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When I was 18, Salman Rushdie chatted me up. I was enjoying a lunch-break
latte on a bench in Hampstead, when up sidled a portly, balding,
bespectacled man at least a quarter of a century my senior (he was 47 at the
time). “You look absolutely charming sitting there. I wonder, would you go
for dinner with me?” he spluttered (or words to that effect). I didn’t so
much decline as look horrified, and promptly upped sticks, clutching my
coffee and muttering something about having a boyfriend. It was then that he
played his trump card, calling after me: “But I’m a very famous author, you
know!” This was five years before Rushdie met Padma Lakshmi, the
Indian-American model who would become his unlikely fourth wife. In our
forensic inspection of this beauty-and-the-beast pairing, you wonder if
Rushdie had used a similar chat-up line on her, and that she, ambitious, yet
not particularly talented, had been seduced by the opportunities that life
with a “very famous author” would bring.
On Rushdie’s part, he is reported to have taken one look at a photograph of
Lakshmi and told himself: “If I ever meet this girl, my goose is cooked.”
And his goose was finally done to a crisp when, in July 2007, after a
five-year relationship followed by a three-year marriage, Lakshmi filed for
divorce, amid rumours that she was seeing another man — the ex-junkie chef
and fellow food writer Anthony Bourdain. A friend commented at the time of
their divorce: “I think she just outgrew him.” She said her ex-husband’s
only “complaint” about her was that she was “too preoccupied with her
career”. Many could be forgiven for thinking that her career was being Mrs
Rushdie and accompanying the famous author to events. But two years after
the split, Lakshmi is keen to present herself as a savvy businesswoman with
a burgeoning TV career (she is busy carving out a niche as America’s
Nigella, co-hosting the hit show Top Chef), two bestselling cookery books
under her belt and a new self-designed jewellery line to promote.
We meet on a sweltering day at her studio in the Lower East Side of New York,
and she is obviously keen to impress that she no longer wants to be known as
Rushdie’s trophy wife, yet his spectre won’t go away. She tells me that her
favourite pieces of jewellery from her own archive are still her wedding and
engagement rings. “Although, of course, I don’t wear them now. They’re in
the bank,” she adds, in an aside to herself. When I ask if she and Rushdie
still have any contact, she replies: “I’m really not here to talk about my
private life.” But was it an amicable split? Deadly silence, pursed lips.
And what about the rumours that she’s now seeing the billionaire businessman
Theodore “Ted” Forstmann, who was previously linked to Diana, Princess of
Wales? She sighs. “Look, I appreciate you have to do your job, but I’m not
answering.”
She might be sick of being defined by the rich, powerful, older men in her
life, but she knows how to work their connections. Lakshmi and 69-year-old
Forstmann are a hot couple, as far as the New York Post gossip column, Page
Six, is concerned. He is chairman of IMG, the talent agency that happens to
represent her. The pair are regularly spotted together, holding hands at
basketball games and dining out all over town. It would appear that her
predilection for sugar-daddy types isn’t confined to very famous authors.
Until recently, Lakshmi had no relationship with her father — common knowledge
because it has been used to explain her attraction to much older men, and
the hardly dashing Rushdie in particular. “I think we’re attracted to what
we feel we need,” she has said. And there is certainly evidence of her
searching for a father figure through the men in her life. The mogul Harvey
Weinstein, who publishes her books, is another powerful close associate. She
once hilariously bamboozled him into booking a table at a charity gala for
which she was an ambassador by spoon-feeding him chocolate soup.
As this incident demonstrates, her flirting techniques are devastatingly
persuasive. If she has a true talent, this is it. Rushdie once referred to
“the intoxicating effect of her presence”, and Lakshmi has always used her
sexuality to her advantage (her first cookery book was titillatingly called
Easy Exotic, and her latest, Tangy, Tart, Hot and Sweet, might be a neat
summation of her appeal — particularly to men).
The apparently calculated way in which Lakshmi has capitalised on her looks is
why many people (there have been several bitchy profiles) appear not to like
her very much. In that sense, she’s more like Liz Hurley than Nigella Lawson
— it just happens to be food that has brought her the most success. And boy,
has she got that market licked.
“I think people like me in Top Chef because of the way I respond to the food,”
she says. “I love the way food smells and feels. I think that’s why Nigella
is so popular, too, because she obviously revels in eating. It’s kind of the
same thing. I want to give the contestants the full audience of my hunger,”
she says suggestively. When I ask if men find it sexy that she loves to eat,
she says that she thinks food (just like jewellery, apparently, which she
describes in much the same way) is “very tactile and sensual. If you think
about it, it’s the only way you can get into another person’s body without
actually touching them”.
At 38 (she turns 39 in September), Lakshmi has a beauty that is not, perhaps,
as bewitching as reports would have had me believe, but there is something
in the way she wraps and unwraps her mane of glossy black hair around
herself, in her pouty mouth, husky voice, and the way she insists on draping
me in piece after piece from her jewellery collection, removing my scarf to
wrap a lariat dripping with small, clear black stones around my neck, that
is, indeed, intoxicating. She is disarmingly tactile, and obviously fully
aware of the effect of her touch. Within 10 minutes of talking to her, it is
quite obvious that Lakshmi could bring any man of her choosing to his knees.
According to Lakshmi, she eats more than anybody else on Top Chef, typically
gaining 5lb over the course of each series. “It’s awful. I was terrified I
wouldn’t be able to fit into any of the clothes on your shoot,” she says,
telling me that she has been in the gym “eight out of the last 10 days”.
Dressed today in a sunshine-yellow vest and swishy green silk maxi skirt,
she is certainly no waif, and looks solid in a curvy, feminine way. Scouted
as a model at the age of 20, she became an overnight success, and while the
cookbooks and writing were not something she “ever pursued”, they have led
to the beginnings of what could become a Martha Stewart-style empire. She
describes her studio as being like a “factory”, equipped as it is with a
jewellery workshop and a kitchen, where she will shoot the pictures for her
next book.
Not bad for a girl who grew up in a single-parent family with no discernible
connections. Her mother, Vijaya, a nurse, moved four-year-old Lakshmi to New
York from Chennai, in India, after divorcing her father, a Pfizer executive.
The family of two then followed Vijaya’s work to Los Angeles, where she
married a plumber. Lakshmi has always insisted that she married Rushdie for
love, but the way she has described the beginnings of their relationship
speaks more of her desire for a stabilising presence in her life. “We
developed this telephonic relationship,” she said, talking about “everything
— baseball, food, music, art”. It was, however, “incredibly chaste”,
although “we did wind up having sex, yes”. When the pair separated, she said
it made her “really sad”.
Sad, maybe, but you get the sense that Lakshmi is not sentimental about the
past. She’s working hard to shake the trophy-wife tag. Now, with a
host of powerful male protectors and a burgeoning media career for Lakshmi
to call her own, it looks like Rushdie was less the man who defined her and
rather more a stepping stone to bigger and better things.
