When the Going Was Good: An editor’s adventures during the last golden age of magazines, by Graydon Carter, Grove Press, 432 pp, £18, ISBN: 180-4711004

‘Growing up’, writes Graydon Carter near the start of this memoir, ‘I worried at times that I was destined to become little more than one of those faceless, nameless men in the scenery of someone else’s better life.’ The story is thus set up to chart the arc of amour-propre rather than the ascent of amour de soi, a black-and-white-to-colour kind of chronicle, about taking the yellow brick road from the circles of Canada to the spirals of the USA.

Carter’s childhood – apart from a four-year interlude during the early 1950s in the small town of Zweibrücken, Germany, where his father was stationed – was spent in and around Ottawa’s Manor Park, a frozen wasteland of a place, in his eyes, where hockey ‘was everything – in part because there wasn’t much of anything else’. A self-described ‘dreadful student’, he was a chronic daydreamer, open to each and every distraction, but, left to his own devices, lying flat on his stomach in the living room, he did manage to multi-task by reading books and watching television.

There was no real parental push to take a path less travelled. His ‘charmingly incompetent’ father, a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot and veteran of World War Two, was a man ‘of endless unambition’ who possessed ‘a number of skills, few of which could be turned to financial advantage.’ His mother, the privately-educated daughter of a soap executive, was a ‘gifted Sunday painter’ whose standard stance was a stoical shoulder shrug.

His major inspiration, at this formative stage, appears to have been the quick-witted, fast-talking character of Sgt Bilko on The Phil Silvers Show. Everything he learned about parenting and running an office, he would later say, ‘I learned from Bilko’, shaping an attitude to inter-personal dynamics that was ‘strict, fair, but conspiratorial.’

The catalyst for his burgeoning sense of ambition, on the other hand, was Act One, the memoir by the American playwright and director Moss Hart. A gift from Carter’s mother, it convinced him ‘that you could achieve your dream if you found out what your dream was’. It would still take him quite a while, however, to determine that dream. There was a spell toiling on the prairies as a lineman for Canadian National Railway, followed by a stint going through the motions for the Canadian government at what was then the Department of Supply and Services. A subsequent semi-detached stay at university back in Ottawa, ostensibly as a student of political science, ended prematurely with him being dismissed as a ‘college discard’. The only thing that this period produced, he would later say, was ‘one failure after another’.

A seed, nonetheless, had already been sown when, as part of his extensive extra-curricular activities, he inveigled himself into a newly-launched literary magazine called The Canadian Review. Abandoning more and more of his classes, he soon took over as editor and, during the course of the next three years, managed to build its circulation to a robust 50,000 until, having run out of money, it was forced to close its covers.

Magazines, from this point on, would be his métier, and metropolitan celebrity his muse. In 1978, aged twenty-nine, he moved to New York, which was, in his view, the quintessential ‘magazine city’, with the likes of Life, Esquire and The New Yorker telling him ‘the story of the city, its might, and the people who made it the centre of just about everything I was interested in’. Following a short course in publishing at Sarah Lawrence College, he practically begged his way into a job at Time magazine on Sixth Avenue.

He was, at last, in his element, rubbing shoulders with ‘Ivy Leaguers, Rhodes scholars, and assorted other overachievers’. Excited to be in a city where ‘famous people lived’ (he once saw Cary Grant strolling down the street), and encouraged by access to ample expenses (‘extreme expense-account creativity was looked upon with the same sort of reverence as writing a particularly fine story’), he proceeded, with Gatsby-like guile and glee, to slip into the gulf stream of the great and good’s gold-hatted glamour.

Time boasted three floors of elegant offices, with leather-bound chairs and soft-panelled ceilings; in-house nurses, doctors and psychiatrists; a bar, and, once a week, a procession of uniformed members of staff who would wheel in dinner and wine on trolleys to all of the writers’ rooms. Carter loved it there – and, as always, relied on printed prompts to facilitate his assimilation (‘I had read about Anderson & Sheppard in a magazine’) – but, after five years of ‘ineffectual activity’, he found himself, by way of a demotion, shunted a few floors away to the now fast-declining Life magazine (‘a zombie monthly, close to dead but moving as if it were alive’).

He endured two spirit-sapping years there, feeling stranded while peering back in envy at the old colleagues at Time who were still ‘overachieving and racing ahead with vibrant careers’. Eventually, fearing that New York was preparing to ‘chew me up and spit me back across that cold and unforgiving Canadian border’, he decided to take a gamble on an idea he had long been pondering.

He launched a satirical magazine, Spy, with his former Time colleague Kurt Andersen, in 1986. Based in a leased set of offices on the top floor of the Puck Building in SoHo, it was envisaged, in Anderson’s words, as a monthly eruption of ‘literate sensationalism’, a synthesis of the investigative rigour of America’s 1940s Time and the mischievous spirit of Britain’s ongoing Private Eye. Covering both the hard and the soft power elites in New York, Hollywood and Washington, the first issue included features on the graffiti-inspired artist Keith Haring, the mercurial owner of the New York Yankees George Steinbrenner, the spiky ex-Sex Pistol singer John Lydon, the revered Knopf book editor Gordon Lish, the dietary demands of The Beach Boys, and a certain ‘short-fingered vulgarian’ by the name of Donald J Trump.

Launched into an age of yuppies, mobile technology, MTV, power dressing and cynical political spin, and a local culture of ‘big hair and egos and long stretch limousines’, Spy captured the city’s zeitgeist, simultaneously nourishing, and being nourished by, the dialectic of utilitarian individualism and civic scepticism.

After the magazine was sold in 1990 (to Charles Saatchi and his partner Johnny Pigozzi), Carter left to take over the New York Observer. Rather like Life, as a publication it had become, he writes, ‘painfully, almost weepingly dull’ but, through a combination of targeted causes and opportunistic marketing, he pushed it back into pertinence.

The achievement was good enough to impress Si Newhouse, the chairman of the media conglomerate Condé Nast (and, according to Carter, ‘the greatest billionaire magazine proprietor of all time’), who had previously attempted to incorporate Spy into his publishing empire. In July 1992, he offered Carter the editorship first of The New Yorker and then (after that opening evaporated during a bout of in-house rank-pulling) of Vanity Fair.

An editorship at a glossy upmarket mainstream magazine has long seemed to be one of the socially aspirational émigré’s best (but most hard-fought for) means to burrow their way inside the gated and gilded cultural community that is America’s Establishment, projecting back a foreigner’s fresh vision on to a native’s tired eyes. The British-born Tina Brown managed it at Vanity Fair (in 1984) and her compatriot Anna Wintour did the same at Vogue (in 1988), and now Carter was able to join them for a run that would last for the next quarter-century.

The first two years, however, were ‘pretty dreadful’, with Carter (already intimidated by an institution which, compared to the ‘youth hostel’ that had been Spy, felt like ‘a five-star hotel’, inheriting far too many members of a sulking staff who – resenting the change of regime – were openly resistant to his own plans and policies. As an insight into the kind of office-based realpolitik required to survive, he recalls how his assistant came up with a tactful way to remove the huge framed tributes to his predecessor: ‘Let’s ask to have the walls painted.’ The atmosphere, however, remained ‘so poisonous I wouldn’t even bring my family to the office’, and he also had to contend with opposition from those advertisers who still remembered the trouble he had caused them during his satirical days.

His defiant response marked the dawning of what was probably his most admirable era as an editor. For one thing, he made some bravely symbolic decisions, such as rejecting an article from the otherwise stubbornly celebrated Norman Mailer on the grounds that he was now ‘phoning it in for a $50,000 assignment fee’. For another, he set about “cleansing the florid baroqueness” of the house style, dispatching such words as ‘tome’ (for book), ‘boîte’ (for restaurant) and ‘chortled’ (for laughed) to the ‘copyedit boneyard’.

Likening the editor’s role to that of a choirmaster seeking harmony from ‘all these disparate voices’, he also courted a younger, brighter and more distinctive breed of writer, such as Christopher Hitchens, Bryan Burrough and Buzz Bissinger, as well as making better use of such daringly inventive photographers as Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton and Herb Ritts. As for the long-form pieces over which he presided, he demanded that they combine the following elements: ‘narrative (that is to say, a beginning, a middle, and an end), access (to the principals, or those on the immediate periphery of the principals), conflict (always a welcome addition), and disclosure (moving the scholarship on the topic at hand along – in other words, new information).’

It worked. The new style sold.

There are, along the way, plenty of entertaining behind-the-scenes anecdotes, such as the photoshoot for Donald Trump, whose flat refusal to remove the Loro Piana cashmere sweater he was given to wear (because of not wanting ‘to muss his elaborately assembled confection of hair’) resulted in the magazine’s exasperated stylist cutting it off with scissors from up the centre of his back. There are also some pleasingly waspish asides, such as his sniffy response to the standard of rental he was once receiving: ‘I had been hoping for something that looked a little less like the sort of car that Joan Collins’s hairdresser would drive.’

Carter left Vanity Fair at the end of 2017. A year or so later he launched Air Mail, a ‘mobile-first digital weekly’. He still cannot, he readily admits, resist his real vocation: ‘I simply love being an editor.’

As he recounts the ways that he strengthened the magazine’s ties with A-list celebrities (such as via its annual Academy Awards party – to which ‘if you hadn’t been invited […] it was best to be studiously out of town’, and savours the kind of circles in which he now moved (‘There was a Magritte in the foyer’, ‘On one side of the alcove was a full-size Lucian Freud naked self-portrait’, Carter allows himself some preening and purring about his own elevated status – ‘I stayed at the Connaught in London, the Ritz in Paris, the Hotel du Cap in the South of France, and the Beverly Hills Hotel or the Bel-Air in Los Angeles […] I flew the Concorde. I took round-trip flights on it at least three times a year for almost a decade […] [W]e bought an apartment in the Dakota…’ – but, for much of the time, he is surprisingly sparing in his self-congratulations. What actually comes across more keenly is his genuine commitment to his craft – ‘I cared about the quality more than the sales, and, above all, I wanted readers to read.’

There are a few instances that beg ‘editor, edit thyself’. An example, in terms of pacing, being the fact that, perhaps trying too hard to make the reader feel as trapped as the author felt in Ottawa, he takes about fifty pages to reach the period of his magazine work; while, in terms of repetition, Spy’s Trump epithet is mentioned on page 95 and then again on page 97, while the fact that all of Vanity Fair’s bespoke ashtrays were pocketed by guests at the Oscars parties is noted first on page 236 and then again on page 245. Generally, however, this is a narrative that flows along as freely and smoothly one of the elegantly epic pieces for which his magazine was so famous.

His memoir is more about what has been lost than about how the loss happened. While one might regret, in this sense, the paucity of telling details, one probably ought to be grateful for the few that have made it, because Carter is hardly, by his own admission, the most persistently Proustian of chroniclers (meeting an old friend at a social event, the man’s wife is pointed out to him across the crowded room. ‘I look forward to meeting her,’ Carter says. ‘Graydon,’ his friend sighs, ‘you were my best man.’

If there is a moral to this tale of the presentation of self in someone else’s ‘better life’, it is perhaps the insight the author offers up after so long a stay at the glossy magazine world’s very own West Egg: ‘A story that lavished thousands of words of veneration could be undone if a single sentence alluded to the fact that, say, the subject’s ears were too big for his head.’