49 pages • 1-hour read
When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines
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Chapters 9-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “My Advanced Vanity Fair Education”
Carter describes the surprising differences between working at Vanity Fair and working at his previous publications. There was a receptionist and an elevator, and he had two assistants. He also quickly learned about expense accounts. His colleagues taught him how to use the accounts to his advantage, which was something of an artform in the community. Carter appreciated this “amenity,” as he and Cynthia were a single-income household and had several children. He and his colleagues could eat fancy lunches and charge it all to the company. He admits that this is something he missed after the post 2008 economic crash, when companies could no longer afford such luxuries.
In his first year at Vanity Fair, Carter worked to change the poisonous culture at the magazine. He and his colleagues from former publications tried to model a more congenial dynamic. He also had to fire members of “the old guard.” Directors or editors like Sarah Giles, Marina Schiano, and Michael Caruso were especially toxic. Carter worried about letting them go but quickly realized that the rest of the team was negatively impacted by them, too. Once they were gone, the company morale improved.
Carter also brought on new editors and writers. Most notably, he asked Christopher Hitchens to work with him. He describes Hitchens’s now iconic writing style and left-leaning politics. He holds that Christopher was one of the best contributors to Vanity Fair.
Carter describes the difficult ordeal of writing. He explains how he ran Vanity Fair, making changes to specifically advantage the writers. For example, he would pay a writer in full even if they had to pull their story (eliminating “kill fees” altogether). He lists all of the best writers he brought on and lauds their hard work.
Another important Vanity Fair contributor was Dominick (Nick) Dunne. Nick is now best known for his reportage on the Menendez brothers’ trial and the O.J. Simpson trial.
Carter describes the process of choosing a cover for the magazine. In that era, they relied on newsstand sales to sell issues. However, selecting a cover that would sell wasn’t always easy. He had to anticipate readers’ desires. One of Carter’s best-selling covers showed Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s baby in 2006. He still doesn’t understand the hype but acknowledges what a big issue it was for him.
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Great Billionaire Proprietor”
Carter describes Si Newhouse’s work in the magazine industry, praising Newhouse’s foresight and patience. Newhouse spent decades waiting for The New Yorker to make a profit. The same was true with Vanity Fair—he would accept the losses until Carter made it profitable again. Si’s brother Donald Newhouse was also in publishing—as he had his own part in the family business—and was a notable figure in the industry. However, Carter saw Si as the best magazine proprietor. Although Si was attentive to their advertisers, he wasn’t overbearing with Vanity Fair. He cultivated other passions outside the magazine, including art collecting.
Carter recalls the one-on-one time he spent with Si over the years. Despite their positive relationship, Carter still feared that Si would let him go. However, Si showed no signs that he doubted Carter’s abilities. There were only a few times when Si pushed back on Carter’s ideas. Once, Carter did an exposing piece on Roy Cohn, a powerful New York lawyer best known as Donald Trump’s mentor and “fixer”—and later discovered that Cohn was Si’s childhood friend. Si confronted Carter but later dropped the issue. Another disagreement arose “over the International Best-Dressed List” (185). Carter wanted it in Vanity Fair, but Si thought it should go to Vogue. Another time, Si got upset with Carter for writing pieces against the war in Iraq; he finally backed down, and Carter continued publishing the op-eds.
Chapter 11 Summary: “A Monthly Magazine in a Daily World”
Carter reflects on Vanity Fair’s uncommon editorial culture. He and his team rarely had proper meetings. Instead, they had a board where they’d propose and plan new pieces. Some stories stayed on the board for weeks or months. One piece stayed for years. Carter finally published it when he retired in 2017, thrilling the writer.
Carter compares and contrasts the experience of putting out a magazine each month to publishing a newspaper each day. Because Vanity Fair was a monthly, Carter wanted each issue to be special. They had to be careful about their reportage, too, because of their delayed response to current events. They were meticulous about fact-checking, and Carter read, reviewed, and edited every section before it went to press. He had a great team of editors, too. He also remarks on his assistants’ remarkable talent and help, specifically lauding Aimée Bell’s work.
Carter describes the role of fixers abroad—or intermediary editors meant to help his traveling writers when they were working on a story overseas. One fixer he worked with in London was Henry Porter. He had a big personality and could be challenging to work with. Carter also describes his attempts to work with the fashion designer and socialite Daphne Guinness as a contributing editor and the conflicts they encountered.
Chapter 12 Summary: “A Charm Offensive and the Oscar Party”
Carter describes the first time he attended the Oscars. It was the early 1980s, and he was working for Time. He attended Irving Lazar’s after-party and was taken by the glamour of the event. After Irving’s death, Carter explored the idea of hosting a Vanity Fair Oscars party. It was 1993 and he felt that “Hollywood had turned its back on one of its trading assets: glamour” (216). He and his team began to seek out venues and ideas for the event. Carter worked closely with his public relations director Beth Kseniak on this project, too.
Carter acknowledges that he wasn’t popular when he launched the Oscars party. However, his relationships with Hollywood figures like Wendy Stark, Ray Stark, and Sue Mengers helped. Sue, with her vibrant personality, was particularly influential in ushering Carter into this world. As Hollywood’s superagent, Sue was outspoken and talented and liked being in the spotlight. She could also be tiring to be around. One time, Sue insisted that Carter and social commentator Fran Lebowitz (Carter’s close friend) attend Bryan Lourd’s pre-Oscars party. The friends agreed, but it was taxing to shepherd Sue around all night.
Carter also worked with notable Hollywood manager Sandy Gallin when he was conceptualizing the Vanity Fair Oscars party. He recalls a meeting they had where Sandy was getting a pedicure while they were talking. Meanwhile, Sandy was trying to get someone on the phone. He finally revealed that Michael Jackson wanted a television special that included Liza Minnelli, Liz Taylor, and the Queen of England. He was trying to contact the Queen.
Chapters 9-12 Analysis
Carter’s depictions of his gradual orientation to Vanity Fair further his explorations of The Entanglement of Success, Celebrity, and Power. At this juncture of the memoir (and thus of Carter’s vocational success tale), Carter is still casting himself as a novice who is attempting to make sense of the editorial world. He remarks that moving from Spy to The Observer to Vanity Fair “was like moving from a youth hostel to a five-star hotel” (151). This metaphor reiterates Carter’s overarching notion that he didn’t pursue success and power in a traditional manner—rather he happened upon it. His story is not therefore a representation of the traditional American Dream model, where the individual intentionally works hard to secure wealth and power. Carter’s self-deprecating style indirectly critiques this American myth. By all accounts, he lived a “normal” childhood. He was an average person and student. He didn’t earn a college degree (a detail that also hints at the degree to which the economic and cultural landscape has changed since Carter’s mid-century rise) and, most notably, he was Canadian. Carter reiterates these points throughout his memoir to suggest that the individual can realize their dreams even before formulating them.
In Chapters 9-12, Carter particularly focuses on how his relationships with writers, editors, agents, celebrities, and socialites allowed him to achieve success and establish a reputation in the industry. For Carter, cultivating fruitful relationships wasn’t one-sided. Rather, Carter describes his work to foster positive connections with his colleagues (no matter their status or position) and to foster connections with more notable figures in New York and Hollywood. For example, Carter remarks on his decision to never pay a kill fee. He ended this practice because, he claims, “I had been a writer in my recent, previous life, and I knew just how brutal the whole ordeal was and how most in the trade lived from assignment fee to assignment fee” (163). This passage allows Carter to portray himself as empathetic, and it underscores the notion that relationships are reciprocal: By cultivating good relationships with some of the best writers of his era, Carter raised Vanity Fair’s cultural profile. Carter also cultivates relationships with those above him in the industry hierarchy. He details the importance of his relationship with Si Newhouse, owner and publisher of the Condé Nast family of magazines that includes Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and many others. A figurehead in the magazine world, Si gave Carter his trust and treated him with respect. Their relationship helped Carter to grow, and Newhouse’s investment in Carter in turn inspired Carter to invest in younger and less established writers and editors. “Success,” he remarks in Chapter 12, is “built on personal relationships” (223). This line underscores the notion that no one achieves anything without the help of others.
Carter claims that his proclivity for creating connections led to the success of the Vanity Fair Oscars party—an event that ushered him into a new world of celebrity, power, and money. Carter devotes the majority of Chapter 12 to describing his foray into Los Angeles celebrity culture and the Hollywood industry. He includes anecdotes with a humorous mood meant to animate his recollections. (Two examples include his story about attending elite parties with talent agent Sue Mengers and his story about taking a meeting with film producer Sandy Gallin while he was trying to contact England’s Queen Elizabeth.) These anecdotes underscore the human aspect of Carter’s work. They also add levity to his overarching account, while their subtext reiterates Carter’s notion that success is often inextricable from celebrity and power. In order for him to do well in the magazine business, he had to make connections with wealthy, famous, and often charismatic figures he otherwise wouldn’t have known.
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