How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young

True, Vanity Fair prints its share-more than its share-of celebrity nonsense. He does not seek to absolve himself completely from responsibility for his flameout, but mostly he blames Vanity Fair (in his view, an upscale supermarket tabloid under the thumb of publicists for the celebrities it covers), New York journalists ('pinched and hidebound careerists who never got drunk and were safely tucked up in bed by 10 p.m.'), and America itself (in the grips of a politically correct tyranny of the majority, much as Alexis de Tocqueville predicted).īut a reading of the book suggests an alternate view: that Young failed because he turned out to be a lazy and undistinguished magazine writer. The magazine’s editor, Graydon Carter, fired him after about two years, a period in which, Young readily acknowledges, he contributed next to no writing, messed up nearly all the administrative tasks he was assigned, and committed a series of other blunders, including bringing in a stripper on Take Your Daughter to Work Day.

In 1995, Young, an Englishman then 32 years old, was hired to come to New York and join the staff of Vanity Fair. I break with convention and point out some of Young’s tangential errors at the beginning rather than the end of this review because they seem germane to the argument.

In a one-sentence footnote on the same page of his memoir, Young tops himself with three mistakes: 'When Harold Ross originally conceived of The New Yorker in 1922 it was going to be subtitled: ‘Not for the little old lady from Dubuque.’ ' The magazine was planned in 1924 the phrase was a characterization in the prospectus, never a potential subtitle, and its actual wording was 'The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.' The Front Page premiered in 1928, at which time Walter Kerr was 15 years old. 'When The Front Page was first produced in 1926,' Young writes, 'the New York Times theater critic Walter Kerr described the essence of Burns’s appeal as'-stop there: The sentence already contains two factual errors.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young