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Home / The Listener / Books

Book of the day: When the Going was Good: An editor’s adventures during the last golden age of magazines

By Kirsty Cameron
Listener editor·New Zealand Listener·
18 Apr, 2025 11:04 PM6 mins to read

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Graydon Carter: Rubbed shoulders with the rich and powerful but simply loves being an editor. Photo / Getty Images

Graydon Carter: Rubbed shoulders with the rich and powerful but simply loves being an editor. Photo / Getty Images

I once had a colleague from my American parent company expound on why the ice rink in Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center was the centre of the universe. He’d really thought about this. The US was the dominant global economy. The media was all powerful – this was the mid-90s – and the most powerful publishers and broadcasters of the day, Time Inc, NBC among them, were clustered around Rockefeller Center. And in the centre of the Center, the ice rink. Thus, he rhetorically flourished, the ice rink was the centre of the universe.

It was a silly analogy, but one my brain retrieved from some long-forgotten mental file while reading Graydon Carter’s pacy and witty memoir.

Carter was for 25 years the editor of the shining exemplar of magazines: Vanity Fair, a flagship title from the Manhattan house of Condé Nast, then located a few blocks from the ice rink. Appointed in 1990, he shaped a publication that not only printed outstanding journalism and opinion from some of the best in the trade – Christopher Hitchens, Sebastian Junger, Marie Brenner, Dominick Dunne, and photographers such as Annie Liebowitz – but grew so fat with up to 250 pages of advertising per issue that it required strong wrists to lift it off the coffee table.

Although he adopted the trappings of a successful New Yorker as fast as his funds would allow – bespoke suits, a summer home, an enduring passion for collectible cars – Carter is Canadian and brought an outsider’s eye and observations to Manhattan. He’s also a sleeves-up grafter, arriving in the Big Apple having worked as a manual labourer on the Canadian railways, considered a very sensible rite of passage for boys by sensible Canadian parents. He’d also created a student-led literary magazine back in Ottawa. Working on it derailed his degree, which certainly set him apart from the Ivy League alumni he worked alongside at Time, his first journalistic gig in his new town.

For someone who is a natural writer and presumably a great raconteur, choosing to work with a ghost writer is interesting. Carter explains he brought in James Fox (scribe of choice for Keith Richards) to help with order and narrative pace. It gives the book a slightly strange kilter; it’s of his voice, not necessarily in it.

But don’t let that put you off. Even if he just wrote of his career trajectory it would be a good tale. At Time magazine, Carter enjoyed the insanely generous expensive accounts but didn’t see himself rising beyond journalistic pinch-hitter status. After a brief period at stablemate Life, he and former Time colleague Kurt Andersen launched Spy, an 80s era-defining satirical journal of the New York demi-monde: a Yankee Private Eye crossed with Mad. It was the anti-Vanity Fair and crazily successful. The business plan saw them selling 25,000 copies but by 1990 it was circulating 150,000 globally. After turning a small Manhattan paper, The Observer, into a must-read that extended well beyond its planned boundaries, he was recruited by Condé Nast owner Si Newhouse, initially to edit The New Yorker before some desk swapping saw Tina Brown go to that title and Carter take her chair at Vanity Fair, on a starting salary of $600,000.

Like any good rubs-shoulder-with-celebs memoir, there are anecdotes about the criminally awful (Harvey Weinstein, close to being banned from Vanity Fair’s Oscars party for bullying staff) and the regally awful (Princess Margaret – “she’s fun, you’ll adore her”. She wasn’t and he didn’t) and, of course, Donald Trump. It was Spy that dubbed the future president a “short-fingered vulgarian” when he was a self-aggrandising New York real estate developer. Carter had profiled him for GQ and noted his remarkably small hands. With Carter’s ascension to Vanity Fair, Trump set out to woo him: gifts of stiff red ties, Trump Vodka, an invitation to his wedding to Marla Maples, dinner at Mar-a-Lago.

“The Trump-Carter truce was not to hold. Try as I might, I couldn’t resist making fun of him, and thus vanished our days of bonhomie and transactional friendliness.”

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Trump reverted to tweeting that Carter was a “dummy”, “a major loser”, and that the food at the restaurant he co-owned “sucks”. Shortly before Trump launched his first campaign for the presidency, he sent Carter a 20-year-old tearsheet of a magazine ad for his book, The Art of the Deal. In gold Sharpie he’d circled his hands in the photo and wrote: “See, not so short!” Carter returned the page to sender with a new notation: “Actually, quite short.”

Carter enjoys an analogy. The move from wrangling the troops of The Observer to managing marquee talent at Vanity Fair (some of them openly hostile to the appointment of an editor who’d spent years lampooning them) was “like going from managing a boy band like One Direction to managing the Metropolitan Opera”.

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Staffers may have been snippy, but then there were the advertisers. Carter’s predecessor, Brown, had wooed high-end, high-worth advertisers to VF, Ralph Lauren among them. Brown had also done a flattering cover story on Lauren. Spy had routinely mocked the designer, who was known to be sensitive about his diminutive stature. “Often, we’d run a photo of him with the words ‘Not actual size’ accompanying the caption.” Lauren proved to be a bigger man, and while guarded with Carter at first, they became friends and his pages of advertising stayed.

Carter neatly defines the sweet spot VF sought to fill. As a monthly publication, it needed to find a story angle that would be relevant for at least 21/2 months after the news cycle “event” and its appearance on newstands. “My feeling was if we were going to be late, we had to be complete and revelatory. Our stories became the interim version between the newspaper and weekly reports on one hand and books on the other.” (Stories that did become bestselling books and movies include Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side, Moneyball and The Big Short.)

Amid the career highs and lows and famous people are light sketches of Carter’s home life. Three marriages – the first very young, very brief, and the end of the second is drawn gently. The five Carter children make guest appearances. He perfected the art, he says, of being able to attend three book launches on a weekday evening and still be home in time to eat dinner with the kids. Having a car and driver helped.

Today, Carter publishes Air Mail, a “digital dispatch” round-up of features. Raising money to launch, then fund, the venture, he admits, isn’t his favourite part of the job, “but the flip side is that the job itself is as enjoyable as any I have ever had. I simply love being an editor.”

It shows.

When the Going was Good: An editor’s adventures during the last golden age of magazines, by Graydon Carter (Grove Press, $39.99), is out now. Photo / Supplied
When the Going was Good: An editor’s adventures during the last golden age of magazines, by Graydon Carter (Grove Press, $39.99), is out now. Photo / Supplied
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