June 11, 2025 • 43 mins
Graydon Carter has the great gift of making his readers feel like insiders in the powerful and glamorous worlds he has covered, notably as the editor of Vanity Fair. He talks to Matha about his new book, When the Going was Good, which shares the stories behind the stories, from uncovering the mystery of the “Deep Throat” source to covering the OJ Simpson trial. Hear these veteran magazine editors dish about the brilliant writers and photographers, the iconic cover issues, the media moguls and the expense accounts that made that era of magazines so extraordinary.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
It feels appropriate to be sitting here at newsstand Studios
with Graydon Carter, where his and My magazines were likely
once sold. Graydon is famously the editor who established the
Voice of Vanity Fair, making it the intersection of celebrity
news and high quality reportage. He has been writing and
(00:24):
editing since he left college to run The Canadian Review.
His new memoir, When the Going Was Good, shares hilarious
stories and insights from the glamorous world of late twentieth
century journalism as only he can. Welcome to my podcast, Graydon,
it's such an honor to be here. Well, it's so
nice to have you here. That's right, Old editors on
(00:48):
old editor. Are you still a good editor?
Speaker 2 (00:51):
I'm a better editor now than I was twenty five
years now.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Oh you're still busy. You're still editing air mail?
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Yeah? No, no, And it's the same sort of job.
Get a little better at it every year. Thank god.
It goes that way rather than the other way.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
And what about writing, well, other.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Than the book? I you know, I write occasionally for Airmail.
I'll do more now that this my book is done,
because that took a lot of my time.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
I bet it did. And you had great archives to
write this beautiful book.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
I didn't consult any archives whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Not really.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
No, if I didn't remember it, I felt it wasn't
that interesting. And I just wanted to have stories that
I thought would interest others. I didn't. I didn't go
consult my diary or anything like that. I just and
I basically have a decent memory, not a perfect memory.
And I had a fact check who went through and
afterwards and made sure that I actually got things correct.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
That is so great. Yeah, I'm trying to write mine now.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
I'll be interested.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
I got it like another year and a half to
get it.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Need it?
Speaker 1 (01:48):
I know, oh, I need it. But I was going
to ask your opinion, because did you feel like you
went down the rabbit hole?
Speaker 2 (01:55):
No? No, I didn't feel that because most of my
stories it was broken up over you know, childhood in
Canada and Time magazine and Life magazine, then Spy and
vanity fairs.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
So you have a good chronological memory, reasonably good, yes,
but you can't write it chronologically.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
I start off with coming back from my honeymoon on
the day we broke the story of Deep Throat, So
you and I had help with that because a friend
James Fox, helped me out a lot on this in
organizing the book, so it wasn't just chronological.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Because I have vast archives. I mean I have photo
and diary and notes. Okay, I saved everything, my entire life. Okay,
So it makes it hard in a way but also
kind of very interesting.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
But you don't want to get bogged down on that stuff.
You want to just tell the fun stuff.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Oh yeah, yeah, I have. I have good chaft for
your titles.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
I've got.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
But your book is so amusing but also so informative
and so introspective, and yet it tells you, I mean
tells us so much about what went on in the
world of media, especially in the United States and in
New York City.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Well, we were there with magazines in the nineteen a
the eighties, nineties and odds were an amazing time because
magazines drove the culture and they you know, they both
reflected the culture and were a big part of it.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Your memoir, When the Going Was Good is about a
time when the magazine industry was, as a title suggests,
good it was. It was the best.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Well, also it was the Golden Age. For a singular
reason is that so many magazines were good then, you know,
I mean your magazine was brilliant. I mean Esquire was
great then. Time and news we were firing on all cyliners.
You had The New Yorker, and you had Harper's in
the Atlantic and New York Magazine. There were Food.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Magazine, Magazine. I mean they were all good, good, editorially excellent,
beautiful photography. It was the heyday for photographers.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
That and it was it was a great time because
young people came out of schools wanting to be in
the magazine business. So we got the sort of the
best in the brightest rather than the banks as it
is now.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
You know, oh yeah, nobody wants to do anything but
run to a bank or to an investment investment house.
That's it, right.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
I know it's very sad.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
So start back a little bit because I want people
to understand that you have always worked in media straight
out of college. You were born in Canada, right, and
then what happened?
Speaker 2 (04:17):
Well, I played, you know, I had a normal childhood
in Canada, and I involved playing a lot of hockey
and skiing, and I I started college and I was
stumbled in this office and these fellow students were starting
up a political literary magazine, and I went in to
talk to them and they said they were looking for
an art director, and I said, well, I can draw,
(04:38):
and so I became the art director. And little magazines
are always very bitter, little vessels of hatred and infighting,
and so one by one they left and I became
the editor, and I ran it for the next or
three and a half four years. It did nothing but
lose money. It wasn't particularly good, but it got me
a job at Time Magazine and York and that was
(05:02):
the beginning of my sort of proper adult life. What
year was that, nineteen seventy eight, oh long? And so
the city was, you know, still coming out of bankruptcy.
Rents were low. My I had a gorgeous apartment in
Greenwich Village that I paid two hundred dollars a month for, which.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Is my rent was fifty a month, a fortunate six
and a half rooms on the US River.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
It was so nice, I know.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
So you know, I probably had roughly the same directory
you did. And then I worked at Time for five years.
I was not particularly accomplished, I.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Was I was the editor at that time.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Ray k was the editor and Henry Greenwall was the
editor in chief. But I came in. So I came in.
They had restocked the magazine. There'd been a strike and
they'd restocked the magazine with this whole new group of
incredibly clever people. And we're all about the same age.
And so it was Frank Rich, you know, became the
chief theater critic of the Times and now as the
producer of Succession and other HBO hits. Michiko Kakutani became
(06:00):
the chief book credit of the New York Times, Maureen Dowd,
who's still the acclaimed Politzer Prize winning columnists of the Times.
Kurt Anderson, my partner at Spy, Alessander Stanley, my partner
at Airmail, Jim Kelly who became the editor of Time,
Walter Isaacson who became the editor Time and later, you know,
the acclaimed biographer. So and there was like six other
people like this. It was just an extraordinary gu It
(06:22):
was the best group. It was amazing and we're all
still close and friends.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Yeah. Nice. So after Time, what happened?
Speaker 2 (06:29):
So I went to I had to They sent me
up to White Planes to work on a magazine that
they wanted to start, it was going to compete with
TV Guide, which was then, you know, the biggest magazine
in the country, and that failed.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
I was there for twenty five million subscribers.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
To think about it, this.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
Is for TV Guide, everybody. The only other magazine that
had such a subscription rate, I think was Reader's.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Was Reader's Digest yea. And remember TV Guy got sold
for three billion dollars of this point. So that came
back after two months and that was sent to Life magazine.
And while I was there, I could do most of
my work in five hours a week. But so then
I kicked around this idea for a spy magazine and I.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Are they paying well? I mean, what do you remember
what you were making?
Speaker 2 (07:13):
They were thirty seven five you remember, yeah, yeah, you
paid that little and with small numbers.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
You didn't have five children then you just had one child.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
I had to true. So Kurt Anderson I we started
plotting what spy magazine would be like. And it was
the you know, the middle of the eighties was a
lot of magazines started around that period.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
It was Funny. That was a really funny magazine.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
It was a funny, reported magazine about the characters who
made up New York and and then gradually and were
you there.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
When they wrote that horrible story about me? No, oh,
so it was Pegazzi that did it.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
It was Pigazzi.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
They wrote a story about me, and I hated Spy
magazine from that day, that day fourth but but I
think I still have the article.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Well, funny, after I left, they they had a couple
of negative things about me, So it just it went
with the territory. But Nora Efron used to say she'd
go to the newstand leaf quickly leave through a copy
to see if her name was mentioned, and be relieved
and then slightly miffed that she wasn't mentioned, because if
you weren't in that Spy, it meant you didn't have
(08:24):
sort of purchase in the in the constellation of the we.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Had to be mentioned. Yes, yes, So then what happened
after Spy? So what did you sell it for? Do
you remember?
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Not that much money? I mean, nothing to change your
life or anything like that. And we sold it to
Johnny Pagazzi, who was a you know, European art collector
and man about town, and Charles Sauci. The advertisings aar
went on.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Then how did you get your vanity fair.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
So I wanted to start up a newspaper and it
would be twice a week newspaper berliner's size, which is
just a thinner version of a tabloid, but with a
of the front page that would look like a broadsheet.
And I was going to bring it out on Tuesdays
and Thursdays and it would be not it wouldn't be
about city, but it'd be built the industries that ran
the city, like publishing, television, the law, city government, and
(09:16):
fashion and things like that. So I was going around
trying to raise money for it, and I bumped into
Arthur Carter, who was a banker who owned a newspaper
called very sleepy Upper east Side newspaper called the New
York Observer, and he said, why don't you take this
over and run this for me, and you can learn
how to do it. So the Observer was a big broadsheet.
(09:37):
It was salmon colored and it looked.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
All it loved.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
I loved it was beautiful looking, loved it, and so
I worked out I said, okay, So I worked at
a plan to change it. It was very it was
really dull, and I thought I had a six month
twelve month eighteen month plan of what I would do
and who I'd bring in. There wasn't a lot of
money attached to it. I mean, we didn't have a
huge budget like that. But by about the eighth month,
(10:02):
people were reading and it became a thing in New York.
So I started sending copies to friends mine, complimentary copies
every week to friends mine around the world, including a
lot of editors in Europe. And I didn't know this
at the time, but sign new House would take twice
a year tour of all his media properties in Europe
when he would stop off in London, in Paris and Milan,
(10:24):
and he noticed that in so many of his editors
in baskets were copies in The New York Observer. And
as he told me much later, he returned from Europe
thinking this was some huge international hit. So he and
I'd gone to him originally as well when I was
writing trying to raise money for this. So he called
me and said would you like to meet? And I
(10:45):
said absolutely. And I was happy of the Observer. Though
I wasn't making a lot of money, but I was
running well. I loved my staff, and we worked in
an old sort of townhouse on the Upper East Side,
and I was worried that SI was going to offer
me like a men magazine or something like that. And
I've never really I've written for end's magazines, but it
wasn't my thing. I didn't read them that much. And
(11:06):
I was worried that I'd have to turn him down
because I was happy where I was. But then we
ment to his apartment over on Ewan Plaza and he
offered me two magazines. He said, I've got The New
Yorker and I've got Vanity Fair. And I said, well,
this is slightly awkward because for the last five years
we sort of made fun of Vanity Fair. We made
fun of at Spy magazine, we made fun of the editor,
(11:29):
we made fun of some of the writers, we made
fun of some of the editors, and they she was
the editor, and we made fun of their sort of
the baroque writing style in the magazine. So he said, okay,
it's the other one, and so I laughed, you know,
and I so it was going to be The New Yorker.
So I laughed, and I only told a few people.
I told my wife and children, my best friend Jim Kelly,
(11:51):
and my agent Andrew Willie when we'd go out for
dinner if we wanted to discuss it. We had a
code word for it when we call it the pencil,
in case anybody overheard us. And I worked at this
plan and then the day it was supposed to be announced,
I got a call from Anna Wintor who said, it's
going to be the other magazine. So he said, Street said,
(12:11):
so it's going to call you Act Surprise, and so
he called a few minutes later and he said, it's
going to be Vanny Fair. Is that okay? I said absolutely,
because I was going to be making about four times
more at Vanny Fair than I was and I had
three children by this time.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
You're going to have a carne driver.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Well I didn't even know any of that. But then,
so that's a vany Fair. But the thing is I
didn't have time to work out a plan, and so
I had to start pretty soon. And yeah, for the
first two years a bunch I fired, none of the staff.
I inherited the entire staff. They hated me at first
because new editors can mean unemployment and because we've made
fun of so many of them along the way, but
(12:53):
lot most of them came around, and I'm a very
collegial person and I like a non dramatic office. And
eventually it settled down to like three people. They were
most of them were just spent their time spreading news
of my inadequacies around town at dinner parties and that
sort of thing. One week I got rid of three
of the troublemakers. And there was two years in and
(13:16):
things just sort of changed. Then all of a sudden,
people started working together and saying please and thank you,
and we're being working together rather than being combative with
each each other.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
And the magazine got fatter and fatter. I remember that
was the time.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
No, they'd be like three quarters of an inch for
Oh yes.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
I loved those magazines. It was so much fun to
get that in the mail. Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
A lot of work to put together. I was able to,
you know, compile one of the greatest stables of writers
and photographers probably ever assembled under one room.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Indible.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Yeah. But at the same time, because it was a
golden age, everybody else was really good, so you could
never rest on your laurels, and you know, and a
lot of the competition was weekly. We were a big
lumbering monthly that took. You know how long it takes
to print your magazine? They bound magazine and I would
go to the printer color correct, would you really? Oh yeah,
(14:04):
I didn't do that.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Oh no, I was real fun.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
I didn't know where the printer was. It was in
Kentucky maybe, yeah, I know. We had a person who
did that for us, a company person, so I didn't
have to do that.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
But what was it? What was the highest circulation of
Vanity Fair when you were there?
Speaker 2 (14:17):
We never tried. You know, the thing is we charged
so much per page. We're charging one hundred thousand dollars
per page. If we increased the circulation too much, we'd
have to raise that above that and that would be
a sort of That was a tipping point for a
lot of advertisers.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
But what was then the readership?
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Oh like one point three million, and then with the
European edition one point four million. But we tried to
grow it like one percent a year, just to show growth,
but not go much beyond that.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
And beautiful printing, beautiful photography. Great, you hit the best photographer.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Any and and her Breds.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Yes, I just worked with any a couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
The best is amazing.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Still. I mean, it's still so fabulous.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
When you would have a discussion or an argument, who
would win?
Speaker 1 (15:02):
I would?
Speaker 2 (15:02):
Are you serious?
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (15:03):
And I'm admiring of you. I lost every single argument
with Annie, every single one.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Yet she was But but I don't like to argue
with her. I just love to I just love to
talk to and her point of view, and she works.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Hard, unbelieva, she works even harder than you. And that's
saying something.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
No, no, she does, and and her her sense of perfection.
What did you hope to add to the legacy of
Vanity Fair when you took over it? I mean you
didn't really have time to think about that right away,
(15:42):
But what did you hope and your mind when you
when you realize here I am, I'm at the helm
of one of the finest magazines ever.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
I just I didn't have any grand plans. My greatest
hope was just keeping the job because at some point,
at a certain point, I had four children and that's family. Yeah,
and so I just want the first couple of years,
I just wanted to hold onto the job because there
were rumors that I was going to be losing it.
(16:12):
And they used to have a sort of peg bulletin
board sort of on the and the foyer three point
fifty Madison where where the conte Nast was, and it
had all the names of the editors and the executives.
And every day when I go into work, I just
like quickly glance at my name was still on it.
And then there was a couple around the newstand called
(16:34):
Market and Helmet, and they sort of knew everything before
anybody else, and I would say hello to them in
the morning and just be able to gauge by their
faces whether they had heard some horrifying news about me.
And so I had no plans at all. Most of
the things, the the innovations, strange enough, were not my ideas.
(16:56):
The one was the the Oscar party I'd gone to.
So when I got to the magazine, I wanted to
meet Sweti Lazar. So we went out to lunch, and
I don't think he knew what to make of me,
because it was so fascinated by all the writers. He
had William Saroyan, and he had Noel Coward and Moss Hard.
But then he represented all the major film stars. You
probably met him the first sort of major superagent in
(17:19):
the world. So we had we had lunch, and he
invited me to his Oscar party that year. He had
it at Spago, which was divided into two rooms, so
you had and you could see that there was an
A room and a b room, and the A room
was like the Gregory Pax and the Billy Wilders, the
Henry Fondos, and the b room was like people like
me below the line talent. And he dies in December,
(17:40):
and I think, you know something, Benny Fair could take
that spot. So I we booked Morton's restaurant, and which
was then the power restaurant in Los Angeles at the time.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
And another guy.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
I was in love with Peter Morton. Yes, I think
he's taken.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
I know he was taking no, but but he was
so attractive.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Does he know this?
Speaker 1 (18:00):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
I'll tell him that, Okay, okay, I was just pretty.
I feel like Dolly Levi here. So I wanted to
I was worried because SI loves Hollywood, he loves movies,
and I wanted to make sure that we were successful,
and if we weren't, I wanted to fail on a
small scale. So I we had one hundred and fifty
people for dinner and it was one room, so there
(18:22):
was no ab delineation, and a lot of big parties
in those days would have a sort of roped off
VIP area, so called VIP area. I wanted none of that,
and once you got in, everybody was the same.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
I like that, so we did.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
I had one hundred and fifty people for dinner, and
then about one hundred and fifty two hundred people came
after the Oscars. We weren't a huge success yet, but
we hadn't failed. And then you know, the next year,
it just grew and grew and grew, and then cy
when late at lunch, he said, have you ever thought
of doing a Hollywood issue?
Speaker 1 (18:53):
And oh, it was his idea.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
It was his idea, and so I sort of resisted
at first because I thought one of the great joys
of a magine, a big general interest magazine like Vanny Fair,
was the the fact that there's so many different types
of stories. And but then I was working at home
one night in the kitchen I thought I tried to
sketched what I thought could be a lineup for a
Hollywood issue, where you would have a crime story involving Hollywood,
(19:16):
and a business story and a historic story and a
you know, a contemporary story with limitless it was, as
it turns out, it was. We did that the next
year and that created a huge sort of old cover.
Did you give a fulld oup coverage? Yes, we had, Yeah,
so I wanted at that time. First of all, the
Oscars had they they'd sort of lost their loster. They
were not considered cool, and young people thought they they
(19:40):
were incredibly uncol and people stayed away in droves. But
we sort of we sort of told the story of
Hollywood glamour back to Hollywood because they'd sort of forgotten
that this was one of their sort of major trading assets.
And the Hollywood issue became a fiction. And then we
said we had this huge tent pole in Los Angeles
in the spring for the magazine. And then the other
(20:00):
sort of major tent pole issue I did was I
was having lunch with David Halberstam. I'm sure you had
a cross on him as well. Oh, okay, I did.
We were talking and we were at lunch and we
were talking about that. He was saying that the economy,
the American economy this is like nineteen ninety four, had
shifted from being an economy that made things and shipped
(20:22):
them overseas, like you know, steel and cars and tires
and that sort of thing, and was now more of
an information entertainment based economy, and what we shipped around
the world were sort of intellectual products and books, movies, books, movies, television.
Technology was coming out of Silicon Valley. So I thought,
if that is the case, because I thought most people
(20:43):
could name the heads of the movie studios, but not
the heads of like US Steel and General Motors. So
I thought there must be then a new establishment as well,
because the old establishment was like you know, Wall Street
and Washington man in gray suits and I so I
sketched out what I thought we could do, and I thought,
you know, I have I have one of this the
(21:04):
greatest assets that any editors ever had, I had, any Liebitts.
So we decided we had to show what this new
establishment looked like. So Annie spent six months photographing I'm
sure you know most of these.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Things people I loved.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
I loved those issues well they were and it just
it sort of created a new look. And it was like,
h and I always wanted to have a Fortune five
hundred type list. And so we had created the new
establishment list, and it became and it was you know,
it was technology, entertainment and information and back when news
and that sort of thing was still a big thing.
(21:39):
And that became a big tent pole. And then again
it wasn't my idea, but my publisher, ed Manikeski, he
kept pestering me, as did one of my staff members,
Betsy Lack, to do like a summit built around the
new establishment. So about three years in we decided to
do that. And then so that that became a huge
successful thing. And so we had sort of tent poles shoes,
(22:00):
one in the in the spring and one in the fall,
and that was that was a very useful thing, both
for the business and for the overall halo image of
the magazine.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
It's like the met you know, you had, you had
your a costume institute ball, I mean, you had those.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
The Oscar party was more fun than it is more fun.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
I've been to the Oscar Party and it was so
much fun that I felt lost there. But it was amazing.
By the way, So the culture around you while you
were doing all this amazing development for cy New House
and Conde Nast, what was the culture like.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
A Cone nas Yeah, it was very competitive between titles.
I mean, Vogue and Vanny Fair competed desperately for advertising pages.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
And and cover stars.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Weazy won the cover battle, yes, and.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Because a bigger circulation, or.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
I would rather be on the cover of Vanity Fair
than Vogue. And but the and SI was very generous
in the way he paid people. And so you know,
all of a sudden, I was making a decent salary,
and you had a car and driver, and I was
able to buy an apartment in the Dakota and uh
and then a house downtown, and all of a sudden,
(23:08):
I didn't have the money worries i'd had before, because
I think he wanted you to just focus right on
your magazine. And so as a result, I was able
to track this incredible array of writers and photographers and editors.
By the way, but.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
The writers, I mean, the list goes on and on.
And the photographers that whose careers you built.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
I didn't build. And most of them were already built
by the time I got.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
But you made them.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
We burnished them. Yeah they were, they were beautiful.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
You know, some of them started at my place, I'm
sure they did, and then they moved on to Vanity Fair.
I'm very proud of that too, because I started, I
took a lot of novice photographers or newbies we used
to and trained them in still life and trained them
and nature and stuff, and boy did they shine.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
They were bad. Your magazine was exquisite.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Yeah, we had great, great imagery, great photography, great editorial,
no mistakes. No editorial mistakes. I think we had one
in ten years.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Well, I'm sorry. Food is a lot easier to not
make a mistake out they're writing about people and this
is the Yeah. Maybe, so maybe we made We had sometimes,
you know, forty fact checkers working on an issue, but
we would make mistake, I remember, and I would take
any phone call from anybody. So the man we had
a story about Salvador Dolly and in the story we
write this man, we say his name and said that
(24:27):
he was Salvador Dally's wife Galley's boy toy. Oh, and
that he was dead. So the man calls me up
and he said, so, first of all, I said, mister
Carter's like to point out that, hey, it was not
Galley Daly's boy toy. And that's number one and number two,
I'm still alive. So we had a lot kind of
corushtion in the next.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Oh boy, that's embarrassed. Yeah, that's so embarrassed.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
I felt badly. I felt just terrible for him.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Were you the editor when when Vanity Fair did a
cover on me? Do you remember it was a cover
with me holding my dog Francesco Plaser, I think, And
it was written by Matt turn Hour, one of your
star Weber's photographed. Remember, beautiful, beautiful pictures, and.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
You're mad, you're going to lead to a mistake of something.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
No, Matt, No, Matt put in a mistruth in there,
and it caused me five months of home confinement because
my parole officer read in there that I took my bracelet,
my bracelet off after I went and he said, he
said I took it off, that I knew how to
take it off, or maybe I joked about it. I
(25:35):
might have joked about but it got into print and
then I had five months of apologize.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Is that why we're here just so you can say this?
Speaker 1 (25:44):
No, okay, I just think it's very funny in retrospect.
It's funny, but it's also pitiful. Anybody ever has to
wear a bracelet and have to be at home confined Okay,
that's what I mean. So do you consider yourself an
editor first and then a writer or vice versa.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
An editor first? Yes, yeah, and and I've been an
editor off and on for the last half century. I
was one of the youngest when I started out, and
I'm one of the oldest now. But I love writing.
And but editing is editing is woodworking. That's the writing
is sort of whittling for me.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Oh, that's interesting analogy. It's very interesting. You wrote that
in the book that an editor is only as good
as his or her proprietor. What was your working relationship
with Si like well, So.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
I was like a second father to me. He I
simply adored him, and we would have lunch every two weeks.
We traveled to Los Angeles together, We'd often be in
London together. And uh he so I had a he
had a wisdom about things that the way beyond magazines.
He taught me a lot, and he had an interesting
(26:53):
way when there was a problem with the magazine, he
would he would sort of have his own awkward, socratic
way of geting to a solution. Need ask you questions
if you tried to just if you thought about.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
That, and what kind of problem.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Oh, there's just always problems, you know, just every but
when there were bigger problems when they finally got to him.
But at the same time, he was he just loved
he loved magazines and he loved books. So he ran
random House and he ran Connie asked, and he liked
big gestures. And I remember one day at lunch, he said,
what's going on with the magazine? I said, well, I
got some good news and bad news. He said, what's
(27:28):
the bad news? I said, we were shooting a Hollywood
cover that Annie was shooting and we had to move
this set around the world to three different spots. And
he said, I said, we're right now. We're about four
hundred and seventy five thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
And over budget.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
Yeah, by way over budget. And so he said, well, wait,
what's the good news. I said, it looks like the
most expensive magazine cover of all time. So he but
he he was great on big gestures like that, and
he he liked it when you swung for the fences
and if you if you didn't make it, you're still okay.
He was just so supportive and whatever wobbles he might
(28:10):
have had when I in my first two years because
they were they were uneven my first two years. He
never let me know, which gave me a you know,
a lot. And that's all you have is that there's
no school for being an editor. There's no textbook, and
so it's all. We didn't do studies of what readers like.
We didn't know, you know, it was just everything was
from the got.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
I never had a mentor like that. I just wish
I had had.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
You would have adored him.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
No, no, I knew him. He let me start my
magazine at Condina.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
I didn't know that.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Oh yeah, I went to see first. I went when
I was when I got the idea to do a
magazine because I wanted to incorporate all the interests of
living into one place, not just write a book a year.
I wanted to do a magazine. So I went to
Rupert Murdoch first, and he said, oh, you know, Martha,
I'm closing magazines at this time, he was closing seventeen
or selling them off. And he said, go see SI.
(29:02):
So I went to see mister Newhouse and he said, oh,
this is a very nice idea, and he said, I
will give you two. I'll give you an art director
and an editor and make me a prototype. I want
to see what you're thinking about. So I worked for
a few months on a prototype and showed it to
him and he said, what do you want the name
to be? And I said, well, living is the title
that I've sort of stuck on. And he said, well,
(29:24):
what do you mean living? I said, well, Martha Stewart living,
and he said he thought about it for about one
one minute and he said, well, you know, our name
is Condye Nast, and so it has to be Condy
Nast Living.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
Not as good a title.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
And I don't think so either, And.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Nobody knows what connye Nast means. And it was an
actual man I know, but.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
I said that that's not sort of what I mean.
This is all coming out of here, mister newhouse. And
we say friends after that. But he gave me the prototype,
he said here, take it, good luck, and so then
I took it to Time and although they were kind
of you know, difficulty.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
You're an not fit for the time.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
Oh yeah, but they couldn't believe that I could keep
it going month to month. They thought it was a
limited subject matter. I said, living is the most limitless
subject matter. And on Earth, I said, I can do July.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
We were obsessed with Maze, I know.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
But it was a July issue of the proto type,
what are you going to do next July? This is
the whole thing, I said, just wait. So of course
we never repeated ourselves. We never did the same same
flag thing twice, right, But it was very interesting. I
loved him, and I met with him like once every
six months after that for a while.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
That.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
Yeah, he was a really interesting he took. It's such
an interesting take in the in the media world.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
I agree. He you know, he'd pause along often between sentences,
like if you asked him a.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Question, Yeah, almost the stutter a mental stutter way.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
He would never say anything stupid because he'd think of
what he was going to say rather than just the
way we're talking is now.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
And I loved going to his home at the u
n Plausa because the art collection was so amazing, you know,
and and intuitive. I mean, it was just so interesting.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
Well, one time I asked him, I said, the insurance
on this must be extraordinary. He says, isn't. I can't
even again insurance. He said, First of all, nobody's going
to see all the stuff so ugly anyway, well.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
Also in a glass towers. My gosh. So your world
is both professional and socially driven, and it has been
for a very long time. When is a colleague also
a friend or is it always a colleague, always a friend.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
A lot of colleagues become friends, and I see, like,
I see all the old I just had lunch with
two Vanity Fair staff members that are dear friends today,
and I see all my old colleagues from Spy, from
Time and from Vanity Fair.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
But I love that you have your same circle of
friends from the olden days, the Walter Isaacson's I mean
I met all those guys when I was at Time
because they were publishing my magazine for a couple of
years before I moved on. But wow, it was such
an exciting group of intelligent really breathtaking, yeah, breathtaking intelligen
(32:09):
And Walter I love his writing and he's been, he's been.
He's a charm charming, fabulous uh A biographer of course.
I love his work. Dominic done too. I mean, you had.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
That was a huge asset. I mean, Dominic, you know
so when because we had two of the greatest murder
trials of the last half of the last century. And
one was the Menandaz Brothers, and one was O. J. Simpson.
And you know Nick, because his daughter had died and
was killed by by her boyfriend. He would go into
(32:41):
a murder story on this. He didn't. He wasn't objectively.
He was on the side of the victim. Yes and so,
and rightly so and rightly so. So let's say, for
the O. J. Simpson trial, every newspaper in the world
and every TV network they were on this every single day.
So the news is just out there all the time.
And here we were a monthly magazine, so that often
(33:03):
some of the details of the trial wouldn't be on
the newstand for two months. So we would send him
out and he would say the Chateau Marmont for eight
or nine months, and he would we'd have to craft
stories each month. He had to dispatch every single month.
It would tell the narrative of that period and bring
in color from dinner parties he would go to. And
(33:23):
he would spend a lot of time in the corridors
outside the courtroom, talking to witnesses, talking to the lawyers.
It was a hugely expensive for us, and to keep
them out there and have a car and driver. But
the advertisers, you know, fell over themselves average get around
his columns. He became probably the most famous print magazine
in the world over that decade.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
Yeah, he was. He was amazing. I have a little
church up in Maine on my property called Holy Family Church.
It's a Catholic church that was built for the housemaids
and the workers who had no Catholic church on the island.
And Dominic wanted to come up for the weekend, and
I put out a little ad that he was going
to come to the church and give a talk, and
(34:09):
that that place was packed. I mean, he was such
a draw. He was such a draw to anybody who
read anything. Yes, they wanted to hear.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
But he had five best sellers, all of which became
a mini series which then were a big point of
the realm.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
His work at your Place and uh, and his work
on media today was just vast, wasn't it huge? Big impact?
Speaker 2 (34:30):
No, he owned those two trials.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
How do you feel now about media and about the
demise of magazines.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
I mean I find it very upsetting, you do, yeah,
And I think that, you know, one of the things
was the people like Cy and the people at time
they loved magazines. And I think that the media companies
now are owned by ear least magazine companies are owned
by people who don't think magazines are just the greatest
things on earth. And the same thing goes with newspapers.
(34:57):
Newspapers used to be owned by families. Now they're owned
by a lot of them are owned by billionaires or
venture capital firms, and it's not the same level of concerned,
loving ownership that you have.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
And for editorial trustworthy, I mean, and I just look
at and even the networks back when you know, say
the Watergate days, the networks, you know, and before that,
we're owned by by people rather.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Than being part of some larger conglomerates. So all that
has changed. I have no idea what the future looks like.
But there's still a lot of great journalists out there
and magazines that invest in what they do, like The Atlantic,
like the New Yorker, like New York Magazine, they're thriving.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
The economists, they love the economy. I get very few magazines.
I get the New Yorkers Economists, the new Town b
the new Town Anti Saper magazine. But I mean, it's
just it's just something very different.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Yeah. Actually I looked at the Architectural Digest. They you know,
it's as beautiful as it ever was.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Yeah, it really is very good. So your reporters were
out in the field, not working from their discs. Why
was that important for you?
Speaker 2 (36:12):
See? I mean I didn't want to rely just on
myself for the ideas. You wanted editors and staff members
to be out and about and to come in with
ideas they've heard not just from reading newspapers but from
other people. And because we had to come up with
ideas of vany fair that. You know, sometimes we just
sign a story in February, it would take the writers,
(36:33):
say two and a half three months to report and
write the story. It would take us a month and
a half to edit the story, lay out the story,
get the photographs in BacT, check the story, and then
maybe another month to print it and distribute it. So
you need you would sometimes have five or six months
between when you assigned it and when somebody could read it.
So we had to have stories that would play off
(36:54):
the news but would still be relevant half a year
down the road later.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
I had to do Christmas in July. I mean you
don't know, or the year before for the next year.
It was so depressing sometimes because when the real Christmas
came around, you know, I'd already done it. So what
was your biggest scoop of all time? Would you say?
Speaker 2 (37:17):
Well, it was the unmasking of Deep Throat, which you
know was a great mystery in journalism circles for fifty
years at that point. And I was at my office
one day and as they say, I took a call
from anybody, and this lawyer called me, and I picked
up the phone and he said he he represented the
man who was deep Throat. This was two thousand and three,
(37:38):
pre sort of internet. You couldn't just immediately google anything.
So I talked to him for a while and he
didn't give me the man's name, but I said, look,
let me I have an editor get back to you.
So I called in David Friend, who was one of
my editors and we'd worked together at Life magazine, and
he over the next two years he dealt with this person.
And so we had problems because the person was deep
(37:59):
throw found out. First of all, his name was Mark Felt.
We had never heard of him before. He was the
number two at the FBI and then, but the troubles.
He'd had a stroke and he was suffering from dementia.
So we'd told some members of his family that he
was deep throat, but we couldn't be one hundred percent sure,
and so we photographed him. We thought we were about
ninety five percent right. So I go away on my honeymoon.
(38:21):
My wife and I get married, and we go in
our honeymoon. We're in the Bahamas and we're coming back.
We're in the the International airport and NASA, and all
of a sudden, I didn't have a cell phone in
those days. My wife had a one of the old
flip phones. And she gets a call. It it's from
David Friend and I see if passes it to me
and he said, you know, we released the deep Throat
story this morning. I said, oh my god, I completely
forgot about this during the of course of my honeymoon.
(38:44):
And I said, and what's happened?
Speaker 3 (38:46):
He said, wellmoon, it was a very nice honeymoon.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
And he said he said, well, Woodward of Bernstein haven't
said anything yet, he said, but they said they might
make an announcement later today. So I thought, oh my god,
I can't get on this plane unless I know one
way or the other, and I could have called Carl
or Bob to be one hundred percent sure, but I
thought if I called Carl, who was actually on our
mass head, he would call Bob and Bob would get
(39:12):
it in the Washington Post the next day. And I
couldn't call Bob because the same thing would happen. So
we waited, and we kept moving to the back of
the line as they were trying to board the plane.
And just before we got to the gate, David Friend
called and said Woodward and Bernstein just confirmed that it
was deep and I was I was so relieved, and
we got on that plane. I just came home and
(39:32):
I thought, what a wonderful way to end a honeymoon.
And it was on the front page of every newspaper
in the world the next day.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
So who was your favorite cover star?
Speaker 2 (39:42):
My favorite cover star? Well, I do think George Clooney
is the funniest non professional person I've ever met in
my life. Noun professional, I mean he doesn't and I
wasn't play it. He's not a comedian. He's really authentically funny.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
And what about what was the most difficult cover to shoot?
Speaker 2 (40:05):
The least popular person on our covers by from the
staff was Hugh Grant? Really, yeah, they didn't like them
at all. Why you're just not a very nice person.
Oh he's not even a charming person.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
What about now he's playing like old man?
Speaker 2 (40:20):
He's right, Yes, I think that's probably more his personality.
But the staff did not like him real No, yeah,
I mean he's adorable looking.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
You know, how have you personally adapted to the world
where the news is broken on social media every single
day so rapidly. I mean, it's so different from what
we were brought up in.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
I know, No, it's just voracious. Well, first of all,
air mail is sort of the antidote to news. I
wanted to features, and I wanted to a lot of
stories that.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
And it's so good. I love airmail, I do, I
do know, And it's to it.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
I look as twice a week, well the big one
on Saturday Marning, okay, like on the internet, like the
big edition of a newspaper. But we do features and
we're on the news, but not a news organization. I
don't have the energy for that anymore, or quite frankly,
the inclination. How many writers know, there's probably like thirty
regular writers, and and a lot of young people by
(41:17):
the piece, paid by the story story, and with a
lot of staff people. Yeah, and it's just it's a
it's one of my the happiest experience in my life,
the night with The great thing about the Internet is
you can do it from anywhere, and I organize this
all from we were living in Provence and I'd organize
this all from from France and we were there during
the pandemic. The downside of the Internet is that can
(41:38):
follow you everywhere, so that you can never get away
from work. The upside is you can do your job
from anywhere. If it's that it doesn't involve physical labor any.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
Well, good luck with airmil because I think it does
serve a very good purpose and is very informative and fun.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
It's fun.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Yeah, it's fun.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Yeah, you don't hang your head in grief afterwards like
you do with a newspaper.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
And I love your I love your graphics. It's it's
just fun to get thank you. I really like it.
I think we've covered so much, so much territory.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
You should do this professionally, Jay, I'll do it professionally.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
And the book that we have been talking about Graydon Carter,
and I the great journalist Graydon Carter, when the Going
was Good. And you know what, he doesn't sound terribly regretful,
which is a very nice things, very nice thing. And
the last chapter I love so much. And I'm not
going to even tell them what it is. It's just
called some Rules for Living. I love rules and and
(42:39):
I love lists, and I love what you wrote in
this last chapter. It is really really great. So get
this book, of course, on Amazon and your favorite bookstore.
When the Going was Good? Great, and Carter, thank you
so much. What a nice, nice interview.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Ye heaven
It feels appropriate to be sitting here at newsstand Studios
with Graydon Carter, where his and My magazines were likely
once sold. Graydon is famously the editor who established the
Voice of Vanity Fair, making it the intersection of celebrity
news and high quality reportage. He has been writing and
(00:24):
editing since he left college to run The Canadian Review.
His new memoir, When the Going Was Good, shares hilarious
stories and insights from the glamorous world of late twentieth
century journalism as only he can. Welcome to my podcast, Graydon,
it's such an honor to be here. Well, it's so
nice to have you here. That's right, Old editors on
(00:48):
old editor. Are you still a good editor?
Speaker 2 (00:51):
I'm a better editor now than I was twenty five
years now.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Oh you're still busy. You're still editing air mail?
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Yeah? No, no, And it's the same sort of job.
Get a little better at it every year. Thank god.
It goes that way rather than the other way.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
And what about writing, well, other.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Than the book? I you know, I write occasionally for Airmail.
I'll do more now that this my book is done,
because that took a lot of my time.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
I bet it did. And you had great archives to
write this beautiful book.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
I didn't consult any archives whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Not really.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
No, if I didn't remember it, I felt it wasn't
that interesting. And I just wanted to have stories that
I thought would interest others. I didn't. I didn't go
consult my diary or anything like that. I just and
I basically have a decent memory, not a perfect memory.
And I had a fact check who went through and
afterwards and made sure that I actually got things correct.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
That is so great. Yeah, I'm trying to write mine now.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
I'll be interested.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
I got it like another year and a half to
get it.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Need it?
Speaker 1 (01:48):
I know, oh, I need it. But I was going
to ask your opinion, because did you feel like you
went down the rabbit hole?
Speaker 2 (01:55):
No? No, I didn't feel that because most of my
stories it was broken up over you know, childhood in
Canada and Time magazine and Life magazine, then Spy and
vanity fairs.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
So you have a good chronological memory, reasonably good, yes,
but you can't write it chronologically.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
I start off with coming back from my honeymoon on
the day we broke the story of Deep Throat, So
you and I had help with that because a friend
James Fox, helped me out a lot on this in
organizing the book, so it wasn't just chronological.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Because I have vast archives. I mean I have photo
and diary and notes. Okay, I saved everything, my entire life. Okay,
So it makes it hard in a way but also
kind of very interesting.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
But you don't want to get bogged down on that stuff.
You want to just tell the fun stuff.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Oh yeah, yeah, I have. I have good chaft for
your titles.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
I've got.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
But your book is so amusing but also so informative
and so introspective, and yet it tells you, I mean
tells us so much about what went on in the
world of media, especially in the United States and in
New York City.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Well, we were there with magazines in the nineteen a
the eighties, nineties and odds were an amazing time because
magazines drove the culture and they you know, they both
reflected the culture and were a big part of it.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Your memoir, When the Going Was Good is about a
time when the magazine industry was, as a title suggests,
good it was. It was the best.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Well, also it was the Golden Age. For a singular
reason is that so many magazines were good then, you know,
I mean your magazine was brilliant. I mean Esquire was
great then. Time and news we were firing on all cyliners.
You had The New Yorker, and you had Harper's in
the Atlantic and New York Magazine. There were Food.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Magazine, Magazine. I mean they were all good, good, editorially excellent,
beautiful photography. It was the heyday for photographers.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
That and it was it was a great time because
young people came out of schools wanting to be in
the magazine business. So we got the sort of the
best in the brightest rather than the banks as it
is now.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
You know, oh yeah, nobody wants to do anything but
run to a bank or to an investment investment house.
That's it, right.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
I know it's very sad.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
So start back a little bit because I want people
to understand that you have always worked in media straight
out of college. You were born in Canada, right, and
then what happened?
Speaker 2 (04:17):
Well, I played, you know, I had a normal childhood
in Canada, and I involved playing a lot of hockey
and skiing, and I I started college and I was
stumbled in this office and these fellow students were starting
up a political literary magazine, and I went in to
talk to them and they said they were looking for
an art director, and I said, well, I can draw,
(04:38):
and so I became the art director. And little magazines
are always very bitter, little vessels of hatred and infighting,
and so one by one they left and I became
the editor, and I ran it for the next or
three and a half four years. It did nothing but
lose money. It wasn't particularly good, but it got me
a job at Time Magazine and York and that was
(05:02):
the beginning of my sort of proper adult life. What
year was that, nineteen seventy eight, oh long? And so
the city was, you know, still coming out of bankruptcy.
Rents were low. My I had a gorgeous apartment in
Greenwich Village that I paid two hundred dollars a month for, which.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Is my rent was fifty a month, a fortunate six
and a half rooms on the US River.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
It was so nice, I know.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
So you know, I probably had roughly the same directory
you did. And then I worked at Time for five years.
I was not particularly accomplished, I.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Was I was the editor at that time.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Ray k was the editor and Henry Greenwall was the
editor in chief. But I came in. So I came in.
They had restocked the magazine. There'd been a strike and
they'd restocked the magazine with this whole new group of
incredibly clever people. And we're all about the same age.
And so it was Frank Rich, you know, became the
chief theater critic of the Times and now as the
producer of Succession and other HBO hits. Michiko Kakutani became
(06:00):
the chief book credit of the New York Times, Maureen Dowd,
who's still the acclaimed Politzer Prize winning columnists of the Times.
Kurt Anderson, my partner at Spy, Alessander Stanley, my partner
at Airmail, Jim Kelly who became the editor of Time,
Walter Isaacson who became the editor Time and later, you know,
the acclaimed biographer. So and there was like six other
people like this. It was just an extraordinary gu It
(06:22):
was the best group. It was amazing and we're all
still close and friends.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Yeah. Nice. So after Time, what happened?
Speaker 2 (06:29):
So I went to I had to They sent me
up to White Planes to work on a magazine that
they wanted to start, it was going to compete with
TV Guide, which was then, you know, the biggest magazine
in the country, and that failed.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
I was there for twenty five million subscribers.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
To think about it, this.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
Is for TV Guide, everybody. The only other magazine that
had such a subscription rate, I think was Reader's.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Was Reader's Digest yea. And remember TV Guy got sold
for three billion dollars of this point. So that came
back after two months and that was sent to Life magazine.
And while I was there, I could do most of
my work in five hours a week. But so then
I kicked around this idea for a spy magazine and I.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Are they paying well? I mean, what do you remember
what you were making?
Speaker 2 (07:13):
They were thirty seven five you remember, yeah, yeah, you
paid that little and with small numbers.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
You didn't have five children then you just had one child.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
I had to true. So Kurt Anderson I we started
plotting what spy magazine would be like. And it was
the you know, the middle of the eighties was a
lot of magazines started around that period.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
It was Funny. That was a really funny magazine.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
It was a funny, reported magazine about the characters who
made up New York and and then gradually and were
you there.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
When they wrote that horrible story about me? No, oh,
so it was Pegazzi that did it.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
It was Pigazzi.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
They wrote a story about me, and I hated Spy
magazine from that day, that day fourth but but I
think I still have the article.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Well, funny, after I left, they they had a couple
of negative things about me, So it just it went
with the territory. But Nora Efron used to say she'd
go to the newstand leaf quickly leave through a copy
to see if her name was mentioned, and be relieved
and then slightly miffed that she wasn't mentioned, because if
you weren't in that Spy, it meant you didn't have
(08:24):
sort of purchase in the in the constellation of the we.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Had to be mentioned. Yes, yes, So then what happened
after Spy? So what did you sell it for? Do
you remember?
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Not that much money? I mean, nothing to change your
life or anything like that. And we sold it to
Johnny Pagazzi, who was a you know, European art collector
and man about town, and Charles Sauci. The advertisings aar
went on.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Then how did you get your vanity fair.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
So I wanted to start up a newspaper and it
would be twice a week newspaper berliner's size, which is
just a thinner version of a tabloid, but with a
of the front page that would look like a broadsheet.
And I was going to bring it out on Tuesdays
and Thursdays and it would be not it wouldn't be
about city, but it'd be built the industries that ran
the city, like publishing, television, the law, city government, and
(09:16):
fashion and things like that. So I was going around
trying to raise money for it, and I bumped into
Arthur Carter, who was a banker who owned a newspaper
called very sleepy Upper east Side newspaper called the New
York Observer, and he said, why don't you take this
over and run this for me, and you can learn
how to do it. So the Observer was a big broadsheet.
(09:37):
It was salmon colored and it looked.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
All it loved.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
I loved it was beautiful looking, loved it, and so
I worked out I said, okay, So I worked at
a plan to change it. It was very it was
really dull, and I thought I had a six month
twelve month eighteen month plan of what I would do
and who I'd bring in. There wasn't a lot of
money attached to it. I mean, we didn't have a
huge budget like that. But by about the eighth month,
(10:02):
people were reading and it became a thing in New York.
So I started sending copies to friends mine, complimentary copies
every week to friends mine around the world, including a
lot of editors in Europe. And I didn't know this
at the time, but sign new House would take twice
a year tour of all his media properties in Europe
when he would stop off in London, in Paris and Milan,
(10:24):
and he noticed that in so many of his editors
in baskets were copies in The New York Observer. And
as he told me much later, he returned from Europe
thinking this was some huge international hit. So he and
I'd gone to him originally as well when I was
writing trying to raise money for this. So he called
me and said would you like to meet? And I
(10:45):
said absolutely. And I was happy of the Observer. Though
I wasn't making a lot of money, but I was
running well. I loved my staff, and we worked in
an old sort of townhouse on the Upper East Side,
and I was worried that SI was going to offer
me like a men magazine or something like that. And
I've never really I've written for end's magazines, but it
wasn't my thing. I didn't read them that much. And
(11:06):
I was worried that I'd have to turn him down
because I was happy where I was. But then we
ment to his apartment over on Ewan Plaza and he
offered me two magazines. He said, I've got The New
Yorker and I've got Vanity Fair. And I said, well,
this is slightly awkward because for the last five years
we sort of made fun of Vanity Fair. We made
fun of at Spy magazine, we made fun of the editor,
(11:29):
we made fun of some of the writers, we made
fun of some of the editors, and they she was
the editor, and we made fun of their sort of
the baroque writing style in the magazine. So he said, okay,
it's the other one, and so I laughed, you know,
and I so it was going to be The New Yorker.
So I laughed, and I only told a few people.
I told my wife and children, my best friend Jim Kelly,
(11:51):
and my agent Andrew Willie when we'd go out for
dinner if we wanted to discuss it. We had a
code word for it when we call it the pencil,
in case anybody overheard us. And I worked at this
plan and then the day it was supposed to be announced,
I got a call from Anna Wintor who said, it's
going to be the other magazine. So he said, Street said,
(12:11):
so it's going to call you Act Surprise, and so
he called a few minutes later and he said, it's
going to be Vanny Fair. Is that okay? I said absolutely,
because I was going to be making about four times
more at Vanny Fair than I was and I had
three children by this time.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
You're going to have a carne driver.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Well I didn't even know any of that. But then,
so that's a vany Fair. But the thing is I
didn't have time to work out a plan, and so
I had to start pretty soon. And yeah, for the
first two years a bunch I fired, none of the staff.
I inherited the entire staff. They hated me at first
because new editors can mean unemployment and because we've made
fun of so many of them along the way, but
(12:53):
lot most of them came around, and I'm a very
collegial person and I like a non dramatic office. And
eventually it settled down to like three people. They were
most of them were just spent their time spreading news
of my inadequacies around town at dinner parties and that
sort of thing. One week I got rid of three
of the troublemakers. And there was two years in and
(13:16):
things just sort of changed. Then all of a sudden,
people started working together and saying please and thank you,
and we're being working together rather than being combative with
each each other.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
And the magazine got fatter and fatter. I remember that
was the time.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
No, they'd be like three quarters of an inch for
Oh yes.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
I loved those magazines. It was so much fun to
get that in the mail. Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
A lot of work to put together. I was able to,
you know, compile one of the greatest stables of writers
and photographers probably ever assembled under one room.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Indible.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Yeah. But at the same time, because it was a
golden age, everybody else was really good, so you could
never rest on your laurels, and you know, and a
lot of the competition was weekly. We were a big
lumbering monthly that took. You know how long it takes
to print your magazine? They bound magazine and I would
go to the printer color correct, would you really? Oh yeah,
(14:04):
I didn't do that.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Oh no, I was real fun.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
I didn't know where the printer was. It was in
Kentucky maybe, yeah, I know. We had a person who
did that for us, a company person, so I didn't
have to do that.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
But what was it? What was the highest circulation of
Vanity Fair when you were there?
Speaker 2 (14:17):
We never tried. You know, the thing is we charged
so much per page. We're charging one hundred thousand dollars
per page. If we increased the circulation too much, we'd
have to raise that above that and that would be
a sort of That was a tipping point for a
lot of advertisers.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
But what was then the readership?
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Oh like one point three million, and then with the
European edition one point four million. But we tried to
grow it like one percent a year, just to show growth,
but not go much beyond that.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
And beautiful printing, beautiful photography. Great, you hit the best photographer.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Any and and her Breds.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Yes, I just worked with any a couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
The best is amazing.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Still. I mean, it's still so fabulous.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
When you would have a discussion or an argument, who
would win?
Speaker 1 (15:02):
I would?
Speaker 2 (15:02):
Are you serious?
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (15:03):
And I'm admiring of you. I lost every single argument
with Annie, every single one.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Yet she was But but I don't like to argue
with her. I just love to I just love to
talk to and her point of view, and she works.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Hard, unbelieva, she works even harder than you. And that's
saying something.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
No, no, she does, and and her her sense of perfection.
What did you hope to add to the legacy of
Vanity Fair when you took over it? I mean you
didn't really have time to think about that right away,
(15:42):
But what did you hope and your mind when you
when you realize here I am, I'm at the helm
of one of the finest magazines ever.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
I just I didn't have any grand plans. My greatest
hope was just keeping the job because at some point,
at a certain point, I had four children and that's family. Yeah,
and so I just want the first couple of years,
I just wanted to hold onto the job because there
were rumors that I was going to be losing it.
(16:12):
And they used to have a sort of peg bulletin
board sort of on the and the foyer three point
fifty Madison where where the conte Nast was, and it
had all the names of the editors and the executives.
And every day when I go into work, I just
like quickly glance at my name was still on it.
And then there was a couple around the newstand called
(16:34):
Market and Helmet, and they sort of knew everything before
anybody else, and I would say hello to them in
the morning and just be able to gauge by their
faces whether they had heard some horrifying news about me.
And so I had no plans at all. Most of
the things, the the innovations, strange enough, were not my ideas.
(16:56):
The one was the the Oscar party I'd gone to.
So when I got to the magazine, I wanted to
meet Sweti Lazar. So we went out to lunch, and
I don't think he knew what to make of me,
because it was so fascinated by all the writers. He
had William Saroyan, and he had Noel Coward and Moss Hard.
But then he represented all the major film stars. You
probably met him the first sort of major superagent in
(17:19):
the world. So we had we had lunch, and he
invited me to his Oscar party that year. He had
it at Spago, which was divided into two rooms, so
you had and you could see that there was an
A room and a b room, and the A room
was like the Gregory Pax and the Billy Wilders, the
Henry Fondos, and the b room was like people like
me below the line talent. And he dies in December,
(17:40):
and I think, you know something, Benny Fair could take
that spot. So I we booked Morton's restaurant, and which
was then the power restaurant in Los Angeles at the time.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
And another guy.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
I was in love with Peter Morton. Yes, I think
he's taken.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
I know he was taking no, but but he was
so attractive.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Does he know this?
Speaker 1 (18:00):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
I'll tell him that, Okay, okay, I was just pretty.
I feel like Dolly Levi here. So I wanted to
I was worried because SI loves Hollywood, he loves movies,
and I wanted to make sure that we were successful,
and if we weren't, I wanted to fail on a
small scale. So I we had one hundred and fifty
people for dinner and it was one room, so there
(18:22):
was no ab delineation, and a lot of big parties
in those days would have a sort of roped off
VIP area, so called VIP area. I wanted none of that,
and once you got in, everybody was the same.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
I like that, so we did.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
I had one hundred and fifty people for dinner, and
then about one hundred and fifty two hundred people came
after the Oscars. We weren't a huge success yet, but
we hadn't failed. And then you know, the next year,
it just grew and grew and grew, and then cy
when late at lunch, he said, have you ever thought
of doing a Hollywood issue?
Speaker 1 (18:53):
And oh, it was his idea.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
It was his idea, and so I sort of resisted
at first because I thought one of the great joys
of a magine, a big general interest magazine like Vanny Fair,
was the the fact that there's so many different types
of stories. And but then I was working at home
one night in the kitchen I thought I tried to
sketched what I thought could be a lineup for a
Hollywood issue, where you would have a crime story involving Hollywood,
(19:16):
and a business story and a historic story and a
you know, a contemporary story with limitless it was, as
it turns out, it was. We did that the next
year and that created a huge sort of old cover.
Did you give a fulld oup coverage? Yes, we had, Yeah,
so I wanted at that time. First of all, the
Oscars had they they'd sort of lost their loster. They
were not considered cool, and young people thought they they
(19:40):
were incredibly uncol and people stayed away in droves. But
we sort of we sort of told the story of
Hollywood glamour back to Hollywood because they'd sort of forgotten
that this was one of their sort of major trading assets.
And the Hollywood issue became a fiction. And then we
said we had this huge tent pole in Los Angeles
in the spring for the magazine. And then the other
(20:00):
sort of major tent pole issue I did was I
was having lunch with David Halberstam. I'm sure you had
a cross on him as well. Oh, okay, I did.
We were talking and we were at lunch and we
were talking about that. He was saying that the economy,
the American economy this is like nineteen ninety four, had
shifted from being an economy that made things and shipped
(20:22):
them overseas, like you know, steel and cars and tires
and that sort of thing, and was now more of
an information entertainment based economy, and what we shipped around
the world were sort of intellectual products and books, movies, books, movies, television.
Technology was coming out of Silicon Valley. So I thought,
if that is the case, because I thought most people
(20:43):
could name the heads of the movie studios, but not
the heads of like US Steel and General Motors. So
I thought there must be then a new establishment as well,
because the old establishment was like you know, Wall Street
and Washington man in gray suits and I so I
sketched out what I thought we could do, and I thought,
you know, I have I have one of this the
(21:04):
greatest assets that any editors ever had, I had, any Liebitts.
So we decided we had to show what this new
establishment looked like. So Annie spent six months photographing I'm
sure you know most of these.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Things people I loved.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
I loved those issues well they were and it just
it sort of created a new look. And it was like,
h and I always wanted to have a Fortune five
hundred type list. And so we had created the new
establishment list, and it became and it was you know,
it was technology, entertainment and information and back when news
and that sort of thing was still a big thing.
(21:39):
And that became a big tent pole. And then again
it wasn't my idea, but my publisher, ed Manikeski, he
kept pestering me, as did one of my staff members,
Betsy Lack, to do like a summit built around the
new establishment. So about three years in we decided to
do that. And then so that that became a huge
successful thing. And so we had sort of tent poles shoes,
(22:00):
one in the in the spring and one in the fall,
and that was that was a very useful thing, both
for the business and for the overall halo image of
the magazine.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
It's like the met you know, you had, you had
your a costume institute ball, I mean, you had those.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
The Oscar party was more fun than it is more fun.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
I've been to the Oscar Party and it was so
much fun that I felt lost there. But it was amazing.
By the way, So the culture around you while you
were doing all this amazing development for cy New House
and Conde Nast, what was the culture like.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
A Cone nas Yeah, it was very competitive between titles.
I mean, Vogue and Vanny Fair competed desperately for advertising pages.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
And and cover stars.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Weazy won the cover battle, yes, and.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Because a bigger circulation, or.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
I would rather be on the cover of Vanity Fair
than Vogue. And but the and SI was very generous
in the way he paid people. And so you know,
all of a sudden, I was making a decent salary,
and you had a car and driver, and I was
able to buy an apartment in the Dakota and uh
and then a house downtown, and all of a sudden,
(23:08):
I didn't have the money worries i'd had before, because
I think he wanted you to just focus right on
your magazine. And so as a result, I was able
to track this incredible array of writers and photographers and editors.
By the way, but.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
The writers, I mean, the list goes on and on.
And the photographers that whose careers you built.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
I didn't build. And most of them were already built
by the time I got.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
But you made them.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
We burnished them. Yeah they were, they were beautiful.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
You know, some of them started at my place, I'm
sure they did, and then they moved on to Vanity Fair.
I'm very proud of that too, because I started, I
took a lot of novice photographers or newbies we used
to and trained them in still life and trained them
and nature and stuff, and boy did they shine.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
They were bad. Your magazine was exquisite.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Yeah, we had great, great imagery, great photography, great editorial,
no mistakes. No editorial mistakes. I think we had one
in ten years.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Well, I'm sorry. Food is a lot easier to not
make a mistake out they're writing about people and this
is the Yeah. Maybe, so maybe we made We had sometimes,
you know, forty fact checkers working on an issue, but
we would make mistake, I remember, and I would take
any phone call from anybody. So the man we had
a story about Salvador Dolly and in the story we
write this man, we say his name and said that
(24:27):
he was Salvador Dally's wife Galley's boy toy. Oh, and
that he was dead. So the man calls me up
and he said, so, first of all, I said, mister
Carter's like to point out that, hey, it was not
Galley Daly's boy toy. And that's number one and number two,
I'm still alive. So we had a lot kind of
corushtion in the next.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Oh boy, that's embarrassed. Yeah, that's so embarrassed.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
I felt badly. I felt just terrible for him.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Were you the editor when when Vanity Fair did a
cover on me? Do you remember it was a cover
with me holding my dog Francesco Plaser, I think, And
it was written by Matt turn Hour, one of your
star Weber's photographed. Remember, beautiful, beautiful pictures, and.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
You're mad, you're going to lead to a mistake of something.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
No, Matt, No, Matt put in a mistruth in there,
and it caused me five months of home confinement because
my parole officer read in there that I took my bracelet,
my bracelet off after I went and he said, he
said I took it off, that I knew how to
take it off, or maybe I joked about it. I
(25:35):
might have joked about but it got into print and
then I had five months of apologize.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Is that why we're here just so you can say this?
Speaker 1 (25:44):
No, okay, I just think it's very funny in retrospect.
It's funny, but it's also pitiful. Anybody ever has to
wear a bracelet and have to be at home confined Okay,
that's what I mean. So do you consider yourself an
editor first and then a writer or vice versa.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
An editor first? Yes, yeah, and and I've been an
editor off and on for the last half century. I
was one of the youngest when I started out, and
I'm one of the oldest now. But I love writing.
And but editing is editing is woodworking. That's the writing
is sort of whittling for me.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Oh, that's interesting analogy. It's very interesting. You wrote that
in the book that an editor is only as good
as his or her proprietor. What was your working relationship
with Si like well, So.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
I was like a second father to me. He I
simply adored him, and we would have lunch every two weeks.
We traveled to Los Angeles together, We'd often be in
London together. And uh he so I had a he
had a wisdom about things that the way beyond magazines.
He taught me a lot, and he had an interesting
(26:53):
way when there was a problem with the magazine, he
would he would sort of have his own awkward, socratic
way of geting to a solution. Need ask you questions
if you tried to just if you thought about.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
That, and what kind of problem.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Oh, there's just always problems, you know, just every but
when there were bigger problems when they finally got to him.
But at the same time, he was he just loved
he loved magazines and he loved books. So he ran
random House and he ran Connie asked, and he liked
big gestures. And I remember one day at lunch, he said,
what's going on with the magazine? I said, well, I
got some good news and bad news. He said, what's
(27:28):
the bad news? I said, we were shooting a Hollywood
cover that Annie was shooting and we had to move
this set around the world to three different spots. And
he said, I said, we're right now. We're about four
hundred and seventy five thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
And over budget.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
Yeah, by way over budget. And so he said, well, wait,
what's the good news. I said, it looks like the
most expensive magazine cover of all time. So he but
he he was great on big gestures like that, and
he he liked it when you swung for the fences
and if you if you didn't make it, you're still okay.
He was just so supportive and whatever wobbles he might
(28:10):
have had when I in my first two years because
they were they were uneven my first two years. He
never let me know, which gave me a you know,
a lot. And that's all you have is that there's
no school for being an editor. There's no textbook, and
so it's all. We didn't do studies of what readers like.
We didn't know, you know, it was just everything was
from the got.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
I never had a mentor like that. I just wish
I had had.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
You would have adored him.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
No, no, I knew him. He let me start my
magazine at Condina.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
I didn't know that.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Oh yeah, I went to see first. I went when
I was when I got the idea to do a
magazine because I wanted to incorporate all the interests of
living into one place, not just write a book a year.
I wanted to do a magazine. So I went to
Rupert Murdoch first, and he said, oh, you know, Martha,
I'm closing magazines at this time, he was closing seventeen
or selling them off. And he said, go see SI.
(29:02):
So I went to see mister Newhouse and he said, oh,
this is a very nice idea, and he said, I
will give you two. I'll give you an art director
and an editor and make me a prototype. I want
to see what you're thinking about. So I worked for
a few months on a prototype and showed it to
him and he said, what do you want the name
to be? And I said, well, living is the title
that I've sort of stuck on. And he said, well,
(29:24):
what do you mean living? I said, well, Martha Stewart living,
and he said he thought about it for about one
one minute and he said, well, you know, our name
is Condye Nast, and so it has to be Condy
Nast Living.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
Not as good a title.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
And I don't think so either, And.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Nobody knows what connye Nast means. And it was an
actual man I know, but.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
I said that that's not sort of what I mean.
This is all coming out of here, mister newhouse. And
we say friends after that. But he gave me the prototype,
he said here, take it, good luck, and so then
I took it to Time and although they were kind
of you know, difficulty.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
You're an not fit for the time.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
Oh yeah, but they couldn't believe that I could keep
it going month to month. They thought it was a
limited subject matter. I said, living is the most limitless
subject matter. And on Earth, I said, I can do July.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
We were obsessed with Maze, I know.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
But it was a July issue of the proto type,
what are you going to do next July? This is
the whole thing, I said, just wait. So of course
we never repeated ourselves. We never did the same same
flag thing twice, right, But it was very interesting. I
loved him, and I met with him like once every
six months after that for a while.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
That.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
Yeah, he was a really interesting he took. It's such
an interesting take in the in the media world.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
I agree. He you know, he'd pause along often between sentences,
like if you asked him a.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Question, Yeah, almost the stutter a mental stutter way.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
He would never say anything stupid because he'd think of
what he was going to say rather than just the
way we're talking is now.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
And I loved going to his home at the u
n Plausa because the art collection was so amazing, you know,
and and intuitive. I mean, it was just so interesting.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
Well, one time I asked him, I said, the insurance
on this must be extraordinary. He says, isn't. I can't
even again insurance. He said, First of all, nobody's going
to see all the stuff so ugly anyway, well.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
Also in a glass towers. My gosh. So your world
is both professional and socially driven, and it has been
for a very long time. When is a colleague also
a friend or is it always a colleague, always a friend.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
A lot of colleagues become friends, and I see, like,
I see all the old I just had lunch with
two Vanity Fair staff members that are dear friends today,
and I see all my old colleagues from Spy, from
Time and from Vanity Fair.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
But I love that you have your same circle of
friends from the olden days, the Walter Isaacson's I mean
I met all those guys when I was at Time
because they were publishing my magazine for a couple of
years before I moved on. But wow, it was such
an exciting group of intelligent really breathtaking, yeah, breathtaking intelligen
(32:09):
And Walter I love his writing and he's been, he's been.
He's a charm charming, fabulous uh A biographer of course.
I love his work. Dominic done too. I mean, you had.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
That was a huge asset. I mean, Dominic, you know
so when because we had two of the greatest murder
trials of the last half of the last century. And
one was the Menandaz Brothers, and one was O. J. Simpson.
And you know Nick, because his daughter had died and
was killed by by her boyfriend. He would go into
(32:41):
a murder story on this. He didn't. He wasn't objectively.
He was on the side of the victim. Yes and so,
and rightly so and rightly so. So let's say, for
the O. J. Simpson trial, every newspaper in the world
and every TV network they were on this every single day.
So the news is just out there all the time.
And here we were a monthly magazine, so that often
(33:03):
some of the details of the trial wouldn't be on
the newstand for two months. So we would send him
out and he would say the Chateau Marmont for eight
or nine months, and he would we'd have to craft
stories each month. He had to dispatch every single month.
It would tell the narrative of that period and bring
in color from dinner parties he would go to. And
(33:23):
he would spend a lot of time in the corridors
outside the courtroom, talking to witnesses, talking to the lawyers.
It was a hugely expensive for us, and to keep
them out there and have a car and driver. But
the advertisers, you know, fell over themselves average get around
his columns. He became probably the most famous print magazine
in the world over that decade.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
Yeah, he was. He was amazing. I have a little
church up in Maine on my property called Holy Family Church.
It's a Catholic church that was built for the housemaids
and the workers who had no Catholic church on the island.
And Dominic wanted to come up for the weekend, and
I put out a little ad that he was going
to come to the church and give a talk, and
(34:09):
that that place was packed. I mean, he was such
a draw. He was such a draw to anybody who
read anything. Yes, they wanted to hear.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
But he had five best sellers, all of which became
a mini series which then were a big point of
the realm.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
His work at your Place and uh, and his work
on media today was just vast, wasn't it huge? Big impact?
Speaker 2 (34:30):
No, he owned those two trials.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
How do you feel now about media and about the
demise of magazines.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
I mean I find it very upsetting, you do, yeah,
And I think that, you know, one of the things
was the people like Cy and the people at time
they loved magazines. And I think that the media companies
now are owned by ear least magazine companies are owned
by people who don't think magazines are just the greatest
things on earth. And the same thing goes with newspapers.
(34:57):
Newspapers used to be owned by families. Now they're owned
by a lot of them are owned by billionaires or
venture capital firms, and it's not the same level of concerned,
loving ownership that you have.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
And for editorial trustworthy, I mean, and I just look
at and even the networks back when you know, say
the Watergate days, the networks, you know, and before that,
we're owned by by people rather.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Than being part of some larger conglomerates. So all that
has changed. I have no idea what the future looks like.
But there's still a lot of great journalists out there
and magazines that invest in what they do, like The Atlantic,
like the New Yorker, like New York Magazine, they're thriving.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
The economists, they love the economy. I get very few magazines.
I get the New Yorkers Economists, the new Town b
the new Town Anti Saper magazine. But I mean, it's
just it's just something very different.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Yeah. Actually I looked at the Architectural Digest. They you know,
it's as beautiful as it ever was.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Yeah, it really is very good. So your reporters were
out in the field, not working from their discs. Why
was that important for you?
Speaker 2 (36:12):
See? I mean I didn't want to rely just on
myself for the ideas. You wanted editors and staff members
to be out and about and to come in with
ideas they've heard not just from reading newspapers but from
other people. And because we had to come up with
ideas of vany fair that. You know, sometimes we just
sign a story in February, it would take the writers,
(36:33):
say two and a half three months to report and
write the story. It would take us a month and
a half to edit the story, lay out the story,
get the photographs in BacT, check the story, and then
maybe another month to print it and distribute it. So
you need you would sometimes have five or six months
between when you assigned it and when somebody could read it.
So we had to have stories that would play off
(36:54):
the news but would still be relevant half a year
down the road later.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
I had to do Christmas in July. I mean you
don't know, or the year before for the next year.
It was so depressing sometimes because when the real Christmas
came around, you know, I'd already done it. So what
was your biggest scoop of all time? Would you say?
Speaker 2 (37:17):
Well, it was the unmasking of Deep Throat, which you
know was a great mystery in journalism circles for fifty
years at that point. And I was at my office
one day and as they say, I took a call
from anybody, and this lawyer called me, and I picked
up the phone and he said he he represented the
man who was deep Throat. This was two thousand and three,
(37:38):
pre sort of internet. You couldn't just immediately google anything.
So I talked to him for a while and he
didn't give me the man's name, but I said, look,
let me I have an editor get back to you.
So I called in David Friend, who was one of
my editors and we'd worked together at Life magazine, and
he over the next two years he dealt with this person.
And so we had problems because the person was deep
(37:59):
throw found out. First of all, his name was Mark Felt.
We had never heard of him before. He was the
number two at the FBI and then, but the troubles.
He'd had a stroke and he was suffering from dementia.
So we'd told some members of his family that he
was deep throat, but we couldn't be one hundred percent sure,
and so we photographed him. We thought we were about
ninety five percent right. So I go away on my honeymoon.
(38:21):
My wife and I get married, and we go in
our honeymoon. We're in the Bahamas and we're coming back.
We're in the the International airport and NASA, and all
of a sudden, I didn't have a cell phone in
those days. My wife had a one of the old
flip phones. And she gets a call. It it's from
David Friend and I see if passes it to me
and he said, you know, we released the deep Throat
story this morning. I said, oh my god, I completely
forgot about this during the of course of my honeymoon.
(38:44):
And I said, and what's happened?
Speaker 3 (38:46):
He said, wellmoon, it was a very nice honeymoon.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
And he said he said, well, Woodward of Bernstein haven't
said anything yet, he said, but they said they might
make an announcement later today. So I thought, oh my god,
I can't get on this plane unless I know one
way or the other, and I could have called Carl
or Bob to be one hundred percent sure, but I
thought if I called Carl, who was actually on our
mass head, he would call Bob and Bob would get
(39:12):
it in the Washington Post the next day. And I
couldn't call Bob because the same thing would happen. So
we waited, and we kept moving to the back of
the line as they were trying to board the plane.
And just before we got to the gate, David Friend
called and said Woodward and Bernstein just confirmed that it
was deep and I was I was so relieved, and
we got on that plane. I just came home and
(39:32):
I thought, what a wonderful way to end a honeymoon.
And it was on the front page of every newspaper
in the world the next day.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
So who was your favorite cover star?
Speaker 2 (39:42):
My favorite cover star? Well, I do think George Clooney
is the funniest non professional person I've ever met in
my life. Noun professional, I mean he doesn't and I
wasn't play it. He's not a comedian. He's really authentically funny.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
And what about what was the most difficult cover to shoot?
Speaker 2 (40:05):
The least popular person on our covers by from the
staff was Hugh Grant? Really, yeah, they didn't like them
at all. Why you're just not a very nice person.
Oh he's not even a charming person.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
What about now he's playing like old man?
Speaker 2 (40:20):
He's right, Yes, I think that's probably more his personality.
But the staff did not like him real No, yeah,
I mean he's adorable looking.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
You know, how have you personally adapted to the world
where the news is broken on social media every single
day so rapidly. I mean, it's so different from what
we were brought up in.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
I know, No, it's just voracious. Well, first of all,
air mail is sort of the antidote to news. I
wanted to features, and I wanted to a lot of
stories that.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
And it's so good. I love airmail, I do, I
do know, And it's to it.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
I look as twice a week, well the big one
on Saturday Marning, okay, like on the internet, like the
big edition of a newspaper. But we do features and
we're on the news, but not a news organization. I
don't have the energy for that anymore, or quite frankly,
the inclination. How many writers know, there's probably like thirty
regular writers, and and a lot of young people by
(41:17):
the piece, paid by the story story, and with a
lot of staff people. Yeah, and it's just it's a
it's one of my the happiest experience in my life,
the night with The great thing about the Internet is
you can do it from anywhere, and I organize this
all from we were living in Provence and I'd organize
this all from from France and we were there during
the pandemic. The downside of the Internet is that can
(41:38):
follow you everywhere, so that you can never get away
from work. The upside is you can do your job
from anywhere. If it's that it doesn't involve physical labor any.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
Well, good luck with airmil because I think it does
serve a very good purpose and is very informative and fun.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
It's fun.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Yeah, it's fun.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Yeah, you don't hang your head in grief afterwards like
you do with a newspaper.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
And I love your I love your graphics. It's it's
just fun to get thank you. I really like it.
I think we've covered so much, so much territory.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
You should do this professionally, Jay, I'll do it professionally.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
And the book that we have been talking about Graydon Carter,
and I the great journalist Graydon Carter, when the Going
was Good. And you know what, he doesn't sound terribly regretful,
which is a very nice things, very nice thing. And
the last chapter I love so much. And I'm not
going to even tell them what it is. It's just
called some Rules for Living. I love rules and and
(42:39):
I love lists, and I love what you wrote in
this last chapter. It is really really great. So get
this book, of course, on Amazon and your favorite bookstore.
When the Going was Good? Great, and Carter, thank you
so much. What a nice, nice interview.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
Ye heaven
Host
Martha Stewart
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