When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines

by Graydon Carter, James Fox (Editor)

Overview

An Instant New York Times Bestseller

From the pages of 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

When 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. Not only was he confronted with a staff that he perceived to be loyal to the previous regime, but he arrived only a few years after launching Spy magazine, which gloried in skewering the celebrated and powerful—the very people Vanity Fair venerated. 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 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.

Filled with colorful memories and intimate details, 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. Moving to New York from Canada, he worked at Time, Life, The New York Observer, and Spy, before catching the eye of Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse, who pulled him in to run Vanity Fair. In Newhouse he found an unwavering champion, a loyal proprietor who gave Carter the editorial and financial freedom to thrive. Annie Leibovitz’s photographs would come to define the look of the magazine, as would the “New Establishment” and annual Hollywood issues. Carter further planted 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593655900
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/25/2025
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

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 the Waverly Inn, and have five children.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

One Big Scoop and a Wedding

May 2005

This could so easily have been where it all ended.

My wife, Anna, and I were on our way back to New York from the Bahamas. We'd spent ten days at the Ocean Club on our honeymoon and it was time to get back to work-or "the coffee cup" as we say in the Carter household.

I'm not what you would call the most relaxed flyer, and I tend to get to airports early because I don't want to compound the stress by having to rush to the gate. At the airport, while I fretted about the flight ahead, Anna's cell phone rang. I didn't have a mobile back then, and calling Anna's was the only way my kids or the office could get in touch with me. In those days I never left the house without a few quarters in my pocket for pay phones, along with a handkerchief (more about that later). Anna answered the call and handed me the phone. She whispered the words "David Friend!"

David, one of my deputies at Vanity Fair, where I'd been the editor for more than a decade, was indeed on the line. In the euphoria of marriage and honeymoon and all that, it had utterly slipped my mind that at ten thirty that morning Vanity Fair had released an article we'd been working on for the past two years. It revealed the identity of "Deep Throat," the highly secret source Bob Woodward relied on during his Watergate reporting with Carl Bernstein. As the Post itself had noted, the identity of Deep Throat was "among the most compelling questions of modern American history, dissected in books, in films, on the Internet, and in thousands of articles and hundreds of television programs."

Two years of work and worry over a major story-at the time, the Holy Grail of journalism scoops-and here I was stuck on the day of its release in the tiny departure lounge of Nassau International Airport. I mouthed the words "Holy fuck!" to Anna. She mouthed back, "What?" David reminded me that, as we'd planned before my departure, he had called both Bob and Carl that morning at around nine thirty to tell them we were faxing them advance copies of our story naming Mark Felt, the former deputy director of the FBI, as Deep Throat. I asked what their reaction had been. David said they had thus far made no comment, but that word was trickling out and the phone lines at Vanity Fair were already jammed.

A more confident editor would probably have been elated at the news. I am not made of such vibrant stuff. My foremost worry was one that I'd had the whole time we were working on the article: that we had somehow gotten it wrong. The fact of the matter was, we weren't 100 percent sure we had the right man. A mistake of such magnitude becomes the stuff of legend and winds up in the first paragraph of your obituary. Also, this was a rough period for journalists. It was during the George W. Bush administration, and if you got something wrong, armies of righteous nitpickers on the right-and the left-would descend to lay waste to your career and possibly your livelihood. Our main worry was that there was in fact no Deep Throat: that it had been a journalistic device, a composite of several sources-perhaps ginned up, some even said, by Alice Mayhew, who was Woodward and Bernstein's editor at Simon & Schuster, to move the plot along in All the President's Men. I never bought into that rumor. Alice was the preeminent nonfiction editor of political books in the nation. And an aboveboard and formidable person in every way. I had played tennis with her as her doubles partner a few times out on Long Island, and whenever I missed a shot, she wouldn't say a word. She'd just give me a look that could have de-strung a racket on the other side of the court.

Ten days earlier, Anna and I had stood at the altar of a small Episcopalian church a short walk from our home in Connecticut, about to get married. It was, as it is for so many grooms, aside from the birth of my children, one of the happiest days of my life. I felt incredibly fortunate to be marrying this smart, beautiful woman before my kids and our relatives and friends. There were a number of hymns, including “Jerusalem,” which I was told later had confused a number of our Jewish friends who were surprised to hear a hymn with that name in an Episcopalian service. Anna, in addition to having Scott as a surname, is a Scot, and her father, Sir Kenneth Scott, a distinguished former diplomat, and her brother Andrew both wore kilts. For the walk to our house, we thought bagpipers would be a nice touch and hired a group associated with the New York City Police Department. Along the way, Harry Benson, a Glaswegian whom I had worked with at Life and Vanity Fair, was taking some snaps. At one point he whispered to me that some of the tunes weren’t Scottish at all. They were IRA anthems.

The weather was decent, and the wedding party had assembled on our terrace and spilled out into the garden. After dinner, we made our way to our barn, which conveniently had a stage. There, Tom Freston and John Mellencamp had an incredible wedding gift for us: Otis Day and the Knights of "Shama Lama Ding Dong" and "Shout" fame, the band that had performed so memorably in the movie Animal House. When the night was winding down, Anna and I were about to drive off to the Mayflower Inn, not far from us, for the first night of our marriage when we found Fran Lebowitz sitting beside our driver in the front seat. Fran was a big part of our lives. We had first met in the men's department of Bergdorf Goodman years earlier when she asked my advice on a tie she was buying for her father. A friendship developed and Fran became an integral part of our family, joining us for Christmas dinners as well as any number of trips to Los Angeles. But this was a bit more togetherness than we expected. It seemed that her ride to a friend's house, a town away, had left early, and so Fran was hitching a ride with us. In the boisterous delirium of the moment, and with the need to get us to the Inn and Fran to her destination, the office and our big scoop seemed a million miles away.

The identity of Deep Throat had been a guessing game in Washington and journalism circles for years. Everyone from Henry Kissinger to Diane Sawyer had been proposed as Woodward and Bernstein’s secret informant. Our evidence that Felt was Deep Throat was, we believed, close to conclusive, but it came from secondhand sources. We were 95 percent sure-but that last 5 percent was unnerving, the difference between great success and humbling failure. If we were incorrect, it wouldn’t quite be on a par with the London Sunday Times’s 1983 publication of the fake Hitler diaries, an episode that its editor, Frank Giles, never lived down. But it would be close. After David’s update, I realized I simply could not get on that plane unless I knew one way or another if we had the right man.

The journey to this moment had begun two years earlier, when I got a call from John O'Connor, a San Francisco-based lawyer. He said that he represented the man who was Deep Throat and that he and his client wanted the story to break in Vanity Fair. You get a lot of crank calls when you're an editor of a magazine, but I had a general policy of always taking the calls and looking into leads when they presented themselves. O'Connor and I talked for a time. He wouldn't reveal who his client was. But I was intrigued enough to say, "Let me have someone get back to you." I asked David if he was free and if he could come down to my office. We had worked together at Life in the mid-1980s and I'd brought him to Vanity Fair a few years after joining it myself. David had sort of an oddball role at the magazine. Unlike the other editors there, he had few fixed writers. He was listed on the masthead as editor of creative development, a title I must have given him, though I was never sure what it meant. I'm not sure he did either. But David was a dogged hand and, more important, because he wasn't always closing stories for the current issue, he was available. I told him about the phone call with O'Connor, gave him the number, and asked him to follow up.

Their conversations dribbled on for a few months. Eventually, we had a name: Mark Felt. Neither of us had ever heard of him. We learned that he had once been number two at the FBI. David and I would meet every few days about the story, but we had our doubts. Chief among them was Felt himself. He was in his early nineties by this time, he had suffered a stroke two years earlier, and he was starting to show signs of dementia. The evidence supporting his claim was strong but essentially circumstantial. He had said nothing about the matter for more than three decades. He had only acknowledged the truth to his family a year or so before O'Connor called me, after family members, having put various clues together, had confronted him. He admitted to them that, yes, he was Deep Throat, but he was reluctant to go public with the information. Felt was proud of his part in exposing the corruption and obstruction of justice he saw in Nixon's White House during the Watergate cover-up, but he also remained loyal to the men and women of the agency.

When David flew out to San Francisco to meet Felt in person, he found him in a diminished state. This meant we had to work around him to firm up the story. All we had to go on were sources at one remove: Felt's daughter, a college teacher; his grandson, who had gone to school with O'Connor's daughter; and O'Connor himself. They all confirmed earlier conversations in which Felt had described his role as Deep Throat. There was also Felt's autobiography, published in 1979, which contained a number of subtle clues, as well as noncommittal but suggestive phone calls between Felt and Woodward. Felt's daughter remembered that someone called Bob Woodward, whose name she didn't recognize at the time, had come to visit her father in 1999, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Nixon's resignation.

After about a year and a half of back-and-forth, we felt we had hit a wall. Then we came up with an idea that would allow us to publish Felt's claims without the sort of guaranteed proof you want when you are wading into such a potential mess. We figured that O'Connor, like so many lawyers, might be a closeted writer. So we offered the story to him. We believed that it would give us a slight, gossamer layer of cover. O'Connor agreed and turned in an article that, after a number of rounds of editing, we thought worked. At that point, only a handful of people knew of the assignment: me; David; Chris Garrett, our managing editor, who had to sign off on the plan; and Robert Walsh, our legal editor.

Editorial Reviews

01/27/2025

This intimate memoir from former Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Carter (Spy: The Funny Years) is at once a sharp look at the art of crafting a story, a collection of fizzy anecdotes about the magazine industry, and a stirring catalog of his efforts to remake Vanity Fair in his own image. The focus is almost exclusively on Carter’s work life, beginning with his employment as a groundman on the Canadian Railroad in the late 1960s before he moved to New York City in the ’70s. There, he helped develop the satirical Spy magazine, worked at Time magazine, and, in 1992, joined Vanity Fair, whose subjects and advertisers were often mocked in the pages of Spy. Balancing grit and glamor, Carter recounts the strain his busy schedule put on his marriage, weighing those difficulties against the perks of collaborating with the likes of Annie Leibovitz and Dominick Dunne. Especially memorable is a section on the Vanity Fair Oscar party, which Carter launched in 1994 to increase the publication’s standing among the entertainment industry’s elite. Carter’s wry tone and hard-won insights make this a must-read for aspiring journalists and those who lived through the good old days of print magazines. It’s a blast. Agent: Robert Barnett, Williams & Connolly. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Yes, of course there’s tea—or dish, as the old folks say. This is Graydon, after all. Deep, deep dish . . . Waltzing, stumbling, dining, wining and twerking through When the Going Was Good, Graydon Carter’s memoir of his editorial glory days astride the New York Observer, Spy and Vanity Fair, are witty people doing anecdotal things.” —The Washington Post

“Written in his signature gait and filled with glorious details.” —Vanity Fair

“Catnip to anyone in publishing.” —Financial Times

“Carter, a former editor of Spy, the New York Observer, and Vanity Fair, has been held up over the years as a force of style, both in his personal taste and in his expansive vision of creative work, which grew from his editorial experiences during a prosperous and thrilling era in American magazines. This winsome memoir is a recounting of that period, brisk, bright, and full of well-told anecdotes about celebrities, artists, and other power players in Carter’s orbit.” —The New Yorker

“I quickly . . . consumed it. The journalism stories and the character analysis, as Elizabeth Hardwick liked to call gossip, are first-rate.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times Book Review

“When the Going Was Good is catnip for those of us still addicted to magazines.” —LA Times

"Scintillating . . . This highly entertaining book has a good story on every page." —The Daily Mail

“Canadian journalist Graydon Carter learned the ropes at Time and Life before co-founding the magazine Spy. But he’s best known for his work as editor of Vanity Fair between 1992 and 2017, the period that dominates his breezy memoir. There’s Hollywood gossip, score-settling and tales from the era of limitless editorial budgets.” —Monocle

“Carter’s wry tone and hard-won insights make this a must-read for aspiring journalists and those who lived through the good old days of print magazines. It’s a blast.” —Publishers Weekly

“Carter chronicles the industry and its people with deep love and affection, and it’s a story of discovering one’s passion, persistence, and undeniably being in the right place at the right time . . . An engaging book for lovers of glossy magazines and the people who make them.” —Library Journal

“[A] rollicking memoir and heartfelt paean to the big, glossy, influential magazines of yore . . . Carter's zestful accounts of his editorial visions and their implementation are fascinating, as are his vivid profiles of writers, photographers, and Hollywood stars. Carter's delight in the chaos, effort, stress, and exhilaration of his editorships generate the effervescence and depth of this enthusiastically detailed chronicle.” —Booklist

“A page-turning, bighearted, self-knowing, anecdote-rich and often screechingly funny record of a life lived to the full. A great memoir by one of the great editors—and characters—of our time.” —Christopher Buckley

“A splendidly written and warmhearted handbook for how to live, for how to be a friend and a leader and a parent and a partner and a dining companion that gets invited back, and it's precisely the sort of book that makes one a better person after reading it. Everybody under the age of 40 should read this masterwork so that we might collectively bring back that golden age, and everybody over 40 should read it and summarily wave their handkerchiefs in admirable surrender.” —Lisa Taddeo

“A tour de force—informative, insightful, droll, and delightful. I am overwhelmed by When the Going Was Good.” —Gay Talese

“There is so much to savour in this enormously enjoyable memoir, but it’s the Vanity Fair chapters—an indispensable ‘how-to’ edit a magazine, host a party, curate a dinner, and inspire a legendary stable of writers—that form the centrepiece and highlight of this fascinating ride. You emerge from this enormously enjoyable memoir with the feeling of having just left an unforgettable party.” —Peter Morgan

“What a great read—but it had a downside. It served to remind me how unexciting, unremarkable, and uninteresting I am, especially compared to this Carter fellow, the charming, colorful, raconteur that he is. As Leon once said to me in a scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm, ‘That mothafucka lived a life!” —Larry David

From the Publisher

03/01/2025

Carter, longtime editor of Vanity Fair, has written a chronicle of his life in publishing that is a microcosm of the last 50 years of upscale American magazines. Opening with an excellent chapter on working for the Canadian railway as a teenager, the book details how he left college and started The Canadian Review in 1973. He wrote for Time and Life before cocreating the satirical and biting Spy in the 1980s, eventually becoming the very successful editor of Vanity Fair for 25 years. He chronicles the industry and its people with deep love and affection, and it's a story of discovering one's passion, persistence, and undeniably being in the right place at the right time. A book about magazines and publishing requires a healthy amount of name-dropping, and Carter does not disappoint. As one would expect, his writing is engaging and entertaining, yet while there is absolutely nothing wrong with being successful or excelling in one's field, the book often feels like it was written for his wealthy friends. One feels a certain type of assumed privilege has always surrounded him. VERDICT An engaging book for lovers of glossy magazines and the people who make them.—Peter Thornell

Library Journal

2024-11-23
Revisiting glossy days.

Carter navigates the path from his upbringing in rural Canada to foundingSpy magazine, a delightfully snarky publication perhaps most famous for labeling Donald Trump (to his indignation) as a “shortfingered vulgarian,’’ fast-tracking to a long, successful run at the helm ofVanity Fair before moving on to his current gig with the digital publicationAir Mail. But his subtitle gives the game away—Was theVanity Fair era, a skillful amalgam of celebrity journalism and investigative reporting, really a “golden age” of magazine journalism? In this admittedly enjoyable account, it seems more like a product, however well executed, of affluent times, generous pre-internet advertisers, and aspirational readers eager to feel part of a world beyond their income levels or societal status. Carter’s odyssey, surprisingly, is most engrossing when he recounts surviving freezing winters and a stint as a railroad lineman before making his way to New York, that “shimmering vessel of opportunity and reward,” where, Gatsby-like, he begins to climb the greasy pole by talking his way into a stint atTime magazine. Bored by the stultifying culture of the newsweekly, he and a colleague, Kurt Andersen, hole up to create prototypes ofSpy. “We wanted the voice,” he writes, “to be a mixture ofTime-ese from the 1940s, with its dense, fact-filled writing, and the saucy manner of London’sPrivate Eye”—andMad magazine. “We wanted to be outsiders on the ramparts picking off the big shots.’’ Mission accomplished. But asSpy’s financial fortunes foundered, Carter was wooed to take overVanity Fair and join the Establishment, gaining more recognition from the VF Oscar Party than journalism, whose halcyon age was better exemplified by Harold Ross’New Yorker or H.L. Mencken’sAmerican Mercury. Curiously, Carter begins this memoir by reciting the “Deep Throat” scoop revealing Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate source. It’s solid reporting, but closer to gossip than lasting literary value. The going was good—but it appears to be gone.

An entertaining look back at a life in full.

Kirkus Reviews