Rushdie’s ex finds love with bereaved BBC star
Eminent broadcaster Lord Berkeley, veteran presenter of BBC Radio 3’s Private Passions, has been nurturng a private passion of his own. For i learn the 68-year-old has just got married to Sir Salman Rushdie’s third wife elizabeth West, believed to be in her late 40s, whom the man Booker winning novelist divorced in 2004.
it is only two years since the death of Berkeley’s wife, literary agent Deborah Rogers, and it is thought that elizabeth has been helping him to come to terms with his grief. ‘We’ve known each other for over 20 years,’ he says.
michael Berkeley, godson of Benjamin Britten and a distinguished composer in his own right with a new work at the Proms next month, was widowed when Deborah died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 76.
She had been one of the most talented literary agents of her generation and Rushdie was among her roster of world-famous authors.
in 1989, when the fatwa, or death decree, was put on Rushdie for his novel the Satanic Verses, he hid for the first few days at the Berkeleys’ home in Wales
By coincidence, it was Deborah who introduced her husband to elizabeth while Rushdie was still married to her. Rushdie credited his then wife, a former publishing assistant whom he married in new York in 1997, with having ‘saved his life’ with her love and support, but
he later dumped her for the glamorous Indian-born model Padma Lakshmi. Elizabeth, with whom Rushdie has a 19year-old son, Milan, reportedly received £5million in a divorce settlement.
Rushdie’s literary agent Andrew Wylie recalls Elizabeth wasn’t even allowed to travel by car with the author during a trip to New york in the early Nineties. Says Wylie: ‘[The security officers] said, “you don’t understand Mr Rushdie, she could have a concealed fork.” After that Elizabeth became known as the forkist.’
Let’s hope Berkeley has a more charming nickname for his other half.