Graydon Carter

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0:10Hey everybody, thanks for joining us today on Table for Two. I'm Bruce and we are in my hometown, NYC, at Via Corotta. We're going to order some lunch. Okay. I mean, I know usually what I get. I had Via Corotta last night. Today, we're having lunch with a man who has come out with his memoir called when the going was good and editors adventures during the last golden age of magazines. Mr. Graydon Carter. I'm going to do the beet salad and the chicken. Okay, I'll have the gnocchi and I might have the fungi. I think it was the best restaurant in New York. You do? That's a big thing coming from you.

0:53So, pull up a chair, grab a glass of rosé, and enjoy. I'm Bruce Bozzi, and this is my podcast, Table for Two.

1:11So, if you pulled up a chair today on Table for Two, we were sitting with the man himself, Mr. Graydon Carter. Graydon's come out with a book, which, Graydon, it's a great memoir. It really is. When the going was good in editor's adventures during the last golden age of magazines. not only because I actually saw my name in it, which blew me away. I guess my first question is, why is this the time for you to tell your story? Do you think? Oh, no, it happened completely by accident. I was having lunch with a friend of mine, James Fox, a great journalist who wrote the book White Mischief and worked with Keith Richards on his memoir, Life, which was a huge bestseller.

1:52And he said, if I ever decided to do a memoir, that he would help me. And I'd never even thought of it up to that point. And then I was approached by Bob Barnett, who's a lawyer at Williams and Connolly, but he also represents authors. He represents presidents and popes. He represented the Clintons, the Obamas, and he's Bob Woodward's agent. And so he said he would love to represent me. And so I coupled together a proposal, I thought. I retired from Banning Fair. I had a little bit more time on my hands. And it made me think that I realized that as I sort of did the proposal that I had lived through this incredible golden age of magazines that was very sort of glamorous and fun, but you could do great work and great journalism.

2:53and James was invaluable because he knew how to organize. He was helpful in organizing the book and he would talk to some of my ex-employees because I was really old colleagues because I was sort of too embarrassed to say, can we talk about me and this way he could do that. And then he sort of guided me through the process. I worked on it with him in the south of France, in New York, in Connecticut, and in London. It's interesting because when you know that you worked on it with someone and you're such a great writer and your letters always in, you know, the editor's letters were so great that one would, but now I understand too because it is a sort of weird thing to not only formulate it and put it together but ask people for things, working with someone that you trust.

3:39Well, also, he would tell me what's boring and what's not. What's not boring. And hopefully we left the non-boring stuff out as much as possible. He really did. Also, I like having a partner, quite frankly. I'm not that sort of solitary writer and a Garrett sort of person. and I adore his company, and it made it a lot more fun than if I had done it just myself. A lot more fun. Having grown up, and I used to save all my Vanity Fairers, I still have a big stack of them because the covers were so great, the articles were so great. I mean, you created something. Because everything always sort of reveals itself.

4:11When did you start to smell the discontent or the age was ending? Well, the Internet. And the internet and the financial crash of 2008 really caused magazines a great deal of trouble. The internet sort of gobbled the weeklies first, and it was slower to get to the monthlies. But then at the same time, the financial crash had dried up a lot of advertising pages. We didn't suffer that much because I had a very close connection to my advertisers. I wrote thank you notes every month. but then the uh the newsstand just started disappearing and um in new york you know every major street corner had either one or two newsstands on them uh and now when you see a newsstand on a street corner in new york you think it's like a part of a movie set um so and every every building every office building in new york had a newsstand in the lobby and now if they do they sell gum and lotto tickets but there's no magazines in fact when we moved to One World Trade Center when Connie Nast moved there.

5:18I don't think anybody thought to ask for a newsstand in the lobby. There wasn't one. We had to send somebody to Times Square to get a magazine. There was a so-called efficiency move afoot that would combine all half of my staff into a group run by Anna Wintour. And I thought I'd worked with these people for 25 years. They were key to the magazine. That was the art direction staff, the photo staff the fact checking staff and the legal staff and I thought I couldn't possibly work that way without the regular people I had because they knew like the fact checkers and the researchers they knew every writer's strengths and weaknesses and they were the ones who kept us out of you know court or libel actions so yeah and so you know when Anna tried to take home half my staff that and I don't I mean I don't blame her in any way but it just that sort of marked the end for me.

6:13And then my wife Anna had been pestering me to retire. And so I thought I was coming up to 25 years. I thought that's a nice tidy number. So she went ahead and rented a house in the south of France that sort of finalized the whole thing because it started in December. And my last day was, I think, sometime in November. And three days later, we were on a flight to Europe. Isn't that amazing? How did it feel after 25 years? And I want to really go through sort of the editorial. Like, you know, I would love for you to explain what the editor does. And you were. It's not that much. But go ahead. I'll do my best.

6:53I don't know about that with your magazine because your magazine was so curated. It's so perfectly and so beautiful. But when you woke up in France after 25 years, did it feel like, oh, okay. It was like I have not missed a single thing. It's funny. I thought I'd missed having a car and driver, but they invented this thing called Uber. So that took care of that. And I miss not seeing my colleagues when I was over there. But airmail is staffed with old Vanity Fair hands. And I see all my colleagues on a regular basis. So I don't now miss them because I see them. And it was like losing like 50 pounds overnight.

7:38I felt healthier. Running a big magazine like that is a lot of stress. And I felt immensely relieved when it was over. And I could wake up in my own hours. I got about 2 ,000 letters after I retired. And I took a couple of months and answered every single one of them. Wow. I mean, well, that's reflective. The success, I think, of Vanity Fair and of you, and I kind of want to go a little bit back in your life, is why the parties were something, why you is the attention to detail and the level of elegance and respect that you make sure. You have an aesthetic that sort of, I mean, you're from Ottawa, you're from Canada, you have an incredible restaurant here in New York called Waverly, the Waverly Inn, and it's beautiful in the foot.

8:33How did you sort of develop this aesthetic from being a kid from Ottawa who worked in the, I mean, the early years of your life were tough. They weren't that tough. I mean, my parents, I sent my parents, a lot of my parents' friends, they sent their sons off to work somewhere out in the West Coast, either on the oil fields or the railroad to toughen them up before they started college and got on with their lives. and I worked for six months for the Canadian National Railroad out in the prairie as a lineman and I lived in a boxcar with 11 men, many of whom had criminal records, some minor, some slightly less so, and I adored these guys and I had a great time and it taught me a ton.

9:20First of all, I got over my fear of heights because you had to climb first 20-foot telegraph holes and then 30-foot ones. and it was hard labor, and it was really enjoyable, and I felt an enormous sense of accomplishment. So it did toughen me up. I came back with muscles I didn't know I had, all of which are probably gone now. But I felt, okay, I'm done with that, and now it's time to get on with an adult life. And I care about little things because I just do. And so I spent, you know, I had a magazine in college that was a literary political magazine. And I used to spend hours and hours and hours there.

10:07I'd spend sometimes 18 hours a day. The Canadian Review. The Canadian Review. And it was not very good. It was a magazine put up by a bunch of young people who had never worked at a magazine before. And what was in it? Was it like articles, poems? It was like a very bad collegiate version of Harper's or The Atlantic. Okay. And it just never did anything but lose money. And Canadians, like the Canadian writers, produced poetry at an incredible volume. And so I hate contemporary poetry, or not all of it, but I hate most of it. At least the stuff that was being sent to me. And I used to just, at one point, the staff found, caught me.

10:50They were very big on poetry, and they caught me shoveling a load of recent submissions into the wastebasket one day, and they revolted en masse, and I had to bring in a new staff. And how old were you at this point? I was like 20. And it was constant infighting, and you have no idea the level of infighting in a small magazine. and but you know we eventually sold it to our closest competitor and it got me a job at Time Magazine.

11:34You talk about New York at a time where I was growing up in New York and was in the 70s was in elementary school, but ending by 14. So hitting 1980 to 15. And New York truly was, and I think at any stage you were in, a magical place in the 70s. It just was. I agree. Explain what New York was to you because you really came, and again, impressive, the tweed blazer that you're sweating your ass off and you're trying to have a dime in your pocket for a phone call. Yeah, I didn't have New York clothes. I didn't have, you know, like, you know, seersucker suits or anything like that because Canada is much colder.

12:15And I didn't have to wear a suit that much. I only had a huge, thick tweed jacket and a huge, thick blue blazer. And I just loved, I was so excited to be in New York. As you know, there were burned out cars. There was prostitutes everywhere. There was drugs everywhere. It was like crime infested. But I've never been more excited. I know. And, you know, also when you look back, New York was sort of more freewheeling than it is now. Oh, not even, no comparison. No comparison. And, I mean, I appreciate that it's less freewheeling now that I'm older. I wouldn't want it to be like the 70s again, for sure.

12:56I mean, my rent was$200 a month for an apartment not far from here. Shoe and gum was 10 cents, 20. I mean, I know it sounds. Well, across the country, I'm sure. Right. Well, it's the thing that... There would probably be a nickel everywhere else. Probably. You could go to a movie for two bucks. I mean, you could go out and have a full dinner movie experience for 20 bucks. That was me at that time. But more so, it was like anything could happen. And anyone who has lived through that, who I've spoken to, it's not like we're glamorizing something. we're just appreciating sort of the, I think, something that you are so good at, the authenticity of what it was.

13:40And how did those years, I think they really do influence you in time, life, spy, to then get to Vanity Fair. Because you go from satirical to sartorial. So it's an interesting, at some point, you made a shift in something. well I mean as you get older and as you get paid a little more you can dress a little better and so and I have to love clothes I'm not interested in fashion that much at all but I really love clothes and also clothes I don't know putting on a beautiful suit in the morning makes you feel better about the entire day I agree and so no it just everything was sort of gradual and I was so just happy to be in New York and there was a I'm reviewing the Washington Post with a critic really funny she compared me to Buddy in Elf and I thought A that's really offensive B it's really funny and C it's really accurate that's one of the great facets of your personality when you read this book too is you find when it's bad but then you're like but you know what I really that was really funny okay Canadians are very happy people look at the Canadians that you probably know in New York Martin Short Catherine O 'Hara they're really happy people they're very affable and it's not a just a surface happiness they're happy and I think they're especially happy to be in America other than we've got an issue right now up until the last couple of months

15:40Welcome back to Table for Two. After writing for Time and then Life magazine, our guest Graydon Carter co-founded Spy, a satirical magazine that ran for 12 years. What inspired him to make the leap? What kind of gave you the cojones to say, now I'm going back out on my own? Well, having had a magazine in college, I knew how to make a magazine. I didn't know how to make a good magazine yet, but I knew the elements of making a magazine. And so I teamed up when I was at life. I was a little bored. The city had come out of that 70s period. burned out cars had been towed away less drugs and prostitution and all of a sudden the city was awash with investment bankers right and money and ladies who lunch and people like Donald Trump and Leona Helmsley right the Steinberg saw Steinberg that whole Godfrey whole shebang so so it it was accidentally really good timing and so I teamed up with Kurt Anderson who I'd met at Time Magazine and Over a nine-month period, he would come up to my office at Life every day, and we'd work on a proposal for a magazine called Spy, which would be a funny journalistic magazine about New York City.

17:06And then we raised the money, and we both left our jobs, and it was a shockingly big hit at the time. Yeah. So when you're sitting with one another, and you're now putting together the issue, how did you target the person that you're like, okay? Didn't target anybody other than we just tried to make each other laugh. Really? And we thought if we laugh, other people will too. Right, right. And the covers were quite interesting. They were good. We had no money, but we did our best with covers. And sometimes we had very primitive versions of Photoshop. But we attracted a number of good photographers to shoot the covers.

17:45and we did the covers in the way that Lauren did Saturday Night Live in the early days. We thought we were sort of not ready for prime time, but we wanted people on the covers to be like the guest stars on Saturday Night Live that the reader would recognize the people on the cover, if not necessarily in the early stages, the writers of the magazine. So we had like, Chris Elliott was on our famous cover. People who don't know Chris Elliott, he was a big thing on David Lundgren. Chris Elliott, who is so funny. Very funny. So then, because really it's the road to Vanity Fair that I think probably pivots your whole life in this way, and you leave that room.

18:31It seems like you're leaving a room and coming into another room of now elevating the people in a way that you are now satirizing. No, just writing in a straightforward way, but there was a, after we sold Spy after five years to, excuse me, Johnny Pagazzi and Charles Sackett. And then I went and edited the New York Observer. It was a very sleepy Upper East Side broadsheet. It was salmon colored. It had sort of New York Times type faces on the front page. after about six months it caught on and I started sending complimentary copies to friends of mine a lot of them were editors in Europe and then Cy Newhouse who made a twice yearly trip to all his properties in Europe you know Vogue and Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and Details and GQ and Architectural Digest and a dozen other magazines So he would go to London, Paris, Milan, where their offices were in Europe.

19:38And at one point, everywhere he went, he'd see a copy of the New York Observer in the editors' inboxes. And he came back thinking that the paper was this international success. I mean, it wasn't. I was sending them copies. But it was a success in New York. And so he asked me if I'd like to get together. And I'd met him previously. Santa Winter had introduced me to him. And so I went to his apartment, and he said, like, I wonder if you'd be interested in one or two of the magazines. And I said, all ears. And he said, either The New Yorker or Vanity Fair. And I thought, oh, my God. So we had made religious fun of Vanity Fair, both the writing style, the editors, some of the contributors.

20:30and I thought, so he said, well, let's do The New Yorker then. And so I worked on a plan for The New Yorker. And then two weeks before, no, the day was supposed to be announced. This was about two weeks after he'd offered it to me. So the day was supposed to be announced. Anna Winter calls me up and says, it's going to be the other magazine. So I said, okay, okay. And by that time, you know, I had no plan for Vanity Fair. but I felt that after he offered me the job and I accepted that I had to get to work right away otherwise he wouldn't pay me and I had three kids at that point and another one on the way so I went to work right away without a plan and so it took me a full two years to get to pull together issues that I wanted rather than ones I could just get my hands on stories and photographs I could get my hands on and also there was a number of people leftover from the old regime who delighted in spreading tales of my incompetency and inadequacies around town at dinner parties.

21:39And I finally, I tried to work with them for two years to bring them around to my way of thinking the way I like to work, but I just couldn't. And so one day, one week, I went into the office and on successive days, I got rid of all three of these troublemakers. and then things just changed. I got people to, I don't like drama at the office and I got people to work together in a collegial way rather than a combative way. I believe you get the most out of people by treating them with great respect and allowing them their dignity. So by the end of that second year, people were saying please and thank you and working together and being collegial and having great respect for the other person's talents and abilities.

22:21and that's the way it was for the next 23 years. I mean, it's really amazing because when I recall seeing, as a young person, Vanity Fair pre-U, it seemed like a very old magazine, like that was, because that had been, it had quite a history. I don't know when it began as a magazine. It started in 1913. Yeah. It went to 1936 and was closed by Connie Nass, who was a person, not two names jammed together. Right. And he closed it in 1936. I know that. Kondi Nass was a person. It was a person. And so it was very much a magazine for the smart set, as was The New Yorker, and stayed too frivolous in the 1930s as the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe and folded in 1936.

23:07It was blended into Vogue magazine. Whereas The New Yorker really cut its teeth during World War II with great reportage, and that's what made The New Yorker. World War II is when the New Yorker became what we think of as the New Yorker. And so, yeah, so it had an illustrious history, and it was very much, it was the biggest launch of the last 40 years in New York City. It was a huge thing when Cy relaunched it.

23:45It had such style. So you brought your sensibility to that. And when did you start to understand you were shifting actual culture? Well, I never quite felt that. But inside the magazine was a magazine of great journalism, great sort of narrative stories that could run from 10 ,000 to 20 ,000 words. But the cover is basically the wrapping. And unlike Vogue and GQ and Architectural Digest, say, that have different editions in every country in the world, There was one edition of Vanity Fair that we produced here in New York, and it went around the world. So I had to come up with cover ideas that appealed to possible newsstand buyers in India and Australia and America.

24:31And the common currency of the global newsstand then were movie stars. So I wanted people to be on the cover who I thought would have long shelf lives, so we would look smart in having chosen them. And movies started so far because, first of all, they're much better looking than we are. And so if you're going to have it on a newsstand and then on your coffee table, much better to have somebody who's really nice looking rather than somebody who's not so nice looking. Right, right. It's true, which is why I still have so many of you about any fair. And I switch who sits on the top. I think right now when I left, it was Brad Pitt.

25:12Well, if you could get Brad Pitt and George Clooney and Julia Roberts every single month, that would have been a success. And it was a success. You know, one of the things that was happening at the time, and I remember this, you know, and I remember when the Oscars were in March. And I could remember Swifty Lazar, who was like a massive agent in Los Angeles, doing his dinner, doing those parties at Spago. He invented the Oscar party. He invented it. So Swifty dies in December. you're like what sort of clicks that you have not only four months to do this in roughly three months to do it and three and a half to say okay this is we have to own this and how did you get to that place well it wasn't it wasn't that certain he invited me to what turned out to be his last Oscar party and since I didn't know many people I had a good chance to sort of see how he did things for the Swift he had an A room and a B room Spaga was divided in two.

26:13And he, the A room was for like the Gregory Pax and the Jimmy Stewart's and all the rest. But then the B room was for people like me. And I thought, okay, so if I, and he paroled, he paroled around the perimeter and like made sure people were sitting in their seats. They couldn't take bathroom breaks. And he would scream at you if you were talking too much. So I thought, okay, when he dies in December, and I thought, we could do this, you know? But I had a number of rules. First of all, I want only one room, no A-B delineation. And in those days, big dinners or parties, there was often an area off on the side that was roped off with a velvet rope where the VIP sat.

27:00And I thought, I'm not having any of that. Once you get in, everybody's the same. It will probably make it pretty difficult to get in. but I wanted a sort of democratic celebrity Serengeti once you got in. And so we did the first Oscar party and we did it at Morton's, not Morton's Steakhouse, but Morton's Restaurant in LA, which was then sort of the power restaurant. And like you said, Monday nights. Monday night. This is when the Oscars were on Monday. And it was a single room. And so we started small because I thought we could really mess this up and I didn't want a lot of witnesses to our fiasco.

27:39But we had 150 people for dinner and then about 150, 200 people who came after the Oscars. And it was successful. And so the next year got a little bigger and sort of more popular. Then it became very difficult to limit the number of people coming because there were so many people who wanted to come. But we would have the Beverly Hills Fire Marshal would stand outside the door with a clicker. And once you hit a certain number of people inside, he would stop the entries. So we had to tier people at what time they came, hoping that the earlier people would have, by that time, left. And then we had a, if you had an Oscar, we had a sort of speed lane, an HOV lane.

28:26And so the Oscar got you immediately. There's a party planner here in New York called Bronson Van Witt. Yes. and he said he he told me much later that he went he bought he bought he bought an Oscar at a pawn shop in the valley and just used it to whisk right in that that speedway when I read that I was very respectful of him for that I mean you liked one of the things about you is like you like mischief I do like mischief you like mischief yes and in that party like that if you're clever like that I'm fine with that I mean I'm not fine with like Harvey Weinstein showing up with like no seven ladies of the night saying, you know.

29:05And mistreating your staff and mistreating Sarah Marks. You treat the staff badly, you never come back. Right. Well, that's the hospitality gene that I think you both share. Yes. Yeah, that's like, no, no, no. No, no, no. So Harvey was lucky to last as long as he didn't, so he finally got the big boot. It is.

29:30you also talk there's a funny story about Courtney Love who mistreated Sarah Marks who figured out because you though you kicked her out I didn't kick her out you didn't she wanted she said she came up to me during the party and she said great you gotta let my manager in her manager's a very famous guy in Hollywood now but I won't say his name She said, he's got my keys, he's got my wallet, he's got my drugs. I said, look, I just can't deal with this right now. There's Sarah Marks over there. Why don't you go ask her? I knew what the answer was. So explain to everyone listening to Sarah Marks.

30:01Sarah Marks is a fucking genius. Okay, she was the person who sort of ran the Oscar party, the build-out of whatever we had to do. She worked with my architect, Basil Walter. She brought in the Rolling Stones lighting manager, Patrick Woodruff, to do the lighting because movie stars like good lighting. And so she sort of basically was the employee in charge of the team, in charge of the Oscar party. And Sarah, she's a much tougher nut than I am. I mean, I was scared of her for so many years. I have fallen in love with her. I just saw her recently, and I can't get up for years. No, no, no, she terrified me.

30:40People would ask. My kids found it really funny when people would come up to me and ask me if I had any pull with her. and so I said go talk to Sarah Marks I knew what Sarah was going to say she was going to say no and so Courtney I see her go out and she goes out where all these banks of photographers from all over the world and film cameras and we broadcast the arrivals inside the room where the television sets were when the Oscars were on so she goes out there and she says I've got an important announcement to make so all the cameras turn on her she says that's Courtney Love she's standing there you can see it Everybody inside the room can hear and see this.