In The Looking-glass World

At the end of Graydon Carter’s entertaining memoir, When The Going Was Good, he sets out some droll Rules for Living. The first is to avoid what he calls “The Wall of Fame”. In the offices and homes of people who have done well you often find an area where they have framed photographs of them standing alongside figures much more illustrious than they are: politicians, actors, rock stars, and so on. “My rule is this,” writes Carter. “Don’t put the photo of you and somebody famous in a silver frame and display it for others unless you are absolutely positive that the famous person has the same photo in their home or office.”

It’s not surprising, then, that there are no photographs of the author in his book, none of him with the stars who clamoured to be in the pages of Vanity Fair, none of the paparazzi shots of him leaving his NYC restaurant with his friends, none of him with his children, who crop up often in the book. And none of the dazzling photos from any of his storied Oscar parties. Instead the pages are illustrated with spare, classy line drawings — doodles, almost — of him going about his life, and the cover is a clean white with a photograph of him when he was much younger.

The younger Carter was a pretty regular Canadian guy, growing up on the usual diet of ice hockey, fishing, and canoeing in Toronto. There was one TV channel and when Hockey Night in Canada showed, the streets emptied. “The parents of the day were less helicopter parents than submarine ones — there, but not really in evidence.” He was a hopeless student, disinterested and dreamy, but he loved comics and magazines. A steady diet of MAD magazine honed an appetite for the absurd, and a couple of books and movies set in New York had a powerful effect on him and cemented an ambition to get the hell out of his hometown.

Cut to the 1980s, when Carter had learned the journalism ropes at Life and Time magazines and had the idea for a satirical magazine. Spy was to be a smart and witty read that lampooned the nabobs of New York. It combined humour with hard reporting, or shoe-leather journalism, as he called it. The house style was ironic and distant, the stories lethal. They wanted to “champion the underdog and bite the ankle of the overdog”.

The first issue ran a feature on the 10 most embarrassing New Yorkers, which included a slick developer named Donald Trump. Carter nicknamed him “the short-fingered vulgarian”. Thirty or so years on, the two still have regular goes at each other. Trump once sent him a photograph with his hands circled and the notation “See — not such short fingers.” Carter sent it straight back, with a note saying, “Actually, quite short.” Spy was a great success.

Carter and his partners decreed that the staff must be well dressed, believing that revolutionary writing would have more weight if you didn’t look like a ruffian. Carter went from having one good tan suit and a pair of leather shoes to becoming an immaculate, old-style dresser with much of his wardrobe made in London’s Jermyn Street.

And so on to Vanity Fair, one of the jewels in Condé Nast’s very shiny crown, which Carter was lured to edit. He took over the editorship from the virago Tina Brown. Carter was unnerved at first. He had spent years at Spy sending up the VF types, the hyperbolic writing, the emptiness of celebrity. He’d also burned many a bridge with prominent people and possible advertisers, and the smoke from those skirmishes still hung in the air. But he plunged in. He changed the voice of the writing, banning lists of words such as Tinseltown, glitzy, and wannabe, and fired the grifters hiding behind fancy titles on the masthead. One such victim was an extravagantly paid and ridiculously titled “creative style director” — what could a style director be, if not creative? — whose real job was to arrive at Brown’s apartment every day and tell her what to wear.

Carter settled in for 25 years, building a team of matchless writers and reporters who were paid immoderately well and given months in which to turn in their stories. It’s hard to believe now but there was no cap on the budget. The first Annie Leibovitz shoot he looked in on had more than 30 people milling around the studio, eating food that cost more than the editorial content for an issue of Spy. Any staffer could take out cash, charge meals to the magazine, use the company’s sleek town cars for transport. Bouquets of flowers were sent to contributors just for getting their stories in on time. One of the feature editors realised that the accountants budgeted your expenses on what you spent the previous year, so best to build on a large amount of expenses. Carter didn’t mind: “I wanted my editors out in the field, meeting with writers and bringing in ideas. The last thing I wanted was editors eating at their desks.”

VF may have been celebrity-forward, but in time it perfected a rigorous, long-form narrative journalism that became its hallmark and, led by Carter’s nose for a good story, broke massive stories that should have been impossible with a three-month lead time. Two years of “leather-shoe work” delivered up the identity of the fabled Deep Throat who was the source of the Watergate leak. It was VF that introduced Caitlyn Jenner to the world, all satin and ormolu feathers, her identity as Olympic medallist Bruce Jenner eclipsed forever.

Carter’s VF never lost the tone of a laconic outsider, laughing at the absurdity of it all. Looking back, he says now, “You never know when you’re in a golden age. You only realize it was a golden age when it is gone.”

Not one to step away forever from the electric charge of NYC, Carter now co-edits a brilliant digital newsletter called Airmail Weekly that slips in every Saturday morning, trailing the same mischief and wry commentary that old VF readers recognise. Do yourself a favour.