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 Powerand 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 Rulesare 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 Yorkerinterview, 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 13and 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 Powerit 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.
