You Can't be Serious: Toby Young's How to lose Friends & Alienate People
Carnegie, Marc
"You Can't be Serious: Toby Young's How to lose Friends & Alienate People" York seems genuinely baffled by New America. , which remains a genuinely baffling place. His recollection of an earlier stay in the United...
...That wasn't the case...
...How to Lose Friends purports to tell what happened: how, in five years, Young was chewed up and spat out whole by an unforgiving city and a beau monde whose codes and rituals he never quite managed to crack...
...But it sounds embarrassingly, and so un-Britishly, like sour grapes...
...No, there was never going to be much hope for a bald Englishman with bad English teeth, who thinks along old-fashioned lines like: Wow, I'd really like to get her into bed...
...its world-conquering stars control and manipulate their images by command-ing vast battalions of flunkies...
...For Young eventually concludes that he does not much like being in America, nor being around the American celebrity machine...
...Still, there are flashes of fundamental honesty in Young's account, which is larded over with musings on political correctness, Tocqueville and his very strange encounter I'd elected to live in a "smoking dorm" even though I wasn't a smoker myself on the assumption that women who smoked would be more likely to "put out...
...On Take Our Daughters to Work Day at Conde Nast headquarters, he hires a strip-o-gram...
...He fires round after round of grapeshot at Carter, who was eventually to give him the sack with the immortal line: "I gave you the opportunity of a lifetime, and you f'-**ed the dog...
...The initial U.S...
...Young recalls an epic line of limousines queuing at a McDonald's drive-thru on Oscar night, each packed with celebs—who go there starving because they can't risk being photographed in undignified poses, stuffing their faces with chow...
...He came armed with a priceless VIP pass into the world of his imaginings—an invitation from Graydon Carter himself to be a staffer at Vanity Fair, that inch-think perfumed bible of fake breasts and true crime...
...Young is still taking the mickey in How to Lose Friends, even if Janet Maslin and other U.S...
...Young, on the other hand, preferred taking the mickey—a time-honored British attitude which ensured he would never slither his way up the greasy pole of glamor and success...
...In the end, after behaving badly and being shown the door (or, as they put it at VF, getting "heaved out the window"), he simply goes home...
...Then there's Tom Cruise's publicist, who turns down a dozen (possibly troubling...
...66 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002...
...After sneaking into VF's legendarily exclusive Oscar-night party, he gets snubbed by Kenneth Branagh (because he can't name any of the actor's Shakespeare films) and finally gets heaved out the window (because he got through the door by claiming to be somebody else...
...On the contrary, they were a bunch of "femi-nazis" who spent their time policing the behavior of the male residents of the dorm for signs of sexism...
...Frustrated because he cannot manage to get anyone nubile or glamorous into bed, he tries to play the Brit card—by ordering an American Express card...
...rendered as his first name, making him a pseudo-Korean: Hon Young...
...reviewers didn't quite notice...
...The tales of his behavior, of course, are too bad to be true—especially coming from someone as savvy as Young, who made his name in his twenties by co-founding a cheeky London magazine, The Modern Review, which made a media splash...
...His recollection of an earlier stay in the United States, as a postgraduate student at Harvard, rings absolutely true: HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS & ALIENATE PEOPLE BY TOBY YOUNG Da Capo Press/340 pages/S24 REVIEWED BY Marc Carnegie I f you've ever wanted to elbow your way into the slipstream of American celebrity, announcing your genius with a bottle of whisky in one hand and an upstretched middle finger in the other, then Toby Young is your man...
...And Young is nothing if not surly...
...journalists before agreeing to a profile from a suitably pliant hack willing to parrot whatever nonsense the image-spinners want him to...
...Young portrays his suave, silver-maned boss as a sellout who went from the inspirational, mickey-taking days of Spy magazine to the scraping genuflections of Vanity Fair, with its legions of courtiers attendant to the whims of the celebrity du jour...
...But he also came with the temperament of, well, an Angry Young Man—a not small thirst for booze, shuddering ambition and a Gulliver-sized chip on his shoulder...
...Carter finally has to tell him: Stay away from the celebrities...
...reviews of this book have been marked by a singular failure to comprehend that Young might not be entirely serious...
...How to Lose Friends is at its best with well-observed details about the absurdities of the Hollywood-New York media circus, seen from a range close enough to feel almost inside...
...How anyone could miss the point is actually the point, if this book can be said to have one...
...Everyone, it seems, is overburdened by seriousness...
...By the end, Young is quoting professors of French and making pronouncements such as: "It would be nice to think that the shortcomings of the current generation of New York hacks is a temporary aberration rather than an instance of that 'general apathy' that Tocqueville identified as an ever-present danger in democratic societies?' Surely, you think, he can't be serious...
...Marc Carnegie is a European editor for L'Agence France-Presse in Paris...
...Its journalists live in the suburbs, write boot-licking profiles and drink in moderation...
...Obeisance to the machine is all: In a stage-managed world, the surly bird never gets the worm...
...He asks the company to add his title to the plastic, then is horrified when it comes back with his title ("the Hon...
...Young, a British journalist, came to New York in 1995 with a dream as powerful as any that has drawn the huddled mass-es to America's welcoming shores—to join the Sly Stallones and Tina Browns, to stop being one of the talkers and become one of the talked about...
...Whether or not you believe he wanted to make it will depend pretty largely on whether or not you're a Yank or a Brit...
...Y0 U C1AIN''T BE SERI 0 U S Young Alco York seems with g seems genuinely baffled n by New America...
...While the strivers around him wear Prada and Armani, he sports jeans and a T-shirt with a photo of Keanu Reeves bearing the legend "Young, Dumb and Full of Come...
Vol. 35 • September 2002 • No. 5
