MEMOIR
When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines
Graydon Carter
Grove Press, $36.99
Editing one of the world’s foremost celebrity and politics publications means you are likely to court some enemies.
Former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, writing in his delightful new memoir When the Going Was Good, says Donald Trump was one such adversary. Ever since writing an unflattering profile in the mid-1980s – one that described the real estate mogul as “short-fingered” – Trump had a persistent fixation with both Carter and the magazine.
And, of course, the size of his phalanges.
Regular broadsides on social media from the US President attacked the monthly magazine and its editor. “Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!” was one of countless tweets. Other vengeful billionaires circled too, like the former owner of Harrods department store Mohamed Al-Fayed, who had a voracious hunger to destroy Vanity Fair after a damning exposé.
Carter says this is why he learned to “always edit with [his] hat on”, as he never knew when he might be out the door. As an editor who has worked at some of the most admired outlets during the halcyon days of magazine publishing, it’s one honest admission. Especially since many might assume he was protected from sudden job loss or budgetary constraints at these deep-pocketed publications.
Carter in the 1990s at the height of Vanity Fair’s popularity.
The 75-year-old Canadian was a “college discard” who “drifted” into magazine publishing thanks to a youthful passion for the printed word – and plenty of desperation. He helped establish a muddled literary magazine, The Canadian Review, that gave him some credibility in journalism but didn’t guarantee employment in its competitive world. It was only after begging a TIME editor at the end of a job interview (with a near empty bank account spurring him on) that Carter landed a reporting gig at the weekly.
Working for TIME in the 1970s was like another world, where the red-bordered magazine wielded unparalleled political influence and provided its reporters with the fabled experience of an “expense-account life”. But it was ribbing the rich and famous (and not simply reporting on them) that really enticed Carter, who then went on to found Spy magazine. The satirical monthly’s aim was simply to “carpet-bomb at 25,000 feet”.
