By Nathan Smith
MEMOIR
When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines
Graydon Carter
Grove Press, $36.99
Editing one of the world’s foremost celebrity and politics publications means you are likely to court some enemies.
Former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, writing in his delightful new memoir When the Going Was Good, says Donald Trump was one such adversary. Ever since writing an unflattering profile in the mid-1980s – one that described the real estate mogul as “short-fingered” – Trump had a persistent fixation with both Carter and the magazine.
And, of course, the size of his phalanges.
Regular broadsides on social media from the US President attacked the monthly magazine and its editor. “Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!” was one of countless tweets. Other vengeful billionaires circled too, like the former owner of Harrods department store Mohamed Al-Fayed, who had a voracious hunger to destroy Vanity Fair after a damning exposé.
Carter says this is why he learned to “always edit with [his] hat on”, as he never knew when he might be out the door. As an editor who has worked at some of the most admired outlets during the halcyon days of magazine publishing, it’s one honest admission. Especially since many might assume he was protected from sudden job loss or budgetary constraints at these deep-pocketed publications.
Carter in the 1990s at the height of Vanity Fair’s popularity.
The 75-year-old Canadian was a “college discard” who “drifted” into magazine publishing thanks to a youthful passion for the printed word – and plenty of desperation. He helped establish a muddled literary magazine, The Canadian Review, that gave him some credibility in journalism but didn’t guarantee employment in its competitive world. It was only after begging a TIME editor at the end of a job interview (with a near empty bank account spurring him on) that Carter landed a reporting gig at the weekly.
Working for TIME in the 1970s was like another world, where the red-bordered magazine wielded unparalleled political influence and provided its reporters with the fabled experience of an “expense-account life”. But it was ribbing the rich and famous (and not simply reporting on them) that really enticed Carter, who then went on to found Spy magazine. The satirical monthly’s aim was simply to “carpet-bomb at 25,000 feet”.
No one was safe from its trolling ways, including powerful Hollywood agents and celebrities like Leonard Bernstein and Michael Douglas. (These big names were sent anonymous cheques for minuscule amounts, with regular reports then published on who banked a cheque for $0.64.)
Then there was then a brief stint at The New York Observer before opportunity came knocking for Carter to oversee The New Yorker. That is, until a last-minute switch saw him given Vanity Fair instead.
Carter at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023 with Robert De Niro.Credit: Getty Images for Air Mail/Warner Brothers Discovery
The first two years there proved “dreadful” as self-doubt, staff discord and job performance plagued Carter. It was introducing the namesake Oscars party and bringing on writers such as Christopher Hitchens that gave him leverage to rebuild the magazine from its “baroque” former self. Making it an active producer of events within the elite world of Hollywood – especially when the Academy Awards had become depassé to many – would prove auspicious.
But moving the mag beyond celebrity worship became Carter’s main goal in his tenure. Vanity Fair was to become a publication of scandals and scoops, producing “literate sensationalism”. Major exclusives, such as unmasking the identity of “Deep Throat” (the figure behind The Washington Post Watergate leaks), were paired with explosive exposés on sexual abuse allegations against Michael Jackson.
As the GFC hit bottom lines and social media took eyeballs away from traditional media, magazines began slowly to lose their centrality in everyday life. Carter says he saw the writing on the wall then after 25 years. Vogue editor Anna Wintour advised him that publisher Condé Nast was letting go of staff and consolidating its editorial departments under her exclusive remit. “Anna Wintour tends to greet me either like her long-lost friend or like the car attendant,” he writes bitingly.
Retirement in the south of France had brief appeal, but Carter was determined to try again. Air Mail, a weekly arts and culture e-newsletter started in 2019 thanks to a Rolodex of talented journalists and advertising contacts at luxury brands. Even so, life has mostly involved “walk[ing] around with a tin cup” to keep the venture running.
When the Going Was Good is a heady account of a bygone era when printed publications held power in public life. Carter is both humble and wry in his retelling, acknowledging the many enviable opportunities afforded to him as well as the setbacks he once faced trying to make it as a wide-eyed wordsmith.
From a stinging satirist of American culture to a celebrated curator of it, Carter may remain an influential editor but that once golden world of magazines is now sadly gone with the wind.
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