ways to make

INTERVIEW: Author Robert
Greene says he is bored by
‘irritating and vacuous’ celebrities
but the story of New York
rapper 50 Cent’s life proved an
irresistible subject for his latest
book
‘DON’T ASK me to do the
accent,” says Robert Greene,
author of the bestselling book
The 48 Rules of Power and the
follow up, The 50th Law , written
in collaboration with rapper 50
Cent.
We’re discussing an episode that
took place when Greene was a
20-year-old living in Paris, when
he reinvented himself as an
Irishman. It’s an odd little story,
in which Greene pretends to be
a Trinity College student, with a
story packed with carefully
researched detail of his ‘life’ in
Dublin, down to the streets
where lived and the professors
who taught him. What started as
a post-adolescent game became
“a nightmare” when his
girlfriend, who had bought the
Irish persona for months, wanted
to introduce him to an Irish-
American family from New York.
“I was this boring, geeky student
from LA, and the idea of
becoming someone else was
exciting. For a time, anyway,”
says Greene, now 49. “I was
fascinated by the Irish people
who went to the pub across the
road from the hotel where I
worked. They just seemed much
more exotic.”
To give him his due, Greene is
embarrassed by his younger
self’s attempts at reinvention, but
it would be easier to dismiss the
story were it not for the
apparent disconnect between
the Robert Greene who is talking
now and the Robert Greene you
meet through his books, the
voice of which is by turns cold,
amoral and often delivered with
a tone of a Chinese warlord
crossed with Gandalf from Lord
of the Rings .
“I created a voice for the first
book [ The 48 Rules of Power ]
which I wanted to be
authoritative and strong, which
reflected the material and which
spoke directly to the reader,” he
says. “Maybe it’s a bit of that old
Irish thing coming back, where
I’m a bit of a chameleon trying
to find a voice that matches the
material. I’d need an analyst to
tell me if that’s true.”
It’s a tone of voice that speaks
directly to a series of powerful
fans, among them Hollywood
studio executives and high-
profile performers from the LA
hip-hop scene. Watch
Entourage , the HBO series
about young Hollywood, and its
not difficult to see a line
between the character of agent
Ari Gold – “hug it out, bitch” -
and the rules in Greene’s book:
“Pose as a friend, work as a spy”;
“Crush your enemy totally.”
These not entirely ironic
catchphrases from the 48
Rules are used by thrusting
young film execs, who have
come to view the writer’s work
as a manual on manipulation,
power and success.
This love-in went a stage further
when, in a New Yorker interview,
it was suggested Greene had
become a personal power
adviser to a number of
producers and directors, most
notably Brian Grazer, the Oscar-
winning producer of A Beautiful
Mind, Apollo 13 and The Da
Vinci Code . “Grazer is a man of
maxims,” ran the piece. “He
believes that the game of life has
rules, and the person who
discovers the most rules and
observes them faithfully will
win . . . Grazer has developed a
detailed code of conduct that
covers nearly every aspect of his
life, and even now rehearses his
rules with a superstitious
fervour.”
In the book, Greene relates
today’s business world to that
found by schemers and plotters
of the past, such as Machiavelli,
Casanova and Henry Kissinger.
And as if it were not enough to
have Hollywood doing your PR,
Greene found himself a hero
among the rap scene, the stars
of which dropped his name in
their lyrics and in magazine
interviews, effectively acting as
pitchmen in a viral advertising
campaign.
“The only book I ever read I
could have wrote: 48 Laws of
Power ,” rapped Kanye West.
And Jay-Z quoted Greene’s book
in an interview with Playboy: “In
The 48 Laws of Power it says the
worst thing you can do is build a
fortress around yourself.”
50 Cent was another devotee, to
the extent that he sought out
Greene via his literary agent and
suggested a collaboration based
on his own life. The rapper is the
most successful artist of the
genre, selling 21 million albums
and amassing a fortune put at
$150 million (just over €100
million) by Forbes .
Talking about the collaboration,
the issue of persona again crops
up. “I’m sure it’s true that there
is a distance between 50 Cent’s
hustler image and the reality,”
says Greene. “During the day
when is having his breakfast, he’s
not dealing with fear and maybe
he’s not exactly what is written
there. Whenever you’re writing a
book you’re creating characters.”
Greene says he is bored by the
notion of celebrities, dismissing
them as “irritating and vacuous”,
but was turned on by the story
of 50 Cent’s life.
“I’m not the one who wanted to
do this book, I don’t like working
with other people, but I met him
and he wasn’t like that. He was
very real and down to earth and
opened up to me.”
The writer is conscious he may
have built a further layer of
mythology around the
burgeoning 50 Cent brand. “I’ve
probably added to the myth of
omnipotence,” says Greene. “He
does make mistakes and I do go
over some of them in the book -
but maybe I could have done
more. But I tried to get beyond
the bull that is in the articles
about him and get to the real
thing, what it’s like to be him on
the streets.”
To this end, Greene goes some
way to try to deflate the image
of drug dealing, a life he
describes as “the most boring
thing ever”.
“People want to romanticise it
but it’s really boring. You’re
sitting there every day doing the
same thing. It’s not all gun-toting
gangster stuff: you’re sitting
there with packs of crack
cocaine, dealing with these really
sketchy, violent, very
unpredictable people.”
The 50 Cent story, he says, is
more about how a man came
from “the very bottom of
America” and got to the top, by
sheer hard work and an almost
“nerdy” approach to learning
the ropes in the music business,
an environment the singer
claimed to be every bit as shark-
infested as the streets he left
behind.
“He went to Columbia records
and didn’t party – he doesn’t
drink and has never taken drugs.
He got his head down learnt
everything he could. We live in a
culture where people want to
imagine that you get to the top
through charisma or some other
quirk of fate. But he got there
because of something inside of
him, which is very real and very
interesting. That’s what I wanted
to write about.”
America, says Greene, is a fearful
culture. “Much of it comes from
the media and people’s
connection with it, and the
reaction to 9/11. People are
overprotecting their children,
afraid to be different and are
scared of ethnic minorities: these
are real issues. To me the book
was an opportunity to send this
message.
“It’s the story of someone who
has got rid of his fears and how
powerful you can be if you are
capable of doing that. That
hustler mentality is something we
try to cover up with other things,
but it’s there and it’s real. We
see it happening on Wall Street,
which is just the same. It’s just
that these guys are dealing drugs
not money.”
The proximity to danger is the
difference between the world
inhabited by the young 50 Cent
and the world with which most
of his fans – and readers – are
familiar. “We’re all gonna die
one day, but we’re running away
from it. Somebody growing up in
the place 50 Cent grew up
doesn’t expect to live beyond
25.” People like that, he says,
know all about power.