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."