Intelligencer

Padma’s Mama Mad at Her Sailor Mouth

Says she should cuss in private.

By Tim Murphy
Published Nov 25, 2007

(Photo: Katy Winn/Getty Images)

Does Padma Lakshmi have her mom to blame for her potty mouth? The model turned Top Chef host and ex-wife-to-be of Salman Rushdie drops the F-bomb seven times in December’s Vanity Fair. “I was having a moment,” she explained November 19 at a Strand reading for Tangy Tart Hot & Sweet, her new cookbook (“Finishing the fucking book was like being in labor for two years,” she told Vanity Fair’s Nancy Jo Sales.) Was she more profane than usual during the interview? “Way more. My mother is up in arms,” she said. “She’s going to wash my mouth out with soap when I go home for Thanksgiving. She said she thinks it’s unladylike and ‘I don’t care if you do it at home or around your friends, but not in public.’ Some of the stuff my mother said is unpublishable.” Aha! So Lakshmi gets her mouth from Mama, then? Seems so. “She can swear in many languages.”