Culture
Too much too Young
by David Cohen
How Toby Young succeeded as a failure.
Vanity, vanity, all is Vanity Fair, said Toby Young, his nose pushed tight against the journalistic window that once was his to gaze through at the great American dream factory. Then he slipped on the first of many, many banana skins.
“I think I have a melancholic streak,” Young says, growling balefully, metaphorically rubbing his head mid-flight during a late-night telephone interview from his home in London on the experiences that have taught him “not to have very high expectations of life”. His publishing agent is, of course, very happy. Most readers should be, too.
In our last chapter, at the closing moments of his very funny 2002 memoir, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, this self-described journalistic failure had handily beaten out all-comers for the transatlantic bumbler’s crown while working at Vanity Fair. He had arrived in New York seven years earlier, intending to take the town by journalistic storm as a “contributing editor” – what non-Americans often refer to as a caption writer – at the once-venerable entertainment monthly.
Alas, within a couple of years he had been fired, in disgrace, “the piece of gum” that stuck to the editor’s shoe (his boss Graydon Carter’s flattering phrase, not Young’s) now prised free to roam Teflon Pan Alley. Unaccepted by Manhattan’s elite in all the places that were chic – unable even to score a single decent date – Young quit town before the final curtain fell. He headed back to London.
And the rest, as they say, is hysteria.
To say that Young, who is now 43, had become disillusioned with journalism by this point was not entirely correct, since (as he has written) “it was journalism – or, rather, its gatekeepers – that had become disillusioned with me. I’d been fired from virtually every paper on Fleet St. My efforts to set up a magazine, as well as my attempts to become the editor of an existing one, had all ended in failure. Indeed, I wasn’t merely unemployed; I was regarded as more or less unemployable. One of the few newspaper executives to offer me any work at this time was a black editor at the Observer. When I asked him why he’d taken pity on me he said, ‘Because I know what it’s like to be a nigger.’”
He decided to write a hit-and-run account about it. Against expectations, not least his own, How to Lose Friends went on to sell 250,000 copies around the American-speaking world. Better still, perhaps, his changing fortunes landed him with a wife whom he adores (most of the time) and a Hollywood contract (sort of) from a mystery producer looking for a screenplay about Studio 54 founder Steve Rubell. Both of these pivots furnished the bulk of the material for his latest memoir instalment, The Sound of No Hands Clapping (Abacus, $37), a work that might just as well have been titled Carry On up the Concrete Jungle, where the self-inflicted calamities pile up thick and fast out on New Grub Boulevard.
“It’s very difficult to write a humorous book about your own life without making yourself the butt of the joke,” explains Young, an Oxbridge graduate, former Fulbright scholar at Harvard University and the son of one of his country’s most distinguished educationalists. “So to a certain extent my self-deprecating persona is dictated by the genre in which I’m writing.”
Not that he’s entirely sure why he chose that genre in the first place. “I suppose I find it easier to write comedy about my own life than anything else,” he admits. “It comes very naturally and it involves very little research.”
So does interviewing Toby Young, at least for some people. We had met previously in London, as it happened, almost 15 years ago to the day of the interview, inside Soho’s Groucho Club – combed,and coiffed and sitting around a table munching cocktail gossip with our hostess for the evening, Julie Burchill, and her soon-to-be-ex husband Cosmo Landesman. Charlotte Raven, the woman for whom Burchill left Landesman, was not yet a fixture on the scene, which in some respects provided the scale model of all that’s followed for Young, who spent a rather long portion of that earlier evening – as I recall – explaining why Sylvester Stallone had done more for American cultural intellection than Paul Auster.
This was in the dear, dead days of the Modern Review, the sometimes brilliant, madly pro-American pop-culture magazine created by Young and Burchill in the early 1990s as a thumb in the eye to the reigning London smart set and which Young rather spectacularly pulled the plug on a few years later.
The pair’s highly publicised bust-up provided the catalyst for his thwarted journey to the US, a country whose gravitational pull he still feels. “I imagine that France in the 19th century, Paris in particular, would have held a similar attraction,” he says. “It’s like America is the big city and everywhere else is the small town.”
Back in the small town, Young and Burchill recently met again during the filming of a splendid, cocaine-bleached BBC documentary about their earlier travails. The climax of the programme showed the dandies eyeballing each other, for the first time in a decade, at a Brighton club.
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