Originally from Bexley, Ohio (a suburb of Columbus), Greene attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and became a reporter and feature writer for the Chicago Sun-Times upon graduating in 1969, receiving a regular column in the paper within two years. Greene first drew significant national attention with his book, Billion Dollar Baby (1975), a diary of his experiences touring with rock musician Alice Cooper and portraying Santa Claus during the show.
Greene's primary focus remained his newspaper column, for which he won the National Headliner Award for best column in 1977 from an American journalism group. Shortly afterward, Greene switched to the competing Chicago Tribune and began making occasional guest appearances on local television, eventually landing a commentary slot on the ABC news program Nightline. He also wrote the "American Beat" column in Esquire.
During the 1990s, Greene spent time covering Michael Jordan of the Chicago Bulls basketball team, forming an unlikely friendship that Greene documented in two best-selling books. The movie Funny About Love (1990) was based on a Greene column. In 1993, his novel All Summer Long was published by Doubleday, and his columns are collected in several books.
Though Greene was popular with readers, critics accused him of excessive sentimentality, heavy writing and repetitive coverage of the same subject, most notably the Baby Richard child custody saga. A therapist for the birth parents in the custody case, Karen Moriarty, claimed in the book Baby Richard: A Four-Year-Old Child Comes Home that Greene never spoke to the parents, although he covered the subject with a hundred columns in which he strongly took the side of the adoptive parents. Greene claimed that the biological parents, the Kirchners, did not respond to his inquiries for interviews. The Chicago Reader ran a derisive column, "BobWatch: We Read Him So You Don't Have To," penned pseudonymously by Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg. Greene's experiences as a roadie were parodied by comics writer Steve Gerber in the background of the villain Dr. Bong in the 1970s Marvel comic Howard the Duck.
Greene was forced to resign from his newspaper column in September 2002 after admitting an extramarital sexual relationship 14 years earlier with a high school student. The student had visited Greene at work for a school project and became the subject of one of his columns. Admission of the affair attracted considerable attention, partly because Greene had made a name for himself as an advocate for abused children and family values, notably in his bestselling Good Morning, Merry Sunshine: A Father's Journal of His Child's First Year. Steinberg said on CNN that Greene was "famous for using his position as a columnist... to try to get women into bed."
The student with whom Greene had a relationship was 17, legal age in Illinois, and had graduated from high school in the months between their first meeting and his invitation to take her out to dinner. Their sole hotel tryst was euphemistically described as a "sexual encounter that stopped short of intercourse" in the Chicago Tribune, and Greene claimed to Esquire that he demurred at going further, telling her, "You should wait to do this with someone you love."
Four months after Greene's ouster from the Chicago Tribune, his wife Susan died of heart failure following a month-long respiratory illness.
Greene did not return to newspaper or magazine journalism, though he continues to write books. His 2006 book, And You Know You Should Be Glad: A True Story of Lifelong Friendship, is a personal account of the illness and death of his lifelong friend Jack Roth at age 57. Publishers Weekly reviewed:
Bestselling author Greene... looks back on his youth in Bexley, Ohio (pop. 13,000), where he and his four pals grew up together, calling themselves ABCDJ (for Allen, Bob, Chuck, Dan and Jack)... Greene met Jack in kindergarten, and they remained best friends for life. Remembering people and places they shared, the two revisit old haunts, discovering that their beloved Toddle House, where they once went for late-night chocolate pie, is now a Pizza Plus. Greene's repetitive, rambling free associations recall everything from his Halloween costume and old songs to ice cream parlors, state fairs and clothing fads. Unfortunately, the author's dusty attic of lost Americana is cluttered with clichés, nostalgia and overly sentimental yearnings.
His latest book, released on May 13, 2008, is When We Get to Surf City: A Journey through America in Pursuit of Rock and Roll, Friendship, and Dreams, a chronicle of a 15-year period when he intermittently toured with surf-rock legends Jan and Dean, singing backup and playing guitar.
He was named Illinois Journalist of the Year and was credited with the Peter Lisagor Award for the Public Service Journalism in 1995 for his reporting on courts failing children in need.
