When a Writer Becomes the Story

Salman Rushdie is a 54-year old Bombay, India-born novelist who left his wife and toddler son in London and moved to New York, where he fell in love with a ravishing Indian model 24 years his junior. He has written a book about Malik Solanka, a 55-year old Bombay-born professor who left his wife and toddler son in London and moved to New York, where he fell in love with an exotic young beauty. Is Rushdie’s latest novel somewhat autobiographical? Well, duh, as they say in literary circles.

The question is not just whether “Fury,” to be released today by Random House, is a work of fiction or a mislabeled memoir. More important, why does it matter? Because in an age of celebrity chefs, celebrity hairdressers and celebrity trainers, Salman Rushdie is a serious writer who lives on the edge of celebrity’s sword and could have, literally, died by it. Many people who have never read a word of his manic, Joycean prose know his name and at least some of his story.

He dines with Al Pacino, pens lyrics for and drinks with the rockers of U2, is photographed by Annie Leibovitz, appears on “Politically Incorrect” and “The Late Show With David Letterman.” He shows up at splashy media events such as the Talk Magazine launch on the Statue of Liberty’s island and even played himself in the film “Bridget Jones’s Diary.”

So if his novel is the thinly disguised confession of a much married midlife modelizer, then Rushdie is giving gossips what they live for. And if it isn’t, then he’s more the victim than the beneficiary of a puzzling public persona. Salman Rushdie has created a rather compelling character, and his name is Salman Rushdie. “Writers aren’t very interesting, and books are,” he says. But his life has featured enough high drama and romance to fill a tome. And perhaps it has.

Although he doesn’t believe that publicity affects book sales, Rushdie nurses a cup of coffee at the Argyle Hotel in West Hollywood one late-summer morning, prepared to talk about “Fury.” “It doesn’t matter how much a book is hyped, or how well-known the writer is,” he says. “If people say it’s a dud, that stops the book in its tracks. The only thing that matters is word-of-mouth.”

On the sunny patio, high and low culture converge, just as they do in Rushdie’s work. The lunch crowd hasn’t yet arrived, so he and a minimally clothed singer, Mandy Moore, poised by the pool facing an MTV camera crew, are the only signs of life. It’s convenient for Rushdie to rendezvous at the hotel; the apartment where he’s stayed on his frequent visits to Los Angeles since meeting Padma Lakshmi two years ago, is nearby.

The Argyle employees are as impressed by Rushdie as they are by the teenage singer. “When he first started coming in, I was surprised to see him,” says waiter J.C. Gardiner. “I knew he was exiled from his home country because of ‘The Satanic Verses,’ but I didn’t know if that situation was resolved.”

The “situation” sounds like a deal an ambitious artist would make with the devil: Live in fear for a while in exchange for worldwide renown and commercial success. In 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the faithful to track down and kill Rushdie for alleged blasphemies in his novel ‘The Satanic Verses.’ Nine years later, Iran gave in to pressure from the British government and rescinded the fatwa.

“Midnight’s Children,” which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1981, established Rushdie’s reputation and sold about 8,000 hardcover copies. Sales of “Shame,” his second novel, were comparable. Then his fans as well as the curious and politically supportive boosted sales of “The Satanic Verses” to nearly a million. “The Moor’s Last Sigh,” “The Jaguar Smile,” and “Haroun and the Sea of Stories,” were written during a fecund captivity. Each sold fewer than 100,000 copies in hardcover. “If a blip of extra interest in my work was the one upside to the fatwa , that’s fine, because it wasn’t an easy time,” Rushdie says. “A lot of people did buy the book to show their solidarity. What am I supposed to do about that? Thanks very much, is my answer.”

Celebrity scribes didn’t suddenly become hot copy because People magazine’s supply of TV actresses ran low. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth are members of a fraternity of 20th century American authors whose enthusiasms, love affairs and feuds attracted attention peripheral to their bibliographies.

Dominick Dunne is another writer whose true story--his daughter was murdered by her ex-boyfriend--is well-known to his readers. A week before the Argyle visit, Rushdie joined an audience of book and scandal lovers at a party for Dunne on the roof of the Raffles L’Ermitage Hotel in Beverly Hills. Rushdie arrived alone, was approached by a few fans during the cocktail hour, and had a “let’s do lunch” conversation with a Hollywood producer after Dunne read from “Justice” (Crown), his collection of high-profile trial reportage. Rushdie still finds it odd that social evenings in L.A. end so much earlier than in India. Shortly before 9, he drives.

When he’s in L.A., he might be at a power lunch one day, and the next go to the movies in a mall in La Puente, the “unfashionable suburb,” as he calls it, where Lakshmi’s mother lives. A friend who worked on the Villaraigosa mayoral campaign showed him sides of the city even many natives don’t know. When Debbie Reynolds asked her daughter to bring a household name to an exhibition of her costume collection, Carrie Fisher arrived with Rushdie.

Any celebrity can try to avoid the limelight by erring on the side of caution. One can avoid the New York restaurants gossip columnists frequent, or postpone dating a paparazzi magnet until a separation or divorce is official. That M.O. doesn’t appeal to Rushdie, who’s spent enough time lying low. “If you have a beautiful young girlfriend, you want to take her out to Moomba now and then,” he says. “I don’t see the problem.”

Yet he knows the problem all too well. “If I could create a situation in which nobody knew anything about me, but people knew everything about my work, that would be incredibly desirable,” Rushdie says. “Unfortunately, just the opposite is often true, and that’s really undesirable.”

Nearly four years past the crisis, he’s part respected author, part literary lion about town, that town being either London, home of his sons from his first and third marriages, New York, where he’s had an apartment for two years, or Los Angeles, where his girlfriend lives. She speaks five languages, is a model, cookbook author and television host and will soon make her American movie debut in the Mariah Carey musical “Glitter.” The couple met at the Talk Magazine launch party in 1999, where the fireworks were no match for her incandescent looks. Comedy, he says, drew them together. “She’s very funny, and I’m a scream.”

“Fury” is dedicated to Padma. The woman the novel’s protagonist is besotted with not only has her coloring, but bears a jagged scar on her right arm one inch longer than one Lakshmi got from a car accident. The first time professor Solanka meets his incipient inamorata, he observes: “Extreme physical beauty draws all available light toward itself, becomes a shining beacon in an otherwise darkened world .... Staring into the sidereal unreality of her beauty, which wheeled in the room like a galaxy on fire, he was thinking that if he had been able to wish his ideal woman into being, if he’d had a magic lamp to rub, this would have been what he’d have wished for.”

No mention is made of the fictional woman’s sense of humor.

It’s easy to be catty about such a perfectly contrasted beauty-and-the-beast couple. Rushdie is physically unimposing and carries more weight and less hair than he did as a young man. His dark eyes are sleepy, his pepper-and-salt beard neatly trimmed. Nothing about his appearance suggests a shining beacon, yet his wit and intellect sparkle. He’s polite, unguarded, friendly and gregarious. Fisher, social director without portfolio for a select Hollywood crowd, held what she called a “welcome to the monkey house” party to introduce Rushdie to her friends.

“People expect Salman to be a grand man of letters, and he is not that,” she says. “He’s very thoughtful and dear, and has a nice, healthy, childish side to him. He’s Salman Rushdie, and that doesn’t escape Padma, just as her being beautiful is no impediment for him. He’s a great intellectual power, and she aspires to that. She’s a world-class beauty who’s also smart and kind. At the end of the day, Salman is silly, and so is she. They have great ability to make dumb jokes with smart people, which is ideal at a dinner party.”

When envy inspires malicious gossip, a sense of humor can come in handy. Christopher Hitchens, an English journalist and essayist who lives in Washington, was among a group of trusted friends who knew Rushdie’s address during the fatwa. “When Salman first went into hiding,” he says, “there was an extraordinary amount of malicious, petty stuff in the British press, and a great deal of it is and was inspired by jealousy. He is acutely aware that celebrity can be a poisoned chalice. He wants the respect of his peers. It isn’t that there’s the celebrity and then the boring old work. The work is everything to him. But if he didn’t go out, that would be like letting his detractors define him. You’re going to get loused-up publicity anyway, so why not do what you want to do?”

The viciousness of the London press heightened Rushdie’s desire to leave England, where he’d lived since he was sent to boarding school at 14. For Rushdie, the ‘90s could be titled “Man, Interrupted.” Without bitterness, he speaks of effects of the fatwa more tangible than the free-floating terror of not knowing when, or how, an attack might come. “Essentially, I lost the normal life of a man in his 40s, which is supposed to be the prime of life. My older son, who is now 22, was 9 at that time. There are things I couldn’t do with him that most fathers do with their sons, like kick a ball around a park. That’s a loss that I can’t get back.”

Had it not been for the fatwa , Rushdie would probably have moved to New York more than 10 years ago, he says. “London’s a tough town. The mean-spiritedness of the gossip [about writers] is a phenomenon of the last 10 or 12 years. When my first book came out, no one asked about my private life. The interesting thing about me was that I’d written a book that people thought was interesting. Now, the interesting thing is I have all kinds of curious personal stories going on, and, by the way, I write these books.”

Famous actors often complain that when they’re recognized, they lose their ability to observe human behavior and become the observed. Well-known writers can have the same problem. The city of New York is a furious character in “Fury.” Rushdie had hoped that living there would inspire him. “I enjoyed being able to have all my senses out, sucking the place in,” he says. “I’m very happy that the thing that I’d expected, that there’d be stuff for me to write about, happened as quickly as it did in New York.”

In an advance review, Publisher’s Weekly praised the novel as “very much an American book, a bitingly satiric, often wildly farcical picture of American society in the first years of the 21st century .... Rushdie remains a master of satire that rings true with unsettling acuity and dark, comedic brilliance.” A review in the New York Times called it “haphazard and disappointing.”

He isn’t ready to write an L.A. story yet, but Rushdie says his novelist’s itch is being scratched by his newest environment. His friends include entertainment industry high achievers, British expatriates such as novelist Helen Fielding and transplanted Latin Americans he met while researching “The Jaguar Smile” in Nicaragua.

“A lot of the social life in L.A. happens inside people’s houses, which is very different than in New York,” he says. “There’s incredible architectural genius here, but much of it is behind gates. If you’re invited in, you find these wonderful places. And that’s where people are relaxed and having a nice time.”

Rushdie is particularly grateful for the kindness of strangers. He says, “The worst thing about the culture of celebrity is its subjects aren’t treated as if they have feelings, as if something someone says might upset or anger or hurt them. And that’s very odd, because I feel like an ordinary human being, and I don’t like it when people are horrible about me. I like it when they’re nice.”

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Rushdie will speak and read from “Fury” at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 14 at Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 Sepulveda, Los Angeles. Tickets are $18. For reservations, call (310) 335-0917.