Graydon Carter on Donald Trump, Anna Wintour and the Golden Age of Magazines

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And Graydon Carter, welcome to the show.

 

GRAYDON CARTER: Walter, thank you.

 

WALTER ISAACSON: You know, one of the things we biographers sometimes think about is that it’s all about Dad when it’s a successful person. Then I’m reading this book, and your father is quite a character. Tell me – let’s start there. Tell me about him.

 

CARTER: Well, he was a, he was a pilot during World War II and flew Spitfires and Lancasters. He did not have what you would call a mind for business and had a business that did not do well after the war. But he loved flying and he loved flying and sailing and skiing and golf. And he was – yeah, no, he was a character. And he loved wood. And he would take my brother and I, we were like a, you know, and like nine and five, out to look for wood on the side of the road that the National Commission, Capital Commission, which was in Ottawa, where we grew up in, would and would go out there to get free firewood. He was quite cheap and would turn the thermostat down to 45 degrees at night. This is in a, in a city where it would easily be 30, 40 below at night.

 

ISAACSON: And so you actually worked as a lumberjack on lines _____. Tell me about some of those jobs and how that affected how you hired people when you got to be rich and famous.

 

CARTER: Well, I didn’t, I never got to be rich and famous, but I did, it did affect the way I hired people. I spent, my parents, like a lot of their friends, sent their kids out west to toughen them up and to, if you could, get a job as a lineman for the railroad. And then I went out and worked for six months for the Canadian National Railroad, railroad, railroad out on the Saskatchewan Prairie. I lived in a box car with 11 other guys. Most of them had minor criminal records. They’d had a spot of trouble when they were growing up. And I overcame my fear of heights and learned how to climb telegraph poles. 

And I had one of the mo, great experiences in my life, and I adored all the guys I worked with. And so when I, when I hired people, I, especially in assistants when they’re young, rather than sort of silver plated internships, I looked for people who’ve worked in restaurants or worked at a dude wrench or done something with their, with their hands. And I do think that if you can handle, if you’re a waiter or a waitress, and you can handle three or four tables of six or eight difficult diners, everything else in life is gonna come easy.

 

ISAACSON: You and I joined Time together there and probably talk about when the going was good. Tell me about your first few months at Time when we were there.

 

CARTER: Well, I mean, I arrived from Canada. I had, it was in the fall. But it was still warm. And I had, I only had really warm clothing from coming from Canada. I had an old blazer with a crest on it, and I wore it to a meeting, and somebody at the meeting asked if I worked as a doorman. And so I sort of sight, you horrified. So I went back that night and I, with a razor blade sewed the label, the crest off of my jacket. And it left a sort of a dark patch because the rest of the jacket had faded. And I looked even more foolish. But it was, it was exhilarating for me. I mean, the rest of you guys, I mean, all of you were incredibly talented and much smarter than the people I’d been around.

 

ISAACSON: Wait, tell me about that team that you came in with at Time.

 

CARTER: Well, it was you, it was Kurt Andersen who became my partner at Spy. It was Michiko Kakutani, became a Pulitzer Prize winner and chief, a book critic of the New York Times. Maureen Dowd, a Pulitzer Prize winning critic for the Times. There was Pico Iyer, the wonderful writer. There was Jim Kelly, who became the editor of Time. There was Rick Stengel who became the editor of Time. There was Steve Smith who became the editor of US News and World Report. Who am I missing here? Frank Rich became the Chief Theater critic for The Times. And that <crosstalk> 

 

ISAACSON: I always thought that you were the consummate insider and also outsider. You could play both roles. Did you feel that way at Time?

 

CARTER: No, I felt like an outsider, but I was dying to get into the melting pot and just melt. I tried to get rid of my Canadianisms. I tried to dress like an American. And I just wanted to sort of fit in with all you.

 

ISAACSON: One of the subtitles for this book could have been expense accounts, I have known. Tell me about your expense account at Time.

 

CARTER: Well, it was the same as yours, and the fact is, I’d never had one before. And to be in your twenties, paying $200 a month rent in New York and having expense, an expense account I felt like I was on, in heaven. And I didn’t cook a meal for the first five years. I don’t think I turned on my oven once. I don’t think I knew how to turn on my oven. And so to be able to go to restaurants, and I remember in those days you rarely went out for lunch with one or two people, that you didn’t split a bottle of wine. And to me it was just absolute nirvana.

 

ISAACSON: Was there something profligate about that, that we should have reigned back knowing that it was gonna be difficult in the future?

 

CARTER: Oh, God, no. It wouldn’t have changed the thing. First of all, I think the expenses were such a small line item in the overall cost of putting out Time. No, I think that is an important element in maintaining, maintaining staff and keeping staff happy and committed. I mean, I then I went to Conde Nast where the expenses were exponentially greater. But Si Newhouse, who ran Conde Nast, you know, he wasn’t, he wasn’t just throwing the money out the window. He wanted to make Conde Nast the dominant magazine publisher in America. And he did,

 

ISAACSON: And he did it by spending money even on like Annie Liebowitz, which helped define your Vanity Fair’s look and feel.

 

CARTER: 100%. I mean, she was our principal photographer. And I remember one time we were a quarter of a million dollars away from what she wanted for her contract and what we wanted to pay her. And I mentioned this to Si, and he just said, oh, let’s pay it. He said, I don’t wanna nickel and dime her.

 

ISAACSON: I love it when nickel and dimming is referred to as $250,000 a year. So tell me about when you were at Time, I used to walk down the halls and I’d see you and Kurt huddled together and you were inventing Spy Magazine. What was going through your head? Why did you decide, okay, we wanna get outta Time and invent a new form of magazine?

 

CARTER: Well, everybody else in the magazine seemed to be doing very well, and I knew that I wasn’t cut out to be time material. So I –

 

ISAACSON: Wait, why is that?

 

CARTER: I just wasn’t. I wasn’t, I wasn’t Ivy League. I wasn’t as buttoned down. I wasn’t as good a writer. And so I just, I could, you know, I could sort of read the writing on the wall, and I thought, I had this idea for a magazine. And then I approached Jim Kelly first, but he sort of, I think he knew he was gonna be the editor at one point. And then I approached Kurt and he was in right away. And so that over a 10 month period, we planned out the entire magazine.

 

ISAACSON: Wait, but you said you had an idea for a magazine. I love Spy, but tell me, what was the idea behind it?

 

CARTER: It was just a funny, satirical fact-based magazine about New York City, which was then, as you know, just, it had come out of bankruptcy or near bankruptcy. It was all of a sudden, it was awash with this new money coming from investment bankers. Their wives were the ladies who lunched. And the city was sort of alive with a lot of characters showing off the money they had. And that’s sort of great for journalism. And we wanted to write about that.

 

ISAACSON: And it was basically poking fun at the pretensions of this elite, like in the tradition of HL Minkin way back on magazines. Tell me about, let’s start with Donald Trump. How did he get to be a stubby-fingered vulgarian?

 

CARTER: Not stubby. Short-fingered. That’s –

 

ISAACSON: Short-fingered! Short-fingered vulgarian.

 

CARTER: He’d be offended by stubby.

 

ISAACSON: Yes, exactly.

 

CARTER: As he is by short. No, I had I was always in need of money ’cause I had a number of kids. And so I took an assignment from GQ to write a story about him, and it was his first national exposure. So I spent three weeks with him, and he was very excited to have me around. And to be honest, I found him sort, I found him charming in a, in a salesman type way. He uses your name like every three or four sentences the way a tin, a tins, aluminum siding salesman would use it. And but I, in the story I’d known, I’d made mention that I thought his hands looked too small for his body. So at Ti – at Spy Magazine, later on we came above epithets for people. And we called him a short-fingered vulgarian, that that truly drove him crazy.

 

ISAACSON: And how did Donald Trump react over the years on the short-fingered vulgarian? He sent you missives at times?

 

CARTER: Well, firstly, he, yes. He would send me nasty notes. Then he threatened to sue us. Then when I became the editor of Vanity Fair, the transactional Donald Trump, I think he realized that he better calm this feud such as it was down. And we tried to be, he tried to become friends. And we had dinner at Mar-a-Lago. I’ve had dinner with him and Melania. He invited me to one of his weddings. And, but it, it just couldn’t hold. And so I would write something about him in Vanity Fair, and he would, once Twitter got started, he started tweeting horrible things about me. He would call me sloppy and dopey. He said my wife thought I was a total loser. He said that Vanity Fair was losing, losing steam. The Oscar party wasn’t hot. The food at our restaurant, The Waverly Inn, was terrible. And I framed, I blew up all these tweets about this large, and I framed them and had them all up inside my wall for visitors to see when they came to visit me.

 

ISAACSON: You talk about him being transactional. That even though you had poked fun of him once you were powerful, he was trying to make it up. That’s a theme of this book too, whether it’s Michael Ovitz or Donald Trump, all these people you pilloried when you were at Spy, they then all wanna be transactional and make it up to you.

 

CARTER: That was just, that was simply because of the chair I was sitting in at Vanity Fair. I think it was very important to them. And you know, I did my best to give them a fair shake. But Mike Ovitz was, you know, then the most powerful man in Hollywood, and he had a dramatic fall. And we did two or three stories on that. And I always used to say that Vanity Fair was the magazine, that if you rose to success, it’d be the magazine you’d want to have that story written about. And if you fell from those heights, it’s the least favorite magazine you’d want to have written about.

 

ISAACSON: How did the Vanity Fair job come along?

 

CARTER: I had <laugh>, I had, there was an intermediary period between Spy and Vanity Fair. And I edited this newspaper called the New York Observer, and it was a very sleepy Upper East Side newspaper. It was a broad sheet on salmon colored paper. It was very well designed, but I took the job and I thought I could make it a thing at a certain point, look readable, and then at some point, a must read. And about six months in, seven months in, I started sending complimentary copies to friends of mine that I’d met over the years. And a lot to a lot of them, there were editors in Europe. And Si took, he takes an annual tour of all his properties in Europe. 

 

ISAACSON: This is Si Newhouse who owns Conde Nast.

 

CARTER: Si Newhouse, who owned Conde Nast and Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. And he stopped off in London and Paris and Milan, and he saw copies of the New York Observer in everybody’s in basket and returned to America under the misguided impression that this was an international hit. So he called me in and he asked if I would be interested in two magazines. And I thought he was gonna say something like GQ or Details, neither of which I could improve on. And he offered me either The New Yorker or Vanity Fair. And we had spent five years making fun of the writing style, the editor, the contributors of Vanity Fair. And so we settled on the New Yorker. And I’d spent a lot, two weeks, the next two weeks working on a plan. I only told Jim Kelly, my agent Andrew Wiley and my family about this.

And the day that it was supposed to be announced, Anna Wintour called me and said, it’s going to be the other magazine. And I thought, oh God, I don’t have, I don’t have a plan for that. But I said, I’ll take the job, because we desperately needed the extra money. And the first two years were rocky because the people at the magazine, I don’t think they fully trusted me because of Spy, but I thought if I just be myself and act, treat them fairly and compassionately, it’ll work out. And I went two years without firing anybody, and in one week I let three people go, which was more people than I’d let go in my, fired in my entire life. And then things sort of changed that people started coming around to the way I wanted the magazine to be. And we tried to change the house style of writing, and I wanted people to work together in a collegial, a friendly, respectful manner. And for the next 23 years, it pretty much was that.

 

ISAACSON: And you had some of the best writers in the business, and you just kind of recruited big names and gave them long form. Tell me, tell me about some of them.

 

CARTER: Well, I went after writers, I thought, I went after, I wanted clever writers like Christopher Hitchens and James Wolcott to be columnists, but I also wanted writers who could write big narrative stories that had a beginning, middle, and end, and they could run between 8,000 words and 20,000 words, but they had to be able to tell a story. So I had people like, you know, Michael Hare and David Halberstam and Sebastian Junger, and –

 

ISAACSON: Michael Lewis, and Brian…

 

CARTER: Michael Lewis and Maureen Orth, and Maureen Do – and Marie Brenner. It was a, and eventually we had about 50 writers on contract.

 

ISAACSON: Why is that desire for brilliant long form narrative fallen out?

 

CARTER: It hasn’t, it’s just so expensive because – I should have thrown Brian Burrow in there as well – it’s just so expensive because a writer has to spend, you know, three months, sometimes half a year on a story, and they’ve got to make a living, and we could afford to pay them during that period. Like when Dominick Dunne, he spent almost a year in Los Angeles covering the OJ Simpson trial, and it was a big thing for Vanity Fair. He was a huge star. And that probably cost us a million dollars a year or more for those stories.

 

ISAACSON: Your relationship with Anna Wintour is carefully woven through the book. Tell me about her.

 

CARTER: Okay, first of all, we were very good friends. I wrote for her for a number of years. She introduced me to Si, she brought me into Conde Nast. She was a great and sort of cozy colleague. And we had a very good relationship. She got a, as she’s, I think she started living up to this, a nuclear winter reputation. I didn’t always find, I didn’t find that to be the case until much later in our relationship. But then eventually she, she became a little unpredictable when I met her. And I have, I’ve said this in my book, but she, I was never sure when I saw her, whether she’d treat me like one of her best friends or the parking lot attendant. And so when she took, became the editor in chief of Conde Nast, she made an effort, she made an attempt to try to take over half my staff and put them under, under her. And that sort of put a chill on the relationship and it put a chill on my time at Conde Nast. I was coming up to my 25th year at Vanity Fair, and I thought, it’s time to do something different.

 

ISAACSON: Graydon Carter, thank you so much for joining us.

 

CARTER: Walter, thank you.