This was in the summer of 2007, and we were on the roof of Soho House in New York shooting a scene from How to Lose Friends & Alienate People. I was actually staying at Soho House, so from a purely practical point of view it would have been relatively easy to dispatch one of these young women to my room. But was he being serious?

True, I had written the book the film is based on—a memoir about my failure to take Manhattan as a glossy magazine journalist in the ’90s—but that isn’t normally a perk extended to authors. There’s a saying in Hollywood that being a writer on the set of your movie is like being a husband in a delivery room—and I hadn’t even written the screenplay. I was like the husband’s best friend in the delivery room. It seemed unlikely that any of the extras would want to sleep with me.

I had expected to be over the moon on finding myself in this situation—My book is being made into a film!—but instead I was wracked by doubt. Is that really Kirsten Dunst standing over there? And is that person standing next to her really Simon Pegg? It can’t be true. I’ve noticed the same incredulous expression on the faces of Oscar winners. Me? An Academy Award winner? It must be a mistake. At any second a little boy in the audience is going to leap up and point out that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.

One of the reasons it felt so unreal is because it had been such a struggle to get to this point. I had been hoping against hope that the book would be turned into a film ever since it had been optioned by an independent production company five years earlier, but there was never a single moment when I thought, “This is really going to happen.” On the contrary, there were just lots of occasions when I thought, “This is never going to happen.”

For instance, there was the time I opened a copy of Variety and saw the following headline: “FilmFour’s deep-sixed.” That is to say, the British production company I had struck a deal with had been closed down. It would eventually be resurrected, but at the time it didn’t look good.

Then there was the phone call I got from Stephen Woolley, one of the film’s two producers. Stephen is probably the most successful independent filmmaker in the U.K., having produced Interview With the Vampire, Scandal and The Crying Game, among other films, so if he couldn’t get it off the ground, no one could. Yet he told me that every single writer he had sent the book to in the hope of persuading them to adapt it had turned it down.

My original plan was to adapt it myself—and Stephen had initially embraced this idea. At my first meeting with him, back when he was still angling for the job, he told me I had written the Catch-22 of my generation: “You’re such a brilliant writer, you’re clearly the guy to adapt it for the big screen.”

Not surprisingly, he changed his tune as soon as he got the gig. Actually, that’s a little unfair. Strictly speaking, he didn’t change his mind until he read the 35-page treatment I submitted, but I like to think he never had any intention of getting me to do it in the first place.

For some reason, Stephen kept me involved in the development of the film, first as an associate producer and then bumping me up to co-producer. Did he hold with Lyndon Johnson’s maxim that it was better to have someone like me inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in? That was probably part of it. In addition, he may have thought I had something to contribute, not least because the book in question was a memoir. After all, who better to advise on whether the film’s details were right than the person whose story it was? In purely practical terms, I was a useful guy to have around.

I had heard lots of stories about “development hell,” but my experience was anything but. Stephen eventually hired a writer named Peter Straughan, and the three of us spent 18 months working on the script. Both Stephen and Peter were very author-friendly, far more so than the vast majority of people in “the business,” and I tried my best not to abuse that goodwill. I was determined not to fall out with them, as I had with so many of the other people I’d been professionally mixed up with. I didn’t want my involvement in the film to echo the events being depicted onscreen.

It all went pear-shaped in the end, of course—and I blame the director. At first, Bob Weide and I got on pretty well. His main claim to fame was that he’d directed about half the episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, one of my all-time favorite sitcoms, and I thought that anyone good enough for Larry David was good enough for me. He had other things going for him, too. Shortly after he’d been appointed, I was in L.A. promoting the American publication of The Sound of No Hands Clapping—the sequel to How to Lose Friends—and he invited me to the Playboy Mansion. It was Hugh Hefner’s annual Fourth of July party and Bob was on the guest list—not a bad way to kick off a relationship. We’re going to get on famously, I thought.

However, when the film finally went into production in June of 2007, things started to deteriorate. On my first visit to the set, about a week after principal photography had begun, I insisted on taking Bob to one side and giving him some notes. I wasn’t happy with how he was directing a particular scene—I didn’t think he had fully grasped what was supposed to be happening at this point in the story—and thought he would appreciate a bit of elucidation. He was remarkably good-humored about it, but even someone as thick-skinned as me could tell this was an unwelcome distraction from the business in hand.

After a couple more visits, on one of which I antagonized Kirsten Dunst by giving her a “performance note,” I sent Bob a lengthy e-mail telling him that every time I dropped in on the set, I became more and more anxious about the fate of the film, and he sent a five-word reply: ‘Very easy solution to this.’ In other words, stay the fuck away. I resented this at the time, but it was good advice. Up until this point, Stephen had consulted me about all the key decisions, including whom to cast as the male lead, and now that Bob was in sole charge, I couldn’t cope with the loss of control. I started to panic, and whenever I visited the set, I began to act like one of those crazy airline passengers who becomes convinced that the plane’s going to crash and wants to wrest control from the pilot. Little wonder Bob didn’t want me around.

After six weeks of shooting in London, the production crew moved to New York, and that’s where I caught up with them again, on the roof of Soho House. I was ostensibly there to shoot my “cameo”—a one-second glimpse of my face at a party—but the real reason was that I simply couldn’t resist the opportunity to return to America in triumph. I had spent five years trying to take Manhattan and gone back to London with the stench of failure hanging about me. Now, seven years later, I was back, co-producing the film based on the book I’d written about that same series of disasters. To quote Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, it smelt like victory.

“I’ll take that one over there in the white dress,” I said, pointing to a beautiful Hispanic girl. “I’m in room 15.”

“I’m only joking,” said Stephen Woolley.

“So am I. My wife’s asleep in my hotel room. I’m a happily married man with three children.”

“I still can’t get my head around that. I find it so hard to believe.”

Me, too. You know where you are with failure—it has an air of solidity about it. But success feels fleeting and insubstantial—a mirage that might vanish at any moment. Where’s that little boy in the audience? And why hasn’t he stood up yet? It’s only a matter of time.

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

editorial@observer.com

As a Vanity Fair contributor, I had the perfect rebuttal whenever Graydon Carter hassled me about a deadline: What about the book he was supposed to be writing for the British firm Chatto & Windus? By the time I started working for the magazine full time in 1995, the book was at least eight years overdue.

The subject of that still-unwritten tome was aerial photography, not the first thing that springs to mind when you think of the editor in chief of Vanity Fair , and the same could be said of What We've Lost , a frontal attack on George W. Bush. During the three years I spent at the magazine, the only politician I remember Graydon getting worked up about was Rudolph Giuliani. He was convinced that the Mayor had ordered a construction crew to start digging up the road outside his bedroom window in retaliation for a piece in the magazine about the Mayor's private life.

Though adamant, What We've Lost is not particularly interesting. Compiled with a team of a dozen or so researchers, it reads like an anti-Bush primer that's been pieced together by some low-level functionary on the Democratic National Committee. The Graydon Carter that I came to know-the seditious cutup, the cynical insider, the guy who knows where all the skeletons are buried-is nowhere in evidence. The prose has a lifeless, bureaucratic, impersonal quality, which is odd given Graydon's force of personality. It's almost as if it had been written by someone else-and for all I know, it was. When I first joined Vanity Fair , I remember being baffled by the air of self-importance emanating from one particular member of the staff. I later discovered that she was responsible for writing the monthly "Editor's Letter."

Far more interesting than the book itself is the question of why Graydon has written it-or, at any rate, put his name to it. Why has this inveterate player of angles, a man who prides himself on never having made an uncalculated move, suddenly made a show of aligning himself with the forces ranged against President Bush?

A brief perusal of Vanity Fair 's back issues, including the February 2002 issue in which Mr. Bush and his team were given the full Annie Leibovitz treatment, indicates that this is a fairly recent conversion. One of the central planks of Graydon's case against Mr. Bush-a charge repeated again and again in What We've Lost -is that he "deceived the American people" about the extent of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. As evidence, he cites a Los Angeles Times poll in December 2002 which showed that 90 percent of the respondents did not doubt that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction.

Alarming stuff, but I fear the percentage of Vanity Fair readers who believed this may have been even higher: The magazine ran an article in the May 2002 issue documenting Saddam Hussein's plans to acquire a long-range ballistic-missile system and identifying sites inside Iraq where chemical and biological weapons were designed, manufactured and tested. The article-by the British journalist David Rose-was based on a series of interviews with Mohamed Harith, a high-level Iraqi defector.

Graydon was still bragging about this scoop almost a year later. In March 2003, he gave an interview to Adweek in which he claimed that this and other, similar articles by David Rose in Vanity Fair had "certainly affected the British government's decision." The interviewer didn't ask him to specify what "decision" he had in mind, but he must have been referring to the fact that the British government elected to throw in its lot with America in the war against Iraq.

Eighteen months later, Graydon no longer seems so eager to take credit for influencing British foreign policy. In What We've Lost , he writes: "Prime Minister Tony Blair's credibility as well as his political reputation and aspirations have been severely diminished by his support of Bush's unilateral invasion." (Given that British forces participated in the invasion, that's an idiosyncratic use of the word "unilateral.")

The first sign that Graydon was having doubts about Dubya's leadership in the war on terror was the "Editor's Letter" that appeared in the May 2003 issue, presumably written by him. "You really have to work at it to create a situation in which Saddam Hussein is looked upon as less of a threat to world peace than the U.S. president," he wrote. "In his little more than two years on the job, George W. Bush has proved himself to be more than up to the task."

This volte-face must have been fairly sudden, since in that very same issue there was another David Rose piece, this one based on interviews with a series of Iraqi defectors, in which he detailed the appalling crimes committed by Saddam Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay, including torture, rape and murder.

Mr. Rose's meetings with these defectors, as well as Mohamed Harith, were arranged by the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmad Chalabi's outfit, which has subsequently been exposed as a fount of pro-war misinformation. All the so-called intelligence passed on by these "defectors" is now regarded as unreliable, even by the C.I.A. If Graydon was opposed to the war in Iraq, why did he allow the imprimatur of Vanity Fair to be used to lend credibility to Mr. Chalabi's anti-Saddam propaganda? Perhaps he changed his mind about the war in the interval between commissioning the Uday and Qusay article and sitting down to write his "Editor's Letter."

Graydon composed the May 2003 "Letter" while holed up in the Beverly Hills Hotel ("as I write this … I'm in the curious position of being in Los Angeles preparing Vanity Fair 's annual Oscar party"), and one theory as to why he decided to come out against the war is that, having been exposed to the high level of anti-Bush sentiment in Hollywood, he realized it would be a good way to make friends on the West Coast. Graydon is willing to go to extraordinary lengths to become a player in the movie business, an aspiration well-documented by Claudia Eller, Michael Cieply and Josh Getlin in their recent investigation in The Los Angles Times .

By declaring himself an enemy of Mr. Bush, the theory goes, Graydon hoped to elevate his status in the eyes of his Hollywood friends. By expressing a point of view they agreed with, by taking a very public stand, he would be transformed in their eyes into a man of substance, a public intellectual, an homme serieux . One Vanity Fair contributor told me he thought Graydon's sudden discovery of politics at the age of 54 was a device to give him something more interesting to talk about at Barry Diller's dinner parties. Instead of regaling the assembled company with horror stories about the prima donna antics of the latest Vanity Fair cover stars, Graydon could hold forth on world affairs. He could converse with them as an equal, rather than-in some obscure sense-the help.

Or perhaps the explanation is much simpler: Graydon is a genuine convert to the Democratic cause. In this month's Women's Wear Daily , Kurt Andersen was asked why he thought his old colleague had jumped on the anti-Bush bandwagon. "Five, 10 or 20 years ago, presidential politics would not have made the list of Graydon's 10 great passions," said Mr. Andersen, obviously choosing his words carefully. "But I've known Graydon for 23 years, and he's always fairly passionate about whatever passions he holds."

Does this mean that Graydon's opposition to Mr. Bush is in some sense authentic? If so, it's a fairly low bar. I'm reminded of that old showbiz line, often quoted to me by Graydon: "The most important thing in life is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made."

One indication that Graydon's recently discovered passion for politics is not authentic is the mechanical quality of his book. It reads like a cut-and-paste job, something that's been rushed out to cash in on a trend. His sources-or, rather, the sources his army of researchers have been able to dig up-are almost all secondary: " … wrote David Morse in Slate … an Iraqi regional planning director in Baghdad told the Boston Globe … a former employee told the Los Angeles Times … according to the Wall Street Journal … read a headline in the April 20, 2004, edition of The New York Times … wrote Richard Schwartz in the Daily News …. " Occasionally, he broadens his frame of reference to include international sources: "Britain's Evening Standard reports that … the English newspaper the Observer obtained a report on global warming that … as Jamal al-Harith, a British citizen who had been held at Guantanamo, told the Guardian …. " It goes without saying that no Vanity Fair reporter would ever get away with such lazy reporting. As Graydon was fond of telling his journalists, you've got to pick up the phone occasionally.

Even with the boost of other people's regurgitated articles, it seems Graydon could barely muster the energy to write. The text is regularly broken up with space-filling devices-a 13-page list of the war dead, for example-and no chapter is complete without a volley of bullet points. Sometimes he resorts to the simple expediency of repeating himself. Thus, on page 30 he writes: "You've got to give it to the Bush administration, though-it's focused. When it wants to go to war, it goes to war come hell or high water, and never mind what anyone else thinks." Compare this to the following passage on page 259: "You've got to give it to the Bush administration, it's focused. When it wants to go to war-as it did with Iraq-it goes to war come hell or high water, the justification for doing so be damned."

Eventually, he just gives up the ghost. The penultimate chapter, entitled "The President by the Numbers," consists of 38 pages of Bush trivia presented in the style of the Harper's Index: "$1 million: Estimated value of a painting the Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, received from Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States and Bush family friend." (Incidentally, this is the second time Graydon has mentioned this fact. On page 13, he notes that Prince Bandar "gave President Bush a painting worth $1 million.")

An air of such exhaustion hangs over What We've Lost , of words squeezed out like blood from a stone, that it can't possibly be the work a man newly fired up by political outrage. So we return to the original question: Why did he write it? What is the old fox up to?

My own pet theory is that he's abandoned his attempts to conquer Hollywood and is now trying to position himself as a credible Democratic opponent to Michael Bloomberg in next year's Mayoral election. The one issue Graydon really does care passionately about (far, far more than the 10,000 dead Iraqi civilians he mentions in his book) is smoking. He was absolutely furious when Mr. Bloomberg's goons ticketed him for lighting up in his own office, and I can easily imagine him dwelling on thoughts of revenge as he sucks down Camel Light after Camel Light in the stairwell of the Condé Nast building. What better way to retaliate than running against Mr. Bloomberg on a pro-smoking ticket-and winning?

When I put this theory in an e-mail to Henry Porter, the London editor of Vanity Fair and the closest Graydon has to a Karl Rove figure in his entourage, he immediately e-mailed back and said, "A double bulls eye-he wants to be mayor and return the city to smokers." He was joking (I think), but I wouldn't be surprised if this fantasy has occurred to the great man. He already thinks of himself as Mayor of New York; getting elected would merely ratify something that, in his mind, has been true all along.

If Graydon does run for Mayor, he'll have to brush up his media skills, which are scarcely better than President Bush's. One of Graydon's main complaints against Mr. Bush is that he's refused to engage with his critics. "Bush sees himself as a CEO-type president," he writes. "But no chief executive can possibly be successful if he's surrounded by wall upon wall of secrecy."

Graydon clearly regards this as uppermost among the President's shortcomings, because he ends the book with this familiar quote from Mr. Bush: "I'm the Commander-see, I don't need to explain-I don't need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being President. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."

Strangely enough, Graydon feels the same way. Earlier this year, he became the subject of investigations by the Los Angeles Times , The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal , all of them looking into his extensive links with the entertainment industry. Not once did he agree to sit down with any of the reporters to answer the charges against him. One intrepid L.A. Times journalist even buttonholed him at the Chicago Book Expo, where he was busy promoting this book, but he shouldered him aside-just like one of the Republican Congressmen Michael Moore tried to interview in Fahrenheit 9/11 .

The most the L.A. Times could get out of him was a written statement, loftily relayed by Beth Kseniak, Graydon's press secretary: "This story and these outrageous rumors and innuendo are beneath the dignity of the Los Angeles Times and not worthy of detailed response. I have been privileged to edit Vanity Fair for 12 years and would never compromise the magazine or its readers' trust for personal gain. Those who seek to imply otherwise-whatever their agenda in doing so-are wrong."

George W. Bush may be an imperial President, but there are few magazine editors as regal as Graydon Carter.

Toby Young, a former Vanity Fair contributing editor, is the author of How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (DaCapo Press).

The fact that I had a monumental hangover didn't help. In theory, I'm a teetotaler, but I'd fallen off the wagon in Las Vegas a week earlier. My book tour was supposed to start in L.A., but at the last minute I'd called an old university friend who lives in Mexico City and we'd arranged to meet in Vegas for the weekend. I told my wife that we'd spend our time playing golf and going to the theater, perhaps even take in the Andy Warhol exhibit at the Bellagio. I meant it, too. Having never been to Vegas before, I'd bought into the notion that it's this ultra-hip, sophisticated place: Soho with sand.

What I hadn't bargained for was the free booze. In Britain, it's against the law to serve alcohol in casinos, presumably because the punters are thought to be at enough of a disadvantage without being mentally incapacitated as well. No such niceties are observed in Vegas. In my case, it was the gambling losses that led to the alcohol consumption. At least, it was at first-after a while, it became a vicious circle. By 6 a.m. on Saturday morning, I was $2,000 in the hole and three sheets to the wind.

The rest of the weekend's a bit of a blur, but I'm fairly sure of one thing: Hip Vegas doesn't exist. Occasionally you spot someone dressed in black with a ring through their nose, but they're standing between a 400-pound housewife from Arkansas and a 55-year-old Korean grocery-store owner. And they're all playing craps. In order for there to be a hip Vegas, there'd have to be an unhip Vegas, and it's far too egalitarian for that. It's the most unhierarchical place I've ever been to. There are no lists, no V.I.P. sections, no hot restaurants. It's America in its purest, most down-to-earth form. It's the anti–New York.

I had a paperback to promote, so on Sunday it was back to reality-or, rather, Los Angeles. It didn't take long for my own status anxiety to come bubbling back to the surface. After I managed to finagle myself a decent-sized room at the Chateau Marmont, I discovered that an old colleague from New York was staying in the hotel and immediately invited him up to my "suite" for "cocktails." We'd once competed for the editorship of a glossy magazine, and he'd got the job. I was keen to foster the illusion that I was doing very well.

Within seconds of arriving, he suggested we go to his room instead.

"I have a balcony," he explained. "I get really claustrophobic in these rooms that don't have balconies."

This episode was to prove typical of my week in L.A. In addition to promoting my book, I was there to try to get some Hollywood writing assignments, and I kept making the mistake of trying to pass myself off as an insider rather than the complete neophyte that I am. For instance, I was having dinner at the Grill in Beverly Hills with a successful television producer when David E. Kelley's name came up.

"Didn't he just ankle Endeavour?" I asked.

The producer stared at me in open-mouthed disbelief.

"Did you just use the word 'ankle' as a verb?"

"Isn't that the industry term?" I protested. " Variety uses it all the time."

"Yeah, I know, but I've never heard anyone actually say it before."

My reason for thinking I might be able to get some work in Hollywood is that a movie producer read my book last summer and hired me to write a biopic about a Broadway producer. I turned it in at the end of May but, rather discouragingly, he hasn't responded to it yet. The book in question, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People , charts my unsuccessful attempt to take Manhattan, and I came to L.A. with some vague notion of moving back to America, trying to take Hollywood and-when that inevitably ends in failure-writing a sequel about screwing up on the West Coast.

Unfortunately, it soon became clear that people in "the industry"-a term I didn't hear anyone use out there apart from me-would take real exception to being featured in a tell-all memoir. My colleagues in New York didn't react well, but I got the impression that Hollywood folk would be even more pissed off-dangerously pissed off, in fact.

"If you repeat what I'm about to tell you, I will literally kill you," said one mid-level player as a preamble to telling me a bit of gossip. "I don't just mean you can't write about it. If you so much as tell anyone what I'm about to tell you and you attribute it to me, I will literally cut off your head with a steak knife."

I believed him.

After a week in L.A., I came to the conclusion that not only do I have zero chance of re-inventing myself as a screenwriter, but my insurance policy-whereby I would gather material for an exposé of contemporary Hollywood-would be tantamount to a death sentence. No, my best hope lies in trying to establish a reputation as a best-selling author, which made it all the more important that I give a good account of myself on The O'Reilly Factor . At the age of 39, I've reached that stage when I'm not going to get many more golden opportunities. This was one of them.

Suddenly, I heard Bill O'Reilly's voice in my earpiece. The segment had begun.

"In the 'Back of the Book' segment tonight, writer Toby Young has been fired from The Times of London, fired from The Guardian of London, fired from The Independent of London, and fired from Vanity Fair magazine here in the U.S.A. He says he was booted because he wouldn't play what he sees as a corrupt game. Mr. Young joins us now from Los Angeles. He is the author of the new book How to Lose Friends and Alienate People , of which he may be an expert. All right. What's-what's the problem that you encountered in the magazine world vis-à-vis the celebrities? What's really going on there?"

It was an inauspicious start, and it didn't get any better. I blurted out something about how you were more likely to read the truth about celebrities in The National Enquirer than you were in glossy magazines, but I wasn't prepared for how adversarial he was. It was like walking onto a tennis court and suddenly finding yourself face-to-face with John McEnroe. After he'd served a succession of aces, I was summarily dismissed.

"All right, Mr. Young, thanks for coming on. We appreciate it."

Game, set and match to Mr. O'Reilly.

Still, when I arrived in New York on Sunday night, there was one consolation. My publisher called to tell me that my book was No. 7 on The Washington Post 's paperback nonfiction best-seller list. Maybe I should forget New York and Los Angeles and move to D.C. At least in that city, no one objects to being written about.

"That's pretty good, under the circumstances," he says. I nod and smile politely while putting an imaginary gun to my head. I quickly calculate that if every person in the room buys a copy of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People , my publisher won't make enough money to cover the hotel bill. It would've been more cost-effective to have stayed in London, picked 18 people at random out of the Washington phone book, and simply read them an extract over the telephone.

At 8.30 p.m., I hurry across town to Cafe Milano, where David Bass, the deputy publisher of The Weekly Standard , is hosting a dinner for me. I'm seated next to Lloyd Grove, the gossip columnist of The Washington Post , who tells me about a conversation he had with Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. "I asked him who he'd like to be played by if your book's ever made into a movie," David says. Apparently, Graydon replied: "I don't know about me, but for Toby Young, they've got to get Verne Troyer." When I look blankly at David, he explains that Verne Troyer is the dwarf who plays Mini-Me in the Austin Powers movies.

Saturday, Sept. 28-

After the low turnout in Washington, I'm anxious about this evening's reading at Barnes & Noble in Harvard Square. My publisher, Da Capo Press, is based in Cambridge, and the publisher, John Radziewicz, has promised to put in an appearance.

To my immense relief, I count 24 people in the audience. Admittedly, four of them, including John Radziewicz, are from Da Capo, but still. It could be worse. Then, just as I'm about to start reading, a kerfuffle breaks out.

"What's going on?" shouts a middle-aged man in the front row. "Who the hell is this guy?"

It turns out that I've been double-booked with the authors of Living in the Dead Zone , an academic tome about borderline-personality disorder.

Monday, Sept. 30-

I finally draw a decent crowd in New York. During the Q&A afterward, a woman asks me whether the book has turned me into a bit of a celebrity, and I'm forced to admit that it hasn't. The only time I've ever been asked for my autograph was just after a radio interview at the BBC in London. A professional autograph-hunter- the kind of man who loiters outside the BBC all day-approached me rather hesitantly with a pen and a card, clearly unsure whether I was worth bothering with. I grabbed the pen and said, "You know, you're the first person who's ever asked me." It was the wrong thing to say. I literally had to chase him down the street in order to give him my autograph.

Wednesday, Oct. 2-

I arrive in Dallas at the invitation of David Davis, the public-relations director of the Adolphus Hotel, who's convinced I'll draw as big a crowd as the authors of The Nanny Diaries . Since the hotel is charging $45 a head for the privilege of listening to me-they throw in a three-course lunch-I think that's unlikely. Nevertheless, David is very upbeat.

Thursday, Oct. 3-

I'm woken at 8:05 a.m. by David wanting to know where I am. We're due at the Dallas Morning News studio at 8:15 a.m.

As I'm having my makeup done, I say to the lady, "In keeping with the local custom, will my makeup be really, really heavy?" She laughs politely. It's only then that I think to look at her makeup. Duh!

There's a cheerleading troop in the studio called the Dallas Desperados, and after my interview, I ask if I can hang around to watch them strut their stuff. I must look pretty goggle-eyed, because one of the producers asks me if I'd like to join them in front of the cameras. I think he's joking, but it turns out he's not. "Go 'head," he says, shoving me in front of the studio lights. I end up dancing a jig alongside the Dallas Desperados, holding my book aloft like some old-fashioned detergent salesman.

Friday, Oct. 4-

Incredibly, David Davis has managed to sell all 75 tickets. I'm extremely flattered but my euphoria is short-lived. The woman who's interviewing me kicks off by asking how many people in the audience have read my book. Not a single person raises their hand.

The interviewer asks me to name my most difficult journalistic assignment, and without thinking I say, "That would be when I went undercover for a consultation with a penis-enlargement surgeon." The women in the audience stare at me in open-mouthed disbelief. I was warned by David Davis beforehand not to use any "curse words," and judging from the look on his face, "penis" falls into this category. Nevertheless, I plow on. The punch line involves me doing an impersonation of the Italian penis-enlargement surgeon delivering his verdict after he's subjected me to a thorough examination: "Yes, Meester Yong, I think I can 'elp you."

It doesn't get a single laugh.

Tuesday, Oct. 8-

The climax of the tour takes place on the roof of the Downtown Standard in Los Angeles, where I've organized a book party with the L.A. Press Club. I'd resigned myself to picking up the tab for this event, but at the last minute a helpful publicist finds a sponsor in the form of Stella Artois.

Only afterward does she explain that, in order to keep the sponsor happy, I'll have to invite some A-list movie stars. Consequently, I've spent the last 48 hours frantically working the phones, trying to persuade my friends to trawl their Rolodexes. By the time the party starts, I've got copper-bottomed commitments from Josh Hartnett, Courtney Love, Tobey Maguire, Eric Stoltz and Quentin Tarantino. None of them show up.

One of the guests at the party is an Englishman called Adrian Butcher. He raves about the sexual opportunities available to Brits in L.A. "Out here, having an English accent is like being a Calvin Klein underwear model," he drawls.

I can scarcely believe it. Clearly, I spent five years trying to make it on the wrong coast. I quickly formulate a plan to come back to America for another five years, only this time to L.A. When I inevitably fail, I can then write a sequel about screwing up in Hollywood: How to Lose Friends & Alienate People II .

It was Sunday night, less than 24 hours to go before my book party, and I was desperately trying to get in touch with a woman I'd heard about who ran a celebrity look-alike agency in Manhattan. It was part of an elaborate publicity stunt I was planning to coincide with the launch of How to Lose Friends & Alienate People , a tell-all memoir about the five years I spent working as a journalist in Manhattan.

"This is she."

Aha!

"I wonder if you can help me. I'm trying to get hold of a Graydon Carter look-alike."

"Who?"

"Graydon Carter. He's the editor in chief of Vanity Fair ."

About 50 percent of my book describes the two and a half years I spent working as a contributing editor at the magazine, and my plan was to have the Graydon look-alike gate-crash the party, beat the crap out of me, and then make a getaway in a Big Apple Town Car.

"Oh boy," she said. "Not somebody I've ever, ever had. You know, that's going to be a tough one. I don't think that anyone has ever had that request."

It was time to try a different tack.

"He looks a little like Garry Shandling."

"Who?"

Clearly, this wasn't going to work out.

I first got the idea for this stunt a few weeks ago, when I read a piece by Alessandra Stanley in The New York Times called "Revenge of the Underlings." Citing my book alongside The Nanny Diaries , American Son and Trading with the Enemy , she claimed to have identified a new literary genre called "boss betrayal." Graydon was one of the few bosses prepared to go on the record about this new trend. "You're forced into playing it cool," he told her, "when all you really want to do is throttle them."

On the face of it, this quote was a little odd. What's the point of pretending you're not bothered by something if you then go and tell The New York Times that you're absolutely furious about it? Still, it did have the effect of making him look more honest than Anna Wintour. In the same article, she was asked how she felt about a forthcoming roman à clef by a 25-year-old ex- Vogue employee called Lauren Weisberger. "I look forward to reading [it]," she said. The title of the book is The Devil Wears Prada .

When I first sent Graydon a copy of How to Lose Friends last August, I got an e-mail back from him saying how much he liked it, but in the intervening 11 months he appears to have changed his mind (or dropped the pretense). My sense of it is that he wasn't too bothered when it was just a British book-it was published in the U.K. last November by Little, Brown and Company-but when it became a best-seller and I sold it in America, his attitude began to change. The final straw was the movie deal I did last April. According to a mutual acquaintance, he now refers to the book as an "unauthorized biography" and describes it as "a gross violation" of his "privacy." It's hard to believe that this is the same Graydon Carter who co-founded Spy with Kurt Andersen in 1986.

Actually, it's not that hard to believe. Graydon is notoriously quick to take offense. Toward the end of my time at Vanity Fair , a young man appeared in the office next-door to mine named Morgan Murphy. After I heard his Southern drawl I started referring to him as "Forrest Gump," but he was a nice enough guy, always eager to ingratiate himself with whoever crossed his path. Like the simpleton played by Tom Hanks, he was completely guileless. One day Morgan bumped into Graydon in the elevator and, without thinking, said he hadn't seen him around much lately. Instead of replying, Graydon scowled at him, and the following day Morgan was summoned into the office of senior articles editor Aimée Bell, one of Graydon's closest confidants.

"Here's a piece of advice," she said. "In future, don't tell the hardest-working editor at Condé Nast that you haven't seen him around the office much, O.K. ?"

In my experience, those journalists who make a living from dishing it out, and then accuse their victims of losing their sense of humor when they kick up a fuss, usually fail to see the funny side when they're given the same treatment. After I wrote a fairly waspish profile of the Australian humorist Clive James in 1993, he told a mutual friend of ours that he wouldn't have minded if it weren't for the fact that my piece "just wasn't funny." Harold Evans was so enraged by an article I wrote in 1997 suggesting his departure from Random House was less than voluntary that he threatened me with a libel suit unless I signed a legal document promising I wouldn't write about him ever again. I refused and the libel writ never materialized, but it taught me a lesson in just how thin-skinned journalists can be.

Much more surprising has been the reaction of people like Alessandra Stanley. In her Times piece she sided with the bosses, loftily dismissing the books under discussion as the work of "servants and office assistants trying to cash in" on the fame of their former employers.

"They are a variation on the tell-all exposé," she sniffed, "written not by peers or rivals or the principals themselves but by subordinates, books that all could be subtitled, 'You'll Never Serve Lunch in This Town Again.'"

I'm quite prepared for a New York Times journalist to criticize my book for being poorly written-and, indeed, Janet Maslin did precisely that on July 11-but for a fellow reporter to object to exploding-cigar journalism on principle seems a tad hypocritical. I was under the impression that throwing a few custard pies in the direction of the ruling class has a long and distinguished history in the annals of American newsprint. Whatever happened to comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable? Ms. Stanley's complaint, echoed by several other people quoted in her article, is that for a mere "underling" to write a tell-all memoir is unacceptably uppity. Presumably, editorial assistants, like children, should be seen and not heard.

I'd like to think that my book, along with the others mentioned in Ms. Stanley's article, is in the tradition celebrated by Jim Bellows in his recently published memoir The Last Editor . As the top man at the Herald Tribune Mr. Bellows published Tom Wolfe's evisceration of William Shawn, and as the editor of The Washington Star he instructed his gossip columnist to write about the love life of The Washington Post 's executive editor.

Mr. Bellows is the closest thing we have to Walter Burns, the wisecracking hero of The Front Page. According to Mr. Bellows, journalism "shouldn't be something ancillary to your life, but something that nourishes your soul and is a lot of fun."

Alessandra Stanley's overdeveloped sense of propriety is depressingly familiar to anyone who's done a tour of duty on a glossy New York magazine. I arrived in New York in 1995 with tales of the legendary bad behavior of Ben Hecht, Herman J. Mankiewicz and Dorothy Parker swimming in my head, expecting to find their modern-day equivalents in the offices of Vanity Fair . I imagined this zany, madcap community where no one stood on ceremony and everyone had a wisecrack at the ready. But that devil-may-care attitude, that sense of fun, was nowhere to be found. Instead, I was confronted with a regiment of pinched and hidebound careerists who never got drunk and were safely tucked up in bed by 10 p.m. In London, I'd seen chartered accountants behave with more abandon. Whatever happened to that harum-scarum roustabout whose status is somewhere between a whore and a bartender? In New York, the people who once thought of themselves as "us" have become "them."

It's particularly important that Graydon Carter should be put in the stocks from time to time, because he used to be one of the chief standard-bearers of the pie-in-the-face tradition. He isn't merely a poacher turned gamekeeper; he now owns the land he used to poach on. I remember one occasion at the beginning of 1996 when I had dinner with Graydon at Le Cirque. The Italian owner, Sirio Maccioni, greeted him in a suitably deferential manner, then turned to his staff and clicked his fingers. Within seconds, two flunkies came scuttling out of the wings carrying a table and set it down in the middle of the restaurant. Clearly, no existing table was good enough for such a distinguished personage. Before long, a team of waiters started making their way towards us from the kitchen bearing trays of expensive delicacies, a perk that's only extended to the grandest of grandees.

"Oh God," Graydon said, rolling his eyes. "Here it comes."

Yeah, right, I thought. Woe betide the restaurateur who treats you like any other paying customer. It may not be possible to hire a Graydon from a look-alike agency, but for all intents and purposes he's now a fully fledged celebrity. He's ferried to work every day in a chauffeur-driven Lincoln Navigator. He presides over the most exclusive party in Hollywood. The enormous effort he puts into cultivating his persona, and the huge gulf between the image and the reality, creates an irresistible opportunity for an ambitious young journalist. Indeed, if Graydon himself had ended up working for Tina Brown in 1986 instead of co-founding Spy , he might well have written a similar book about the editor in chief of Vanity Fair himself.

In spite of being such an appalling turncoat, Graydon is still great company. When he's on a roll, he can spit out one-liners like a Chicago newspaperman of the old school. For instance, when I first met him in 1993 I suggested that Vanity Fair should put together a photographic portfolio of "literary London" featuring headshots of Britain's most distinguished authors in their favorite pubs. The idea was to illustrate the connection between alcohol and London literary life.

"What, are you kidding?" he responded. "It'd look like a fucking dental textbook."

Occasionally, you can see glimpses of the revolutionary leader Graydon used to be, a devilish glint in his eye as he briefly considers throwing a bomb at the car of some capitalist fat cat. At one point, I almost persuaded him to run a profile of Jay McInerney in which I treated the ubiquitous partygoer as if he was a notorious literary recluse in the same vein as J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon. Headline: "Who is the elusive Jay McInerney and why is he so publicity-shy?" But Graydon's newly developed sense of caution got the better of him. As he frequently points out, he has four kids to put through school.

In spite of everything, I still have a soft spot for Graydon and I'm sorry he's so angry about my book. Indeed, I'd like to take this opportunity to clear the air. Graydon, I have a message for you and it's this: Hello ! You practically invented this type of journalism. You've been dishing it out ever since you arrived in this city 24 years ago, and now it's time to suck it up. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.