The Press Box - Graydon Carter on ‘Vanity Fair,’ ‘Spy,’ and the Glorious Excess of the Magazine Era

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

Bryan kicks off the week with a conversation with Graydon Carter, who comes on to discuss ‘Spy Magazine’ going to ‘Vanity Fair’ and more. They discuss the following: The idea behind 'Spy Magazine' (2:46) Who took the stories the hardest from 'Spy' (9:57) His perception of Donald Trump (10:36) If Spy could have worked in the early 2000s (13:20) Being offered a choice between 'Vanity Fair' and 'The New Yorker' (14:19) How writers were treated like stars (23:26) How 'Vanity Fair' was able to land the”deep throat” story, the source behind the Watergate scandal (29:10) Creating the Vanity Fair Oscar Party (38:00) Why he left 'Vanity Fair' in 2017 (40:50) What we lost from the magazine era (43:33) Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Graydon Carter Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you hear the word Seattle Supersonics, what comes to mind? Maybe it's Sean Kemp, The Rain Man, or Gary Payton, the glove, or maybe an image of a tall and skinny 19-year-old rookie, Kevin Duran. For fans in Seattle, it's something else. It's tragedy. It's theft. An iconic team with an incredible fan base that packed its bags and shipped off for Oklahoma City. From Spotify and The Ringer, I'm Jordan Ritter-Con.

And in my podcast, Sonic Boom, I talk to players, politicians, owners, and fans about how Seattle lost the Sonics. You can listen to it on the Book of Basketball feed on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. Media consumers, welcome to a special episode of the press box. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Brian Waters. Where do we start with today's guest, Graydon Carter? Well, Graydon Carter in the 80s was one of the editors of Spy, the magazine that taught many of us libel-free.

ways to pulverize public figures. Donald Trump in those pages was a short-fingered vulgarian. After spy, Carter went on to edit the New York Observer, a paper that was fantastic until it was bought by, well, Donald Trump's son-in-law. Then Carter spent the following 25 years editing Vanity Fair. He tells stories about these times in a new memoir, when the going was good on editor's adventures during the last golden age of magazines. As Carter and I talked last week, one story in particular stuck out, especially for those of us who came up in the business at a time when Graydon Carter and Vanity Fair were inseparable. Back in 1992, when Carter went to Vanity Fair, he didn't even want to edit the magazine. He told Condé Nast, Cy Newhouse, he wanted to edit the New Yorker,

and Newhouse had agreed. But, thanks to a last-minute switch, Carter found himself atop the masthead of a magazine he had ridiculed back at Spy. He'd made fun of the language of Vanity Fair. He'd made fun of the way the previous editor cozied up to her subjects. And now he was running the place. One quote from the book I'm going to leave you with, and this stuck with me as I thought about the business of media. You never know when you're in a golden age, Carter writes. You only realize that you only realize it was a golden age when it's gone. Grab a martini and turn to the feature well.

Here's Graydon Carter. All right, Graydon, I would love to start in 1986 when you launched Spy Magazine. What was the idea behind Spy? Well, my partner and I, Kurt Anderson, we were writers. We had been writers at time. He was still at time. I had moved to Life magazine. And Kurt was doing a lot better than I was.

I thought I was not going to be long-term time ink material. So I had an idea for a magazine, and Kurt joined me as a partner. And it was a strange, it was a good time in New York to do it because the city had come out of bankruptcy. It wasn't as vile and festering a wonderful pile that it had been. And all of a sudden, there was money awash in the city. and the money wanted to show itself in terms of restaurants and the way people lived or the way they drove. And it just turned out to be a great, accidentally, a great moment to start it. There's a story that Tad Friend told in that spy anthology that came out a few years ago,

where he turned in a profile and you read it and you filled it was a little too even-handed. So he rewrote the profile and then you read it and you said, this is now a fine piece of hatchetry. I think I was being I was kidding actually but I do remember him telling me that I said that So what made for a good piece of spy hatchetry? Well actually I think we tried to be fair I mean most of the people we wrote about were part of the the ongoing circus of New York And it was a circus in those days with you know people like Fiona Helmsley and our current president and there were just a lot of characters and they loved

being in the news and money showed itself back then. It doesn't quite so much now. People have sort of wizened up and try to hide the fact that they have money. But the great thing about New York back then is also the rich and the poor lived cheek by jowls so that you had, you know, we were all writers, but we managed to because rents were low. We had decent apartments that didn't break the bank. And anyway, New York was just going through a great shift in terms of what it was and what it would become, and we were lucky to be there. You mentioned that some of your influences at Spy were Mad Magazine and Private Eye from the UK, and also Looney Tunes. So how did Bugs Bunny and Wiley Coyote figure in?

Well, Bugs is the coolest of all cartoon characters, completely unflappable, able to handle almost any situation with grace and humor and ease. Chuck Jones, who created bugs and Daffy, he always used to say that to most people think their bugs bunny, you know, cool, calm collected. But in actual fact, most men he knows are actually more like Daffy Duck, which was buying off the handle to any given moment and not be able to handle any kind of situation. You mentioned you and Kurt Anderson edited the magazine together. How did his talents complement yours? We just, you know, basically when we came up with story ideas, we just came with the ideas we thought would make the other person laugh.

And so we top-edited everything together because we wanted to create a new voice. And so we figured that if we created the voice in the first few issues, the other writers who were very clever and really good, would sort of parody that voice a bit and that's sort of what happened. that it more than any magazine of the time in in america certainly it had a voice it was singular let's talk about having an ideal reader so in that case you had each other he was the ideal reader and you were his ideal reader pretty much if i made him laugh it made me really happy and i think if i made him laugh uh no if i made him laugh it made me very happy and

vice versa i want to talk to you about a few great spy stories that involved the media Why was obtaining Tina Brown's letter to the Hollywood agent Mike Ovitz, which Spied in 1990, such a big deal? Well, Ovitz was then the, well, Tina was editing Vanity Fair, and Ovitz was then the most powerful person in Hollywood. And this was a, I'm not going to say, groveling. It was a very, it was an entreaty for Mike Ovitz to cooperate for a profile that she may have gone overboard, a bet in terms of of the flattery, but we got it through somewhat nefarious means. And then Bruce Handy, one of our editors, annotated the whole letter. And it just drove her crazy.

I don't blame her for it driving her crazy. Did you hear from her directly or just hear about her reaction? I know. I heard after I became the Vanity Fair, I discovered that Jane Sarkin, who was the magazine's Hollywood Wrangler, she was on honey, she was on her honeymoon. in Bermuda at the time when we published this letter. And the letter had been stored in her office.

So she got an earful from Tina Brown. So when I come to Vanity Fair, Jane is terrified that I'm going to fire her. And I was terrified that she was going to quit. But as it turned out, we worked together for the next 25 years. The Yorker in those days did not have a masthead, because it doesn't now either.

But you printed one in Spy. How did you put that together? That was the work of, two people for almost a year because there was nothing to go on. This is pre-internet. And it was a lot of reporting and it ran on a single page in spy after a year of work by two reporters. There's also a spy column about the New York Times written by someone under the pseudonym of J.J. Hunsecker. Right. Now, was this a deep throat situation where Hunsacker's real identity will only be revealed upon

death? Hopefully never. I hope we will never reveal at that the identity. But I'd gone to Jan Wenner and he was looking at spy and he said, don't do a column on the media as a whole. Why don't you just do it on the New York Times? And the Times in those days was this fortress of just reverence and to go after them in any way was to sort of court certain career death. And so we did it just about the New York Times. And I remember when it would come out work, but almost shut down at the paper, as I say, this is pre-internet, where people would Xerox the page

and spread it around the office, because usually it was about their superiors, not about the reporter level. Of all the regular subjects or targets in those pages, which one of them took the stories the hardest? Well, we were very, we were not particularly kind to Abe Rosenthal, who was then editor of the time, and his wife, Shirley Lord, who was an editor, was a beauty editor at Boebogue. And we had these epithets for people. We called, you know, Donald Trump

a short-fingered Bulgarian, and we called Larry Tisch, a dwarf billionaire. And Shirley Lord was a bosomy dirty book writer. And so they eventually, I think they sort of forgave me. Lally Weymouth still breathes fire any time I'm in a row. room with her. Maybe she just breathes fire anyway. Right, but maybe it's a little bigger and brighter when you're in the room. Yes. You mentioned Donald Trump.

So you got to know him when you wrote a 1984 GQ cover story about him. Right. Which parts of Trump, the president, were visible to you then. I don't recognize this man. I'll be honest. I thought he was the Donald Trump I met. I mean, he had a very transactional charm. and he

and I knew he was ambitious and he loved being, I think, being in the press. And this was his first time in the sort of national spotlight as opposed to just being on the front page of the New York Post. And, you know, I thought he was, you know,

a smoothie, but I kind of liked him. And at the same time, I realized he had this, he was a narcissist. He had a, he had a, he had a, maroon stretch limousine with vanity plates. And I noticed that his cufflings were way too big. They're about the size of silver dollars.

And his hands were too small. And that drove him crazy. He hated that part of the story. And he spent years defending the size of his hands. Valiantly. You've got to admire him. So two years after you found spies, Cy Newhouse, who is the chairman of Condé Nass,

comes to you with an offer to buy the magazine. Right. You and Kurt Anderson say no. What would spy have been like as a Kondaynest title? Successful, probably. I mean, Sai would have changed under Kondi Nass. I remember Sai telling me they probably would have done.

If he had had it, he would have suggested we do sort of more fashion type things so that we could get fashion advertisers because that was the, in large part, the backbone of the Kondi Nassahs sort of advertising revenue. But it might have had a longer shelf life, but it would have changed.

I don't think it would have worked well in a large corporation, even though it needed to be in a large corporation to succeed. Yeah. I mean, wouldn't have all those targets just called in air support every time you made fun of them in the pages of the magazine? No, we wouldn't have gone after some of the advertisers who were in spy. and we wrote about, you know, we wrote about Vogue and Vanity Fair at great length on a regular basis. More Vanity Fair than Vogue.

If you had been born at a different time, would you have liked to try to launch Spy as an online publication in the early 2000s? I'll be honest. If the Internet was at the stage it is now, I'm not sure we would have done a print magazine. I would have thought it would have been much more sort of efficient and, and cost effective to do it digitally, but printing and binding and shipping and sending a magazine all across the country is a very laborious and time-consuming

and expensive process. And then you've got to wait months before you get the unsold copies back and then maybe 60 days after that, you've got a check from the wholesaler. It was a rough business, the magazine business, in terms of getting it out there and then getting paid for it.

Yeah, it feels like as a website you could have gotten a lot of the spirit of spy. 100%. But, you know, in terms of like, you know, getting every piece of type, every photo caption, just perfect. That would have been very difficult. No, I think you could still do it.

And I think we, you know, we pay very close attention to type at airmail. And so I think it might change ever so slightly. But I think if we'd had a great engineer, we could have figured that out. So you go off from Spy to edit the New York Observer. and then in 1992 you meet with Cy Newhouse again. And Sy Newhouse told you, I have two magazines, and I wonder if you'd be interested in either

one of them. Right. The magazines were Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Right. Now, that's got to be the greatest two title offer made to any editor in magazine history. Well, it's funny because I went into the meeting, because I was at the observer and I was enjoying myself and it had become a bit of a thing. People were reading it.

and I remember fretting with my my wife and that sigh would offer me something like details or GQ and I wasn't sure I could do a good job at those and but at the same time we had we had three kids at that point and there was never enough money I mean with with tuition and rent and everything like that so when he offered me that I felt my my throat coming up and almost choking me And I explained to Cy that we had spent the last five years making fun of Vanity Fair. It's sort of Baroque house style of writing. It's some of its writers, some of its critics. Anyway, so he said, okay, the New Yorker. And I said, fine. And then we agreed on a salary. And I spent the next two weeks working on a plan of a six-month, 12-month, 18-month plan

to how it would change. the New Yorker and then the day of the announcement was supposed to happen and a winter called me and said it's going to be the other one so size going to call you and and act surprise and um and i was surprised but i my we had already had a plan to like renovate our kitchen that we had a rental apartment we were going to fix it up a bit and i thought oh my god this extra money is going to be really helpful with when you have three kids in New York City. And so, but I foolishly, I should have, I knowing Sine now and knowing Condy Nass, I should have said, I'll take them great, I'm happy, but give me two months off, give me two months to just plan the whole thing up. But I thought

I would not get paid unless I was actually at the wheel. So I started about two weeks later, and it took me a full two years to get my, my feet comfortably under the desk. And, and was able to put together issues that I wanted by through design, rather than issues I could pull together from what was available. You're writing in the book about spending those two weeks sketching out what your New Yorker would have been like. It's like reading about a film script that never turned into a movie. Right.

So what would the Graydon Carter edited in New Yorker have been like? Well, I'm not a disruptor in any way, shape, or form, and I thought at best I would have been a caretaker. And I just made lists of a few editors I'd bring in. and what I'd do visually to the magazine, which would be minimal, but I would introduce photography in a more significant way. And some of the writers I brought in, I thought a New Yorker then could have used journalists who could write in a funny way, the way we had sort of the stable we had

built up in spy, not humorous, but funny journalists. All right. So we mentioned the Tina Ovid's letter. Now you become editor of Vanity Fair, the magazine you have made fun of. What is it like to edit a magazine that you have mocked in print? Well, I mean, first of all, me showing up, I was the last person any of them wanted to see. And, you know, new editors mean change and change can mean unemployment. And so, but I, it was quite hostile when I first went in there.

and I didn't fire anybody for two years. But eventually there was a lot of backbiting and bad-mouthing about me in the gossip columns and newspapers. And I thought, and I narrowed the problem areas down to three people who I worked with for two years. I just couldn't get them around to my way of thinking. And in one week, I got rid of all of them. And things just sort of changed. I like a collegial office. I like people who work together who respect each other and appreciate the other person's talents and abilities.

And I don't like office drama. And so within, after that, the purge of these three employees, which was, which was, where more people than I'd fired in my entire life up to that point, things changed. And people started working together in a collegial manner. and saying thank you and please. And for the next 23 years, it was pretty great. Let me ask you a couple of questions about editing. What were the elements of a great Vanity Fair story? Well, you know, we ran stories that ran between, you know,

the longer stories ran between 10,000 words, and I think we ran one at 21,000 words. And not all stories are worthy of that, but our stories would come after the news events. that probably kicked this story into the public consciousness, but before the books were written about them. So they had to be pretty complete, and I think that all great long-form pieces of journalists should have

these four characteristics. It should have a narrative, and that by the time we get around to doing it, there should be a beginning, a middle, and an end. It should have conflict. any story of any length, it should have some conflict. That will help drive the narrative. It should have some level of access,

either to the principles of the story or the people on the periphery of the story who can help guide the writer into the story. And finally, it should have disclosure, and that is advancing the scholarship on the subject of whatever the writer is reported. on. And if you get all four of those in a lengthy, lengthy story, you got a good chance of, you know, hitting a bullseye. In terms of the mix, to use a term from the magazine age,

what kind of mix of stories did you want in each issue? Well, I used to have a planning board in my office that brand was probably about 30 feet long and about 10 feet high. And I, and I would plot out the issues. It had the subjects on the left side and the months along the top. And the subjects were, you know, literary, scandal, global politics, American politics, fashion style. And so you want something of everything because, you know, we never did studies. I'm not a big one for doing market surveys or anything like that. But I knew, and I knew that if we did a story on, say, Brian Burrow did a story for us on the battle between what's called Caring now and LVMH over Goose.

It was a wonderful story. And Brian doesn't know anything about fashion, but he's one of the great reporters and narrative storytellers. And he did a brilliant job. But I knew that, you know, a lot of readers, I'm not going to give two hoots about that. But the people in the fashion world, there's not a single person who didn't read that story and come away impressed. At the same time, a story said in Washington might not appeal to European readers. But the thing is, if there was enough overlap and, say, the average person read two to three out of, say, nine stories and big stories and an issue, they'd come away happy and would return the next month. So something on the cover to get people from all these different sectors of life in, maybe, and then the hope is that they keep reading the magazine month after month.

Well, the cover is, you know, the thing is movie stars are better looking than the rest of us. And so you want something pleasing on the cover because it's basically, the gift wrapping and the we sold all over the world with this with this individual cover whereas you know somebody like gQ there was a different gq in britain and and but this we had the same issue of vanity fair that went around the world and the the common cover currency for the global newsstand back then were movie stars because that's when people actually went to the movies as opposed to now and um you know i mean tom hanks was a movie star in and and and and and Mogadishu and Milan and in Minneapolis.

And so we had movie stars on the cover, and they just, they looked nicer than us. And they, I wanted them to get the magazine off the newsstand into somebody's home. And so, and looked nice. It would be on their coffee table. You write in the book, we treated our stable of writers like the stars they were. How did you tend to the care and feeding of writers? Well, first of all, it's a lot harder to be. a writer than to be an editor. An editor's job is actually quite easy by comparison. To be a writer,

especially a Vanity Fair writer, you could spend between a month, two months, sometimes a year on a single story, you're away from your family, you're terrified, you're not going to get all the detail and color you want for the story or the access. And then you've got to come back and turn it into a narrative with all those four elements. And so I took care of them, and I gave them sympathetic editors who would be their sort of managers, as well as their editors,

because most of the writers were on contracts. So if they got their work into the magazine, they were doing well in terms of fulfilling their contract. And if they didn't, that may hurt them in the long run. So it was about getting writers to do the best version of what I would do. I told the others, basically, when you're dealing with a writer, you've got to tell them that this story that they're about to embark on now is a single most important thing they will ever do. And then you've got to then turn around and do it again three months later. Same writer about a different story.

And be completely convincing the second time, just as you were the first time. 100%. And, you know, there was a plus, you know, we had huge budgets. And so they were paid well and flowers would be sent for, you know, certain things. Everybody got flowers on their birthday or a bottle of scotch. And, yeah, no, he treated them like stars because they were stars. You wrote a note to them after every issue that they were in the magazine. I wrote a note to every writer, every photographer, every illustrator, and every advertiser

after every single issue for 25 years. What's a typical note to a writer say? You know, I'd talk a bit, it would be short because there'd be like 250, 300 notes at the end an issue. And, you know, I'd be, I'd be praised them or like say, you know, I acknowledge the difficulty in it and and, and, but it would be on a small, you know, three by five inch card with raised lettering. And, um, but I thought if I, if I was a writer for Vanity Fair, I'd really appreciate this. The acknowledgement and, you know, gratitude is a really important thing in, in, in, in, in the arts. And I think, because, you know, most people feel, you know,

that unappreciated, but I truly appreciated them. Whenever I'd hear stories about Adam Moss, who was one of your contemporaries, there was a lot of tinkering with features right up until deadline. How much of the tinker were you? Well, first of all, with this, very fair, Adam is, the first of we're just going back to Adam for a second. One of the things during the golden age of magazines was that there were so many great editors. And the reason it was a golden age is because magazines were,

phenomenally great. And so the competition was enormous. And, you know, people like having people like David Remnick or Adam Moss, that made a huge difference. And in terms of how we approached each day, because a number of, a lot of our competitors were weekly, either at the New Yorker or New York or at the news weeklies. And we were a big, you know, lumbersome monthly. And so it kept everybody on their, it kept, it kept, everybody on their toes. But we tinkered with things up until the very last moment, at least we tried to. But big chunks of the magazine have to be printed in advance because you can't print the entire 400-page thing at a printing press on one day. That's done over multiple days and

through like maybe a week's process. You write in the book that Sy Newhouse wanted to turn Vanity Fair into a weekly, or at least wondered aloud about turning it into it. Yes, he did. And I, you know, I was, we were making a lot of money back then. And I thought that one reason why it worked was because I had enough space to do both that fashion story about the battle for Gucci and a big Washington story and maybe something about a war in like Haiti or something. And if you do a weekly, all of a sudden you're down to about three features an issue. and you can't give that sort of that Catholic mix that might appeal to European readers.

Also, it sounded like four times as much work. And I'm at heart a little bit lazy. I had also at one point I had four than five kids, and I like to be at home at 5.30 at night. As a former critic of Vanity Fair, was there ever a moment where you said, oh, my God, I'm about to do something I once made fun of? Oh, almost every single day.

And how did you steer the car away? All that it had come before me. A newfound respect. A newfound respect. A newfound and understand why. Your Vanity Fair had a lot of Kennedy covers, not the current cabinet secretary, but the other Kennedys. Where did that come from? That came from just because readers lapped it up.

It's like if you're producing a magazine in Britain and you run, I don't know, Harry and Megan on the cover, it'll sell. It was Kennedys and Princess Diane. and Madonna were big sellers during that period. I don't think they would be now. That was a big three, the Holy Trinity of magazine covers. For us, yes. All right, let's talk about some big Vanity Fair stories.

2005, the magazine revealed that Deep Throat, Bob Woodward's source during the Watergate scandal, was Mark Felt, former deputy director of the FBI. How did Vanity Fair get the Deep Throat story? Well, I had a policy of taking, answering almost every phone call. And I got a call from a lawyer out West who said he represented the man who was deep trope.

And so we talked for a bit and I said, let me have somebody get back to you. So I called in one of my editors, David Friend, who didn't have anything. It wasn't working on a story at that moment. I said, why don't you follow up with this fellow? And so he did. And he came back and he and I would. A couple of weeks later, we talked, he said that the man's name is Mark Feld. And this is before the internet and, you know, neither of us were national security experts.

I'd never heard of them. And but we continued on. There were difficulties with the story because he was then suffering from dementia. He had told some members of his family that he was the basis for deep throat. But then we had a problem. So we worked on this for two years. And then we were about to go to press. And I could have called Carl Bernstein, who was on our mast head.

But then I figured he would have called, he'd immediately call Bob, and then Bob would get it in the Washington Post the next day. And I couldn't call Bob because the same thing would happen. So we had to go to press 95% sure, rather than 100% sure, that the man we had was deep throat. And the morning we released the story, strange enough, I had gone away, I got married, and I was on my honeymoon, and we were in the departures lounge at the airport of NASA, and I get a call on my wife's cell phone because I didn't have a cell phone in those days. And he said, we released the story this morning, and I completely forgot about this. I'd been away for 10 days.

and I said and what's happening said well they Bob and Carl haven't made any comment yet so I thought well God I can't get on this plane until I know what they're going to say and so we kept moving to the back of the line as they were boarding the plane and finally just before we were about to have our to give the person the gate our ticket my wife's phone which was then running down she got it it rang and David called me and I said, please give me some good news. I really need some good news.

And he said, Bob and Carl just confirmed that it was deep throat. And that was a really pleasurable trip back to New York. And it was on the front page of every major newspaper in the world the next day. I think of Vanity Fair columnist of that period. I think of James Wolcott writing about culture. Right. And of course, Christopher Hitchens. What was Hitch's career like when you hired him in 1992. Well, Christopher was at the top of his game within the sort of the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, I, I, um, he was the first person I hired when I, I came to Vanity Fair. And, um, and we went to Elaine's that night to celebrate, and we run into, uh, Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's. Now, Christopher had to leave Harper's.

in order to come to Vanity Fair. And I thought this is going to be really tense. But Lewis was incredibly gracious, joined us at our table. We had way too much a drink that night. And then Christopher became one of the signature writers at the magazine. There's nobody like him. I could send him to real horrible trouble spots in the world. And at the same time, we put him on a regimen of self-improvement.

involved going to a tailor and going to a nail parlor and being waxed. And one of the, I'd heard from somebody in our fashion department, there's something that these Brazilian sisters called the J sisters who had a shop on 57th Street, we're doing it's called the back, the crack, and the sack. And it took me a while to think of what that meant. I thought, oh my God. And so I mentioned it to this to Christopher. and he said, okay, in for a penny.

And he had this waxing operation done about a year before he had been waterboarded to see what that was like. And he said the waxing operation was much worse than the waterboarding. I hadn't known until reading your book that after hiring Hitch, you gave him a glow up inside Vanity Fair. A what? A glow up. I think that's what it's called. This is not a word I'm totally familiar with. I don't know what it is.

You had his beard shaved. Oh, no. He, yes. Well, no, he got, and I'd never heard that. He'd gotten into a spat with Sydney Blumenthal when the White House was trying to besmirch Monica Lewinsky. And Christopher had repeated something that Sidney told him off the record. And then they became a big hoo-ha on television. And Christopher was starting to look the worst for wear.

A beard rarely works on a middle-aged man. And he was looking even more disheveled than normal. And so I called him. I said, why don't you come to New York? And so we had the fashion department, you know, get him a suit and get him a shave and a haircut and all the rest of it. And I remember at one point they, the head of the fashion department looked at the shoes. And she said, okay, we've got to get you some new shoes. And she said, what size are those?

And Christopher looks at him. He says, I don't know. They're borrowed. Those shoes. So he and then it was, you know, we, yeah, a friend Brian McNally and I took him to Elaine that night and I think it sort of helped restore his spirits. You even got him new underwear. It's a full service operation at Fannie Faire.

I didn't want to mention that on the podcast, but yes. Some fresh underwear is always nice. So you had great stories and great writers, but you also had wonderful perks. at Vanity Fair in the 90s and early 2000s. You list some of these in the book. You had two assistants. You had a car and driver at your disposal. Right.

Passport photo taken by Annie Leibovitz. Right. You write that a lovely woman in an English maid's uniform came to make fresh coffee every few hours. Yes. That's nice. I know. Interest free loans of an employee wanted to buy a house.

Just a few of the top editors. Okay, for a select few. Yeah. Okay. This is my favorite. You're right. Staff members could expense their breakfast. Not a working breakfast with a writer or photographer, just breakfast. Just breakfast. No, I mean, Sye was the most generous and just the most compatible of all proprietors at anywhere, any time. And he was insanely jealous and generous to the staff and

to the editors. I mean, this is all predicated on you doing really well and the magazine making a lot of money, which it did. And basically, strange enough, he was brilliant because all these things, all these, having a car and driver, it meant that you're, when you're not struggling on the subway and trying to find a seat or a pole even to hold on to, you're in a car and what I would do with that half hour drive to the office, I'd edit manuscripts and the same thing on the way home. So the car just sort of extended your working day in a certain way. Which perk do you look back at and say, well, that was wonderful excess that served no editorial purpose whatsoever? Absolutely, none of them.

They're all they all served. Are you crazy? I don't feel you would say that. No, they all served a purpose in a strange way. Also, Cy made it so that, you know, when he had started out, Connie Nass was like the third-tier publisher. There was Time Incorporated, and then there was Hearst, and then there was Connie Nass. by the mid-1990s Connie Knafs was far away number one

and part of it was this mystique of black town cars everywhere and people flying the Concord to Europe all the time and so that created a mystique that attracted a huge amount of talent as well. It's just the place you wanted to be

because it looked more exciting than Hurst or Time Incorporated. Speaking of the place you wanted to be, you created the Oscar Party, the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in 1994. What led you to create that? Well, Swifty Lazar invented the Oscar party, and he was, Swifty was for the younger people out there. He was one of the world's first, one of Hollywood's first super agents,

but he also represented a ton of great writers like William Soroyan and Truman Capote and then a ton of movie stars at the time. And he invited me to his Oscar party. And then he died. And he died in December of like 19, I want to say 93. And I thought we could pick up that slack. And so we did the first Oscar party about four months later at Morton's, not Morton's steak, but Morton's restaurant in Beverly Hills.

And I thought, I've always thought this best of your, If there's a chance you're going to fail, do it before as few people as possible. So we only invite about 150 people for dinner. And then about 150, 200 people to come after the awards. But it was successful. And I think we did a very good job. We had an amazing team. And so the next year, it was a bit bigger.

And then the year after that was a bit bigger. And then it became a sort of institution. As a schlubby writer, I always wondered how many Vanity Fair writers got to go to the Oscar party? Oh, I would say probably I rotated them, probably 20 in any given year. Is that a reward for good performance? 100%. 100, yes. Oh.

Very important. And at the same time, I remember Larry Fink, who's a gifted art photographer and more photographer. And he was going to shoot the Oscar party for us. And I was meeting with them two hours before we were about to leave the hotel for the, for the, for the, for the, for the restaurant. And I said, when are you going to change? Because Larry was wearing like combat clothing and like everything was all camouflage. And he said, I'm not going to change. I said, Larry, what do you talk about? He said, I'm wearing this. I said, no, no, no, no, no. You don't understand. Everybody else can be wearing every other man is going to be wearing a dinner jacket and you will fade in better and get better pictures of you have a dinner jacket. He says, I don't own one. So I call the fashion department. The head of the fashion department was all staying in the hotel. I said, can you get Larry a dinner jacket in an hour?

She said, have him meet me out front. So they go out front. They go to Armani. She gets him a dinner, a tuxedo. And I show up at the Oscar party like two hours later. And there's Larry in a tuxedo. And he took some brilliant photographs. A couple quick ones before you go.

Yeah. What were the events that led you to leaving Vanity Fair in 2017? I mean, you know, I'd been there for 25 years and I thought that's a that's a tidier number than 26 years. I really done everything I wanted to do there. I could I could see we had sort of kept the world at bay after the financial crisis. We were still profitable. The magazine was still thick. but I could see changes happening within Connie Nass.

I had retired, and I thought this is not going to go on the way I'm used to it. And I was too old to make enormous changes in how I was going to work with other people. I mean, they were going to put fact checking and art design and photo and copy editing under one umbrella thing for the entire company. and I thought, I've worked with these people for 25 years. I trust them. And I don't want half my staff taken away from me. And my wife had been pasturing me. We love a certain area in the south of France.

And we wanted, and I was 68. And I was 68. I was done. I read a review of this book by one of your former Vanity Fair writers that refer to the book having an index and yet my copy does not have an index. Graydon, did you remove the index from this book? No, no, that's Brian. No, he wrote that.

There is no index. I didn't want an index. And there are no photographs because I thought it had to look more timeless without an index. And it means people actually have to read it to find their names. And I didn't want photographs because I think they can date a book. And obviously, because I'm only going to choose photographs that are somewhat flattering to me, and I had trouble finding enough of them. But no, no index.

I just assumed it was a great prank to make all those people read the entire book to find out what you said about it. It is. I mean, Barbara Streisand didn't have an index for her book, and Andy Warhol back in the day didn't have an index for his diaries. I believe you made one in spy, just in case. Well, that thing was, that's when a book was an, an important. And the Warhol Diaries were sort of the biggest literary event in New York at the time. And it didn't have an index.

So we sat down with like 10 interns and ground out an index for the next issue of spy and bounded into the issue. All right. Finally, I love the Golden Age of Magazines, but there is still plenty to read out there in the world. 100%. So as we move out of the magazine age, what would you say that we've really lost? Well, you've lost some things and gained others. In the old days, you had to, you know, if you wanted to be a writer or a photographer, you had to know somebody who had the means of production,

either a magazine or a newspaper or a book publishing company. The Internet has eliminated that as an issue. So you can do anything. You can publish anything. You can publish your photographs, your words, your illustrations. it's a question of being discovered. And I think the people who will get discovered and have successful careers both in terms of an audience and in terms of making a living, which is pretty important, people with quality will find

that route. People with Flash and the Pan ideas won't. But that would have been the case 70 years ago, too. With some exceptions like the New Yorker and the New York Times, I also think there's an end of a kind of generalist approach to publications, also put airmail in that category. Right. That there would be a publication for someone

that would want to read a little something about politics and a little something about fashion, a little something about Hollywood. I miss that too. Well, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, New York Magazine, they're unchained.

In fact, I think they're better now than they were 14. years ago. And so there's a lot of that out there. And hopefully that'll be, and I think they're, and they're all, you know, roaring businesses. And so it, it, um, journalism is not going away. It's just taking different form and it's both easier and more difficult. The fact is you can go through and fact check your own story before you send it in in an hour on the, with, with, with, with the internet, where it would have taken maybe three trips to the, uh, the, uh, the New York Public Library before this.

Graydon Carter's book is When the Going was Good, and editor's adventures during the last golden age of magazines. Anybody who buys it gets an interest-free loan and free breakfast. Graydon, thanks for coming on the press box. Brian, a pleasure. Thank you. Okay, two things I'd like to leave you with. First, if you'd like to read more of the Graydon Carter Uvra,

I highly recommend the book I mention, Spy the Funny Years, which has a treasured place on my bookshelf. Go buy it immediately. Second was one more line from Graydon Carter's book. I've always felt that one of the reasons there are editors, he writes, is because the public doesn't actually know what it wants. Carter was talking about magazine consultants that were brought in during the 90s to tell editors what to do.

He could just as easily have been talking about outlets these days that are guided by numbers, rather than figuring out new and smart ways to do things. All right, that is the press box. I'm Brian Curtis, but I'm seeing magic by Brian Waters. If you are listening to this, I am on a road trip across the Great American Southwest. If you see a magenta minivan,

please wave and send me restaurant wrecks for Flagstaff, Arizona, and St. George, Utah. Good news. Pressbox will continue. Joel Anderson is going to be hosting the pod with special guests. later this week and next week. And next Monday, you're going to hear the second installment of our 25 for 25 series. This is our tribute to the publications that have died or attained zombie status in the 21st century. Joel and I went nearly two hours.

We did Grantland. We did ESPN the magazine. We did Talk Magazine. We did Nintendo Power. We did everything we could squeeze in it. There are so many stories and memories. I think you're going to really enjoy that podcast. That is next Monday.

Until then, treat yourself to a free breakfast at a bodega, egg and cheese on a roll, enter into your expense account, and I will talk to you soon.