If you happened to have toiled in the rarefied world of New York magazine publishing at the turn of this century—a world of fax machines, cosmopolitans, iPods, and $700 rents—you could not possibly have escaped the name Graydon Carter. For 25 years, Mr. Carter was the editor of Vanity Fair magazine, a publishing money mill that employed 150 staff turning out monthly issues that ran up to 400 pages and charged high-end merchants like Ralph Lauren, Louis Vuitton, and Aston Martin as much as $100,000 per advertising page. Carter, or simply “Graydon”—apex editors like “Tina” and “Jann” needed only one name back then—now gives us details of his rise to the top in a memoir, When the Going was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines. It is a zesty blend of score settling, heartfelt gratitude, apologies, editorial heroics, reflections on family, friendship, design, travel tips, and the many uses for a pocket handkerchief (seriously) served in a martini glass with a Day-Glo swizzle stick. As Cindy Adams, the New York Post’s gossip goddess of that golden age, would say, only in New York, kids, only in New York.
Carter begins his autobiography in Toronto, where he grew up a lousy student and an only average hockey player. He found refuge in books about young men who take on New York, like Moss Hart’s Act One and Herman Wouk’s Youngblood Hawke. At Carleton University he edited the literary magazine instead of going to class and never graduated. “Movies and magazines I read were my guideposts to the more glamorous world outside our frosted, snowy windows,” he writes. “I wanted an adult life of cocktails, cigarettes, bridge games, witty banter, and clothes that weren’t tartan.”
He found all that and more when he arrived wide-eyed in Manhattan in 1978. His first moves were to rent a cheap flat in Greenwich Village and buy a Paul Stuart Gabardine suit—on credit. Through luck and pluck he landed at Time magazine as a junior writer, and it was there he was introduced to the magical world of expense accounts and staff town cars idling at the curb. At Time, the author fell in with a group of other young and talented journos, many of whom would become lifelong friends and colleagues. He would also become immersed in the dogma of the American political left. Over the years, the author learned to sniff out the right people to know and where to avoid social land mines. Suits were upgraded from off-the-rack to custom-made Anderson & Sheppard—tailors to Cary Grant and Noël Coward. Carter dated a Rockette, which is pretty cool.
By 1985, the author was ready for the next step, a magazine of his own creation that he imagined would take the mick out of society’s spoiled and self-important—in finance, politics, the arts, old money, new money, anybody perched on their own plinth. Together with Time partner Kurt Andersen, they launched Spy. “We wanted to be outsiders on the ramparts picking off the big shots,” Carter writes. “We wanted to champion the underdog and bite the ankle of the overdog.” Stories were well reported and written with a knowing voice the author describes as “wit, satire and literate sensationalism.” Friends, investors, and advertisers were reportedly given a pass, while others became hunted game, and the humor at their expense could be mean-spirited. The author admits to having second thoughts about the attacks. “Who was I to start a magazine that poked holes in the bloated egos of the city’s grandees?” That moment of self-reflection evidently passed.
The fact is, Spy was quite often funny as hell and, for a time, a sensational hit in New York and beyond. (Disclosure: Your reviewer wrote a short and only mildly amusing piece for Spy in its early years.) Noteworthy is the sense readers may get that of all the editorial adventures in Carter’s career, the Spy years come across as his happiest. A magazine start up—any start up—is exciting, a high-wire act. There was no sugar daddy funding Spy. Staff threw in together despite being paid almost nothing. Pulling it off must have been a triumphant feeling.
By the early 1990s, however, Spy was taking on water. That’s when Carter got a call from Arthur Carter (no relation), a New York investment banker and publisher of a largely ignored, salmon-colored weekly newspaper, the New York Observer. The odd color was the only interesting thing about the publication until the author was offered the editorship, deploying an editorial mix of the frivolous and the serious, transforming the weekly into a citywide must-read. Owner Carter’s deep pockets bought the best writers the editor Carter could buy, and the author made the most of it.
To the New York publishing world, the Observer’s resurrection was a triumph and it did not escape the notice of S.I. Newhouse, the petite paterfamilias of the Condé Nast publishing empire—home to such luxury titles as Architectural Digest, Glamour, GQ, and Vogue. The crown jewel of its holdings were the New Yorker (published by sister company Advance Publications) and Vanity Fair—the glitzy, gabby chronicler of the world’s smart set. (To land any job at the 350 Madison Avenue headquarters of Condé Nast in the late 1990s was to be welcomed into the Emerald City.) As Rich Uncle Pennybags go, they didn’t come any richer or more avuncular than “Si”—another one-named being of this golden era. He offered Carter a $600,000 salary (over $1.4 million today) to take the helm at Vanity Fair. (Si first offered him editorship of the New Yorker, but in a bit of palace intrigue, Tina Brown—the incumbent editrix of Vanity Fair at the time—managed to snatch that job away for herself. Readers will enjoy tales of Graydon vs. Tina’s long-standing enmity in the book.)
With the wunderkind now installed, New York’s publishing world wondered how the editor who once lampooned the rich and famous was going to pivot to fawning over them. Carter steps lightly over this awkward question in his recounting except to suggest that today, bygones are bygones—hey, it was a long time ago, we’ve all moved on—and when he writes elsewhere in this book that “I hate hurting anyone’s feelings,” you could almost believe him.
Over the next two decades Carter would mold the magazine into something more than a showcase for starlets—although there were still plenty of those. His aim? “An assortment of compelling stories encompassing current history, feuds, scoops, and scandals from the world of literature, art, fashion, show business, politics, Wall Street and Silicon Valley.” He built a first-rate stable of writers such as Michael Lewis, Dominick Dunne, Nancy Collins, and Christopher Hitchens. Circulation soared, and with every important story Vanity Fair broke, his reputation grew—along with his signature hair style, a cotton-candy mélange of Giuseppe Verdi meets Bob’s Big Boy.
“When traveling on business, I stayed at the Connaught in London, the Ritz in Paris, the Hotel du Cap in the South of France, and the Beverly Hills Hotel or the Bel-Air in Los Angeles,” the author tells us. “Suites, room service, drivers each day. For most European trips, I flew the Concorde.” Who wouldn’t have traded places with him?
Carter is a terrific writer with a gift for romancing the reader along. His story is almost never boring—it’s a safe assumption that he would rather stay at a Red Roof Inn than be boring.
If there are any sour notes in Carter’s story, they occur whenever the name “Trump” appears—and when it does, some readers may want to skip ahead. The author takes a whack at 45/47 with wearying regularity in this memoir. The two have been feuding since the Spy years—a feud the author started—when the magazine began calling Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian.” To this day, Carter still goads the Donald; Trump still takes the bait, and well, de gustibus, as the old timers used to say. There are no insights to be gained from the author’s Trump asides except, perhaps, that after 40 years, these two deserve one another.
The last golden age of magazines was wiped out with the Great Recession of 2008 and the rise of the internet. But if you’re up for a tour of the ruins, you couldn’t ask for a more expert guide than Graydon Carter, or a more charming one.
When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines
by Graydon Carter
Penguin Press, 432 pp., $32
Patrick Cooke is a writer in Washington, D.C.
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