Author of the controversial book, The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie tells of painful and dramatic secrets in nine years of hiding from Iranian Ayatollahs hitmen. Geordie Greig reports.
ON Valentine’s Day 1989, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC reporter and told that the Ayatollah Khomeini had sentenced him to death. When asked how he felt, he told the female journalist: ‘It doesn’t feel good.’ What he actually thought was: ‘I’m a dead man’.
Only now can he tell the full story of living under the fatwa in an extraordinarily candid memoir, serialised by The Mail on Sunday.
In it he also reveals his secret lovers, his marriage breakdowns, his despair at being forced underground, and the fierce behind-the-scenes battles to keep his novel The Satanic Verses the reason for the fatwa in print.
For a decade he felt unable even to write about his experiences.
In an exclusive interview he tells me: ‘I had come out of this very dark place and the idea of re-immersing myself in the mood of those years, when I had just come out of it, felt awful. I thought, I don’t want to go back there. I want to leave that behind and shut that door and think about new things.’
But now the 65-year-old British author of the most controversial book of the 20th Century is ready to talk, clearly relishing his freedom after ten years of living in constant fear of being assassinated by an Iranian hit man.
‘To walk without a guard, to go into a shop, to visit my family, to fly on a plane, all these things were at times impossible,’ he says.
Rushdie was forced into hiding for more than nine years until the fatwa was lifted by the Iranian government in 1998 with ever-changing safe houses, constant armed guards and a new identity. His alias, Joseph Anton, was a combination of the first names of two of his favourite writers Conrad and Chekhov. To his bodyguards he was simply known as Joe.
‘When I became free I was glad to end Joseph Anton’s existence and let Salman Rushdie live once again. It was a joyous moment,’ he says.
In the book, titled Joseph Anton and written in the third person, he readily exposes his own failings and infidelities.
‘There was only one point and that was to be nakedly honest, all my mistakes as well as better judgments are included, even if it showed me in a bad light,’ he says.
Rushdie tells of being unfaithful to his wives, early on hoping in vain that his first wife Clarissa Luard would not realise that he was betraying her.
‘In retrospect, he was amazed that he could have been so vain. Of course she knew,’ he writes about himself.
He reveals in detail how his marriages fall apart, the most bitter relationship being with his second wife, the American writer Marianne Wiggins, whom he accuses of lying and jeopardising his security. They have never spoken a word since their acrimonious split.
He falls in love with his third wife, Elizabeth West, when they meet in a hastily organised safe house, where their courtship is carried out in the greatest secrecy.
They have one child, a son Milan, and lose another, but later he leaves her for the actress Padma Lakshmi. They marry but she eventually dumps him. He recounts in astonishing detail his rollercoaster romantic life.
The only constant is his son Zafar, by his first marriage. He calls him every day at 7pm until one day there is no answer.
The police go round and find the front door open and fear that terrorists have broken in to try to kill him. In a heart-stopping description he finds that the police have mistakenly gone to the house next door, and that Zafar is fine.
‘This was what happens when you are living under police protection, the agony of simply being unable to rush to your son even when you fear his life is in danger,’ he says.
The book is also often comic. Four of his bodyguards were called Piggy, Stumpy, Fat Jack and Horse. He also describes being filmed for the movie Bridget Jones’s Diary in which Hugh Grant kissed him on the mouth.
He retells the most famous fatwa joke. ‘What’s blond, has big tits and lives in Tasmania? Salman Rushdie!’ He is encouraged to wear a wig himself, but he is immediately spotted and never tries it again.
The book also covers Rushdie’s early life and tells of bullying and racism at his public school.
The one devastating lesson he learned at Rugby was ‘there would always be people who just didn’t like you, to whom you seemed as alien as little green men or the Slime from Outer Space’.
He reveals how shamed he was by his father’s drunken bullying of him as a teenager with ‘nights of foul language and unprovoked, red-eyed rage’ but also movingly tells of their final reconciliation on his father’s death bed.
Throughout his life in hiding, Rushdie was often criticised by people who resented the £1million a year it cost to keep him under police protection.
He says now: ‘My biggest problem, I used to think, was that I wasn’t dead.
‘If I were dead then nobody in England would have to fuss about the cost of my security and whether or not I merited such special treatment for so long.
‘But if you were to balance out the taxes I’ve paid in the years when I was protected by the British police you would find it was a pretty even balance sheet.
‘Remember, the police who were protecting me were on a salary. They were not specially paid to protect me. No extra people were taken on.’
Rushdie’s books have sold more than 25 million copies in 40 languages. That success, he says, allowed him to fund part of the security protection he needed.
He stresses that he paid for all the safe houses, which needed four bedrooms for the detectives.
‘The cost for myself has been hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. So a very large proportion of the money that the books were making me was going to finance the protection I was paying for. Not, of course, the police salaries. I was never offered a government safe house.’
He is aware that his rare public appearances while under guard most famously he appeared on stage with his friend Bono at a U2 concert may have given some people the wrong impression.
‘Being under the fatwa was a jail, but I think that one of the problems is that from the outside it looked glamorous, as I sometimes showed up in places in Jags with people jumping out to open the door and make sure you get in safely and so on. Looks of who the hell does he think he is? Well, from my side it felt like jail,’ he says.
‘There was this crude argument that I did it in some way for personal advantage, to make myself more famous or to make money. At its most unpleasant it was levelled at me from the Islamic side that the Jews made me do it. They said my [second] wife was Jewish. She wasn’t, she was American.
‘If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction,’ says Rushdie.
‘What you have to remember is that The Satanic Verses is not called Islam the Prophet, it is not called Mohammed, the country is not called Arabia it all happens in the dream of somebody who is losing their mind.’
What still shocks him is that no radical Muslims in Britain who backed the call for his assassination were ever prosecuted.
‘There were these occasions, like in Manchester, where Muslim leaders said to their congregation, “Tell me who in this audience would be ready to kill Rushdie?” and everyone in the audience raised their hand. And the police thought this was OK.’
He says: ‘Supposing I had been the Queen and an iman said to his congregation, “Who would be ready to kill the Queen?” and everybody raised their hand. Would you think the police would not act?
‘I only use the Queen as an example to dramatise this but it seems odd that when it is a novelist of foreign origin, therefore not completely British in some way, that it was allowed to happen with impunity.
‘If this had happened to Alan Bennett the response would have been completely different.’
Rushdie remembers his split from his wife Marianne as being a particularly traumatic time. She claimed that the CIA was aware of Rushdie’s whereabouts and so his cover was blown. When he realised that she was lying he decided to end the relationship.
‘It was very shocking. There simply was a point at which I had to choose whether to be alone in the middle of this hurricane with nobody there for companionship or whether I somehow had to put up with this person in whom it was difficult to have faith.
‘It was horrifying to be told by a policeman that they believed that your wife was lying to you. It is an experience most of us don’t have.
And then for her to say that it was the police who were to be blamed and that I shouldn’t trust them sets a kind of mindf*** and I had to make my judgments. It became impossible for me to have faith in her veracity. So in the end I thought it was better to separate,’ he says.
‘In the course of 65 years I have been in love with four women, one of whom certainly was a bad mistake. But to have had three long relationships is not so bad.
‘I think I am due for a nice, long stable one. Certainly, I am not in the market for anything else. I think it is a silly thing to say that I’ll never get married again.’
He discovered that the common link between all his women is that they had missing parents. His first wife Clarissa’s father committed suicide, his long-term lover Robyn Davidson’s mother committed suicide and Marianne’s mother committed suicide. Even Elizabeth’s mother died when she was very young. And in Padma’s case her father left her mother when she was only about one.
‘I seem to have fallen for women with missing parents. Goodness knows what it signifies,’ he says.
‘There have been two kinds of relationship in my life, very long and very stable ones and relatively short and rather unstable ones. But I am very proud of the fact that my relationships with the mothers of my children remain close. I still talk to Elizabeth every day.
‘To walk without a guard, to go into a shop, to visit my family, all these things were at times impossible’
‘I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.’
The most volatile was Padma Lakshmi. ‘The thing with Padma is that we were really in love with each other. I have to say that. There was nothing fake. It was also a very painful finish. I didn’t want it to end. She said that the marriage had come to an end.’
When they met he was married to his third wife Elizabeth but had gone to a showbiz party in New York on Liberty Island under the Statue of Liberty with his son Zafar.
‘I just ran into this girl who I had read one newspaper article about and I remember thinking, “Who is this beautiful Indian girl?” I thought, “God, what a very gorgeous girl.”
‘We talked to each other only for a few minutes but clearly something happened in that we exchanged phone numbers, which I wasn’t in the habit of doing with anyone really, as I was married.’
A key strand to his book is his fight to be published, as he sees it, a basic fight for the freedom of expression. He does not think that any publisher today would have taken on The Satanic Verses.
‘No. The dangers of attack are greater now than they were then. I think it is because of the internet, the enormous feed of global mass media. If you attack a work of art now you can do it instantaneously on a global scale. There is more fear now than there was then.’
Rushdie is torn as to whether, in the end, he achieved victory. ‘On the one hand we managed to keep the book in print but on the other there was a colossal chilling effect on my life and that fear of being critical of Islam is very great now. It means the situation is more constrained now.
‘It wouldn’t be published now. I just think the publishers would say it is too frightening and it would give them too much of a security problem.’
So would you have changed a word in order to get it published? ‘No. No. Don’t bother to write if that is what you do. It seems that nobody is asking you to write a book. The world will do just fine without any books by any of us and if you are going to write a book, say what’s in your head.’
Was it meant to attack Islam? ‘No. It wasn’t particularly reverential towards Islam but most of it is not even about Islam,’ he says.
He remains passionate about his role as a writer. ‘There is no reason why you shouldn’t be able to take issue with any ideology, elite system, political system, social idea that’s what a writer is for. Writers are not there just simply to tell pleasing tales that you can read on the beach and forget. They are there to try to shape the world they live in.’
Books as well as friends were his chief solace when in hiding.
‘I’ve got into lots of trouble by saying I have never finished Middlemarch. I’ve cheated and looked at the end. I just got bored.’
And Jane Austen? ‘Well she is just sitting there. It’s a little samey. It doesn’t matter which of the books you’re reading. It is worth reading one but the others are all the same.’
The books came and went, but the police were uncomfortably ever-present.
‘It was horrifying to be told by a policeman that your wife was lying to you. In the end it was better to separate’
‘I was isolated but I was surrounded by people all of the time. And that was a kind of claustrophobia that was very difficult to deal with.
Some of the places we were in had enough room for us to get away from each other, because it was difficult for them, too. Four large men living in a house for two weeks at a time and these are men of action, they are not men who sit in chairs and contemplate the world.’
And yet his praise for his minders is unreserved.
‘The last thing in the book is if it were not for the activities of the British police and intelligence services I wouldn’t have been able to write this book,’ he says. ‘I am very grateful. Nobody was put on this job unless they volunteered for it. They were asked in Special Branch who was prepared to do it, so everybody was a volunteer…and the fact that they did, not knowing what level of danger they would be in, was extraordinary.’
And he also has a great love for Britain, to whom he owes his career and his safety. ‘I am a knight of the realm and I feel deeply, deeply connected. I have lived in this country longer than I’ve lived anywhere and I am a citizen of this country. My children are English and both of their mothers were English. These are roots which are deeper than my roots in India.’ And looking back, during the low moments, did you ever seek help?
‘No. If I was American I would have been in therapy. I did have a couple of medical check-ups at that time and they were always amazed I didn’t have high blood pressure.
‘So either I am very insensitive or somehow I was able to resist this.’
NEXT WEEK: EXTRACTS FROM JOSEPH ANTON, SALMAN RUSHDIE’S EXPLOSIVE NEW MEMOIRS.
Courtesy: The Mail on Sunday
