Charles Saatchi

Another irony about seducers is that the greatest of them all, Don Giovanni, a mythical figure who had 1,003 women in Spain alone, was partly created by a seducer who didn’t at all look like the Don—Lorenzo Da Ponte, a Venetian Jew who eventually was exiled by the Inquisitors for loose morals, i.e., seducing women left and right and that continued once he met with Mozart in Vienna and wrote the libretto of Don Giovanni. Incredibly, he wound up in Brooklyn of all places, giving Italian lessons to upper-class New York women.

There is a way to treat women, and some men have it and others don’t. Take the case of Giscard, an ex-French president about whom Charles Moore wrote last week. Giscard fancies himself a seducer, but he was as much a seducer as he was an aristocrat, which he pretended to be. He was served at dinner before Margaret Thatcher at the Élysée Palace and excused it by saying that as president, he was a cut above Maggie as prime minister. Yes, but once at a dinner in a private house, my then teenage wife and I were forced to walk into the dining room before the then president of France, Georges Pompidou, because of la jeunesse d’abord. Giscard should have waived the waiters away and ordered them to serve a lady first. It would have accomplished more than a dozen expensive diplomatic dinners. That’s what a real aristocrat would have done.

Which brings me to someone who has never been accused of even resembling a gent, Charles Saatchi. This individual has written a letter via the Speccie to me regarding my attack on his person last week in defense of his ex-wife Nigella. He writes that Nigella thinks of me as a vile person, and he addresses me as a woman. He goes on to say that my martial arts are for nancy boys, that he is a black belt, and that he fights inside cages with no rules and that everything goes. He calls me a geriatric and a soppy one at that, and says that the idea of fighting with me got him laughing rather hard. What he does NOT do is issue a challenge. He writes how tough he is and how weak I am but does NOT go any further. So, as a soppy geriatric, here’s my answer: I am 77 years old, 5’9”, and weigh 185 pounds. I am willing to face him anytime under no-rules cage fighting, which will be a first for me. I need three days’ notice.