Lorne. Graydon. Keith. Three abiding kings of New York City’s cultural life are the subjects of new books. Lorne is Lorne Michaels, the creator of “Saturday Night Live,” who is examined under the stereo microscope that is Susan Morrison’s biography, “Lorne.” Graydon is Graydon Carter, a co-founder of the stinging magazine Spy in the 1980s and the editor of Vanity Fair during its plumpest and happiest decades, whose memoir is our topic today. Keith is Keith McNally, the proprietor of that consummate French bistro Balthazar — which is so well run, so well lit and so well victualed that surely one idea of a good death is to deliquesce in one of its red leather banquettes — who has a memoir out soon.
Lorne is 80; Graydon, 75; Keith, 73. Each is still very much in the game. But to have these books in a clump on my coffee table has given me an Auld Lang Syne-ish feeling. An era is approaching its end.
Carter’s memoir, “When the Going Was Good,” runs on two overlapping tracks. It’s the story of an underdog — the hockey-playing, Canadian-born son of an air force pilot — who morphs into a crisply dressed and flamboyantly maned overdog. It is, figuratively, the story of a young man who walks into Gotham barefoot and leaves, whistling, owning the keys to one of its castles.
A class journey is described as well. The consumption grows conspicuous and conspicuouser. Thorstein Veblen’s eyes would pinwheel. By the second half, Carter can’t seem to get out of a paragraph without mentioning his possession of the perfect apartment, or vintage car, or bespoke suit, or excursion, or hotel suite, or weekend house, or restaurant table, or friend (Fran Lebowitz), or pajamas or fishing camp.
D.H. Lawrence held a class animus against the Bloomsbury group; Pauline Kael distrusted the high-living Joan Didion. Paul Theroux called luxury the enemy of observation. This is another way of saying that Carter’s book will make some readers itchy. I quickly and (mostly) happily consumed it anyway. The journalism stories and the character analysis, as Elizabeth Hardwick liked to call gossip, are first-rate.
Let us get three drawbacks out of the way. 1) Although Carter wrote “When the Going Was Good” with James Fox, a co-author of Keith Richards’s electric memoir, the prose is basic. Anyone who comes in hoping for a tincture of the old Spy style — ironic, wised-up, dense with intellect and allusion — will be disappointed. 2) Carter is not one for introspection. There are no “Rosebud” moments. 3) He doesn’t talk about his signature, wide-winged, George Washington-esque hair, with its Nike whoosh up the center.
This cut, atop his cherub’s face, does a lot with little. Carter cannot be pleased that Mark Ruffalo sports a similar do in the movie “Mickey 17” while playing a buffoonish and Trump-like autocrat in space. One of Carter’s best attributes, after all, is that he has been on Trump’s enemies list almost from the beginning, ever since Spy labeled him a “short-fingered vulgarian.” Carter has other stalwart qualities. Chief among them is loyalty. Anyone who has kept so many old friends and co-workers by his side for decades is surely doing something right.
Carter arrived (in a red 1972 BMW, with his tennis racket in the back) in New York City in the summer of 1978, when he lucked into a job at Time magazine. He’d dropped out of the University of Ottawa because he cared more about a magazine he was running, and he’d been through Sarah Lawrence’s vaunted publishing course. At Time, he got his first taste of expense-account life, and he had a knack for maximizing it. He began to get his suits made in London; he loitered in suites at the Chateau Marmont; he mixed with people like Mike Nichols, Diane Sawyer, Nora Ephron and Nicholas Pileggi. He sensed he would never be a star at Time. It’s gauche to stay around when you are not wanted. He jumped before he was pushed.
He founded Spy magazine with another Time refugee, Kurt Andersen. Raising the money was a trial. The first issue appeared in October 1986. God, Spy was smart and jolly and elegant and mean. It was like a new planet coming into view. If you weren’t there, imagine it as Gawker with a pedigree that arced like a Bose speaker. “They knew their Negronis from their stingers,” Carter writes about the contributors. “They knew Wodehouse and Perelman and Waugh. And they were as versed in funny stories from the old National Lampoon as they were in high-minded criticism in The New York Review of Books.”
Spy took its tone from, among other places, the British magazine Private Eye and from Bugs Bunny, because the latter is so “cool, collected and funny in the face of adversity.” The magazine blended humor with serious reporting. It took aim at the city’s elite, including the staff of this newspaper.
The blows were high and low. An example: After the magazine bestowed the epithet “churlish dwarf billionaire” on the businessman Laurence Tisch, who’d bought CBS and fired and bullied its employees, Tisch had his minions complain. This allowed Spy to print a correction for the ages: Tisch “is not, technically, a dwarf.” Imagine that tone over issue after issue. It hurt to be mentioned in Spy but it was worse to be ignored. The magazine tweaked the collective sensibility of a generation and ushered in the 1990s as a distinctive decade. Many of its contributors went on to write for “The Simpsons” or “The Late Show” with David Letterman.
If you poke the establishment with enough energy and insouciance, eventually you will be invited to become part of it. Spy didn’t make money, and Carter and Andersen were forced to sell it in 1990. (It staggered on for a few dismal years without them.) Si Newhouse, the chairman of Condé Nast, came calling. Newhouse offered Carter the editorship of either The New Yorker or Vanity Fair: He could take his pick. Carter chose The New Yorker, only to have Vanity Fair’s editor, Tina Brown, claim the role instead. He took over Vanity Fair from Brown in 1992, where he’d remain for 25 years. He describes the job as close to bliss, especially after he cleaned out a few notable malcontents and banned certain dread words from the magazine’s copy:
Out went words like abode, opine, plethora and passed away (for died). Out went glitzy, wannabe and even celebrity. Out went chops (for acting abilities), donned (as in put-on), A-list, boasted (as in had or featured), coiffed, eatery (for restaurant), flat (for apartment), flick (for movie) … honcho, hooker, schlep (as in to lug something somewhere), scribe (as in writer) and Tinseltown. All found their way into the copyedit boneyard.
Among his first hires was Christopher Hitchens. Vanity Fair had a murderers’ row of columnists in its front section, among them Hitchens, Michael Kinsley and the critic James Wolcott. Carter’s budget had no ceiling. He paid enormous word rates and attracted writers such as Marie Brenner, Michael Lewis, Bryan Burrough, Maureen Orth and Sebastian Junger. Orth broke the Michael Jackson sexual-abuse story. Two of Brenner’s Vanity Fair stories became movies — Michael Mann’s “The Insider” (1999) and Clint Eastwood’s “Richard Jewell” (2019). Vanity Fair outed Mark Felt as Deep Throat, scooping The Washington Post on its own story. This memoir opens with Carter’s near panic attack that his magazine had gotten it wrong.
Jane Austen, in “Persuasion,” wrote that “One likes to hear what is going on, to be au fait as to the newest modes of being trifling and silly.” That was another reason to pick up Vanity Fair; it took the trifling stuff seriously, too. Carter describes the lengths the magazine went to in 2006 to secure the first photographs of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s baby daughter, Suri.
Print magazines today are editorial starvelings. Journalism is among the most regretted college majors. Carter often had 400-page issues, with 140 pages of editorial to fill. In those pre-internet days, his staffers lived well. They expensed meals and flowers and hotel rooms and long black cars. (“Fashion is about long black cars when you need them,” the Harper’s Bazaar editor Liz Tilberis once commented.) Nearly everyone had a cheerful, attractive and often well-born assistant or two. Interest-free loans and car leases could be had. Employees could take out cash by signing a chit. An eyebrow lady came around to perform work for women who desired it. Carter lived better than the rest. His passport photo was taken by Annie Leibowitz.
Carter would sit down after every issue and write a thank-you note to each writer, photographer and advertiser. The former rebel had taken over the empire. Initially he was hard to seat at dinner parties, he writes, because he’d made fearsome enemies at Spy. He managed to smooth ruffled feathers. He became a canny observer of dinner parties, in fact, noting that in Los Angeles “husbands and wives sit together. In New York, husbands and wives sit at the same table but not together. In Europe, husbands and wives sit at different tables — all the better, apparently, for post-dinner gossip picked up during the meal.”
Carter offers detailed and mostly fond portraits of figures such as Newhouse, an ideal publisher in that he was generous and disinclined to meddle; the Hollywood superagent Sue Mengers, who helped Carter achieve the level of Californication he needed to host Vanity Fair’s annual Oscar’s parties; and the writer Dominick Dunne, who covered the blockbuster trials of the 1990s, including O.J.’s and the Menendez brothers’, for the magazine.
Less fond is his portrait of Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, who he suggests helped push him out of Condé Nast in 2017. Her efforts to seem intimidating were comical, he writes. He mocks her habit of wearing sunglasses indoors and of eating her meals (“steak, rare”) with the speedy efficiency of a McKinsey consultant. He refers to her Met Galas as close to but “not quite on the level of a protection racket,” in that advertisers are forced to buy tables for $250,000 or more — or else. He could almost “smell the fear” in her offices. Wintour tended to greet Carter either like a long-lost friend or like the car attendant, he writes.
Old messes are tidied up. He pushes back, for example, against the idea that Vanity Fair deliberately went easy on Jeffrey Epstein in a 2003 profile. There is not a great deal about Carter’s marriages (three) or children (five) in this memoir. He is proud that he reserved his evenings for them, he says. He does not attempt to reconcile this comment with the fact that, being a varsity socializer, he appears to be out every night.
Such are the contradictions of being Graydon Carter, homme du monde. Today he lives in the West Village near his restaurant, the Waverly Inn, and the offices of his digital newsletter, Air Mail. The journalism trade has become far leaner and shakier after its move to screens. Me, Auld Lang Syne-ish? Here’s Carter: “You never know when you’re in a golden age. You only realize it was a golden age when it’s gone.”
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