Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Graydon Carter: The Voice of Vanity Fair

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

In this conversation, Anthony Scaramucci interviews Graydon Carter, founder of Airmail and former Vanity Fair editor, about his journey in magazine publishing. They discuss the golden age of magazines, the editor’s role, and the decline of print. Carter reflects on his time at Vanity Fair, the post-9/11 political landscape, media’s influence on Hollywood and Wall Street, and the cultural power of iconic photography, especially by Annie Leibovitz. He highlights the value of an outsider’s view in journalism and shares thoughts on power and responsibility, culminating in a reflection on media’s evolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci. and this is open book where I talk to some of the brightest minds about everything surrounding the written word. That's everything. That's from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, political activists, and of course, Wall Street.

Before we dive in, make sure to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And don't forget to leave a review. Good or bad. I want to hear from you. I want to hear whether you're enjoying it or where we can improve. And I can take the hits. So let me know. If you don't like something, say it straight.

Now let's get into it. Today, we're stepping into the world of glossy covers, bold headlines, and the golden age of journalism with none other than Graydon Carter. For decades, Graydon led some of the most influential magazines in the world. From co-founding spy to his legendary run at Vanity Fair, he helped define what sharp, stylish journalism could be. We'll talk about what it meant to shape the national conversation through the printed page. How photography and storytelling created icons and why the decline of print is about more than just paper.

We'll also dive into the politics of publishing, the post-9-11 media landscape, and how Carter's signature events and editorial vision help create cultural moments that still echo today. Let's go to the conversation with Graydon. Well, welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. I am delighted today to have have with me, Graydon Carter. Graydon Carter is the founder of Air Mail, but before that, he was the co-creator of Spy Magazine. He edited the New York Observer, and for 25 years, 25 years, he was the award-winning editor of Vanity Fair.

He's also the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning producer of more than a dozen documentaries, and one-hit Broadway show. And Graydon, I have been following your career since I was. was 22 years old. I bought my first spy magazine on the train from Long Island as I was heading into the city, try to get myself a job. And you were probably beating up on Donald Trump at the time, which was actually quite funny. But the book that we're going to talk about today is when the going was good, an editor's adventure during the last golden age of magazines. But how did it all start? You're a Brit, right? But no, first of all, Anthony, I'm so honored to be here with you.

I love your other podcast as well, as you know. No, I'm Canadian. Canadian. Okay. So where did you grow up? In Toronto? I grew up in Ottawa, which is the capital city. It was one of the snowiest, coldest capital cities in the world back when I was growing up.

And strange enough, half our culture came from the United States and half came from Britain with a lot of Canadian hockey thrown in in between. And had you find your way down in New York? Well, I was in college and I was a cap upon this office where a number of young people were with typewriters and they were setting up a literary and political magazine and the university, that was at the University of Ottawa. They'd given them office space and a grant. And they asked if I would like to join them. I said, sure. And they said, well, we're looking for an art director.

And I said, well, I can draw. And they said, great, you're the art director. And so I don't know you've ever been involved with a small magazine, but they're, they're, they're bitter little circles of sort of concentric hell. And everything's fighting over everything because the stakes are just unbelievably low. Yeah, well, that's Washington, Greight. You know, they pick each other's eyeballs out because they're tiny stakes, you know. Well, those stakes are higher in Washington than they were at this little magazine. Not some of these AIDS.

It's not, you know, Trump did have a good line. He said to me once, and by the way, he said this to me on a Wednesday graded, and I know because I was only there for one Wednesday. You know, he said to me, they'll pick your eyeball out with an ice pick. They'll drop it in a martini class and still talk to you like nothing happens. Well, he's doing that now. Well, no, he's a machete. He's got a machete.

Yeah. All right. So you. So anyway, I'm magazines because you're a Renaissance man. You've built businesses. Why magazines? Because if you grew up in Ottawa. in the 1950s and 60s,

magazines told you about the world outside, you know, your cold windows. Like magazines tell you about the way we live now. Newspapers tell you about the news of the way we live now. And magazines back then, like the New Yorker and Esquire and Life and Look were my sort of passports to an outside world. So I was, I'd never worked in a magazine before I became the art director of this one. And then gradually I became the editor.

And it did nothing but lose money. It wasn't particularly good. Nobody had worked at a magazine before, which was painfully evident to the readers, certainly. But it did get me a job at Time Magazine in New York in 1978 as a writer. And that was the beginning of my life in a way. But Time in those days was, it was such a dominant magazine. I think there was something like 800 people on the masthead. It had a weekly circulation of 4 million.

When I got there, there was people like Walter Isaacson, Michi Kakatani became the chief book critic of the New York Times, Frank Rich, it became the New York Times chief theater critic and later a successful producer of HBO of Succession and other shows. I mean, Evan Thomas, who became a famous historian, my partner at Spide, Kurt Anderson, my partner at Airmal and Alexander Stanley, Maureen Dowd. I mean, you could go on and on. Do you remember Yu-Sidy?

Hugh Seidy was the White House correspondent. Yeah, you said, write that column in time about leadership, member presidential leadership. Yes. So I never met him because he was down to D.C. all the time. But anyway, that was my first introduction to New York. And I was, I dreamt of moving here. And I was very excited to be at time among people who were so incredibly smart and talented. Well, I grew up out on Long Island. I don't know if you'd recognize the name Publishers Clearing House. Of course.

Okay, so I grew up about two miles from Publishers Clearing House and my best friend from home, his mom was like a clerical assistant there. And so when I went to college, she gave me a gift. She said, here are 60 magazines. I get the magazines for free. I'm going to give you a yearly subscription to 60 magazines. Unfortunately, Playboy and Pennhouse were not on the list, Graydon, because you remember that era as well. But anyway, that's how I got introduced, it's I Magazine, and Newsweek, Forbes, and of course, Vanity Fair and others. And so I'm in your era.

You know, I'm a magazine lover to this day. I love holding it in my hands. Me too. But for people that didn't grow up like we did in the magazine era, give us a little bit of the romantic. of the magazine era in the world, the color, the, you know, the placement, the pictures, the Demi Moore's, the, well, first of all, they were owned by, by people who love, and operated by people who loved magazines. I worked for Henry Grunwald at Time Magazine and for Sy Newhouse at Vanity Fair, and the magazines were hugely profitable. They were expensive

to put out, but hugely profitable. And I had never had an expense account. before I came to New York, and it was a life-changing experience. I went five years, though, ever turning on my oven. I mean, I can't cook anyway, so it was just as well. But it was just, you know, and because magazines, they were very much a center of the culture, and they helped not only report on the culture, but drive the culture, and as a result, they attracted the best and the brightest. What later went to, you know, dot-com startups and to Wall Street came to magazines in those days.

And it was exciting to be around such, you know, energetic, intelligent people and to have the wherewithal to do any kind of journalism that you wanted. The sort of the luxuries at Connie Nass were exponentially greater than those at time. and it made it made you know a very competitive difficult jobs a lot easier well one of the things about your book for me as I was going I was going down memory lane Fran Leibowitz right Donna's in the book Christopher Hitchens you know I mean he was he was the man you know 20 years ago and unfortunately we we lost him a very gifted writer on a very provocative one but but I get I see you as a sort of an interior designer and an exterior designer of thought. So just give me a moment.

Okay, you, I've been to your restaurants, Waverly Inn. I've been to the monkey bar. There's a majesty to those places, but there's also a simplicity. I'm a subscriber to airmail. I love the way, you know, I look, one of the reasons why I love magazines, I want to see what the editor is doing in terms of the format. Where are the pictures going? Where are the stories going?

What's important? The reason I do open book, Graydon, is I'm in love with authors. I figure if you put countless hours into writing that book, I can spend a few hours reading and learning something from you. But this is a gift that you have. Where did you get this gift? And how do you think about applying it? Well, I'm not sure as a gift. It's a loose skill that's built up over years.

I mean, my job now at Air Mail is not appreciably different than my first editor, when I was the first editor, which was 52 years ago, it's the same job, essentially. Just I do it a lot better now, and I have skill sets that I didn't have then at all. And then there's sort of like a choir master. You're trying to bring all these disparate voices together to, in a single issue of something, to sort of be in rough harmony with each other. they could be, you know, altos and sopranos and everything, but the fact is you try to work it all out in harmony. And an editor's chief job when he's talking to a writer is to say, Anthony, this is the single most important story you've ever done. And then you go out and you work on that story for two or three months and you come back and we line up the photographs and the research and the legal review and the fact checking and then we publish it. And then for me to come back to you four months later and say, no, no, no, Anthony,

This is the single most important story you've ever done. And that's basically an editor's job is a lot easier than a writer's job. But it is a very gratifying career if you, especially during this, this incredible period. Yeah, we're going to get to the period in a second. But I want to have a little bit of build up for our audience. Tell us what the Carter pick is. I found that so fascinating. Well, in your book, you write about,

iconic writers and somebody said to you that if you're picked by grading quarter, it's a sign of gray. It's almost like an award, if you will. Well, it's fine. We sort of, we nurtured a sort of unknown writers and helped make them stars at Vanity Fair. Most of the writers, because they had to be able to write, you know, long stories between sometimes 10 to 15,000 to 20,000 words, and that takes great skill and experience. Most of the writers were at the very top of their games. We had so many Pulitzer prize winners. I had people like David Halberstam and Michael Hare and Sebastian Younger and Maureen Orth and Marie Brenner and, God, I mean, Michael Lewis. I mean, it was incredible. And then I had incredible essayists like Christopher Hitchens and Gorbidall and James Walcott. So, and then I had a

stable of photographers. It was probably unmatched since the glory days of Life magazine. I had you know, Annie Leibowitz and Helmut Newton and Bruce Weber. And so, you know, as I got comfortable in the job, I learned what I could do with all this talent. Well, I mean, I guess for me, the frustrating thing for me today is that the gas is down in the tank for magazines. We see them in the newsstands, very few people are reading them as much. I have to confess to you that if I'm reading a magazine, it's likely on my Kindle or it's on my iPad. It's no longer there for me. And what did we lose, Graydon, by that? Because, you know, I'm sure somebody said, as the horseless carriage was coming into vogue, that we lost something, right? And I'm sure somebody said that we lost something

in Fifth Avenue, New York, when the Gilded Age ended. What did we lose? Well, you know, it's funny because magazines, they were very much not a reflection of the culture, but, you know, the big ones really drove the culture. I remember, you know, in 19, and mid-1970s, both Time and Newsweek put Bruce Fierstein, Bruce Springsteen on their covers the same week, which is a big faux pie in Newsweekly. It's like two women wearing the same dress. to a grading quarter vanity fair Oscar party.

A thousand times worse. So, but it's so, and I, you know, the fact is after the financial crash in New York, certainly, we lost, we lost newsstands. There used to be major newsstands at every single intersection, sometimes two of them. They were often mom and pop operations run by veterans. And after 2008, it just became harder and harder for them. And now, and also, every. office building had a new stand in it. Now they

sell, you know, lotos and gum. And when you see a proper news kiosk in New York City, it's like a movie set. It's like something out of a Benora Ephron film. And they're so rare now.

Well, I, you know, my old boss when I worked at Goldman, this is 30 years ago, he had a picture in his office that he continually updated. And it was a newsstand. And so he had gotten to Goldman's of the 1950s and the picture of the newsstand. And there, you know, there were, you know.

Okay, why did he do this? Because he was in love with New York. He saw that as a zeit guest, as a representation of the city and its culture. And so literally you would see that, you know, the, the 1950s picture is great and where, like clothespins, clothespins hanging up the photo play and chewing gum and packs of cigarettes. And as he got into the 80s, you could see the evolution. But you were in what you call the golden age. And I believe it was the golden age because it was a proliferation of talent, volume, and interest.

And both of us are old enough to know when life died. You know, it was sort of like December of 1972, life died. And I remember my parents being saddened by that. but little did they know that they were coming into a golden age. So describe the fever you so eloquently do in the book. Well, one of the things, so what say streaming services and podcasts are now, magazines were then, that they attracted a lot of the dominant literary and journalistic talent. They were evident everywhere because of news.

even in, you know, in cities that were not as large as New York's. And they were, you know, they, they were available all across the country. Van Eyrefer was available all around the world in the same form. And if you were living in Paris, Vanity Fair would give you the worldview of editors operating out of New York City. And because New York is New York in the center of everything, at least certainly to us, that it had exponential influence and weight. And they were thick, there were great value. You know, you'd pay, I can't remember what you used to pay for copy,

Banyfair like $5, $6. But some of our issues would be 450 pages thick with 150 pages of editorial and 300 pages of advertising. And the advertisers, you know, they paid dearly to be on the magazine. They paid upwards of $100,000 a page. It was profitable. And, yeah, we had outside influence. I mean, there were, you know, major newspapers like the Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.

But magazines had a special place. And they still do in a way. I think that I think that the Atlantic and New York and the New Yorker are still very strong. And economist is, you would never know there was a recession of picking up a copy of The Economist. Yeah. So it's still there. You just need owners who care about what they make and who are willing to invest in the product they make. Yeah, but it's different, honestly, it's different because I get the economist on my tablet.

I used to remember the smell of Vanity Fair, the ink, and I remember the freshness of it in my hands. Well, and the perfume, mad is going to be because. Perfew man, you don't put on a paint. Exactly. All of that stuff, even the, even the Armani masculine. Cologne ads, but the thing you did, which I know you're aware of, but I'm just going to say it out loud to you. For a younger person, me in the 1980s when I was in my mid-20s, I had no idea what the Allen and Comforti conference was. You taught me that. I had no idea what the establishment was and that there was a need for a new establishment.

Remember, I like you, I'm an outsider. I grew up in a blue collar family out here on Long Island. and I sort of felt like when I picked up Vanity Fair, you were scaling me into a different, you know, almost like at a different electron orbit than I was in. Were you aware that you were doing that for some of us? Or you, you, you, what was the genesis of the editorial ideas? You know, if I was in Canada at exactly the same day in the 1980s and the same age as you, I would have felt exactly the same way about Vanity Fair. and I think that I didn't have that most of the time, I'll be honest. It wasn't about crafting the great magazine or anything like that. It was just desperately trying to hold on to my job. I have five kids.

And also, a golden age is the golden age because there's a lot of competition. When the Hollywood had its golden age, you know, Columbia, Paramount Fox, MGM, they were all phenomenal in those days. So during the magazine golden age, which probably stretched from the 1970s through the end of the aughts, you know, everything was good. Gardening magazines, good, cooking magazines were good. Sports Illustrated was an incredible magazine. ESPN magazine was an incredible magazine.

So you just had a lot of competition, so there was never a moment where you could sit back and say, oh, God, we did it. It's all good. A couple of real iconic pictures that I want to ask you about. So the one was the Demi Moore picture? Before my time. That was about, that was just before my time. But I thought when she was painted, that was your time. No.

Well, that wasn't my time. No. Stole before your time. Yeah. Before my time. So yeah, that was 91, the Demi Moore naked picture. Yes. And I came in 92.

And I had a rough, I'll be honest, I had a rough first couple of years because we had at spy magazine we made a lot of fun of the of the writers at vanity fair of the editor of vanity fair and it wrote about it in the book that you had a rough start that Tina Brown loyalists were we're sort of pissed at you right well I didn't fire anybody at first I wanted to see if I could bring them around to my way of working and thinking and I like a drama free office I like people to work together and to respect each other's talents and to say please and thank you. And so for the first years, it was pretty grim. I wouldn't even bring my children into the office.

But I finally zeroed it. And most of the leftover staff was basically there just to report my inadequacies to the outside world at dinner parties around New York. And they did. And so, but it on one week after being there for two

years, and I'd only fired, I think, one person before in my life. I fired three troublemakers on one in one week. And then things started changing. The office became more collegial and cordial, and we all worked together basically hand in hand for the next 23 years. We didn't, we lost almost no major senior staff members during that period. Well, I mean, I, listen, I, you know, it's funny you say that because when you're, when you're merging or you're joining a new entity, you've got to get either the culture right or you've got to replace parts of the culture. I, you know,

I bought a company, sort of a division, I should say, from Citibank. And the good news is the senior guys are still with me 15 years later. There were a couple of people, unfortunately, we had to remove. Of course. So I totally get it. So I'm about Annie Leibowitz for a second. How would you describe Annie? And I'm going to tell you a funny story, if you don't mind.

Go ahead. I met Annie through Bill Moore. So I was on the Bill Maher show. Bill and I owned a piece of the Mets together after I was summarily fired from the Trump, White House Trump. No. Okay. Yeah.

So Bill and I, you know, he was calling me Tony Soprano on the Potomac. I think he called me a Jersey Shore cast member. But, you know, people, I didn't mind. I mean, I was getting lit up on Saturday Live. But I took the opposite approach of everybody. I just went on all the shows. I leaned into it. And Bill and I developed a friend to be invited Andy Lieberwitz to the suite together.

We're at the, at City Field. and even though I had already rebuffed Trump at this point, the fact that I was once with Trump, I had a cancelization on my forehead. She really had nothing, no bid for me. I think she's a diehard Democrat, yeah. Even though I was serving hot dogs and corned beef and all kinds of, she had no bit for me.

But I think she's one of, and I mean this sincerely, I think she's one of the most talented people out there. So tell us about your relationship with her and some of the art that she did. And she was one of the great photography art, I should say. Oh my God. She's one of the great assets of the magazine, probably the greatest asset. And I'm, you know, when I did, we eventually invented two tent pole issues.

One, the Hollywood issue, which was Cy Newhouse's idea, actually, not mine. In fact, I resitted it first. And the second, the new establishment issue, which came out in the fall. And that was largely David Halberstam's idea. So, but I had this incredible asset in Annie Leavitts to be able to photograph what we were trying to tell orally and on the page. You know, a great magazine is a combination of words and images. And Annie was our principal photographer and she can shoot sort of middle-aged white man and make

them look much more epic than they really are, which was a great advantage. And eventually, you know, having your portrait taken by Annie was a symbol of achievement in America, the way being painted by Van Dyck was in previous centuries. And she, you know, I watched, it took a while for her to do to come around to shooting group shots. I love group shots. They sort of tell you the history of something at a time. And at first she resisted. She thought it was a sort of cheap trick.

But then she got into it. And to watch her craft a Hollywood cover, because you'd have sort of 11 people, and she would have, she would have been preparing for two or three days beforehand. And she would have people roughly the same size as the cover subjects, wearing roughly the same coloring clothing. And she would light it and pose it and get it all constructed

the way the old masters did. So that by the time the subjects came in for the photo shoot, she had it all figured out. It wasn't all of a sudden, you know, putting the tall people in the back row and the short people in the front row. And it didn't always go smoothly. We went, one point we wanted to,

I wanted, I wanted to shoot all the living bond girls. And so we, this took about three months to pull together. We managed to get them all. We were missing one. And it was a, well, this actress, French actress named Claudine Ange. And I don't know you remember,

but she shot her husband. a very famous American Olympic skier named Spider-Savich. And she was a big thing at the time, but I thought, oh, no, we have to have her. And so the woman who works with Jane at the magazine, Jane Sark, which with Annie at the magazine, Jane Sark, and she said, okay, I finally found her, but she wants to be flown over by the Concord, and she wants to stay at the Carlisle. I thought, God, we've worked on this for four months. We've spent so much money on it anyway.

I thought, okay, let's do that. So we fly her over in the Concord, we put her up with the car loud. The day of the shoot, Jane comes into my office and said, she won't leave her hotel room. I said, you've got to be kidding me. And she said, no, no, she refuses to come out. I said, look, we need Claudine Ange for this shoot to make it complete. She goes, wait a minute, Claudine Ange. No, no, no, this woman's Claudine lingerie.

So this is a different actress. This is a woman with her. This is also a French actress, but it wasn't. one we were looking for. And so I said, so we phone this woman across the Atlantic. I said, you've got to tell her she's going to have to check out at the end of the day, and we'll fly her back business class to Paris. So they don't always go smoothly, but we, over the decades, we produced some amazing group

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It helps protect against identity theft and financial fraud so I can stress less during tax season or any season. Plans start at just $12 a month. Learn more at tellus.com slash online security. No one can prevent all cybercrime or identity theft. Conditions apply. Well, I mean, no, I want to talk about one of you don't mind. I mean, because based on my experience, the Annie Leibowitz.

the picture that she took of the Bush administration, which I think is probably one of their most famous pictures, okay? And this was, I think the title of the article was The Path to War. Yes. And it was a picture of Bush with Brumsfeld and Card and Cheney and Pound. I know you remember the picture. I mean, she had a, I mean, that picture helped Bush, by the way, my opinion. I know. I know.

Tell us what went down there. You know, I mean, I think, well, they took a while to wrangle them to get them all into one room. This was before the invasion of Iraq. Yep. And it was, you know, probably a ham-fisted way of showing American resolve after 9-11. And people were scurrying around trying to, especially journalists, trying to figure out how to report on this and figure out the way forward on this. Anyway, the funny thing is the big difference between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans are really down.

They're sort of buttoned down operations. After that, I got one of the few thank you notes from a cover subject from Dick Cheney. And I thought, okay, that's the way they do things. No question. To this day, he'll write me a note thanking me for supporting, you know, his daughter, Liz, in the whole Trump debacle. You know, he's very. I respect. Yeah, he's very formal like that.

But I think I just want you to react to this. Okay, I read the book. I followed your career. I'm a huge fan. I remember, before I got to know you, Graded, I was wangling my way into the Waverly Inn. You know, I had to get a reservation there. Not that.

I remember taking my wife there and feeling so cool that I was in there. And then, of course, my own restaurant. And I had my own restaurant. I do. and finally have my own restaurant. But I also, you probably don't even know this, but my fifth, 10th, 15th anniversary parties were at the Monkey Board. Because I'm in 527 Madison, and I've been there for 20 years, which is right there.

I know all the doorman at the monkey boy, you know, all the doormant at the hotel. And you did such a beautiful job there. I have such good memories of your restaurants. But I want you to react to this. There's something that you did. And you probably are aware of it, but you may not be aware of it. And so I'm going to say what you did and then I want you to react to it. You had Hollywood a buzz.

What is vanity fair thinking? You had politics a buzz. What is vanity fair thinking? You had Wall Street a buzz. Okay. Again, the Allen Accompany Conference would be an example of that, but also other articles that you wrote about Wall Street Titans and that. hedge fund industry and other things that were going on. And it felt like if you got the checkmark

from Graydon Carter and his team, it helped your business. It helped your career in those different genres. And by the way, Jeff Berg is a friend of mine. I think you remember Jeff Berg. I was at the Allen conference when he told me that I guess he had gotten, I don't know, a fairly big position in your Hollywood new establishment category. And he thought it was them. He's a grown man worth lots of money, Graydon. But he was just thrilled that he was on your radar and on your list. So, you know, and again, I'm not trying to flout to you, sir.

That's the facts. So I want you to react to that. How did you manage that? How did you become the guy that the guys and the girls wanted to be in, your field of vision. Not through intent. In a funny way, because we weren't part of any of those world, we weren't part of Wall Street or Washington or Hollywood, sometimes having a second-party validation is often worth more than somebody within the inner circle. So one of the things we did in Hollywood is we told, you know, the story of glamour back to Hollywood. When we did the first

Oscar party, it was in the early 90s, it had really turned. it's back on Hollywood. The big style of the day was grunge, young people avoided the Oscar party in droves, and it took an outside group from New York to tell Hollywood, remind them of one of their trading assets, which is, or glamour, or in many cases, Urzat's glamour. With Wall Street, a lot of it came from the stable of writers I had. So after the financial crash in 2008, I had, you know, I had Michael Lewis, I had William D. Cohen, I had Bethany McLean, I had Marie Brenner, I had Brian Burrow. I mean, you can't top that.

So we had such an extraordinary collection of journalists who could specialize in Wall Street. And then in Washington, a large part was that we played a big part in the White House Correspondence dinner. And, you know, I did a number of parties during that. We did the big after party. I did that with Mike Bloomberg for many years. And we'd often do one on a Friday night with Christopher Hitch. And so it was, again, we were sort of interlopers, but we brought a sort of whiff of big city glamour to Washington. Well, I met, I met Elon Musk at one of your parties.

It was, I guess, I don't know, could have been 2016, maybe. Mike invited me, actually. So I was on Mike's New York City Financial Services Advisory Committee. My old boss, Bob Steele, who you may remember, was deputy mayor. Bob told Mike, hey, you've got to get somebody that's an entrepreneur. He can't just have the Jamie Diamonds and the Lloyd Blank finds. And so Bob got me on there. And so Mike invited me to that party.

At the French ambassador. The French ambassador, I think it was 2016. I'm going to really test your mind. I took Georgette Mozbacher with me. I love Georgette. You know, no, she's, well, if you ever run into her, you ask Georgette how she became the ambassador to Poland. You want to hear that story?

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I got my ass fired on Monday. But there was an interregnum period between Friday afternoon when Rice Prebus was blown out and Monday morning where people were scared shit at me because I had gotten Previs for moved from the White House. And so the personnel director, I called him on that Saturday. George, I was a really good friend of mine. Previs was stalling her ambassadorship. And I said to him, I said, what's left in Europe? And he gave me the list. I said, okay, hold on a second. I called her on my cell phone. I said, which one of these countries would you like to go to? She said, Poland.

I hung up. I said to Johnny. I said, I want her to be made ambassador to Poland. And I brought over to the White House to get it signed. And so she's a very dear friend of mine. And a very good ambassador. And she did a great job, by the way. And she did a great job for Poland, particularly with what's going on in the Ukraine. And so I'm sure you've been to her salon dinners at that circular table that she had in her apartment.

But, you know, so you and I have surfaced near each other, but you did do something. Well, we did meet at Rayos about 20 years ago. We met at Rayos. We were at the same table together. We were with Bo Diedel. A lot of people who looked like surrounded by a lot of people look like mobsters. Yeah, so Bo, Bo tried to talk me in a Wolf of Wall Street. I said, Bo, I can't do that.

I said, that's like a real guy. I mean, you know, I was, Oliver Stone got me into Wall Street, too. I was in Wall Street, too. Of course you were. I was at the after party. And so was Buffett. Buffett was with us. But I, what I, what I, what I did me, not Warren.

Yes. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But I just say to you that we did meet with Bo that night, and I obviously got a big kick out of you, and I'm a huge fan, but you didn't tap it yet, Graydon. And I want to get this out of you for this interview. Okay. Okay.

And I don't want Canadian modesty, and I don't want any of that. I really want you to tell me, because I can tell you what I do well. I can tell you what I absolutely suck at. Okay. But you do this better than anybody that I've ever seen. People want to buy goods from airmail because they're curated by an organization that's run by Grady and Carter. People want to go to your after parties. They wanted to go.

If they didn't get into the Oscar party and they thought they were somebody, they were crushed by that. Okay. So what is it? What is the sauce that you are serving? I think it's, I think every, any outshy, of your life should be organic to you and your worldview and your sense of design and your taste. And I think that we built up a reputation for doing things in a first-rate manner and of treating people really well.

And in the olden days, before we did the Oscar party, any big event like that always had a roped-off VIP area, where the with like a petting zoo for famous people off in the corner somewhere and i said no when we if we do this we'll make it difficult to get in but once you're in everybody will be treated the same and that was that went with everything we did in both in the south of france in new york parties and in washington dc and i think that um you know there's no trickery and so i think that if we say this is is worthwhile to read or to say if there's an airmail store to buy, you know, we back up the, we back it up with, with a history and with our guarantee that we approve of this. And we're not doing,

and there's zero trickery. And I think that makes one other. There's one other thing. If I can be brutally honest with you, there's one other thing. It's a little bit like Framing Leibowitz this way. Your aperture, your aperture focuses in and it's a, it's one of veracity. It's one of truth. There's no mendacity in it. So if you think somebody screwed up, you write about it. I can't remember exactly what you wrote about Trump,

but it was like some short-fingeredville. I don't know what the hell it was. A short-fingered Bulgarians. It's fucking perfect. I mean, you can't come up with it. I mean, you know, I mean, it's like, it's almost like you, you like invented Sudoku before there was Suducoo. I mean, it's like perfect, right?

But my point is that you see it for what it is. And this is why people have anxiety around you because they want you to see them as good. We all do. I think it actually helps, Anthony, and I think maybe you found this too. It helps to not have been born in Manhattan and growing up with that. Because if you come from outside, you're a sponge because this is all a wonder to you. The book critic of the New Washington Post when she reviewed. my book. She said, you know, I was less like one of the, you know, disaffected, you know,

New York writers and much more like Buddy, the Will Ferrell character in Elf. And I, you know, so I couldn't disagree with her. I can't, I just, every day, I just think I see it that way for you, sir. If you, if your book title was, see, I believe that there are comfortable outsiders and there are uncomfortable outsiders, okay? And so I, this is crazy. today because he's no longer an outsider but Mike Bloomberg you know Medford Massachusetts you know awkward starred fired from Solomon brothers comfortable outsider he's now the pillar of the inside but he was a comfortable outsider okay if you're if the title of your book was comfortable outsider

becomes curator for the insiders I mean that that that that but you say something of that like that what's that I'm not going to say something like no no you're But you see, I'm making you blush because I can say something like that because that's what you are. This is a gift that you have. And by the way, I'm an outsider, great. And I've always been an outsider, but I see myself as a comfortable outsider. And let's go to Trump for a second because he is an uncomfortable outsider. Okay, Giuliani is an uncomfortable outsider.

And I like the mayor. The mayor helped me early on in my career. And I never say anything bad about the mayor because I see he's very troubled. But Trump is not only an uncomfortable outsider. but he's got a chip on his shoulder he's mean at it you know he didn't get into deep dale he's got to have 18 golf courses uh didn't it you know is that the reason oh 100 percent and you don't you know and by the way deep dale they would want me to landscape the fucking place great okay i'm just want to make sure you know that okay i i have a lot of self-awareness so i'm not i'm not delusional okay but my

my point is he can't get over certain things you know hollywood didn't treat him right let's put taras on. Yes. Harvard didn't treat them right. Let's reduce their tax exemption status. NPR and PBS didn't treat them. Exactly. So,

no, I know. So address that for me because I see you, you're, let's face it, you're an insider now in many ways. I'm an insider now in many ways, but we still identify, I think,

as comfortable outsiders. Am I wrong in saying that? No, I think you're completely right. I mean, I think that maybe people born in the city, whether it's Los Angeles or Paris or London or any major city, the ones who were born there and stayed there,

they may not have been the sponges, but they never will experience the outsider thing. And I actually think outsiders see so much more. No question. People who live in. In New York, certainly editors who have made their mark in New York, like Harold Ross or Harold Hayes, Henry Grunwald.

they, Henry Luce, they came from, you know, places far away, whether it's, you know, Denver or Aspen or China or Luce came into China, right? He was born in China. Right. So it, and so they see America in a way that Americans don't and they see New Yorkers in a way that New Yorkers don't. Well, well, I, unfortunately, I have a 40-minute window here for my podcast. I mean, I have to take you the dinner.

I really want to finish this more philosophical. Well, Cliff the restaurant. I'm sorry? We'll flip for which restaurant. Okay, that's a deal. That's a deal. I would rather go to yours, by the way, just because it's so, it's so avant-garde. But I want to get to the five words.

So my podcast, we sell some books. I thought this book was awesome. It was a perfect book for me and my demography because of my love affair with magazines and publishers clearinghouse origin story. But I ask each of my writers five words. you're going to react to the word. You know, you can give me a sentence or two sentences or just a word. I'll do my best.

Okay, so if I say the word journalism, you say the word what? I say the word calling, like a calling and a service. See, it's interesting. So when I hear that word, I hear freedom. And this is what got me in trouble with Trump. In April of 2019, I wrote an op-ed, saying it was an open letter. I said, Dear, Mr. President, the press is not the enemy of the people.

Because not only is it checking power, but when we teach our children to speak and think freely, they go on and create Facebook. They become the editor-in-chief of vanity fear. They create Skybridge. They create an iPhone. When you teach the kids that they can't say anything about dear leader, now you got them in a box. They've got to steal our intellectual property or they go to an internment camp for re-education. When I hear the words journalism, or I say,

see a journalist, I think freedom. That's why when I was getting lit up coming out of the White House, never bothered. My attitude was that is the job of the journalist. That is the job. Your answer is much better than mine. That's number one, which is a shame. No, no, no. You said it's like you're calling.

It's a service. Your time at the White House, actually, you sort of, that kind of made you. I mean, it took, it made you not just another, you know, Wall Street success. story, it made you a cultural figure. It gave me a platform. It definitely gave me a platform to at least provide my analysis. And then if people thought the analysis was worth listening to, they gave me a little bit broader of an audience.

I look forward to every Friday morning because of, you know. You're very, very sweet. You know, as I tell people, though, Caddy Kay is not my better half on that podcast. She's my better nine-tenths. So, because she, trust me, she does a lot of work behind. It's like bread and ginger, and you need both of them. All right, exactly. Amen, amen.

Okay, so I'm going to now say the word culture, sir. Culture. I think the culture is the texture of the life around you, that it is, whether it's pop culture or high culture or middlebrow culture, it's what separates one country from another. I'm sure you have a better answer to that. Not that I have a better answer, but I just want to test my answer. Just to think of all these things. I did, I did. But I want to test my answer on you because I think the culture is actually tied to the journalism.

It's actually tied to the freedom because if you have the freedom, you have unbelievable latitude in the culture. There's a reason why the Chinese don't produce international iconic pop stars. They hem these people in. But you can put a nose ring in your nose somewhere. in Toronto or New York or a tattoo weirdly on your face somewhere in London and sing an outrageous song and you become an international start. It has to do with the freedom. Am I wrong in saying that? Yes. I mean, certainly that would be an element. At the same time, a lot of great culture is created during periods of oppression. Repression. But, you know, the greatest, in America,

I think the greatest cultural period was between the two wars. You know, at the end of night, World War I and the beginning of World War II, and the greatest period for movies, for, you know, mysteries, for Ligert, the Great Gatsby. For cars, you know, for architecture, for Broadway, everything. I mean, it was just, that was the greatest, one of the great times. Really well said. Really well said.

All right. So, you're going to do this better than me again. No, no, I'm not even going to answer this one. I'm just a third word. I'm just asking, I'm testing my theories on you. Power. What? Power. Power. Power.

Something that should be used carefully. The more carefully you use it, the longer you'll have it. So well said. And it has to be used judiciously. I always said judiciously rather than carefully. So you're already, you're better than I. No, I didn't mean. Well, I just decentralized.

When I hear the word tower, I think of decentralized. You can't have too much power, grade. Because if you do, your brain gets skunked. Absolutely. Right? It gets corrupted by the power. So you have to, the founders had it right. You got to, you got to flatten the system, you know. We're not there right now.

But anyway. Yeah. Well, we're not. No, no. We're out of control. All right. Okay, two words for word number four, vanity fair. I say vanity fair.

You say what? Well, I mean, my employer 25 years, but also, you know, it came from Pilgrim's progress. And, you know, it was a about the parade of the, you know, each era produces a parade of figures. The 80s was very different from the 90s. No question. And Vanity Fair was, I think, the vessel to report on and all of that and the characters in those parades. Yeah. I'm beautifully said, okay, last word.

And I'm going to give you the last word. I'm not going to say any word after this. Okay. Graydon Carter. say the words, great and quarter. Very fortunate, blessed by the people in his life, and losing his hair as we speak. Listen, I can help you with that.

I'm an expert on this shit. Are you really? I don't know. 100%. I mean, offline, I'll tell you exactly what you need to do. You got the most beautiful head of hair. This is 61 years of like hard work. health and beauty.

I just try to roll my fingers through your hair. Well, I am so delighted to have you on, and I really appreciate it. The amazing Graydon Carter, the title of the book is when the going was good in editors' adventures during the last golden age of magazines, and hopefully you and I will enjoy many golden years ahead, you and me, Graydon. But I really appreciate you joining us, stay, on Open Book. Anthony, thank you so much. Well, let's face it, what a tremendous icon Graydon Carter is.

What an amazing book and a life well lived. But what I said to Grayden is true, he's a comfortable outsider that understands the inside about it as well as anybody. And one thing about the inside is they want to be insiders for a reason they want to be loved by other insiders. And Grayden was very, very good at picking that out, calling out some of the weird aspects of it. but doing it with a great sense of humor and a great sense of wit. Go read his book. I think you'll learn a lot. And it's also a human nature story embedded in everything else.

I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was Open Book. Thank you so much for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends and make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. While you're there, please leave us a rating or review. If you want to connect with me or chat more about the discussions, it's at Scaramucci on X or Instagram. I'd love to hear from you. I'll see you back here next week. When a country's productivity cycle is broken, people feel it in their paychecks, their communities, their futures.

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