His mother, Jean Pauline (Hindes), was American, his father was an English lord: Peter Haden-Guest, the fourth baron of Saling in Essex, an actor and dancer who ended up a UN diplomat. His half-brother is
Anthony Haden-Guest, the bibulous English socialite and journalist satirized by
Tom Wolfe in
The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990). He is of Russian Jewish (mother) and upper class English/European Jewish (father) descent.