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Graydon Carter | When the Going Was Good

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ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Graydon Carter | When the Going Was Good

Join Michael in his conversation with Graydon Carter about his memoir When the Going was Good, An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines which documents his life and storied journalism career including his twenty-five years as the award-winning editor of Vanity Fair.

Graydon Carter is the founder of Air Mail. Before this, he was a staff writer for both Time and Life. He cocreated Spy, edited The New York Observer, and for twenty-five years was the award-winning editor of Vanity Fair. He is also the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning producer of more than a dozen documentaries and one hit Broadway play. He and his wife live in Greenwich Village, not far from his restaurant, the Waverly Inn, and have five children.

Book Notes

From the pages of Spy and Vanity Fair to the red carpets of Hollywood, editor Graydon Carter’s memoir revives the glamorous heyday of print magazines when they were at the vanguard of American culture

After working at both Time and Life and cofounding Spy, Graydon Carter was offered the editorship of Vanity Fair in 1992. He knew he faced an uphill battle—how to make the esteemed and long-established magazine his own. With curiosity, fearlessness, and a love of recent history and glamour that would come to define his storied career in magazines, Carter succeeded in endearing himself to his editors, contributors, and readers, as well as those who would grace the pages of Vanity Fair. He went on to run the magazine with overwhelming success for the next two and a half decades.

When the Going Was Good is Graydon Carter’s lively recounting of how he made his mark as one of the most talented editors in the business, further planting a flag in Los Angeles with the legendary Vanity Fair Oscar party. With his inimitable voice and signature quip, he brings readers to lunches and dinners with the great and good of America, Britain, and Europe. He assembled one of the most formidable stables of writers and photographers under one roof, and here he re-creates in real time the steps he took to ensure Vanity Fair cemented its place as the epicenter of art, culture, business, and politics, even as digital media took hold. Charming, candid, and brimming with stories, When the Going Was Good perfectly captures the last golden age of print magazines from the inside out.

Biography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graydon_Carter




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TRANSCRIPT 🔗

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[SPEAKER_01]: M-S-W-M-E-D-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E
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[SPEAKER_01]: Before this, he was a staff writer for time and life magazines.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He co-created spy magazine, edited the New York Observer, and for 25 years was the award-winning editor of Vanity Fair.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He is also the Emmy and Peabody award-winning producer of more than a dozen documentaries, and one hit Broadway play.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He and his wife live in Greenwich Village, not far from their restaurant, the Waverley Inn, and have five children.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Great and quarter.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to that set.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Nice to be here.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So this book of yours when the going was good in editors adventure during the last golden age of magazines was such an interesting read.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I loved this book.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I want you to say I want to say that to you right at the outset.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is a great read.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What I'd like to do in this conversation is track the arc of your career.
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[SPEAKER_01]: How do you go from Canadian farm boy, if you will, to executive editor of Badity Fair for a quarter of a century.
01:29.691 --> 01:38.584
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I also want to talk about your newest venture, air mail, but I want to start with sort of growing up.
01:38.564 --> 01:53.603
[SPEAKER_01]: you write that growing up, you worried that you were destined to become little more than one of those faceless, nameless men in the scenery of somebody else's life, great sense, and that you add, everything that you
01:54.730 --> 02:09.252
[SPEAKER_01]: Everything that drove you, sports, music, cars, they were all just impulses, essentially in that, your friends and your parents even thought that in a professional sense, life had little in store for you.
02:10.273 --> 02:12.216
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's start there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, Canada's, you know, Graham and Canada is not that different from the and the growing up of the United States, except it's a lot colder.
02:19.604 --> 02:29.339
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's more hockey and skiing, perhaps, in Canada than you would have had say in New York City, but it, you know, I had a really, it was just a normal childhood.
02:29.359 --> 02:35.167
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, a, a, a brother and a sister, my mother was a painter and stayed at home.
02:35.207 --> 02:41.477
[SPEAKER_00]: My father went to work and we, skied on the weekends, played hockey every
02:42.115 --> 03:05.018
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we had a cottage in the kind of people called it a summer house here in the United States, but we had a cottage in the country, and we spent the summer up there and canoeing and fishing and water skiing, and it was just in, it was a, you know, an analog of life, like yours when you were growing up, and, but it was like, because it's so cold for like six months a year, there's a lot of time spent indoors.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and for growing up in Canada, the outdoor outside world came to me through movies, a little bit through television, but a lot through magazines.
03:15.191 --> 03:24.829
[SPEAKER_00]: And so even when I was in my early teens, I sort of dreamt of being a like to write, I dreamt of being a writer of some sort of New York.
03:24.961 --> 03:33.329
[SPEAKER_01]: you write that you are dreadful high school student, constantly distracted, constantly daydreaming, and always just following your own interests.
03:33.750 --> 03:38.935
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's not typically the way people rise to the top of the magazine world.
03:39.315 --> 03:43.760
[SPEAKER_00]: No, it's to the great frustration of my parents, because it was called six months of the year.
03:43.780 --> 03:54.090
[SPEAKER_00]: I got a lot of time to read and I got my use of the outside world through books and
03:54.408 --> 04:05.665
[SPEAKER_00]: newspapers tell you about the events of the world, but magazines magazines like the New Yorker and Esquire and Time and Life, they told you about the texture of the outside world.
04:05.886 --> 04:18.225
[SPEAKER_00]: And from my early routine ages, I was drawn to New York City where I thought, I wanted to be a writer, I'd love writing, and I thought that's for my future hell.
04:18.285 --> 04:20.348
[SPEAKER_00]: I just had no idea how to get here.
04:21.543 --> 04:38.337
[SPEAKER_01]: you said that you knew you wanted to become something but no idea of what it was that you wanted to become and how you were able to become it that you had that yearning and day dreaming were the things that you excelled in and pretty much all you did.
04:39.245 --> 04:52.039
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, there was a lot of time, and I still, it's funny, I still believe that there's almost nothing you can't sort out in your life by lying on your back and staring at the ceiling for a half an hour.
04:52.099 --> 04:56.744
[SPEAKER_00]: I've always had a taken a siesta in the afternoon if I have a chance.
04:57.765 --> 05:02.991
[SPEAKER_00]: The first 15 minutes of that is sort of staring at the ceiling and just thinking about
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[SPEAKER_00]: the rest of the day ahead and what happened in the day before and if there's an issue, try to work it out, especially something it work.
05:10.660 --> 05:10.860
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
05:11.000 --> 05:20.271
[SPEAKER_01]: And so there you were lying on the couch day-dreaming about getting to New York, although you weren't sure how you're going to get there, what you were going to do when you got there.
05:20.391 --> 05:25.136
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you did what typically anyone would do, you became a alignment for the railroad.
05:25.397 --> 05:26.578
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's a diversion.
05:26.618 --> 05:31.003
[SPEAKER_00]: So my parents are like a lot of
05:30.983 --> 05:35.109
[SPEAKER_00]: They sent their teenage boys out to Western Canada.
05:35.330 --> 05:51.034
[SPEAKER_00]: Some worked on farms, some really hardy souls worked on the oil fields of Alberta, but my parents and their best friends, they sent myself my best friend out to Western Canada to work as on the railroad in you.
05:51.807 --> 06:00.381
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, you know, you went about 600 miles from Winnipeg, which is a remote city anyway on out onto the Canadian Prairie.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I, for six months, I lived in a box car with 11 other men, almost all of whom all of it, one had a criminal record of some part, sorry.
06:11.779 --> 06:17.528
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was so soft and, and, and, um, untrained in the sort of ways of the world.
06:17.508 --> 06:28.265
[SPEAKER_00]: But it toughened me up, I learned to have a great respect for these men, most of them, and had sort of, you know, sort of hard-scrabble, difficult childhoods and gotten a spots in trouble.
06:29.066 --> 06:39.803
[SPEAKER_00]: But they eventually warned me because I brought books, they thought I was sort of intellectual, and something I played up around and wasn't difficult.
06:39.918 --> 06:43.566
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, yeah, I just say it was a wonderful experience.
06:43.586 --> 06:47.915
[SPEAKER_00]: And I sort of, yeah, I grew to really appreciate these men.
06:48.095 --> 06:57.755
[SPEAKER_00]: And it sort of helped me, in the fact that I can talk to almost anybody, I can talk to a king or the guy who picks up the garbage in the morning, the same way.
06:57.835 --> 07:00.120
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was a wonderful experience.
07:00.387 --> 07:27.289
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mentioned to you before we started in my interview with David Gergen and his book on leadership, he said one of the mistakes that entities make is they hire these people with Harvard and Harvard and Princeton in this and he liked to hire people who had a much more diverse background, not necessarily a college degree but who had done linemen for the railroad or other such jobs like that because it brought diversity to their thinking.
07:27.775 --> 07:41.110
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it's funny, when I've hired hundreds of young people over the years, and one of the things I always look for is if they've had restaurant experience, I feel having one rubber restaurant, I feel that if you can handle
07:41.562 --> 07:58.440
[SPEAKER_00]: three or four tables of difficult diners and do it with ease and grace you can handle almost anything in life and so I too look for a diverse, you sort of backgrounds especially in the terms of summer jobs that they might have done with if I'm hiring them right out of college.
07:58.606 --> 08:06.010
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, when I was in law school, every summer job, whenever I was looking for internships at large law firms, I waited tables.
08:06.331 --> 08:07.675
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm much preferred that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I learned so much about people.
08:09.802 --> 08:12.210
[SPEAKER_00]: I bet you, Davis, the hardest job in the world.
08:12.308 --> 08:21.581
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, it was pretty hard, especially if the kitchen was in the basement and you had to go a flight of stairs, especially that, and most kitchens are in the basement.
08:21.601 --> 08:22.523
[SPEAKER_01]: I know, I know.
08:22.723 --> 08:23.604
[SPEAKER_01]: You leave the railroad.
08:23.664 --> 08:26.708
[SPEAKER_01]: It's too late to begin college.
08:26.969 --> 08:35.401
[SPEAKER_01]: You have as your description of yourself, no marketable skills, and so what is the person with no marketable skills and no opportunity to go to college do?
08:35.701 --> 08:36.983
[SPEAKER_01]: He joined the Canadian government.
08:37.520 --> 08:41.106
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it was pretty sleepy back in those days.
08:41.186 --> 08:43.590
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure it's much more efficient now that since I've left.
08:44.051 --> 08:47.437
[SPEAKER_00]: But yes, I thought I got to sort of work at something.
08:47.497 --> 08:59.116
[SPEAKER_00]: And they had one point they asked me to possibly be a trainee for a diplomatic post and that didn't really interest me.
08:59.337 --> 09:02.582
[SPEAKER_00]: And I sort of worked there and they gave me an assignment.
09:02.562 --> 09:12.997
[SPEAKER_00]: To do and sort of a report on the system that the government paid all its employees and I had never It was a computerized system.
09:13.037 --> 09:14.159
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd never seen a computer.
09:14.179 --> 09:21.229
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd never worked on a computer But I spent six months working on this and produce a you know two hundred fifty paid board
09:21.766 --> 09:24.710
[SPEAKER_00]: that after I left, I was in there long.
09:24.730 --> 09:33.381
[SPEAKER_00]: After I left, I literally would lay awake at night, worried about the people getting their paychecks based on this report I had put in.
09:33.602 --> 09:40.511
[SPEAKER_00]: This is back in the days when I was like, I'd big giant IBM, you know, mainframes where, you know, it was punch cards going into the system.
09:40.891 --> 09:47.560
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I was completely unfit for any kind of office work in a way.
09:47.800 --> 09:49.242
[SPEAKER_00]: It just wasn't my thing.
09:49.475 --> 09:59.812
[SPEAKER_01]: And, rightfully, then you left it and you enroll at the University of Ottawa and, you know, your high school, attention span to college classes.
09:59.852 --> 10:01.234
[SPEAKER_01]: So the center follow you.
10:01.434 --> 10:10.890
[SPEAKER_01]: But what you did there, which was, I think, the first step in finding your direction was you got involved with the Canadian review.
10:11.911 --> 10:13.474
[SPEAKER_01]: And so talk about that.
10:13.454 --> 10:17.545
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it's a growing up, but I was grew up in Ottawa, and that's the capital city.
10:17.565 --> 10:20.934
[SPEAKER_00]: There were magazines and Canada, but they were all in Toronto.
10:21.696 --> 10:27.472
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'd never met anybody who worked at a magazine, but I stumbled upon these guys.
10:27.532 --> 10:28.695
[SPEAKER_00]: We're starting up a...
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[SPEAKER_00]: a political and literary magazine and I was a real student of magazines and I could draw and I asked them what they were doing, they explained what they were doing and I said they said, well, what can you offer, I said, well, I can draw, they said, well, do I want to become the art director and I said, yes, of course and so I became the art director and after a few months the others sort of drifted off, small magazines are just
10:55.017 --> 11:08.729
[SPEAKER_00]: festering pots of envy and jealousy and bitterness and and it's because part of the stakes are so incredibly low and so after at the end of the first year I was I was the editor and I ran up for the next four years.
11:09.630 --> 11:24.703
[SPEAKER_00]: It never stopped losing money and took up all of my time at some point but when I was the school said and I ran them out of a random magazine out of offices at the
11:24.683 --> 11:37.249
[SPEAKER_00]: They got a call saying that, you know, there's no point in you continuing at the university, they said because you have so many incomplete in your courses that you can never properly graduate.
11:37.430 --> 11:43.823
[SPEAKER_00]: Basically, I wasn't a college drop, but I was a college throw out for the sake of better term.
11:44.242 --> 11:47.426
[SPEAKER_01]: And though it's so interesting, we talked again before we came on air.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In my interviews with Nina Totenberg and Carl Bernstein, they followed the almost exact pair that you did, Carl was essentially asked to leave the University of Maryland, because there was no likely chance that he would graduate, because he was washing tin store, washers, cup reporter.
12:05.431 --> 12:10.037
[SPEAKER_01]: And Nina was also involved in magazines and other such things.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So you're in very good company.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I was so happy because finally I found something that I dreamt of that I could do.
12:17.086 --> 12:25.997
[SPEAKER_00]: I wasn't very good at it and the magazine wasn't particularly good, but it, I always tell my kids, I've got five kids that you never learn from failure.
12:26.037 --> 12:30.542
[SPEAKER_00]: You only learn from, you only never learn from success, sorry, but you only learn from failure.
12:30.582 --> 12:40.354
[SPEAKER_00]: And I made a lot of mistakes at that magazine that when I came to magazines later in my life,
12:40.553 --> 12:45.548
[SPEAKER_01]: One thing we mentioned early about your mom was that she was an artist.
12:45.568 --> 12:52.046
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's that artistic skill that you got your first job applying, I guess what she taught you.
12:52.267 --> 12:55.356
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm wondering, did you have pencil sharpeners?
12:55.876 --> 12:59.901
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, no, because your dad wouldn't let him in your house, right?
13:00.301 --> 13:07.570
[SPEAKER_00]: I have pencils and pencil sharpeners everywhere in my house, apartment here in New York and our house in Connecticut, in every single room.
13:07.890 --> 13:16.540
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's been a, it's a phobia because when I, yes, when I was growing up, my father had some, in a pencil sharpeners would have been those little calls that were 10 cents.
13:16.961 --> 13:17.862
[SPEAKER_00]: He had a thing.
13:17.902 --> 13:19.444
[SPEAKER_00]: He just didn't walk one in the house.
13:19.564 --> 13:23.048
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we sharpened our pencils with a
13:23.787 --> 13:52.140
[SPEAKER_00]: and he my father was just incredibly cheap and one point he put us on he severed my brother in the sister and I were drinking too much milk and put us on a ration of powdered milk and it was foul tasting stuff and after a week or so my mother put a stop poochie thought we were going to get like rickets or something like that and he he turned the thermostat down to a 45 50 degrees a night and we'd wake up and just freezing
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[SPEAKER_00]: because the Canadian winners are brutal.
13:54.082 --> 14:01.151
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, we would play hockey regularly or go skiing in minus 25 degree temperatures.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's brutal.
14:02.253 --> 14:07.459
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was the year the days before tougher codes and the expensive ski boots.
14:07.479 --> 14:12.906
[SPEAKER_00]: This is when ski boots were sort of leather and ski jackets were wool.
14:13.347 --> 14:15.850
[SPEAKER_00]: They got, you know, if you fell, they got wet.
14:16.420 --> 14:28.272
[SPEAKER_00]: It was just a lifetime of cold and I sort of basically one of the things I love about New York is I think whether it's absolutely perfect, it's 40 degrees out now and that's fine with me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's like summer in Canada.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, exactly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I know when I was doing TV in my last year, and I did a lot for Canadian broadcasting corporation who I loved.
14:39.742 --> 14:40.323
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
14:40.343 --> 14:47.613
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, I just was on with them recently, so it came out of retirement to talk about Robert Mueller because I was his special counsel.
14:47.653 --> 14:49.816
[SPEAKER_01]: And they said, don't you want to come to Toronto?
14:50.036 --> 14:51.979
[SPEAKER_01]: Don't you want to move to Toronto?
14:51.959 --> 14:56.065
[SPEAKER_00]: I know it's warming up, but it's not there yet.
14:56.526 --> 15:00.792
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, and the other no, I suppose that the airport there.
15:01.654 --> 15:02.315
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
15:02.555 --> 15:02.996
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
15:03.296 --> 15:06.161
[SPEAKER_00]: So the Canadian review folds.
15:06.701 --> 15:10.127
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I said, I sell it to, it's sort of fold.
15:10.607 --> 15:15.655
[SPEAKER_00]: I sell it to the closest competitor, which is a big proper magazine called Saturday Night.
15:16.141 --> 15:21.167
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I signed up for this editor editing program in New York at Sarah Lawrence College.
15:21.388 --> 15:44.376
[SPEAKER_00]: And through that I met a number of editors including Lewis Lappham who's then the editor of Harper's and Otto Friedrich, this remarkable man who was the last editor of the Saturday even post and whose father had written the West German constitution and who was the editor and Otto was the editor of the nation section of time, which is the most important section in the magazine.
15:44.356 --> 15:50.751
[SPEAKER_00]: And he introduced me to Ray Cave, who was the editor of time, and I was offered a job, which was that.
15:51.132 --> 16:01.335
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it gave me a chance to move to New York and to get a workpiece, which is also vital in trying to come down here and do something.
16:01.568 --> 16:05.071
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you start as a floater, is that the wind start as a work?
16:05.432 --> 16:08.995
[SPEAKER_00]: I know, I started as a in the business section at first.
16:09.436 --> 16:17.684
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I became a floater and a floater, Calvin Trillon wrote a book called floater, because he had worked at time as a floater as well.
16:17.964 --> 16:21.808
[SPEAKER_00]: And a floater is just somebody who they don't quite know what to do with.
16:22.388 --> 16:30.276
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you write for the show business section one day and the business section one day and the nation section one day, you're sort of
16:30.256 --> 16:33.837
[SPEAKER_00]: You just fill in a gap when somebody else is on vacation, basically.
16:34.289 --> 17:01.866
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's a great way to learn everything there is to about for somebody who had was a generalist like me, but also that the time in those states was just incredible because they had stocked the magazine with a new generation of writers and so we're all in our 20s and Walter Isaacson was there, Jim Kelly became the editor of Tom, he's my best friend with was there, Kurt Anderson, my eventual partner at Spie was there,
17:01.846 --> 17:04.129
[SPEAKER_00]: Alexander Stanley, my partner at air mail was there.
17:04.209 --> 17:05.671
[SPEAKER_00]: Marine Dowd was there.
17:06.292 --> 17:10.859
[SPEAKER_00]: Micheal Kakotani, who was the chief book critic of the New York Times, was there.
17:10.919 --> 17:17.208
[SPEAKER_00]: Frank Britch, who became the theater, the chief theater critic of the Times, was there.
17:17.689 --> 17:24.398
[SPEAKER_00]: At the promise that the historian was there in Steve Smith, was there and became the other US News and World Report.
17:24.438 --> 17:27.803
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was an extraordinary collection.
17:27.783 --> 17:29.226
[SPEAKER_00]: really talented people.
17:29.347 --> 17:31.412
[SPEAKER_00]: And we sort of all became friends.
17:31.472 --> 17:33.035
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was just a wonderful life.
17:33.055 --> 17:41.836
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, New York itself was sort of filled with burnt out cars on the west side highway and and graffiti and there was stabbing and murder everywhere.
17:42.437 --> 17:45.003
[SPEAKER_00]: But I was an absolute heaven in the time of life building.
17:45.404 --> 17:46.146
[SPEAKER_00]: And
17:46.126 --> 17:49.410
[SPEAKER_00]: I had an apartment not far for where I am now in Greenwich Village.
17:50.191 --> 17:58.582
[SPEAKER_00]: I paid $200 a month ahead, you know, 12-foot ceilings and looked out onto a garden and a head of a huge window of letted glass.
17:58.622 --> 18:03.328
[SPEAKER_00]: I was an absolute heaven and I had an expense account for the first time in my life.
18:04.630 --> 18:07.133
[SPEAKER_01]: Henry Gunn, Grunwald was the editor-in-chief?
18:07.553 --> 18:07.794
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
18:08.294 --> 18:10.497
[SPEAKER_01]: And what was it like working for him?
18:11.253 --> 18:30.628
[SPEAKER_00]: well we worship Henry and Henry was he was a man a few words he didn't he didn't throw his weight around he was really gentle he was very kind to the young writers and he was intimidating not through intent I don't think and he would have a collection of the young writers to lunch on a regular basis
18:30.608 --> 18:36.214
[SPEAKER_00]: I became friends with Henry after I left time and very close to him and his wife Louise.
18:36.895 --> 18:43.722
[SPEAKER_00]: And after Louise is one of my closest friends, his widow, who I see probably twice a week.
18:44.022 --> 18:47.425
[SPEAKER_00]: And she sort of the den mother of all of us who used to work at time.
18:47.686 --> 18:52.170
[SPEAKER_00]: And Henry was just, he was of the old school of magazine editors.
18:52.230 --> 18:59.518
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd grown up in Vienna, they'd laughed during the war, when he worked as a copyboy
19:00.562 --> 19:04.508
[SPEAKER_00]: As did John Klies worked as a copyboy at Newsweek around the same time.
19:05.129 --> 19:12.319
[SPEAKER_00]: So Henry was quite a major figure in my life, and I was to have him as my first real boss was extraordinary.
19:13.641 --> 19:30.265
[SPEAKER_01]: You write that after about five years at time, you realized that your future there was bleak, because you didn't seem to fit in, so talk about that, and then you get shipped off to or ship yourself off to TV guide for a little bit of time and then on to life
19:30.582 --> 19:43.032
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, yeah, I fit in socially, but I wasn't as, I couldn't handle, I wasn't as good a writer as all my colleagues in terms of writing in that very distinct time style of the time.
19:43.092 --> 19:46.380
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it,
19:46.360 --> 20:11.102
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I knew my days were limited, but I had to keep working because I needed my visa to stay in New York and I went till work of life magazine for a couple of years and then during that period, New York all of a sudden started coming back, the burnt out cars and the graffiti and the the were still murders and stabbing, but the city was sort of coming back to life after near bankruptcy in the 70s.
20:11.082 --> 20:19.556
[SPEAKER_00]: And also you had investment banks, which mean you had to invest in bankers, you had the ladies who'd launch, you had, you know, sort of big real estate developers in New York.
20:19.656 --> 20:30.555
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought, but my last magazine, like magazine in Canada, was either that far left wing or that far right wing, it was, it had had no real purpose of the note, it was a magazine.
20:30.755 --> 20:35.202
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought if I ever do another magazine, I thought the underlying thing has to have a point.
20:35.323 --> 20:37.326
[SPEAKER_00]: And so this magazine,
20:37.306 --> 20:48.298
[SPEAKER_00]: would be a satirical magazine, satirical monthly about New York City, fact-based rigorously fact-checked and the sort of beautifully designed.
20:48.599 --> 20:56.187
[SPEAKER_00]: And so my partner, who was working at time at the time, Kurt Anderson, we came up with a plan to for spy magazine.
20:56.968 --> 21:01.153
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is like the magazine launched in the fall of 86.
21:01.387 --> 21:02.308
[SPEAKER_01]: the fall of a six.
21:02.328 --> 21:11.977
[SPEAKER_01]: So you write a life that it was a zombie monthly at the time you were there close to dead, but moving as if it were alive.
21:12.017 --> 21:25.370
[SPEAKER_01]: That is, that which made life in look, I guess, so famous as a kid was was the photographs, the fake Robert Kappa and Margaret Bork, white, all these unbelievable images.
21:25.430 --> 21:30.094
[SPEAKER_01]: And then all of a sudden what the cronkite is showing you real
21:30.074 --> 21:34.920
[SPEAKER_00]: a video of in color every night on your television set.
21:36.142 --> 21:51.542
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I know it was it had all the structures of the old life, but it didn't have the seven million readers that the old life had and it was it was a bit sleepy, but I enjoyed it made some lifelong friends there and so
21:51.522 --> 21:56.009
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and also did, and it gave me the time to, I had a lot of time in my hands.
21:56.670 --> 22:04.963
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we had a lot of time to draw up a prospectus for spy magazine and came up with a hundred story ideas and went out and raised the money.
22:05.404 --> 22:11.053
[SPEAKER_00]: And launched, I left a life and launched, we launched it with fall of 86.
22:11.113 --> 22:14.138
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're coming up there 20th or 40th anniversary.
22:15.367 --> 22:16.792
[SPEAKER_01]: your book made me laugh out loud.
22:17.375 --> 22:26.068
[SPEAKER_01]: You wrote that one of the jobs was to edit letters to the editor, which would have been nice if only there were letters to the editor.
22:26.487 --> 22:32.895
[SPEAKER_01]: written during your tenure, and in fact that you would have friends right in letters so that you would have something to respond to.
22:33.055 --> 22:37.481
[SPEAKER_00]: So I would send Ian and we get a lot of mail from President Mades.
22:37.881 --> 22:40.405
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was part of the life demographic.
22:40.445 --> 22:46.532
[SPEAKER_00]: But I would often have to like mail stories out to people who I thought might have an opinion about the story.
22:47.914 --> 22:52.680
[SPEAKER_00]: So I get not letters to fill a single page in the magazine every two weeks.
22:53.217 --> 22:53.578
[SPEAKER_01]: great.
22:54.018 --> 23:04.194
[SPEAKER_01]: So 1986 rolls around you come up with this idea of of spy, which was going to be smart, funny, and fact-based.
23:04.795 --> 23:09.463
[SPEAKER_01]: You call it humor combined with hard reporting.
23:09.503 --> 23:17.115
[SPEAKER_01]: Sort of like when I started looking at spy magazine, I thought of it as a sort of a narrative version of May
23:17.095 --> 23:22.686
[SPEAKER_00]: which was a big, uh, which were the huge influence on us, mad magazine in the National Ampune.
23:23.107 --> 23:26.133
[SPEAKER_00]: But they were basically fictional magazines.
23:26.634 --> 23:29.940
[SPEAKER_00]: We wanted a non-fiction magazine that was also funny.
23:31.017 --> 23:36.383
[SPEAKER_01]: and it was terrific and a red about in your book.
23:36.403 --> 23:42.769
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I do external research the first issue, which features embarrassing new yorkers.
23:42.789 --> 23:44.451
[SPEAKER_01]: I think was it was it's top 10?
23:44.912 --> 23:45.412
[SPEAKER_00]: Announcing.
23:45.873 --> 23:46.814
[SPEAKER_00]: New yorkers, yeah.
23:46.834 --> 23:51.639
[SPEAKER_01]: Can most embarrassing new yorkers and talk about this and who you profile do.
23:52.119 --> 23:59.607
[SPEAKER_01]: With one person who spy would mock repeatedly as short fingered
24:01.443 --> 24:19.803
[SPEAKER_00]: And now I in 1982, I was assigned to do it for GQ magazine to do a story on this young real estate developer named Donald Trump, and he had been in the tabloids of the New York, but he hadn't had any real national exposure.
24:19.863 --> 24:23.406
[SPEAKER_00]: So he was excited to have me do this story.
24:23.447 --> 24:30.454
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean Trump had to have me around, so I hung around with him for three weeks.
24:30.434 --> 24:35.199
[SPEAKER_00]: And he, uh, strangely, if he buys, he has a staff buy up all the copies.
24:35.259 --> 24:37.221
[SPEAKER_00]: They can find on New York, New stands.
24:37.761 --> 24:44.568
[SPEAKER_00]: Years later, I'm having dinner with Say New House, who own GQ and random house in Cunningust.
24:44.588 --> 24:49.313
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said that the sales of the, that GQ thing is to trump us on the cover.
24:49.373 --> 24:56.340
[SPEAKER_00]: The sales of that issue inspired, sigh, to reach out to Trump to see if he would do a book.
24:56.320 --> 25:02.029
[SPEAKER_00]: which led to the art of the deal, which then led to, you know, the apprentice and then led to where we are now.
25:02.170 --> 25:07.158
[SPEAKER_00]: So I take small responsibility for that, but in the course of the story, yes.
25:07.178 --> 25:12.186
[SPEAKER_00]: I noticed that there was a number of things he didn't like, but I believe, especially didn't like the fact that I said that it looked like
25:13.482 --> 25:15.527
[SPEAKER_00]: his hands were too small for his body.
25:16.088 --> 25:18.493
[SPEAKER_00]: So at spy magazine, we get to spy magazine.
25:18.593 --> 25:26.732
[SPEAKER_00]: We come up with funny epithets for people and sort of surely Lord, who was the wife of the executive of the New York Times, Abrose and Tall.
25:27.213 --> 25:33.246
[SPEAKER_00]: We used to call her a Busamy dirty bug writer and Donald Trump, we used to call her a regular basis.
25:33.226 --> 25:44.580
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, every time we mention him, a short-fingered Bulgarian, and that sort of had that expression had legs, and there was sort of slightly mean apathats, but they had a tendency to stick.
25:45.041 --> 25:49.947
[SPEAKER_00]: And he threatened to sue spy a number of times when I got to Valley Fair.
25:50.067 --> 25:57.276
[SPEAKER_00]: He wanted to be friends with the transactional person in him, wanted to become friends with me, he invited me to
25:57.256 --> 26:07.498
[SPEAKER_00]: He would bite me to dinners and and anyway, but the the friendship couldn't hold because I couldn't stop making fun of him It's just I he was just to he was like wifful ball.
26:07.518 --> 26:09.342
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the easiest target in the world
26:09.811 --> 26:13.656
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, as looking over the top 10 list, and it's quite a list.
26:13.676 --> 26:21.788
[SPEAKER_01]: A Donald Trump former mayor, or mayor at the time, it caught Lyona Hemsley Helmsley, who you called the queen of mean.
26:22.369 --> 26:23.370
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
26:23.390 --> 26:32.603
[SPEAKER_01]: Cause Van Bulo, which famously on trial for murdering his wife, Rupert Murdoch, right, Amelda Marko, see you know, Al Schofton.
26:32.663 --> 26:33.645
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a great list.
26:33.665 --> 26:34.927
[SPEAKER_01]: We didn't make a lot of friends.
26:35.387 --> 26:39.413
[SPEAKER_01]: I was going to ask you, did that sort of humor cost you?
26:39.393 --> 26:49.507
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't know any of these people, and they were mostly uptown and we lived downtown, so I didn't run into them on a social basis.
26:49.547 --> 26:51.010
[SPEAKER_00]: They weren't hanging out at the restaurants.
26:51.130 --> 26:54.515
[SPEAKER_00]: I was hanging out at, I did have what I came to pay for.
26:54.595 --> 27:05.350
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a certain amount of diplomatic sort of regrouping I had to do to try to sort of stop them from actively hating me.
27:05.330 --> 27:31.624
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, but at the same, by the same token, I remember Nora Afron saying that if if she felt she was relieved when she was, she'd find out that she wasn't in an issue of spy, but then feels slightly meth because if you were in New York at that time and you had any kind of purchase on the city, chances are you're going to be in an issue of spy, but if you're not in an issue of spy, and then you did have, you had no purchase in the sort of intellectual conversation of the city.
27:31.773 --> 27:40.027
[SPEAKER_01]: you're right that the rich in famous would be relieved not to be mentioned, but those left out would be insulted at the same time.
27:40.047 --> 27:40.808
[SPEAKER_00]: Lightly, yes.
27:40.988 --> 27:44.134
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, so there was that.
27:44.174 --> 27:45.856
[SPEAKER_00]: We try not to be mean.
27:45.876 --> 27:50.885
[SPEAKER_00]: We try to be, we were a stringent, we try to tell true stories and do funny things.
27:50.965 --> 27:57.696
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember we called, I know this sounds going to sound really rude, but when Larry Tisch was
27:57.676 --> 28:14.368
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, when he was, um, he'd taken over CBS and was firing people at CBS news and I knew a number of people there and we did a call them on him and for his effort that we came up we brought we called him a a churnless dwarf billionaire and the trends out of
28:14.348 --> 28:24.089
[SPEAKER_00]: his PR guy at the time was a dear friend of mine named John Scallon and Scallon called me up and he'd ready to open a conversation with me by saying you've gone too far this time, right?
28:24.770 --> 28:27.216
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said, look, first of all, you got everything wrong here.
28:27.236 --> 28:31.785
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, first of all, Larry Tish is not technically a dwarf, so I wrote down in the way.
28:31.805 --> 28:34.872
[SPEAKER_00]: I had a notebook, because I wrote down not technically a dwarf.
28:34.852 --> 28:38.078
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we did a column on Larry Tiss the next month.
28:38.319 --> 28:51.103
[SPEAKER_00]: And I said, we, you know, we had a correction to make that we'd gotten a call from a CBS Factotum who pointed out the error of our ways and that he pointed out the Larry is not in the quotation marks, not technically a dwarf, which caused another FI rate call from Scotland after saw that.
28:51.123 --> 28:57.315
[SPEAKER_00]: So we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we
28:57.295 --> 29:09.796
[SPEAKER_00]: We had a list of the 10 most litigious New Yorkers and one of them was Gorbidol and our phone numbers of the phone book and he he he phoned up and the receptionist came to me and said Griden Gorbidol is on the line.
29:09.856 --> 29:19.472
[SPEAKER_00]: So I pick up the phone and I say hello Mr. Bidol and he he said I saw your list of the litigious New Yorkers he said
29:19.452 --> 29:24.198
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't like being on that, he said, if you don't take me off of it, I'm going to sue.
29:24.418 --> 29:30.205
[SPEAKER_00]: Just as I was trying to say, you don't see the irony in this comedy hung up on me.
29:30.986 --> 29:36.433
[SPEAKER_00]: Years later, I was like, 30 years, 25 years later, we're working together in band that you fare and we're having dinner.
29:37.074 --> 29:38.896
[SPEAKER_00]: And I remind of them of the phone call.
29:39.076 --> 29:42.140
[SPEAKER_00]: And I said, do you see the irony in this now?
29:42.160 --> 29:45.484
[SPEAKER_00]: And he looked at me and said, no, so I dropped it.
29:45.504 --> 29:46.185
[SPEAKER_00]: That's great.
29:46.503 --> 29:49.287
[SPEAKER_01]: But spy became really an international hit.
29:49.347 --> 29:52.612
[SPEAKER_01]: It was quite, quite the magazine, right?
29:52.632 --> 29:56.639
[SPEAKER_00]: We planed it to be in New York largely.
29:56.659 --> 30:00.645
[SPEAKER_00]: And we wanted to platform it the way they used to platform movies in the old days.
30:00.685 --> 30:08.136
[SPEAKER_00]: The old days, movies would open at the cinema on the cinema, too, on the Upper East Side in Westwood at like four or five theaters.
30:08.156 --> 30:13.084
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we go to 12 theaters the next week and then build towards, I don't know, four or five hundred theaters.
30:13.064 --> 30:19.796
[SPEAKER_00]: So we could because we only had a certain amount of money, but it caught on faster than we ever anticipated.
30:19.836 --> 30:34.701
[SPEAKER_00]: All of a sudden we had to send copies to Washington DC and then to Southern California and then London and Paris and we were we'd planned it to have a circulation of 25,000 but within no time at all and had a circulation of 150,000.
30:35.120 --> 30:53.807
[SPEAKER_00]: which sounds great, business wise, except for the fact that with a magazine you have to pay your rent to your light, your printer, your staff, now, but you don't get the money from your advertisers for 60 to 90 days, and you don't get your money from your new stand sales for like 120 days.
30:53.927 --> 30:59.575
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's a huge gap between when the money went out and when the money came in.
30:59.774 --> 31:05.244
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that caused financial pressure that let you ultimately sell it.
31:05.645 --> 31:07.389
[SPEAKER_00]: After five years, we ran out of money.
31:07.829 --> 31:11.236
[SPEAKER_00]: And we had amazingly blue chip investors.
31:11.436 --> 31:16.366
[SPEAKER_00]: The CEO, Kornagra, we had one of the heirs of the Washington Post there.
31:16.406 --> 31:17.748
[SPEAKER_00]: We had a safe way, air.
31:17.829 --> 31:19.071
[SPEAKER_00]: We had an EF hot air.
31:19.131 --> 31:21.175
[SPEAKER_00]: We had a Coca-Cola air.
31:21.155 --> 31:34.608
[SPEAKER_00]: But after five years, we ran out of money, and we sold it to Charles Sachi, who the great English advertising man and sort of Johnny Pagazzi, who's a London art collector.
31:34.848 --> 31:47.601
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I went, yeah, and then I was going to start a newspaper twice weekly newspaper, but I was offered the job of editing the New York Observer, which is a really sleepy,
31:47.581 --> 31:54.553
[SPEAKER_00]: Upper East Side, Salmon Colored, Weekly Broadshade, and it was really sleepy.
31:54.593 --> 31:55.334
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody read it.
31:55.454 --> 32:03.708
[SPEAKER_00]: My friends made fun of me for taking the job, but I worked on a plan of how I would make it a thing where I could get people to read it.
32:04.429 --> 32:08.897
[SPEAKER_00]: And within six months people were reading it,
32:08.877 --> 32:10.519
[SPEAKER_00]: And I love the job.
32:10.539 --> 32:15.005
[SPEAKER_00]: We looked at an old townhouse on the Upper East Side at fireplaces.
32:15.246 --> 32:21.214
[SPEAKER_00]: I brought one employee with me from Vanifere, Amy Bell, who was my assistant at Vanifere.
32:21.814 --> 32:24.478
[SPEAKER_00]: And she became my deputy editor at the New York Observer.
32:24.678 --> 32:32.949
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, but I would send, once I caught on, I started sending complimentary copies to friends of mine or editors in London and Paris.
32:33.010 --> 32:37.095
[SPEAKER_00]: And what sigh on one of his tours of all his properties was in the
32:37.075 --> 32:51.642
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, the boat offices and the GQ offices and random has offices and he would see copies of the New York Observer in their inbaskets or on their desk and came back to New York thinking that the observer was this international hit.
32:52.330 --> 33:18.692
[SPEAKER_00]: and he and I had met him earlier he tried to buy spy at one point and we thought it was too early to sell the tomb this is very early on and he he wanted to meet with me and so he offered me one of two magazines he lived in the neorker or band in the fair we agreed on the neorker I worked on a plan for the neorker I was not I'm not a disruptor in any way and I worked on a plan of how to just to modernize it a bit and make it a bit mine
33:19.145 --> 33:24.353
[SPEAKER_00]: But the day it was supposed to be announced, I got a call from Adam Winter, and said it's gonna be the other magazine.
33:24.553 --> 33:26.776
[SPEAKER_00]: And I did not have a plan for vanity fair.
33:27.157 --> 33:33.286
[SPEAKER_00]: And not only that, we'd spend five years that's by making fun of vanity fair, making fun of the editor.
33:33.447 --> 33:37.553
[SPEAKER_00]: There's some of the contributors and the house writing style.
33:37.633 --> 33:48.409
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was lucky in the vanity fair was not the, it was not a good moment for me, and it was not a good moment for the staff.
33:48.862 --> 33:54.572
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, spy, you describe it as sort of the anti-manity fair magazine.
33:55.013 --> 33:56.917
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was a very unusual choice.
33:56.997 --> 34:02.767
[SPEAKER_00]: And we've come with exactly the same territory in a certain way, but from completely different vantage points.
34:03.809 --> 34:07.596
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's take our first break and then let's turn to your tenured vanity fair.
34:15.372 --> 34:16.193
[SPEAKER_01]: We're back.
34:16.213 --> 34:19.118
[SPEAKER_01]: We're speaking with Great and Carter about his wonderful book.
34:19.699 --> 34:34.022
[SPEAKER_01]: When the going was good and editors adventures during the last Golden Age of magazines, we left off where you are now just arriving at Vanity Fair, surprised to you, I expect
34:34.002 --> 34:39.710
[SPEAKER_01]: very big surprise to the staff in that you mocked them for the previous five years.
34:39.750 --> 34:40.852
[SPEAKER_01]: So how did that go?
34:40.872 --> 34:45.098
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, not well at first, but I was, I'd hate people very, fairly.
34:45.138 --> 34:48.302
[SPEAKER_00]: So I, for the first two years, I didn't fire anybody.
34:48.382 --> 34:49.323
[SPEAKER_00]: I really hadn't fired.
34:49.343 --> 34:52.308
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I'd only fired one person in my life up to that point.
34:52.928 --> 34:57.254
[SPEAKER_00]: But I gave everybody a chance to come around my way of things.
34:57.375 --> 34:58.356
[SPEAKER_00]: I sort of,
34:58.336 --> 35:05.206
[SPEAKER_00]: I cleaned up the language so that I got rid of all the frills and the writing style.
35:05.666 --> 35:10.553
[SPEAKER_00]: I brought in a number of new writers starting with Christopher Hitchens and then Brian Burrell.
35:12.736 --> 35:16.942
[SPEAKER_00]: But I treated the staff with great care and respect.
35:17.623 --> 35:23.331
[SPEAKER_00]: Finally, I eventually just realized there were three troublemakers who I could not get to.
35:23.868 --> 35:30.035
[SPEAKER_00]: I bring around to my way of thinking or doing things, and I got rid of them in one week, and then everything sort of changed.
35:30.075 --> 35:33.479
[SPEAKER_00]: It was like, you know, Mrs. Havisham pulling this, like, opening the curtains.
35:34.461 --> 35:39.507
[SPEAKER_00]: And for the next 23 years, it was a an absolutely wonderful run.
35:39.527 --> 35:42.210
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, there was disasters every single day.
35:42.230 --> 35:44.492
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to make it sound like it was also going.
35:44.613 --> 35:48.357
[SPEAKER_00]: The wheels were always falling off, but it was a blast.
35:49.417 --> 35:58.876
[SPEAKER_01]: When you got there, you said you really didn't have a vision for yourself, or for the magazine, and you would evolve that, and what was it?
35:59.257 --> 36:06.652
[SPEAKER_01]: As you got your C legs under you, what was your vision for the magazine, and for yourself as an editor?
36:07.012 --> 36:09.838
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, tell me a while, first I wanted to.
36:09.818 --> 36:15.946
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't a lot of listening and I wanted to do the magazine the way they wanted to do it at first.
36:16.187 --> 36:23.837
[SPEAKER_00]: And the transition from what I inherited to what became under me was incremental and gradual.
36:23.877 --> 36:27.763
[SPEAKER_00]: And you wouldn't have noticed any dramatic change issued issue.
36:27.843 --> 36:33.931
[SPEAKER_00]: But by the end of the second year, it was a very different magazine from the one I inherited.
36:33.991 --> 36:36.855
[SPEAKER_00]: First of all, the country had changed a bit.
36:36.835 --> 36:43.417
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the ladies who lunch and they sort of socializing the upper side, they had sort of faded away.
36:43.458 --> 36:47.993
[SPEAKER_00]: And all of a sudden, I was having dinner with David Halberstein one night.
36:48.327 --> 36:57.985
[SPEAKER_00]: He noted that the country America had gone from being an industrialized country to a largely information and attainment economy.
36:59.027 --> 37:06.201
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I thought that's interesting, that means there's a different establishment than there were had been in the 1950s and 60s.
37:06.321 --> 37:11.331
[SPEAKER_00]: So increasing the magazine became a lot about this, these new emerging
37:11.311 --> 37:18.975
[SPEAKER_00]: There are sort of titans and battles within the worlds of technology and information and entertainment and that became a
37:19.411 --> 37:46.448
[SPEAKER_00]: a big part of what I did in having writers like like a Lewis and David Margler and William D. Co-han and Bethany Franklin, Bethany McLean, sorry, was that I had an amazing staff from reporters in Brian Burrell to cover these whole new enormous transition in the American
37:47.339 --> 37:50.750
[SPEAKER_01]: every single word that went into the magazine for 25 years.
37:51.372 --> 37:57.231
[SPEAKER_00]: Every word, every caption edited every photograph, every pull quote, every headline.
37:58.190 --> 37:59.052
[SPEAKER_01]: it's amazing.
37:59.432 --> 38:22.594
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm surprised that that's why it's funny because it's probably I would have preferred it over a weekly magazine because a weekly magazine that's a that's a that's that that conveyor belt is going so fast you you're having trouble doing this sort of thing but the monthly there was enough time to do it all properly and especially in the first few years as I was trying to change the the voice of the magazine.
38:22.574 --> 38:24.765
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a spy had a very distinct voice.
38:24.825 --> 38:31.538
[SPEAKER_00]: It took Curtin a year to get all the writers to write within this voice we had created and took me.
38:32.733 --> 38:36.898
[SPEAKER_00]: probably two or three years of banning fair to get the writers to write in a certain way.
38:36.938 --> 38:44.027
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, running a monthly magazine and when most of the competition was weekly was not easy.
38:44.067 --> 38:52.417
[SPEAKER_00]: Because we, you know, it would take between, say, two to four to up to two years to report a story.
38:52.437 --> 39:00.968
[SPEAKER_00]: Then we had to, like, edit it, fact check it, go through legal review, do the photography, lay it out, print it, ship it.
39:01.319 --> 39:10.567
[SPEAKER_00]: to legal on the news, and it could be months later, so if I ordered up a story in March, the odds are I wouldn't get it into the magazine much before the July or August issue.
39:10.688 --> 39:16.513
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you had to choose stories that had, what they say in Colin Shubbis's legs.
39:17.133 --> 39:28.744
[SPEAKER_00]: I came down to, I think, a great magazine article that, in ours, would run between five and 20,000 words, need to have four elements to them.
39:28.927 --> 39:37.745
[SPEAKER_00]: One was narrative and that is that you needed a beginning middle and end to the story and by the time our stories came out their chance are there was a version of the ending.
39:37.785 --> 39:45.400
[SPEAKER_00]: You needed access to either the principles in the story or the people in the periphery.
39:45.802 --> 39:58.716
[SPEAKER_00]: you needed a conflict in the fact that a story where people are battling over one thing, whether it's a country or a company or a woman or a man or whatever it is, that improves the story.
39:58.776 --> 40:09.868
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you needed disclosure in that you advance the scholarship on that subject through their reporting and through the telling of the story.
40:10.203 --> 40:14.253
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's interesting to me when OJ was on trial for murder.
40:14.774 --> 40:16.459
[SPEAKER_01]: I was covering it for CNN.
40:16.940 --> 40:25.782
[SPEAKER_01]: I would make sure to get vanity fair even though it was, if you will a month later, the writing of that,
40:25.762 --> 40:37.279
[SPEAKER_01]: was just so brilliant and so encompassing of things that as a day-to-day TV analyst, I would just say, yes, so-and-so said this, so-and-so said that, we're gonna take a adjournment now.
40:37.780 --> 40:45.271
[SPEAKER_01]: And your magazine put it together in a way that was so instructive to me in my thinking about the case.
40:45.871 --> 40:53.102
[SPEAKER_00]: Interesting, well, the thing is we had a huge disadvantage because the reports on CNN and in the New York Times,
40:53.082 --> 41:07.544
[SPEAKER_00]: were daily, and we came out probably, whatever events we were writing about in the OJ Simpson trial, probably, are six weeks, two months old by the time, the magazine got into readers' hands.
41:07.624 --> 41:10.008
[SPEAKER_00]: So Dominic Dunne covered it for us.
41:10.068 --> 41:13.453
[SPEAKER_00]: I should be moved to Mount Toulouse, Angeles, to be lived at the time.
41:13.433 --> 41:26.032
[SPEAKER_00]: the shadow of Marmont for the duration of the trial, but he did was he, he not only reported on what happened to the trial, but he could print all the color around the trial and the characters on the fringes of the trial.
41:26.112 --> 41:33.484
[SPEAKER_00]: And then he would go out at night and hear the gossip from the, you know, the chattelanes of Beller and Beverly Hills.
41:33.944 --> 41:36.268
[SPEAKER_00]: And we've these into a
41:36.248 --> 41:47.239
[SPEAKER_00]: a narrative each month, which was sort of a small movie in a way, and it became the single most read part of the magazine during that period.
41:47.700 --> 41:53.246
[SPEAKER_00]: And it cost a great deal of money to send him a keep him out in a hotel for nine months or whatever it was.
41:53.846 --> 42:05.158
[SPEAKER_00]: But the advertiser's clamored to be around his stories, you know, our advertising rates and those days were, you know,
42:05.645 --> 42:09.374
[SPEAKER_00]: It made good financial sense despite the fact that it was quite expensive.
42:10.076 --> 42:22.506
[SPEAKER_01]: Can I ask you to take a detour from this linear story that we're doing and tell me, tell our listeners, what goes into putting an issue together?
42:23.498 --> 42:29.385
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, as I said, you've got the reporters, the writers out doing the reporting.
42:29.445 --> 42:33.770
[SPEAKER_00]: The editors would sometimes work on each editor had about six writers.
42:34.230 --> 42:48.527
[SPEAKER_00]: We, at any given time, I was probably working on, I don't know, 60, 70 stories at any given time you were tracking because you're working both on the next six months issue and like four months issue, four issues ahead of that.
42:48.507 --> 42:51.771
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like releasing a movie every month.
42:52.112 --> 42:54.975
[SPEAKER_00]: It takes like a good two weeks to edit a story.
42:55.336 --> 43:04.107
[SPEAKER_00]: It would go through the senior editor, who was directly involved with the writer, and then I would edit it, and then it would go through fact checking, and then it would go through legal review.
43:04.127 --> 43:17.704
[SPEAKER_00]: The photography we have, the probably one of the greatest stables of photographers ever, starting with Annie Liebewoods, but also her breath and helmet, Newton, and Bruce Weber.
43:18.680 --> 43:23.666
[SPEAKER_00]: And Vannefaire is a magazine of words and images.
43:23.726 --> 43:31.796
[SPEAKER_00]: So he spent 40% of your time with the art department and the photographers and 60% of your time with the editors and the writers.
43:32.016 --> 43:44.691
[SPEAKER_00]: And I found it exhilarating and they're staffed that, by the, that was there at the second year mark of my period there was pretty much the same staff that was there at the end of my 25 years.
43:44.752 --> 43:45.953
[SPEAKER_00]: We learned how to,
43:45.933 --> 43:47.116
[SPEAKER_00]: We trusted each other.
43:47.136 --> 43:49.441
[SPEAKER_00]: We, you know, could speak in shorthand.
43:50.443 --> 43:52.648
[SPEAKER_00]: We had, you know, multitude of scoops.
43:52.909 --> 43:53.911
[SPEAKER_00]: We won every award.
43:53.951 --> 43:54.733
[SPEAKER_00]: You can imagine.
43:54.753 --> 43:59.363
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was just, it was, it was a, you know, it wasn't me.
43:59.383 --> 44:04.735
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the, I was the, the collective efforts of a lot of really talented people.
44:05.120 --> 44:13.551
[SPEAKER_01]: What struck me as interesting in the putting together of the magazine was because these are such long-form pieces, you would assign them.
44:13.591 --> 44:18.578
[SPEAKER_01]: And I guess hope for the best that what came back was publishable.
44:18.758 --> 44:23.144
[SPEAKER_01]: You told a story about Norman Mailer and the Democratic National Convention, maybe you can repeat it.
44:23.545 --> 44:25.828
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that was very first.
44:25.808 --> 44:52.423
[SPEAKER_00]: month on the job, and Tina Brown, who succeeded me, had assigned him to cover the Democratic and Republican conventions, the Democratic Convention was in New York, and I would watch it, I would be in my kitchen, watching it on television, and I would see him up in the stands with all the sort of the IPs, and I thought he should be down on the floor, but he
44:53.433 --> 44:58.081
[SPEAKER_00]: So when the story came in and it was basically a recap of what you could have seen on television.
44:58.101 --> 45:06.775
[SPEAKER_00]: So I thought I can't believe I'm going to do this, but I can't run this story and so and this is only my second or third issue.
45:06.856 --> 45:17.213
[SPEAKER_00]: So we have a meeting in my office and he I go through how much I admired him in his books and is writing but that I couldn't run this.
45:17.952 --> 45:26.565
[SPEAKER_00]: He was furious, he called me a number of things I'd been called before and a number of things I'd never even thought of having been called before.
45:26.605 --> 45:44.753
[SPEAKER_00]: And so then I would probably the one of the stupid things I've ever done, but at the end my job was to make it not good for me, not good for the others, but good for that one reader who's about to get on an airplane and I wanted, you know, for eight hours and I wanted to make sure that
45:44.733 --> 45:48.981
[SPEAKER_00]: that they would find enough in that magazine to occupy their time.
45:49.262 --> 45:54.832
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought Norman's story was lazy and was a good enough.
45:56.035 --> 45:57.838
[SPEAKER_01]: That must have been a fun conversation.
45:58.279 --> 45:58.760
[SPEAKER_00]: Pretty hard.
45:58.780 --> 46:01.425
[SPEAKER_00]: It was bad as any conversation I ever had there.
46:01.540 --> 46:18.260
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the things that I always love about Van Dfeir and I, I get it in its print copy, I get it by social internet stuff, but I love getting the hard copy of it because I love looking at the covers and the photography in it.
46:18.300 --> 46:28.712
[SPEAKER_01]: You said you had antilewits, but so can you talk about what goes into the photography of these things and perhaps that'll be a good segue into the Hollywood issue and the three
46:29.350 --> 46:31.173
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, it must have been a nightmare.
46:31.673 --> 46:38.223
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, we can, you know, any one of us can go out and take a nice photograph of a sunset or a, you know, a cuddly dog.
46:38.804 --> 46:44.092
[SPEAKER_00]: But professional photographers have to go out and take the excellent every single assignments.
46:45.634 --> 46:55.729
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, starting with Annie, she, for instance, for the only, when we first started doing the Hollywood covers, I thought, at that point, this is 1994.
46:56.890 --> 47:02.798
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought no individual in Hollywood at that time could represent what we wanted to do with the issue.
47:02.818 --> 47:05.562
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the first magazine to have a Hollywood issue.
47:05.823 --> 47:11.551
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I wanted to do a panel with a lot of people.
47:11.571 --> 47:14.595
[SPEAKER_00]: And I love group photographs, I love like
47:14.947 --> 47:21.838
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, that the arc canes picture one day in Harlem of all the jazz musicians filling out under the sidewalk.
47:22.499 --> 47:25.824
[SPEAKER_00]: So I wanted each Hollywood cover to be three panels.
47:25.904 --> 47:27.106
[SPEAKER_00]: They would look like a billboard.
47:27.126 --> 47:30.932
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, we would take a billboard on Sunset Boulevard each year with them as well.
47:31.172 --> 47:41.308
[SPEAKER_00]: It was, and any, you know, most people, you know, in their first issue, there were a number of group shots and some photographers just put the short people in the front row and the tall people in the back row.
47:41.288 --> 47:45.677
[SPEAKER_00]: Annie composed hers like a, like an old master painting.
47:45.717 --> 47:47.140
[SPEAKER_00]: She would work on the lighting.
47:47.220 --> 47:52.130
[SPEAKER_00]: She would have people wearing similar clothes and similar, similar hypes.
47:52.150 --> 47:53.953
[SPEAKER_00]: She'd have them all posed by the time.
47:53.993 --> 47:56.178
[SPEAKER_00]: The subjects came in.
47:56.238 --> 47:58.122
[SPEAKER_00]: She knew exactly where they were going to go.
47:58.402 --> 48:00.867
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they weren't wasting a lot of their time.
48:01.910 --> 48:07.539
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the best picture ever taken of me was taken by Helman Newton and the South of the France.
48:07.579 --> 48:20.038
[SPEAKER_00]: And he shows up with no assistance training like that, with a Nikon, very small, no, a small like a, and just snapped away to the pictures and that was it.
48:20.238 --> 48:21.420
[SPEAKER_00]: And so,
48:21.400 --> 48:36.760
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of the shoots had, you know, 15, 20 assistants on them, and some of the photographers and they'd go into war zones, I mean Tim Hatherton, who was one of the great war photographers, in fact, in Syria.
48:37.651 --> 48:43.260
[SPEAKER_00]: He went through incredible dearest when taking pictures for us.
48:43.280 --> 48:45.985
[SPEAKER_00]: He would go on assignment with Sebastian Younger.
48:46.085 --> 48:48.930
[SPEAKER_00]: So they all had different ways of shooting things.
48:49.451 --> 48:57.905
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think part of it because of my experience of life, I had great respect for photography and I thought it's almost as vital to the magazine.
48:57.965 --> 49:00.790
[SPEAKER_00]: If not equal to the words in the magazine.
49:00.989 --> 49:05.248
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's interesting how you poured it over life to vanity fair.
49:06.132 --> 49:08.502
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's take our second break and we'll be right back.
49:17.527 --> 49:18.128
[SPEAKER_01]: We're back.
49:18.569 --> 49:24.059
[SPEAKER_01]: We're talking with Grayton Carter about his terrific book when the going was good, which is just out now in paper.
49:24.339 --> 49:26.604
[SPEAKER_01]: So people can get it in paperback.
49:26.624 --> 49:28.888
[SPEAKER_01]: I personally like the hardback version.
49:29.389 --> 49:33.757
[SPEAKER_01]: So when the going was good in editors, adventure during the last golden age of magazine.
49:33.777 --> 49:41.070
[SPEAKER_01]: So you're
49:41.050 --> 49:51.219
[SPEAKER_01]: And I wanted to discuss with you, your decision to host parties, Academy Award, Can Film Festival, White House Correspondence Dinner.
49:51.520 --> 49:53.462
[SPEAKER_01]: What was the thinking in that?
49:54.242 --> 49:55.964
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not sure there was any real thinking.
49:56.024 --> 50:03.331
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I have to tell you one thing, though, as a regular attendee at the White House Correspondence dinner.
50:03.351 --> 50:06.954
[SPEAKER_01]: I was always very disappointed not to get an invitation to the vanity party.
50:06.974 --> 50:10.197
[SPEAKER_00]: That will, we'll fix that at some point.
50:10.177 --> 50:15.698
[SPEAKER_00]: I, you know, I am, you know, I'm very anxious of parties like any sort of normal person.
50:16.454 --> 50:30.949
[SPEAKER_00]: When I'd gone, I'd had lunch with Swefty Luzar who had intended the Oscar party, he used to do this restaurant called Spago, and he invited me one year, and I got to see how he did it.
50:31.650 --> 50:34.813
[SPEAKER_00]: And then that was in March, and he died in December.
50:34.834 --> 50:38.177
[SPEAKER_00]: But this is my second year at the magazine.
50:38.217 --> 50:40.960
[SPEAKER_00]: I was still on my back foot.
50:40.940 --> 50:44.566
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought that this might be something for Vanity Fair.
50:44.646 --> 50:47.391
[SPEAKER_00]: They style and Hollywood at the time was Grunge.
50:47.611 --> 50:53.581
[SPEAKER_00]: And very young people thought the Oscars were square, and they wouldn't show up.
50:53.922 --> 51:03.598
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought, I'm magazine from the East could sort of remind Hollywood of what it's, one of its trading assets, and that is glamorous.
51:04.098 --> 51:05.040
[SPEAKER_00]: We,
51:05.020 --> 51:25.999
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't in my idea and so yes so 50 dies I decided to the first the first year we did I wanted to do in a small way of having 150 people to dinner to watch the Oscars a lot of old Hollywood people like the Billy Wilders and Betsy Bloomingdale and Nancy Reagan and they like that and and people like Prince as well.
51:26.941 --> 51:30.306
[SPEAKER_00]: and then have the 200 people come after the Oscars.
51:31.067 --> 51:35.654
[SPEAKER_00]: And because I was worried we'd fail, and but we didn't, it's succeeded.
51:35.914 --> 51:42.964
[SPEAKER_00]: And then it grew each year to the point it almost became bigger than the magazine.
51:43.004 --> 51:48.653
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a, I loved the planning of the Oscar party, the actual event.
51:48.733 --> 51:50.135
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's a long day at the office.
51:50.155 --> 51:53.319
[SPEAKER_00]: You leave your hotel at about 230 and you don't get back.
51:53.780 --> 51:54.501
[SPEAKER_00]: Till about.
51:54.886 --> 52:01.977
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what a clock in the morning, so yeah, I'm, I should have taught myself to be a good host and, and
52:03.256 --> 52:11.246
[SPEAKER_00]: with great directors and a beta blocker helped at the beginning of the evening, and I would pace myself with what's alcohol, I wouldn't drink that much.
52:11.947 --> 52:19.376
[SPEAKER_00]: But basically, my feeling is that I'd stand outside and welcome people, because I think people always feel everybody's anxious when they show up at the party.
52:19.597 --> 52:26.125
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think if the host says just there to say, hello, it helps, and then I, um,
52:26.223 --> 52:36.241
[SPEAKER_00]: And then when I was inside the party, I thought, if you smile and look like you're having a good time, regardless of whether you are or not, the other people will it'll reverberate out.
52:36.642 --> 52:45.919
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I would put on a smile and I would be friendly and try to look like I was having the best time in the hopes that others would as well.
52:47.013 --> 53:03.480
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't imagine the service that must have gone into deciding who gets to come, because once this party took off, I made a little tongue-in-cheek joke about not being invited to the White House Correspondence dinner, which I had no expectation of being invited to the after party rather.
53:03.660 --> 53:11.333
[SPEAKER_01]: But I always expect that the Oscars and the Cannes Film Festival, people wanted to be invited and you had to make
53:11.313 --> 53:11.954
[SPEAKER_01]: decision.
53:12.014 --> 53:18.464
[SPEAKER_01]: So all their stories around that who got invited, who didn't get invited, who just wanted to crash and not crash it.
53:18.604 --> 53:19.826
[SPEAKER_00]: We had very few crashes.
53:19.906 --> 53:28.258
[SPEAKER_00]: I can come to that, but it was we would come up with a list of what takes about three weeks to put together the list for the dinner and then the after party.
53:28.829 --> 53:58.093
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was, you know, I was very careful in what I, when I went out in the two or three days leading up to the Oscar, probably because I thought, if I, I would go to some of these house, but I wouldn't go to a restaurant because I didn't want to be hit on by agents and managers and, and we got it down to roughly a, a sort of a workable science of, of who
53:58.073 --> 54:08.026
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, every year there were people who were going to be disappointed, but it became when the Oscar, but the job that for that night is to get every Oscar you possibly can into that single group.
54:08.126 --> 54:23.287
[SPEAKER_00]: So, let's say for the best actor, a nomination, you had to invite set up five into invitations to the net to the nominee, and they'd bring it usually a spouse, a manager, and an agent.
54:23.347 --> 54:26.511
[SPEAKER_00]: So then, obviously, you got 15 people from one category.
54:26.862 --> 54:48.668
[SPEAKER_00]: you got another 15 for the best actress and then so you've read off the bat you're talking about 200 people just to get on to make sure you hit the bullseye with all the people who are going to win Oscars that year and we had we we're very good on security but we did have incidents you know the year babe was up for an Oscar a man shows up in a tuxedo
54:48.648 --> 55:06.015
[SPEAKER_00]: with a little pink peg on a leash and you know what we know for farm animals and and we lied to man and of course it wasn't the big peg so but it fine large it it was stressful but it worked and I think it
55:06.974 --> 55:15.265
[SPEAKER_01]: must have helped the magazine, certainly the Hollywood issue, but did it sort of get rid of some of the tarnish of your spy days?
55:15.765 --> 55:16.366
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
55:16.386 --> 55:17.467
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I didn't have a lot.
55:17.568 --> 55:27.761
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't have a fair amount of diplomatic outrage, but after a year or so, after the first Oscar party, that became less of a thing.
55:27.781 --> 55:32.847
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think I do think that people can get very upset if you do a
55:32.827 --> 55:35.592
[SPEAKER_00]: a rough story on them and get it wrong.
55:36.153 --> 55:42.544
[SPEAKER_00]: If you do a rough story, but the facts are correct, they'll be hurt, but they'll move on.
55:42.584 --> 55:49.075
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, we had upwards of 40 fact checkers working on some issues.
55:49.316 --> 55:55.847
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, I went overboard every month trying to make sure that whatever we wrote,
55:56.182 --> 56:06.242
[SPEAKER_00]: that we got it right, and because I thought, A, you get respect that way, and B, you can go back to work with the same people, the next, it would the same subjects.
56:06.593 --> 56:09.016
[SPEAKER_00]: year down the road if they're involved in another story.
56:09.477 --> 56:19.110
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're at 20 of and teens of September the 7th and you decide that you're going to leave the editorship of vanity fair.
56:19.270 --> 56:31.687
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'll say to our listener audience, the accolades during your tenure are enormous 14 national magazine awards being named to the magazine editors Hall of Fame.
56:31.707 --> 56:35.031
[SPEAKER_01]: It's quite a legacy and you should be
56:35.011 --> 56:37.594
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, no, but I was, I mean, it's incremental.
56:37.654 --> 56:46.866
[SPEAKER_00]: I was basically just proud of like, you know, I loved the job, but I never thought of having a career of my, I also have like five kids who had to educate and feed.
56:46.966 --> 56:51.673
[SPEAKER_00]: So, Manifera allowed me to, to have a big family, which was very important to me.
56:52.373 --> 56:55.297
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, but after 25 years, I felt I'd done everything.
56:55.377 --> 56:57.540
[SPEAKER_00]: I could see there were shifts in the way.
56:57.620 --> 57:01.305
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'd, I'd dored sign new house, my, my boss.
57:01.285 --> 57:03.769
[SPEAKER_00]: and sigh retired in the teens.
57:04.009 --> 57:06.153
[SPEAKER_00]: And it just wasn't the same for me.
57:06.213 --> 57:10.760
[SPEAKER_00]: And so my wife and my wife and I decided she wanted to move to Italy.
57:10.861 --> 57:12.002
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to move to France.
57:12.103 --> 57:20.597
[SPEAKER_00]: We tossed a coin and we settled on the south of France and we rented a house there and we after many fair within two days of my last day at the magazine.
57:20.637 --> 57:25.825
[SPEAKER_00]: We were on a plane to France and where we lived off and on for the next six years.
57:26.598 --> 57:32.829
[SPEAKER_01]: until 2019 when you co-launch with Alexandra Stanley Airmail, your warrant.
57:33.410 --> 57:36.897
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, we launched that from France, at least I was in New York.
57:37.618 --> 57:43.729
[SPEAKER_00]: And, yeah, so after I got 2,000 letters,
57:43.709 --> 58:03.669
[SPEAKER_00]: and I replied to after I left any fair and I replied to every single one of them and and then I got a little, you know, I had some kind of to myself and but we had always gone and collected the other town newspapers on Sunday mornings and came back and read them and shared stories and I thought I saw enough stories in the foreign papers.
58:03.729 --> 58:05.633
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought I could put together a little
58:05.613 --> 58:13.303
[SPEAKER_00]: sort of newsletter that would attract people with stories that they may not have seen in the American papers.
58:14.024 --> 58:17.429
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we launched air mail and hired a young staff.
58:17.929 --> 58:20.313
[SPEAKER_00]: My best friend Jim Kelly came on his books editor.
58:20.333 --> 58:29.445
[SPEAKER_00]: So a lot of people from time magazine, my day is a time magazine people from spy magazine, people from Bany Fair and people from the New York Observer.
58:29.505 --> 58:33.510
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was a collection
58:34.418 --> 58:38.126
[SPEAKER_00]: And we had a wonderful time for like the next six years.
58:38.146 --> 58:42.175
[SPEAKER_00]: It was just, and a really wonderful young staff of young 20.
58:42.376 --> 58:47.727
[SPEAKER_00]: I do just, you know, a recent college graduate who made a huge difference to the, to air mail.
58:48.609 --> 58:54.402
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, and then we, you know, like all these things, we ran out of money and we sold it.
58:55.343 --> 58:56.104
[SPEAKER_01]: But I still get it.
58:56.484 --> 58:59.889
[SPEAKER_00]: Every day I get an email, here's my latest air mail.
59:00.369 --> 59:08.279
[SPEAKER_00]: I was run by Julia Vatali who's just a wonderful young editor who had been an assistant of family fair and became an editor at air mail.
59:09.660 --> 59:12.984
[SPEAKER_01]: The book ends with some rules for living.
59:13.004 --> 59:16.128
[SPEAKER_01]: 20 rules for me, which I actually loved.
59:16.228 --> 59:20.153
[SPEAKER_01]: I loved and the arc of our conversation.
59:20.234 --> 59:33.807
[SPEAKER_01]: In my mind was, let's talk about your career and how you built it and the things that you learned from it and then turn to the rules for living that that you extrapolate from this illustrious career of yours.
59:33.867 --> 59:42.796
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of the things that you mentioned earlier, on which I want to start with, and then we'll get to some of those rules, which is you write that few people learn from success.
59:42.976 --> 59:49.903
[SPEAKER_01]: Rather, a worthwhile professional life is built
59:49.883 --> 59:53.628
[SPEAKER_01]: So what's that a little bit you mentioned earlier, but I want to tease out.
59:53.648 --> 01:00:04.061
[SPEAKER_00]: Nenshin before that, you know, that, um, yeah, uh, you, uh, the first one on any job, you're going to have minor failures every day and that the goal is to keep the minor and not major.
01:00:04.642 --> 01:00:12.111
[SPEAKER_00]: I had it when we, we have a very successful, we still have a part owners of a very successful restaurant in New York all the way, really.
01:00:12.445 --> 01:00:16.996
[SPEAKER_00]: And another restaurant came up with two blocks away.
01:00:17.377 --> 01:00:19.382
[SPEAKER_00]: And we bought that one.
01:00:19.422 --> 01:00:28.986
[SPEAKER_00]: And basically, the wavelength is low lighting, fireplaces, red bandcats, white tablecloths, American comfort food.
01:00:28.966 --> 01:00:51.615
[SPEAKER_00]: and so this was the Beatrice in and we had white tablecloths and fireplace and low ceilings and lighting but green band cats and same kind of food and it didn't do as well because it didn't have a point the way really and how to point because when we took it over most of the restaurants in the village were either japanese or italian there was very little in the way of american food there
01:00:51.595 --> 01:00:53.177
[SPEAKER_00]: consumable boat.
01:00:53.197 --> 01:00:56.182
[SPEAKER_00]: So one of my being rules is something has to have a point.
01:00:56.222 --> 01:00:58.365
[SPEAKER_00]: My magazine Canada didn't have a point.
01:00:58.806 --> 01:01:00.428
[SPEAKER_00]: Spy magazine did have a point.
01:01:01.349 --> 01:01:08.440
[SPEAKER_01]: In journalism, you write that a career requires a lead from your instinct.
01:01:08.420 --> 01:01:13.994
[SPEAKER_01]: business sense and to be really curious and care about everything.
01:01:14.014 --> 01:01:19.929
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that would be something that would be well sent in an email to most newsrooms these days.
01:01:19.990 --> 01:01:24.842
[SPEAKER_01]: So talk about this lead from your instinct business and being curious about everything.
01:01:25.058 --> 01:01:41.565
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I mean, there are schools and licenses you require for everything from, you know, hair styling to real estate sales, there's no college course for editing, there's nothing, there's no guide book, there's nothing so.
01:01:41.545 --> 01:01:49.418
[SPEAKER_00]: And I know algorithms teach you a lot about or can help you guide to what people are reading.
01:01:49.919 --> 01:01:56.550
[SPEAKER_00]: But as an editor, you have to try to be consistent without being predictable.
01:01:58.117 --> 01:01:59.219
[SPEAKER_00]: We would run stories.
01:01:59.519 --> 01:02:12.462
[SPEAKER_00]: The goal was to run a story, you know, at least one or two in an issue, where I may be on a subject you had no idea that you might be interested in, but that we would do it in a way that once you got started, you couldn't put it down.
01:02:13.043 --> 01:02:18.032
[SPEAKER_00]: And I remember Brian Burrow did a story for us on the, there was a battle between, uh,
01:02:19.396 --> 01:02:26.322
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a company called, it's, it's now called carrying and they own Gucci and it's a luxury goods company in Paris and LVMH.
01:02:26.382 --> 01:02:30.386
[SPEAKER_00]: Another luxury good company in Paris in the battle for for Gucci.
01:02:30.626 --> 01:02:36.772
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was, everybody came off looking badly in it because everybody handled themselves badly, but he was such a good reporter.
01:02:37.292 --> 01:02:49.403
[SPEAKER_00]: The story was so fascinating that it was one of the most red stories of the issue and even though probably 80% of our readers had absolutely no interest in the fashion business.
01:02:49.383 --> 01:02:58.972
[SPEAKER_00]: approach and finding the right writer for the right the right story and most of the writers were general assignment reporters they could do almost anything.
01:02:58.992 --> 01:03:19.052
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean that was part of the mandate and an editor's job is basically like a choir master you've got all these various voices but you want them sort of roughly singing in harmony in each individual issue and it's just
01:03:19.825 --> 01:03:23.530
[SPEAKER_01]: I wanted to just talk about four rules and then I'll let you turn.
01:03:23.750 --> 01:03:37.667
[SPEAKER_01]: The four rules of the 20 that struck me, I mean, they all struck me, but Fess up, tell the truth, Bobby Kennedy used to say, hang a lantern on your mistakes, put yourself in the movie.
01:03:38.568 --> 01:03:45.917
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not so much what you say yes to in life as what you say no to and wish others well.
01:03:45.897 --> 01:03:47.741
[SPEAKER_01]: So, can we talk about those four, can you?
01:03:48.121 --> 01:03:48.923
[SPEAKER_01]: What was the first one?
01:03:48.943 --> 01:03:51.107
[SPEAKER_01]: The first one was Fests up until the truth.
01:03:51.127 --> 01:03:56.458
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so, you know, when I had my magazine Canada, I was always behind in payments to my printer.
01:03:56.498 --> 01:03:59.504
[SPEAKER_00]: My printer was the Montreal Gazette, a big city daily.
01:03:59.724 --> 01:04:05.155
[SPEAKER_00]: And when their presses were down, they'd print magazines, so they would print the magazine and they would want
01:04:05.135 --> 01:04:27.447
[SPEAKER_00]: payment in 30 days and I would you know make all these excuses and why the check had with Adam and Sand and my very friend of mine John Doran said, you know what I'm just going in and tell them when they ask when you could be paid go go to Montreal see them in person and just say I actually don't know when I can do it but I'll do my best and and
01:04:28.422 --> 01:04:29.404
[SPEAKER_00]: So I did that.
01:04:29.464 --> 01:04:46.515
[SPEAKER_00]: And I went all by myself to, you know, it was in my, I was like 21 years old and this, you know, boredom of like, you know, gray suited executives and I said, and they asked me when they could be paid for the last issue and I said, I said, I don't know, but I will as soon as I have the money.
01:04:46.495 --> 01:04:52.923
[SPEAKER_00]: I will send it to you and they said, okay, because, and I went on and, and they, they continue printing me for the next three years.
01:04:53.523 --> 01:04:57.608
[SPEAKER_00]: The thing is, your printer, if you're in a magazine, because your printer is almost your banker.
01:04:57.788 --> 01:04:59.991
[SPEAKER_00]: They, they carry you more than almost anybody else.
01:05:00.852 --> 01:05:02.614
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, only owning your, your failures.
01:05:03.094 --> 01:05:08.861
[SPEAKER_00]: So, first of all, builds trust with wherever you made them to stake with, it's primarily an employer.
01:05:08.921 --> 01:05:12.165
[SPEAKER_00]: What does put yourself in the movie mean?
01:05:12.736 --> 01:05:29.513
[SPEAKER_00]: So that is just a thing I came out with, I thought, in any situation, lift yourself up off the and look at it from above, and if this was a movie and you're watching the scene play out with you and I'll be seeing involved in an interaction with another person.
01:05:29.493 --> 01:05:33.940
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you the person you're rooting for or is the other person the person you're rooting for?
01:05:33.980 --> 01:05:42.714
[SPEAKER_00]: And the thing is the goal is to make sure that your actions cause this external you to root for you.
01:05:42.974 --> 01:05:49.745
[SPEAKER_00]: And it means if you use it's a good rule and it makes you do the right thing more often than if you don't think of it this way.
01:05:51.127 --> 01:05:57.677
[SPEAKER_01]: And saying no to things being more important than saying yes to things
01:05:58.096 --> 01:06:09.377
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I, you know, I've been offered a lot of jobs along the way, and I, and I, and I, there was, I remember two people approached me about becoming a part owner of playboy magazine.
01:06:09.417 --> 01:06:13.886
[SPEAKER_00]: They wanted to buy it and make me the editor, and I sort of politely turn them down.
01:06:13.986 --> 01:06:16.611
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, Harvey Weinstein approached me about.
01:06:16.726 --> 01:06:21.696
[SPEAKER_00]: being the editor of New York magazine that he was endeavoring to buy with a number of people.
01:06:21.716 --> 01:06:29.512
[SPEAKER_00]: And also just in terms of your life, unavailability is one of your greatest assets.
01:06:29.532 --> 01:06:35.764
[SPEAKER_00]: If you got every night and accept every invitation, you become sort of part of the rent of crowd.
01:06:36.892 --> 01:06:47.149
[SPEAKER_00]: be discreet and have great discussion and what you say yes to in terms of a social life in first of all, spend time at home with your family.
01:06:47.169 --> 01:06:48.972
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like she'll never regret that.
01:06:49.874 --> 01:06:53.500
[SPEAKER_00]: And so yeah, since it's just learning how to say no at the right time.
01:06:54.610 --> 01:07:03.405
[SPEAKER_01]: final one, which I think is perhaps the most instructive and the least practiced these days in my experiences, wish others well.
01:07:04.107 --> 01:07:10.037
[SPEAKER_00]: That came from David Halberstam, and, well, two friends, David Halberstam, this friend John Scanlan, who would work for.
01:07:10.017 --> 01:07:11.919
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, for Larry Tish.
01:07:12.680 --> 01:07:15.603
[SPEAKER_00]: And David said, you know, always wish your friends well.
01:07:15.663 --> 01:07:18.306
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, there's a lot of success to go around.
01:07:18.326 --> 01:07:21.209
[SPEAKER_00]: And you, you can share that success.
01:07:21.810 --> 01:07:24.353
[SPEAKER_00]: And I remember Scanlon who had a ton of friends.
01:07:24.373 --> 01:07:30.420
[SPEAKER_00]: He had, like, and he, he said, you know, I remember time one time at a 60th birthday.
01:07:30.440 --> 01:07:31.221
[SPEAKER_00]: And he pulled me aside.
01:07:31.241 --> 01:07:36.126
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, you know, and I was a, I was probably 30 years younger than him.
01:07:36.224 --> 01:07:41.973
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said, you know, the reason I have a lot of friends, because they all know that I wish them well.
01:07:42.193 --> 01:07:45.278
[SPEAKER_00]: And that has been a guiding principle in my life.
01:07:45.378 --> 01:08:04.206
[SPEAKER_00]: I wish almost nobody ill. And it really, Sean Freud is so dangerous, such a problem because it's hard enough to create to control your own destiny, rather than spending time wishing the destiny of others the less than fruitful and successful.
01:08:04.253 --> 01:08:04.534
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
01:08:04.734 --> 01:08:11.913
[SPEAKER_01]: One of my early mentors used to say to me, honor that which is important to others, even if it's less important to you than 100%.
01:08:11.933 --> 01:08:12.595
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
01:08:13.317 --> 01:08:20.777
[SPEAKER_01]: Is the bottom line of all of this to be a success like you've been or what others might as far to be as you have to be a good person?
01:08:21.297 --> 01:08:32.170
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you know, I think when I first went to Vanity Fair, I thought, I'm sort of a very Canadian and demeanor, and I don't like drama, and I think they thought that is a weakness.
01:08:32.771 --> 01:08:41.341
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think that that is the thing that enabled me to not succeed there, but survive there for 25 years.
01:08:42.142 --> 01:08:48.469
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that being a decent person, and that's the one thing I've instilled in my children,
01:08:48.449 --> 01:08:58.120
[SPEAKER_00]: But you may, it may take longer to get to where you're going, but you will get there and it'll enable you to stay where you, where you wanted to be longer.
01:08:58.160 --> 01:09:05.869
[SPEAKER_01]: The book is, when the going was good in editors' adventures during the last golden age of magazines.
01:09:06.289 --> 01:09:06.850
[SPEAKER_01]: Great and quarter.
01:09:06.890 --> 01:09:08.912
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for talking with me today.
01:09:09.253 --> 01:09:10.434
[SPEAKER_00]: Michael, an absolute pleasure.
01:09:10.494 --> 01:09:11.335
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
01:09:13.002 --> 01:09:26.860
[SPEAKER_01]: Join us next episode when we'll be speaking with Nina Wilner about her new book, The Boys in the Light, which follows the parallel journeys of company D and Eddie Wilner, the author's father as they are caught up on two sides of World War II.
01:09:28.021 --> 01:09:36.192
[SPEAKER_01]: That said, is produced by Compro and the Museum of Public Relations, and is a proud member of the MSW Media Network.
01:09:36.948 --> 01:09:39.253
[SPEAKER_01]: The music by Sam Post.
01:09:39.273 --> 01:09:43.342
[SPEAKER_01]: Please address any comments to that said, zeldin at gmail.com.
01:09:44.063 --> 01:09:51.520
[SPEAKER_01]: If you enjoy this podcast, please rate and review us on your favorite podcast app to help more people find us.
01:09:52.101 --> 01:09:53.945
[SPEAKER_01]: For that said, I'm Michael Zeldin.
01:09:54.506 --> 01:09:56.450
[SPEAKER_00]: M.S.W.
01:09:56.791 --> 01:09:57.252
[SPEAKER_00]: Media.

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