BOOKS
An Incorrect Brit in King Carter's Court
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How to Lose Friends & Alienate People |
In his new tell-too-much memoir, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, Toby Young explodes the myth that every would-be British journalist who washes up on Manhattan is promptly handed a corner office at Condé Nast. On the contrary, two years after accepting a trial contributing editor slot from Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter, Young is forced to go scampering back to Blighty broke, drunk, depressed, hated by some of the most powerful media players in New York, and without a whole lot of byline to show for it.
As the story of this failure, How to Lose Friends should be avoided by those in search of a magazine equivalent to William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade or John Gregory Dunne’s Monster. Young can’t deliver a hardened, knowing take on the inner workings of the country’s top-dog glossy because he wasn’t privy to them. At Vanity Fair, Young was quarantined in a converted closet with an equally disenfranchised twenty-five-year-old researcher, Chris Lawrence, with whom he apparently spent his days striking out with Prada-clad fashion assistants, flipping through the James Bond Companion, and bestowing such nicknames on each other as “Frat Boy” and “Toadmeister.”
Neither will the memoir be of much help as a “what not to do” because the series of transgressions that ultimately get him fired come off much more as adolescent self-sabotage than genuine miscalculation. Would any aspiring magazine journalist really need to be told not to start off an interview with Nathan Lane by asking if he’s gay, offering Graydon Carter red-penned critiques of his own articles, or sending a colleague a stripper-gram on Take Our Daughters to Work Day?
Young’s best trade material is on his editor-in-chief. When he arrives at VF, Graydon Carter gives him what Young later learns is the standard matriculation address: “You think you’ve arrived, doncha? I hate to break it to you but you’re only in the first room . . . .” Young dubs Carter’s infamous seven-rooms speech “the nightclub theory of career advancement” and muses, “I was the wannabe in Studio 54 who’d somehow managed to get past Steve Rubell at the door but was a long way from snorting coke off Margaret Trudeau’s cleavage in the VIP room.” Another nice tidbit is the Carter-authored list of words officially banned from VF: “boîte (for restaurant); chortled (for said), chuckled (for said), cough up (as in to spend); doff, donned (as in put on); eatery (for restaurant), executive-produced, and such like, flat, flick, freebie, freeloader, fuck (okay for exclamation, not for having sex) . . . .” But before Young can gather more revealing material on Carter, their relationship devolves into wayward son and annoyed father. Carter returns his pitches with rejection notes in progressively shorter shorthand (“That’s great, Toby, but it’s first room stuff”; “first room stuff”; and finally simply “first room”). After Young spends months wangling an invitation to the vaunted Vanity Fair Oscar party at Morton’s, Carter chastises him for arriving ahead of his scheduled time (the invites are staggered so that no-names like Young barely get in before last call) and harassing A-listers like Jim Carrey and Mel Gibson. Finally, when one of Young’s increasingly common drinking binges leads to a pummeling from the bouncer at Pravda and an item on Page Six, the ax falls. “Listen, Toby, I’m gonna have to take your name off the masthead. This kind of thing isn’t good for the magazine’s image.”
From there Young departs completely from the publishing world to chronicle his brief descent into New York misery and ultimate redemption. He drinks so heavily even Anthony Haden-Guest advises him to slow down, he pouts over the success of his fellow British expat Alex de Silva (who manages to set up a life selling screenplays and screwing a supermodel in L.A. in the same time it takes Young to get fired), he curls into a ball of self-pity and despair. But, in the end, he backs away from the windowsill, wins the love of a sassy British lass who — unlike her New York counterparts — laughs at his dirty jokes and can get past his bald head and empty bank account. And under her influence, he realizes the error of his ways, gets on the wagon, and retreats to London.
If not inspiring, his personal history is harmless enough if a bit syrupy at the end. However, what rankles are Young’s pseudo-intellectual posturings on the state of American magazines and wannabe Toquevillean musings on the differences between Brits and Yanks.
Young casts himself as an idealistic young reporter and satirist (In London, he had founded The Modern Review, a high-brow journal of low-brow culture which ran stories about things like the enduring appeal of the Porky’s trilogy in the Romanian underground) who comes to New York chasing roundtable-at-the-Algonquin dreams, but finds to his horror that the magazine world is peopled by humorless teetotalers who do nothing but worship at the altar of celebrity. “I’d been looking forward,” Young writes, “to meeting the hardscrabble reporters Ben Hecht pays tribute to in A Child of the Century: ‘They sat, grown and abuzz, outside an adult civilization, intent on breaking windows.’ I was expecting their contemporary equivalents to adopt a them-and-us attitude towards celebrities and their handlers, ridiculing and lampooning them at every turn. In fact, they behaved like flunkies at the court of Louis XIV, snapping to attention whenever a boldface name so much as glanced in their direction.”
As a recent escapee (not a euphemism for fired) from a brother Condé Nast publication, Details — a magazine Young describes as being for men “who like staring at pictures of naked men but haven’t quite figured out why” — I can certainly empathize with some of Young’s disappointments about glossy life. Like him (and undoubtedly all of our peers), I brought my own journalistic fantasies to the job — although mine ran more toward ’60s Esquire than ’20s Vanity Fair. Like him, I sometimes ran afoul of a corporate culture that didn’t share my sense of humor, was inept at playing the office politics that help get you to “the second room,” and was surprised at the extent to which publicists influenced magazine content. But the biggest disappointment about the experience was that Details lost its nerve only a year into an experiment to make over the magazine from its brief incarnation as a Mark Golim-led Maxim imitator into a semi-serious, basically unisex, general-interest magazine. In my first year there, I wrote about boxing, sumo wrestling, hip-hop tattoos, and Mario Cuomo. But in response to sluggish newsstand sales, it was decided that the magazine needed to rid itself of expensive and often nondemographic targeted reportage. My editors suddenly started trying to convince me to write first-person pieces about going to a nude beach with my girlfriend’s family and taking a two-month program of penis-extending pills (with no assurances of what was actually in them).
While no one would confuse Vanity Fair with Harper’s, it’s not exactly Entertainment Weekly either. The issue on newsstands in August contains its standard cocktail of movie business, high society, politics, crime, and foreign affairs: stories on Daniel Pearl, the child-molesting priest Paul Shanley, the fall of Michael Ovitz, and the Skakel trial. With Talk essentially a non-starter, it remains the only monthly general-interest magazine with the budget and inclination to fund such a diverse range of stories. And while (like every other glossy) it may have to employ full-time celebrity wranglers and kiss some Hollywood publicist’s ass to get the cheesecake covers that insure they hit their circulation targets, Vanity Fair often gets the compensatory pleasure of Hollywood agents calling to option their features. With an in-house opportunity to get ideas approved and follow in the footsteps of his reporter-heroes, corporate charge card in hand, Toby Young hit Vanity Fair with the following pitches: 1. “How hard is it in this day and age to become a social pariah?” He offers to see how many enemies he can make in a twenty-four-hour period by drinking beer at an AA meeting, letting his cell phone ring incessantly during Death of a Salesman, and smoking a cigar at a vegetarian restaurant. 2. “Who is the elusive Jay McInerney and why is he so publicity-shy?” He suggests a tongue-in-cheek profile of the ubiquitous author, wherein he is ironically described a Salingeresque recluse. 3. There’s this guy named Abdul in L.A. who for $300 picks a fight with you during a date and then lets you kick his ass. Young offers to go out with a Playboy bunny and have Abdul work his magic.
But even if, as Young wants us to believe, some of those pitches were originally intended as jokes, he unironically tries to blame his ultimate failure at Vanity Fair on the inability of his colleagues to accept his politically incorrect views and swinging nightlife habits: “The old-fashioned New York journalist, a harum-scarum roustabout whose status is somewhere between ‘a whore and a bartender,’ has been replaced by a clean and sober careerist with a summer house in the Hamptons.” He never seems to notice that the only thing he has in common with his idealized newsies of yore is a love of booze: he doesn’t have a nose for hot copy, he doesn’t pound the pavement looking for scoops, and his pitches read like they were plucked from the reject pile at The Onion. Christopher Hitchens likes to drink and smoke, too, but he still has a job at Vanity Fair because he also likes to report. In the end, Young’s analysis of his failure is less convincing than Carter’s. “What the hell happened? I gave you the opportunity of a lifetime and you fucked the dog?”
Fortunately for Toby Young, he no longer needs Carter’s favor. The movie rights to How to Lose Friends have already been optioned (Cameron Crowe to direct?), and his latest dispatch from London is the lead story in the August issue of Details. The cover line: Why It’s Okay to Pay For Sex.
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