Graydon Carter, the Canadian journalist who served as the editor of Vanity Fair from 1992 until 2017, at his apartment in Greenwich village in New York, on March 5. In his new memoir, ‘When the Going Was Good,’ the editor recounts his long-running feud with Donald Trump among other reminiscences.DANA SCRUGGS/The New York Times News Service
Most people dream of a bigger life. Graydon Carter has one. The self-described yearner shucked his snoozy Ottawa childhood (hockey, canoeing) and two failed stabs at university, strode into New York news magazines (Time, Life), set the city aflame with Spy (the satirical monthly he co-founded with Kurt Andersen), then landed smack in the centre of everything at Vanity Fair, where he reigned for 25 years as editor, hosting Hollywood’s hottest Oscar party and racking up eye-watering bills at the world’s poshest hotels and restaurants. (Full disclosure: I wrote two VF cover stories in the 1990s, and received, as did all Carter’s writers and photographers, handwritten thank-you notes afterward.)
But don’t expect salacious gossip from his new memoir, When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines. Or from our video interview, which Carter conducted from his home office in New York’s Greenwich Village, where he sat in front of a splendid 1920 isometric map of Paris, wearing his signature white Lacoste polo shirt (he owns two dozen), and looking content. Carter is 75; his Pennywise-swoop hairstyle has gone white, and he’s woven too many webs among too many social circles to tear it down now. Instead, he remains as he’s always styled himself: the best guest at the most glittering dinner party, recounting just the right tales in just the right self-deprecating tone; a bridge builder, whose charm and finesse ensure that everything always leads back to him. Here are highlights from our conversation.
Let’s start with Donald Trump. At Spy, you dubbed him “a short-fingered vulgarian.” He wooed you at Vanity Fair, sending you Trump vodka and ties, and inviting you to two of his weddings. Later he tweeted a barrage of insults, which you framed and hung outside your office; and the menus at the Waverly Inn, the restaurant you co-own, are printed with, “‘Worst food in the city’ – Donald J. Trump”. You are the man he wishes he could be – popular, erudite, witty, included. Is his enmity based on jealousy?
I know he wanted to be my friend. We took a stab at that after I got to Vanity Fair. But it just couldn’t hold. By the way, I’m always proud to be a Canadian. I’ve never been more proud to be a Canadian than right now. Trump has underestimated the Canadian spirit and the Canadian strength.
You call yourself a beta male, but you also write, “Don’t mistake politeness for weakness.”
I don’t know how he thinks he’d invade Canada. I’d love for him to try it in the winter. It would be like when the Germans went into Russia in World War Two. I love Mark Carney – he will play Trump like a fiddle.
Your description of those Trump ties, “as stiff as a child’s toy sword,” made me laugh out loud.
They really were. You’d hold them up, they’d barely bend. They’re nothing anybody I know would wear. I gave them away; I couldn’t even have them in my office.
Your book is studiously un-snarky, though. It’s a love letter to the glory of magazine life.
I have a great love for the last half of the last century. The Kodachrome-ness and black-and-whiteness of it. Magazines were important then. They were engines of the culture. And they’re not now. There are still potent magazines, but that age, when all magazines were good, is gone.
Did you pull any punches to maintain that loving tone?
No. I tried to look for the best in most of the people I wrote about, and I found it. Going into detail on feuds dates a book quickly, and I’ve had very few feuds in my life anyway.
Well, you write conspicuously little about Tina Brown, your predecessor at Vanity Fair. You had to fire several of her former staffers, who seemed eager to see you fail.
I wrote as much about her as I felt was interesting. I don’t see her; we don’t have a relationship. But a feud involves active, daily combat. There was never any of that.
It feels like you cut her head out of all your pictures.
[Raises eyebrows, widens eyes and waves hands in a “not touching that” gesture.]
The magazine life you describe is unthinkably luxurious. Condé Nast’s billionaire owner, Si Newhouse, put no limit on your spending. You dined out many nights a week, sometimes with your children at the next table – on your expense account. Annie Liebowitz took your passport photo. The Rolling Stones’ lighting designer lit your Oscar parties.
We had a lot of guests from old Hollywood at those parties, and they appreciated good lighting.
Ha. You treated your writers like stars and turned their stories into events. How much did you spend on Dominick Dunne’s must-read series on O.J. Simpson’s trial?
The whole trial? I bet it ran into a million-and-a-half dollars. But worth it.
Is any magazine, including Vanity Fair, spending anything like that now?
No. Those days are long, long gone. They share a wastebasket at Vanity Fair now. I’m serious. They literally have one wastebasket on the whole floor.
So what did it feel like, to be at the centre of everything?
I didn’t feel that. I never thought, “I run this.” It was fun, but the competition was strong – GQ, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, New York – and it was a granular battle every single day to try to beat them, for readers, writers, photographers, advertisers.
Weren’t the Oscar parties fun?
I had a lot of social anxiety. I still take a beta-blocker before I go into any large social situation.
What’s your go-to small-talk line?
I find the less you say, the better. Let the person beside you do 75 per cent of the talking, and they come away thinking how funny and intelligent you are.
Did everyone want favours from you?
Yes, but that’s fine with me. No one ever asked, “Could you do a story about my business?” Our stories were wide-ranging, narrative things, they involved conflict, scandals, figures from fashion, the literary world, politics. If you don’t have conflict you’ve got nothing; you need two bulls in rut. If you were on the rise, Vanity Fair was the place you most wanted to have your story in, but if you were on the decline, it’s the magazine you’d least like to have your story in.
You write this about your teenage self: “I wanted to become something, but I had no idea what to become, or how to become it.” In your life, what was the value of being an outsider, of yearning?
Yearning and curiosity are vital. I grew up in Ottawa in the 1950s, 60s and early 70s. We didn’t have any magazines, there were no cultural figures I could learn from. Everything I wanted was either in Toronto or New York.
Are you still a yearner?
I’ve started yearning for bigger-picture things: for a world at peace, a compassionate society. That’s the part I miss about Canada, the sanity and the compassion. Whatever minimal, gossamer safety net we have in America, Trump is going after it.
Earlier, you mentioned anxiety. Were you an anxious kid?
No, strangely enough. The anxiety started at Vanity Fair. Everyone was watching, waiting for me to fail. There were stories in the papers where I was a bumbling fool. I was anxious every day. If you put out a phenomenal issue, you’d think, “It’s never going to be this good again.” If you put out one you felt was lacking, you’d think, “We’ve lost it, it will never come back.” I’m still an anxious person. It’s baked in.
I’m fascinated that you’re smoking in your book cover photo.
My wife loves that picture, and I wasn’t going to erase the cigarette. Mike Bloomberg is throwing a book party for me.
That would be former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg.
He agreed to do it before he saw the cover. He’s rabidly anti-smoking, so we’ll see how that works out.
You still run a few businesses: Air Mail (newsletter), Electragram (e-cards), the Waverly Inn (restaurant). The restaurant, your home and your office are within blocks of one another; your friends call the area Graydonia. Do you really do the seating for the restaurant yourself, every night?
One-hundred per cent. Already did it today. Every night.
Why?
It ensures that people I know get a table roughly similar to the one they had the last time.
So you’re always the host of the dinner party.
Even if I’m not there.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
