Graydon Carter

Sponsored by Hickory Stick Bookstore

It is no secret that print journalism is in dire straits. Rising production costs and decreasing readership have shrunk the number and size of once venerable publications.

But there were once rich and plummy days—days of expansive expense accounts, travel, stories about celebrities written by equally celebrated authors and long-form articles illustrated by fabulous photography.

Former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter will look back on those halcyon days in a conversation with author Lisa Taddeo Sunday, April 27th from 2 to 3:30PM, at the Judy Black Memorial Park & Gardens,1 Green Hill Road. There, in a program sponsored by the Hickory Stick Bookstore, they will discuss his new book, When the Going Was Good, An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines.

Carter’s career is a classic Horatio Alger tale—not exactly rags to riches but, in our credential-happy society, a testimony to native talent and drive.

In his book, Carter recounts his rise from an Ontario schoolboy—son of a World War II father with no mind for business who loved flying sailing skiing and golf—to manning the helm at Vanity Fair for a quarter of a century.

Following high school, Carter was dispatched by his parents for a character-building six months on the Saskatchewan prairie. He worked as a linesman for the Canadian National Railroad, living in a boxcar with 11 co-workers with “minor criminal records.” The exposure had a lasting effect. He says that as an employer he looked past candidates with cushy degrees for people who had done something with their hands.

Carter went on to college but never graduated. Motivated by a passion for magazines, in 1973 he co-founded The Canadian Review which by 1977 had become the third-largest circulating magazine in Canada. Despite its critical success, The Canadian Review was bankrupt by 1978.

In the same year, Carter moved to the U.S. where he started his climb up the ladder to national acclaim with a stint at Time magazine. He spent five years writing about business, law and entertainment but never felt he fit into the culture of the magazine. “I wasn’t buttoned down, I wasn’t ivy league, and I was not as good a writer,” he told one interviewer. In 1983 he was moved to Time’s sister magazine Life where, desperately bored, he and fellow writer Kurt Anderson huddled together to invent their cheeky magazine, Spy.

A cross between MAD magazine and Private Eye, it was a “funny satirical magazine that sent up a New York City that was “awash with new money and alive with a lot of characters showing off the money they had.” Spy specialized in satirical pieces targeting the American media and entertainment industries and zinging high society icons such as Arnold Schwarzennegger, John F Kennedy Jr and Martha Stewart.

During this period, he accepted an assignment from Gentlemen’s Quarterly to write a story about Donald Trump. He spent three weeks with Trump and found him to be “charming in a salesman-like way—kinder in those days.” He also wrote that Trump’s hands were too short for his body, “which truly drove him crazy.”

He later dubbed Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian,” leading Trump to excoriate him in a series of “horrible” Tweets that Carter blew up and displayed for visitors to see.

When Spy folded in 1998, Carter moved briefly to the New York Observer, a newspaper he believed was “very well designed.” “I took the job because I thought I could make it readable and then a must-read,” he said.

After a few months he started sending copies to editors he knew in Europe. There Si Newhouse, owner of Condé Nast, who was touring European publications, saw the easily recognized, salmon-tinted newspapers in editors’ in-boxes and assumed it had become an international success. He approached Carter about coming to work for him as editor for either Vanity Fair or the New Yorker.

Carter, who had poked fun at Vanity Fair in the Spy’s pages, said he preferred the New Yorker but shortly before the announcement was to be made, Carter learned he was to lead Vanity Fair. His maiden voyage at the publication was “pretty rocky,” he said, but within two or three years the magazine was moving in the direction he desired, combining high-profile celebrity cover stories and probing news stories.

“I wanted clever writers but also people who could write big stories of 10,000 to 20,000 words,” he told an interviewer. “Eventually, I had about 50 writers (including the likes of Dominick Dunne and Christopher Hitchens).”

He says the long-form style hasn’t fallen out of favor but that it is just too expensive and difficult to produce for fast-moving news cycles. It can take months for a writer to cover such a story and by then it may no longer be current. But in the days before digital media undermined print, “we had the money,” he said.

The lavish expense accounts of the day were a small—but important—line item to keep staff committed and happy. In his book, Carter recalls, the Vanity Fair “budget had no ceiling. I could send anybody anywhere for as long as I wanted.” For a story that never ran on the collapse of Lloyd’s of London, one Vanity Fair writer ran up expenses of $180,000.

Everything was on expenses: meals, hotels, flights, taxis and flowers. “Si Newhouse wasn’t throwing money out of the window,” he said. “He wanted to be the preeminent publisher in America.”

For Carter, his move to the magazine in 1992 was the beginning of a successful 25-year run. However, the experience started to change when Anna Wintours became editorial director for Condé Nash. “We were very good friends,” he recounted. “I wrote for her for years.

But eventually it became unpredictable when I met her. I was never sure how she would treat me—she tends to greet me either like her long-lost friend or like the car attendant. When she became editor of Condé Nash, she tried to take over half of my staff and that put a chill on the relationship. It was time to do something different.”

He resigned in 2017 and retired to Southern France but publishing still held allure. In 2019, Carter co-launched a weekly digital newsletter called Air Mail with Alessandra Stanley. It survived the pandemic and continues today.

“You never know when you’re in a golden age,” Carter writes. “You only realize it was a golden age when it’s gone.”

The event is free and open to the public. Those unable to attend may reserve signed copies by calling The Hickory Stick Bookshop at 860-868 0525 or go to www.hickorystickbookshop.com.