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New York A-lister Toby Young lets rip on celebrity - 27 Jan 2002 by Rachael Oakes-Ash

Magazines are the social barometers of modern times. Spot someone reading HQ on a metropolitan train and you can assume they are travelling to the inner-city, to an arthouse flick followed by a latte-fuelled discussion with the like-minded. Bulletin readers have mortgages, street press readers don't. GQ readers dress well, Wallpaper* readers do it for image. Ralph readers drink beer, Elle, champagne.

A magazine's target market used to be divided into purely feminine and masculine. Women read The Women's Weekly, Family Circle and other homemaking periodicals while the man of the house flicked through Life or The Post. Feminists would say their movement's influence in the 1970s changed the way women (and men) read magazines forever. But another more powerful movement has reshaped the magazine industry - the onset of "celebrity-ism".

While once you could safely assume that a man who read Time would know more about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis than what Natalie Wood wore to the premiere of Gypsy in the same year, the boundaries are now blurred.

I blame Vanity Fair. Thanks to its editor, Graydon Carter, and especially his predecessor, Tina Brown, the glossy monthly has emerged as the premier "celebrity magazine for educated men and women" (an oxymoron surely). Vanity Fair's sumptuous celebrity cover stories and high-society crime features are its trademark. Magazine journalists worship the Manhattan Mecca of Conde Nast from which it is produced and dream of writing highbrow articles on previously low-rent celebrities.

Toby Young, the British author of How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, was one of those journalists. From a glance at Young's pedigree, you'd expect his coffee table to be adorned with copies of The New Yorker, his bookshelves lined with Tolstoy, and his cellar filled with Grange. With an Oxford first, post-grad study at Harvard and Cambridge and a life peer for a father, Toby Young is part of the Establishment. But move The New Yorker aside and you're likely to find Hello! magazine and books by Nick Hornby. And the Grange? It was a gift from his best mate, model Sophie Dahl.

After being sacked from The Times and the demise of his own satirical magazine, The Modern Review (co-edited with British shock columnist Julie Burchill), the slogan of which was "Low Culture for High Brows", Young was summoned to New York City by Graydon Carter for a month-long trial at Vanity Fair. The month turned into two years and in the process the previously controversial writer became a slave to celebrity and the mythical New York one-night stand. He traded in his family's socialist ideals (his father created Open University) for the vacuous world of show biz.

But his Big Apple adventures have now become a warts-and-all book about life in the fast lane. Young couldn't help himself. The title of his book says it all. There was the time he organised for a stripper to appear in the politically correct offices of Conde Nast on Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. A manager's three-year-old daughter was most intrigued. His ability to upset and irritate people around him is boundless.

"I think it's worth alienating the rich and the powerful if that's the price you pay for telling the truth about them," Young says from his ski chalet in Verbier. "I guess I decided at an early stage that it would be easier to shine if I wrote about parties and celebrities since most journalists covering that beat are pretty dumb."

He doesn't hold back. He reveals that Anna Wintour (editor of US Vogue) won't allow staff to eat in front of her, and if you take on Talk magazine editor-in-chief Tina Brown and her publishing magnate husband, Harry Evans, you will be sued.

As an expose on the superficial world of fashionable magazines, How To Lose Friends And Alienate People is spot on. The size of the celebrity egos match Young's own and he's candid about his obsession with celebrity and popular culture. He's more likely to read National Enquirer than Vanity Fair - though his footnotes betray him and, in the end, there's no escaping his privileged past.

"People seem to think that I have invented them. Critics are ignorant and they're not aware that footnotes are fashionable and that I'm just a pretentious wanker," laughs Young. That said, when I ask him how self-destructive he is on a scale of one to 10, he says, "Eleven."

It's obvious that if Toby Young were a magazine, he'd be out of circulation. As an author, however, I say, where do I subscribe?

How To Lose Friends And Alienate People by Toby Young is published by Abacus, distributed in Australia by Penguin, $28.