I do my best to avoid schadenfreude – it’s kind of childish after all – but somehow, this one was too hard to resist.
You may have heard about it, so I’ll cut to the quick.
The great Italian politician and tycoon, Silvio Berlusconi, made the mistake of paying some off-kilter compliments to not one, but two former beauty queens (one of them now a Forza Italia! MP) at a reception hosted by one of his TV companies.
Unfortunately for the great lover, his attempts at charm made it onto the front page of a national newspaper, causing great humiliation to his long-suffering wife, Veronia Lario.
She tried to get him to apologize, but in typical macho fashion he refused.
So she sharpened her pencil and wrote to a (left-wing – ouch!) newspaper. The former actress and mother of three of Mr Berlusconi’s five children wrote that his remarks were
“unacceptable” and “damaging to my dignity. I am therefore asking for a public apology”.
But here’s the best bit, and why (honest!) I’m writing about this here.
She said she felt like a woman in one of the novels of the Irish writer Catherine Dunne.
“I ask if, like the Catherine Dunne character, I have to regard myself as ‘half of nothing’,” she wrote.
He caved in and published a craven apology.
What publicity for Catherine Dunne! The Irish Times covered it, of course, and the Guardian in London, and who knows how many papers around the world. As for Italy… Excellent. Maybe not many of her Irish or English readers realize it but Catherine is huge in Italy, and this has probably put her sales through the roof!
Hee Hee!
