BACK TO

The Man Who Fluffs His Lines / November 4th 2001

Amanda Mitchison is not surprised that the journalist Toby Young failed to conquer America

How To Lose Friends & Alienate People by Toby Young

In 1995 the bumptious young bar-fly and journalist Toby Young was offered a temporary job on Vanity Fair in New York. He went, entered the world of celebrity parties with gusto, got promoted a little and was then fired. He also acquired a nice sideline as correspondent for the Evening Standard, which also promptly felt the need to let him go. Finally a new men's magazine called Gear scraped him up of the bar-room floor.

Gear discovered that Toby would do and write almost anything. A series of lubricious stunts followed: Toby Young spends a night watching teenage strippers; Toby Young tries (and succeeds) dating women using terrible pick-up lines and wearing a hairpiece; Toby Young takes a sexual lie-detector test and has electrodes attached to his penis while he looks at photographs of naked men. But even for Gear, Toby Young proved too much. And he was fired again.

Why? What was it about Toby Young? Is he, or was he, the crass, fickle, lazy rat of a drunk that he depicts himself in this account of his time in New York? Certainly during his time at Vanity Fair - which is the most interesting part of this book - he provides plenty of examples of his atrocious behaviour and terrible gaffes. He hires a stripogram for one of his colleagues. He sends overly familiar joshing messages to the editor. He comes to work late and hung-over. He alienates and offends. He leches after a big bosomed editorial assistant. He does very, very little work.

But there is another Toby Young - a part of him which sees with horrible clarity his own foibles and those of his colleagues. This makes for some very nice social observation. He learns pretty quickly that America - it so often comes as a surprise to the British - is in fact a very formal society, and very hierarchical in its own way. He discovers - less of a surprise - that the world of glossy magazines is venal, vacuous, utterly cut-throat and devoid of any irony. Here for example is a conversation he overhears between two women in Vanity Fair's publicity department: First Woman: "Some plane went down over the Atlantic. 256 people killed." Second Woman: "Anyone on it?" First Woman: "Nah".

But Toby Young persists. He is desperate, so he says, to go to the celebrity parties where bouncers and publicists with clipboards and headsets stand guard at the entrance and the invitations are timed (the likes of Toby Young only being allowed in to join the revellers late in the evening). And even when he does get in, the celebrities, who are there just to be seen and are terrified of ever eating in public in case they should be photographed with their mouth full, frequently look most bad-tempered. Every time Toby Young meets one of them he inevitably fluffs his lines.

He fluffs his lines in life too. And not just the jobs. His girlfriend dumps him. He develops a drink problem. A nasty lawsuit is pending. In the final chapters we follow him down into the depths. He starts to re-examine his relationship with his mother. One should have expected as much. Young's frivolity was always a little fake. He overdoes his enthusiasm for glamour. Real snobs, real social climbers are quiet and stealthy. Just as you cannot - he finds this out earlier in the book - be "ironically sexist" you also cannot be "ironically" star struck.

Toby Young glories in his own loathsomeness. Throughout the book he relishes his small acts of crassness and thuggery. He sympathises with peolpe who hate him. As a literary device for getting round New York, this works well enough Toby Young provides a lively, enjoyable account of the ghastliness of the world of American high fashion.

But the accident-prone, prat persona wears a little thin and doesn't give the author the moral stature to support a drastic change of tone at the end of the book. Nor does it make him very lovable. Consequently the final voyage though Toby Young's soul falls a bit flat. After all, nobody can care about a person they don't like.