“You better let me take this. They’d never believe it coming from you.” That’s legendary New York Times editor R.W. Apple at the end of a particularly expensive dinner with Times colleague Joseph Lelyveld. Though Lelyveld had extended the dinner invitation to Apple, and had chosen the venue, Apple’s spending resume included “the world’s single-trip expense-account record.” Only he could submit such a receipt.
The quotes and anecdotes come from Calvin Trillin’s 2024 book/memoir of sorts (review here), The Lede. Trillin’s stories of print media and how things used to be came to mind a great deal while reading Graydon Carter’s unputdownable new memoir, When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines. Reading Carter’s book I found myself wishing, as with Trillin’s, that he’d tripled the length. I similarly found myself wanting to get Carter’s take on Trillin’s memoir, Trillin’s take on Carter’s, and most of all I found myself wanting to watch a podcast or television show featuring both trading stories about how things used to be.
That When the Going Was Good has so many great stories would presumably explain to many why Carter has been so successful in each stint as an editor: he knows his readers intimately and what they’ll like. Yes, but that’s only part of it. Actually, a very small part of it. And it is mainly because the suggestion that Carter knew and knows his readers, and succeeds for giving them what they want, insults him.
What truly makes Carter’s book great, along with the various media he’s been a part of, is that Carter leads. The enterprising don’t “know their customers,” they lead them. As Carter explained it about the great and much missed Spy Magazine that he co-founded with Kurt Andersen, “Kurt and I just wanted to come up with story ideas that would make the other one laugh.” Amen. It’s not about the customer, it’s about you. If the creator of the market good isn’t entertained, how will the buying public be? Since Carter and Andersen could make each other laugh, that was enough. In Carter’s own words, and written by him about his time at Vanity Fair, “the public doesn’t actually know what it wants.” Yes! Over and over again. “Know your customer” might be the weakest “truism” in business.
Which further explains why it would be so interesting to watch Carter talk about his book solo, or ideally with someone like Trillin. That is because something so interesting to read had to have been a blast to write. Carter plainly finds people from books, movies, politics and business very interesting, and the proof of this less-than-insightful assumption can be found in the stories from a memoir that were never boring. Those included tales of excess from the print media of old that fascinate, but that weren’t indicative of excess as much as they’re a reminder that in business, the past is a lousy predictor of the future.
Carter’s first big media job was at Time which, when Carter arrived in 1978, had weekly circulation of 4 million. It staggers the mind to contemplate the reach of Time just a few decades ago, and it was of course the reach that enabled the seeming “excess.” Carter writes that lunch and dinner were expensed “on the flimsiest of pretexts,” while dinner every night could be described as “with source.” And since there were nightly dinners “with source,” Carter recalls that “I went five years without ever turning on my oven.”
Long distance calls made from Time were free at a time when long-distance calling was a major luxury enjoyed by very few. Cars “took you home every Friday evening” after the weekly issue closed, and this included long drives out to the Hamptons where Carter and other magazine types rented shares together. He notes that overseas bureau chiefs “lived as well as U.S. ambassadors.” The perks were in many ways even greater at Vanity Fair, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Long before Graydon Carter became Graydon Carter, he was a doer. His first media venture was The Canadian Review, which he started while rarely going to class at the University of Ottawa. Carter is more than self-deprecating in looking back on his first magazine, and that’s not an observation made with first-hand knowledge of the Review, but based on circulation for the magazine that at its height reached 50,000. Carter might comment that awe about the previous number is rooted in the fractured nature of media and entertainment today, but 50,000 is still 50,000. Though Canadian Review ultimately folded, its rise from zero to 50,000 indicated Carter was going places, and New York City was very much in his sights.
He writes that by age 25 he had a well-developed sense of what would make him happy: “Living in New York,” “Becoming the editor of a big, general interest magazine,” “Being one half of a wonderful marriage,” and “Having a large, happy family with a dog.” If you’re reading this review, you likely know that Carter achieved what he thought would bring him happiness, and if his memoir is an indication, what he thought would bring him happiness in fact did.
The New York that Carter arrived to in the summer of 1978 “was a festering pot of arson, stabbings, prostitution, and graffiti.” Yet despite what it was, New York attracted the talent. Even at its worst, it still attracted the ambitious from all over. Carter was an actual immigrant, but the view here is that everyone who loves themself enough to get to New York City is an immigrant. There’s quite simply nothing like it, which is just a comment that the mobile types are different from the average bear. And it’s worth thinking about with immigration in the bigger, modern sense, well in mind. Not just anyone moves to New York as Carter did, and not just anyone moves to the United States. Each move is indicative of something grand about the person doing it, which is why the U.S. arguably shrinks itself by putting up physical, armed and legal barriers to the arrival of the strivers. New York was and still is frequently enhanced by outsiders like Carter, and the U.S. is no different.
Carter as mentioned started out at Time back when it was Time, but eventually sensed he’d fallen off the success track there. This included a symbolic demotion to Life, along with time spent working in White Plains, a place that’s figuratively very far from Manhattan.
The good news is that Carter’s years at Time included working alongside the endless talent at the magazine. Kurt Andersen was one of them, and in 1986 they founded Spy. For those who never read it, or who are too young to have read it, it’s worth finding old issues. They were great. So interesting. Spy had in it what interested Andersen and Carter, and that’s the point. Inside the magazine were things like photo essays “on what nightclubs looked like in the morning,” a map showcasing the top mob hangouts in the city, and the “dietary requirement in a Beach Boys concert contract.”
Donald Trump was famously “the short-fingered vulgarian” in the pages of Spy, Abe Rosenthal (New York Times editor) was “’Abe, I’m writing as bad as I can, Rosenthal,’” and billionaire Larry Tisch was the “churlish dwarf billionaire” Larry Tisch.” The latter earned a response from Tisch’s PR team that indicated he’s “not technically, medically, a dwarf.” The response made it into the magazine too, which was perhaps the point.
Though Spy was created to make fun of the rich and famous New Yorkers who gave so much life to New York, fame is obviously its own drug as Carter reveals through others throughout his memoir. With Spy, Carter writes that “it was never great to find yourself in the pages of Spy. But it was worse never to be mentioned.”
Spy’s circulation reached 165,000, but as evidenced by its popularity with those it mocked, its heft was much greater than a circulation statistic would on its own indicate. Better yet, Spy got Carter noticed, including by Si Newhouse (1927-2017), the billionaire heir to a newspaper and magazine company that included Conde Nast and its magazines catering to high U.S. demographics.
Newhouse is in some ways the hero of Carter’s story, and Carter writes very highly of him. This includes his observation that Newhouse was “the greatest billionaire magazine proprietor of all time.” Newhouse actually made an offer to purchase Spy at one point, and as you’re reading about it, you find yourself wanting Carter to say yes with money top of mind. Glorious as his career was and is, he doesn’t hide from the fact that every dollar of annual income, and every outside writing assignment was spoken for by his growing family that included a second wife, along with three boys. Two more children were to arrive later (and eventually a third wife, Anna), and the kids are all very successful. More on Carter’s brilliant parenting style in a bit.
For now, Carter turning down the offer that could have improved his finances had novelistic qualities. Take the offer, please! At the same time, it brought up questions. About money. It was difficult to figure out Carter and money in the early days. Carter reports that he had a $37,500 salary at Spy, yet still kept a Manhattan roof over the head of a well-bred wife and three boys, educated the boys at private schools, not to mention that he was a “summer bachelor” when wife and kids went out to a “two-hundred-year-old colonial on the town green” in Washington, CT. No doubt he had outside writing assignments, and the pay per word in the golden age of magazines was enormous, but the money side of things with Carter in the early days was sometimes difficult to figure out. How did he get by?
The good news is that while Newhouse’s offer for Spy was turned down (Carter didn’t want to lose control of the magazine), eventually Newhouse invited him to his apartment where he offered him the editor’s role at either Vanity Fair or The New Yorker. Here’s the heroic side of Newhouse. He sensed talent. Though Spy wasn’t Vanity Fair or The New Yorker, it’s evident Newhouse could see Carter thriving at either one. What an eye he must have had. Carter was eventually slotted for Vanity Fair after then Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown decided she wanted The New Yorker, but the fun thing was Newhouse offered him $300,000. Carter lied and said that it was already his salary. He told Newhouse he’d like to double $300,000 and Newhouse bit. Carter wasn’t in love with taking over Vanity Fair, but candidly wrote that he and his second wife (Cynthia) “were already living on my new salary.”
Which brings up another quibble. About it, it’s no insight to say that people hate change. They no doubt despise it even more when a new boss arrives at a magazine like Vanity Fair that was already thriving. Still, Carter’s memory of the “dreadful” first two years at Vanity Fair, of the “funereal” atmosphere there upon his arrival, and a “staff in revolt” over the hire of a new editor who “had spent the past half decade ridiculing the magazine” read as overdone? The question is asked by someone who obviously wasn’t there, and who knew and knows no one who was, but Carter wasn’t just anyone, he was the accomplished, cool, cigarette smoking new arrival. It implies that a magazine known to lionize the rich and wellborn was suddenly going to mock them out of an inability to understand them. No chance. Carter was able to make fun of the elite while at Spy exactly because he understood them, which means he was in many ways perfect for Spy’s antithesis. Which is another reason that Si Newhouse reads as so heroic. He could see what wasn’t obvious to the typical set of eyes.
Surely there was change at Vanity Fair, including certain personnel subtracted and added and that Carter discusses, but as someone who read it under Carter and Brown (Tina), it was always a great read. Both editors plainly found the world of wealth, society, politics, business and scandal interesting, and they delivered what interested them to interested readers.
At the same time, Carter entertains with some of the changes he demanded. Out went words and phrases like “boite,” “tome,” “plethora,” “A-list,” “passed away,” and “eatery” for instance. Thank goodness for that, though on p. 214 Carter described long-gone Los Angeles-area nightclub Tramp as “a fashionable watering hole.”
Much more interesting and impressive was Carter’s skill with editors and writers on the way to filling 120-150 pages each month with content. What an operation! The good news was that ad pages in the magazine cost $100,000 per, which meant Carter had the means to “commission the best working writers and photographers available.” Along these lines, one of Carter’s top writers (Bryan Burrough) recently wrote that he was earning around $500,000/year writing three long-form pieces for Carter alone.
Yes, the golden age was still the golden age while Carter was at Vanity Fair. He writes that the Newhouses enjoyed profit margins on their newspapers of 27%, margins that would knock over most any oil baron today, and most certainly any newspaper or magazine owner in modern times. And the margins informed how people in the magazine’s employ lived. Carter always stayed at the best hotels, including the Bel-Air out in Los Angeles. When in the South of France, it was Hotel du Cap, which is in his mind the greatest of all the great hotels (“there’s really only one hotel in the world, and that’s the Hotel du Cap”), and when writers like Dominick Dunne went out to Los Angeles to report on the various celebrity murder trials, he was put up at the Chateau Marmont.
What’s interesting about the expenses wasn’t just the expenses, it was also the economic lessons within the expenses. Carter writes that his longtime and much-trusted colleague Aimee Bell “figured out early that the accountants budgeted your expenses based on what you spent the previous year. This meant that what you needed to do was set a high bar early and build on a large amount of expenses.” In two sentences Carter vivifies why government only grows. “Spending cuts” absent actual tax revenue decreases are such a lie, and that’s true no matter one’s ideology.
Another economic lesson in “how they lived then” is that the high-living at magazines was, as Carter well knows, a direct effect of the money brought in. In other words, magazines that charge $100,000 per ad page are going to spend big sums on those whose stories abut the ad pages.
Lastly, Carter, his editors, the writers, fact checkers and staff more broadly got to work in style (this included a monthly visit from the best eyebrow person in NYC) exactly because the pressure to earn the profits that enabled working in style was so great. Early in the book Carter recalls how ahead of the printing and shipping of every issue, “the various top editors at Conde Nast were required to deliver a summary of each issue of their magazine at a grim affair called Print Order.” He goes on to report that the “number of copies that were printed for each issue was dependent on the quality of the issue that was presented that day.” Stop and think about that. Think about the pressure. Think about the lack of job security if the print runs are consistently low. High living, working or both are an effect of enormously high pressure on those living and working well.
Most interesting about Carter’s travel beyond the locales and the hotels has to do with his family. Carter recalls that “I almost never went on a business trip without them.” This is confirmed in Dana Brown’s (an editor at Vanity Fair under Carter) own memoirs (Dilettante, review here), and it speaks so well of Carter. Some may respond that many more dads and moms would do as Carter did and bring the family on work trips if they had Carter’s income and expense accounts of old, and while that’s likely true to for some, what appeals most about it beyond Carter’s love of family is that he “figured my kids would learn more about life watching things come together for these events [the various Vanity Fair events] – or just by being in Paris or London – than they ever would in the classes they missed.” Yes! Carter did what most parents couldn't mentally do, which is embrace the reality that the learning in the classroom is likely the least important part of school.
Which is why the “Yes!” expressed becomes truer by the day. Carter shows why through the New Establishment issue that he established at Vanity Fair, which covered the new entrants to the top of the business pyramid who were replacing the old. Carter crucially describes them as “dropouts, visionaries, artists, and tech oddballs.” These people didn’t get to the top based on what they learned, and that’s true even if they did their learning or pre-dropout learning at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford or Yale. They got to where they are and were by seeing a future of business utterly at odds with what they saw, only to act on it. Conservatives obsessed with education and test scores need to recognize this truth. The U.S. gets its economic dynamism from the present and past routinely and relentlessly being replaced. Despite this, conservatives continue to focus on test scores measuring understanding of the same things schools have been teaching for centuries.
None of this is to knock the value of going to school (Carter’s kids went to prominent ones), but it is once again to say that the learning for the future isn’t taking place in the classroom. Which means Carter got to enjoy his remarkable years at Vanity Fair while enjoying his kids. This included dinners out at his favorite New York restaurant, Da Silvano. The kids sat at the neighboring table.
The bet here is that a majority buying Carter’s book are and will do so for the anecdotes about the many famous people he knows. Which is perhaps why many will think 417 pages is way too short. With good reason as Carter entertains. Some will say this is him knowing his audience, but it’s yet again more realistic to say that Carter finds people interesting as do his readers.
Carter has a way of making the celebrities more interesting than they made themselves. For instance, The Way We Lived Then, which was Dominick Dunne’s memoir of his first and ultimately failed stretch in Hollywood, was really good and inspiring. But Carter’s analysis of Dunne, that among other things he “began to unravel when John and Joan [brother John Didion and wife Joan] had a highly commercial success, though a critical failure, with their remake of A Star Is Born,” exceeded Dunne’s own self analysis. Carter’s recollection of how much Dunne wanted to be on television, and how much John Dunne hated his brother’s fame once Dominick came back from failure and addiction to achieve fame as a writer, is fascinating. Carter describes it so well.
Regarding Anna Wintour, Carter found her “efforts to seem intimidating and powerful almost comical.” To be clear, he thought and thinks very highly of her, but he indicates that fear permeates the offices at Vogue. And then she wears sunglasses even while being driven in her cars with the darkest of dark windows.
I’d most like to ask Carter about Robert Evans (1930-2019), the former head of Paramount Pictures (The Godfather, Love Story, etc.) whom Carter brought back to proverbial life when he produced a documentary of Evans’s own memoirs, The Kid Stays in the Picture. Carter writes that Evans was “certainly the best-looking studio executive ever,” only to add on, “I know. A low bar.” Which raises a question: Harvey Weinstein makes many appearances in When the Going Was Good, and he’s notably Evans’s opposite in the looks department. Which is maybe the point? Without excusing Weinstein’s thuggish qualities for a second, Evans was never the physical caricature of the studio exec. It’s a long way of musing about whether Weinstein sits in prison not for being unique, but precisely because his actions weren’t that different from past mogul types in Hollywood. In other words, they got into movies to gain the attention and favors of women who would never have noticed them in the way all women noticed Evans absent their stature in the business.
Early in the book, Carter writes of “that brittle period when anything your parents said, did, or wore brought on serial waves of mortification.” Ok, but did Carter’s kids feel that way about their much looked-up to father?
A few more quibbles about an otherwise excellent book. David McClintick, author of the great Indecent Exposure, comes up in Carter’s as does David Begelman, about whom McClintick wrote. Carter asserts that Begelman was broke at the end of his life when he committed suicide. Without doubting Begelman’s financial state (the former studio head could never get control of his gambling), Carter referenced his empty refrigerator as evidence supporting the claim. That didn’t read as true. Wouldn’t Begelman have always been out for meals as Hollywood types without family around them frequently are?
Carter referenced immense wealth and inequality a few times in the book, and wrote with pride about how Vanity Fair contributor Joseph Stiglitz introduced "1 percenters" as a pejorative in the magazine. He’s long been a critic of it, but why? Forget that Vanity Fair wrote about the rich so well and interestingly and just remember that Carter himself had the proverbial tin cup out for Spy, and still does to this day for Air Mail. The richest of the rich uniquely have the money to lose on new ideas. In other words, the wildly rich can’t spend it all, and since they can’t they put it to work. And since they have money to once again lose, they can match their capital with the oddballs and dropouts that give life to so much that we enjoy today. This isn’t just the internet and smartphones, but Carter’s very own New Establishment issue from his Vanity Fair days. Only the very, very rich would have taken a chance on so many of them, and only the very, very rich would have had the means to. Carter as mentioned gets his digs at inequality at times in the book, but the view here is that he would despise the world without it, while loving even more a future world defined by much more of it. The rich drive progress in all ways. Carter sides with Michael Lewis that essentially "Wall Street" caused 2008, but the bet here is he could be convinced that markets and Wall Street simply are, and that the crisis was one of intervention by the inept minds inside the Bush administration.
Carter’s speculation that Christopher Hitchens took the pro-war side of the Iraq/Saddam debate because there would be more television for a prominent left-wing intellectual in the pro-war camp was fascinating. And it will drive many more questions for those who knew him. At the same time, I found myself siding with Si Newhouse (unbeknownst) when he told Carter to “knock it off” with his monthly rants against the war. This isn’t to say Carter was wrong, and this is not a defense of George W. Bush whom I’ve regularly described as easily the worst president of my lifetime, but the politics became too much. Carter answers the previous critique with the reply that a failure of magazines to address global realities had in the past put them on the path to obsolescence borne of irrelevance, but was the latter an effect of avoiding the allegedly big issues, or was it just progress?
Whatever the quibbles, they don’t reduce what was a great read. So much fun. Writing about Dominick Dunne, Carter recalls that particularly during the days of the O.J. Simpson trial, “everyone” in the prominent parts of Los Angeles’s west side “wanted to be quoted” in Dunne’s monthly trial pieces. Absolutely. Fame is the drug, and all that. Still, it brings to mind again how Carter thought at times he wasn’t the right person for Vanity Fair, but the hero in Newhouse yet again knew better. What had everyone wanting to be quoted in Vanity Fair is what had everyone wanting to be mentioned in Spy. And it all begins with Carter and his unique state of mind rooted in an uncompromising need not to feed readers, but to give them what they didn’t know they wanted. We need more people like Carter, and certainly more memoirs like his.
