Graydon Carter, a former editor of Spy, the New York Observer, and Vanity Fair, has been held up over the years as a force of style, both in his personal life (he dresses well) and in his expansive vision of creative work. At Vanity Fair, Carter gave the movie industry a layer of polish and championed a particular idea of the good life—affluent and lush, yet seriously engaged in the world. As a New York restaurateur, he helped to promote a certain kind of refined dining: intimate, convivial, and bound to specific neighborhoods. And, as a power player, he remains a background impresario, helping to launch movies, shape events, and assemble people. All these activities are exercises in style, and all, in his telling, grew from his editorial work during an especially prosperous and thrilling era in American magazines. That era is the subject of the memoir “When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines” (Penguin Press), which Carter has written with the ghostwriter James Fox. It is not for us to wonder how Carter, who came up as a writer and editor, feels about the double byline on his life, but the choice of Fox, the writer behind Keith Richards’s excellent “Life,” from 2010, reflects both Carter’s good taste and his instinct for cachet. If you must collaborate, why not with the ghost of the grooviest Stone? Fox, known to be a great ordering force, has helped turn Carter’s extremely un-Richardsian life into a winsome book—brisk, bright, and full of well-told anecdotes about bold- and semi-boldface names—without straying from Carter’s aloof and sometimes chilly sybaritism. “Somehow, in my case, with a lot of mishaps and a dollop of good luck along the way, things just worked out,” Carter writes: the voice of a man who tasted the best of the American century and still left the party early, with his dignity intact. Anything lost through the co-writing is mostly in the realm of portraiture. No existing reputations are broken here, and many are burnished. The book trades in a familiar New York style of information-sharing by which outsiders are allowed to feel like insiders, and sometimes—because Carter’s career has been one of turning tables endlessly—the other way around. Carter’s own superpower seems to have been ordinariness. He was passable at most things, notable in none. After high school, he did railroad maintenance in western Canada—by his account, a military-like experience of barracks life, labor, and diverse camaraderie, common among sheltered middle-class Canadians. He attended two universities in Ottawa and left both. To pass the time during these desultory days, he began working at a new publication called The Canadian Review. A masthead shakeup swiftly tossed the editorship into his lap. The appointment was less grand than it sounded—The Canadian Review was a literary magazine with campus funding—and the role was not a perfect fit. A lot of what the Review printed was poetry, but Carter’s appreciation of the form ended somewhere around “So We’ll Go No More a Roving,” and he took to putting all the poetry in the trash. The magazine’s financial bottom fell out, but not before he’d tasted real success: under his tenure, the Review reached a circulation of fifty thousand, a high number in Canada. (As a population share, that would be, in today’s United States, about as many people as now take Sunday delivery of the New York Times.) He glimpsed an upward path. Across the twentieth century, New York magazines were powerful convening spaces—not just for readers but for journalists, artists, photographers, and literary writers. At the largest of them, a few small assignments a year, or a major one every couple of years, could pay the rent. For young staffers, the magazines were life-making, paternalistic institutions, providing support both in and out of the office. The editor of The New Yorker set up a “drawing account” system to help writers with their cash flows while they worked. A “Vogue doctor” advised young staffers on reproductive health. In the late seventies, when Carter arrived at Time, in a mid-level writing job, he was pleased to find that he never had to use his oven. Staffers charged restaurant dinners and even some family vacations to the magazine, often at their superiors’ urging. Time had a reputation as an apiary for buzzing young Ivy League types. “The general feeling was that everybody else could be making more elsewhere—a theory I did not subscribe to—but the expense account life made up for some of the shortage,” Carter writes. Every Friday, as the upcoming issue was put to bed, carts rolled through the hallways with hot dinner and wine, after which company cars took staffers home—or, in the summer, out to Long Island, where they rented houses in Sag Harbor. For Carter, who had his first Savile Row suit made during those years, Time was where the good going began. He was at first a “floater,” like the character in Calvin Trillin’s novel of the same name, writing pieces across a range of desks. On Monday, stories were assigned. On Tuesday, correspondents corresponded, researchers researched, and Carter went to the movies. Wednesday was when he began writing, drawing from a file that landed on his desk; then his efforts went to editors, who rewrote almost everything. (“My heart would skip a beat when I’d read a published piece and recognize a phrase I’d written.”) If this process dampened the anxieties of authorship, it also dampened its pleasures; a week at Time was like bowling with bumpers, and many people, in the end, want a real game. When Carter realized that he wouldn’t be among the bright lights elevated—his cohort included Walter Isaacson and Michiko Kakutani—he foresaw an aimless future. Time had been a paradise for him, but it was not enough. Spy, which Carter launched, in 1986, with his former Time colleague Kurt Andersen, strove for a tone he calls “bemused detachment, but witheringly judgmental,” and was almost instantly a hit. Comic magazines like Mad and National Lampoon were zany, gag-filled, world-inside-your-head parodies, but Spy was a reported fact-and-trend magazine—closer, in some ways, to Time or Life. It had columns, features, sidebars, spreads, and crosswords, but in mischievously ironized forms. A fine-print sidebar, called “Fine Print,” might list prominent New Yorkers who had been found guilty of ethical and other violations. A service feature, called “Service Feature,” offered a breakdown of, for instance, who was who in the decade’s notorious romans à clef. Borrowing Private Eye’s penchant for reusable epithets (“small but perfectly formed”) and Time’s tic of front-loading descriptors (“beaver-toothed Joe DiMaggio”), Spy gave its subjects recurring and unflattering titles. There was “too-rich-and-too-fleshy Bill Blass,” the designer. A former Secretary of State was “socialite war criminal Henry Kissinger.” And there was “short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump,” Spy’s perpetual embodiment of everything inept, corrupt, tacky, buffoonish, and cruel in eighties New York. The best satirical projects are mapping exercises that bring comfort and community to readers: by poking fun, they name and locate people in a knowable comic landscape. (The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town, which its founding editor held to be the heart of the magazine, was conceived as one such endeavor, meant to turn the daunting city into a familiar “village of New York.”) To be lampooned in Spy was, if not at all an honor, something like a backward, upside-down mark of distinction. Nora Ephron, Carter says, described being relieved when she opened an issue and didn’t find her name, then feeling annoyed at being left out. (Of Ephron’s novel “Heartburn,” Spy had succinctly pronounced, “Everybody fares poorly, including the reader.”) Carter co-edited the magazine for five years and oversaw what ended up being an ill-starred sale to Charles Saatchi and Johnny Pigozzi. (Spy would cease publication in 1994 and, after a brief resurrection, die a second death in 1998.) He was growing restless, and, in the summer of 1991, to the surprise of his colleagues, he moved to a job running the New York Observer, an East Side weekly. The paper’s readership picked up. He started sending sample copies to editors abroad. The chairman of Condé Nast, S. I. Newhouse, toured his European publications in the late winter and, noticing the Observer in everybody’s inboxes, assumed that Carter had created an international success. That spring, Newhouse invited Carter to his apartment and offered him the editorship of either of two magazines he owned: Vanity Fair or The New Yorker. Carter chose the latter, where his starting salary was set at six hundred thousand dollars, or about $1.4 million today. In the weeks that followed, he drew up an eighteen-month plan to turn the magazine onto a fresh course. The New Yorker was known in his apartment as “the Pencil”: a kind of code that enabled Carter, who has a reasonable fear of eavesdroppers in Manhattan restaurants, to talk about the future over dinner with his children and his wife. No New Yorker succession has been without last-minute drama, except for, possibly, the first, in 1951, when the magazine’s founding editor died while having one of his lungs removed, and the ship glided on under his longtime deputy. On the morning when press releases were to announce Carter’s appointment, he received a call. Accounts differ about who insisted what to whom, but Newhouse and Tina Brown, then the editor of Vanity Fair, had decided between themselves that Brown should take over The New Yorker, leaving Vanity Fair to Carter, who was less than thrilled. As he puts it: “I thought, Oh, fuck.” At Spy, Carter had mocked Vanity Fair, which he had found breathy and incestuous. (“In Vanity Fair, it’s sometimes difficult to tell who is slurping whom,” Spy pronounced in 1988.) Now, with no warning or plan, he had to fill at least a hundred and twenty editorial pages a month while attracting advertising at around a hundred thousand dollars a page. He got to the office every day by 5:30 a.m. “I was constantly worried that I was going to lose my job,” he writes. The magazine’s backlog (material bought but not run) contained nothing that he considered publishable, and the work in progress brought him little joy. That summer, Norman Mailer had been assigned to cover the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, but the piece that Mailer submitted on the first Convention was so weak—a tedious recap of what everybody had seen on TV, with no insight or reporting—that Carter killed both assignments and paid Mailer in full (a sum well into the six figures in today’s money). He delivered the news to Mailer, who stormed out of the room. Later that day, in a laying on of misfortune, one of Carter’s sons had an alarming riding accident: his head was stomped on by a horse. “The first two years at Vanity Fair were pretty dreadful,” Carter allows. The magazine’s luxury advertisers seemed to hate him for his lèse-majestés at Spy, and some stepped back. So did the staff, who crept around giving him, he felt, the evil eye. “The atmosphere was so poisonous that I wouldn’t even bring my family into the office,” he writes. The press reported rumors of his firing before his first issue appeared. If the golden rule for a writer is to try to avoid situations where you find yourself writing something you wouldn’t read, a similar calculus probably applies to assigning and editing stories. Magazines, unlike newspapers, aren’t engaged in comprehensive coverage. Pieces that are gratuitous or dutiful, undertaken in the “we should probably” mode, usually stink like dead fish from a mile away. The defining experience of good magazine reading is “I didn’t think I was interested, but”: the medium is made not in its choice of subjects but in its qualities of execution. Magic happens when at least one person—a writer, a photographer, or an editor—has been allowed to fall in love. “My philosophy has always been that if you take care of the talent,” Carter explains, “you’ll get better work.” Vanity Fair had no budget—that is, no ceiling—and came with perks that might make even a Time editor blush. Condé Nast offered its editors-in-chief interest-free home loans, set up every senior editor with an assistant, and sent employees home in town cars when work ran late. (Three words only: no longer so.) Expense policies amounted to free cash for breakfasts and lunches—Carter had a horror of indoor-cat editors who ate at their desks. Photo shoots had craft service on the scale of movie sets’, and reporting coffers ran deep. When the O. J. Simpson trial began, Carter flew Vanity Fair’s courtroom correspondent, Dominick Dunne, to Los Angeles and installed him in the Chateau Marmont for the length of the eight-month proceedings. When Dunne struggled to file, as he often did, Carter periodically flew out his editor and installed him there, too—presumably to sit nearby and spirit out copy to New York. There is, it must be said, no such thing as an overpaid writer, and Carter, to his credit, recognized the value of singular work. What wouldn’t you pay to get something extraordinary and lasting on the page? As an editor, Carter describes himself as nonconfrontational, and is not what one might call a big technician. “I believe that all great magazine stories must have a combination of the following elements,” he declares: narrative, access, conflict, and disclosure—a bit like saying that baseball must have pitches, outs, hits, and runs. But he knows a good game. The first writer he hired was Christopher Hitchens, who, until his death, in 2011, brought in columns on a great range of subjects: politics, literature, drinking, and how it felt to be waterboarded (bad). Carter was proud of the magazine’s literary reporting—and of beating Woodward and Bernstein to the public identification of Deep Throat, in 2005. When that story was released, Carter was honeymooning in the Bahamas in service to his third marriage, and was petrified that they’d got it wrong. But he enjoyed getting in ahead of the giants. It is tempting to describe Carter’s Vanity Fair as Spy without the irony, but it also offered him a way to stretch his point of view. The writing had a curious expansiveness—even short columns now read as long—and, in stories about affluent perversity and cursed dynasties, an eye for glamour with a darkened edge. Though he and his team worked from New York, his Vanity Fair became, in many ways, the essential magazine of L.A. In the early nineteen-eighties, while reporting for Time, Carter had been deflected from Irving (Swifty) Lazar’s famous Oscars party. After Lazar died, in 1993, Carter saw a vacuum in the Oscar-party scene, and created his own, setting it up as a dinner at Morton’s, a good Hollywood restaurant with banquettes, to keep it small. There were cameras waiting at the entrance, but the party was less an extravaganza than a social occasion. (“If you’re a successful movie actor, you don’t really get to meet other movie actors unless you’ve been in a movie with them, because you’re working all the time,” Carter writes.) It became an institution. One comes away from Carter’s memoir with a sense that his natural art form, even more than making magazines, might be dinner. He has astute things to say about the restaurants where he has eaten, and, in the mid-two-thousands, he went into the business himself, rejuvenating the Waverly Inn and the Monkey Bar. There was a period when he regularly gave thirty-person dinner parties at his home. His editing style, with its big budgets and nonconfrontational leadership, feels akin to hosting. Carter has keen ideas about the correct practice of dinner: the guest list (lunch is for people who might stress you out; dinner is for those who delight you), the table settings (place cards should be double-sided, to help people find their seats and remember whom they’re talking to), and, most of all, the time to leave: “the minute dessert hit the table.” He cannot abide the after-dinner drift or those who linger. Once, for reasons never satisfactorily explained, he found himself obliged to host Princess Margaret for dinner in his apartment. She stayed past midnight. Carter recalls it as one of the great traumas of his life. By the new millennium, Carter himself had become someone about whom untrue (or true!) claims of all kinds circulated. He had ventured onto Hollywood’s creative side, producing documentaries and taking small acting roles. He had become the sort of powerful, well-connected, public person his magazine wrote about. This was the backdrop for an accusation that the writer Vicky Ward made in 2015: that, in preparing her 2003 Vanity Fair profile of Jeffrey Epstein, Carter had suppressed information about Epstein’s ghastly sex abuse out of insider loyalty. Carter has nothing kind to say about Ward in his book; he says more than two pages of unkind things. In his telling, she was a loose cannon at the magazine, self-aggrandizing and mistrusted, and brought in allegations against Epstein at the last minute, as the piece was going to press, seeking to force them into print with insufficient support. (He notes that one source subsequently sent her a cease-and-desist letter.) Carter’s eleventh-hour time line seems to be wrong, but the matter won’t be settled by these quarrels. It lingered for years, and by the time of Epstein’s final arrest Carter had left Vanity Fair. The first change in weather, he suggests, came in 2008, during the recession, which hammered publishers. By the mid-twenty-tens, he saw more fundamental changes under way; media companies were streamlining their operations. “I could see the shape of things to come,” he writes. Dessert was hitting the table. In 2017, after twenty-five years at Vanity Fair, Carter decided to resign. When an alert announcing the news popped up on his friends’ phones, some later told him, they assumed that he had died. Carter went off with his wife and the youngest of his five children to live in the hills above Cap d’Antibes, on the French Riviera—a place where, one would like to think, the going never stops being good. He had asked his chief assistant from Vanity Fair to come with him and, in a wonderful vestige of golden-age practice, assigned this talented and carefully selected young person the task of travelling with his dog. Carter gave up smoking and took up swimming and—a basis for a musical, perhaps—entertained Bette Midler and her husband. Then he got bored, and started thinking up ideas. The result was Air Mail, an e-mail publication he created with the journalist Alessandra Stanley which launched in 2019. E-mail, at that point, seemed retrograde and uncool—Substack was still in its youth—but, like many of Carter’s circumspect ideas, the plan had a surprising canniness. An e-mail publication was invulnerable to the caprices of social-media platforms and their algorithms. And, at last tally, Air Mail had in excess of four hundred thousand paid subscribers, which is more (but who now is counting?) than Harper’s or Fast Company. When people fret about the fate of magazines, digital or print, they look today at balance sheets and growth, and it’s true that many publications are in peril. The greater long-term challenge, though, will be keeping talent in the field. If the craft to which Carter devoted his career has a future, it will be because creative people—people who could easily do something else—still want to do this. If it vanishes, the reason will be that the best new arrivals face a course that appears too rough, too lean, and, in a fundamental way, too unfun. One can easily look askance at the excesses of Carter’s magazine era, but the indulgent assignments were invitations to a full, interesting life. Banish plump Jack, and you banish all the world. Commercial culture and electoral politics share a basic truth: people want to feel a little rich, a little powerful. They want to brush against magic and mystery—rooms within rooms—and to move through a surprising, expansive world. Over the years, so many creative enterprises have been stripped of these qualities, leaving them lustreless and diminished. The paths of people like Carter are a measure of the golden age lost. But their memories are proof of the promise that remains. ♦