Carter, Graydon

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    Confirm or Deny: Graydon Carter Edition

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    A king of the glossy-magazine era sits for a lightning-round interview.Maureen Dowd: Annie Leibovitz took your passport photo.Graydon Carter: She took my passport photo.You were told to sod off by James Bond.Confirm! One year I invited all the men who played James Bond to the Oscar party. For one reason or another, all but one were either working or unavailable. We got George Lazenby, who had appeared in the pre-Sean Connery era in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” I spotted him at the bar by himself. I went over and introduced myself. He just looked straight ahead and then turned and in the sort of fragrant language not generally permitted in a high class newspaper, told me to buzz off.When you were at Time — and single — you wrote fun tidbits for the “People” page, and you had a romantic encounter with the young woman who wrote Newsweek’s version of the people page, called “Newsmakers.”No comment.The two funniest non-comedians you’ve ever met are George Clooney and Anderson Cooper.In both cases, they were so funny that I had to tell them to stop because I thought my trachea would break.When a New York Times push alert announced the news of your departure from Vanity Fair, multiple friends later told you that seeing your name pop up on their phone, they assumed it was because you died.Yes, and for some of them, it put a spring in their step.Anna Wintour should retire.Absolutely not. I think she can go on for decades.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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

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      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.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘When the Going Was Good,’ by Graydon Carter

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      The former Vanity Fair editor reflects on an era’s power moves and expense-account adventures in a new memoir.WHEN THE GOING WAS GOOD: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines, by Graydon Carter, with James FoxLorne. 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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More