Graydon Carter: The Voice of Vanity Fair

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1:23Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk to some of the brightest minds about everything surrounding the written word. That's everything. That's from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Before we dive in, make sure to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to leave a review. Good or bad, I want to hear from you. I want to hear whether you're enjoying it or where we can improve. And I can take the hits. So let me know. If you don't like something, say it straight. Now let's get into it.

2:06Today, we're stepping into the world of glossy covers, bold headlines, and the golden age of journalism with none other than Graydon Carter. For decades, Graydon led some of the most influential magazines in the world. From co-founding Spy to his legendary run at Vanity Fair, he helped define what sharp, stylish journalism could be. We'll talk about what it meant to shape the national conversation through the printed page. how photography and storytelling created icons, and why the decline of print is about more than just paper. We'll also dive into the politics of publishing, the post-9-11 media landscape, and how Carter's signature events and editorial vision helped create cultural moments that still echo today.

2:53Let's go to the conversation with Graydon.

3:03Well, welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. I am delighted today to have with me Graydon Carter. Graydon Carter is the founder of Airmail, but before that, he was the co-creator of Spy Magazine. He edited The New York Observer, and for 25 years, 25 years, he was the award-winning editor of Vanity Fair. He's also the Emmy and Peabody award-winning producer of more than a dozen documentaries and one hit Broadway show. And Graydon, I have been following your career since I was 22 years old. I bought my first spy magazine on the train from Long Island as I was heading into the city, trying to get myself a job.

3:48And you were probably beating up on Donald Trump at the time, which was actually quite funny. But the book that we're going to talk about today is When The Going Was Good, An Editor's Adventure During the Last Golden Age of Magazines. But how did it all start? You're a Brit, right? But no, first of all, Anthony, I'm so honored to be here with you. And I love your other podcast as well, as you know. No, I'm Canadian. Canadian. Okay. So where did you grow up? In Toronto? Where? I grew up in Ottawa, which is the capital city. It was one of the snowiest, coldest capital cities in the world back when I was growing up.

4:24And strange enough, half our culture came from the United States and half came from Britain with a lot of Canadian hockey thrown in between. And how did you find your way down to New York? Well, I was in college and I was a captain upon this office where a number of young people were with typewriters and they were setting up a literary and political magazine. and the University of Ottawa, they'd given them office space and a grant. And they asked if I would like to join them. I said, sure. And they said, well, we're looking for an art director. And I said, well, I can draw. And they said, great, you're the art director.

5:07And so I don't know if you've ever been involved with a small magazine, but they're bitter little circles of concentric hell. and everything's fighting over everything because the stakes are just unbelievably low. Yeah, well, that's Washington, Graydon. That's Washington. Exactly. That's why they pick each other's eyeballs out because they're tiny stakes. Well, the stakes are higher in Washington than they were at this little magazine. Not for some of these aides. Trump did have a good line. He said to me once, and by the way, he said this to me on a Wednesday, Graydon, and I know because I was only there for one Wednesday.

5:43He said to me, they'll pick your eyeball out with an ice pick. they'll drop it in a martini class and still talk to you like nothing happened. Well, he's doing that now. Well, no, he's a machete. He's got a machete. Yeah. So you – So anyway – Why magazines? Because you're a renaissance man. You've built businesses. Why magazines? Because if you grew up in Ottawa in the 1950s and 60s, magazines told you about the world outside your cold windows. that more so like magazines tell you about the way we live now. Newspapers tell you about the news of the way we live now. And magazines back then like The New Yorker and Esquire and Life and Look were my sort of passports to an outside world.

6:30So I'd never worked in a magazine before. I became the art director of this one, and then gradually I became the editor. And it did nothing but lose money. It wasn't particularly good. Nobody had worked at a magazine before, which was painfully evident to the readers, certainly. But it did get me a job at Time Magazine in New York in 1978 as a writer. And that was the beginning of my life, in a way. But Time in those days was such a dominant magazine. I think there was something like 800 people on the masthead. It had a weekly circulation of 4 million. when I got there there was people like Walter Isaacson Michi Kakutani became the chief book critic of the New York Times Frank Rich who became the New York Times chief theater critic and later a successful producer at HBO of Succession and other shows I mean Evan Thomas who became a famous historian my partner at Spy, Kurt Anderson, my partner at Airmail Alexander Stanley, Maureen Dowd, I mean you could go on and on Do you remember you, Sidi?

7:40Hugh Sidi was the White House correspondent. Yeah, he used to write that column in time about leadership, member presidential leadership. Yes. So I never met him because he was down in D.C. all the time. But anyway, that was my first introduction to New York, and I dreamt of moving here, and I was very excited to be a time among people who were so incredibly smart and talented. it. Well, I grew up out on Long Island. I don't know if you'd recognize the name Publishers Clearinghouse. Of course. Okay. So I grew up about two miles from Publishers Clearinghouse and my best friend from home, his mom was like a clerical assistant there.

8:22And so when I went to college, she gave me a gift. She said, here are 60 magazines. I get the magazines for free. I'm And unfortunately, Playboy and Penthouse were not on the list, Graydon, because you remember that era as well. But anyway, that's how I got introduced. It's iMagazine and Newsweek, Forbes and of course, Vanity Fair and others. And so I'm I'm in your era. You know, I'm a magazine lover to this day. I love holding it in my hands. But but for people that didn't grow up like we did in the magazine era, Give us a little bit of the romanticism of the magazine era in the world. The color, the placement, the pictures, the Demi Moors.

9:15Well, first of all, they were owned by people who loved and operated by people who loved magazines. I worked for Henry Grunewald at Time Magazine and for Cy Newhouse at Vanity Fair. And the magazines were hugely profitable. They were expensive to put out, but hugely profitable. And I had never had an expense account before I came to New York, and it was a life-changing experience. I went five years, though, ever turning on my oven. I mean, I can't cook anyway, so it was just as well. But it was just, it was, you know, and because magazines, they were very much a center of the culture, and they helped not only report on the culture, but drive the culture.

9:58And as a result, they attracted the best and the brightest. What later went to, you know, dot-com startups and to Wall Street came to magazines in those days. And it was exciting to be around such, you know, energetic, intelligent people and to have the wherewithal to do any kind of journalism that you wanted. The sort of the luxuries at Conning Ass were exponentially greater than those at times. and it made very competitive, difficult jobs a lot easier. One of the things about your book for me, as I was going down memory lane, Fran Leibovitz, Donna's in the book, Christopher Hitchens, I mean, he was the man 20 years ago.

10:49Unfortunately, we lost him, a very gifted writer, on a very provocative one. But I see you as a sort of an interior designer and an exterior designer of thought. So just give me a moment, okay? I've been to your restaurants, Waverly Inn. I've been to the Monkey Bar. There's a majesty to those places, but there's also a simplicity. I'm a subscriber to Airmail. I love the way, you know, I look. One of the reasons why I love magazines, I want to see what the editor is doing in terms of the format. Where are the pictures going? Where are the stories going? What's important? The reason I do open book, Graydon, is I'm in love with authors.

11:32I figure if you put countless hours into writing that book, I can spend a few hours reading and learning something from you. But this is a gift that you have. Where did you get this gift? And how do you think about applying it? Well, I'm not sure it's a gift. It's a loose skill that's built up over years. I mean, my job now at Airmail is not appreciably different than when I was the first editor, which was 52 years ago. It's the same job, essentially. It's just I do it a lot better now, and I have skill sets that I didn't have then at all. And then there's sort of like a choir master. You're trying to bring all these disparate voices together in a single issue of something to sort of be in rough harmony with each other.

12:24They could be altos and sopranos and everything, but the fact is you try to work it all out in harmony. and an editor's chief job when he's talking to a writer is to say, Anthony, this is the single most important story you've ever done. And then you go out and you work on that story for two or three months and you come back and we, we line up the, the, the photographs and the research and the legal review and the fact checking. And then we publish it. And then for me to come back to you four months later and say, no, no, no, Anthony, this is the single most important story you've ever done. And that's basically, an editor's job is a lot easier than a writer's job.

13:02But it's a very gratifying career, especially during this incredible period. Yeah, we're going to get to the period in a second, but I want to have a little bit of build up for our audience. Tell us what the Carter pick is. I found that so fascinating. I don't know what that means. Well, in your book, you write about iconic writers. and somebody said to you that if you're picked by Graydon Carter, it's a sign of Graydon. It's almost like an award, if you will. Well, it's fine. We nurtured sort of unknown writers and helped make them stars. At Vanity Fair, most of the writers, because they had to be able to write long stories, sometimes 10 ,000 to 15 ,000 to 20 ,000 words, and that takes great skill and experience, most of the writers were at the very top of their games.

13:56We had so many Pulitzer Prize winners. I had people like David Halberstam and Michael Hare and Sebastian Younger and Maureen Orth and Marie Brenner and, God, I mean, Michael Lewis. I mean, it was incredible. And then I had incredible essayists like Christopher Hitchens and Gore Vidal and James Walcott. And then I had a stable of photographers. It was probably unmatched since the glory days of Life magazine. I had, you know, Annie Leibovitz and Helmut Newton and Bruce Weber. And so, you know, as I got comfortable in the job, I learned what I could do with all this talent. Well, I mean, I guess for me, the frustrating thing for me today is that the gas is down in the tank for magazines.

14:48we see them in the newsstands very few people are reading them as much I have to confess to you that if I'm reading a magazine it's likely on my Kindle or it's on my iPad it's no longer it's no longer there for me and what did we lose Graydon by that because you know I'm sure somebody said as the horseless carriage was coming into vogue that we lost something right and I'm sure somebody said that we lost something in fifth avenue new york when the gilded age ended what did we lose well you know it's funny because magazines they they were very much not a reflection of the culture but you know the big ones really drove the culture i remember you know in 19 and mid 1970s both time and newsweek put bruce fierce bruce springsteen on their covers the same week which is a big faux pas in newsweekly right it's It's like two women wearing the same dress to a Grading Carter Vanity Fair Oscar party.

15:50A thousand times worse. So, but it's so, and it, and you know, the fact is after the financial crash in New York, certainly we lost newsstands. There used to be major newsstands at every single intersection, sometimes two of them. They were often mom and pop operations run by veterans. And after 2008, it just became harder and harder for them. And now and also every office building had a had a newsstand in it. Now they sell, you know, lottoes and gum. And when you see a proper news kiosk in New York City, it's like a like a movie set. It's like something out of a Nora Ephron film. And they're so rare now.

16:34Well, I you know, my old boss, when I worked at Goldman, this is 30 years ago, he had a picture in his office that he continually updated. And it was a newsstand. And so he had gotten to Goldman Sachs in the 1950s and took a picture of the newsstand. And there, you know, there were. OK, why did he do this? Because he was in love with New York. He saw that as a zeitgeist, as a representation of the city and its culture. And so literally you would see that, you know, the 1950s pictures, Graydon, were like clothes pins, clothes pins hanging up the photo play. And chewing gum and packs of cigarettes.

17:14And then and as he you know, as he got into the 80s, you could see the evolution. But you were in what you call the golden age. And I believe it was the golden age because it was a proliferation of talent, volume and interest. And both of us are old enough to know when life died. You know, it was sort of like December of 1972, life died. And I remember my parents being saddened by that. But little did they know that they were coming into a golden age. So describe the fever that you so eloquently do in the book. Well, one of the things, so what, say, streaming services and podcasts are now, magazines were then, that they attracted a lot of the dominant literary and journalistic talent.

18:09They were evident everywhere because of newsstands, even in cities that were not as large as New York's. And they were, you know, they were available all across the country. Vanity Fair was available all around the world in the same form. And if you were living in Paris, Vanity Fair would give you the worldview of editors operating out of New York City. And because New York is New York in the center of everything, at least certainly to us, that it had exponential influence and weight. And they were thick. They were great value. You know, you just pay, I can't remember what you used to pay for a copy of Antifair, like$5,$6.

18:54But some of our issues would be 450 pages thick with 150 pages of editorial and 300 pages of advertising. And the advertisers, you know, they paid dearly to be on the magazine. They paid upwards of$100 ,000 a page. It was profitable. And, yeah, we had outsized influence. I mean, there were major newspapers like The Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. But magazines had a special place. And they still do in a way. I think that The Atlantic and New York and The New Yorker are still very strong. And The Economist, you would never know there was a recession of picking up a copy of The Economist.

19:40So it's still there. You just need owners who care about what they make and who are willing to invest in the product they make. Yeah, but it's different. Honestly, it's different because I get The Economist on my tablet. I used to remember the smell of Vanity Fair, the ink, and I remember the freshness of it in my hands. Well, and the perfume ads. And the perfume ads. You don't put on the paint. Exactly. all of that stuff, even the Armani masculine cologne ads. But the thing you did, which I know you're aware of, but I'm just going to say it out loud to you. For a younger person, me in the 1980s when I was in my mid-20s, I had no idea what the Allen and Comforty conference was.

20:28You taught me that. I had no idea what the establishment was and that there was a need for a new establishment. Remember, I like you, I'm an outsider. I grew up in a blue collar family out here on Long Island. And I sort of felt like when I picked up Vanity Fair, you were scaling me into a different, you know, almost like a different electron orbit than I was in. Were you aware that you were doing that for some of us or you you what was the genesis of the editorial ideas? You know, if I was in Canada at exactly the same day in the 1980s and same age as you, I would have felt exactly the same way about Vanity Fair.

21:10And I think that I didn't have that most of the time. I'll be honest. It wasn't about, you know, crafting the great magazine or anything like that. It was just desperately holding trying to hold on to my job. I have five kids. And I'm also a golden age is the golden age because there's a lot of competition. When when the Hollywood had its golden age, you know, Columbia, Paramount, Fox, you know, MGM, they were all phenomenal in those days. So during the magazine golden age, which probably stretched from the 1970s through the end of the aughts, you know, everything was good. Gardening magazines, good.

21:50Cooking magazines were good. Sports Illustrated was an incredible magazine. ESPN magazine was an incredible magazine. So you just had a lot of competition. So there was never a moment where you could sit back and say, oh, God, we did it. It's all good. A couple of real iconic pictures that I want to ask you about. So the one was the Demi Moore picture. Before my time. That was just before my time. But I thought when she was painted, that was your time. No, that wasn't my time. No. Still before your time. OK. Yeah. Before my time. The night that was 91, the Demi Moore naked picture. Yes. And I came in 92.

22:29And I had a rough. I'll be honest. I had a rough first couple of years because we had at Spy Magazine. We'd made a lot of fun of the of the of the writers at Vanity Fair, of the editor of Vanity Fair. And you wrote about it in the book that you had a rough start. The Tina Brown loyalists were sort of pissed at you, right? Well, I didn't fire anybody at first. I wanted to see if I could bring them around to my way of working and thinking. And I like a drama-free office. I like people to work together and to respect each other's talents and to say please and thank you. And so for the first two years, it was pretty grim.

23:08I wouldn't even bring my children into the office. but I finally zeroed it and most of the leftover staff was um basically there just to like um report my inadequacies uh to the outside world at dinner parties around New York and and they did and and uh so but it and one week after being there for two years and I'd only fired I think one person before in my life I fired three troublemakers on one in one week and then When things started changing, the office became more collegial and cordial, and we all worked together basically hand in hand for the next 23 years. We didn't – we lost almost no major senior staff members during that period.

23:51Well, I mean, listen, I – you know, I – it's funny you say that because when you're merging or you're joining a new entity, you've got to get either the culture right or you've got to replace parts of the culture. I bought a company sort of a division I should say from Citibank and the good news is the senior guys are still with me 15 years later a couple of people unfortunately we had to remove so I totally get it talk about Annie Leibovitz for a second, how would you describe Annie and I got to tell you a funny story if you don't mind I met Annie through Bill Maher so I was on the Bill Maher show Bill and I owned a piece of the Mets together after I was summarily fired from the Trump White House Trump.

24:33OK. Yeah. So Bill and I, you know, you know, he was calling me Tony Soprano on the Potomac. I think he called me a Jersey Shore cast member. But, you know, people I didn't mind. I mean, I mean, I was getting lit up on Saturday Night Live. But I took the opposite approach of everybody. I just went on all the shows. I leaned into it. And Bill and I developed a friendship. We invited Andy Leibowitz to the suite together. We're at at the at City Field. and uh and even though i had already rebuffed trump at this point the fact that i was once with trump i had a cancelization uh on my forehead she really had nothing no bid for me i think she's a die-hard democrat yeah even though even though i was serving hot dogs and corned beef and all kinds of she had no bid for me but i think she's one and i mean this sincerely i think she's one of the most talented people uh out there so tell us about your relationship with her and some of the some of the art that she did and she was one of the great photography art i should say oh my god she's one of the great assets uh um uh of the magazine probably the greatest asset and i'm you know when i did we eventually invented two tentpole issues one the hollywood issue which was cy newhouse's idea actually not mine in fact i resented it first and the second the new establishment issue, which came out in the fall.

25:56And that was largely David Halberstam's idea. So, but I had this incredible asset in Annie Leavitz to be able to photograph what we were trying to tell orally and on the page. We, you know, we, a great magazine is a combination of words and images. And Annie was our principal photographer and she can, she can shoot sort of middle-aged white men and make them look much more epic than they really are, which was a great advantage. And eventually, you know, having your portrait taken by Annie was a, was a symbol of achievement in America, the way being painted by Van Dyke was in, in, in, in previous centuries.

26:40And she, she, you know, I, you know, I watched, it took a while for her to do to get it, come around to shooting group shots. I love group shots. They sort of tell you the history of something at a time. And at first she resisted. She thought it was a sort of cheap trick. But then she got into it. And to watch her craft a Hollywood cover, because you'd have sort of 11 people, and she would have been preparing for two or three days beforehand. And she would have people roughly the same size as the cover subjects, wearing roughly the same coloring clothing. And she would light it and pose it and get it all constructed the way the old masters did.

27:21so that by the time the subjects came in for the photo shoot, she had it all figured out. It wasn't all of a sudden, you know, putting the tall people in the back row and the short people in the front row. And it didn't always go smoothly. One point we wanted to, I wanted to shoot all the living Bond girls. And so we, this took about three months to pull together, and we managed to get them all. We were missing one, and it was, this French actress named Claudine Angers, and I don't know if you remember, but she shot her husband, a very famous American Olympic skier named Spider Savage, and she was a big thing at the time, but I thought, oh no, we have to have her, and so the woman who works with Jane at the magazine, Jane Sarkin, works with Annie at the magazine, Jane Sarkin, she said, okay, I finally found her, but she wants to be flown over by the Concorde, and she wants to stay at the Carlisle.

28:19I thought, God, we've worked on this for four months. We've spent so much money on it anyway. I thought, okay, let's do that. So we fly her over in the Concorde. We put her up at the Carlisle. The day of the shoot, Jane comes into my office and said, she won't leave her hotel room. I said, you've got to be kidding me. And she said, no, no. She said, no, she refuses to come out. I said, look, we need Claudine Angers for this shoot to make it complete. She goes, wait me claudine angers no no no this woman's claudine langer so we had this is a different actress this is a woman with her this is also a french actress but it wasn't the one we were looking for and so i said we so we found this woman across the atlantic i said you've got to tell her she's going to have to check out at the end of the day and we'll fly her back business class to to paris So they don't always go smoothly, but we, over the decades, we've produced some amazing group shots.

29:38on your first campaign and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Get started today at linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. Tuesday on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozema St. John host the highly anticipated new competition show. I hired 10 creatives from all walks of life. They will be battling it out to see who can impress the world's biggest brands. This is a huge opportunity. This is the battle for the next big idea. This is not play play we're spending millions of dollars i'm so excited to embark on this adventure with all of you make the best idea win on brand with jimmy fallon series premiere tuesday on nbc well i mean no i want to talk about one of you don't mind because uh based on my experience the annie lebowitz the picture that she took of the bush administration which i think is probably one of their most famous pictures okay and this was uh i think the title of the article was the Path to War.