Graydon Carter Memoir Chronicles Time at Vanity Fair, magazines' Peak

The retroactive FOMO flows quickly and thick through “When the Going Was Good”, the former editor -in -chief of Vanity Fair Graydon Carter on the last golden age of magazines edition. Glamor. Power. Fat names.

Expenditure accounts.

“The extreme creativity of spending was considered with the same kind of reverence as writing a particularly beautiful story,” writes Carter about his days of time, where he arrived in 1978 as a Canadian puppy seeking to enter the American journalism sector. He wrote about a colleague who tried to begging to cover a visit to the Pope by inventing contradictory family holidays. His editor suggested that he send the family during the holidays and spend it. Thus, the enterprising journalist had some false strings printed and was quickly reimbursed for the holidays that no one took.

It's a funny story. It is also emblematic of an era when magazines had money to burn and bend. There was no internet, and readers who wanted to be in knowledge went to these things called newspaper kiosks. On the hour, Carter worked with future stars as a Walter Isaacson a-list and the critic of the book awarded by Pulitzer, Michiko Kakutani (“Michi” to his friends). He ate and drank well, often for free. But it did not adapt the mold in time. “I was not Ivy League – a diploma in which the magazine put a department store – and I was not as buttoned as some of my peers,” he wrote. He was launched in life always relevant, where he plotted the escape that would shake magazines and New York.

Carter was not only the Non Ivy League; He never even obtained his university degree. There is nothing of the origin of man about him; One of the most lively chapters in the book tells of his time working on a Canadian railway line, sweating from the elbow to the shoulder with former condemned and other unsuitables with whom he developed a camaraderie and an infernal work ethics. Even when he drops names – and you do not last 25 years as editor -in -chief of Vanity Fair without dropping the names – you have the feeling that he still cannot believe that it is his life. You might not consider humility as a decisive trait of Graydon Carter, but that is part of what appears here.

It is a kind of outsider initiate, a bit like another Canadian who climbed quickly and made his bones in New York Spotlight, “Saturday Night Live” Creator (and Carter Confident) Lorne Michaels. An indigenous celebrity of New York Schmoozer would probably not have had the idea of ​​spy, the satirical monthly that Carter created with Kurt Andersen and Tom Phillips in 1986.

There was nothing like the spy, a New York gossip magazine deeply pointed out with a literary soul and a feeling of bottomless mischief. Carter and its often underpaid staff proposed diabolical nicknames for their main targets. Donald Trump, then a real estate player in intimidation, was “the vulgarian with a short finger”. They cultivated interior sources wishing to deliver a dish on the rich and the powerful. “We wanted to be foreigners on the ramparts taking the big blows,” writes Carter. “We wanted to defend the oppressed and bite the ankle of the overdog.” The only thing worse than to land at the spy was not land at the spy.

“When the course was good” is at its best when Carter is the oppressed bite to the ankles, or a Quixote Don which learns to tilt to the right mills. The spy, for all his buzz, did not really translate into a monetary reward. Carter's detailed account on general costs and rigorous planning that enter into the management of a magazine is revealing, and facilitates the reason why so many glossies have not survived the digital transition. Even when he started in Vanity Fair in 1992, Carter faced a powerful task, inheriting a staff faithful to his predecessor, Tina Brown (an initiate of initiate). This did not help that he was mercilessly embarked on the magazine in the pages of the spy. “New publishers generally mean changes and changes can mean unemployment,” writes Carter. “When the new editor in chief has passed the last half-defense to ridicule the magazine, its senior executives, its contributors and its too oxygenated writing house, well, it did nothing to clarify the atmosphere. I would have hated myself if I was in their place. ”

Of course, he did very well. Some of the best writers in the company honored the magazine's pages during Carter's mandate, notably Bryan Burrough, Michael Lewis, Maureen Orth and Mark Bowden. The annual magazine's Oscars party has become an institution. And boy, made the flow of money. In a recent trial for the Yale review, Burrough, whose books include “enemy public” and “The Big Rich”, recalls that for 25 years, Vanity Fair has contracted it to write three articles of 10,000 words per year – for an annual state -of -the -art salary of $ 498,141. “This is not a print error,” says Burrough.

It couldn't last. “You never know when you are golden age,” writes Carter. “You realize that it was a golden age when it disappeared.” The economic collapse of 2008 was not nice to the magazine sector; The age of social media was not either. Carter sprawled in the Vanity Fair management centralization plans under the parent company Condé Nast, then the artistic director and editor -in -chief of Vogue, Anna Wintour. He left the magazine at the end of 2017; In 2019, he launched the Air Mail newsletter with a longtime friend and colleague Alessandra Stanley.

“When the course was good” is catnip for those of us still dependent on magazines, which always house the illusion that we will arrive at this battery on the table as soon as possible. Carter seems to know how lucky he was to get on the wave and prosper as a shooting sensor when it meant something more than today. The departure was indeed good.