Boorish charm: if at first you don't succeed, write a book about failing

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 24, 2002 | by Robert Stacy McCain

Toby Young long had dreamed of life amid the exciting world of New York publishing and Hollywood celebrities. When the British journalist received an offer to move to New York City and write for Vanity Fair, one of the glossiest of glossy magazines, it seemed perfect. Young imagined himself becoming buddies with Vanity Fair's legendary editor, Graydon Carter, hanging around movie stars and dating glamorous women.

So it was that Young arrived in Manhattan in 1995 at age 32, thinking he was certain to succeed. He failed. Spectacularly so. By the time he returned to London less than four years later, he had been fired from his Vanity Fair job, sunken into an alcoholic daze and somehow managed to offend nearly everybody he met.

But his tale has a happy ending. Young has turned his New York saga into a book, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People(Da Capo Press, $24, 352 pp), a best seller in England scheduled for publication in the United States in July. Hollywood film producers--the same high-powered big shots who wouldn't give him the time of day five years ago--are bidding to turn his story into a movie. Not bad for a chap who describes himself as "a balding British hack."

"All my close friends accuse me of false modesty," Young says in a telephone interview. "But I realized a long time ago that if you put yourself down a lot, people are more likely to accept it when you criticize others."

His roller-coaster ride through the celebrity culture of New York and Hollywood began with a quarrel with Julie Burchill, his coeditor at the Modern Review. "I called it low culture for highbrows," Young says of the journal he co-founded in 1991. The journal found a niche among the London elite, but when Young decided in 1995 to shut down Modern Review--without first informing Burchill--the result was a media furor. Accusations and counteraccusations flew. The buzz apparently reached across the Atlantic to the offices of Vanity Fair. Just as the Modern Review brouhaha was fading from tabloid headlines, Young's phone rang with an offer to join Vanity Fair at a salary of $10,000 a month.

It was like a dream come true for Young, who was fascinated with celebrities--Vanity Fair's stock in trade. "In the early nineties in the U.K., American celebrities and American popcorn movies were considered quite cool," he explains. "... Coming to New York to work for Vanity Fair seemed like an incredibly hip thing to do."

Young was expecting Vanity Fair to be "a little bit more irreverent and iconoclastic than it turned out to be," he recalls. What he found was a high-pressure, status-obsessed world where image was everything and political correctness frowned on the kinds of antics that were commonplace among the hard-drinking Brit journalists of Fleet Street.

"Within about a fortnight, I was branded a chronic alcoholic with an inappropriate attitude toward the opposite sex," Young says. Among his most infamous blunders: hiring a "stripper-gram" to deliver a birthday greeting at the Vanity Fair office to a coworker--on what turned out to be Take Our Daughters to Work Day.

His dreams of romance with the stunning models featured in Vanity Fair's fashion spreads came to naught. "I realized as far as the gorgeous models milling around in the building were concerned, I was just the help," Young says. "They crave attention from Richard Gere look-alikes pulling down a million bucks a year on Wall Street. They didn't crave attention from the likes of me."

Likewise, his notions of camaraderie with the literary luminaries of New York proved illusory. "The thing which really astonished me about New York, after having bought into the myth of New York as the great melting pot, was how class-bound it is," Young says. "Everyone I encountered was obsessed with status.... There was a very rigid food chain. And even though I was a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, I was still a minnow."

After returning to London, Young wooed and wed a woman who apparently was planning to keep him safely at home in Britain. "I went to L.A. on my honeymoon last July," Young says. "I was hoping my wife would like L.A. so much we could both go and live there, and I could write a sequel about crashing and burning in Hollywood, but unfortunately, she didn't much like it."

ROBERT STACY MCCAIN WRITES FOR Insight's SISTER DAILY, THE WASHINGTON TIMES.