If you happened to have toiled in the rarefied world of New York magazine publishing at the turn of this century—a world of fax machines, cosmopolitans, iPods, and $700 rents—you could not possibly have escaped the name Graydon Carter. For 25 years, Mr. Carter was the editor of Vanity Fair magazine, a publishing money mill that employed 150 staff turning out monthly issues that ran up to 400 pages and charged high-end merchants like Ralph Lauren, Louis Vuitton, and Aston Martin as much as $100,000 per advertising page. Carter, or simply "Graydon"—apex editors like "Tina" and "Jann" needed only one name back then—now gives us details of his rise to the top in a memoir, When the Going was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines. It is a zesty blend of score settling, heartfelt gratitude, apologies, editorial heroics, reflections on family, friendship, design, travel tips, and the many uses for a pocket handkerchief (seriously) served in a martini glass with a Day-Glo swizzle stick. As Cindy Adams, the New York Post’s gossip goddess of that golden age, would say, only in New York, kids, only in New York.
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