Vanity Fair editor Graydon CarterThe Globe and Mail
Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and I are sitting in a banquette at New York's Monkey Bar, and he's giving my hair a quizzical squint, as if to ask, what happened?
At least a decade has passed since I saw my acerbic and detail-minded former boss, so I couldn't blame him for noticing those diminishing assets. I was waiting, coiled actually, for a barbed remark. None came. I was almost disappointed.
Maybe Mr. Carter, once the co-founder of Spy – the biting chronicle of pastelled eighties excess – has mellowed. At least relative to what I remember during my four-year-stint as a coffee-fetching editorial assistant at VF, clawing my way toward my peak as horoscope editor.
Way back in the nineties, when I worked there, he couldn't get his words out quickly enough. Even when they were mean, they were funny. ("Don't tell people in New York you're from Canada," he told me in my first job interview. "They don't care.")
Today he speaks with a sly, elegant drawl. Even his signature undulatory coif looked relaxed. He also employs many Canadians. But why shouldn't he be relaxed? One of the longest-standing editors at the famously fancy (and fickle) Condé Nast empire of magazines, the legendary expat has topped his vertiginous masthead for more than two decades, second only in longevity to Vogue editor and the group's artistic director Anna Wintour. This year he was inducted into the U.S. Magazine Editors' Hall of Fame.
When we sat down, the discussion naturally turns to the ancient homeland. Mr. Carter had just talked about the Jian Ghomeshi scandal with his mother over the phone. Justin Trudeau, whom the magazine featured in the December issue, also came up. "He's not as good-looking as you'd expect," Mr. Carter said. "He's attractive for a politician."
On the day we meet, Mr. Carter has a meeting scheduled to inspect his new offices at One World Trade Centre, the tallest building in the United States, where his magazine – as well as the rest in its owners' fold – is set to move in January. (It's also the same day that window washers were rescued after dangling from 68 storeys, but he had nothing to do with that.) The visit to his newly designed office undermines speculation that he'll step down. He didn't make much of a deal about it, offering a deferential response. "I love my job," he said, "but I'd be the happiest retiree in this world."
Maybe. While the 65-year-old Mr. Carter could retreat to his fishing camp in rural Connecticut, equipped with seven antique canoes ("It's a little pocket of Canada in the fifties," he says) and spend more time with his five children, he's also a multiplatform industry unto himself. Mr. Carter co-owns clubby restaurants (Monkey Bar, Waverly Inn) and produces documentaries (he is wrapping a film on the late writer Nora Ephron and working on another about the late fast-lane fop and industrialist Giovanni Agnelli).
There is also the magazine. He recently hosted a gathering of tech and media leaders called the New Establishment Summit in San Francisco, is launching a major redesign of Vanity Fair's website and is promoting his latest book, a collection of between-the-wars essays called Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers & Swells when the periodical was run by Frank Crowninshield. "The magazine captured the Jazz Age, but it couldn't make that transition into the Depression and the tiptoe steps that led up to the war," says Mr. Carter, referring to the publication's first incarnation that was folded into Vogue in 1936. "You have to make right turns once in a while. He didn't make the turn."
In the early nineties, Mr. Carter was the Alain Prost of the right turn. A sharp-witted parvenu from a middle-class Ottawa family and University of Ottawa drop-out, he moved to New York in 1978 and worked at Life and Time magazines. Within three years of arriving, he was already co-editing Spy. Eventually he ran the New York Observer, once a sleepy title that he turned into a biting must-read for the city's masters of the universe. (A prankster, he legendarily conducted Spy's annual reviews at Christmas parties by dressing as Santa and talking to employees seated on his leg.) But taking over Vanity Fair from Tina Brown in 1992, he had slipped through the looking glass to the other side, a power broker in training who had to massage the pocked egos of the people whom he and former partner-in-snark, Kurt Andersen, used to skewer. Some of the targets were actually staffers at the magazine he took over.
"Spy made so much fun of Vanity Fair and a number of contributors before I got there that the level of hatred and disgust was quite high," says the father of five, tomato bisque in front of him. "I wouldn't bring my children in there because it was so poisonous." In his first year on the job, his throne seemed equipped with an ejector seat, with tabloids poised to watch him drop to the sharks. Mr. Carter recalled that his fortunes changed around two years later, when he fired three employees whom he thought were toxic, all in one day. "It was the only time I ever fired anyone. It sort of showed people the alpha male thing," he says, sounding unconvincingly alpha. "I should have done it earlier, but I'm Canadian."
Other sharp turns arrived. Mr. Carter came up with a trademark VF flourish that paved the yellow brick road of his career: the Hollywood Issue and the ensuing Oscar party. While the general-interest magazine's coverage of Tinseltown remains a pillar, he initiated several right turns of his own: more investigative pieces after 9/11 and hiring marquee business writers such as Michael Lewis in the aftermath of the financial crisis.
One of his proudest recent moments was in 2005, when after a two-year investigation, the magazine uncovered Mark Felt as Deep Throat, the FBI source who helped Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post bring down the Nixon Administration. The day the story was about to go to print, he recalled, he was on his honeymoon in Nassau with his third wife, Anna Scott Carter. "I had completely forgotten about it," he said, adding that he had also forgotten to bring his own cellphone.
The editor in charge of the project reached him on his wife's mobile. The magazine was 95-per-cent sure that it was right, and while Mr. Carter could have verified it with Mr. Bernstein, who is on its masthead, there was a danger he might notify Mr. Woodward, who'd run it in the Post and they would have been scooped. "This would be a big wrong to get wrong," said Mr. Carter. "I started drinking at the airport. This would be a long, crappy ride home if we screwed this up."
As a rule of thumb, airplanes have been kind to the magazine. Mr. Carter says that his magazine doesn't do any reader studies. Instead he looks at his magazine from the perspective of its quintessential reader: the curious airline passenger. "It's about making something for the reader who's going on that eight-hour flight and bought a copy at the airport."
In his estimation, a magazine is a bridge between news and a book. A great article is doing its job when it features three vital ingredients: narrative, revelation and unique access to the principals. "If you have two of the three, or three of three, that's something that the Internet can't take away."
Despite the industry's tumult, his formula still works. VF's circulation has remained steady since the troughs of the recession in 2009. Its single-copy sales, considered the critical gauge of reader interest, took the same breathtaking drop as most magazines. To keep advertisers happy, Mr. Carter sends most of them handwritten thank you notes every month. "Well, wouldn't you want to be thanked if you were cutting a hundred-thousand-dollar cheque?" he said. "They pay for everything that we do."
My chicken paillard arrives. I immediately regret it. The plate is topped with a massive thicket of frisée. I eat as daintily as I can. Which means clear-cutting the foliage with a knife and shovelling it into my mouth.
Ruminating about my sloppy table manners, I ask Mr. Carter what qualities he doesn't like in his employees. He pauses for a second over his bald piece of salmon. Instead, he'll tell me about what he does like. Unable to resist, he says, "Hair loss, obviously." Letting that hang for a bit, he continues: "You want people to be curious, passionate and consistent without being predictable. All I care about is if they care. If they care, you can figure everything else out."
What qualities does he dislike in himself? "I probably don't have the energy I used to when I first started," he says, adding a little later in the conversation that he's a fan of the 20-minute catnap. "On the floor?" I ask him, a little surprised. "No, on the sofa," he replies. "I can sleep like that and feel like a new man."
Confrontation, he says, is also not a strong suit. "I'll let things go longer than they perhaps should, interpersonal things at the office."
Aptly, Mr. Carter describes his leadership style as both micro and macro, with everything in between a kind of management flyover country. "I try to look after the really small things and the really big things, and delegate the stuff in between," he says.
At least in my own time – and things haven't changed that much from what I hear – he would bore down on a manuscript's particulars, whether it's crossing out a pretentious word such as boîte (he had a list of verboten words) or asking what kind of car a subject drives. Visuals inside the magazine and the office were also critical. Editorial assistants should look brisk and efficient. Woe to the entry-level hack caught reading at his desk, i.e. me. "I don't [expletive deleted] pay you to read New York Magazine!" he once scolded me. Lesson learned. But I knew a thing or two about him. For example, he sometimes shined a laser across West 44th Street at the editor-in-chief of a sibling magazine.
As the big boss, he was generous, exacting and possessed a spy's long-game memory. I decided to leave Vanity Fair in 1998 with neither regret nor rancour. I went about as far up as I could, made lasting friendships and learned a lot. Mr. Carter threw me and a few others a farewell party that left us under the glow of mid-afternoon Veuve Clicquot. He presented me with a parting gift: a Prada wallet.
Wayne Lawson, my wildly gracious boss and no stranger to the zinger himself, threw me a small lunch at a fancy midtown restaurant called Aretsky's Patroon. Mr. Carter was at a nearby table with his former comrades from Time, where I was heading as a reporter. He brought me over to meet each of them, including the man in charge, Walter Isaacson, and the two editors who would later succeed him. When we returned to the office, he gave me a friendly warning: "Don't wear soft-soled shoes, they're embarrassing."
But wait. It gets better. Five years later, I bumped into Mr. Carter at a New York launch for the Walrus magazine. The first thing he does is look at my shoes. "No rubber soles!"
Now I'm just awaiting a remark about the chicken paillard.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In his own words
You used to tell me, 'Stop asking me how I am. I don't have time.' How come?
[Sigh, followed by a silence that says that careful words will be spoken. And then a mild chuckle.] You were sort of known for … well … I'd need an answer quickly from Wayne [my boss] and you'd keep me on the line. "Oh, hey Graydon. How's it going!" The call took eight seconds when it could have taken two. It became sort of famous. If I were running a meeting and I'd need to call Wayne's office, I'd say to everyone there, "Talk among yourselves. I'll get through this."
Why are soft-soled shoes bad?
It's a place of work. Leather-soled shoes are more professional. And better for your feet, too! And you'll look more like a get-up-and-go kinda guy.
Is it because soft-soled shoes have an intrinsic orthotic Canadianness to them?
Save them for when you're 80.
Why wouldn't New Yorkers care if someone is from Canada?
It's a melting pot. Unless you're from Mogadishu or some warring hotspot, it doesn't really matter. Everyone is from somewhere else. I used to revel in my Candianness. I had a crest from the boat club we used to belong to on my blazer and I went to a Time event – the Time board of economists – as a reporter. Somebody said, "Are you a doorman or something?" I went home that night, and got a razor blade and sawed the little crest off the blazer. All I wanted to do is fit in.
Editor's Note: Graydon Carter moved to New York in 1978. An earlier version incorrectly said he made the move in 1983.