Graydon Carter Eulogizes the Golden Age of Magazines — as Vanity Fair Finds Itself at a Crossroads

The editor Graydon Carter’s memoir, “When the Going Was Good,” has the effect of focusing the mind on the present moment, when the going is less good. Still, a romp into a Golden Age past is bound to leave at least a mild glow even on those schlepping along without the luxuries once afforded to the literary. Mr. Carter is best-known for his quarter century atop Vanity Fair, and his dispatch marks the meeting of a magazine, a man, and a moment.Mr. Carter was not to the corner office born. A son of Canada, he writes in one of the book’s most engaging chapters about a spell spent as a lineman on the railroad across the endless Canadian prairie, a toughening rite of passage for middle class boys like Mr. Carter. He calls his father a “man of endless unambition” and expresses his own fear of ending up as one of “those faceless, nameless men” shuffling across Saskatchewan. That is not Mr. Carter’s fate. It dawns on him that New York City, “that shimmering vessel of opportunity and reward, was where I wanted to be.” A college dropout, Mr. Carter cut his teeth at a small magazine called the Canadian Review, where the accounts were kept by abacus. He secured a job at Time and reckons that “it’s difficult for the more recent arrivals to this planet to fathom just how mighty Time magazine once was.”The Time of that era certainly could boast an array of writers — among them Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, Walter Isaacson, Michiko Kakutani, Jim Kelly, and Rick Stengel — and they lived richly. Mr. Carter writes that “extreme expense account creativity was looked upon with the same sort of reverence as writing a particularly fine story.” This contributed to an ambience of “magical realism” at the magazine, which lorded over the land.Mr. Carter left Time’s cozy confines — where “staff in uniforms brought dinner (with wine) to writers’ office on tea trolleys” — to found Spy, which skewered the New York City of the 1980s, a “city of big hair and egos and long stretch limousines.” His time atop Spy appears to have been the most fun Mr. Carter has had in his long life in magazines, and he expresses particular glee in his repeated clashes with a real estate developer named Donald Trump.When money at Spy ran out Mr. Carter took the reins at the New York Observer. Mr. Carter calls his time there an “interlude,” and devotes just a couple of pages to his efforts to animate the “desperately sleepy Upper East Side weekly.” Soon enough a call came from a higher authority — the baron of Condé Nast, Si Newhouse, who offered Mr. Carter the editorship of either the New Yorker or Vanity Fair.Cover of Vanity Fair, December 1925. Via Wikimedia CommonsMr. Carter’s choice was the New Yorker, but he was boxed out by the then-editor of Vanity Fair, Tina Brown. Ms. Brown’s own chronicle of her time at the magazine, “The Vanity Fair Diaries,” makes for a compelling companion volume to Mr. Carter’s account, which laments that his first two years at Vanity Fair were “pretty dreadful … the atmosphere was so poisonous that I wouldn’t even bring my family into the office.” He blames the ancien régime.The glamor gets going once Mr. Carter eventually take the reins of Vanity Fair, which he likens to a “five-star hotel.” A representative sentence reads that he “stayed at the Connaught in London, the Ritz in Paris, the Hotel du Cap in the South of France, and the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles.” He mourns that “younger people would never understand the expense-account stories of the time, because they all disappeared with the Great Recession.”The payoff was the journalism. Mr. Carter explains that “a perfect Vanity Fair piece would slip in somewhere between the news report on a particular story and the inevitable book about it.” Mr. Carter is, by his own account, not himself a passionate wordsmith — he had help writing this book, and its prose is solid but not spectacular — but he coaxed dispatches from writers like Christopher Hitchens and Michael Lewis that set the magazine standard.Mr. Carter devotes generous space to his creation of Vanity Fair’s Oscar party, which he depicts as more freewheeling — more fun — than the Met Ball lorded over by his fellow Condé Nast impresario, Anna Wintour. Mr. Carter’s pages on Ms. Wintour are among the tartest in this generally amiable book, suggesting that bad blood simmers between the two. It was Ms. Wintour, though, who weathered the storms and still reigns at Condé Nast. Days after the release of Mr. Carter’s memoir, his successor at Vanity Fair, Radhika Jones, announced that she was departing the helm after eight years. Condé Nast is now advertising for a “Global Editorial Director” to lead the magazine “across markets.” That seems different from the kind of role Mr. Carter inhabited with aplomb. Now it falls to Ms. Wintour to find a steward for a shrinking fiefdom within a contracting kingdom. Now Mr. Carter lives in the south of France, directing a new digital publication, Air Mail, that caters to the Hamptons and Riviera set. He also owns a restaurant at downtown New York City, the Waverly Inn, where, say, sea scallops will set a diner back $61. At the top of the menu, in red script, is inscribed an endorsement — “Waverly Inn – worst food in the city.” That comes from one Donald J. Trump.Mr. Carter’s salad days look decadent in retrospect. But the shrinking of the magazine world has also made the rest of the world a little poorer. Cutting costs has not led to abundance elsewhere. Publications on annual budgets that would not have sustained Mr. Carter’s merry band for a fortnight are doing good work, but few — none? — of them are able to match his reach across politics, business, the arts, and entertainment.

Graydon Carter Eulogizes the Golden Age of Magazines — as Vanity Fair Finds Itself at a Crossroads

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