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

In Chapters 5-8, Carter details The Entanglement of Success, Celebrity, and Power as he describes his work to secure an editing position in New York City. After leaving The Canadian Review, Carter admits that he “was at a complete loss for what I would do next,” but acknowledges that his decision to give up on his college education was “for the magazine” (59). His intuition is that simply by coming to New York, he has placed himself in proximity to the powerful people who can give him the opportunities he seeks. The Canadian Review fosters Carter’s early love of print journalism and motivates him to seek editorial work in the city, and once there, he learns by doing, building connections along the way. His early editorial jobs expose him to the fast-paced professional environment of New York’s glossy magazines. Time, for example, “worked in ways that few other magazines did” as there was “a magical realism” to its operation (71). The publication had “a person for every conceivable need,” and thus covered the gamut of possible cultural, medical, and political topics (71). His self-deprecating descriptions of his job search infuse the memoir with wit and levity—reiterating the notion that Carter’s rise to editorial power was more haphazard than an outsider might suspect. While Carter’s eventual placement at Vanity Fair appears to be providential, Carter’s meandering depictions of his foray into New York print journalism suggest otherwise. He details his time at an array of other publications before Vanity Fair—a stylistic technique that enacts his unconventional journey into a successful and sustaining career.

Carter’s experiences at Time, Life, Spy, and The Observer capture The Media’s Impact on the Political and Cultural Narrative. At each of publication he worked for, Carter took part in an ongoing negotiation of influence between media and culture, as the magazines shaped the culture while simultaneously struggling to keep up with cultural and technological change. He noticed, for example, that Life was already being left behind in the television age, and he started Spy in part to address the perceived sluggishness of such legacy publications. Instead of representing New York culture in a serious, high-brow manner, Carter sought through Spy  to expose the humor and absurdity of it. While the Spy team “didn’t really know any of the people [they] were writing about,” Carter quickly discovered how much reach and pull they had on New Yorkers at the time (particularly those of a certain celebrity and status). Spy was influential enough that real-estate mogul and future US president Donald Trump felt the need to push back against its jibes at his “small hands”—an insult that appeared to still rankle him on the campaign trail as late as 2016. Carter even goes so far as to hold that his first Trump article inspired Trump’s bestselling business handbook The Art of the Deal, which prompted The Apprentice, which helped to cement the public image of Trump as a brilliant businessman, smoothing his path to the presidency. This anecdote underscores the notion that even in its earliest analogue forms, media has the power to dictate how a culture understands itself.

Carter’s detailed descriptions of his time at Spy and The Observer also underscore his inherently bold, ostentatious approach to editing. Carter’s tone is consistently self-deprecating, but he never masks his early successes. At Spy, he launched out on his own and established himself in the historically gate-kept upper echelon of New York life. With The Observer, he gave up a job that he loved (leaving Spy) and took on the seemingly impossible task of revitalizing a sleepy newspaper with no readership. In highlighting these risks, Carter suggests that he was ahead of the cultural curve and thus a visionary in his own right. By including these experiences on the page, Carter formally captures how his more “small time” jobs ushered him towards his high-powered position at Vanity Fair—a job that he holds he was reluctant to take at the time. These anecdotal sequences also imply that success, celebrity, and power don’t always come to a person in a traditional manner. For Carter, he took chances and found himself in a position that would give him more cultural influence and reach than he ever could have imagined when he came to New York with no money in the late 1970s.