104 Minutes With... Lord Maurice Saatchi

The British advertising executive is thoroughly enjoying the rollout for his new book, Orgasm.

- By Carl Swanson

FAMOUS AD GUY Lord Maurice Saatchi co-founded Saatchi & Saatchi, which for a while was one of the largest agencies in the world. So he really knows how to pitch. When I find him at a back table at Il Gattopardo, a quiet-luxury Italian restaurant in the bottom of a townhouse across from the Museum of Modern Art, on a recent Saturday, the elegantly soft-spoken 77-year-old is wearing his trademark Mr. Magoo glasses and a long white shirt that extends down below his knees. It's noon, and he has already ordered a glass of white wine and is prepared to tell me about—or sell me on-his saucily titled book, Orgasm, a large-format, large-print collection of his essays. Each is designed to rhetorically demolish what he apparently perceives as the reader's preconceived notions. Chapter titles include "Conservatives Are Cruel," "Poetry Is for Wimps," "Cocktail Parties Are Stressful," "America Is Perfect," and "Truth Is Good." He hopes to disabuse you of these beliefs, assuming that you hold them.

He has priced Orgasm at $100. Assuming that I haven't bothered to read it, he starts off with the big catchy idea. "We know that a physical orgasm is the most blissful human experience," he says, the theme music from Succession actually playing in the background. "This book claims that there is another kind of orgasm-an orgasm of the mind. Which has nothing to do with sex. Which is even more pleasurable." The waiter arrives with an amuse-bouche, with compliments from the chef: arancini, a rice ball with sweet peas, mozzarella, and pear.