The Going Was Very, Very Good
A conversation with editor Graydon Carter (Air Mail, Vanity Fair, Spy more).
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I’m a writer and the former deputy editor of Vanity Fair. Now, if you know anything about me, which statistically you don’t, unless—shameless plug—you read my memoir, Dilettante, about my time at Vanity Fair and the golden age of the magazine business. Which, statistically, you didn’t.
The only reason I have a career at all is because of today’s guest on Print Is Dead (Long Live Print). He hired me in the mid-nineties to be his assistant. Or as he likes to say, “rescued me off the scrap heap” and then, like gum on the bottom of his shoe, he could never seem to get rid of me.
I’m talking of course about Graydon Carter, former editor of Vanity Fair, Spy, The New York Observer, and now co-editor and co-founder of Air Mail.
He’s here to talk about his memoir When the Going was Good—a title that, with signature understatement, suggests things were once better than they are now, which feels correct. But his book isn’t just about magazines. It’s about a time when media was glamorous and powerful and vital. When New York was still New York. When the world he had a hand in shaping still existed.
It’s not nostalgia, it’s a public service, because Graydon didn’t just edit and create magazines. He built worlds. He predicted the cultural weather. He made journalism feel essential, and more importantly, cool.
I was lucky enough to work for him at Vanity Fair for almost 25 years, back when magazines mattered, when people still returned phone calls, and parties had seating charts instead of hashtags, when the media wasn’t just people making videos about sandwiches, and when style wasn’t a “brand CoLab,” and when you could still smoke indoors without a visit from HR.
You know what? Hold on one second. “Hey! You kids get off my lawn!”
Sorry. Graydon began as my boss, but quickly became a mentor, then a friend, and it’s a friendship that continues to this day. So enjoy this conversation with Graydon Carter as he looks back on the chaos, the glamour, and the thrill of a better time. Back when, yes, the going was very, very good.
“The ‘Golden Age’ was the Golden Age because magazines were phenomenal then—all editors were firing on all cylinders, and everybody was the competition.”
George Gendron: Do you have any idea at all how many interviews you’ve done?
Graydon Carter: I’ve done a few. I mean, I’ve probably done two dozen. But in Canada, Britain, and America.
George Gendron: This has got to be one of the most successful book tours ever.
Graydon Carter: Well, I think the timing was good for my book in that I think it will do better now three months after Trump returns to the White House. And I don’t know, I think it’s a nice aspirational book and I think it goes back to a happier time in our lives.
George Gendron: Boy, does it ever!
Graydon Carter: Professionally and personally, yeah.
George Gendron: Yeah. Certainly professionally for many of us.
Graydon Carter: Oh yeah.
George Gendron: And once in a while people accuse the legendary editors of nostalgia and sentimentality, but I don’t find that. I find that good conversations have a lot of value in addition to that. But there’s something about magazine making where there’s a tangible product at the end of the process and you’re working with kind of an incredibly diverse group of really bright, inquisitive, passionate people. That’s just thrilling.
Graydon Carter: Oh, I agree with that. And it is funny because magazines still have an aura around them and I think young people would just love working for magazines if they can find one that can pay them.
George Gendron: Yeah.
Graydon Carter: I know the people we have at Air Mail, and we treat it as a magazine, and there’s about a dozen young people all in their twenties and they’re as smart as anybody I’ve ever worked with.
George Gendron: Yeah. I have a bunch of former students that have occasionally worked with us on a variety of projects and they’re, God, they’re extraordinary.
Graydon Carter: Yeah. No, I think this generation is wonderful.
George Gendron: I do too. So we want to have a conversation about the book, but about your experiences in the magazine space. And I want to start with growing up in Canada. Part of my family is French Canadian, so I feel a kinship here. So you said that half of the cultural influences for you growing up in Canada were American and British. And I’m curious what magazines, from either country, were you exposed to and what magazines really engaged you?
Graydon Carter: Yeah, so it was largely movies and television and books, in terms of the culture. We got American shows like Bonanza and Ed Sullivan. We also, in the movie theaters in Ottawa, the Ealing Studios comedies would come to town. So I knew all of those. Shows like Tony Hancock’s Hancock’s Half Hour.
So growing up in Canada, you get a grounding in the cultures and especially the humors of both places. Our magazines at home were largely American. They were Life and Time and Esquire and The New Yorker and those were my parents’ magazines when I was growing up.
And then I had my own subscriptions when I got older. And that was a window to the world to me, because magazines tell you more about the here and now and the way we live than newspapers do and they do it before books do. So magazines were an important element in my life. I love them. I still love magazines.
George Gendron: Someone at the Boston event, during the Q&A, actually asked you, “Why magazines for you?” And you said something about the fact that just repeating what you just said now, that if you wanted a picture of life, particularly in America, you looked at Life magazine in the fifties and Esquire in the sixties. Could you explain just briefly what you felt each of those magazines did that was so unique or special?
Graydon Carter: Life, every week, would bring you the ways of the world, especially the way Americans were living. And it seemed the people lived in a warmer climate than we did, they had less snow by and large—unless you lived in Minnesota or Maine—and it just looked like they were having more fun. But granted that’s because they were in magazines.
And that was the fifties and the early sixties. And then Esquire magazine in the 1960s was the definitive magazine of the counterculture—and of the establishment—in a strange way. It was anti-establishment. But you got a better portrait of the establishment that way. At least the American one.
George Gendron: That’s an interesting way to put it. I think Esquire provided an interesting view of the establishment through the eyes of the anti-establishment.
Graydon Carter: Yeah. And then New Times magazine, which I thought was brilliant. I thought Willie Morris’s Harper’s magazine was brilliant. And this just formed a big part of my, not worldview so much as, but what I wanted to do with my life.
George Gendron: It’s interesting you mentioned New Times. I was at New York magazine in the early seventies. And New Times had launched and they were headquartered right down the street from us. And it was interesting because Clay Felker and the senior staff ignored them and sniffed about them—
Graydon Carter: At their peril.
George Gendron: —and the young staff adored the magazine. Every young writer we knew suddenly didn’t want to write for New York anymore. They wanted to write for New Times.
Graydon Carter: Yeah. New Times was a revolutionary magazine.
George Gendron: It was. Why do you think it didn’t last longer?
Graydon Carter: Because probably—I’m basing this on absolutely nothing, but the fact is that magazines are a brutal financial proposition. It’s time consuming and costly to color-correct pages to print the magazine, to bind the magazine, to ship the magazine, and then to wait 120 days before you get paid for the copies you sold.
George Gendron: Yeah.
Graydon Carter: You needed advertising to bolster that and maybe the counterculture advertising was drifting mostly to Rolling Stone in those days. I don’t know. But also it’s a small magazine. Small magazines are famous for the—famous for the tinyness and the bitterness and just the infighting that goes on to anything that’s quite small. I’ve never experienced that except for one time in a magazine, but I know it exists.
George Gendron: We have to talk afterwards because that would make a great podcast for someone.
Graydon Carter: “Little Magazines.”
George Gendron: Yes. So let’s reframe that question that somebody at CitySpace asked you earlier this week and say, what destination do you turn to for a picture of America today with all of its conflicts and contradictions?
Graydon Carter: I mean, I think that first of all, there are a number of extraordinary magazines still operating in the country. And I love—I love The Atlantic. I love The New Yorker. I like New York magazine for my world here in the city.
But I think TV does a lot of that now. In the way that movies used to give you a portrait of the, say 1970s, the movies were incredible at doing that. Television does a very decent job of that. And I mean scripted television. I don’t mean TV news.
George Gendron: Yeah. Give me an example of what you watch then. Something specific.
Graydon Carter: Funny enough, I’m trying to think. I do know my wife and I, if we watch TV in the evening, just before we turn off the television, we watch Frazier simply because I think it’s one of the best-written shows of all time. And they’re like perfect half hour, 22-minute plays. And it’s a really cleansing nightcap to all the stuff you might’ve read during the day or heard during the day.
But I watch everything on television. I watch every major series. I’m trying to watch Mob Land now, and I watched, obviously, White Lotus like everybody else. So I watch what everybody else watches. But a lot of British stuff as well. There’s a wonderful series called Douglas Is Canceled with Hugh Bonneville that I love, that I recommend to everybody. It’s on Britbox. I loved it.
George Gendron: That’s interesting, because when I heard it in one of the interviews, I immediately thought, for me, The Sopranos, The Wire, Friday Night Lights. We’re rewatching The West Wing—
Graydon Carter: Just to make you feel better?
George Gendron: Just to make us feel better, yeah. Or not.
Graydon Carter: Yeah. Or not. Yes.
George Gendron: But just for that Aaron Sorkin dialogue. Jesus!
Graydon Carter: That’s a brilliant show. I watched all of those, obviously, as well.
George Gendron: So let’s spend some time talking about one of my all-time favorite magazines: Spy.
Graydon Carter: I’m sure Kurt [Andersen]’s told you everything you need to know.
George Gendron: No, I want to hear your version of the story because I was saying to Patrick earlier today, I don’t know why, but I think a lot of people, because Kurt has spoken about this so frequently that a lot of people think of him as the founder. And it was your idea. But you write in the book something really interesting, Graydon. You say you have no idea where that idea for Spy came from. And a reader is totally unprepared after having read what you had written beforehand, that here’s this guy, he’s a Canadian, he’s an outsider, he seems insecure, and he comes up for this magazine that ends up being ballsy and brash.
Graydon Carter: No, I was less insecure than I was anxious. I was an anxious person. So a minimal space of difference there. No, I actually spent seven-and-a-half, eight years in New York. And I was a sponge when I came to New York. I always say, “People who grew up in New York see the city completely differently than people who come here in their adult years.” Because the adults come for a reason and they come out of purpose.
And if they’re like me, they’re just sponges for everything about the city, the architecture, the people, the sort of parade floats of people who were in the tabloids every day. And New York had just come out of bankruptcy in the mid eighties, it was getting back on its feet. Banks were all of a sudden not these things where you went to deposit your paycheck, but they were all these investment banks and then that spawned investment bankers.
And so there was a flood of money in the city. And a lot of people had it and wanted to show that they had it, which made it good for journalism. And just accidentally, I was at Life magazine, and I could do my job in about five hours a week, and I got terribly bored.
And I’d had the idea a couple years before, and I had the name right off the bat: It was Spy. It was both the name of the illustrator for these Vanity Fair caricatures at the turn of the century, the the last century, in the British Vanity Fair. You’ve seen them in antique shops. And it was an artist named Leslie Ward who drew under the name “Spy.”
But it was also the name of the magazine that Jimmy Stewart worked for in The Philadelphia Story, one of my favorite screwball type comedies. And so I had the name and I loved the idea. My previous magazine was The Canadian Review and it has so many letters that, by the time you got it on the cover, the letters were about 32 point. I wanted something to be like 150 point. So Spy accomplished that. And I thought it paid a bit of homage to Private Eye magazine in Britain, which was very influential to us.
And in The Philadelphia Story, the magazine empire is called Spy & Dime. And Spy was a takeoff on Time and Dime was a takeoff on Life. So everything fits together. And then I went looking for a partner. I first talked to my friend Jim Kelly, who was at Time, and I think Jim had a good inclination that he was going to be the editor of Time at some point.
And indeed he did become the editor of Time. But then I talked with Kurt and within—we did it over lunch, and by the end of lunch he was in. And I would never have been able to do it without him. And I love having a partner and Kurt was the perfect partner for that.
“New York has a history of editors who came from somewhere else and saw in New York something that New Yorkers did not see.”
George Gendron: And he too, an outsider.
Graydon Carter: Yes. He was less of an outsider than me, but he is from Nebraska. I’m from Canada. And by the way, so many of the editors who made any kind of difference in New York, did not grow up on the Upper East Side. Harold Ross came from Aspen, and Clay, I think, came from Missouri. So the city had a history of editors who came from somewhere else and saw in New York something that New Yorkers did not see.
George Gendron: That’s a good point. In fact, if we had John Huey on this interview right now, John would say, “You came from Canada, but I was even more of an outsider. I came from the South.”
Graydon Carter: Yeah!
George Gendron: He talked about how his southern accent was a source of incredible competitive advantage because people always underestimated him.
Graydon Carter: That’s interesting. Well, perhaps. I mean, I got rid of all my Canadianisms when I first came here because I just wanted to get in the melting pot and melt. So it was easier for a Canadian to melt than a Southerner, I suppose, because that accent will always brand you.
George Gendron: So you never walked into Vanity Fair in the morning, and somebody said to you, “What’d you do yesterday?” And you said, “I fucked the dog”?
Graydon Carter: No, I, no. No. That was a thing that we used to say when I was growing up. If you met a friend and asked what you did that weekend, you’d say, “I don’t know. Fuck the dog.” And I never, I never, I never actually heard it the way other people might hear it. So I was at Time in my first few months and I bumped into Jim Kelly on the elevator and everybody else was in rep ties, and button-down shirts, and Brooks Brothers blazers, and Jim said, “What’d you do this weekend?”
I said, “I don’t know. Fuck the dog.”
And I could just all of a sudden feel the chill on the elevator and realize how that sounded to somebody who was not Canadian from my boyhood. And that was the last time I’ve used that expression. I retired it forever.
George Gendron: Well, I grew up in New Jersey and we had a glossary of those terms, and if I gave you even one example, I would never do another podcast in my life. So we’ll just, we’ll transition to something else. In my favorite book about magazine making ever, Spy: The Funny Years.
Graydon Carter: Oh, Spy the Funny Years. Yeah.
George Gendron: Yeah. There are excerpts from notes that you wrote, and it’s amazing how many of them focus on tone, style, and sensibility, when it comes to the magazine, you, and eventually you and Kurt wanted to create. Where did that come from? Was it that you felt that other magazines had lost their edge or was it just no, this is what you guys wanted to make?
Graydon Carter: No, we borrowed in part the writing style from Time magazine of the fifties, which was dense, fact filled, and often used crude epithets to describe people and from the sort of breezy detachment in the writing style of Private Eye.
So we had a writing style that we wanted. We didn’t want humorists writing for us. We wanted journalists who could write, get the story, and make it funny. Which was a tall order because all the ones that could do that were employed by the Washington Post and places like The New York Times. And we couldn’t afford them and they wouldn’t have come to work for us anyway.
So we cobbled together our own house style of writing because we thought it should be a chorus of voices, but all singing in some sort of harmony. And so the first few months were like hundreds of hours of editing on each issue trying to get the style down. And once we got it down, the other writers parodied that style and then we were off to the races.
George Gendron: Yeah. That’s fascinating.
Graydon Carter: We thought that it had to have a look and a voice that was unlike any other magazine.
George Gendron: You succeeded.
Graydon Carter: I think so. Yeah.
George Gendron: Yeah. You think so? you guys hired Stephen Doyle among others. A short time later, Alex Isley, both of them alums of Tibor Kalman’s legendary M&Co. What was it about those two, but also about M&Co. that was such a perfect cultural fit for what you guys wanted to do?
Graydon Carter: Yeah. That was the Pentagram of the eighties in a certain way. And they produced a number of great designers. And we didn’t want to have goofy typefaces or funny-looking layouts. We wanted to have a classical look to it—in the same way we wore jackets and ties to the office.
We thought you’ll get a lot better reception standing on the rampart if you’re dressed like the establishment than if you’re dressed like a rebel. But we wanted classical typefaces, classical layouts. And these art directors provided that.
We had brilliant art directors and each one added their elements to it. So it was like adding onto a house over a century, say, and somehow it all came together. But we paid a lot of attention to the look of the magazine.
George Gendron: Boy, did you ever. When these guys first showed up, when Stephen first showed up, how much direction did you provide? And if you did, in what form? Were there pages torn from other magazines, sketches, favorite typefaces?
Graydon Carter: Most of the headline types were serif types because they looked more classical than san serif. And I don’t recall tearing things from other magazines, but we’d had these Italian designers to do the prototypes and Stephen just built on that and made it better. Each designer added their own flourishes. And yet if you looked at them, you wouldn’t really be able to tell much difference between year one and year five, let’s say.
George Gendron: That’s very unusual. Usually when you bring—even a young designer in—they want to immediately put their own fingerprints all over the design rather than letting it evolve incrementally.
Graydon Carter: No, Kurt and I were too involved in the look to let that happen. And I think magazines they go through sudden, enormous changes can really turn off the reader—whether it’s the design or in the selection of stories. And we wanted a continuity of design and an evolution of design rather than any kind of giant disruption.
George Gendron: The visual identity of the magazine just blew people away right from the beginning as, as well as the contents. But this was still a period when a lot of people, including a lot of publishers, just didn’t get how important design was becoming to magazines.
Graydon Carter: Well, New York magazine, where you worked, obviously did and that was a big part of what New York was. And I think at Rolling Stone Jann Wenner had a great eye. Especially with type. And it’s important because magazines—and this helped when I got to Vanity Fair—but magazines are words and images and you have to pay attention to both in a strange way.
And also we had no budget. So in that respect, having classical type made that more acceptable of having to use stock photography and then original photography. And then we did just a money-saving thing that sort of became a part of other magazines and newspapers—we would take publicity photographs, which you could use for free, and we’d silhouette the heads and we’d use them very small on a page. You could get 10 people, say, on a page. And that became—I remember even The New York Times started—
George Gendron: Oh yeah. That became a thing.
Graydon Carter: Yeah. And that was just out of desperation because of the budget constraints.
George Gendron: You’re talking about something that is near and dear to my heart and I want to come back to later in the context of Vanity Fair, but I’ll just mention it now. And that is that I ran the creative team at Inc. magazine for 20 years—
Graydon Carter: I loved Inc. magazine.
George Gendron: Oh, thank you very much.
Graydon Carter: Oh, yeah.
George Gendron: And we were documenting the rise of an entrepreneurial economy and also of an entrepreneurial business culture as well. And one of the things that you can’t help but come away with is the, I guess I’ll call it the “power of poverty.” That when people don’t have access to financial capital, they have to invent, they have to be resourceful. I love that. And the same was true at New York magazine. A lot of the journalists there would constantly talk about how the really interesting stuff always came, what they called, “the fringes of the culture.” And anyway, I just love this notion that in the absence of resources, you guys had to find ways to get what you wanted to do to create the impact that you wanted to have.
Graydon Carter: Well, it was a very collegial staff and everybody worked together. And there were so many smart people at Spy that the ideas would flow in. And basically Kurt and I were gatekeepers to a filtration system before they actually got into the magazine, but no idea was too crackpot.
And I remember going on the first Annie Leibovitz photo shoot when I came to Vanity Fair, and the catering budget for that one shoot was equal to the editorial budget for an entire issue of Spy. And in fact there was one issue where I think Kurt and I must have written about four stories each under pseudonyms just because we had no money.
George Gendron: Whoa. Whoa! Wait. The catering budget? I’ve got to wrap my mind around that.
Graydon Carter: Well, no. No, it was because there were probably, I don’t know, 24 people on the crew. This was for a big shoot. And then for the subject. The table must have been 20 feet long, groaning with food. And yeah. And it was probably within, yeah, within a thousand or two dollars of the editorial budget of an issue of Spy.
George Gendron: Oh my God! Okay, we’re going to come back to this. Tell us, especially our young listeners, where was Spy located? What was the culture at Spy like? How did you generate story ideas?
Graydon Carter: Well we, okay, Spy—so we took office space in the Puck Building. Puck was the first American humor magazine. And it was this beautiful building down in SoHo. And we had the top floor and wonderful offices with beautiful arched brick ceilings.
So the offices were really pleasant and this was a time when rap was just getting started. So people like DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince were in the neighborhood. And most of SoHo then was not a shopping mall of French and Italian designers. It was largely mom and pop affairs. It was quite dangerous. There were a lot of nightclubs around.
And the ideas—we would have a weekly meeting where we had a big table and everybody’d scratch their initials into where they were seated. And Kurt would be at one end, I’d be at the other, and often it would be during lunch and we’d come up with maybe 24 story ideas at a meeting. And by the time you boil it down and rethink the whole thing, maybe three or four of them wound up in the magazine, but we did that every week.
George Gendron: So that was the equivalent of a newsroom in a way?
Graydon Carter: Not a newsroom, because then we went back to our desk—we all had offices and they were open, they didn’t have ceilings. The walls came up to about, say, seven feet. So Kurt and I could talk all the time, but we’d have to see each other. But the meetings were vital.
It was a very editor-driven magazine. There were more editors than almost anything else at Spy. The people who showed up for work every day. So there’s probably, at any given time, maybe seven, eight editors. Which is a lot for a small magazine, because everybody wrote as well. Those meetings are where the ideas came from. And this was a smart crowd. And so the ideas were plentiful.
“You’ll get a lot better reception standing on the rampart if you’re dressed like the establishment than if you’re dressed like a rebel.”
George Gendron: I want to wrap up about Spy and I want to move over to Vanity Fair, but I can imagine that the pushback from some pretty well-known and influential New Yorkers must have been pretty intense at times. Did it help you and Kurt to have each other to absorb that?
Graydon Carter: Well, One thing is, the good thing is each one of us could always say if we were confronted by somebody, that the other one was the person who did the mean stuff, that we did the funny stuff.
No, having a partner really, you share the glory, but you share the pain as well. The thing is, we were slightly non grata in the sort of fancier living rooms of New York. So we didn’t run into our subjects that much, but there is a telephone system.
And I remember, we called Jill Krementz a champion name dropper once. And then her husband, Kurt Vonnegut, called me and said that she is not a name dropper, she just has a lot of famous friends and she likes to talk about them at length. And just before he got off the phone, he said, “And by the way, if you don’t have cancer, I hope you get it.” I thought, That was a first for me. And my feelings are slightly hurt.
And we did a story on the most litigious New Yorkers. And one of the people we mentioned was Gore Vidal. And he got our number. He called and I picked up the phone and he was quite to the point. He said, “I don’t want to be on that list.” He said, “I am, I’m not litigious, and if you don’t retract that, I’ll sue you.”
I was about to say, “You don’t understand the contradiction in this?” And he just hung up.
And we worked together 15 years later at Vanity Fair, and one time at a dinner, I brought this up again. I said, “Do you remember that phone call you made to me where you threatened to sue us if we didn’t retract that you were litigious?” I said, “You didn’t see this sort of contradictory irony in all of this?”
He went, “No.”
And I said, “Okay.” I just dropped it. I just, I’m not going to go there again.
George Gendron: I got to tell you, your book is filled with some of the most priceless one-liners I have ever heard. One of my favorites, another one from Spy—I keep delaying moving over to Vanity Fair, where there are also some great one-liners. But this one, you’re on the phone with your libel lawyer and he wants you to take something out that’s slated for the next issue. And you’re getting frustrated, and so you finally say to him, “What are you going to do to me if I don’t take it out?”
Graydon Carter: He says, “I’m going to, I don’t know, I’m going to call your mother.”
And I said, “Okay, fine. We’ll take it out.”
But then I remember I was often—I had a very good, dear friend, John Scanlon, who was a legend in New York. He was a famous PR man. He had worked in the John Lindsay administration. He’s a big, Falstaffian fellow with big appetites. And we did a story on Larry Tisch when he had taken over CBS and he was gutting the news division.
So we did a story on him and we called him a “dwarf billionaire” in the story. And John Scanlon, who was then representing Larry Tisch, called me up and he often started off a conversation by saying, “Okay, Graydon, you’ve gone too far this time.”
And that’s the way he started off this discussion. I said, “What are you talking about?”
He said, “Larry.”
I said, “You mean Tisch?”
He goes, “Yes.” He said, “You’ve gone too far.” He said, “First of all. Larry is not technically a dwarf.”
So I wrote that down on a piece of paper, “not technically a dwarf.” And in the next issue we made a correction saying that a CBS factotum had called us to point out that Larry is not, and in quotes, “not technically a dwarf.” And Scanlon called me when he saw that and he was even angrier.
George Gendron: That has to be one of the most priceless—
Graydon Carter: It was wonderful.
George Gendron: —corrections in the history of publishing.
Graydon Carter: John and I were lifelong friends after that. But quite often, he would start off—a lot of people would start off—a conversation by saying, “You’ve gone too far this time.” And also at Vanity Fair, by the way.
George Gendron: Listen, I realize we’ve skipped some wonderful stories about your time at Time magazine, but I want to get to the subject of your wonderful book, When the Going Was Good and your tenure at Vanity Fair. So it’s 1992, you meet Si Newhouse and agree to edit one of his signature magazines. Now, I know you’ve told this story to a lot of interviewers, but somehow, Graydon, you’ve managed every time to tell it as if it’s a story you have never told before.
Graydon Carter: Actually, I told it in Vanity Fair once before, but anyway.
George Gendron: Yeah. But you managed to do it with charm. So anyway, tell the story again for, especially for, our young listeners that have never heard about the—I call it the “bait and switch” story.
Graydon Carter: It wasn’t bait and switch at all. But no, we sold Spy magazine in 1991 to Charles Saatchi, a famous advertising mogul in Britain, and his friend “Johnny” Pigozzi, who is a famous art collector. And after about nine months, I left Spy and I took over The New York Observer, which was a sleepy Upper East Side broadsheet.
It was on salmon-colored paper. It had very beautiful typefaces, you know, sort of cobbled from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal at the time. And I worked out a plan for it. I brought in some new staff members, some from Spy, and within six months, all of a sudden, I had people reading it. It had become a thing.
And so then, at about the nine-month mark, I started sending complimentary copies to friends of mine—editors in Europe and in America. And Si Newhouse, who at the time controlled Condé Nast which owned Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, GQ, Architectural Digest. And he also had Alfred A. Knopf and Random House.
So he was the biggest cultural force in New York in a certain way then—over a long period of time. And so twice a year he would go to Europe to inspect his properties over there. Because there were European editions of most of these magazines.
And everywhere he went, he saw a copy of The New York Observer on the editors’ desks, in their in-baskets, not realizing that I had actually sent them. They didn’t buy them. And so he comes back to America thinking The New York Observer is a big international hit. And he called me, he said, “Would you like to meet?”
And I said, “Of course.”
And so it was for Monday. And that weekend, my wife and I were just stewing over this because I thought he was going to offer me something like Details or GQ. And I didn’t think I could do a better job than the editors there were. And also I was really happy at the Observer. I wasn’t paid much, but I loved the staff, I loved the frequency. It was being read by a lot of people and it was becoming a hit.
But then I sat down with Si on that Monday, and he said, “I’ve got two magazines and I wonder if you’d be interested in them.”
And he said, “The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.”
And my mouth just went completely dry. And I explained that we had made fun of Vanity Fair for the past five years at Spy—about the editor, about the house style of writing, about many of the contributors.
And so he said, “Okay, The New Yorker.”
So I said, “Okay.”
And he said, “We’re going to announce it in two weeks.”
So every night after dinner, I would sit in the kitchen and work on a six-month, 12-month, 18-month plan to run The New Yorker. And I’m not a disruptor on anything at all. I like incremental changes. I think changes should be so minimal you wouldn’t notice them from week to week, but it’s boiling a frog at some point. It is different.
And so I had this plan. And the day it was going to be announced, Anna Wintour said it’s going to be the other magazine. She said, “Act surprised.” So Si called me maybe a half hour later and said it’s going to be Vanity Fair.
And I said, “Fine, I’m good with that.” But I didn’t have a plan for Vanity Fair, and I was worried that if I didn’t start work immediately, I wouldn’t get paid.
Now, knowing Si now as I came to, he would’ve said, “Fine, take two months off and work on a plan and then start.” But I just, I didn’t know enough then. So I started with absolutely no plan with the staff absolutely despising me. And I don’t blame them for despising me—we’d made fun of them for the past five years.
And so it was like letting the fox into the hen house in a major way. Also, they probably worried that I’d clean house quickly, and that means unemployment. But I didn’t fire anybody for two years. I actually don’t think I’d fired one person up to that point in my life.
And so I tried to work with the staff. I tried to bring them around to my way of working when I like an office with little drama, but with a lot of respect between colleagues. And I like people to work together rather than against each other. And after two years, I’d had enough, and in a three-day period, I got rid of the three major troublemakers at the magazine.
And it’s funny. Things just literally—there was “before this,” it was an era at Vanity Fair for me. And then there was “after this.” It just changed in one day the general mood of the office. People started saying, “please” and “thank you” and working together and respecting each other’s talents and abilities. And it stayed that way for the next 23 years for me.
George Gendron: Boy can I identify with that story. I never got any better at firing people.
Graydon Carter: It’s horrible.
George Gendron: I’ll tell you a story about someone who I’m sure you know and love as I do. He’s not with us anymore, but I hired Nelson Aldrich. And oh my God, I just can’t—
Graydon Carter: He can be prickly.
George Gendron: He can be prickly. But I came to value my relationship with him in a way that was extraordinary, but it wasn’t a great fit. And I think he knew it. I certainly felt that way. And so at one point I went in and had a long conversation with him and I just said, “Look, it’s not working. And take your time, but I’d like you to eventually clear out your office. You’ve got a couple of weekends, you can do it.”
Eventually I went into Nelson and said, “When are you thinking of leaving?”
And he said, “What do you mean?”
And I said, “I fired you.”
And he said, “You did?” And he got up, Graydon, and he walked around the desk and he asked me to stand up and he gave me a hug and he said, “Oh my dear man, that must have been so difficult for you.”
Graydon Carter: Oh, that’s sweet.
George Gendron: Oh my gosh!
Graydon Carter: No, I like that.
“A lot of people would start off with conversation—by saying, ‘You’ve gone too far this time.’”
George Gendron: I do, too. Yeah. So let’s go back to—I sense a reluctance, certainly from what I’ve read in the book, for you to talk explicitly about Tina Brown, but did it ever occur to you, even just for a moment, that she really didn’t want to go to The New Yorker? She just wanted to screw you over?
Graydon Carter: Oh, no. No. To be fair to Tina, I don’t think there would be a Vanity Fair had she not preceded me. She saved the magazine.
George Gendron: I agree.
Graydon Carter: I don’t think Si would’ve folded it, but he really took a beating the first few years because the expectations were so high. They had made this big mistake of spending—I think at the time was $10 million, which was a lot of money—on this huge advertising campaign announcing the launch of the magazine.
George Gendron: I remember that.
Graydon Carter: It was just, it was the wrong thing to do. And I remember Bob Levinson, an old advertising man telling me, “Nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising.”
George Gendron: Yeah.
Graydon Carter: And the ad campaign was brilliant. The magazine couldn’t possibly live up to that. Even though it was good. I go back and look at those first few issues that Richard Locke did—they were terrific.
George Gendron: You think so?
Graydon Carter: Yep. 100%.
George Gendron: That was not the reception of the readers—and certainly not other journalists
Graydon Carter: I spent a lot of time looking at old issues of Vanity Fair. And his Vanity Fair was exactly what Si requested. Si didn’t own The New Yorker at the time. He wanted a New Yorker with pictures, and that’s what John gave him.
George Gendron: What do you think happened?
Graydon Carter: I think that the advertising campaign was way too much. This magazine was not going to be a cure for cancer, it was just a magazine—the most anticipated launch in decades and decades. And they oversold it. And I remember there was a column in, I want to say The New Republic—back when that was a must read—I think by Henry Fairlie that just eviscerated the magazine.
And I’m sure the advertisers fled in droves, as they sometimes do. And it was just brutal to the magazine. So Tina truly saved the magazine. And I think she probably wanted The New Yorker job because she had done, I don’t know, six, seven years at Vanity Fair. And I think Si was happy with her being there and me being at Vanity Fair.
George Gendron: I think—I could be wrong about this. I don’t know her well, I did a podcast with her, but I think five or six years is her limit. And then she gets restless. She was at The New Yorker and after five or six years went off with the Weinstein group—that’s a different conversation.
Graydon Carter: Different conversation, yeah.
George Gendron: Yeah. So tell us about—I love this—your list of banished words.
Graydon Carter: Oh God, yeah. I mean, I don’t have it right in front of me, but it was just—there was a baroqueness to the writing. So a restaurant wasn’t a restaurant, it was a “boîte.” And a book wasn’t a book, it was a “tome.” And people didn’t say something funny, they “chortled” or they “quipped.” So many words—I hate the word “flick” for movies. Anyway, so the list started off with maybe two dozen words. It’s probably close to five dozen words now, because I carried that same banned word list to Air Mail as well.
So that was the beginning. And I edited every story, every caption. But I printed the stories out—I edited only on paper at Vanity Fair, never on the computer. So I’d print the stories out where half the page was the text, and there was an empty half page for edits.
And the first couple years I went through a million HB pencils editing because I was trying to just peel away at the writing just to make it to make it more readable, at least to me. And then bringing in writers who wrote the way I appreciated great writing.
George Gendron: We both agree Tina really saved Vanity Fair. But those words don’t strike me as Tina Brown vocabulary. Or were those just kind of part of her British vocabulary that she brought?
Graydon Carter: Oh, no. That was that their—I don’t know whether there was a house style, but to me as a reader there was so much that I just found ridiculous.
George Gendron: Yeah. It was cloying.
Graydon Carter: Yeah. So, anyway, it took about nine months, a year to clean that away.
George Gendron: I’ve been over your list several times and my favorite word is “chortle.”
Graydon Carter: Oh, I hate “chortle.” I hate “wannabe.” I even hate the word “celebrity.” I hate the expression “A-list.” I hate all of it. It’s just so cheap. There was one writer at Vanity Fair—who will go nameless—and I was editing one of her things and she must have had eight banned words in a single paragraph. And all of the sudden I thought, Is she having me on here? I mean, Is she pulling my leg? But she wasn’t. Anyway, that was a whole other thing, just getting rid of the language.
George Gendron: You were very careful to parse earlier the difference between insecurity and anxiety. I’ll phrase this very carefully, but you’re very disarmingly open about your anxiety for quite a long time at Vanity Fair.
Graydon Carter: Oh, No. For the entire run.
George Gendron: The entire run?
Graydon Carter: 100%. Yes.
George Gendron: At one point—I forget how long you had been there—you talk about going in every day with the fear that you’re going to be fired.
Graydon Carter: Well, that was in those first two years when there were rumors, both just orally, and in circles, and in the newspaper. And there used to be one of those black boards—you used to see them in detective movies—black with little white letters that they stuck into the grooves. And it had the editor’s names on it, with Si’s name at the top, and I would check it just before I got on the elevator to make sure my name was still there.
And there was a couple that ran the newsstand, Helmut and Marget, and I thought if I was fired that I would see it in their faces, because they knew everything before anybody else. So the first two years there was a lot of that.
George Gendron: So did you check in with them every morning?
Graydon Carter: I’d say, “Hey, good morning guys.” And I could just tell—if I got a cheery “hello,” I thought, Okay, I’m good for today. And also, I was not an American citizen. I had an H-1 visa. And loss of employment could have meant loss of the visa, which was tied to employment. And I could not be a freelancer with an H-1, so if I lost my job and I didn’t get another job immediately, I’d be shipped back to Canada.
George Gendron: Good thing Trump wasn’t president.
Graydon Carter: Well, I’d be shipped to Guantanamo or El Salvador. At this point, Guantanamo seems like the more charitable option!
George Gendron: So here’s the question I’m going to ask, but I’ll preface it by saying I used to do these very long interviews with some well-known entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs. Many of them highly successful people, but you had never heard their names before. And I can’t tell you the number of times, sometimes on the record, people talked about this incredible anxiety they had, this imposter syndrome. They always felt like it was going to “catch up to them.” People would realize they weren’t anywhere near as good as the public image that they had. And I want to ask you a question, particularly for our younger listeners, which is how do you not let that kind of anxiety really influence your day-to-day decision making?
Graydon Carter: Oh, actually, I think it helped me. For the simple reason that the anxiety was largely about putting out a great issue of the magazine. I do have social anxiety, but for large events, that’s a whole other different thing.
George Gendron: Whoa, whoa. Wait a second.
Graydon Carter: What?
George Gendron: You, the host of the big Oscar event—you have social anxiety?
Graydon Carter: Especially in something so dramatic. I’ve never been the host of anything that large before. And here I had 150 movie stars coming for dinner and then 150 coming after dinner, the very first one. And I think Scanlon had suggested I take a beta blocker—I took no pharmaceutical drugs whatsoever—but I got a prescription for a beta blocker.
And so I’d take a nibble of that and a single ounce of vodka and that would get me through the first hour and a half and settle me down a bit. Once I got over a threshold, the anxiety would reduce by about 50%, but it never left me.
And remember the “Golden Age” was the Golden Age because magazines were phenomenal then—all editors were firing on all cylinders, and everybody was the competition, and a lot of our competition was weekly. And I had this big, lumbering, very thick magazine—it took four days just to print Vanity Fair, to print like, a million and a half, 2 million copies. And they’re often half an inch thick.
So we couldn’t turn on a dime the way some could. And there were issues where I thought, Oh my God, this is so wonderful, this issue. It’s got everything you want in a magazine. That would make me anxious because I thought, This is the best I’m ever going to do. And the next one, we’re not going to be that good.
And then if I put out something that I thought was less than that, I thought, I’ve lost the touch and it’s all downhill from here. And I could always tell other editors who are anxious because their magazines were better. You could tell an editor who says, okay, I’ve got the job, now I can relax.
“I wrote thank you notes to every advertiser, and every writer, and every photographer after every issue for 25 years.”
George Gendron: I’m surprised this issue of anxiety hasn’t come up in any of the conversations I’ve had so far. I think one of the things reading your book did for me recently, certainly for this conversation, is it gives you permission to talk about it.
Graydon Carter: That’s true. It’s really crippling at times, too. I’ve worked out a bunch of things. In a large setting what I do is I generally, if I’m going to stay there for any length of time, I’ll make my way to a fixed point—rather than mingle—get to a fixed point and say, put your elbow on the bar and make that your workstation for the cocktail portion of the evening.
And, first of all, it grounds you. And then people will swing by. But wandering around the room is not my style—at all. And I do find that if you just smile and look like you’re having a good time, that’ll mask the anxiety in a major way—and just tell people how fabulous they look.
George Gendron: That’s true.
Graydon Carter: It was just, it was such a public job. And if you made a slip up, it’d be in the newspaper the next day. There was a guy called Keith Kelly at the New York Post—he’d complain about a comma in the magazine. The anxiety has diminished over the past seven years, but it’s still there.
George Gendron: Yeah, I’m not surprised.
Graydon Carter: Also, I tell young people, when they come in as young assistants for one of the editors, I’d say, “Listen you’re in the excellence business and you’ve got to treat it that way every single day for the rest of your professional life. Because every step of the way, you’re a little further up the food chain. And so the fall is going to be further.”
It’s one thing to fail as an assistant or an intern. It’s another thing to fall from being an editor—that is punishing and you may not recover from it. So if you just understand this is the excellence business and that’s the job every single day for the rest of your professional life.
George Gendron: And, as you point out, as you move up the masthead, the scrutiny becomes so much—
Graydon Carter: —much worse. And the fall is much more punishing.
George Gendron: Let’s shift for a second. I want to hear you talk about design and the whole visual character of the magazine at Vanity Fair, because I get the impression from the book that you think about it in a way that’s quite different from a lot of editors. But in your own words, I want to hear, how did you think about and approach the question of what you wanted the visual identity of Vanity Fair to be under you?
Graydon Carter: I really learned to appreciate photography from working at Life. Not that I worked with the great photographers there, but they were in the offices, people like David Douglas Duncan, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Ralph Morse. So I appreciated photography in a major way.
And then I came to Vanity Fair and we built up a stable of photographers, including Helmut Newton, Annie Leibovitz, Mark Seliger, Jonathan Becker, Patrick Demarchelier, and Herb Ritts. Slim Aarons shot for us. Henri Cartier-Bresson shot for us.
So I got to work with these amazing photographers. I really spent probably 45-50% of my time on the layout. We didn’t do layouts on computers, ever, in my time there. Everything was done in a planning room on a flat surface. And you would edit the pictures when they came in. And I wanted a magazine that looked “epic.” Because a lot of the stories were epic narratives.
And also you wanted a million ways in for the reader. You wanted the headline to capture their attention, or a pull quote, or a caption, or the photographs. And so you wanted the readers—if a reader read three-to-four stories out of 10 in an issue, they’d be pleased and they’d come back the next month and you have a business. If they don’t read three, you go out of business.
George Gendron: It’s interesting you use the word “epic.” I’ve never heard anybody use that to describe either a visual identity or a story. “Epic.” It’s a great word.
Graydon Carter: And we ran stories that ran as long as 20–21,000 words. So you’ve got to have photographs that compliment that and are worthy of that length. And having somebody like Annie was just the greatest gift of all.
George Gendron: And how much direction would you or a photo editor give to someone like Annie?
Graydon Carter: Oh, a lot. And all of it would be ignored.
George Gendron: Of course.
Graydon Carter: No. If I said, “I see this in black and white,” she’d shoot in technicolor. If I said, “I think this should be really bright and colorful,” it would be black and white. Somehow it all worked. But I don’t think she ever once, not to my knowledge, took my advice on anything. And, by the way, nor should she.
George Gendron: Yeah. So let’s shift to writers now. You made a comment in the book, with which I wholeheartedly agree, and I know a lot of editors get miffed about this, but being a writer is difficult. Much, much more difficult than being an editor. On so many levels.
Graydon Carter: Yeah. On every level.
George Gendron: On every level, yeah. Describe why you wrote that in the first place, and then I want to go on from there.
Graydon Carter: I was pretty good at ideas. So a writer would come in, we’d talk about an idea, and they’d have their editor with them. And then they would go off for between two months, four months, being away from their family and nervous that they would not get the story we were looking for.
And so, let’s say on January 1st you assigned a story. It would take maybe three months to report and write. So it comes in at the end of March. It would take a month-and-a-half to fact check, to go through legal review, to get the photographs in, to lay it out. So this story might not appear in the magazine until May or June. But you had to have stories that also had what they called in Hollywood “legs.” And they would be vital in May.
And so I treated most of them as the interim period between the news reports and books. I liked stories with a beginning, middle, and end. I wanted stories that had conflict, that had access to the major figures. And that had disclosure that you moved the scholarship along in some way.
George Gendron: You were very explicit about that in the book.
Graydon Carter: Very. And I love conflict. You need conflict. It’s got to be man against nature, two men against each other for a company or a woman, or two countries in a battle over territory. And that is the essence of a great narrative story.
George Gendron: And you say you wanted to make sure the writers at Vanity Fair really felt loved and appreciated. So how did you do that? How did it manifest itself?
Graydon Carter: First of all, I did love them and appreciate them, so that was authentic. Some writers would get flowers if they turned in a big, very difficult story. When they turned it in I’d send scotch on a regular basis to a number of them. They got very elaborate Christmas gifts and I wrote them thank you notes after every single issue. I wrote thank you notes to every advertiser, and every writer, and every photographer after every issue for 25 years.
George Gendron: How many thank you notes—with those 400-page issues—are we talking about?
Graydon Carter: Sometimes it would be 450–500 notes. It would take a day, but I thought it was vital. I thought, I know how I work best and I work best when I feel that the person I’m working for is appreciative and respectful of what I do. And I only know that way. And so that’s the way I treated the writers rather than making them fearful for their jobs or anything like that. And it worked. And it still works for me.
And I wanted editors who felt the same way because so many of the writers were on an exclusive contract to Vanity Fair. So their livelihood, their reputation, their professional progress was dependent on getting stories into the magazine. And so the editor’s job was both being an editor, an agent, and a career manager. And so their job was to get their writer’s stories into the magazine.
George Gendron: You also didn’t pay kill fees.
Graydon Carter: No. And I remember there were a number of magazines—I remember hearing about a magazine, a major magazine, that would order up two versions of the same story, choose the best one, and pay the other writer a kill fee of 25%. And I thought that was punishing.
But no, I paid a hundred percent regardless of whether we ran it. And if the writer had what I would call “punted” the story, we’d be less likely to hire them again, but I paid them off for this story.
“Si [Newhouse] inherited the third-tier magazine publisher in the country, and over a 5-7 year period, he built Condé Nast into the dominant magazine publisher in the country. He wanted his magazines to be big and to be spectacular. And they were.”
George Gendron: I remember there was one story that came in and you were unbelievably impressed with it, but for some reason it wasn’t published. And so you paid twice the original kill fee.
Graydon Carter: Oh, no. Oh, no. No. I wanted a story on this man, Sidney Korshak who was the Chicago mob’s lawyer in Hollywood. He was a famous fixer. He was more powerful than any studio head or agent. And this is pre-internet, so there was nothing on him. And I assigned it to Nick Tosches, who was a legend in music criticism and reporting, and had written an amazing book about Dean Martin. Nick was a very cool fellow.
And Nick disappeared for a year. And it was on our planning board. He kept moving along. I thought, Okay, he is never going to turn it in. And then one day a manuscript arrived that was about a half-an-inch thick, in a brown-paper envelope. And I took it out and it was a Sidney Korshak story. And I read it in one sitting—it was 17,000 words.
George Gendron: Wow!
Graydon Carter: I’d asked for 8,000 words. But I called him up, and I almost had tears in my eyes. I said, “This is so wonderful. This will be the best story I’ve published up to this point, and we’re going to pay you double the fee.” It was an incredible piece.
George Gendron: I do remember something else you did that was extraordinary and again, I’m trying to remember the story.
Graydon Carter: About Lloyd’s of London?
George Gendron: Lloyd’s. Yes!
Graydon Carter: Well, David McClintick, who had written Indecent Exposure, and a number of other huge, wonderful books, was one of the great reporters of The Wall Street Journal, and he came to me with an idea: he wanted to do a story on the collapse of Lloyd’s of London, saying that it would affect the wealth of nations and that it would bring down the British aristocracy.
So I assigned the story to him. He had to move to London for three months, then he extended that to six months, and there was still no story. This went on. And then he came back. Lloyds had collapsed in a way, but the wealth of nations was not affected. And so he wanted to go back to London for another three months, and we already had about $180,000 in expenses in this story.
George Gendron: Wow.
Graydon Carter: And I said, “Listen, this is like Vietnam for me.” I just decided I’m going to cut my losses. I said, “David, you can take it elsewhere.” And so Norm Pearlstine, who had been his editor at the Journal, was then running Time Incorporated. And so he went to Time and I think he finished the reporting and it ran in one of their international editions.
George Gendron: It was huge too.
Graydon Carter: It was huge. But it was not the story that David thought it was going to become.
George Gendron: Yeah. When I say “huge,” I mean it ran 24 pages.
Graydon Carter: 24 pages. Yes. But David is one of the great reporters of all time. Maybe I should have run it, but I just couldn’t invest any more money in it. My managing editor, Chris Garrett, and I would have a meeting about it once-a-week as the bills came in and even for us, it was too much.
George Gendron: I want to wrap up this particular part of the conversation by asking were there days when you just felt—however successful Vanity Fair was—that the level of money that was being spent was just obscene?
Graydon Carter: No. And I’ll tell you why. Because most of the money was spent with purpose: to get the best talent we could get and to get the best stories we could get. At Vanity Fair, in those days, the advertising pages were upwards of $100,000 a page. And a lot of that came from fashion companies.
And I never did a fashion spread my whole 25 years there. The only other people who got those pages were fashion magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. So I had to produce a magazine that was really compelling—but that attracted those people—and with tough stories, but that wouldn’t necessarily scare them off either.
Si was brilliant. Everything was spent with a purpose. Furthermore, Si had inherited the third-tier magazine publisher in the country. There was Time Incorporated at the top when Si took over. Then came Hearst with Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar. And then came Condé Nast with Mademoiselle and Glamour and a bunch of “finishing school” magazines.
And over a 5, 6, 7 year period, he built Condé Nast into the dominant magazine publisher in the country. And so he wanted his magazines to be big and to be spectacular. And they were. And the money flowed in from readers and from advertisers. So it was all spent, and maybe there was excesses—small excesses—here and there, but it was all spent with purpose.
George Gendron: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense to me.
Graydon Carter: It was wonderful, but it was spent with purpose.
George Gendron: As a reader of the book, I have to say, sometimes it does get a little bit overwhelming because of the gap—between other successful magazines—we were obscenely profitable at Inc. But not on that scale.
Graydon Carter: Well Condé Nast was private. Remember I’d done two things on a shoestring. So it was wonderful to have all these financial levers at my disposal.
George Gendron: I can imagine.
Graydon Carter: I’ve done both. And having the money is nicer than not having the money.
George Gendron: Yes, it is. As we begin to wrap things up here, bring us up-to-date on Air Mail. There are rumors all over the place about every conceivable aspect of Air Mail. What’s happening there?
Graydon Carter: When we had Spy, Si came to us at the two-year mark and wanted to buy it. And Kurt, and Tom Phillips and I talked about it and we said we thought it’d be best that we stay independent. And that was probably both a good decision and a crazy decision because it’s very hard to be independent.
I think it’s very important to be on your own as you’re getting started up and launching. And I don’t want to make the same mistake twice. I would like to find a partner for Air Mail either to merge with somebody or to be part of something larger so that it can continue on into the future.
George Gendron: How’s that going?
Graydon Carter: It’s going. It’s not a fast process. And there are people interested. And some people I’m interested in. And some people I’m not so interested in. So it’ll work its way out some way or another this year.
George Gendron: So you’re not looking for a capital raise, you’re really looking for a partner.
Graydon Carter: A partner, yeah.
George Gendron: I hope it works out well.
Graydon Carter: Thank you.
George Gendron: Yeah, I love Air Mail. It’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a digital magazine.
Graydon Carter: I think it’s the closest thing to a magazine on the internet because it’s put together by magazine people. We don’t know any better.
George Gendron: Thank God.
Graydon Carter: Thank God!
Carter with old friend Fran Lebowitz
George Gendron: Speaking of Vanity Fair and the current environment, Radhika Jones just stepped down. I think she’s done a really good job under trying financial circumstances. What was it like for you, once you’ve run a magazine for two decades—you have to have a special place for it in your heart?
Graydon Carter: The thing is, I used to have a comp list of 400 names that I’d send out to people all over America, and Europe, and Britain. And she took me off the comp list when she took over. And so I actually haven’t held a copy of Vanity Fair in seven years.
George Gendron: She took you off the comp list?
Graydon Carter: Off the comp list. And I haven’t followed it that closely.
George Gendron: When you say “she” took you off—Radhika took you off?
Graydon Carter: Yes.
George Gendron: Why would she have done that?
Graydon Carter: I have no idea. I have no idea. But anyway, I check it on Apple News+ just to count the advertising pages—because I’m a really small person. And other than that, I think I’ve read a couple of Gabe Sherman stories, but not much else.
George Gendron: Okay. What do you imagine it might be like for a young person—and I’m assuming it’s going to be a youngish editor—trying to run a magazine in this environment?
Graydon Carter: You’re going to have to be a lot smarter than the competition. And the competition is fierce. But if you’re clever—as I say, shoestring magazines can be very inventive—as you were saying as well.
George Gendron: But do you still think there’s a niche for Vanity Fair?
Graydon Carter: With a clever editor, yes. With the complacent editor, no.
George Gendron: You got a candidate in mind?
Graydon Carter: All the people who I suggested when I left the magazine, I think, should be considered: Dana Brown, William D. Cohan, Anne Fulenwider. There were a whole slew of them. Most of them are now otherwise occupied.
George Gendron: I’ll be curious to see how the search ends. Okay, I have to ask you two questions. One is just, it’s just a personal one of mine. I’d like to hear what you, as a Canadian, think about the Canadian response to Trump’s talk about a hostile takeover. The response among Canadians seems to have been extraordinary, but I have to confess that my image of that has been shaped solely by the hockey games that I watch, which are numerous.
Graydon Carter: Yeah. I actually find booing the American national anthem not the right way to do it. I think Mark Carney—who I hope becomes prime minister—I think that first of all, he’s been in these rooms for the last decade and a half. He’s got a rye, clever wit. I think he’ll run rings around Trump. And it has unified Canadians in a wonderful way.
Canadians are different from Americans. They like being Canadians. And this has pulled them together. I think there’s a great sense of national pride. And I don’t know whether Trump—this is some idle, crazy boast of his, but it has done wonders for the Canadian disposition.
George Gendron: It seems to have, doesn’t it?
Graydon Carter: Yes.
George Gendron: Yeah, it’s extraordinary. I think there’s going to be more of this. In Greenland it’s having the same effect.
Graydon Carter: Yes. And so I don’t think it’s going to happen, but I think it’s done wonders for Canada. And first of all, never go into a cold climate like Russia or Canada. Napoleon tried it, Hitler tried it. And both fared badly. Canadians are great in the cold, and remember they can skate and fight at the same time!
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