'I plunged into the cesspool of celebrity as an act of rebellion'

13 April 2012

Someone is shooting at Toby Young. Every minute there is an almighty "thwack" at the window of his shed-office. "It's all right," he says, jumping visibly. "It's just conkers from the horse chestnut tree."

The thing is, quite a few people would like to shoot Young. He has been threatened with lawsuits by Liz Hurley, Robert Maxwell and Tina Brown.

When Julie Burchill was asked to provide a quote for the jacket of his first volume of autobiography, 2001's How To Lose Friends & Alienate People, she replied: "I'll rot in hell before I give that little bastard a quote for his book." He ran it on the front cover.

But over the past few years Young, 44, has gone from cartoon twit to national treasure. How To Lose Friends & Alienate People, which told the story of his short-lived stint as a contributing editor on Vanity Fair in New York, won rave reviews. He turned the book into a one-man West End show. Now he's the star of his own film.

Or rather actor Simon Pegg is. He is playing Toby in How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, which stars Jeff Bridges (as Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter) and Kirsten Dunst, as Young's girlfriend (now his wife), Caroline.

Many of Young's real-life disasters make it to the film. Like the time he booked a strippergram as a birthday surprise for a colleague on Take Your Daughters To Work Day. Or the night he took pity on a lovelorn transsexual and he ended up "outed" by his flatmate.

Finally he is a bone fide player in the movie world — after years of being turned away from premieres by "clipboard Nazis" — though there's not much chance of him making millions. "I am what is referred to as a net profit participant', which means I won't see a penny, even if the film does Bridget Jones business."

When I arrive at his rambling Victorian house in East Acton, I'm struck by the cool decor. But this is child central. His baby son lies in his crib on the kitchen table, while three-year-old Ludo bangs his fork for more sausages. Young leads me to his shed, which is full of magazine covers featuring (you've guessed it) Toby.

His career really began back in 1991 when he co-founded the Modern Review, with Burchill and her then husband Cosmo Landesman. It was here he began to make enemies, most notably Liz Hurley.

An obscure actress then, she agreed that Young could use topless photos of her in the Modern Review. Then she wore "that dress", became a star and told the lawyers to ban the pictures. He got revenge by giving the story to The Sun. Of course it came back to haunt him later when Hugh Grant was mooted to play Young in the film — and refused point-blank.

Young disbanded the magazine in 1995 and set off for a job with Vanity Fair in New York, where his attempts to ingratiate himself with celebrities blew up dramatically in his face.

Nevertheless, he lays claim to inventing the whole idea of Cool Britannia — which led to that infamous 1996 Vanity Fair magazine cover. The shoot featured Damien Hirst and the Spice Girls and a soon-to-be-elected Tony Blair. As Toby tells it, it was a disaster. He ended up pitifully procuring coke for Hirst and Keith Allen. "They were having such fun torturing me."

But what surprised him most was "how ambivalent Tony Blair and his handlers were about being photographed. They were worried the Conservative Party would take credit for Swinging London Mark II. But then Blair got in and it proved to be a huge electoral asset. He actually kept the tie."

The funny thing is Young should have been the last person to be susceptible to celebrity froth. He got a first at Oxford in PPE and went on to Harvard. His father was the late Labour peer Lord Young of Dartington, who virtually invented the welfare state, founded the Open University and coined the word "meritocracy". His mother, Sasha Moorsom (Lord Young's second wife), was a novelist and artist who "found any kind of extravagance almost physically painful".

Such intellectually gifted parents can't have been easy. "They were much more interested in politics and society: they didn't take a great deal of interest in my little world," Toby agrees. "It's only now that I'm doing all the things conscientious parents are supposed to do, such as ferrying my daughter to after-school clubs, that I realise just how uninvolved my parents were in my upbringing."

The young Toby was often infuriated when his father returned home to announce that he'd given away the contents of his wallet to some poor homeless person. "What about my Chopper?" his son would scream.

As a teenager he began to rebel, smoking dope and initially failing his O-levels. He retains a talent for self-sabotage. "I give poor first impressions. I think I come across as arrogant and disdainful, immediately throwing down a gauntlet to cool, good-looking people, and saying, What's so great about you?'"

He thinks he may have mild autism. His father was tremendously eccentric and he has a half-brother who is diagnosed with Asperger's. "One of the reasons I wanted to plunge head-first into the cesspool of celebrity culture is because it was something my mother very strongly disapproved of.

"Getting a job at Vanity Fair was an act of adolescent rebellion. It was my way of dealing with the inevitable guilt. It was almost as though there was a person inside me acting on parents' wishes by effectively stopping me from getting anywhere in this wretched world."

At one point he found himself sacked, skint and alcoholic. Then — and the scale of the miracle is not lost on him — he managed to persuade Caroline, who had already ditched him once, to marry him in 2001. She, in turn, urged him to write a book about his exploits.

Everyone agrees that Caroline, 33, has been the making of him. "She is my therapy," he says. "She has an almost supernatural ability to say: No, don't do that.'"

In the film, she is a Vanity Fair journalist who is secretly having an affair with her boss and loathes Young. In real life, Caroline, a sparky 23-year-old British law student, was actually the sister of a friend who came out to share his flat in New York. He fell in love with her because she disapproved of him and his fascination with fame, just like his mother.

His mother died of cancer, aged 62, before he went to New York. You sense that it may have helped him go off the rails. In the book he writes about his descent into cocaine abuse as a form of "cutting the umbilical cord".

Eventually he realised that his only form of redemption was persuading Caroline to take him back.

Today Toby is a contented — if frazzled — family man. He and Caroline have four children under six: daughter Sasha, five, sons Ludo, three, Freddie, one, and baby Charlie. He loves reading to them but the practical side flummoxes him.

Caroline tells him off when he flings open doors too quickly, because children may be playing behind them. To redress the balance he's now writing his own book about parenting — "part-funny, anecdotal, part-philosophy".

He's also thinking of starting his own school. "Both my parents were very involved in education and I'm keen to try and start a school in Acton. I can't afford to educate my four children privately. The local primary schools are OK but the secondary schools are fairly poor. The obvious solution is to start a school, and that seems to be emerging as a plank of the Conservative Party's manifesto.

"If parents opt out of the state system, they'll have vouchers which they'll be able to trade for part-financing educating their childen privately. It won't just be media kids' in Acton."

He tells me there's a model in Scandinavia which the Tories intend to import. "In fact, there's already one school which was set up by some parents in Queen's Park with the help of the Right-of-centre think-tank, Civitas, which has become the blueprint for a no-frills private school. It requires the parents to contribute to the teaching."

Young is an Honourable, thanks to his father's life peerage. He jokes, in poor taste, that he's a "member of the lucky sperm club". At his most insufferable he even had it printed on his Amex card to impress girls. Amex thought it was his Christian name and it arrived "Hon Young" in the work mail. At Vanity Fair, whenever Young opened his mouth, Graydon Carter would say: "Pray silence for Little Lord Fauntleroy."

He admits that he often says terrible things because he can't bear to be thought priggish or self-righteous. "I have negative charisma. I walk into a crowded room — and already 10 people have taken a dislike to me." But, I tell him, I know he has very loyal friends. "Yes, but I think that's different from being popular."

He'll be milking any fame that comes from the film (although he's hurt that Pegg had to bulk up two stone to play him). Because for a very bright man he loves trash. He nearly did I'm a Celebrity ... It was all going swimmingly well until he told the producers: "But let's cut down on Ant and Dec." They showed him the door.
His parents would be horrified by his precarious freelance life, he thinks. But he is also the first generation of his family to actually have to earn a living. And Caroline expects hands-on childcare. So he's more of a male feminist than his Lefty dad.

"My wife certainly isn't the good woman who is happy to stay at home and look after the kids single-handedly. Actually, I think friends of mine whose wives work have a slightly easier time of it. If their wives work, they feel so guilty about not being at home with the children that they want to spend every spare minute with them, and don't really care if their husbands are involved.

"The moment my key is in the door, there are four children sitting there screaming and I can hear a large bottle of wine being uncorked."

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People opens on 3 October.

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