What two better editors to discuss the Golden Age of magazine publishing than Terry McDonell and Graydon Carter? As McDonell writes in Alta, the two first met in 1985 when they were trying to start their own magazines and trying to secure funding from Carl Navarre, owner of Atlantic Monthly Press.
“Graydon received $500,000 for Spy; I secured $5,000 for Smart. I don’t hold any of that against Carl or Graydon,” McDonell writes, “Spy was a better idea, and there is a bigger picture to reckon with now that the future of magazines looks like no future at all. To understand what that means, you have to know what actually happened to magazines since that time, and that’s what Graydon is giving us.” Their discussion of Carter’s new memoir, When the Going Was Good touches on tricky transitions, Si Newhouse, favorite writers, the Vanity Fair party, and somebody’s small hands.
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Terry McDonell: Between us we have close to a hundred years of magazine experience. :Do you remember the first magazine that captured your imagination, got you thinking?
Graydon Carter: Well, probably two magazines. My parents got Life and Time Magazine, like a lot of people in those days. And then it was Mad Magazine—probably the most influential magazine of my life at a certain point.
TM: I think—generationally—that works for a lot of us.
GC: It was brilliant; I was getting it for my kids up until like, 10, 15 years ago and it was still smart.
TM: What about your first magazine?
GC: My first job in the magazine business was at this little literary magazine in Canada, when I was in college. They were looking for an art director. I said, Well, I can draw. And they said, Then you’re the art director. And I was the art director, and then became the editor. I used to spend probably 40% of my time on the look of my magazines.
TM: Most editors don’t but I think I did roughly the same thing.
GC: Yeah, I think it’s really important, especially if you’re a big league magazine.
TM: I became obsessed with typography for a while.
GC: A constant obsession of mine.
TM: That inside magazine-making comes through in your memoir, which is really a social and intellectual history of magazines over the last 50 years.
GC: Oh, you’re a doll for saying that.
TM: It’s also hilarious and surprisingly kind. Were you conscious of that kindness?
GC: Well, it represents how I authentically feel. Feuds of any sort date a book because most people forget what the feud was about. The fact is many of the participants may be long gone by the time anyone reads the book. Also, it’s just your one-sided view of the feud, so it’s not really fair.
TM: So, 1992, you walk into Vanity Fair, and there’s more than a little hostility waiting for you there, right?
GC: [Laughs]
TM: I wonder if that hostility affected you more than the hostility you encountered outside of Vanity Fair, when you had to go on those Spy hangover tours to explain to people you had made blistering fun of that you weren’t going to turn Vanity Fair into a new Spy Magazine…
I don’t recognize this Donald Trump in the Trump that I met 35 years ago. I don’t recognize him at all. I don’t recognize the anger, the bitterness, the whining.GC: The office was much tougher, but I hope I treated everybody the same. I tried to treat them well, and I think that eventually won them over because I didn’t pit people against each other—it was very much that kind of office when I got there. What I wanted was a collegial office where people would respect each other and work together. And for basically 23 years, we had that.
TM: You write that the support of Si Newhouse made that possible. Tell us about your relationship with Si. I found him to be one of the most compelling characters in your book.
GC: To have fallen into his orbit when I was in my early forties was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Actually, I started working for him in my mid-thirties as a writer for Conde Nast magazines. He was not only wise about the magazine business, he was wise about life. I know people thought he was an eccentric and he was, but in a very healthy way.
TM: Did you count him as a friend as well as a boss or patron?
GC: I counted him more like an alternate father than a friend. If you were in the magazine business or the book business or the photography business or the writing business in New York City for the last 30 years of the last century, he was it.
TM: You became good friends with most of your writers.
GC: A good number. There were a lot of them and I was very close to them. I knew how hard their job was. My job was easy. An editor’s job is basically to be a wage ape and you’re sitting at your desk most of the day. But writers have to go and create magic and bring it back to the office. Editing something is a lot easier than writing something.
TM: Was Hitchens your favorite writer?
GC: He was my favorite. I mean, you know, I loved so many of them, but Christopher was in a special category. First of all, I tried to hire him eight years earlier when I started Spy Magazine. But he was working at The Nation and they paid more than we could afford
TM: Speaking of money, the expensive sheen of Vanity Fair reflected the highest glamour. I think in some ways that distracted from some of the difficult journalism you were doing.
GC: Well, you know, if we’d taken away all the Annie Leibovitz pictures and produced it more like a think magazine, it could have stood alongside The Atlantic or Harper’s but the advertising and the glamour of the magazine meant you weren’t flying in economy, you were flying in first class, and you could pay the writers what they deserved to be paid.
TM: I’m thinking specifically about the stories behind the stories that you tell in the book, such as the work you did with Marie Brenner and Maureen Orth.
GC: Well, they did that. They did the heavy lifting. I did the assigning. For instance, I remember reading about this guy who was killing gay men on a murder spree across the country. And I assigned Maureen and she started working on it for a couple weeks, tracking his path across America, and then he killed Johnny Versace and then the story became gigantic. She did a great story for us, and became the expert on the murderer Andrew Cunanan on television, and then published a book on the subject.
TM: That often happened with your writers.
GC: Right? A lot of their pieces became books and movies.
TM: Were you conscious of pressure journalistically? Where’s the next big story?
GC: First of all, in the Golden Age, magazines were firing on all cylinders and editors were at the tops of their games. The competition was extremely fierce, as you remember, for readers, for advertisers, and for stories and, and for contributors. So the competition made it less than relaxing, but made you produce better work
TM: How important was the Oscar party in terms of your success at Vanity Fair.
GC: It sort of got things rolling. It started off small because I thought, if you’re gonna fail, fail before the fewest number of eyes as possible and make no big promises about it. It became a huge, financial windfall for the magazine with advertising. That was probably the most profitable issue of the year. It was just thick. It was like a phone book with advertising.
TM: Did you enjoy those parties?
GC: I sort of did, I liked the dinner part. I would stand up front and welcome all the guests. I’m pretty good with names and I would then sometimes have to introduce Si and Victoria (Newhouse) to some of the guests they didn’t know. So I had 600 or 700 introductions before dinner. But the happiest moments were getting in the car at the end of the evening knowing that we hadn’t completely fucked things up.
TM: To update the record here, let’s talk about your relationship with Donald Trump.
GC: Well, he’s gone from being a joke to being the world’s menace. I don’t recognize this Donald Trump in the Trump that I met 35 years ago. I don’t recognize him at all. I don’t recognize the anger, the bitterness, the whining. I don’t find this Donald Trump compelling in the least.
TM: Anything else?
GC: I still have a Canadian passport…
TM: He called you a sissy.
GC: Yes, he called me a sissy. He called me sloppy. He called me dopey and he said even his wife thinks I’m a total loser. And so I checked with her that day and she said, I never used the word total.
TM: When was your last encounter?
GC: In 2016, a month or so before he announced that he was running for the presidency, he sent me a clipping from an old magazine of an ad for The Art of the Deal. And he circled his hands in gold Sharpie and said, See? Not so small. But they are small. So I stapled a note and wrote, Actually quite small, and sent it back to him.
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Graydon Carter’s When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines is available now from Penguin Press.
