“I think it would be fun to run a newspaper,” said Charles Foster Kane. But in the telling of Graydon Carter, there was no enterprise more engaging, stimulating, or fun than running a glossy, well-subsidized general-interest magazine at the turn of the millennium. In a droll, trenchant, and surprisingly affable new memoir, When the Going Was Good, Carter recounts his incomparable tour of duty at the helm of Vanity Fair from 1992 to 2017, a period that roughly coincided with the last go-go period in American print media.
These days, the shine is off the job of running Vanity Fair, as we can see from the abbreviated reign of Carter’s successor, Radhika Jones, who will soon be calling it quits a mere eight years after taking over. Once, magazine editors clung to their influential perches for decades or even generations, but now it’s barely two presidential terms. No one understands this new normal better than Carter, who speaks in his memoir with misty-eyed melancholy for the page counts and ad revenues of years gone by. Even his title has an aspect of a backward glance.
Carter rounded up the best and the brightest writers to craft robustly reported long-form stories on everything from Hollywood history to Washington scandals to celebrity trials. He opens the book with a history of the magazine’s 2005 scoop in which the identity of Watergate’s “Deep Throat” source was disclosed, a representative example of Vanity Fair journalism. On the evidence offered here, he took great pleasure in pairing talented writers with provocative topics and assembling the puzzle pieces that made up the table of contents. “We regularly would have more than four hundred pages in an issue, and the assembly seemed to take forever,” he says. He came to know what he was looking for. “It was sophisticated, knowing, and international.” With each issue, he had the added pleasure of knowing that the stories they ran (and the photos that lavishly illustrated them) set the agenda for what the culture would be talking or arguing about.
This might sound like the ultimate insider book, and its author is certainly unafraid and unashamed to drop names at a staggering rate. But we ought to remember that books about magazines have an impressive track record. Renata Adler’s Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker, Benjamin Balint’s Running Commentary, and Richard Brookhiser’s Right Time, Right Place, about National Review, are so engaging and entertaining because magazines are lively places: they are populated by interesting personalities whose idiosyncrasies are tolerated because of their talent. And they are produced on schedules speedy and hectic enough to make accounts of their production dramatic. This book is an honorable addition to a worthy but underappreciated literary subgenre.
A native of Ontario, Carter seems to have been a reasonably average child with an unusual inkling that he was cut out for great things. Persuaded that “a complete set of teeth” would be necessary for future success, he stopped playing the national pastime of hockey around age 13, and he curated his own reading lists in high school: “If Beowulf was being taught in class, I was reading Hemingway. Or Mad.” More consequentially, his mother gave him Moss Hart’s memoir Act One and Herman Wouk’s novel Youngblood Hawke — encouraging gifts that convinced him that a grand life was attainable. “I knew that I wanted my adult life to be in New York, in the world of magazines or the theater,” he says.
Nothing if not persistent, Carter joined the roster of, and later took control over, The Canadian Review, which he managed to transform into a fair imitation of the Willie Morris-edited Harper’s. Even then, he had a discerning eye, especially for the poetry submissions to the magazine. “The non-rhyming gibberish that flowed into our offices on a daily basis was something else,” he says. “I would shovel this compostable rot unopened into the wastebasket.”
Having pulled up stakes for the New York of his fantasies, Carter proceeded to ascend the treacherous journalism ladder. This included a memorable but not entirely satisfying stint writing at Time, which, at the peak of its hold on the popular imagination, was described as a most gracious place to work. Tea trolleys brought dinner and wine to the writers on Fridays after the latest issue wrapped up. “Almost all dinners out were similarly expensed, generally on the flimsiest of pretexts: ‘dinner with source,’ ‘meeting with source,’” he says. “And these were the expenses of writers, who did almost no reporting.” A subsequent job at Life was seemingly a step down in Carter’s eyes. With diminished circulation, he struggled to assemble enough letters to the editor to print each issue. “Weeks would go by without a single reader’s comment, aside from the occasional screed from a federal correctional facility — Life still had its captive fans,” he says.
His fortunes improved when he dreamt up the satirical magazine Spy, which “poked holes in the bloated egos of the city’s grandees.” The targets chosen by Carter and co-founder Kurt Andersen were power brokers with whom they had little firsthand familiarity, an advantage for sharp humor writing. “Editing Spy was like carpet-bombing at twenty-five thousand feet — as opposed to hand-to-hand combat,” he says. Feathers were nonetheless ruffled, including those of Kurt Vonnegut, who objected to his wife, photographer Jill Krementz, being described as a “champion namedropper.” “If you don’t already have cancer, I hope you get it,” Vonnegut tells Carter.
Spy was a success, but Carter had moved on, reviving the once-comatose New York Observer when Newhouse tapped him to assume control of Conde Nast’s marquee magazines, The New Yorker or Vanity Fair. He asked for the former but was saddled with the latter — a magazine that, by his account, was in a sorry state when he took over. A so-called “creative style director” earned more than $350,000 annually to work on eight covers a year, and “everybody had an assistant.” “When I arrived at Vanity Fair, there was almost nothing lying around that I thought was worth publishing,” he says. This included Norman Mailer’s account of the 1992 Democratic National Convention, which Carter says could have been written with Mailer having “watched it on the kitchen television with me.” “This was coaster Mailer, phoning it in for a $50,000 assignment fee,” he says.
The pay scale remained insanely competitive, but the quality of the work steadily rose. Dominick Dunne was already in the rotation, but his articles on assorted trials became sharper, shapelier, and certainly more widely known during Carter’s epoch. “He wasn’t objective, like most crime and courtroom reporters,” Carter says, referring to Dunne being the parent of a child who was murdered. “He was there to defend the rights of victims.” The O.J. Simpson trial is unimaginable without Dunne’s coverage. Then, there was Christopher Hitchens, a Carter hire who had no reservations about hand-to-hand combat. “He loved dogging the other side, mostly because he was so good at it,” Carter says. “I relished and admired his wit and his social fearlessness.”
Carter comes across like a paterfamilias to his squad of writers, whose quirks were tolerated, perhaps even encouraged. After he assigned Nick Tosches to profile Sidney Korshak, a mob lawyer, months went by without a communique from its author. “And Nick wasn’t responding to his editor’s calls,” Carter says. Some editors would have thrown in the towel, but not our hero. Eventually, a 17,000-word manuscript (“assigned at half that length”) turned up. “It was a masterpiece and so beautifully written that I felt my eyes welling up with tears,” he says. He honors Annie Leibovitz for her masterly staging of group photos — the sort that became famous on Vanity Fair’s Hollywood issue gatefold covers. Aware that the cost of being influential is being hated, Carter recounts with fondness the complaints lodged by various story subjects: Novelist Tom Wolfe did not like being called “spry,” and movie producer Robert Evans railed at being described as “puffy.”
FOR LORNE: ANOTHER SATURDAY NIGHT
Carter offers several explanations for the declining fortunes at Vanity Fair. There are references to the 2008 financial crisis, and much is made of ominous signs from the magazine’s corporate parent, including the proposal that more editorial control be granted to Vogue Editor-in-Chief (and Conde Nast editorial director) Anna Wintour. Fair enough, but the magazine became slacker in the final years of Carter’s reign: Its bold spiciness gave way to something more blandly safe in its appeal to limousine liberals. Unworthy of the magazine’s rich heritage is Carter’s unimaginative anti-Trump line (repeated ad nauseam here) and his apparently irony-free account of the magazine’s ignominious role in trumpeting the “transition” of Bruce Jenner to Caitlyn Jenner, and thus mainstreaming the toxic transgender movement. When Carter proudly reminds us that former President Barack Obama posted “congratulations” to Jenner for her Vanity Fair cover, Carter comes across as being weirdly out of touch with the anti-woke backlash.
As this book amply and entertainingly demonstrates, nothing good can last forever.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.
