Fashion Neurosis with Graydon Carter

0:01Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea. When you find yourself in the afternoon slump, you need the right thing to make you bounce back. You need pure leaf iced tea. It's real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine. You're left feeling refreshed and revitalized so you can be ready to take on what's next. The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a pure leaf iced tea. Time for a tea break. Time for a pure leaf.

0:32Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door. Expertly cleaned and folded. So you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you. Like tea time you. Mmm. Or this tea time you. Or even this tea time you. So did you hear about Dave? Or even tea time, tea time, tea time you. Mmm. So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rinse. It's time to be great.

1:10Hi, come in.

1:18Welcome to Fashion Neurosis, Graydon Carter. Thank you, Bella. Can you tell me what you're wearing today and why you chose these particular clothes? okay i have um a work jacket that i designed about 20 years ago and i have them made by a friend of mine on 39th street in new york and this one's made out of sort of heavy linen um he makes my pants as well i have a white probably 20 year old uh lacoste shirt that i have two dozen of them and i wear one each day they're getting a bit threadbare and I have a pair of blue trainers on and blue socks. And in your memoir, When the Going Gets Good, you describe your first vision of glamour, watching your parents do the twist.

2:12What did you see happening when you witnessed that? Well, the twist was a new song at the time and my parents would have another couple over the McLennans and they would have cocktails and then they would have dinner and then they would play bridge. And the women sort of wore pearls and sweaters and skirts and the men wore ties and jackets. And I thought, this is the most glamorous adult life. And I thought, unlike a lot of people who wanted to extend their adolescence into their 40s, I wanted to become an adult and I wanted to dress like an adult. as soon as I got to my 20s. Yeah, because you grew up in Ottawa, Canada, but not in an affluent household, and you had no pocket money and worked at the railway shinning up telegraph poles, which was a fascinating job.

3:07It sounded so hard. And I remember reading the book, you describing looking into a passing train into the first-class carriage and seeing these white tablecloths and this elegance and longing for that. And I wondered how you thought you were going to make the leap. Well, I had no idea. I mean, I could have stayed in Canada and become a part of the government, which everybody did in Ottawa, which is the capital city. But my whole gravitational pull came from New York City, a city that I only knew about in films and magazines. and books. And so I had to figure out a way to get from there to New York.

3:56And it happened completely by accident. I was in college and I happened to, I went by this office that was filled with, you know, half dozen young people and there were typewriters and desks. And I went in to ask them what they were doing. And they were starting up a political and literary magazine. And I asked them if I could be part of it and they said well we're looking for an art director and I told them that I could draw and so they said fine you're the art director and over the course of months there's little magazines are famously like small sort of petri dishes of of infighting and back backbiting and bitterness and one by one the other people left and I was left as the editor it did nothing but lose money in its entire life and eventually it folded but I sold the assets to our closest competitor a much more illustrious magazine and it got me a job at Time Magazine in New York and and so that's how I got to New York through happenstance.

5:07It's an incredible story, I must say. I wondered, was there an item of clothing you were obsessed with as a child that you thought would sort of consolidate your identity, the identity that you envisioned for yourself? Well, first of all, clothes that were appropriate in Canada were completely different than clothes that were appropriate in New York. First of all, the temperatures are incredibly different. Ottawa was one of the coldest cities in the world, capital cities in the world back then. I think it's probably a little more moderate now. And so the clothes that I wore to New York only had two jackets.

5:46So I had a sort of a very heavy sort of wool blazer with a crest on it from my parents' sailing club. And then I had a very thick tweed jacket. And on my first day in New York, I was getting off the plane. And those days, you went down the stairs onto the tarmac, like the way you do in small airports now. and I uh it was in July and I was hit with a a blast of heat the likes of which I'd never ever experienced before and I had this very very heavy woolen jacket on so my clothes were they just had to be the clothes I had rather than the clothes that meant that much to me and was there something as a child I just remember when I was a child that I got fixated on something that I thought if I could have this it would just order me it would take care of my internal feeling of disorder and was there anything like that in your childhood like some fixed well watching people like Cary Grant and and um and again and and um Fred Astaire and and sort of the way they moved to the close from from the sort of the 30s and early 40s I thought that when I did get a chance to get a suit it would be something like that and but my first suit in New York was from a company called Paul's Store which is right next door to Brooks Brothers on Madison and but it was and it was it was like gabardine so it was like a fabric I'd never had before we had cotton and we had wool in Canada and there was very little in between because I'm interested in your like with your first paycheck you got a suit and I think a coat from Anderson and Shepard and I'm interested like the difference in when I grew up we had very little money and I just thought things were too expensive I thought this black turtleneck that I was obsessed with must cost at least two thousand pounds because it was never ever on the cards but somehow you just assumed that you were going to have these things and it seems a much better attitude and then you got them and they worked for you well my first suit was but not for my first paycheck but probably in the first month just I had to look more like a a time incorporated employee so I got my this one suit and probably four years five years later I had my first Anderson Shepherd suit made and it was probably $2 ,500 or$3 ,000 back then.

8:28But I thought I could wear it every single day and amortize it over, you know, a number of years. And strange enough, I still have it. But I thought in those days, you could get a decent suit made for$500. So this was maybe it was$2 ,500. So it's about five times as much. But I thought it would fit better. I'd look better. And if I look successful, perhaps my employers would think I might become successful. Yeah, that's the usefulness of... I dress much better as a writer than I was as a writer in those days. Well, it's all part of the kind of disguise that you leap into, isn't it? And you talked about Mad Magazine being a big influence on your adolescence, and you say it explains how things in the adult world work, darker more sophisticated and vaguely anarchic and i always loved the clothes you know him in that black suit on the cover it was just somehow it felt like it kind of narrowed the gap between a teenager that without power and an adult with some sort of power and i wondered how you thought you would look when you were being influenced by mad magazine well mad for it was produced strange enough on madison avenue and it started in the early 1950s and which was the beginning of the sort of the satire boom in both britain and and in america you know from britain you then you in the late 50s and early 60s you got that was the week uh this week that was the the frost report Beyond the Fringe you know Cambridge Footlights in America you had a magazine called Monocle and any number of other things but that's when sort of satire first took flower and Mad Magazine was and still exists it was incredibly clever and it was funny but it also told you about Madison Avenue and how Chicago worked and elements of adult life that you may not have known about it and did it in a very funny satirical way and if you're like a 13 year old boy in Canada and those sort of frozen wasteland of Canada you find it really entertaining and instructive.

10:52It was just one of those great things to chance upon and it was quite punk rock in a way and that was my kind of introduction into finding myself and there was so much in there I didn't understand i just knew it was on to something and it's great to see that well it was sort of it was sort of private eye for adolescents right yeah that's a good description and with um with your first successful magazine spy you initiated the spy ball and you described not having any money for decor but using the black tie outfits that you'd ask people to come in as decoration and which is such a brilliant idea and how did you know that these clothes were going to be they were I mean it's an inspired thought how did you know that this was going to work well we the spy magazine was started in the 1980s New York was changing then and it was just coming out of its bankruptcy.

12:02The city had come close to bankruptcy in the 1970s. Investment banks had been invented and therefore investment bankers. You had the ladies who lunch and all of that. And there were a lot of characters with new money in New York and they were not afraid to parade it around. So we started, I'd worked at Time and then Life Magazine and we started, my partner and I started Spy and the first issue came out in 1986. And we wanted to write, we borrowed heavily on Mad Magazine and Private Eye and the very dense, adjective-filled writing style of time. It was going to be fact-based, but satirical about the city and the people who made the city run.

12:49and so we we had a ball we were in the puck building which was the the building where the very first humor magazine in america puck magazine was um located in the late uh part of the 19th century and it had a huge ballroom on the ground floor and so the we thought we'd kick things off with our first issue with a a ball and we had an all-woman swing band the kit mcclure band and we had no money for decorations but i thought if we asked made it black tie the people sort of you sort of amortize the the decorating costs among the guests and as a room full of people in black tie looks a lot more festive or um party filled than just people who show up from work in the in the clothes they they spent the day in and we had a number of these and they were hugely successful and people scrambled to get become part of that and a number of people would have would change their clothes two or three times during the evening just to to wear different outfits and i'm talking about men here not necessarily women no that's so good really yes do you remember anyone in particular yes i'm not going to mention him because he'd probably be embarrassed tell me what they he was a former art director of vanity fair and he told me he he had four separate outfits that he wore throughout one of the nights of our balls wow do you remember what they were no i don't even remember seeing him there i didn't know him at the time i love that um god i know because you you had this you've had this incredibly grand taste in spite of not growing up with stuff and i actually don't have grand taste i have simple taste I think when you're doing something do it in a in a in the best way humanly possible professionally well maybe grand taste doesn't sound like it's a compliment but it's you just have this discerning taste and you had all the things you talked about like later when you made had things specially made for the Vanity Fair party and I mean it's just genius to be able to think of these things it's like they're innate in your dna and um you know when you described your your suit from sat anderson and shepherd and how you were advised to wear it in a light rain so it would fit better i wondered if you thought certain clothes made you a better editor first of all in those days um everybody wore jackets and tie men wore jackets and ties to the office so that was so that was the uniform of the day and it was up until roughly around the financial crash crash of 2008 and uh you know because you spent a good portion of your life at the office we'd got in the early days of vanity fair i would get in at 5 30 and i'd leave at 5 30 so that's that's half the entire day and um and so that was your uniform during the day and everybody dressed professionally and uh it was just the way it was so i thought a well-made suit's going to fit far more comfortably than a badly made suit an anderson shepherd suit fits on your shoulders in a way that you can it feels like you're not you're just wearing a shirt um and whereas a a badly made suit can really drag you down and yeah i just thought you know if you're if you look if you look somewhat like you're somewhat successful people might actually think you're successful even though you're not and as for the details of the parties that we you know we just sort of muddled through and and um but i i i did anything i always did things thinking of how i would feel if i was on the other side if i was the guest and if you as a guest you'd like um you know decent food decent wine be treated well um be seated seated beside somebody interesting on either side um have something to take away from the table like we had you know we had zippo lighters yeah they had in great um sayings on them different things on them each year i mean they weren't expensive or fancy or anything like that but and asheraes we had um we had our own specially made asheraes just like a lot of restaurants did in those days and everyone stole them everything was stolen great but that was the intention that they'd be stolen because once they wind up in somebody else's coffee table it's a free ad for the magazine it's so thoughtful though but it's like extra thoughtfulness of your guests creating something for them to steal i mean it's like the ultimate i think it's well it's like the gift shop after you've been through a magazine only it's free yeah i used to steal things from annabelle's when my father took me when everybody has an annabelle's or a marx club ashtray or something like that they pocket at the end of the night i used to steal cutlery because i didn't have any so i had like a fork and a spoon from annabelle or ba flights yeah way way back and you mentioned the phrase too rich and too thin and i wondered what that image conjures up for you well i mean that's a famous expression in new york and at spy magazine we did a story about called too rich and too thin and it was the based on the women who sort of ran new york and it was a woman named nan kempner there was a um pat buckley there was a jackie o and they you know they and the first sentence of the story if I remember it says it's there's it seems slightly unfair that in New York City a woman who has a size five or size 14 lives in a two-room apartment and a woman who's a size two gets a 14-room apartment and it's just that was the style of the moment and Tom Wolfe called them in bonfire the vanities social x-rays and it's just I get in these people women were really thin like abnormally thin yeah it's really one of those phrases that's gone into folklore like nothing tastes like skinny feels i think that's your friend kate moss isn't it well actually i think it might have been steve tyler so i remember reading him about him doing 200 sit-ups every morning and telling kate but i don't know if it came from her or him but a very good source She embodies it, yes.

19:32Yeah. And I read that you love doing the ironing or you loved doing the ironing. And that's something I have an obsession with. And when I was a teenager, I used to get really out of it and get the ironing board out because it just calmed down my heart. And you were quoted as saying, I might do an ironing tutorial. I can iron a shirt like a French laundry. I can. And when I, back in the, you know, when I was working at Time, and I didn't have a ton of money. So I would iron three or four shirts at the beginning of the week. And I, and, you know, as I said, I could do them almost perfectly. And I found it very therapeutic.

20:18It takes a little bit of brain work and a little bit of manual work, but you can either watch television, listen to music, you can almost read while you're doing it. If you had a stand up stand to hold the book in front of But I found it a chore, but a very relaxing therapeutic chore. Yeah, it's such a good thing. It's part mind and part activity. Yeah, it keeps you on your feet. And there's something very nice about wearing a shirt you iron yourself. It's like it regulates your emotional sort of erraticness. I remember doing the ironing for my neighbor, and when I was 12, she taught me how to iron, and I still do the same thing.

21:05You start with the yoke. You start with the yoke. And the back of the neck. Yep. And the back of the collar. Yep. Go to the sleeve. Yep. Front sides, and then the backs at the end. See, I do it the opposite way. I do the back, and then the front, the last thing. And it does. It sort of does something to your neural pathways, because you come out feeling in control. and I get the same thing from making my bed. My grandmother taught me how to make beds. She had a bed and breakfast in Ireland. And however busy, I like doing this thing. It creates this sort of order and it's even if you feel disordered.

21:45Now my wife and I make our beds in the morning. Really? That's so cool. That's really. I try to get my kids too, but so far I've failed in that mission. I failed in that. I was forced to make my bed, and I never forced my son to do any of those things. Oh, I forced them, it's just they won't do it. Oh, God, well, I'm glad it doesn't always work when you use force. Well, famously, it never works, but... Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start? Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to. Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin, or what that clunking sound from your dryer is?

22:24With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one. You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today. I'm really pleased that the Jane Goodall collection with Brilliant Earth connects to my vision of how we can live in harmony with nature. every choice we make ripples outward and you can choose what sort of impact you make i know that the things i've worked for all my life will carry on discover the jane goodall collection exclusively a brilliant earth and you just talked about when you were at vanity fair how attending fashion shows was one of your duties as the editor.

23:16And it was the era of the supermodels. And you described freezing in the presence of extreme beauty. And I wondered when that first happened, that you recognized that. Well, it just, I mean, first of all, there are supermodels and there are supermodels. And the ones that I liked, and I met them outside of the actual fashion industry were two very different women one dale haddon the canadian supermodel who died last year the year before and um she was uh she didn't look like a traditional supermodel she just looked like the prettiest woman you'd ever meet in a neighborhood and and and i liked her and she was an activist for uh various women's causes and and elaine erwin who who pulled herself away from the supermodelary business and moved to Indiana with her husband, John Mellencamp.

24:14Oh, right. And she was like looking into the sun. But they were both smart and they were both engaging. And, I mean, a lot of the supermodels, I think they're used to not having to talk because the beauty does all the talking for them. but Elaine and Dale were engaging on all fronts. I think sometimes people talk to supermodels in a stupid way because they just can't imagine that they're... Like thinking to a small dog or something. Yeah, I mean, they're all so intelligent and they're so experienced and know so much. And there's some sort of weird attitude that you can only be beautiful or intelligent.

24:58you can't but they're so i mean they're so amazing and um i mean they're most yeah i mean yeah i don't think yes i think that uh in my for the you know i'm only interested in interesting people if there happened to be someone attractive that makes it better but at a certain point in your life um interesting is much is is much better than beautiful yeah both is great i agree and anyway interesting is beautiful so it is um it's true and if you fancy someone and you don't like what they're wearing does it kill your attraction to them no but um it depends i mean i don't think i couldn't fall in love with somebody who dressed like a kardashian or something i'd just be too it would just be too mortifying uh both in the house and outside the house I think as long as people style is a really funny thing my boss, Cy Newhouse, used to dress in basically the same outfit every day and he had khaki pants car shoes a polo shirt and a sweatshirt and he was very fit and he looked good every day I mean he didn't look fancy but he didn't he was a billionaire, he didn't have to impress anybody and that style.

26:24And I remember Edie Wasserman, whose husband was Lou Wasserman, who for decades was the most powerful man in Hollywood. And Edie, she wasn't beautiful, but she had a style. She had sort of a Louise Brooks sort of haircut, but her hair had gone gray and she left it gray. And she wore black dresses with white Peter Pan collars. And that was her look. and she just looked sort of, she had a look, she had a style, and she just kept with it every day. And to me, that's sort of real style. And do you quite like pearls in a twin set? I'm old-fashioned, and yeah. Yeah, I read about that in your book. I love it when people have a drawn towards something because it's suggestive, and that's always an allure, isn't it?

27:16Well, the hidden is much more sort of attractive and sexy than the overt. And if it's overt, there's no mystery there. Right, right. You've seen it all. Yeah. And you started working with Annie Leibovitz, making these huge photographic spreads and amazing covers, which we all waited for. Did you have a favorite one? That's like saying my favorite child. No. Sorry. But I do remember it was hard to get her to do it at first because I think she thought we had in our first Hollywood issue. I thought that one, there wasn't one actor and this is 1993 or 1994, 1994. And I didn't think there was a movie star that could carry the idea of what we wanted to get across of just the enormity of Hollywood and its history and its future and its present.

28:11and so I wanted a three panel cover so there would be three separate panels and all sort of come in one long photograph and Annie at first was resistant to do it she thought it was sort of a I think she thought it was a cheap trick at the beginning but I love group shots and they become in time they come become quite historical there's a famous photograph by Art Kane who did it for Esquire in 1958 and it's called A Great Day in Harlem and there's um probably a hundred of the greats of of jazz yeah all in front of a building and they spill out onto the sidewalk and so I um so I got Annie to shoot the first cover this way and we made a billboard of it over um over uh Sunset Boulevard but Annie would and there were we also had shots in the same issue where the photographers would put the like a high school photograph put the tall people in the back row short people in the front row and um annie would she would craft her covers she got better and better at it so by year four she would have this whole cover all plotted out we knew exactly where everybody was going to go and she would have models stepping in for the for the people before the movie star showed up so she would have it all lit and have the clothing figured out and everything figured out before the people came so she composed them well in advance and so then she can make slight adjustments once the real people got there and she turned it into an art form.

29:54That's incredible. Kicking and screaming but turned it into an art form, yes. But you've won her round. well there were a ton of work to get these things done I mean arranging first of all if you have a if you have three panels of movie stars obviously the people on the first panel would be a lot happier than the people in the second panel and the people in the second panel are going to be happier than the people on the third panel so keeping everybody um happy and everybody by the time they showed up at the photo studio they knew exactly what panel that they were going to be all the negotiating had already been done so she but so she it was just but it was all you know each one of these things would take you know five months to plan and you had to get bring people in and everybody had their own hair and makeup and whatever and and um and you know thousands of pieces of clothing for a cover shoot yeah they were real ground breakers those because i remember buying the magazine and then looking at the front and then it was like then reading the book you'd go into the second page and then the third and just absorb it all and delve in it was it was amazing well the cover got it off the newsstand and then once you're inside we tried to fill it with you know big uh sort of fascinating um works of journalism yeah that told stories and because i love the kate moss cover one with the top hat or that one i like the one with her as marilyn yes i think james wrote the piece or maybe a.a gill yeah james wrote the piece the noted author james fox yes and i love that here they were just so glamorous um well she's made for the camera yeah well she's the best at it and you're also a champion of writers and you you're famous for paying better than any other publication and which is unheard of now and you're very good at describing competitiveness between people like the stories about Dominic Dunn and his brother John Gregory Dunn who was married to Joan Didion and I wondered how you handle competition um I was pretty collegial with most of my competitors um uh the golden age of magazines uh which probably you could stretch from the 1970s through the aughts of this century um uh one thing that made it the golden age was because magazines were great and because there were great editors great writers great photographers is the golden age of Hollywood.

32:40If you think of it in the 1930s and into the 40s, it was a golden age because, you know, Paramount and Columbia and MGM and 20th Century Fox, and they were at the absolute tops of the games run by people who had great vision for movies and had great passion for movies. So it's a collective more than any single individual. So I appreciated the fact that the competition certainly made Vanity Fair better than if there had been no competition. Do you find it at all demoralizing when there's competition, or does it stimulate you? Well, first of all, any time, and this happened all the time, when another magazine would have a story that I wish I had ordered up and had in Vanity Fair, I both feel frustration that I didn't have it, and admiration for them that they did.

33:40Yeah. Yeah, I felt... It's such a weird... I think particularly for women, it's so... You're not supposed to feel competitive, only kind of generosity and love towards other women. But I remember my therapist saying to me... You had a therapist? I've got a couple. I remember him saying to me, think of it as a game. and it just changed my morale completely instead of thinking fail I thought okay you know maybe I can get something out of this if I I don't mean out of their success but just some sort of you know little bit of raising up of the spirits yeah you play better tennis with a better tennis player and I think the same thing goes in your professional life I mean there are a lot of a business is where it's a zero-sum game that um um you know for you to gain a hundred somebody else has to lose a hundred yeah but the magazine business isn't that and nor and there are many any creative industries the film business isn't really that the television business used to be that but it um you know they can have five great best-selling books out at the same time and actually it does better for the entire book industry because if there are five great best sellers out there that everybody's talking about other books get sold as well so it um in the creative field i think that competition is is an elixir and and it it just it can be frustrating at times but it's a it's a very healthy element in a professional life yeah it's so true because if one person's doing well anyone can do well as long as somebody's doing well yes um and you said you like to have a partner in and a co-conspirator and uh you had one at spy and was it johnny pigotzi you work with at spy no my partner was kurt anderson and we met at time magazine and we plotted spy out from my office at life magazine oh yeah but i just love having a partner i have a partner in my restaurants i had a partner um johnny pigotzi and charles sachi bought spy from us right right and um i didn't have a partner at vanity fair because it's just the way the job was constructed but i had sort of uh um colleagues so i worked with it there at 20 for 25 years that i you know i trusted their judgment i trusted you know them to like not be yes people because most of them were women but they were they were they they had no compunction and telling me I was an idiot from time to time.

36:25But that was very helpful. And so I think you need, I think a partner can both balance things. I have a partner at Airmail, Alessandra Stanley, who I worked with at Time Magazine. And you sort of share whatever glory there is, but you also share the day-to-day pain and minor failures that all these jobs entail. And in your memoir, When the Going Was Good, you chose James Fox as your co-author. What a fool I was. I mean, what a fool. No, in fact, I wouldn't have done the book without James. We'd had lunch nearby over in Sloan Square, and this was about seven years ago, and he said that if you, I think I'd just left that in the fair, he said, if you ever write a memoir, I'd love to help you through it.

37:14And so it was the first time I'd ever thought of that. But I thought I'd be very fortunate. and I thought if a boob like me could sort of do well in the magazine business, there's a decent story to tell. James was invaluable. First of all, he talked to a lot of my colleagues because I couldn't talk to him. I couldn't go to a colleague and say, let's talk about me for a while. So I couldn't do that, but James could do that or talk about, and he brought us some things that I'd forgotten along the way that my colleagues had remembered. and then he helped organize it because you can't tell a memoir in a pure chronological way.

37:59And also he has a better work ethic than I do so he kept sort of the engine stoked for the next, we worked on it for four years. We worked on it in New York, we worked on it in London, in Connecticut, and in France. And we had a ball. And I'm not a solitary sort of person. I'm not a people person necessarily either. But I'm not a solitary person who can stay and work by themselves all day long with no outside oxygen. And anyway, James provided that. And I also had another editor who came in after, Colin Murphy, who I'd worked with at Vanity Fair for 15 years. And he was my editor when I wrote at Vanity Fair.

38:45and he'd been at the Atlantic magazine and he's back at the Atlantic now. Right. And he was instrumental in the whole thing as well. So this is a combination of me with a lot of help. Well, your brilliance at the center of it. And as you know, James is my ex-husband. Oh God, is he? I forgot that. And I think his investigative journalism background makes him such a sleuther when it comes to, you know, any detail. And, you know, I remember when he was working on Keith's book, Keith Richards' book, and it was so exciting when he said he was going to be working with you and, you know, all the stories of glamour.

39:33Not as much fun as Keith, obviously. When you started at Vanity Fair, you banned certain words, which I thought was fantastic. and you said language was the language was baroque and florid and which were your most hated words well everything was just slightly overwritten so when i got there i first wanted to make the staff their staff had been pitted against each other a lot and i don't like um office drama i think there's much enough drama outside outside the office and this might be partly from being canadian i like people to get along to respect others talents and their work uh to say please and thank you and that so the first two years there was a lot of that and also then sort of eradicating the the the magazine of this this house writing style i don't think it was a formal writing style but you know a book wasn't a book it was a tome god a restaurant wasn't a restaurant when I was in eatery, it's sort of the Vanity Fair school of bad writing, and it's just looking up in a thesaurus to see a word, so I don't use the, you know, and people didn't say things that were funny, they chortled, and it just all grated to my nerves, and I wore out pencil after pencil, because I used to edit with a, I edited 25 years there with a pencil and a paper manuscript.

40:59I just you know I just someone that would just be gray on the sides of the comments that that because I I just it was just a certain type of writing that drove me crazy yeah and it's a certain type of writing we made fun of at spy for five years before I got to Vanity Fair so I wasn't I both wasn't the most popular person to arrive on their doorstep and it was probably most one of the most unlikely people to arrive on their doorstep. Yeah, that sounded like a tense, tense initiation period. It was very tense. But you seem like as much as an, of an art director as an editor and the notes you wrote to advertisers on paper from a special shop in Paris and how the look and feel of them were.

41:47And I remember getting one of those from you. I'd done a questionnaire or something and I have an obsession with envelopes I literally drool over them fancy envelopes and and I I wondered where you got those got that stationery well I first of all I thought you know the um I mean stationery is a one I never had stationery until I was probably in my my 30s because I never had a in New York you sort of move around a lot because most people had rentals up until they were 40 so there's no point in having stationery with an address on it because it'd be out of date by the time they were printed and so by the time I got there to Vanity Fair I had found the stationery shop in Paris and had them made their very thick stock and it's the kind of note you'd like to receive and I sort of designed the way the type went on the stock there was the address on the left and my name on the right and some details on the right and I was shocked at how many people copied these cards uh after that I've got at least a half dozen or a dozen of other people who have had cards made that are almost identical but I you know I thought I'm I was very appreciative of the advertising which sort of paid for the journalism kept the lights on paid my salary and I was appreciative of the work of the writers and photographers and illustrators because they were the franchise of the magazine it wasn't me and and and the the editors on staff they were the franchise and I was appreciative of their they they made the magazine they made the magazine successful and then they brought readers back month after month and so um I wrote them thank you notes every month and sometimes it would take the better part of a day to do all of this.

43:42There'd be, in a big issue, there'd be sometimes 450 thank you notes to write because we had a lot of advertising and I just thought if I was an advertiser, yes, I'm going to get a letter from the publisher who sold me the ad, but I thought it'd be much more gratifying and appreciative if you got one from the editor of the magazine and I think I was the only editor to do this and it paid off in spades. We never we were all thick right up in the last issue of that i edited at the magazine take with advertising yeah god i mean there's nothing like writing on that kind of blissful paper it's like putting a cherry on cream or something it is it's so sensuous it's also quite therapeutic it is it's true i mean there's that great moment in american psycho when they're showing each other their cards and one of them has embossed gold or something and then this surge of demented jealousy he has about do you remember that scene no i've forgotten the movie completely but my son reminded me one of my sons reminded me of this scene it's very good moment and um when you hired henry porter as the editor of the uk vanity fair you describe him as having a a beethoven head of hair and how would you describe your hairstyle which has always been quite distinctive well now just disappearing i mean i wish i'd gone to turkey during the during the um the lockdown during the pandemic and had one of those treatments done no it's just it's it's just trying to maintain the same relative look with with fewer and fewer materials and um and no Henry was our London editor he wasn't under the London edition because the London edition strange enough was edited in New York it was the same edition yeah that we had in the United States through just slightly different advertising but Henry would help out all the writers um who came to do stories in Europe in fact there was an amazing cover that I always remember which was um Patsy Kensett and uh one of the gallagher yes god that was glamorous it was like a such a sort of exciting moment generally in in london yeah london was back yeah i remember yes them like lying in bed looking like a union jack yes spread yes yeah that was you know that was a good and it was a that there was a big portfolio in there and it was yeah when london sort of had come out of its doldrums and was back and i think we i think we had a big dinner at the river cafe for that issue that was so cool it was amazing and now you're the editor of ml which is an online weekly magazine named after that particular exquisite translucent paper that we both love and uh do you still love hold the front page meaning what well just the kind of electricity it seems like you haven't given up that quest for a second.

46:50Well, any editor in America, there's two models for the editor, one a real person, one a fictional person. The real person is Ben Bradley, who is the editor of the Washington Post during the Watergate investigations by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. And the other is Walter Burns in the movie The Front Page and the remake, His Girl Friday. and his Girl Friday is played by Cary Grant. So those are the two iconic editors for most editors. And there's something, I'm doing the same job for 50, gosh, 53 years, 52 years now. And it's not appreciably different than it was 53 years ago. It's a little easier, you get a little better at it.

47:38But the excitement of reading something great that's going to be in your next issue, whether it's a weekly or a monthly, that's everything. Also, I feel that as an editor, you're in the service business. So my feeling is what I want to do is say an airmail is to deliver every Saturday morning, deliver a wonderful package of articles that are beautifully art-directed, fact-checked. They've gone through and copy-edited and with beautiful advertising around them so that on Saturday morning you can sort of break away from the grim news of the, of the previous week and, and sort of appreciate the, the, the, the, um, the, the, the things in life that don't involve politics and, and world affairs.

48:27And, um, although we love, do love a lot of scandal stories. And so there's probably one or two of those in each issue. And so it, but to me, it's a service entry the same way, um, uh, a chef in a restaurant puts together the elements for a great meal to put on your table tonight. It's incredibly effective. There's so many. Whenever I get the notification, it's like going through a department store. That's a nice way of putting it. It's like every kind of appetite is... It's like Harvey Nix in the olden days. I know. It was great that everything you could wish for is kind of satisfied in that journey.

49:15It's the most wonderful. And every once in a while, I'm lucky to get James Fox in there. Yeah, he's a pretty good writer, isn't he? Wonderful writer. Yeah. Also, James is a friend of mine. And when we were working on the book, it was just, we had a great time. It was not an arduous journey at all. It was a ball. yeah well you talk in your book in your book about and being an editor about wanting to be a kind person and james is a very kind person very kind person it just reminds you that that's really what matters about you know your core value if you can be you know look out for other people then you can go on an adventure and have that sort of drive to get the best story and everything and there's no need to trash anybody along the way it's sort of a trite word the way the word nice is a trite word but it's it's it's it's it's core to to uh somebody you want to spend your life with or somebody you want to be friends with or somebody you want to travel with or work with and it's completely antithetical to sort of the way of leadership is in in many parts of the world especially my own country right now, which is turning its back on America's core values.

50:36And kindness to strangers has been a major part of America's identity over the last 250-odd years. And the Statue of Liberty says it all. Yeah. Bring me your unwashed. And so hopefully it's temporary, but kindness in the micro level matters a lot. It'd be nicer if we had it on the macro level as well. Yeah. That may take a while. I suppose all you can do is invest in your own bits of kindness. You can't control the macro, except every four years at the voting booth. You can control the micro. And you used to have a cultural test quiz. and I wondered what the codes are that you still use. What do you mean a cultural test quiz?