Graydon Carter Has “Never Been Happier”

Since this seems to be the season for sharing personal accounts of working under Graydon Carter during his fabled tenure at Vanity Fair (1992–2017) — all in celebration of the editor’s new memoir, When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines, out March 25 from Penguin Press — let me humbly offer my own.

This is not another story of a Vanity Fair writer earning a half-million dollars to file three stories a year, which they’d report while living for months at a time at the world’s finest hotels. If only. Rather, it’s the story of a young, perhaps stupidly ambitious aspiring writer, freshly relocated to Manhattan from my hometown of Montreal, Canada.

In 1997, out of sheer desperation, I wrote a letter to Carter — the big boss at my dream magazine. In it, I made sure to stress common ground (our mutual Canadian-ness) and brazenly asked for a job. I addressed it to “Graydon Carter c/o Vanity Fair” and dropped it into an East Village mailbox, expecting nothing to come of it.

Several months later, I received a phone call about a stringer opening, basically a paid intern position, at Vanity Fair.

Someone — in my mind it was Carter, but it was probably an assistant — had read the letter and passed it along for consideration. Before long, I had been granted the keys to Disneyland, marching in each morning with the rest of Condé Nast rank-and-file.

Throughout my time at Vanity Fair, I never met or made eye contact with Carter, who I only caught fleeting glimpses of as he strode into his sprawling corner office.

My duties typically involved being sent to the nearby New York Public Library to hunt down some faint memory scratching at Carter’s brain. For example, I spent several days trying to locate the work of a cartoonist (name forgotten) in a turn-of-the-century satire magazine — I believe it was Puck — that amounted to nothing.

There were the expected menial tasks, though this being Vanity Fair in its heyday, nothing was ever quite menial. I had to call a distribution list to find out where to send out that year’s Hollywood Issue. Billy Wilder answered. We had a lovely chat.

I typically hung with the fact checkers at lunch, all of whom had designs on something else. I remember one telling me he’d gotten his Frasier spec script to “the right people at Paramount” via “internal pouch,” which made me think of a kangaroo.

By then, they’d accepted me as one of their own and inducted me into their mysterious, fact-checking ways. Pretty soon I got a job as a fact checker at House & Garden — same building, different floor — and my Vanity Fair era had come to an end.

By 2000, the fabled, Frank Gehry-designed Condé Nast cafeteria opened its doors — but that’s a tale for another time. The point is, Carter (or his assistant, which is really an extension of the man when you think about it) did not toss my letter in the garbage with disgust. He gave me my first break — and for that I will be forever grateful.

I finally got to tell him that story when I broke the news of his memoir in September. To my relief, he did not hang up and block me but seemed rather delighted by my tale.

I have since read the memoir — it’s everything one would hope it to be — and recently had the opportunity to sit with Carter, now 75, for a probing exchange about everything from Donald Trump’s war on our beloved homeland to nearly-averted Harvey Weinstein fisticuffs to Gwyneth Paltrow’s vaginal jade eggs.

It’s a full-circle moment if there ever was one.

Graydon, when you first got to Vanity Fair, you fired some very toxic staffers. You told them, “The trouble is, you’ve confused politeness for weakness.” That seems to me a very Canadian thing to say.

100 percent. Don’t let the affable exterior make you think that you’ve got a weak opponent. Canadians are very strong. They’re very strong inside. They may be charming on the outside, but there’s an inner steel there.

I’m curious, then, what you make of Donald Trump’s ongoing hostilities towards our native land.

First of all, Canada is probably the best neighbor you’d ever want. We’re just a wonderful trading partner and neighbor. I find it so awkward to be in New York at this time when the president is attacking the country I love. I think Canadians have handled it brilliantly. Rob Ford, the premier of Ontario, I thought his response was terrific. And I actually thought Justin Trudeau’s response was terrific, too.

What is the Vanity Fair story you’re most proud of — your greatest scoop?

The Deep Throat exposé [in which the magazine revealed W. Mark Felt to be the legendary Watergate informant] was a big thing because it took two years to pull together. If you’re a journalist, it was one of the great mysteries of our profession. We played a long game at Vanity Fair. Very few publications today could afford to spend two years on a single story. But there were a lot of wonderful stories. I’m proud of the group I brought together. We were very collegial. We all had dinners together. It was a very sociable place.

You go deep into the Vanity Fair Oscar party. There are some amazing stories in the book — like the time Adrien Brody, this year’s best actor winner, tried to make off with a table lamp.

They were these very heavy brass table lamps that are electrified. I made a joke about it. He was very funny about it. I was thrilled to see him win. And he is a complete gentleman. The fact is, his mother had taken photographs for us at Spy magazine, [which I launched prior to Vanity Fair]. She was previously a photographer for The Village Voice. And there she was in the audience the other night! He had a good, New York head.

He just has sticky fingers.

Like anyone with a good, New York head.

Did you have a favorite this year?

Other than Conclave, I haven’t seen a single film. I haven’t watched the Oscars for seven years.

And why is that? Has it something to do with leaving Vanity Fair?

It’s partly the PTSD from doing those parties all those years. And [my wife and I] were living in France off-and-on for the last six years. The Oscars were on at 1:00 a.m. and I just wasn’t going to stay up for them. I read about them in the next day in the papers.

One of the things I most fondly remember about my time at Vanity Fair is that around Oscar season, we would be invited to the conference room to watch all the nominated films — back then screened on VHS. Lunch was provided. I remember watching Geoffrey Rush in Shine, for which he won best actor. It was first time I worked somewhere that really honored movies and wanted everyone to take them seriously.

Back then, I made sure I did watch all the major films. I wanted to make sure that I was up to speed for the evening. I still watch movies, but I’ve just been busy. I prefer great TV series instead. I’m watching The White Lotus and we’re about to watch The Leopard. TV is great right now. It appeals more to people my age than films do. Films are for young people. [You go on] dates and stuff. I’m not young anymore.

Another great story from the Oscar parties, and I think this one has evolved over time into something of an urban legend, is where you and Harvey Weinstein beat each other to a pulp. But the book tells a different story.

It was a couple of nights before the Oscar party, actually, and I was with my friends, [Scrooged screenwriter] Mitch Glazer and [his wife and Cocktail star] Kelly Lynch. We’re at a restaurant owned by [Madonna’s late brother] Christopher Ciccone. I think it was called Atlantic or something.

We were leaving and Harvey Weinstein was sitting at a table with a bunch of young actresses. And he said, “Graydon, I want to talk to you.” And I said, “Yeah?” And he said, “I know you’re doing a big takedown of us at Miramax in Vanity Fair.” And I thought for a second, and I said, “No, I don’t recall anything like that.” And he said, “We could do a huge story [at Talk, Weinstein’s magazine venture with Tina Brown] about all the drugs at Spy.”

I knew this was a blind threat because nobody was paid enough at Spy to afford drugs. They drank alcohol, but they couldn’t afford drugs. And so he said something like, “Let’s step outside.” He’d seen too many movies.

So we go down to the sidewalk and there’s photographers out there, and I thought, “Oh, this is going to look really bad — two middle-aged men scuffling on the street corner.”

But he immediately changed once he got outside. He tried to hug me. And he said, “Vanity Fair is phenomenal, and I hope our magazine Talk is going to be just as good.” It was all for show — for the six or seven women at the table.

And then he moved in across the street from me in New York.

Really? And did you ever run into him?

Every day. We lived on a small block in the West Village and he bought the house directly across from ours. He was in my life a lot. He was a good neighbor, but obviously not a good person.

The rumors about him were pretty rampant, yet no one was able to get the goods on a story. Was anything ever brought to you that you couldn’t run with?

I remember David Carr from The New York Times tried to do a story and I talked to him [about it]. [Harvey] didn’t do it in broad daylight and he certainly wasn’t going to do it on Bank Street where we lived, because his wife and children lived there.

In a similar vein, a lot has been written about the early Jeffrey Epstein profile in Vanity Fair and the fact that Vicki Ward, who wrote it, had uncovered some sort of impropriety there [from two sisters accusing him of sexual misconduct] that you cut out. You address this at length in the book.

First of all, those were the days [when Epstein] was still a private citizen. You needed people to come and stand up in court if there was a lawsuit. And quite frankly, there could have been a lawsuit. But those young women, they didn’t want to. And they came to hate Vicky Ward. She is a great opportunist. Once the news came up 13 years later, she was talking about them at length to the point where they wanted to get a cease-and-desist letter so that she couldn’t mention their names. So she’s like a case of long COVID, to be honest.

You call Ward “a mini-Tina” in the book, meaning a mini Tina Brown. Ward had worked for Brown at Talk and elsewhere. Brown was the Vanity Fair editor before you. Then you were offered the job to edit The New Yorker. According to the book, Brown had a change of heart in which she decided she wanted to helm The New Yorker, which is how you ended up at Vanity Fair. Did that last-minute switcheroo kick off a history of bad blood between the two of you?

No, not at all. I really respected her as an editor. It’s just all of a sudden, we were competitors — and that changes everything, in a certain way. We didn’t socialize in the same circles. So I haven’t seen her in probably 15 years. I haven’t laid eyes on her.

I would think you would run in the same circles.

You would think, but no.

What did you want to do differently with Vanity Fair?

Get rid of the sort of florid, baroque way of the writing, which took a year or so. And I wanted to make the place a collegial place. It was not that. It was a nest of vipers when I got there. It was so terrifying. I wouldn’t even bring my children to the office. So it was about cleansing the place of the old guard.

With sage and whatnot.

There was was a lot of sage.

On the subject of the Vanity Fair Hollywood Issue, it was funny to me when you talk about how there were actual fights over which of the three cover panels various stars would appear on.

Not fights. Negotiations.

Well, to quote you, convincing stars to be on the second or third panel “was like talking down a bridge jumper.”

Because on a coffee table, you don’t see the second or third panel. You just see the first panel. But you did see all three of them on a billboard, which we took out every year.

Now that you’re out of the game, can you spill some names in terms of who was the most difficult among the A-list to deal with?

They were all pretty good. I will tell you from the point of view of [my Greenwich Village restaurant] the Waverly Inn, our two least favorite customers were people who lived right in the neighborhood: Harvey Weinstein and Alex Rodriguez. And both had a tendency to do this when they wanted to get away. [Snaps his fingers in the air.] That’s the most awful thing you can do at a restaurant. Most people are pretty well behaved at the Oscar party. Journalists were often less behaved than the actors or actresses.

Gwyneth Paltrow covers the current issue of Vanity Fair, which reminds me of that whole affair back in 2014 over the supposedly devastating Gwyneth exposé you had ordered up. Things got so ugly she was warning her friends to stay away from Vanity Fair journalists.

And we didn’t run it. There was some rumor going around that we were going to do some huge [takedown] story on Gwyneth. The thing is, I kind of like her. [One of her exes] lived on my block and I would see her around. Not Owen Wilson, but his brother. What’s his brother’s name?

Luke.

Luke Wilson. She was going with Luke Wilson. I’d see them on the block. I’ve always liked her. I think Goop is so brilliant. I get the little emails every morning. And even though I’m not in the market for jade eggs or anything like that, I can see why people buy her things. We call her “the Steve Jobs of the Vagina.” And she was a wonderful actress. I’m sorry she’s not still acting.

She is. She’s going to be with Timothée Chalamet in a movie.

Perfect. But the truth is there was never a story. Finally I just wrote a thing about how this thing all came about. [In his editor’s letter explaining the affair, Carter wrote the story “was just what had been assigned — a reasoned, reported essay on the hate/love-fest that encircles Gwyneth Paltrow” and “such a far cry from the almost mythical story that people were by now expecting” that he deemed the exercise a failure and killed it.] I bumped into her a few months later and it was all fine. I think it was at the Met or something like that. Or maybe a Broadway play.

And you talked and hugged it out?

Just briefly. I’ve never had any animosity towards her. I think she’s a wonderful actress. That thing took on a life of its own.

One thing I admire about you is that you have a detachment and let things roll off you. If you take things too personally, then they can really blow up easily. Not even Trump’s merciless taunts…

I love those. Are you crazy? Those are fabulous. I’m slightly hurt that he hasn’t tweeted about me since 2016. I feel slightly left out because he had done four dozen nasty tweets about me. Quite frankly, I miss the attention.

As for Anna Wintour, her name frequently comes up in the same breath as yours. You have a line in the book where you said she “tends to greet me as her long lost friend or the car attendant.”

I’ve felt that for a long time. But I still have very warm feelings towards Anna. She was a great friend to me, and we sort of grew apart when she took on greater and greater titles at Condé Nast.

Well, as you describe in the book, her reordering of the Condé Nast system — where it was going to be a centralized copying and fact-checking department — is really what led you to leave.

That didn’t work for me at all. I got it stopped for Vanity Fair, but I could see it as putting your finger in the dike, that it was only going to hold for so long.

So are you OK with your decision to leave Vanity Fair when you did?

Oh my God, I’ve never been happier. I loved my 25 years there, but I’ve loved seven years away.

I understand have been seeking to sell Air Mail, your current, newsletter-based publication, through an investment bank called Raine Group. Is that still in the works?

Yeah. You can’t be independent. We went through this at Spy magazine. I think it’s very important to be independent when you start up, but at a certain point it’s time to become part of something larger if you’re going to go for a long run. We have a number of interested potential buyers. That will run its course over the next two or three months.

So an Air Mail sale could happen as soon as this year.

Yes. I hope so.

Without putting you on the spot, but I guess I will, what do you think has happened to Vanity Fair since you left? Is this something you still read or enjoy?

We used to have a comp list, 400 names. We’d have these blue stickers that said “first-bound copies.” And we messaged them to 400 opinion-formers every month. And I was on it, just so I could see what time the copy would get to me.

After I left Vanity Fair, I was taken off the comp list. So I haven’t read the magazine for seven years. I’ve only held it a couple of times because the person who manages our house in the country, he’s still on the comp list. And I’ll see one at his place every once in a while. But I haven’t read the magazine in seven years.

They don’t send it to me and I refuse to pay for it. [Per the The New York Times, Carter’s successor, Radhika Jones, says, “We sent him a digital access code in 2018. Happy to re-up if needed!”]