There are lines in When the Going Was Good, Graydon Carter’s memoir of his swashbuckling career as an editor during the heyday of magazines, that will make any journalist laugh (bitterly) out loud. “There was a bar at the end of each corridor,” writes Carter of his first job at Time magazine in the mid-1970s, where expense accounts were huge, oversight relaxed and, “I went five years without ever turning on my oven”. At Vanity Fair, where Carter took over the editorship in 1992, “the budget had no ceiling. I could send anybody anywhere for as long as I wanted.” For a commission on the collapse of Lloyd’s of London, one Vanity Fair hack ran up expenses of $180,000 – and the piece didn’t run.
These are the details most readers will come for and Carter, who at 75 remains a symbol of magazine glamour and excess – a fact somehow vested in the whimsy and extravagance of his comic-book hair – doesn’t short-change us. His years at Vanity Fair entailed as much sucking up to the worlds of Hollywood and fashion as it did publishing great journalism, and this book reminds us that, like all hacks, he is a gossip at heart; casting an eye back on his life, he can’t help but dish the dirt.
And thank goodness for that. At the front end of the memoir are some lovely, funny passages about his boyhood in Ottawa and Carter’s early jobs as a manual labourer and on a doomed student magazine. (It remains a curiosity that, unlike some of his fancy English peers at Condé Nast, his roots are modest and suburban, and his fascination with class feels connected to that.) But let’s cut to the chase: what did he really think of Anna Wintour? The Vogue editor is, writes Carter, someone who “tends to greet me either like her long lost friend or like the car attendant”, a woman of such awesome bad manners that, he recalls, she would demand the check at a restaurant the minute she finished her food even if her dining companions were still eating. Pioneering magazine editor Clay Felker? A snake. Legendary newspaperman Harry Evans? Also a snake. Like all good memoirs, When the Going Was Good includes a disastrous encounter with Princess Margaret. And there are long, satisfying sections on, for example, the extraordinarily bad behaviour of Hollywood stars trying to crash the Vanity Fair Oscars party. Meanwhile, Carter is so affable, so genial, so disarmingly honest about his own shortcomings – he refers to himself as “a beta male”, who hates negotiating and has to fight “inherent laziness” – you hardly notice the knife going in.
Some of the book’s best material derives from the years between Carter quitting his dead-end reporting job at Time and joining Vanity Fair. This was when he and Kurt Andersen set up Spy magazine and, as he puts it, undertook a campaign of “carpet bombing at 25,000 feet” the great and the good of New York. Incredibly, the pair’s description of Donald Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian” still stands, a testament to the power of the precisely judged insult. There are other delicious moments, including the time they referred to Jill Krementz, the wife of Kurt Vonnegut, as “a champion namedropper”. Carter writes: “Vonnegut called me in a fury. He said that his wife did not namedrop – she simply had a lot of famous friends and liked to talk about them. ‘Let me leave you with this,’ Vonnegut said, ending the call, ‘If you don’t already have cancer, I hope you get it.’”
Carter himself isn’t above namedropping, of course, and he retains some tics from Vanity Fair’s more Tatler‑ish side. If a person went to Harvard (a “Harvard alum”, in Carter’s clubby language), you can bet you will hear about it. Someone is “the Boswell of England’s Eton-Oxbridge set”, while someone else was “then married to one of the lower-ranking members of the Tisch family”.
A greater irritation is the book’s occasional vibe of old lags reliving their glory days. With yet another account of an overindulged male hack running up a huge hotel bill and skipping off without filing the piece, the larkish tone starts to wear thin. In the late 1990s, Christopher Hitchens staggered, tramp-like, into the Vanity Fair office and Carter sent him to the fashion closet to be refurbished right down to his undies. Yes, the magazine promoted plenty of women, but you have to wonder whether, if Marie Brenner, another star who broke story after story, walked in looking as if she had slept under a bridge, would the editor-in-chief have found it quite so endearing?
Then there are the antics of Dominick Dunne, the star crime and society writer of the 1990s, who, despite being “on his way to earning half a million dollars a year”, writes Carter, “wasn’t always easy to get copy out of”. (Dunne would check into the Chateau Marmont hotel for weeks at a time, and his editor, Wayne Lawson, would have to fly to LA from New York to hold his hand and effectively talk the piece out of him.) The rivalry between Dunne, his brother John Gregory, and John’s wife, Joan Didion, meanwhile, was venomous, decades long, and is related in exquisite detail.
I couldn’t get enough of this stuff: anecdotes about the subjects of Vanity Fair’s fawning profiles who flew into a rage because of a single perceived insult. For the super-agent Sue Mengers, it was the writer calling her house “modest”. For Tom Wolfe, it was use of the word “spry”. One journalist would turn in 70,000-word “vomit drafts” and expect the editors to whittle them down. And then there was the amazing amount of theft that took place at the Vanity Fair Oscar parties. “I remember catching Adrien Brody trying to smuggle out one of our electrified candle lamps on the tables,” writes Carter. “I said, ‘Adrien, you can’t do that. We had the shades all made up especially.’ He’s a gentleman, and a charming one at that, and still apologises any time I see him.” Some gentleman.
Behind all the nonsense and the glamour, it’s easy to forget that Carter was a truly great editor, a natural risktaker and ideas guy, who commissioned Monica Lewinsky to write about her experiences, tracked down the true identity of Deep Throat, and before the world changed and the money ran out, honoured a principle that imbues this joyful memoir: “A journalist’s life in those days [was] just plain fun.”
• When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines by Graydon Carter is published by Grove (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy for £18 at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
