So I finish by asking for his number-one piece of advice.
‘My best advice is listen, listen rather than talk. I was never bright in school, but I was a very good listener, and I still am. I have a better life because of it. When I meet people, I’m curious about their story, about how they did what they did. Along the way you meet people smarter than you and they teach you what you don’t already know. So I listen to them, take away my little titbits, and off I go …’
And with that, a final wave and a ‘lots of love’, he’s whisked off by his ever-faithful team. Unfortunately my holiday romance with the talented Mr Cowell is over. I wonder if he’ll write.
‘IF YOU GET A “YES”, THEN SHUT UP. THERE ARE TIMES I’VE SAID YES AND THE ARTIST STARTS WITH “I KNEW IT, WE’RE GOING TO DO AMAZING THINGS TOGETHER” AND THE MORE THEY TALK THE MORE I’M THINKING, “I’M REALLY GOING OFF YOU”.’
– Simon Cowell
SHAMI CHAKRABARTI: ALL TOGETHER NOW
I AM HAVING COFFEE WITH ‘THE most dangerous woman in Britain’, according to The Sun newspaper. Shami Chakrabarti, former director of Liberty (the human rights lobbying organisation), was given that illustrious title after 9/11 due to her high-profile work in defending civil liberties, or, as The Sun saw it, cosying up to terrorists and criminals.
It was a title Shami was happy to accept. ‘It was like an honour, better than a CBE from the Queen.’ In a brilliant twist of fate, a few years later Shami found herself helping the journalist who had written the piece. He had been sacked from a radio show for describing a Tory councillor as a ‘Nazi’ for preventing smokers from being foster parents and his defence was his right to freedom of speech under the Human Rights Act, an act he had so wilfully attacked in the past. But as a protector of everyone’s human rights, Shami was there to support him too. It was a situation that illustrated a contradiction that Shami knows only too well. ‘We all like having our own human rights, it’s just other people’s we have a problem with.’
Unfortunately for Shami, being branded ‘dangerous’ was the least she had to deal with in her job: constant racist, misogynistic and personal slurs also came with the territory. But she’s not complaining: ‘Elsewhere in the world human rights campaigners get physically attacked or worse, so if I have to deal with someone saying nasty things about me in the newspaper or social media then bring it on.’
The reason why she experienced so much hate was partly the context she was working within. Shami’s time at Liberty was shaped by the 9/11 terror attacks and the world’s response to them. ‘I started at Liberty on the tenth of September. On that first day, I was told to blue-sky think about what our priorities could be. Then the next day happened, so no more blue skies.’ Her role required her to defend very publicly the basic principles of human rights when the world suddenly wanted to ignore them. ‘The country did really bad things, not just for human rights, but for our own security: extraordinary renditions, indefinite detention without trial. So I had to say things nobody else wanted to say, and a lot of people didn’t want to hear them.’ The scorn of members of the Establishment and the Fourth Estate followed.
She never shirked once, no matter how unpopular her campaigning made her. If anything, she relished the fight, taking on the government over proposed new laws and holding the system to account. I ask her where she gets the resilience to face such strong headwinds and stand up to power. Shami herself attributes it to several things, but none less than her parents. ‘I am the daughter of migrants. They’d both been to university in India before moving to England and they raised me to believe I could do anything. I was educated at the local comprehensive and I knew Eton boys were privileged and different, but I never believed they were better than me.’
She has a personal motto that encapsulates this thinking: ‘Anyone’s equal, no one’s superior.’ It’s a principle that guides her approach to life as well as work. ‘It’s a pretty good way to rub along with other people in the world.’
The goal of achieving a society where everyone is equal, according to Shami, is still far away. She despairs at how refugees are talked about increasingly with disdain. ‘“Refugee” to me is one of the most noble words on the planet. When I grew up in the 1970s we loved refugees because they were Russians who wanted to escape the terrible Soviet bloc for our better way of life. But now we cast refugees as “others”, as “less than”, as a problem.’ And worse than that, she sees women’s place in the world as the biggest inequality going. ‘The older I get and the more I see, I think gender injustice is the greatest human rights abuse on the planet. It’s literally like an apartheid, except this isn’t one country, this is global and millennial and it’s insane.’
She has a one-word answer for tackling such issues of inequality and defending our basic rights, and that is solidarity.
‘Powerful elites in the world always succeed by divide and rule, using tools like fear and racism. But solidarity, the basic human connection we can all have with one another, is stronger. It is the magic weapon to achieve change. If we remember that your human rights are the same as my human rights, even if we don’t look the same, and if we support one another we all benefit, we all become stronger. Ultimately, we are each other’s security.’
THE REAL ARI EMANUEL
IT’S OSCAR WEEK AND ARI Emanuel, Hollywood super-agent and inspiration for Entourage’s Ari Gold, is a busy man. He’s so busy even his assistant has an assistant, and she’s worked marvels, getting me time with the most powerful man in Hollywood at Hollywood’s busiest time of year. But there isn’t a second to lose.
I’m grabbed from reception and walked quickly, almost at jogging pace, to his office. A meeting is just ending and this is our shot. Two people are still being shown out as I am shown in – we briefly get stuck in the doorway. Inside, Ari is stood at his chest-high desk, a desk that is placed over a treadmill so he can work out while he’s working. He looks up and over at me, then to his assistant, and asks, quite reasonably, all things considered, ‘So, who the hell is this guy?’ And so my conversation with Ari begins.
If that makes him sound rude, then it’s misleading. Focused, for sure. Direct, definitely. But not rude. It’s just that ‘it’s a shitty week for me, what with it being the Oscars, and EVERYONE is in town, there is a LOT going on’. He talks in lean, rapid-fire bursts, all protein, no sugar. A dark-matter magnetism radiates from him; he’s unquestionably the centre of gravity in the room. He had me at ‘So’.
Ari wants to know why I want him in this book. I explain it’s about people at the top of their game, and that he’s the most powerful and successful agent in the world. He listens to my answer, reflects for a nanosecond and says, ‘That’s true. I am.’ And then, a beat later, follows up with, ‘Well, it doesn’t pay for me to be humble, not in this industry.’
So what does pay in this industry? What is the secret for getting to the top?
‘I’ve thought about this, and my advice for success comes down to three things: be curious, show up, stay in touch. You have to keep reading, listening, talking, thinking, finding out how people think, what they do. And chase down anything that seems interesting.’
He recounts an article he read ten years ago about a new technology that to him sounded intriguing and to us is now known as virtual reality. So he got on the phone to the person in the piece, invited him for lunch and asked him questions.