Graydon Carter Looks Back on a Glossy Career of Parties and Feuds

After our interview, Graydon Carter emailed me.

“Oh God, did I do okay yesterday? Too boring? Too indiscreet? Drank too much? Didn’t drink enough?”

This was something I had failed to notice about Mr. Carter during his plummy, powerful quarter-century astride a glittering Vanity Fair. This one-time social arbiter, who ran a wildly successful magazine in the peak era for glossies, has social anxiety.

How could the man who caused so much social anxiety, when he mercilessly decided who was in and who was out for the most exclusive parties on the planet, including his white-hot Oscar parties, have social anxiety?

“I’m not cool — I’m the squarest person you’ve ever met,” he says, unconvincingly.

We both started at Time magazine in the early ’80s, a louche era of bars in offices, clouds of cigarette smoke, cascading illicit affairs, sumptuous dining carts of roast beef rolling down the halls and expense accounts so lavish that a top editor would think nothing of sending someone from Paris to London to fetch a necktie he had left in a hotel room.

I knew Mr. Carter only slightly back then, but he sure looked confident and debonair to me. Unlike a lot of the men at Time, he wasn’t condescending to the few women writers there. My impression, when I met him, was of a Canadian who seemed to want to dress and talk like a Brit, with dandy aspirations and an upper-crust pronunciation of rather as rah-ther.

“It was a British suit,” he affirmed, laughing. “Well, you know, nobody’s going to buy a Canadian suit.”