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Graydon Carter's Wild Ride Through the Golden Age of Magazines

The former Vanity Fair editor recalls a time when the expense accounts were limitless, the photo shoots were lavish, and the stakes seemed high. What else has been lost?

“Somehow, in my case, with a lot of mishaps and a dollop of good luck along the way, things just worked out,” Carter writes: the voice of a man who tasted the best of the American century and still left the party early, with his dignity intact. Every Friday, as the upcoming issue was put to bed, carts rolled through the hallways with hot dinner and wine, after which company cars took staffers home—or, in the summer, out to Long Island, where they rented houses in Sag Harbor. ( The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town, which its founding editor held to be the heart of the magazine, was conceived as one such endeavor, meant to turn the daunting city into a familiar “village of New York.”) To be lampooned in Spy was, if not at all an honor, something like a backward, upside-down mark of distinction.

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