Secrets of Success: The Quirks and Superstitions of the Rich and Famous

by Charlie Croker

Overview

Did you know that Beethoven made every cup of coffee with exactly 60 beans?

Or that Shirley Temple always had precisely 56 curls in her hair?

Or that the young Frank Sinatra practised underwater swimming as a way of developing his ability to hold long breaths?

In Secrets of Success, Charlie Croker brings his proven blend of gripping trivia and incisive humour to the question of how famous high achievers reached those heights. We'll see Chopin sleeping with wedges between his fingers to increase their span, learn how P.G. Wodehouse reminded himself which pages of a manuscript still needed work, and find out why Thomas Edison chose his research assistants on the basis of their soup-eating habits.

This revealing and entertaining book provides countless glimpses into the methods – and sometimes madness – of the world's most famous figures. From ancient Egypt to the modern day, you're about to learn the secrets of their success . . .

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780752484655
Publisher:	The History Press
Publication date:	02/29/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Charlie Croker is an author and journalist whose titles include Lost in Translation and A Game of Three Halves. He has written for mainstream national media such as The Times and The Independent.

Read an Excerpt

'I Didn't Get Where I Am ...'

How the Rich and Famous Achieved Their Success

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By Charlie Croker

The History Press

Copyright © 2012 Charlie Croker
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-8465-5

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CHAPTER 1

GENIUS IS 1% INSPIRATION ...

You're itching to get started. Fame and fortune beckon – you just need the idea that's going to do it for you. Shouldn't take long. Inspiration can't be that hard, can it? Can it? Er ...

The question of where ideas come from, and how they can be accelerated on their journey, has taxed and bedevilled our species' greatest creative minds since the first caveman fashioned the first pointy-headed sharp thing and called it a spear. Some pretty great people have done some pretty weird things in search of that elusive substance known as 'inspiration'. Beethoven used to tip iced water over his head as he composed, while Charles II collected dust from Egyptian mummies and rubbed it on himself to acquire what he termed 'ancient greatness'. Peter Sellers, meanwhile, was inspired by no less an authority than the Almighty. 'I just talked to God!' he told director Blake Edwards one night, after a long day struggling with a difficult scene in a Pink Panther film. 'And he told me how to do it!' The next day they tried the scene that way – and it was even worse. 'Peter,' said Edwards, 'next time you talk to God, tell him to stay out of show business.'

Here's how some other notables have tackled the inspiration issue ...

Keith Richards often reads the Bible – 'some very good phrases in there', he says. He got the title for the Rolling Stones song Thief in the Night from Thessalonians 5:2.

Stephen Sondheim deliberately improvises in keys he's uncomfortable with, to prevent 'muscle memory' guiding his fingers into tired old patterns.

John Lennon took to composing on piano in the latter part of the Beatles' career precisely because he was unfamiliar with the instrument – it helped to give him fresh ideas.

Albert Einstein did what Sherlock Holmes was famous for – he played the violin as he mused on a problem. He credited it with extending his thinking.

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA

'Not taking risks in art is like not having sex and then expecting there to be children.'

The British comedy writer John Junkin was once asked how he inspired himself to write. He said it was very simple: you put a blank sheet of paper in the typewriter, then put the gas bill next to the typewriter.

Alan Bennett says you have to make yourself sit down and try to write something even if you don't immediately feel inspired. He likens it to making yourself go into the post office 'to see if anything's come in.'

Martin Amis: 'You know that foreign correspondent's ruse; in the days when you had your profession on the passport, you put writer; and then when you were in some trouble spot, in order to conceal your identity you simply changed the "r" in writer to an "a" and became a waiter. I always thought there was a great truth there. Writing is waiting, for me certainly. It wouldn't bother me a bit if I didn't write one word in the morning. I'd just think, you know, not yet.'

Douglas Adams: 'Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a piece of blank paper until your forehead bleeds.'

Artist Chuck Close: 'The advice I like to give young artists is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case.'

Vincent Van Gogh: 'Why should a painter be afraid of a blank canvas? A blank canvas is afraid of the painter; if you take that attitude you've beaten it already.'

Chris Ofili, the Turner Prize-winning British painter, starts every day by tearing a large sheet of paper into eight pieces, each 6 inches by 9. Then he makes some pencil marks to loosen up: 'they're just a way to say something and nothing with a physical mark that is nothing except a start.'

Where inspiration strikes:

The bathroom

Chris Addison: 'I have most of my best ideas when I'm brushing my teeth. Maybe I should floss them, too. One day you'll see me doing an amazing show with really, really clean teeth.'

Junot Diaz, whose novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the Pulitzer Prize, writes in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the bath.

Hilary Mantel, author of the Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall, counters writer's block by taking a shower.

Demosthenes wrote his speeches after shaving half his head, so that he would be too embarrassed to show himself in public.

The bedroom

Paul McCartney woke up with the tune for 'Yesterday' in his head, and couldn't believe it wasn't an existing song. He had to hum it to several people before being convinced that it was indeed his.

The guitar riff for 'Satisfaction' came to Keith Richards in his sleep. The guitarist woke up, recorded the riff and the words 'I can't get no satisfaction' into a cassette recorder, then went back to sleep. Listening back to the tape he heard 'two minutes of "Satisfaction" and 40 minutes of me snoring.'

Victor Hugo made himself work by having his valet hide his clothes. He was therefore unable to go out and had no choice but to write – naked.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge dreamed the whole of his poem 'Kubla Khan'. As he wrote it down he was interrupted by a visitor from the village of Porlock, and on resuming found that he couldn't remember any more. This is why the poem stops after just 54 lines. 'A person from Porlock' has come to be literary slang for an unwanted intruder.

Freddie Mercury used a piano as the headboard of his bed. If he awoke with a tune in his head he could reach up behind his head and, being double-jointed, play it straightaway. This is how he composed the beginning of 'Bohemian Rhapsody'.

The car

George Lucas got the inspiration for the Star Wars 'hairy co-pilot' character Chewbacca from his own Alaskan Malamute dog, who used to ride around on the front passenger seat of Lucas' car. The dog – Indiana – also inspired the name of Harrison Ford's character in Raiders of the Lost Ark, which Lucas produced. (Meanwhile Lucas got the idea for another Star Wars character while mixing his earlier film American Graffiti – he asked the sound engineer for R2-D2, meaning Reel 2 Dialogue 2. Liking the sound of the phrase he noted it down ...)

Gertrude Stein would sit in her parked Ford car (called Godiva) to write poetry.

The pub

Sebastian Faulks: 'Pub research – it's quite important to do that. The difficulty is to determine the difference between a thought and an idea. I may be interested in certain notes in a female singer's repertoire. If I talk about it in the pub and people's eyes glaze over and say it's completely uninteresting then I know it's just a thought I've shared and move on. But if it lights up their eyes and they say "yes, I wonder if people write songs just to include those notes" and "do you think it's possible a singer might actually live her life to give herself material for a song," then suddenly that's more than a thought, that's an idea. You can see some sort of flesh on it.'

The importance of routine

Karl Lagerfeld: 'The brain is a muscle and you have to work out not with machines but with your brain. You know, the French say "you get hungry when you are eating" and I think you get ideas when you are working.'

Italian novelist Alberto Moravia: 'When I sit at my table to write, I never know what it's going to be till I'm under way. I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn't. But I don't sit back waiting for it. I work every day.'

Somerset Maugham had a very strict routine at his home, the Villa Mauresque on the French Riviera: after breakfast, he would go up to his study at the top of the house, then work from 8.00 a.m. until noon (in longhand). Then he went downstairs and got ready for lunch. He once told a friend that he did that every single day. The friend asked: 'You mean Sundays and holidays and birthdays?' Maugham replied: 'Especially Sundays and holidays and birthdays.'

Some notes on notebooks

Francis Bacon (the Elizabethan statesman, not the twentieth-century artist): 'A man would do well to carry a pencil in his pocket, and write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought are commonly the most valuable, and should be secured, because they seldom return. It was advice that Isaac Newton would have approved of – he always had to have a pen in his hand, to help him concentrate. Discretion with your writing implement is important, though. The composer John Cage studied with Schoenberg: 'He pointed out the eraser on his pencil and said, "This end is more important than the other."'

But of course a pencil is of little use if you've got nothing to write on. This is why the humble notebook has come to be such a crucial tool for so many creative people ...

Mark Twain used leather-bound notebooks which were custom made to his own design: each page had a tab which could be torn off once the page was full. This allowed Twain to easily find the next blank sheet.

Charles Darwin wrote vertically down the page when out making field notes – he found this the easiest way while holding the book with one hand and writing with the other. He also sometimes started from both ends of the notebook simultaneously and met himself in the middle – a habit he shared with Isaac Newton. Newton numbered the front half with Roman numerals and the back half with Arabic numerals.

Thomas Jefferson's notebook had ivory leaves on which he wrote in pencil. Getting up early every day he would take measurements about the weather, bird migration, plant growth and so on. (He did this wherever he was in the world, using tools he carried with him such as a thermometer, a compass and the like.) Every night he would transfer the results from his notebook to seven large books, each concerned with a different subject. This allowed him to erase the ivory pages, freeing them for use the next day.

Beethoven's notebook was illegible to other people. Wilhelm von Lenz wrote in 1855 that, 'when Beethoven was enjoying a beer he might suddenly pull out his notebook and write something in it. "Something just occurred to me," he would say, sticking it back into his pocket. The ideas that he tossed off separately, with only a few lines and points and without barlines, are hieroglyphics that no one can decipher. Thus in these tiny notebooks he concealed a treasure of ideas.'

When he went deaf, the composer used notebooks as conversation aids. Friends would write down their comments and questions, to which Beethoven could respond orally.

Ernest Hemingway's relationship with his notebook was about as deep as you can get. 'I belong to this notebook and this pencil,' he once declared. He used them in Paris cafés, waiting for inspiration to appear. 'I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence that you know." So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.'

Larry David's notebook, according to the comedian's director Robert Weide, is a 'ratty brown thing that looks as if it might have cost forty-nine cents at a stationery store. Its pages are covered with David's illegible scrawl.' A typical instance came when David had no cash for a parking garage valet and had to borrow some from Weide. 'What would I have done if he hadn't been there?' said David. 'That could have been funny.'

David has even written the notebook into his show Curb Your Enthusiasm. He leaves it at a house of a neighbour, who on returning it asks for the $500 reward promised inside the front cover. 'Let me get you a check, Sherlock,' says an angry David.

John D. Rockefeller used a notebook as he toured his oil refineries and processing plants. He would ask questions of the managers, and note down their replies. 'More than once I have gone to luncheon with a number of our heads of departments,' he said, 'and have seen the sweat start out on the foreheads of some of them when that little red notebook was pulled out.'

The nineteenth-century American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson had 263 notebooks, which he indexed in another book of 400 pages. Then he made indexes for specific subjects, and another index for people mentioned in the books. Eventually he even had indexes for his indexes.

Leonardo da Vinci kept tiny (3.5in by 2.5in) notebooks tied to his belt, ready to note down drawings and ideas. His famous 'mirror writing' (from right to left across the page, readable only by viewing it in a mirror) was not so much a secret code as a way of stopping the ink smearing – da Vinci, you see, was left-handed. Though he could, as a party trick, write with both hands simultaneously. US President James Garfield, on the other hand (on the other two hands?), had an even more impressive trick: he could write in Latin with one hand and Greek with the other – again simultaneously.

Sebastian Faulks doesn't carry a notebook to jot down ideas because 'that looks a bit camp. But I do often have cheque books that end up with completely indecipherable scrawls on the back.'

Another solution to that problem came from the American poet Robert Frost – while travelling on a train once he made notes on the sole of his shoe.

Lieutenant Clancey Hatleberg wrote on his clothing for a different reason. He was the US Navy officer who opened up the hatch of Apollo 11 when it landed in the Pacific Ocean after returning from the moon. In charge of ensuring that quarantine conditions were met, he had three main things to remember: make sure the air vent valves on the spacecraft were closed ... remove the tape from the filters on the astronauts' biological isolation garments ... and inflate the life preservers on the garments. To ensure he wouldn't forget, as he was helicoptered over to the landing site he wrote across his face mask in red grease pencil: 'Vents, tape, inflate'.

What they listen to in order to inspire them:

[TABLE OMITTED]

The happy accident

The photographer and painter David Bailey is a great believer in the happy accident. 'The accident is the thing that makes creativity because if you're painting and a drip goes, you think "S***, I never thought of that drip there."' In this spirit he always starts working as quickly as possible. 'Pictures don't get better the longer you're around the subject. And you don't want them to be bored with you either because the magic goes. If I go to Delhi, I get off the plane and I start photographing because days later it all starts to look normal.'

Freddie Mercury's famous short microphone stand came about as the result of a happy accident. A normal stand broke in half during a 1970s gig – deciding he liked it that way, Mercury subsequently had them made specially.

CHAPTER 2

... AND 99% PERSPIRATION

Of the three categories listed by Malvolio in Twelfth Night – 'some are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them' – most high-achievers fall into the second category. There are very few true geniuses in this world. And even those who are born with a natural talent have to work hard to improve and maintain it. As Leonardo da Vinci wrote: 'It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.' A more modern saying on the subject has come to be associated (for some reason) with the game of golf, being attributed variously to Gary Player and Arnold Palmer. But the original version actually stemmed from Thomas Jefferson: 'I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.'

As Mark Twain said, 'the dictionary is the only place where success comes before work.' You don't have to bust a gut – the American author of motivational books Robert Collier pointed out that 'success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out' – but you do have to keep going. 'I walk slowly,' said Abraham Lincoln. 'But I never walk backward.' After a while your persistence will become habitual, certainly if you believe Aristotle: 'We are what we repeatedly do.'

If they felt the need to work hard at achieving success, why shouldn't you?

What does practice make?

Franz Liszt read books while practising piano exercises. But not just any books. 'Poetry interferes subtly with the rhythm of the music, and so does really admirable prose. The most useful, I have found for myself, are detective stories, sociology and literary criticism.' Richard Coles, the classically trained keyboard player with 1980s band The Communards took this habit one stage further: he found the pop parts so simple to perform that during concerts he would keep a book of poetry on top of the keyboard, reading it to prevent himself getting bored.

Fred Astaire practised each dance until he could read a book while performing it.

As a child Elton John was forced to practise the piano by his grandmother – although he hated it at the time, he now expresses his gratitude. The young Chopin went to bed with wooden wedges between his fingers, to increase the number of piano keys he could span. Even more extreme measures were employed by Miles Davis' childhood trumpet teacher: whenever Davis used vibrato, the teacher would slap his knuckles. Davis grew up to be famous for his vibrato-free sound.

The youthful Steve Davis used cheese and Marmite sandwiches as practice incentive – only after potting a set number of balls would he allow himself one. Sometimes he'd use only the white ball, hitting it up and down the table from the brown spot to check that his cue action was straight. The regulars in his club laughed at this eccentricity – until he became successful, after which they formed his entourage at tournaments, known as the 'Romford Mafia'.

As a child Donald Bradman practised batting by hitting a golf ball with a cricket stump. He would hit the ball against a curved brick wall, from which it would rebound at differing angles – then try to hit it again.

Before every Grand Prix Jenson Button sits on an inflatable gym ball, holding a steering wheel. He then shuts his eyes and drives an imaginary lap of the circuit, making all the appropriate noises. He invariably finishes the lap within a second of his real time.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from 'I Didn't Get Where I Am ...' by Charlie Croker. Copyright © 2012 Charlie Croker. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title,
Introduction,
1 Genius is 1% inspiration ...,
2 ... and 99% perspiration,
3 The 'wow' factor,
4 Get your strength up,
5 'Good day at the office, darling?',
6 The body beautiful,
7 Money, money, money,
8 And relax ... how to spend your downtime,
9 Looking back on it all,
Copyright,