When the Going was Good: An editor’s adventures during the last golden age of magazines by Graydon Carter (Grove Press £20, 432pp)
As a boy growing up in Canada in the 1950s and 60s, Graydon Carter had a feeling in the back of his mind that he must not lose a tooth playing hockey.
In the staid milieu he grew up in, Hockey Night in Canada was the most popular TV programme. Lots of his friends did lose teeth on the pitch.
But Carter had a premonition that he might one day work in a glamorous world where it would be useful to have the full set.
Sent off to mend telegraph poles on the Canadian railroad after leaving school (the traditional rite of passage to toughen up ‘soft white Anglican kids’), he saw a Super Continental train speeding past, with an attractive couple living it up in the dining car.
‘I knew one thing,’ he writes, in his scintillating memoir. ‘I wanted to be on the other side of that window.’ He yearned for ‘an adult life of cocktails, cigarettes, bridge games, witty banter, and clothes that weren’t tartan’.
He kept all his teeth, but his eyebrows were burnt off when he was tasked with putting out a bushfire next to the railroad. ‘They never grew back as thickly.’
Fast-forward to 1992, by which time, thanks to a mixture of dogged determination, journalistic genius and sheer luck, he’d become editor of Vanity Fair in New York. He now found himself in a lavish glossy magazine world, dripping with money, and incredibly generous to staff.
Everyone in the office was allowed to put their breakfast on expenses: not ‘taking important people out to breakfast’, just daily breakfast. Bouquets of flowers were sent to writers simply to thank them for filing on time.
The company gave staff interest-free loans to buy houses or apartments. They could take out as much expenses cash as they liked, simply by signing a chit. Writers were put up in luxury hotels all over the world, for months on end, while researching their in-depth investigative pieces. There was no ceiling on the budget.
And – of all unlikely freebies – a cosmetician, ‘the best eyebrow lady in the city’, came into the office once a month, to pluck everyone’s eyebrows. Carter doesn’t mention whether or not she did his own. I think she didn’t need to, after that disastrous singeing incident in Canada.
Glamour: Graydon Carter with Dame Joan Collins in 2006
What a lost world he evokes: the glossy magazine world before the 2008 crash – a thriving business empire, Conde Nast, owned by the deeply civilised Si Newhouse (Carter describes him as ‘the greatest billionaire magazine proprietor of all time’), who always put quality above cost.
When tobacco companies withdrew $4 million of advertising from the magazine, after Marie Brenner wrote an exposé about the tobacco company Brown & Williamson setting out to destroy the career of a whistleblower, Newhouse was philosophical. ‘The good story was most important.’
Carter’s hero-worship of Newhouse and his generous tributes to writers and colleagues such as Dominick Dunne and Christopher Hitchens are thrown into relief by the sheer relish with which he nails the foibles and failings of others he found annoying.
The first is Donald Trump, to whom Carter took a profound dislike way back in the mid-1980s when, as founder and editor of Spy magazine (the American Private Eye), he branded Trump ‘the short-fingered vulgarian’. From that day on, Trump has been defensive about his finger length. At a meeting decades later in Anna Wintour’s office, Carter noted that Trump kept his hands hidden under the table.
Successor: Graydon Carter took over from Tina Brown as Editor of Vanity Fair
Carter’s predecessor at Vanity Fair was Tina Brown, who went off to edit the New Yorker. He doesn’t go as far as blatantly slagging her off. But he makes it clear that he was unimpressed by the state of the magazine when he took over from her.
There was not a single piece hanging around that he wanted to print. One piece she had commissioned, by Norman Mailer about the Democratic Convention, was ‘unpublishable’.
And the atmosphere in the office was poisonous, he writes: ‘a viperish nest.’ In one week, he fired three particularly bitter people, and things improved from then on. He set about banning certain words from the magazine: ‘abode’, ‘opine’, ‘plethora’, ‘donned’, ‘eatery’, ‘tome’, and ‘passed away’.
He’s hilarious about the petty greed of the rich. At Spy, he conducted an experiment: sending billionaires cheques for tiny amounts, and waiting to see whether they paid them in. Two men of great wealth took the trouble to deposit cheques for $0.13: Adnan Khashoggi (the most notorious arms dealer in the world) and Donald Trump.
He also notes that at the annual Vanity Fair Oscars party in Los Angeles, guests always made off with the decanter-sized bottles of Dior and Chanel cologne from the ladies’. At one Oscars party, he saw Adrien Brody trying to smuggle out one of the electric table lamps. Anna Wintour: friend or foe? ‘She can be a warm and loyal friend,’ he writes of her. ‘She can also be a cold and loyal friend.’
Ice Queen: Carter recalls Anna Wintor’s face in an editorial meeting: ‘I’ve seen cheerier faces in hostage videos.’
Attending an editorial meeting presided over by Wintour when she was editor of American Vogue, he notes: ‘I’ve seen cheerier faces in hostage videos.’
Having supper with her was not much fun, either. (He could at least feel secure about his full set of teeth, sitting opposite that flawless face with the brunette bob). She always ordered a rare steak on the dot of 8pm, and as soon as she’d finished it, she ordered the bill, whether or not her guest had finished.
On one fateful day in 2016, when Wintour became editorial director of Conde Nast, she rang him to say there were going to be some changes in the company. ‘The changes involving Vanity Fair that she laid out were dumbfounding,’ he writes.
Half the staff were being moved to a central unit. He protested, and she agreed to exclude Vanity Fair from the new arrangement for the moment. But Carter saw how things were going, and decided to resign.
He went on to found the weekly digital dispatch Air Mail. So he has now been an editor for more than half a century, through ten presidents from Nixon onwards.
This highly entertaining book has a good story on every page.
Here’s one great detail about his own lavish lifestyle, and the incipient laziness of old age. He knew it was time to move out of his five-storey house in Greenwich Village when he started noticing that if he’d left something on the top floor, he could no longer be bothered to climb back up and fetch it. He just ordered a new one from Amazon.
‘You never know when you’re in a golden age,’ he writes of those glorious Vanity Fair years. ‘You only realise it was a golden age when it’s gone.’
