Oh, bittersweet day: the Grexit is upon us. Among those of us who have worked with Graydon Carter for a long time, the thought has lingered uncomfortably in the back of our minds that he might someday snap shut his laptop, pull on his Anderson & Sheppard overcoat, and get on with the rest of his life, leaving Vanity Fair behind. But acknowledging this possibility isn’t the same as living the reality. So it’s with some sadness and shock that we face the truth—that Graydon is departing from the magazine after 25 years—even while we’re happily aware that this won’t be the last we hear of him.
There are a lot of people at V.F. who have been with Graydon for all or most of his tenure, and some, like me, who have worked alongside him even longer. You don’t engender that kind of loyalty simply by offering a good benefits package and the chance to interview, say, Bruce Springsteen or Kerry Washington. Graydon has always possessed a showman’s charisma, a persuasive ability to make you believe, to use one of his stock lines, that This is the best job you’re ever going to have.
My time with him dates back 30 years, to 1987, when, having just completed my sophomore year of college, I reported for duty as a summer intern at Spy, the satirical New York monthly he had co-founded a year earlier with Kurt Andersen. I’d been smitten from afar with Spy’s visual audacity and reportorial approach to humor, but what struck me upon my arrival at the Puck Building, in lower Manhattan, where the magazine was then based, was how stylish an affair it all was. Humor is generally the province of trolls; think of the motley assemblage of unfortunates in the slovenly writers’ room on 30 Rock, and that gives you an accurate picture of the setting in which most good jokes and satire are created in America.
Yet Spy, though run on a shoestring, carried itself off as a sumptuously cast and art-directed screwball comedy: the staff attractive and uncommonly kempt, the offices smartly minimalist, and the magazine’s first anniversary celebrated with a black-tie blowout in the Puck Building’s ground-floor ballroom, the music provided by an all-female big band. Kurt and Graydon were equally responsible for Spy’s distinctive voice and funniness, but, as I was to discover, it was Graydon who was the pushier aesthetician, the one who imposed upon the place his own seductive, wonderful vision, gleaned from black-and-white movies, of how a magazine should look and comport itself. (Spy took its name from the magazine that Jimmy Stewart writes for in George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story.) Later on, with greater resources at Condé Nast, Graydon would scale up these ideas and improve upon them. What if I threw the best party in Hollywood? What if we got the guy who lights the Rolling Stones’ concerts to do the lighting? What if we carved topiary into the shape of Oscar statuettes? What if everyone got a silver Zippo lighter with VANITY FAIR engraved upon it? He was an impresario as much as an editor, a job description he essentially created.
Graydon terrified me at first. He wore, even in the old days, elegant bespoke suits, exuded a sort of regal mystique, and was the first person I’d ever met called Graydon, which, to my provincial ears, was not actually a name. (I am from middle-class New Jersey.) He spoke like someone out of Kipling, referring to cigarettes as “gaspers” and a pee as a “squirt,” and requesting that I make more coffee by gently placing a hand on my shoulder and saying, “David, can you fetch me a cup of your world-famous java?”
But as I got to know Graydon better, I realized that our sensibilities dovetailed in many ways, not least in our love of language (especially as deployed by such comic masters as S.J. Perelman and P.G. Wodehouse) and our belief in the transcendent, unequaled brilliance of The Phil Silvers Show, otherwise known as Sergeant Bilko. We also shared an acute, almost misophonic intolerance of irritating words, both of us finding unbearable such tabloid-hack terms as eatery, boîte, and scarf (when used as a gastronomic verb). To this day, Vanity Fair circulates to its editors a list of Graydon-verboten words and terms, among them doff, eschew, hooker, celebrity, moniker, opine, and A-list. (I did once successfully plead for an exception regarding another banned term, jet set, on the grounds that I was writing, literally, about rich people who flew on the Concorde.)
I also found—and I am just one of many in this regard—that Graydon is a natural mentor figure. He was warm, familial, and paternal, already the father of three boys when I met him. (Years later, my wife and I would ask him to be the godfather of our boy, Henry.) He took us Spy kids to lunch, asked us about our interests and aspirations, and granted us the opportunity to have bylines in a glossy magazine before any of us were old enough to rent a car.
And if you put in a good effort, he didn’t forget you. Two years after that first internship, I graduated from college. My plan was to take a few weeks off and go on a cross-country road trip with my best friend from school, who lived in Washington, D.C. I was staying at this friend’s house when his mother, who was from Louisiana, beckoned from the kitchen, phone receiver in hand, quizzically asking, “Y’all know someone named Gray-dun Carter?” Graydon, in those pre-cellphone days, had tracked me down by calling my parents and scribbling down the number where I was staying. When I came to the phone, his voice was urgent. “David! Andy Warhol’s diaries have just come out, and they don’t have an index,” he said. “So we’re doing one. Come in on Monday—and be ready to work.” That was on a Friday. My graduation had been four days earlier. What I lost in terms of open-ended summer days and a taste of Fonda-Hopper freedom, I gained in terms of a career, and, over time, an enduring friendship.
Graydon, I eventually learned, was not some plummy munitions heir or the ninth baronet of Tufnell Park, but, rather, a middle-class Canadian who loved America, dreamed big, and moved to New York in his late twenties—a Warhol-like self-invention (with similarly provocative hair). I admire people with this capacity, to will into reality an idealized vision. Graydon has certainly done this with his homes, his offices, and the two restaurants he co-owns, which variously evoke the novels of Henry James, the cabanas of the Beverly Hills Hotel, the sculptures of Joan Miró, the supper club where Barbara Stanwyck sings “Drum Boogie” in Ball of Fire, and MI6’s Kingston, Jamaica, office circa 1962. (For the purest distillation of Graydon’s consciousness and subconscious—the Being John Malkovich-style portal into his brain—have dinner at the Waverly Inn on Bank Street, surrounded by Edward Sorel’s murals of such figures as Jackson Pollock, Anaïs Nin, James Baldwin, Dawn Powell, George S. Kaufman, and Fran Lebowitz. Order the chicken pot pie.)
But it’s at Vanity Fair where Graydon’s gift for endless invention has really served him well. For all the constants in his career—his Anglophilia, his Francophilia, his love of old cars, his curious obsession with the talent agents Sue Mengers and Mike Ovitz, two people who shouldn’t have ever registered in the public’s consciousness but now do in part because Graydon found them interesting—he has himself never been, professionally, a one-trick pony. His V.F. found its footing not as a Spy redux but as quite the opposite: a trusted, authoritative voice on business, starting with the New Establishment list (born in 1994); on the entertainment industry, starting with the Hollywood Issue and portfolio (born in 1995); and on culture, politics, and international affairs, through deep reporting and sharp commentary. He further developed V.F. into the most important showcase for photography since the heyday of Life, granting pages upon pages to, among others, Annie Leibovitz, Bruce Weber, Helmut Newton, Mark Seliger, Jonas Fredwall Karlsson, Snowdon, and Tim Hetherington—and capturing everything from the year’s crop of emerging actors to U.S. soldiers stationed in Afghanistan to the stars of the British stage to New York’s 9/11 first responders.
Like a lot of people as they get older, Graydon grew more serious over time. Through his wife, Anna, he became deeply invested in environmentalism, active in the Natural Resources Defense Council and the movement to curb climate change. His editor’s letters became a platform, in 2003, for his vocal, vigorously reasoned objections to the Iraq War, leading to the publication of his 2004 book, What We’ve Lost. More recently, his letters have been surgical dissections of his old Spy-magazine adversary Donald Trump, nominally and temporarily the holder of the most powerful office in the world.
But, as John Cleese has often said, we shouldn’t confuse seriousness with solemnity. Vanity Fair still fizzes with variety and fun, just as it did under Frank Crowninshield, the editor during the magazine’s original, Jazz Age run. In fact, Graydon has now outlasted Crownie, as he was known, by almost four years. In terms of influence and longevity, there are few editors in the annals of magazine journalism to match Graydon. Harold Ross and William Shawn at The New Yorker; Willie Morris at Harper’s; Harold Hayes at Esquire; Helen Gurley Brown at Cosmopolitan; Clay Felker at New York. He belongs in that pantheon. This is all the more remarkable when you consider that the aforementioned greats reigned in a time when a magazine was simply a bound stack of printed pages. Graydon has navigated V.F. through the so-called age of disruption, launching the successful Web vertical The Hive last year, building up robust profiles across social media, and playing the impresario at more events than ever. (He’ll be hosting the New Establishment Summit in Los Angeles next month—your last chance for a while to see him play live.)
In a neat bit of symmetry with my graduation-week experience in ’89, I got a call from Graydon during the languid week leading up to Labor Day, once again while I was putatively on vacation. Once again, I was to come see him, tout de suite. But this time, it was at his weekend house in Connecticut, not at the office. And the occasion was for him to deliver the news, gently, that he would soon be leaving Vanity Fair. It’s simply time, he said. He is 68, and he wants to move on while he’s still got plenty of life ahead of him for a third act.
Immediately after his departure from V.F., Graydon told me, he will spend six months living in France with Anna and the youngest of his five children, Isabella. He plans to use this time, he said, basically to recharge—to step outside of the hectic life he has been leading, wean himself off of screens, read more, calm down, maybe visit some cities in Northern and Eastern Europe that he’s never been to, and possibly fly somewhere warm “to see if kitesurfing is as easy as Obama makes it look.”
After that, in the latter half of 2018, he will return to his adopted, beloved home country to begin his next chapter, refreshed and ready to #MakeAmericaGraydon’sAgain.
