Secrets of a Hollywood hustler

Salespeople love to say that when a customer says "no" it's merely a prelude to an inevitable "yes". "No" is the starter's gun launching the salesperson onto the obstacle course that is the selling process. It's a philosophy that if offered up by a sex offender would land him in jail, and yet lives on as gospel in selling.

Jerry Weintraub is one of the few salespeople who can sound cool rather than creepy when he says "the word no, to me, was always an opportunity to make people say yes". A 72-year-old pistol of a man, whose career has taken him from promoting Frank Sinatra and The Carpenters to producing the Ocean's Eleven films, starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, he has just published the best business book of 2010, When I Stop Talking You'll Know I'm Dead: Useful Stories From a Persuasive Man.

It's as breezy and Beverly Hills as a Burt Bacharach song and full of stories describing business as a raucous contest of nerve, fakery and bluster, with not a framework or corporate social responsibility initiative in sight, which if you're as fortunate as Weintraub, can lead to the Hollywood good life.

"If asked my philosophy, it would be simply this: savour life, don't press too hard, don't worry too much," writes Weintraub. "But I never could live by this philosophy and was, in fact, out working, hustling, trading, scheming and making a buck as soon as I was old enough to leave my parents' house." It's the hustling and scheming that give the book its flavour and offer all kinds of business lessons.

Brooklyn-born and Bronx-raised, Weintraub learned his first business lesson from his father, a jewellery dealer. When Weintraub was eight, his father came home with a huge star sapphire, the largest in the world. As gems go, it was worthless, but his father polished it up and gave it a name, The Star of Ardaban. He then had a case made for it, and began taking the stone around the country.

At every stop, his father was met by armed guards for protection and a local reporter. Once the story of the stone appeared in the local paper, he would invite all the jewellers to his hotel to look at it. While they examined it, he sold them everything else in his jewellery case. At the end of the tour, he donated the Star to the Smithsonian museum.

"This is a Bible story in my family, a foundational myth, it explains everything you need to know about my father's business and about my own," writes Weintraub. "Though he was selling rubies and sapphires and I am selling Clooney, Pitt and Damon, the trick is the same: packaging."

Another of Weintraub's big lessons is never to waste your time on activities that don't hold out the possibility of a big, positive outcome. Go big or go home. To prove the point, Weintraub's current projects include a new Tarzan film and a biopic of Liberace starring Michael Douglas as the flamboyant pianist and Matt Damon as his boyfriend, a project to test the mettle of even the most seasoned Hollywood peddler.