Never say a humorous thing to a man who does not possess humor;
he will always use it in evidence against you.HERBERT BEERBOHM TREE
This was reported in a 1956 biography of Tree by Hesketh Pearson. The older brother of the famed English caricaturist Max Beerbohm, Tree was an English actor and theater manager who went on to found the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1904. He may have been familiar with a similar warning advanced two centuries earlier by the esteemed French writer and aphorist Jean de La Bruyère:
Never risk a joke, even the least offensive and the most common,
with a person who is not well-bred, and possessed of sense to comprehend it.
Never rise to speak till you have something to say;
and when you have said it, cease.JOHN WITHERSPOON
Witherspoon was a Scottish Presbyterian minister who was persuaded in 1768 to come to America to serve as president of the struggling College of New Jersey, later renamed Princeton University. As a Scotsman, he was often suspicious of the English crown, and he quickly became sympathetic with the grievances of the colonists. He was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence.
Never suspect people.
It’s better to be deceived or mistaken, which is only human,
after all, than to be suspicious, which is common.STARK YOUNG, quoting his father
nine
Never Approach a Woman from Behind
Sex, Love & Romance
In August of 2004, celebrity ghostwriter Neil Strauss was thrilled to learn that his most recent literary project—Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale—had opened at number three on the New York Times bestseller list. The book was his third bestselling “celebrity bio” in six years. At age thirty-five, Strauss was already being described as one of the most successful ghostwriters in publishing history.
After graduating from a private high school in the Chicago suburbs in the late 1980s, Strauss headed east with dreams of becoming a writer. While a student at Vassar College and Columbia University, he honed his skills by writing scores of articles for newspapers and magazines. After college, he landed a job at the Village Voice, where he performed whatever menial tasks needed doing—fact-checking, proofreading, writing ad copy—in order to occasionally write a piece that carried his byline.
Though months would go by without one of his stories being published, Strauss didn’t get discouraged. His persistence paid off when several of his pieces were noticed by honchos at the New York Times. Strauss soon began writing pieces on music and pop culture for the Times, and shortly after that for Rolling Stone. It was a heady time for the aspiring writer. Still in his twenties, he was developing a national reputation—and garnering a few industry awards along the way—for his profiles of such cultural icons as Madonna, Tom Cruise, Kurt Cobain, and Marilyn Manson.
Shortly after the Marilyn Manson profile appeared in Rolling Stone, Strauss received a call from Manson’s agent, asking him if he would consider ghostwriting a book for the rock star. Strauss eagerly accepted, and over the next several months developed a whole new approach to writing celebrity autobiographies. Instead of spending hundreds of hours poring over tape-recorded interviews, Strauss immersed himself in Manson’s life: living in his L.A. mansion, traveling with him on tour, partying with the musicians and their groupies, and in general becoming a fly on the wall of the performer’s life. He said of his method:I need more than just a voice on tape. I really need to be around that person all the time so I can see what their life is like. And if I’m ghostwriting, I need to be able to write how they would write if they could write.
Strauss’s around-the-clock presence in Marilyn Manson’s life, combined with his ability to gain the rock star’s trust, resulted in The Long Road Out of Hell, a 1998 celebrity autobiography that directly paralleled another famous journey through helclass="underline" Dante’s Inferno. The book, which revealed dark and disturbing elements of Manson’s past as well as softer and more vulnerable sides of his personality, was critically acclaimed, and Strauss was soon being hailed for breaking new ground in the genre (a Rolling Stone review said, “There has never been anything like it”). The Manson book marked Strauss’s first appearance on the New York Times bestseller list, and was soon followed by three more bestselling celebrity ghostwriting projects: The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band, by Tommy Lee and other members of Mötley Crüe (2001), Don’t Try This at Home: A Year in the Life of Dave Navarro (2004), and also in 2004 Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.
As Strauss was putting the finishing touches on the Jameson book, he was approached by his editor about looking into an online community of pickup artists who claimed they could turn an “average frustrated chump” into a “chick magnet.” The idea appealed to Strauss both professionally and personally. As a short, balding, bespectacled, shy, workaholic writer, he saw the assignment as a way to fix a longstanding problem in his life. He later said:I went into that community of pickup artists . . . not as a writer but as a guy who (like millions of others) had problems with women in his life and was too scared to approach women or was always the guy caught in friend-zone.
After laying out $500 to attend a weekend workshop for aspiring pickup artists (PUAs), Strauss came face-to-face with the workshop leader, a Toronto magician who went by the name of Mystery. Mystery was anything but handsome. According to Strauss, he looked like a combination of a vampire and a computer geek. But his incredible success with women had made him a kind of deity in the PUA community. Intrigued by Mystery’s tales of seduction, Strauss decided to study at the feet of the master. Within a few months, he moved into a Sunset Strip mansion with Mystery and a number of other master PUAs, adopted the nickname Style, and began to apply his workaholic research skills to his new assignment.
Strauss quickly learned such tricks of the trade as “the three-second rule,” which says a man must approach a woman within three seconds of seeing her (wait any longer, the rule goes, and you may chicken out). Early in his research, Strauss also learned another important principle:
Never approach a woman from behind.
The rule was explained: “Always come in from the front, but at a slight angle so it’s not too direct and confrontational. You should speak to her over your shoulder, so it looks like you may walk away at any minute.” As Strauss’s learning progressed, he was provided with additional rules:
Never give a woman a straight answer to a question.
Never hit on a woman right away.
Start with a disarming, innocent remark.
Never begin by asking a question that requires a yes or no response.