BACK TO

F Troop Meets the A List - By Jared Paul Stern

07/02/2002 (Copyright (c) 2002, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS & ALIENATE PEOPLE By Toby Young -(Da Capo, 368 pages, $24)

A FEW YEARS AGO, while having lunch with the British author Martin Amis at the restaurant 44 in New York, I foolishly raised the subject of Toby Young.

At the time, Mr. Young was working at Vanity Fair as the magazine's "society editor," and we'd gotten acquainted through running into each other at various bacchanals and booze-ups around town. He wanted to interview Mr. Amis for the magazine but was concerned about the author's reaction to some unflattering articles he'd penned back home in Britain. So when I mentioned the lunch to him, Mr. Young asked me to work his name into the conversation.

Upon my dropping Mr. Young's name, Mr. Amis's characteristic semi-sneer blossomed into a rictus of loathing. Contemplating his hand-rolled cigarette, he breathed: "Tell Toby Young . . . to go f--- himself." I duly relayed the message to Toby, who was waiting anxiously around the corner.

The episode appears in "How to Lose Friends & Alienate People," Mr. Young's memoir of his failure to take Manhattan (or anything else) by storm. Throughout the book Mr. Amis's sentiment is expressed many times by many people. Mr. Young seems tailor-made for the role of plucky but luckless loser, but he also recounts his experience with wit, a flair for comedy, self-deprecation and a goodish bit of sociological insight on the side.

Much of the book concerns his tempestuous relationship with Graydon Carter, the imposing editor of Vanity Fair. Mr. Carter, having admired Mr. Young's work as the editor of Modern Review, a brilliant journal of low culture for highbrows, asks him to come work at the magazine for a month, the equivalent, Mr. Young writes, of Boot being summoned to the Beast in Evelyn Waugh's "Scoop." Mr. Young is overjoyed -- but this is no mere Boy Meets Editor story.

Understandably, Mr. Young arrives at Vanity Fair feeling as though he has achieved a measure of success; but like a vindictive Virgil giving Dante the wrong directions through hell, Mr. Carter informs him that in the grand scheme of Manhattan media success he has merely managed to make it to the "first room" and that there are seven rooms in all, the rest of which he may never set foot in.

Despite Mr. Carter's surprising generosity and obvious affection, Mr. Young, like a bumbling Bertie Wooster, can't help bringing out Mr. Carter's inner Aunt Agatha, resulting in hilarious but hurtful outbursts. Mr. Carter tells him that he has a brown thumb -- i.e., "everything you touch turns to s---" -- and that he is "like a British person born in New Jersey." He likens Mr. Young's story ideas to "dog whistles" -- "you can hear them but I can't." It's an amusing, relatively unflattering but fairly fond portrait of Mr. Carter, a Gatsby-esque character who started off his professional life laying railroad ties on the Canadian Pacific and now lords it over most of Manhattan's (and Hollywood's) movers and shakers.

Mr. Young, it seems, had long dreamed of coming to America and worshipping at the altar of celebrity because of his decidedly non-U and un-British infatuation with movie stars and other famous folk. Among his fellow Oxford- and Cambridge-educated aesthetes back home, expressing interest in the "trained monkeys of the media-industrial complex" simply "isn't done." But given the choice between what is and is not done, Mr. Young always opts for the latter.

Once here, however, not only is the alarmingly naive Mr. Young a liability at the magazine, where he comes to be known as "the British guy who hired a strippergram on `Take Our Daughters to Work Day,'" but he can't put a foot right in love either. Of course, since he can hardly approach the subject of sex without trotting out Freud, it's little wonder that his amorous attempts so often fail. Meanwhile, depressingly, a fellow British hack who came to the U.S. around the same time as he did makes it big in Hollywood and squires around a supermodel, of all things.

Grasping at similar success himself, Mr. Young never misses an opportunity to get his name into print, though the effects are often detrimental. Unable to settle a bar tab at a pricey watering hole, he gets into a scuffle that ends up being reported in the New York Post's "Page Six" column, prompting Mr. Carter to fire him. (In the book he neglects to mention that he phoned the item in himself; I know because I wrote it.) Another item about a satirical play he'd written based on the lives of media power couple Tina Brown and Harry Evans caused Mr. Evans to threaten a libel suit (he planted that one himself as well).

At this point Mr. Young starts on a downward slide, drinking himself into oblivion. He finds himself yearning for home and the comforts of the British class system, wherein those in power can take a bit -- even a lot -- of ribbing. Just when things seem blackest he somehow manages to find a girl (British, natch) who's willing to marry him, on the condition that he return to England with her.

He is sorry to leave New York, and despite his near-heroic imbecility, by the end we're sorry to see him go.

---

Mr. Stern writes the "Nightcrawler" column for the New York Post.