Quote of the Day (Graydon Carter, on Bygone High-Flying Days in Magazine Journalism)

“Going from Spy and the Observer to Vanity Fair was like moving from a youth hostel to a five-star hotel….When traveling on business, I stayed at the Connaught in London, the Ritz in Paris, the Hotel du Cap in the South of France, and the Beverly Hills Hotel or the Bel-air in Los Angeles…Staff members could expense their breakfasts — not a working breakfast with a writer or photographer. Just breakfast. Large dinners at home were catered. Flowers went out to contributors at an astounding rate, sometimes just for turning a story in on time. One staff member who was a holdover from the old regime would get so depressed at the mere thought of my being there that she would send flowers to herself just to perk up her spirits. On the company account, of course.”—Magazine editor Graydon Carter, on moving to Vanity Fair in 1992, in When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines (2025)

I admit to being a sucker for anything relating the inside story of major book and magazine publishers. And so, when excerpts from Graydon Carter’s memoir appeared in The Atlantic and New York magazines, I snatched them up eagerly.

But I also must confess to reading the one in New York—a distillation of his 25 years editing the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Dominick Dunne, and Marie Brenner—more eagerly than the less gossipy one in Vanity Fair, which focused on his youthful adventures working for the Canadian National Railroad.

Part of my fascination with the New York article stemmed from seeing to what extent Carter would vent secrets from the Conde Nast empire.

He congratulates himself for making “the culture less poisonous” than the one inherited from Tina Brown, while fending off “deeply hostile and subversive” holdovers from the old regime. (Yes, Faithful Reader, he names four of the principal culprits among the latter, even briefly discussing how they practiced the black arts of office politics.)

But I was also fascinated by what I highlighted in the “Quote of the Day,” on the deep pockets once held at Vanity Fair and other magazines. Over the years, several staffers in those establishments from the Seventies through the Nineties told me about the perks once enjoyed at those organizations.

One young woman discussed how Malcolm Forbes gave company employees a holiday for his birthday, “like some medieval lord treating his serfs,” she chuckled. And a Vanity Fair article about the late Time art critic Robert Hughes was subtitled “A Tale from the Mythic Days of Magazine Expense Accounts.”

All of that has changed because of corporate takeovers that have enabled accounts to pull tighter strings, as well as, of course, the Internet, where advertisers can find a digital alternative to print media. Increasingly, publishing days of wine and roses will be recalled by writers and editors lucky to find outlets for their memories—or in oral histories.

(The image accompanying this post, of Graydon Carter at the Vanity Fair kickoff part for the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, was taken Apr. 21, 2009, by David Shankbone.)