A Worm’s-Eye View of the Media Elite   

In a burst of Anglophilia he would soon regret, Vanity Fair Editor in Chief Graydon Carter offered British journalist Toby Young $10,000 to fly to New York and "hang out," as Carter put it, for a month during the summer of 1995. Young, cofounder of the witty, bitchy Modern Review in London, had recently lost control of that magazine after a falling out with his ex-friend and business partner Julie Burchill. (This was that summer's Big Event in the world of British media; one London paper reported that stories about the Burchill-Young fight came to 1,705 column inches, second only to Bosnia.) Carter, who'd cofounded the witty, bitchy Spy in the '80s, was something of a hero to Young, who'd seen Spy as a lifeline during his stifling year at Harvard as a Fulbright Scholar.

Each man had so many romantic delusions about the other it makes you dizzy. The Ottawa-born Carter, famously Anglophilic in that weirdly intense Canadian way (Spy, in fact, was modeled after the British magazine Private Eye), apparently hoped that Young would bring his British attitude to Vanity Fair in particular and New York in general. As Young remembers it, "I think Graydon had hoped I'd start something like the Modern Review in New York." For his part, Young had fallen in love with American screwball comedies while at Harvard and was also enchanted by legendary newspaperman Ben Hecht's autobiography, "A Child of the Century," which describes the real-life Roaring Twenties antics that inspired "The Front Page."

But modern American media are no more like "The Front Page" than contemporary London society is like a Noel Coward drawing- room comedy, and Young's Vanity Fair tryout quickly devolved into half a decade of comic disaster in the absurdly self-important world of New York glossy maga-zines. Young amused himself (but not Asian American staffers) at the office by calling up the chic designer boutique Shanghai Tang to order Peking duck with fried rice. Unaware of earnest American office holidays like Take Our Daughters to Work Day, Young, as a prank, hired a stripper to come to the Vanity Fair office--the same day Carter's 3-year-old daughter was there being Taken to Work. At the Vanity Fair Oscar party in Hollywood, Young hogged a pay phone while trying to call in a story and got dressed down by Diana Ross.

Now the whole misadventure is recounted in Young's new book, "How To Lose Friends & Alienate People," a sort of "Innocents Abroad" meets "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" in reverse. True to form, this screw-up memoir immediately caused yet another screw-up for its author upon publication. Young's tale of trying to appease sulky British celebrities during Vanity Fair's 1997 "Cool Britannia" photo shoot by bringing in cocaine to the Groucho Club got him kicked out of the private media and celebrity hangout. "They were shocked, SHOCKED, to discover coke is taken on the premises!" Young commented in a mass e-mail to friends. (The author's fondness for committing every excruciating moment of his life to print was recently satirized in a Private Eye cartoon: "So you're the Toby Young you write so much about," a woman says to a man at a party.)

In London, Young, who studied philosophy at Oxford and Cambridge, was as well-connected as he was educated; his father, the late sociologist and life peer Lord Michael Young, coined the word "meritocracy" in the '50s. In New York, the bar-hopping, model-chasing Toby thought that getting an American Express card with his formal title--the Hon. Toby Young--would be an easy way to impress girls. Naturally, the plan backfired: The card came imprinted with the name Hon Young. "My glamorous dining companions would assume I'd stolen the card from some poor Korean student," Young writes glumly.

"How to Lose" will be published in the U.S. later this year but until then can be ordered from the U.K. publisher via www.amazon. co.uk for just under $20, including shipping. It's a bargain for anyone who wants a worm's-eye, outsider's view of what life is like at the top of the preening American media heap. This is in stark contrast to the proudly hackish world of Fleet Street, where Young recalls that the unofficial slogan is "Everybody Hates Us And We Don't Care."

Young eventually learns that the Condé Nasties, as he (and others) call them, are "a little like a corrupt priesthood: The fact that they abuse their authority doesn't mean they've lost their faith." But it's a long process. Carter may cynically describe Vanity Fair readers as "two kinds of people...trailer park white trash and everyone who matters," but he doesn't take kindly to Young's endless stream of weird story ideas ("Dear Graydon, How hard is it in this day and age to become a social pariah? Why don't I try and find out...") that treat everyone who matters with pointed irreverence. Young's story ideas, Carter informs him, are like "dog whistles--you can hear them but I can't."

The month at Vanity Fair turned into two-and-a-half years at the magazine and five years in the New York media world, and Young figures that by the time an exasperated Carter finally fired him, he'd been paid $85,000 for writing around 3,000 words. "Given how much I was paid and how little I produced, I was probably paid more per word than anyone else there," he says. Only the famously well-compensated Dominick Dunne--who of course does produce copy, by the ream--even comes close.

Comfortably settled back in London and recently married, Young is now a theater critic for The Spectator and a contributor to The Tatler and British GQ. I spoke to him in December when he was back in New York for a visit.

There seems to be little bad blood between Young and Condé Nast, all things considered. Jonathan Newhouse, who runs Condé Nast's international stable of magazines, came to the "How To Lose" book party in London and even insisted on paying for a copy. (Young tried to give him a freebie, which does seem the least he could do.) Vanity Fair contributing society editor Kristina Stewart threw Young a dinner party during his New York visit. Graydon Carter wasn't there, but he did go to Young's going away party when he returned to London a couple of years ago, providing this quote for the New York Times reporter covering the event: "Toby's like a piece of gum: He lingers on the bottom of your shoe."

Did Young actually think that Condé Nast in the '90s would be as fun as the Algonquin Round Table in the '20s? "I did expect people in New York to be a little more madcap," he says ruefully. "I guess I did exaggerate my naïveté just for the purpose of comic effect. I wasn't quite as disillusioned as I pretend to be in the book--but I still was fairly disillusioned. I thought Vanity Fair would be a little more jolly and irreverent than it turned out to be."

Young had had fair warning. He recalled that on a tour of the New York Times newsroom while at Harvard, "I was amazed to discover the level of pomposity. I remember being vaguely irreverent, mentioning that I'd written for the Times of London. They were deeply unimpressed. Since Watergate, journalists have become more powerful in America. And as they've become more powerful they've become correspondingly more self-important. Journalism in Britain is still very like journalism as it was practiced in Chicago and satirized in 'The Front Page.' "

But Young's troubles in New York had at least as much to do with himself as with the prevailing stuffiness, as he well knows. He drank so much that even Anthony Haden-Guest, the freeloading, well-marinated journalist who was the model for the feckless British hack in Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities," told him to cut back. "I just have one of those personalities that reacts very badly to authority," Young admits. "I [had] a good relationship with my father, but whenever I'm confronted with someone who tells me what to do, I cock a snook at them."

A major element of "How To Lose" is its indelible profile of media titan Carter, who emerges as a towering figure of comic pretense. But you can't help feeling sorry for Carter, just as you can't help seeing the Skipper's side of it when Gilligan (yet again) does something really infuriating. The long-suffering Carter must have wondered what he'd done to deserve this pea beneath his pile of mattresses. As he told Young at one point: "Toby, you have a brown thumb. It's the opposite of a green thumb. Everything you touch turns to shit."

On the other hand, "How To Lose" may turn things around for Young. There is talk of a movie version. And the book has mended fences with old friend-turned-enemy Julie Burchill. She wrote a rave review for The Spectator, describing Young as "the most talented outsider since F. Scott Fitzgerald." Perhaps she was softened by the pride-of-place Young gave her previous comment for the U.K. edition. Just above the title, on the cover, is this: " 'I'll rot in hell before I give that little bastard a quote for his book'--Julie Burchill.