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Time magazine, November 19th 2001

Back in London, bad-boy journo Toby Young tells how he blew his chance for success in Manhattan

by Lauren Goldstein London

Toby Young has his first serious assignment at Vanity Fair. It's to identify photos from a New York party. The party was a fairly standard Manhattan affair, the opening of artist Ross Bleckner's work at the Mary Boone Gallery. But Young is new in town, having just moved from London, and isn't quite up to speed on who's who in the Big Apple. So he phones the gallery and gets Boone herself. "Ross Bleckner," he plunges in, "man or woman?" "Are you really calling from Vanity Fair?" asks Boone before hanging up. Young was off and running. Five years later Young still didn't have a clue about how to navigate the city's society, but he did have a load of funny stories about his failed attempts. How To Lose Friends & Alienate People is Young's tale of not making it in Manhattan.

One of Young's revelations, about the lengths to which he had to go to pull of a "Cool Britannia" photo shoot for the magazine, has already earned him more column inches in Britain than he wrote during his career at Vanity Fair. The Groucho Club, a members-only hangout favored by the media set, suspended Young after co-owner Matthew Freud read his account of taking cocaine at the bar while organizing the shoot of actor Keith Allen, artist Damien Hirst and Blur guitarist Alex James. For a man who has been sued or threatened with lawsuits by the likes of Robert Maxwell, Elizabeth Hurley and Harold Evans, the incident has him surprisingly flustered - he moves a lunch date from the club to a nearby restaurant, lest he antogonize the owners further. "I just want to get back in," he explains.

Or maybe it isn't surprising. As packed as Young's book is with scandalizing tales about his co-workers in New York (many names have been changed to avoid even more litigation), it is downright conciliatory to those he came home to in London. Take columnist Julie Burchill. The two fell out loudly 10 years ago when Young decided unilaterally to close the magazine they had co-founded for fear the editorship would fall into the inexperienced hands of Burchill's lesbian lover. But in his book, Young calls Burchill "regal" and "whipsmart". She returns the favor in the Spectator: "This is the funniest, cleverest, most touching new book I've read for as long as I can remember." Part of Young's mission while burning bridges in New York is to mend fences in London. "I was quite nice," says Young. "I did want to draw a line under all that."

The best reading is Young on his own outrageous faux pas. For his first day in the "casual" Vanity Fair office, he shows up in jeans and, taken for a messenger, is sent to the mailroom. Young inadvertently hires a stripper to come to the office on "Take Our Daughters To Work Day" and gets kicked out of party after party. "Jesus Christ, Toby, I'm not going to tell you again," Vanity Fair's editor Graydon Carter shouts at him during the magazine's Oscar party. "Stop bothering the celebrities!"

Young's celeb obsessions are the result, he claims, of being sired by one of "the great and the good." His father, author and advocate Michael Young, invented Britain's Open University and, more relevant to the book, coined the word meritocracy. As Young's experience in New York goes from bad to dire, he struggles to understand what makes Manhattan so inhospitable. What he settles on is that America is not the meritocratic society it believes itself to be. "The various setbacks I suffered brought home to me the extent to which New Yorkers judge you according to how well or badly you're doing. After I was taken off the masthead, I vanished from the radar screen." Successful Americans believe they have risen because of hard work, not birthright, he says, so the believe they are right to judge others by their success - whether taxi drivers, waiters or failed magazine writers. Young goes on to contrast this with the British class system - and comes out in favor of an aristocratic society, since those at the top have the decency to feel guilty about it. Such guilt doesn't exist in New York, and so Young, no matter how witty or entertaining, is made to feel a loser there. A questionable excuse for failure, but it makes for good reading. In the end, Young is saved by the love of a good woman who insists he return to London. When he does, he realizes "the circle I'd been hanging out with back in London was far closer to the Algonquin round table than any group of journalists I was likely to encounter in Manhattan." Young is now talking about editing a book of essays on meritocracy with his father - and about writing a novel in which celebrities are overthrown. Revenge is sweet.