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If you had the chance — and good fortune — to work in magazine publishing in 1980s or ’90s New York, chances are you are still talking about it.
When I started my journalism career at Condé Nast straight out of college in 1992, even lowly editorial assistants like me could take a town car home after 6pm. You’d walk out of work having put in maybe six hours if you discount long lunches (nobody came in before 10am), possibly carrying a load of free make-up and clothes on “loan” from the fashion department, and see a line of black Lincolns in front of the HQ on Madison Ave. You’d hop in one and head straight to a free five-course tasting dinner at some hot new Spanish restaurant, or a film screening, or — as I once did — to the airport to take a first-class flight on Aer Lingus to a five-day luxe tour through Ireland’s best distilleries. It was crucial research, of course, for that 400-word “front of book” piece on the latest whiskeys.
This was back “When the Going Was Good”, as former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter titles his nostalgic new memoir about his adventures “during the last golden age of magazines”. The topic is catnip to anyone in publishing, which probably accounts for the fact that such books about the glory years are still being written.
Content wise, there’s little here that we haven’t heard in some form in one New York magazine piece or another over the past two decades. But I still found myself speed reading through details of Carter’s starchy upbringing in Canada to get to the good bits about the era when magazines such as Time and Newsweek (both of which I worked for) had their own buildings with their names on top, and “staff in uniforms” who “brought dinner (with wine) to writers’ offices on tea trolleys”, as Carter remembers.
He quite rightly cites the “magical realism” of Time (where he, along with other well-known editors like Walter Isaacson and Jim Kelly, got their start in the 1970s), a place where “[t]here was a person for every conceivable need. Nurses. Doctors. Psychiatrists. Long-distance phone calls could be made for free. Bureau chiefs overseas lived as well as US ambassadors.”
As Carter notes, “[g]rowing up in Canada, magazines — Life, Look, Esquire, The New Yorker, New Times, and Time — more than anything else, told me the story of the city, its industry, its might, and the people who made it the center of just about everything I was interested in.” Many others around the world felt the same way, as glossy magazines projected the luxury, fun, wealth and desirability of American culture across any number of genres from women’s “books,” as they were called, to lifestyle and news publications.
In fact, in those days, news magazines almost seemed like branches of the state department, populated mostly with the kind of sharp and vaguely posh young men — except the fact checkers of course, who were women — who might have been in the character line-up of The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam’s fabled account of the brilliant and fatally flawed “whiz kids” of the Kennedy era, if they’d graduated a few years earlier.
Carter positions himself as a beta-male who somehow stumbled down into this glimmering world from Ottawa. But as anyone who has ever worked at a big American glossy knows, you don’t get to the top of these places without very sharp elbows. As the co-founder in the 1980s of the satirical monthly Spy and editor of Vanity Fair from 1992 to 2017, Carter was at the top for a long time.
At Spy, he created, together with Kurt Andersen, a kind of smart-alecky insider-outsider brand that poked fun at elites while also selling to them — the graphic style of the publication is still widely copied. His Vanity Fair combined the edgy wit of essayists such as Christopher Hitchens with award-winning feature writing from people like Sebastian Junger, Bryan Burrough and James B Stewart, whose pieces were very often turned into top-selling books and movies.
The photographers were the best in the world. And they were paid like it. Carter writes about one contract negotiation with Annie Leibovitz that came down to a $250,000 difference between her agent and the magazine. Finally, Condé Nast owner Si Newhouse tells Carter, “Oh, give it to her. We don’t want to nickel-and-dime them.”
Eventually, of course, brightness fades. Magazines get thinner, as does Carter’s temper. There’s a bit too much grousing about other editors and praising of his own staffing and general good humour. “I . . . had to make the culture less poisonous,” he writes about his efforts to reshape Vanity Fair post-Tina Brown, who many people feel did a great job with the publication. “You could feel the venom in the corridors.”
I never worked at Vanity Fair, so I can’t testify to Carter’s before and after narrative. But I do know that when I finished When the Going Was Good, I had the sense that this was the last “glory days of New York publishing” book we’ll see. The stories have been told, the town cars have gone home, and even Carter has gone digital with his online publication Air Mail. Technology comes for all of us eventually. But I’ve still got those snakeskin Blahniks from the fashion closet.
When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines by Graydon Carter Grove Press £20/Penguin Press $32, 432 pages
Rana Foroohar is the FT’s global business columnist
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