At Spy, Carter had mocked Vanity Fair, which he had found breathy and incestuous. (“In Vanity Fair, it’s sometimes difficult to tell who is slurping whom,” Spy pronounced in 1988.) Now, with no warning or plan, he had to fill at least a hundred and twenty editorial pages a month while attracting advertising at around a hundred thousand dollars a page. He got to the office every day by 5:30 a.m. “I was constantly worried that I was going to lose my job,” he writes. The magazine’s backlog (material bought but not run) contained nothing that he considered publishable, and the work in progress brought him little joy. That summer, Norman Mailer had been assigned to cover the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, but the piece that Mailer submitted on the first Convention was so weak—a tedious recap of what everybody had seen on TV, with no insight or reporting—that Carter killed both assignments and paid Mailer in full (a sum well into the six figures in today’s money). He delivered the news to Mailer, who stormed out of the room. Later that day, in a laying on of misfortune, one of Carter’s sons had an alarming riding accident: his head was stomped on by a horse.
“The first two years at Vanity Fair were pretty dreadful,” Carter allows. The magazine’s luxury advertisers seemed to hate him for his lèse-majestés at Spy, and some stepped back. So did the staff, who crept around giving him, he felt, the evil eye. “The atmosphere was so poisonous that I wouldn’t even bring my family into the office,” he writes. The press reported rumors of his firing before his first issue appeared.
That was then. In the years that followed, Carter became a great fullness of man with a great fullness of hair, and the magazine into whose arena he was tossed among lions became synonymous with his feathered nest and rising name. He and Brown were different editors: his muse sang in a lower key than hers—more skeptical, more reserved, perhaps a touch more male. But there were attributes they shared. She had come to Vanity Fair from Tatler, an impish British magazine not wholly unlike Spy. And, as Newhouse surely reasoned in assuring himself about Carter, it was her antennae for buzz and power there that had helped her turn around the fortunes of Vanity Fair.
If the golden rule for a writer is to try to avoid situations where you find yourself writing something you wouldn’t read, a similar calculus probably applies to assigning and editing stories. Magazines, unlike newspapers, aren’t engaged in comprehensive coverage. Pieces that are gratuitous or dutiful, undertaken in the “we should probably” mode, usually stink like dead fish from a mile away. The defining experience of good magazine reading is “I didn’t think I was interested, but”: the medium is made not in its choice of subjects but in its qualities of execution. Magic happens when at least one person—a writer, a photographer, or an editor—has been allowed to fall in love.
“My philosophy has always been that if you take care of the talent,” Carter explains, “you’ll get better work.” Vanity Fair had no budget—that is, no ceiling—and came with perks that might make even a Time editor blush. Condé Nast offered its editors-in-chief interest-free home loans, set up every senior editor with an assistant, and sent employees home in town cars when work ran late. (Three words only: no longer so.) Expense policies amounted to free cash for breakfasts and lunches—Carter had a horror of indoor-cat editors who ate at their desks. Photo shoots had craft service on the scale of movie sets’, and reporting coffers ran deep. When the O. J. Simpson trial began, Carter flew Vanity Fair’s courtroom correspondent, Dominick Dunne, to Los Angeles and installed him in the Chateau Marmont for the length of the eight-month proceedings. When Dunne struggled to file, as he often did, Carter periodically flew out his editor and installed him there, too—presumably to sit nearby and spirit out copy to New York. There is, it must be said, no such thing as an overpaid writer, and Carter, to his credit, recognized the value of singular work. What wouldn’t you pay to get something extraordinary and lasting on the page?
“I want to take a vacation, but the last time I left you in charge your face appeared on a grilled cheese sandwich.”
Cartoon by Tom Toro
As an editor, Carter describes himself as nonconfrontational, and is not what one might call a big technician. “I believe that all great magazine stories must have a combination of the following elements,” he declares: narrative, access, conflict, and disclosure—a bit like saying that baseball must have pitches, outs, hits, and runs. But he knows a good game. The first writer he hired was Christopher Hitchens, who, until his death, in 2011, brought in columns on a great range of subjects: politics, literature, drinking, and how it felt to be waterboarded (bad). Carter was proud of the magazine’s literary reporting—and of beating Woodward and Bernstein to the public identification of Deep Throat, in 2005. When that story was released, Carter was honeymooning in the Bahamas in service to his third marriage, and was petrified that they’d got it wrong. But he enjoyed getting in ahead of the giants.
It is tempting to describe Carter’s Vanity Fair as Spy without the irony, but it also offered him a way to stretch his point of view. The writing had a curious expansiveness—even short columns now read as long—and, in stories about affluent perversity and cursed dynasties, an eye for glamour with a darkened edge. Though he and his team worked from New York, his Vanity Fair became, in many ways, the essential magazine of L.A.
In the early nineteen-eighties, while reporting for Time, Carter had been deflected from Irving (Swifty) Lazar’s famous Oscars party. After Lazar died, in 1993, Carter saw a vacuum in the Oscar-party scene, and created his own, setting it up as a dinner at Morton’s, a good Hollywood restaurant with banquettes, to keep it small. There were cameras waiting at the entrance, but the party was less an extravaganza than a social occasion. (“If you’re a successful movie actor, you don’t really get to meet other movie actors unless you’ve been in a movie with them, because you’re working all the time,” Carter writes.) It became an institution.
One comes away from Carter’s memoir with a sense that his natural art form, even more than making magazines, might be dinner. He has astute things to say about the restaurants where he has eaten, and, in the mid-two-thousands, he went into the business himself, rejuvenating the Waverly Inn and the Monkey Bar. There was a period when he regularly gave thirty-person dinner parties at his home. His editing style, with its big budgets and nonconfrontational leadership, feels akin to hosting. Carter has keen ideas about the correct practice of dinner: the guest list (lunch is for people who might stress you out; dinner is for those who delight you), the table settings (place cards should be double-sided, to help people find their seats and remember whom they’re talking to), and, most of all, the time to leave: “the minute dessert hit the table.” He cannot abide the after-dinner drift or those who linger. Once, for reasons never satisfactorily explained, he found himself obliged to host Princess Margaret for dinner in his apartment. She stayed past midnight. Carter recalls it as one of the great traumas of his life.
Even visionary editors-in-chief have crass responsibilities—having to do with subscriptions, newsstand sales, and so on—and, like late-night TV hosts, they’re always hunting for recurring bits to build a following and a legacy. For Carter, there was the Oscar party and a yearly roundup that he called the New Establishment List—a set of power rankings and a way of bringing fresh faces and readers to a magazine otherwise much enamored of Old Hollywood, the Kennedys, and the alleged crimes of aging moguls. His real interest, he has said, was not celebrities but scoops and exposés. Carter helped create the hum around the high-profile true-crime and psycho-grift stories that now saturate long-form journalism, and many of the anecdotes he relays with the greatest relish relate to his efforts to pin those stories down. Once, when Vanity Fair was preparing an investigation of Mohamed al-Fayed, the magnate and hotelier, whom it believed to have sexually harassed and mistreated women (among other misdeeds), Carter made the mistake of booking a room at the Paris Ritz, a Fayed property. When one of Carter’s deputies brought him a bug-detection device procured “at a ‘spy’ shop,” he got readings from the phone, the television, and a tapestry over the bed.
By the new millennium, Carter himself had become someone about whom untrue (or true!) claims of all kinds circulated. He had ventured onto Hollywood’s creative side, producing documentaries and taking small acting roles. He had become the sort of powerful, well-connected, public person his magazine wrote about. This was the backdrop for an accusation that the writer Vicky Ward made in 2015: that, in preparing her 2003 Vanity Fair profile of Jeffrey Epstein, Carter had suppressed information about Epstein’s ghastly sex abuse out of insider loyalty.
Carter has nothing kind to say about Ward in his book; he says more than two pages of unkind things. In his telling, she was a loose cannon at the magazine, self-aggrandizing and mistrusted, and brought in allegations against Epstein at the last minute, as the piece was going to press, seeking to force them into print with insufficient support. (He notes that one source subsequently sent her a cease-and-desist letter.) Carter’s eleventh-hour time line seems to be wrong, but the matter won’t be settled by these quarrels. It lingered for years, and by the time of Epstein’s final arrest Carter had left Vanity Fair.
The first change in weather, he suggests, came in 2008, during the recession, which hammered publishers. By the mid-twenty-tens, he saw more fundamental changes under way; media companies were streamlining their operations. “I could see the shape of things to come,” he writes. Dessert was hitting the table. In 2017, after twenty-five years at Vanity Fair, Carter decided to resign. When an alert announcing the news popped up on his friends’ phones, some later told him, they assumed that he had died.
Carter went off with his wife and the youngest of his five children to live in the hills above Cap d’Antibes, on the French Riviera—a place where, one would like to think, the going never stops being good. He had asked his chief assistant from Vanity Fair to come with him and, in a wonderful vestige of golden-age practice, assigned this talented and carefully selected young person the task of travelling with his dog. Carter gave up smoking and took up swimming and—a basis for a musical, perhaps—entertained Bette Midler and her husband.
Then he got bored, and started thinking up ideas. The result was Air Mail, an e-mail publication he created with the journalist Alessandra Stanley which launched in 2019. E-mail, at that point, seemed retrograde and uncool—Substack was still in its youth—but, like many of Carter’s circumspect ideas, the plan had a surprising canniness. An e-mail publication was invulnerable to the caprices of social-media platforms and their algorithms. And, at last tally, Air Mail had in excess of four hundred thousand paid subscribers, which is more (but who now is counting?) than Harper’s or Fast Company.
The question with memoirs is always what they’re straining toward. In Carter’s case, the answer appears to be eccentricity. He is constantly trying to suggest that he is just a little odd—in his interests, in his family’s conversation habits, in the way he built his career—when the evidence is that he carries normal bourgeois ideas of the good life: steady high-paying work, nice suits, fine dining, cars, art, a brood of children, and a dog named Charley. A list of “rules for living” in the back of the book contains sensible advice on minor matters, such as buying two Lacoste shirts if you like them and not monogramming your clothes. Carter at times puts one in mind of a male character in a Mary McCarthy novel whose great, embarrassing secret is that he’s really just a normal sort of chap.
When people fret about the fate of magazines, digital or print, they look today at balance sheets and growth, and it’s true that many publications are in peril. The greater long-term challenge, though, will be keeping talent in the field. If the craft to which Carter devoted his career has a future, it will be because creative people—people who could easily do something else—still want to do this. If it vanishes, the reason will be that the best new arrivals face a course that appears too rough, too lean, and, in a fundamental way, too unfun. One can easily look askance at the excesses of Carter’s magazine era, but the indulgent assignments were invitations to a full, interesting life. Banish plump Jack, and you banish all the world.
Commercial culture and electoral politics share a basic truth: people want to feel a little rich, a little powerful. They want to brush against magic and mystery—rooms within rooms—and to move through a surprising, expansive world. Over the years, so many creative enterprises have been stripped of these qualities, leaving them lustreless and diminished. The paths of people like Carter are a measure of the golden age lost. But their memories are proof of the promise that remains. ♦
