Rushdies: babe magnets
New York Post [Page Six] - December 12, 2006
The Rushdies: Babe Magnets?
LOCK up your daughters when Salman Rushdie and his son hit the party
circuit.
The acclaimed author and his offspring are talking each other up as
powerful chick magnets no woman can resist - with Zafar Rushdie, 27,
even confessing he’s used his 59-year-old father’s prowess to score.
“Most people who go to a party with their parents try to run away
from them. Not me. If I want to meet girls, I just stand near him,”
Zafar gushes in a unusually candid interview with London’s Sunday Times.
“All the beautiful women want to talk to Dad, so I stand close and
bask in the sunlight. Beauty loves brains.”
Salman, who lives in Manhattan with his fourth wife, topless model
and actress Padma Lakshmi, 36, is equally complimentary of Zafar,
talking him up as a red-hot ladies man who can’t be resisted.
“Every time I see a picture of him in the paper, he has four girls
around him, so I think he’s not doing badly,” the author tells the
paper. “He’s absurdly charming - lethally, disgustingly charming. He
has it like a weapon.”
That’s where the backslapping stops. Zafar confesses he won’t take
any advice from his father on how to conduct his sex life. “I don’t
consult him on my girlfriends. He doesn’t like the fact that my
relationships don’t last long,” Zafar says. “But I’m not convinced
he’s necessarily the best person to give relationship advice.”
Zafar also admits that, as a young boy, he thought the fallout from
his father’s novel, “The Satanic Verses” - which prompted death
threats from Iran’s rulers over its alleged “blasphemy” of Islam in
1988 - was all fun and games.
“The fatwa was fun for me at first. I was 9, and I came home one day
to find police in the house,” Zafar told the paper. “It was really
cool to be around these big guys with guns. But I soon found out
enough to realize there was a big deal going on, and it wasn’t
good . . . I’d answer the phone and this voice would say: ‘We’ve got
your number. We know where you are and we’re going to come and kill
you’ . . . I lost my childhood innocence early.”