Graydon Carter is able to pull back the curtain on his storied stewardship of Vanity Fair. And The Hollywood Reporter can now exclusively reveal the quilt of the magazine editor’s memoir, out March 25 from Penguin Press.
The dust jacket for When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures In the course of the Last Golden Age of Magazines encompasses a younger Carter in a bespoke power suit, cigarette in hand, his trademark hair wings just starting to take flight.
Carter, 75, was offered the highest job on the Condé Nast magazine in 1992, taking up from Tina Brown, who’d edited it since 1984 and was moving to The Latest Yorker.
Over the following two-and-a-half many years, Carter — who’d immigrated from Canada in 1979 and previously helmed the groundbreaking, celebrity-skewering Spy — transformed the magazine right into a monthly must-read.
His Vanity Fair brimmed with tales of obscene wealth, celebrity and riveting true-crime — and, if the celebrities aligned, because it did for Dominic Dunne’s seminal reporting on the O.J. Simpson trial, a story contained all three. Other memorable contributors from the era include Christopher Hitchens, James Wolcott, Maureen Orth and Nancy Jo Sales.
It was the times of town cars, town houses and seven-figure expense accounts for top editors. Only Carter’s former counterpart, Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour (who now also serves as artistic director for all Condé Nast), still stands as a remnant of that bygone era.
“Only whenever you exit a golden age, do you realize that you just were in a single,” Carter, 75, tells THR. “I desired to capture the enterprising spirit and sheer fun of those wonderful years for others.”
Amongst Carter’s lasting contributions to the entertainment-media landscape is the annual Vanity Fair Hollywood Issue, mere inclusion by which meant a star had truly arrived. At its peak influence, the problem’s covers assembled essentially the most famous faces on the planet, captured like Renaissance paintings by photographer Annie Leibovitz. Herb Ritts, Mario Testino and Bruce Weber were also frequent contributors.
Carter says his final Hollywood Issue cover — which features Oprah Winfrey, Nicole Kidman, Zendaya, Harrison Ford, Robert De Niro and even Carter himself — “was up there when it comes to my favorites.” Radikha Jones has held the highest editorial post at Vanity Fair since Carter’s departure in 2017.
And it was he who masterminded the magazine’s annual Academy Awards party, which stays one of the crucial sought-after Oscar-night tickets. The perfect a part of every bash? “Heading back to the hotel knowing the night had been successful,” Carter says.
But greater than the glitzy Hollywood soirees, it was the day-to-day grind of putting out the magazine from Latest York that Carter misses most — which, in its golden age, was a type of glitz in itself.
“The glamour and exhilarating collegiality of a bustling office full of smart, and smartly-dressed young people,” is how he puts it.
Carter currently oversees Air Mail, a weekly newsletter for “worldly cosmopolitans” he launched in 2019.
