, pictured here on new show Style Code Live, said she had been ‘young, star-struck and love-struck’

Judging by his public appearances, the women have come thick and fast — or more precisely young and busty — in the years since Padma.

Invariably towering over the 5ft 7in writer as they pose for the cameras, they have included the model Riya Sen, (India’s answer to Katie Price), the actresses Rosario Dawson and Olivia Wilde, Topaz Page-Green, a model-turned-charity campaigner, and Melissa ‘Missy’ Brody, a New York socialite.

Brody, who reportedly went so far as to become engaged to Rushdie, bears a remarkable resemblance to Padma Lakshmi.

It’s not clear how many of these ever got to the stage of getting breakfast tea and toast from the novelist, who still lives in Manhattan.

But one who did become a notch on the Rushdie bedpost, a statuesque actress named Pia Glenn, attacked him in 2009 as ‘cowardly, dysfunctional and immature’ after he gave her the push by email.

Glenn, 30 years his junior, said Rushdie had remained obsessed with Lakshmi, and was so self-absorbed that he began most days by putting his name into Google to see what had been written about him. After charming her into bed, Rushdie showed little interest in her beyond sex and parading her in public, she said.

‘If he just wanted sex, he should have gone out and paid a prostitute,’ she said witheringly.

The writer countered that he split up with Glenn because she was ‘unstable’ and ‘carries around a large radioactive bucket of stress wherever she goes’. He dismissed her as a publicity-seeking wannabe.

Still, he seems to land himself with an awful lot of those as his weakness for pretty, far younger women takes him into less rarefied social circles than he once enjoyed.

The roue’s most embarrassing tryst came four years ago with Devorah Rose, a young New York aspiring socialite he had found through his penchant for flirting on Facebook and Twitter.

An unseemly spat broke out after she posted a picture of them together online, with Rushdie angrily accusing her of over-egging their connection, and Rose returning fire by deriding him as leering and infantile.

For good measure, she published his stream of painfully embarrassing messages to her, such as the not-at-all Nobel-Prize-winning gem: ‘You look so gorgeous and hottt! see you v soon.’

Rushdie hardly helped himself around the same time by turning up ‘very emotional’ at the party of a former girlfriend, the Manhattan party planner Michelle Barish, and leaving some guests embarrassed by his behaviour.

Two days later, he reportedly proposed to her — even though she was technically still married. She turned him down.

Propelled by his high-octane mix of ego and libido, Sir Salman will no doubt continue to bulldoze his way through the ranks of a certain type of admiring female — even if it’s clear the ageing lothario faces the prospect of ever-diminishing returns.

As for Padma Lakshmi, the woman with whom he is still said to be obsessed, it’s fair to say that particular ship has very definitely sailed.