Anthony Haden-Guest

Anthony Haden-Guest (born 2 February 1937) is a British-American writer, reporter, cartoonist, art critic, poet, and socialite who lives in New York and London. He is a frequent contributor to major magazines and has had several books published.

Family

Born in Paris, Haden-Guest is the son of Peter Haden-Guest, a United Nations diplomat who later became 4th Baron Haden-Guest. His mother was Elisabeth Haden-Guest, née Louise Ruth Wolpert. As Haden-Guest was born before his parents' marriage, upon his father's death the peerage passed to his younger half-brother, Christopher Guest, a comedian, actor, writer, director, musician and Grammy Award-winning composer.

A humorous blurb on the back cover of The Chronicles of Now, a book of Haden-Guest's cartoons published by Allworth Press, reads as follows:

Boring, pompous, and a complete and utter waste of time. I don’t know what my brother was thinking.
—Christopher Guest.

Through Christopher Guest, Haden-Guest is brother-in-law of actress Jamie Lee Curtis. The heir presumptive to the barony is actor Nicholas Guest, younger half-brother of Anthony and brother to Christopher.

Career

Haden-Guest writes a weekend column on art collection for the Financial Times His drawings have appeared in the New York Observer and he has contributed articles and stories to the Sunday Telegraph, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Sunday Times, Esquire, GQ (UK), The Observer, Radar and other major publications. In 1979 he was awarded a New York Emmy for writing and narrating the PBS documentary The Affluent Immigrants.

Haden-Guest frequently turns to upscale Manhattan social life for his subject matter as seen in the following sample of his work from Rolling Stone:

The lead singer had been married to one of those decadent European rich so numerous in Manhattan nowadays—"International White Trash," as the uncharitable put it—and there was a sizable splinter group of fashionable uptown faces cruising among the downtown regulars, their expressions mingling curiosity, distaste, alarm. We fetched drinks. Making small talk would have been strenuous ... We left. He got into a Maserati the color of arterial blood. The three of us followed in the rich girl's Mercedes. Although almost brand-new, it was already dented and scarred by careless driving.

One reviewer said about Haden-Guest's book The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night, published by William Morrow & Co.,

British socialite and writer Anthony Haden-Guest has been a champion party-goer for more than 30 years. There are few people more qualified to lead a reader, as he does in The Last Party, past the velvet ropes and doorman and into the tornado of 1970s disco, drug excess, and excessive sex that was Studio 54. Unlike some of his contemporaries whose memories are dulled by years of hard living, Haden-Guest seems to actually recall many of his experiences at Studio. His book is therefore part personal memoir, part reportage.

Haden-Guest was a guest on Charlie Rose while promoting his book True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World, published by Grove Atlantic.

Personality

Haden-Guest is known for being humorously irreverent, as seen in the following quote on Gawker.com:

The massive streak of Puritanism in America has reasserted itself, especially amongst liberals. When I moved to New York there were still a bunch of good writers, often half-drunk, but still very good writers. That doesn't exist anymore. Where do they go? They probably go and teach at Bard.

In response to a suggestion that Peter Fallow in the Tom Wolfe novel The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) was based on British expatriate journalist Christopher Hitchens, Hitchens said that Haden-Guest was a more likely candidate. A website maintained by the University of Kent cites Haden-Guest as the inspiration for Fallow.

Once known for his late-night antics, Haden-Guest was named the winner of Spy magazine's "Iron Man Decathlon" in 1988 and 1989.