Toby Young Is An Ass

Toby Young blasts Tina Brown in The Telegraph today. In his missive he says of Brown, "The truth is that however hard Tina tries she can't seem to persuade the gatekeepers of media power that she is 'hot,' to use one of her own favorite yardsticks."

To be frank, The Corsair has always had a bit of fun with Brown, but this is just too juicy an opportunity. The comment that Tina Brown is not 'hot' to the gatekeepers of media power could only have been made by a very out of touch chump like Toby Young, on the other side of the Atlantic.

Now I have nothing against Britain, but everything against Toby Young. We met briefly at a dinner Taki Theodoropoulos at Elaine's when I was in my mid 20s. Taki introduced me to Young, who wrote for the Top Drawer section of the NY Press, back when the NY Press was relevant. I had read Young's first piece on Graydon Carter and thought it was very funny. Carter has this theory of "seven rooms" and if you make it into the seventh room you have made it, you are at the top of the status heap along with Tom Cruise and George Bush; Toby Young made Graydon Carter appear to be a status obsessed fool. On that evening I saw that it was Toby Young himself who is a status obsessed fool.

As I started to tell Young how much I liked the piece and ... slowly ... but ... surely ... Young turned away from me and looked towards the door. Finally his back was to me: conversation over. At the time I was appalled, but later realized that sometimes, at dinner parties, especially in Washington, status oriented asses will literally turn away from a conversation in search of someone "more important." As a young man at the beginning of his career, I was, I suppose, less interesting than other guests, like Michael Mailer and Christopher Buckley. Often I wonder -- l'espirit d'escalier style -- what I could have said to salvage the situation.

Several years after that I got a bit of revenge. The excellent Jim Romenesko, ran a hot web site for media insiders, which is still the best at what it does. Somehow a conversation started on Toby Young, who had been fired at Vanity Fair and was being disciplined at New York Press for passing off an urban legend as a first hand experience (I told you Toby Young was an ass).

Young emailed me almost immediately. I guess either he read ny account of him or one of his friends did. He wanted to know if I was sure it was him because he kept a diary and he didn't remember the event. Oh, I was sure about the events of the evening. I even told him I remebered him as "balding."

Young apologized and that was that. But now, hearing Young in London attacking Tina Brown as being unable to get through the gates of power in the US is laughable. It was Toby Young who was blacklisted in the US because of his asshole ways, at New York Press, at Vanity Fair.

Tina Brown may have her faults, but she's never done anything to bring about the opprobium of an ass like Toby Young.