Anthony Haden-Guest
About
Anthony Haden-Guest was born in Paris on 2 February 1937. He was the son of Peter Haden-Guest, and grandson of Leslie Haden Haden-Guest, a Labour MP who later became Baron Haden-Guest of Saling. Anthony Haden-Guest’s father eventually inherited the title, but it failed to pass to him because he was born out of wedlock. His mother was the writer and socialite Elizabeth Furse, who separated from his father soon after they were married. On the outbreak of the Second World War Haden-Guest was in France with his mother. They were interned by the Germans in 1940, but later returned to England, where they spent the rest of the war with Elizabeth’s third husband, Pat Furse, in Devon.
Haden-Guest was educated at Gordonstoun and Cambridge University. After graduation he became a journalist, and by 1964 was drawing the pocket cartoon ‘This Way Out’ for the Sunday Telegraph. In the late 1970s Haden-Guest moved to New York, where he established himself as a notorious socialite and attracted the nicknames ‘Unwelcome-Guest’, ‘Uninvited-Guest’, and ‘The Beast.’ Haden-Guest is widely believed to be the model for Peter Fallow, the drunken British journalist exiled in New York in Tom Wolfe’s novel Bonfire Of the Vanities.
Haden-Guest’s drawings have appeared in the New York Observer, and he has also contributed numerous articles and stories to Talk, Sunday Telegraph, Vanity Fair, New Yorker, Paris Review, Observer, Sunday Times and others. In 1979 he won an Emmy Award for writing and narrating the documentary The Affluent Immigrants for PBS television in the USA. On his father’s side Haden-Guest is the half-brother of the actor Nicholas Guest, and of the actor, film director, writer and comedian Christopher Guest – husband of actress Jamie Lee Curtis, and inheritor of the barony.