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American Morning
Book Touts Keys to Failure
Aired July 16, 2002 - 08:54 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ARTHEL NEVILLE, CNN ANCHOR: We're going to switch gears a moment here. Plenty of books have been written about how to succeed. Now comes one touting the keys to failure. Toby Young is something of an authority on the subject. After he took a job at "Vanity Fair" magazine in New York, his once promising career went south. Now he has written a book all about it. His fall from grace in a new book called "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People."
Toby, so we're talking about a big job, big 10 magazine. You are on the a-list here in New York, who's who, hobnobbing with everybody. How did you mess that up?
TOBY YOUNG, AUTHOR, "HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE": Well, it was kind of a culture clash. I come from this totally different journalistic tradition in London. If you can imagine Austin Powers being let loose in this ultra-chic glossy New York magazine. I used to go up to these beautiful, put together women in the library and $5,000 outfits and say, are those space pants you're wearing, because your ass is out of this world. Ten minutes later, I would have a...
NEVILLE: And you got slapped, I would think.
YOUNG: I was given the office guidelines on sexual harassment, and it was a miracle I lasted two and a half years.
NEVILLE: Come on, that's pretty classy. But give me a few more highlights of your downward spiral.
YOUNG: I did a number of really dumb things. I hired a stripper-gram to come into the office to surprise one of my colleagues on what turned out to be "take our daughters to work day."
NEVILLE: Wrong move. Wrong move.
YOUNG: Bad move.
NEVILLE: What were you thinking?
YOUNG: In London, that kind of thing goes down well. I remember saying to my boss, Graydon Carter, the editor and chief of "Vanity Fair," you know, it's ironic sexism. He said, Toby, that's like ironic anti-Semitism, it doesn't go over in New York, drop it. NEVILLE: You're a smart man, though. At some point, though, you started to figure out, I'm guessing here, that this whole alienation thing was working for you.
YOUNG: No, it really wasn't working for me. I remember I got into -- the last straw at "Vanity Fair" was when I got into a bar fight in the most fashionable watering hole in the city, and yet there are two kinds of journalists -- there's the kind of Clean and sober careerist with a summer house in the Hamptons and then there's the kind of harem-scarem (ph) rastabout (ph), whose status is somewhere between a whore and a bartender. The first kind work the "Vanity Fair." I was very firmly in the latter camp.
NEVILLE: Come on, you're working here, you're a journalist. You have got to catch on that you can't do this here in America, it's not flying.
YOUNG: I should have...
NEVILLE: Hello, McFly? Clue? Can you get one?
YOUNG: It eventually got into my thick skull that I had a problem, but like most self-respecting Englishman, what I did when faced with that was turn to alcohol, which of course made it all 10 times worse.
NEVILLE: Exactly. So if someone wanted to follow in your footsteps or not, how do you lose friends and alienate people, in a nutshell?
YOUNG: Well, it's probably a good idea not to go up to Mel Gibson at an Oscar party and confront him about his anti-British movies when he's clutching an Oscar in each hand. That was a bad idea.
NEVILLE: How did you even get in this building? I don't understand how you even get into any place at this point.
YOUNG: It was a miracle.
NEVILLE: And how does your wife put up with this?
YOUNG: My wife is very long suffering and understanding. She's British. She shares my sense of humor, and miraculously, she married me last year.
NEVILLE: Miraculously. Now look, "The Nanny's Diaries," best- seller list for four months, and then "Trading With the Enemy," which is about investment guru Jim Kramer. Now you're writing this back, so I'm wondering if all CEOs now have to worry about their assistants, because these tell-all books are selling, and they're working.
YOUNG: Yes, the category has been called the revenge of the underling. I was expecting Graydon Carter, my former boss, to say to me at one point, you'll never eat lunch in this town again if you write that book. But I never really reached the expense account lunch stage. For me, it would have been, you'll never eat a brown bag lunch in your office cubicle in the unfashionable section of "Vanity Fair" ever again.
NEVILLE: Yes or no -- do you have a job right now other than this book?
YOUNG: I do. I'm a theater critic for "The British Spectator."
NEVILLE: Critic -- that's a good thing. All right, nice to see you, Toby Young.
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