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"Someone once told me that at the Soho House in London, the cocaine problem had reached such epidemic proportions that one of the managers suggested putting these fans in the gents' cubicle that went off every thirty seconds," says How to Lose Friends and Alienate People author Toby Young. "They're these really powerful fans. But someone else pointed out that if you did that, it would just turn into this game. You'd have to rack it up and snort it before the fans started." We're sitting in the bar at the Soho House in New York and discussing the irony of doing a formal interview in a club where theoretically everything that's being said is supposed to be off the record. (House rules. This may be my last overpriced cocktail at Soho House.). Toby's in town to promote the paperback release of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which is an autobiographical account of his experiences working for (and getting fired from) Vanity Fair. He's also looking to produce a New York version of a one-man stage play based on the book that recently played to sold out performances at the Soho Theatre in London. He has reportedly had some difficultly casting in New York because the actor would have to impersonate Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and rising actors are said to be afraid of being blackballed from appearing in the magazine.

Toby had hosted a screening the previous night in one of the Soho House's screening rooms. I was there and I thought the stage play was funny, but wondered if anyone outside the media industry would care about it or find it amusing.

"A surprising number of people who aren't in the media are interested in it," say Toby. "They're interested in reading nasty stuff about it. So anything knocking this self-important coterie within the New York media might well be quite popular." (This would appear to explain the email I get from college students in Minnesota asking about Anna Wintour.)

Speaking of self-important coteries, does he still talk to anyone from Conde Nast? "I have a few deep throats who keep me informed," he says. "But people like Graydon and some of my former Vanity Fair colleagues don't send me Christmas cards. Graydon was recently asked who he'd like to play him if the book was ever made into a movie, and he said, [imitating Graydon's accent] 'I don't know about me, but for Toby Young: Verne Troyer!'"

"Of course," Toby adds mischievously, "if Verne Troyer [dwarf actor who played "Mini Me" in Austin Powers movies] did it on the New York stage, he'd also be playing Graydon."

So it's probably safe to say that the old wounds are still a little raw and that Toby doesn't sit around reading Vanity Fair all day. So what does he read? "I read the Observer online and I look at your site [Ed.of cooooourse he does] and I look at Hint. So I try and keep up."

All smallish independent publications. "If you were going to work in New York media again, who would you want to work for?" I ask.

"I really like the Observer," he says. "I think I'd love to have a column with a broad reach that would enable me to do some proper reporting, but keep it on sort of a humorous level. I've always had a very happy experience writing for them. I think that would be fun. But I'd quite like a shot at editing something, too. I guess in an ideal world, a benign billionaire would buy SPY, resurrect it with a huge budgetlike a New Yorker sized budgetand just give me an absolute free hand as the editor in chief to cause as much trouble as possible." I start mentally assembling a publisher's nightmare "troublemaker" staff for the resurrected SPY and it's all I can do to keep myself from gleefully rubbing my hands together and cackling evil laughter. Greg Gutfeld from Stuff. Neal Pollack contributing. Ben Widdicombe from Chic Happens. If they didn't all kill each other, it'd be brilliant! (Or at least very, very funny.) Radar editor Maer Roshan comes to mind as well, but I wonder if he's too nice...

"What do you think of Radar?" I ask. Toby's a contributing writer there and I'm on the masthead as well, so maybe it's a dumb question; I'm not really expecting any scathing critiques. But I'm curious.

"I like the fact that Maer isn't willing to negotiate with publicists," he says. "I like the idea of doing an upscale Enquirer. I used to describe Vanity Fair rather snarkily as an upscale supermarket tabloid, but actually it isn't, because you're much more likely to read the truth about celebrities in the supermarket tabloid that you are in glossy magazines." Ooh, was that the first Vanity Fair barb? No, wait. There was the Verne Troyer comment earlier.

I agree with the bit about negotiating with publicists, and mention that I'd been contemplating a story on Pat Kingsley, the PR queen who has contributed heavily to entertainment journalism into the sappy celebrity marketing vehicle it is today by punishing journalists who write unflattering articles about her clientseffectively weeding out the people who don't want to do maudlin profiles. She represents enough A-list celebrities that it's very nearly impossible to have an antagonistic relationship with her firm ("PMK") and remain an entertainment journalist for very long.

"I think there's a bit of historical reporting to be done, analyzing just how the situation we're in came about," he says. "Whereby people like Pat Kingsley have as much power as they do. In a way, I don't blame Pat Kingsley because of course celebrity publicists are going to try and control what's written about their clients. That's what they're paid to do. I blame magazine editors for agreeing to their terms and for surrendering so much power to celebrity publicists. Magazine editors formed an alliance at one stage to combat this. They thought, if we all hold firm. And it collapsed when it was tested for the first time. I think the piece that needs to be written is a kind of rigorous analysis of how this situation came about and a concrete 10 point plan as to how to reverse it and claw back some kind of power for journalists."

Toby's comments remind me of one of [NY Mag's] Simon Dumenco's columns from a week or two ago about how everyone in the media industry is sitting around analyzing the Jayson Blair situation when stuff like that happens all the time in entertainment journalism because directly or indirectly, publicists are writing the stories and "adjusting" the details.

"I think one of the reasons publicists can get away with it is because the subject matter is so trivial," Toby says. "People don't really care if it's not properly reported on. It's not like Pat Kingsley is running interference for George W. Bush and insisting that he be given copy approval over what's written about him in the New York Times. Then people would be up in arms."

"[But] I don't think the vital issue is whether the public, reading about celebrities, are being misled. I don't think they expect read hard-hitting attack pieces in magazines like Vanity Fair and Vogue. And they know that what they're getting has gone through this doctoring process. I don't think that's the vital issue. The vital issue is that, as a matter of principle, journalists shouldn't be willing to adopt the tune of these publicists, even if they are entertainment journalists. They should have a fundamentally more skeptical attitude toward the rich and powerful. Just as matter of their own self-respect, they should refuse to jump through all these fucking hoops in order to get access."

"But," Toby adds, "Most of the people who buy a magazine with a picture of Tom Cruise on the cover are Tom Cruise fans and want to read precisely the kind of things that Kevin Sessums writes when he quotes Tom Cruise in Vanity Fair. They don't want to read how you and I would write about it. Well, maybe they do, but on the whole they don't want to read knocking copy about their favorite star. They just want blowjobs."

"Back to the Observer," I say. "[Editor] Peter Kaplan gave an interview to the Washington Post where he said, first, the Observer isn't "snarky"he hates that wordand that secondly, they do a lot of hardcore investigative journalism. Do you think that's the case? What makes the Observer different to you?" On review, the phrase in the WaPo article was actually "intelligent" rather than "investigative" journalism, but I think the question still stands.

"I like the highbrowed takes on New York media figures, sort of splashed on the front page," he replies. "But I think what makes it such a good read is the sense that the people who produce it are fairly independently minded and are not beholden to anyone and are proper journalists rather than social climbers disguised as reporters. It seems to have a bit of integrity, and that's rare when it comes to other publications. I don't know. I wouldn't have singled out investigative journalismit wouldn't be the first thing that came to mind. It's more like investigative gossip than investigative journalism. Not that there's anything wrong with that."

"One of the things that makes the Observer such a good read is its snarkiness," he continues. "The fact that there's a bit of mean-spiritedness running through its veins." I have to agree, even if Peter Kaplan doesn't.

So what's next? "After you've exhausted Every. Possible. Incarnation. of How to Lose Friends and Influence People," I say (emphasizing the "every possible" as that's what I'm anticipating), "What do you plan to do?"

"I want to try and write a novel," he says. "I have this idea for a dystopian satire. It's set in the immediate future, and it's going to be about the moment when ordinary Americans turn on the celebrity class. There's going to be a sort of French Revolutionary-style bloodbath where A-list celebrities are strung up from lampposts and lynched on street corners. The storming-the-Bastille moment is going to be when the looky-loos outside the 2023 Academy Awards kind of break through into the Kodak Theater and start lynching A-list movie stars on live TV." (Only 15 minutes 'til the first VF Oscar party reference, I note.)

"And it sets off a chain reaction across the United States," he continues, leaning in, conspiratorially. "And there's a scarlet pimpernel figure, who's kind of a second rate English talent agent based in Los Angeles, and in the pre-revolutionary era, he couldn't get anyone to return his calls. But in the post-revolutionary era, he figures out a way to get celebrities to safety. And the way he does that is, the only country where celebrities are still safe is Britain, because they're such craven starfuckers that the revolution doesn't actually affect them. And the way he smuggle celebrities out of Los Angeles is by disguising them as flight attendants on Virgin Atlantic. They occasionally get spotted. They get rumbles in mid-air and tossed off the plane. I need to come up with the right word to describe this celebrity apocalypse. If I can come up with the right word, I'll be in business. My father wrote a similar book in the 1950s called The Rise of the Meritocracy, which is about a bloody revolution in which a kind of meritocratic overclass overcame and coined the term 'meritocracy.' I want to coin a similar word to describe a society in which celebrities are the kind of governing class."

Perhaps celebrities are the governing class. How else does one explain the commercial success of reality TV? "It's no longer enough, if you have a bit of talent, to merely want to be a celebrity," Toby says. "What people aspire to now is to become a brand. And to be able to stamp that brand on a whole range of products. The Olsen twins seem to be the model here. Serious celebrities are aspiring to Olsen twin brand status." Brand notoriety, I think. And speaking of...

"What about your brand?" I ask. "Your brand is basically your experience at Vanity Fair. Your failures."

"I guess I've certainly been flogging this material for quite some time now," he replies, laughing. "My ex-roommate was saying after the screening yesterday that first he'd had to live through these episodes, then he had to listen to me forming them into anecdotes, then he had to read about them in newspapers, then read them a second time in my book, and now see them that tenth time, redone as a stage play."

Toby says he thinks the book has done well because in part because it's about New York. "There's a great deal of fascination with New York in England," he says. "Particularly in London. It's really just this ordinary glamour that has a sort of gravitational pull. Young people, in particular, see as the center universe. Even British celebrities, oddly enough, feel like second class citizens if they haven't yet made it in America. Like Posh and Becks, for instance."

Who?

Kidding, kidding.

"I think that the difference between New York and London is very similar to the difference between Oxford and Cambridge," he adds. "One of the saying about the difference between Oxford and Cambridge is that people in Oxford think of Oxford as the center of the world, whereas people in Cambridge think the world ends three miles outside of Cambridge. And I think that's true of London and New York. People in London think of London as the center of the world, whereas New Yorkers think the world ends three miles outside of Manhattan. Not even three miles, reallyas soon as you cross a bridge or go through a tunnel. And that's very much depicted in that famous New Yorker cartoon [the view outside Saul Steinberg's window.]"

"I think they're dimly aware that there's this city on the opposite coast called Los Angeles which occasionally mounts some pathetic challenge to New York, but it's tacky and plastic and superficial," he adds. "I think the resentment in Los Angeles is greater than the resentment New Yorkers have for Angelinos. This interloper from New York can kind of swan into town every year and hold a party which then becomes the fanciest party in town and end up defining who is and who isn't on the Hollywood A-List." Here it comes. Again.

"I don't know if Graydon's aware of this," Toby says, "but he seems to have generated an enormous amount of hostility in Hollywood, simply by being from New York. I got hired by this Hollywood producer to write a screenplaynot based on my bookbut I'm pretty sure the reason he hired me is because he's not a fan of Graydon's, and my enemy's enemy is my friend. If you can imagine the equivalent of Oscar week in New York...Let's imagine for a second that the National Magazine Awards are accompanied by the same amount of hoopla that the Oscars are, and an LA magazine editor flying into town and holding a party, which is a kind of post magazine awards party, which then becomes the hottest party in town, which everyone on the New York A-list wants to attendof course New Yorkers would resent that interloper for having the temerity to make them jump through hoops."

So what happens when media peoplelike Graydon Carter, or Toby Young, for that matterbecome celebrities themselves? "There are very few journalists who have become celebrities," he says, "but there are plenty that imagine that they're celebrities and conduct themselves accordingly."

Then he brings up the inevitable. "I thought about writing Jayson Blair an open letter," he laughs, "about how to parlay a catastrophic career at an important New York media institution into a successful book. My first bit of advice would be to try and treat the whole incident with as much levity as possible."

"I think he killed that possibility with the Observer article," I respond, referring to an interview Blair did with media reporter Sridhar Pappu in which he gloated about having fooled the Times and expressed absolutely no regret.

"He's turned out not to be particularly skilled at spinning a story to his own advantage," Toby agrees. "I mean, it is difficult in that situation. He must feel completely beleaguered and very defensive. If there's some kind of levity it makes it look like you've got some kind of distance on the whole thing and that you've risen above it. My advice to him would be to write a funny piece about it all as quickly as possible."

So how did he escape so relatively unscathed after writing How to Lose Friends and Influence People? "I was always expecting Graydon to buttonhole me at a party after I started writing the book and say, 'you'll never eat lunch in this town again,'" he concedes. "But in my guess it would have been 'if you write that book, you'll never eat a brown bag lunch in the unfashionable part of Vanity Fair's offices in your cubicle ever again.'"

"I'm not going to write for Vanity Fair again" he continues. "But I'm a special correspondent for British GQ which is a Conde Nast publication. I don't think Si Newhouse sits there with a list of names and crosses one out and says, "he'll never work for any of my publications again! He's a dead man!" Actually, at the end of the day, I don't think it damages Vanity Fair at all. Someone who works for Conde Nast's circulation department emailed me and said that when my book first came out here, Vanity Fair experienced a small spike in circulation and that was referred to within the circulation department as 'the Toby Young effect.'...But it hasn't really hurt me."