Roman Polanski labeled Vanity Fair "abominable." Now the director is on the receiving end of some name-calling in his high-profile libel trial unfolding in London.

Taking the stand Wednesday, Lewis Lapham, a New York-based journalist, said Polanski was "tasteless and vulgar" for making advances toward a woman just days before burying his murdered wife, Sharon Tate.

Lapham is an editor at Harper's magazine who's described as the source for the salacious Vanity Fair article that claimed the filmmaker propositioned a Scandinavian model at Elaine's restaurant in New York while en route to Los Angeles for his wife's funeral in 1969.

"Mr. Polanski pulled up a chair between myself and Beatte Telle and began to talk to her in a forward way...began to praise her beauty, romance her," Lapham told the court. "At one point, he had his hand on her leg and said to her, 'I can put you in the movies. I can make you the next Sharon Tate.' He meant it as a compliment. He was attempting to impress her, wanting to express his admiration for her looks."

Polanski's attorney, John Kelsey-Fry, quizzed Lapham about the alleged seduction, asking him if the Oscar-winning director was capable of "the most astonishing, asinine chat-up line in history." He also asked the editor whether Lapham would apologize after admitting he may have gotten the timing wrong and that the incident really occurred after the funeral.

Lapham said he would but not before adding: "Would Mr. Polanski apologize to me for calling me an abominable liar? Because the incident as it happened in Elaine's was true."

The libel trial is turning out to be Polanski's real-life Rashomon, with the players in the courtroom drama offering vastly different recollections about the come-on, or lack thereof. (Vanity Fair's lawyer, Thomas Shields, confirmed that Telle was still alive but wouldn't be called as a witness.)

Despite mixing up the dates, the 70-year-old Lapham stuck to his story and told the court he remembered being "astonished" by Polanski's lewd advances.

"I was impressed by the remark, not only because it was tasteless and vulgar but also because it was a clich?," Lapham recalled.

Backing up his claims was financier Edward Perlberg, Telle's boyfriend at the time and Vanity Fair's second witness. He testified that he was present at Elaine's that night and that Telle had related to him their conversation.

"?'He touched me with his hand and said that I should come to Hollywood and he would get me a screen test, and he would make another Sharon Tate of me,'?" the 66-year-old Perlberg quoted the model as saying. "I thought this was generally creepy. I think the words that he was a twerp, or to that effect, were used."

Both men took the stand on behalf of Vanity Fair and parent company Cond? Nast, which are the targets of the Polish-born filmmaker, who claims the attempted seduction never happened. The magazine has since acknowledged that the incident may not have taken place before the funeral as originally stated in the article but insists it took place two weeks later and doesn't change the central point of the piece, which depicted Polanski's aberrant behavior.

Tate was eight months pregnant with the Chinatown helmer's child when Charles Manson and his cult broke into the couple's Hollywood Hills home and murdered her and four of her friends.

Polanski testified via satellite from his home in Paris Monday that he was in "a state of shock" after reading the tawdry allegations.

An unprecedented ruling by England's highest court permitted him to beam in his testimony to Britain in order to avoid being extradited to the U.S. on a decades-old rape charge.

Polanski, 71, told the court that the Vanity Fair piece was an "abominable lie" that "was particularly hurtful, because it dishonors the memory of Sharon."

Under cross-examination however, The Pianist director admitted to being an inveterate womanizer who engaged in casual sex with numerous women both before and during his marriage to Tate. He also agreed it was possible he may have had casual sex with someone four weeks after her death.

Sticking up for Polanski on Tuesday was Mia Farrow, who starred in the director's 1968 horror classic, Rosemary's Baby. She testified that she was with him at Elaine's before Tate's funeral and that all he could talk about was the horrific murder. The actress also said that the director was so distraught that he brushed off two women who were flirting with him there.

Vanity Fair's legal team has tried to use Polanski's past promiscuity against him, painting him as a "fugitive from morality" who mixes fantasy and reality and suggested that he had "an inability to tell the truth when it matters."

As the defense began its case Wednesday, Shields took a further potshot at Polanski, stating that "it is the defendant's case that the claimant actually has no reputation to protect in this country at all."