MIXED MEDIA
English author came, saw, but couldn't conquer America

By Cathy Burke
Associated Press

Toby Young's "How to Lose Friends & Alienate People"

What the 38-year-old Young found during his five-year stay in Manhattan was a celebrity-mad media horde of sycophants.

"I was expecting their contemporary equivalents to adopt a them-and-us attitude toward celebrities and their handlers, ridiculing and lampooning them at every turn," Young writes of modern journalists. "In fact, they behaved like flunkies at the court of Louis XIV, snapping to attention whenever a boldface name so much as glanced in their direction."

Of course, this doesn't stop Young from elbowing his way among the "flunkies" to climb the ladder of success at Vanity Fair magazine, where he worked for two years. With his book "How To Lose Friends & Alienate People" (Da Capo; $24), the title tells us how this is going to come out. And is it really so surprising that all that glitters — or is it glitterati — is not gold?

Still, Young brings to hilarious life the names in the gossip columns that he tries, and mostly fails, to cultivate: supermodel Sophie Dahl (his roommate at one point); movie stars Mel Gibson, Jim Carrey, Nathan Lane and Sean Penn; publishing titans Tina Brown and Harry Evans; and celebrity journalist Candace Bushnell (whose columns became the basis for HBO's "Sex and the City").

He saves particular venom — and sympathy — for Graydon Carter, the Vanity Fair boss he strove hardest to please. The resulting portrait proves to be the most complex and intriguing in the book.

During his New World adventure, Young made a steady descent into alcoholism, unemployment and romantic dejection.

"Statistically, I knew I had about as much chance of taking Manhattan as I did of re-growing my hair. But there were enough examples of people exactly like me who had made it to prevent me giving up hope," he writes.

It seems plain to everyone except Young that his problems on the job, with friends, and with women are no one's fault but his. At bottom, it's America that disappoints Young. But he describes this failure with none of the narcissism and self-pity that taints his other misadventures.

Young hits rock bottom, as we knew he would. And it becomes an epiphany, as we could have predicted it would be.

He sees his New World experience as a kind of morality tale in which he finally shuns the pointless pursuit of celebrity. That used to be known as growing up.