Nigella Lawson and Charles Saatchi: the remarkably messed-up life of two remarkable people It was, therefore, with a certain irony that the greatest crisis in their lives erupted in one of the few places where they still felt comfortable. Photographs of the 53-year-old television cook arguing with the multi-millionaire advertising tycoon on the terrace of Scotts of Mayfair, their favourite restaurant, caused shock around the world. The pictures showed Saatchi, 70, with his hand locked around Nigella's throat. A "quickie" divorce followed, but its aftermath is proving to be long, bitter and messy, and threatens to destroy the life's work of both. Last week's acquittal of Italian sisters Elisabetta and Francesca Grillo on charges of defrauding the pair of almost £700,000 leaves Nigella in an especially precarious position. The court heard a tale of Gatsby-esque extravagance and wretched excess, in which the sisters" defence essentially amounted to a claim that Saatchi was too cranky to care where his money was going and Nigella too addled by drugs to know. With employers who thought nothing of spending £25,000 a year on flowers, £12,000 on having their silver polished, £10,000 on a Glastonbury trip for Nigella's children, £4,000 for a day's boat hire in Cannes, tens of thousands more on designer clothes, hotel suites, first class airline tickets, limousine hire and gifts, how - asked the Grillos - how could they guess what was reasonable expenditure and what wasn't? After all, they were part of Team Cupcake, the inner core of trusted aides who effectively ran Nigella's life, keeping the money-spinning show on the road by relieving the star of the chores and drudgery. Although their salaries were relatively modest - around £30,000 - they lived high on the perks. In June last year, Francesca racked up £64,000 in credit card charges, including £4,700 on flights to New York, a £1,280 bill at the Ritz in Paris and £8,000 at fashion stores Prada and Miu Miu. Miss Lawson came into the trial as a figure of huge affection, having played the "domestic goddess" role with gusto since shooting to fame in the late Nineties. More highbrow chefs tut at her finger-licking, frontage-flashing shtick, but behind the image is a formidable mind always at works to update and refine the Nigella package. What it seems not to have foreseen was that the trial of the Grillos would turn into a vicious settling of scores, and that her own carefully fashioned reputation would be Exhibit One. Around her in court swirled allegations of cocaine and marijuana use that allowed Charles - with a typical flash of ad man's ingenuity - to brand her "Higella," piling on claims (from which he later backtracked) that she was not only "off her head on drugs" as the Grillos piled up the bills, but that she had supplied drugs to her own daughter. How did it come to this? At the heart of the Saatchis" decade-long marriage were two remarkable - and remarkably messed-up - people, who, according to those who know them well, genuinely adored each other while resenting the degree to which they had become mutually dependent. "If you look at them in terms of compatibility, you'd say the whole thing was nuts, a total non-starter," says one friend. They've got almost nothing in common except this funny sense that they are both lost souls with no one else to cling on to. Love isn't quite the right word for what kept them together. It was more of an addiction. While Nigella dashed between TV studios, airports and parties, Charles was as dashing as a collapsed sofa. Tongue-tied and ponderous of manner, he detested socialising, and could muster no appreciation of Nigella's culinary talents: "I'm sure my wife's food is fantastic," he once said, "but it's a bit wasted on me. I like toast with cheese spread and Weetabix for supper. It drives her to distraction, frankly, particularly as she gets the blame for my fat look. In the past, Nigella had taken pains to sound forgiving, even philosophical, about Charles's irascibility. "I don't think it's possible to analyse what makes relationships work," she once told me in an interview. So my view is that if it works, don't question it. Just be glad. If things were going badly for us, I suppose I'd have to try to figure out why, but I feel happy so they must be all right. People are simply too complicated to fit into neat little boxes marked 'nice," 'funny," 'clever," 'avoid at all costs."" Over the last two years there were small but ominous signs of difficulty. Charles was feeling the age gap, unhappy about Nigella's new American venture, and ruminating sourly on what he saw as the disdain and ingratitude of the British arts establishment. Three years ago he gave his private London art gallery, complete with contents worth £25 million, to the nation, only to have his taste mocked and intentions questioned. Charles's suspicion was that much of this was political payback. With his younger brother, Maurice, he had created a famous poster, "Labour Isn't Working," which played a significant part in the election of the Thatcher government. Much of the cultural establishment still hasn't forgiven him. "We must never forget," one curator icily told The Independent at the time of the gallery gift, "that he hurt the Labour Party." It is tempting to see too the implosion of the marriage as a tale of a man taking out his frustrations on his wife, but there is a deeper thread to what happened to them, that runs through the troubled pasts of both and helps to explain what held them so closely together for so long. Behind its veneer of riches and glamour, Nigella's life has been far from easy. A shy, insecure child born into a high-achieving family, she grew up in both fear and awe of a mentally-unstable mother, socialite Vanessa Salmon, whose shadow she has never fully escaped. "She just didn't like me," Nigella said last year. I never thought I could please her. She was funny, but depressed. The sound of a plastic bag being crinkled would send her deranged. She'd shout at all of us and say, 'I'm going to hit you until you cry," and so I would never cry." Food took on a core role in this fraught domestic drama. Nigella told me that at mealtimes, the Lawson children were forbidden to leave anything on their plates. If they did the leftovers would be served up, cold and congealed at the next sitting. Sometimes she would remain at the table for over four hours. She found solace in books, growing up a serious-minded young woman who, she told friends at Oxford, "intended to become the greatest novelist of the 20th century." Yet unhappiness continued to stalk her. Vanessa died of cancer when Nigella was 25, and eight years later the disease claimed her sister, Thomasina. By then Nigella was married to John Diamond, an extrovert journalist with whom she would have two children. He eased her out of her shyness, encouraging her to pursue a career in television and cookery writing. "I don't want to sound unkind," says a former colleague, "but in those days hardly anyone fancied her. She was overweight, awkward, never wore make-up and dressed in these terrible, baggy kaftan things. It took John to see what she could be, and he changed everything. But in 1997 John, too, was diagnosed with cancer. He raged against the unfairness of it, and there is no doubt that Nigella suffered a double ordeal as she watched him die - as a friend puts it - "to the sound of breaking doors." Charles entered her life roughly as John was departing it. Despite his fame as one half of Britain's biggest advertising agency, Charles was still a mystery man. He was born in Baghdad, the son of a Jewish merchant who was forced to smuggle his family out of Iraq after anti-Semitic riots. The Saatchis eventually settled in London, but Charles, then aged five, seemed to have been badly affected by the turmoil. Like Nigella, he grew up shy, vulnerable and in constant need of reassurance. His first two marriages ended in failure, although neither ex-wife has suggested he was abusive. Kay Saatchi, who divorced him in 2001, says: "I didn't marry him because he was mean and cruel. When the light shines on you, he is charming and amazing and special. I know because it shone on me. Then the light fades and there is darkness. As her celebrity grew, Nigella's dependency extended. Around her orbited a host of assistants and advisers whom she elevated to the status of an alternative family. "I have a team of girls, who are now very grown up women because they have been with me for so long," she said in 2010. They came to work for me temporarily but have never been able to leave. Often I'm busy with work and it's like my children have got an old fashioned extended family with lots of aunts, so if I'm away there are other people to say, 'how did your day go?" " At the heart of this were Elisabetta Grillo, 41, and her sister Francesca, 34. Hired by Nigella while she was still married to Diamond, they followed her to Eaton Square, and, according to several witnesses, had become so indispensable to Nigella that they considered themselves more as partners than employees. It was on this basis, they claimed, that they felt entitled to spend money as they did. In the aftermath of their acquittal, the Domestic Goddess now faces a professional dilemma on the scale of her marital meltdown. To date, worldwide TV audiences have seen almost nothing of the fragile personality behind the fleshy, plummy-voiced package that Nigella serves up so well. Will they think differently of a woman whose gilded life suddenly looks as tough as everybody else's? And what of Charles, who told the court he still loves his ex-wife, intended no harm at Scott's and accepted a police caution only in the hope that the incident would not "hang over" them? What really hangs over this stricken pair is a sense that for all they have achieved they remain outsiders who are misunderstood, and never quite appreciated. Such reassurance as they have found has largely come from each other, and now that even that has gone, they have to face the fall-out alone.