We never realised you were so shy, Salman!
OWLISH, bespectacled Salman Rushdie has enjoyed a surprisingly eventful love life.
The 71-year-old has been married four times and has been an unlikely magnet for a string of beautiful and sophisticated women.
His married first wife Clarissa Luard in 1976 and they had a son, Zafar, three years later. But the couple divorced in 1987 after Rushdie left her for bohemian Australian blonde Robyn Davidson, also an accomplished writer. The pair were introduced by the late literary great Bruce Chatwin. They did not marry and they went their separate ways after two years.
In 1988, Rushdie married American novelist Marianne Wiggins but their tempestuous union ended in acrimony and accusations of deceit five years later.
Next came young brunette Elizabeth West, whom he married in 1997. The couple had met during his period in hiding following the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses.
This marriage collapsed when he met towering Indianborn model Padma Lakshmi. He later described how he knew he would be unable to resist the woman he had previously only seen gracing the pages of magazines.
‘If I ever meet this girl my goose is cooked,’ he recalled in a memoir.
Rushdie and Lakshmi married in 2004 but the union ended three years later when she left him. Rushdie later admitted the relationship had probably been ‘a mirage’, but reasoned: ‘She was just too goddamn gorgeous to leave.’
His love life hit the headlines again in 2009 after he ditched actress Pia Glenn by email. In response she dubbed him ‘cowardly, dysfunctional and immature’.