How Vanity Fair put Graydon Carter in his Place

Faint praise is one way of damning something. Another is to throw a knowing glance at the something before shifting one's fanning gaze elsewhere, fast. As if to say, "Next!" This latter course has been adopted by the April 2025 edition of Vanity Fair, and the 'something' is Graydon Carter's memoirs, When the Going was Good, about his time as editor of that magazine - all of 25 years.

VF's fanning gaze takes the form of  a tiny capsule nod to the fact of this book's existence, a review-ette no bigger than a postage stamp. Oh here it is...

Given Carter's eminence - among other things, presiding over the sensational Caitlyn Jenner cover marking the transition of Olympic gold medal-winning decathelete Bruce to the sisterhood - one might think that the book worthy of a longer review and/or an extract and/or an interview. It was not meant to be. There was the chance to mire the readership in celebrity goss and relive VF's glory days! A chance to celebrate its best editor, arguably. Current editor Radhika Jones plainly decided - or it was decided elsewhere - that the book should not experience an excess of enthusiasm. On the other hand, to ignore it altogether would be less than elegant. After all, one of the reasons why statuesque intellectual Radhika holds her post is because Graydon (and Tina Brown before him) made the magazine such a success in the first place. Kerching, poppet. 

The review-ette has all the hallmarks of an amateurish nepo-intern job. Have you spotted its tautology? Do write in. So, what's going on? We now turn to last week's The Sunday Times Magazine for likely backstories and Hadley Freeman's breathless interview with Graydon. 

Hadley shows some gusto as a writer, and what she lacks in exquisiteness of style is plainly over-compensated for by an abundance of gall (or chutzpah). This latter goes far in mainstream journalism. Pushy-push push. AI-subs can tidy up the outpourings. Alas, Hadley had to fly steerage London to New York to meet Carter, a revelation that plainly amuses him. He flew Concorde in his pomp.

The interview is quite revealing. First we learn that he thinks not too affectionately of American Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, his boss at Condé Nast as editorial director in the last eight years of his editorship. We discern a long-standing froideur between the legends. He tells Hadley: "It's funny, Anna's job title has gotten longer as Condé Nast has gotten smaller. She's like one of those Ruritanian princes". He also shares that Anna has the vulgar habit of terminating a restaurant meal as soon as she is done, leaving "dinner-mates...mid-bite". Anna was always "frosty" and hints he could have said so much more. While Anna will not have known what Graydon had say to Hadley, we may suppose she got wind of the book's contents - the "cheeky anecdotes" about her - and it was editorially intuited that a minimal reception was in order. Fanning gaze!

We then come to Radhika and her VF - a gelding compared to Graydon's big bollocks stallion. Hadley finds the gelding "less fun", and here I would agree. The layouts are sophomorically distracting and the features candy crush toothless, but for the recent profile of the Sussexes which found its courage in running with the media pack and slagging the Montecito royals off. Hadley tells Carter that she finds Radhika's covers "dull" to which he responds, "You can say that, I never could". A good House of Cards line of non-self-incriminatory agreement. He looks happy to note that today's VF has fewer ads.  

Personally, I would have run a long extract from Graydon's book and relished the indiscretions. Get dirty. I mean, who cares? But Radhika's VF is just nice. And if it does get mean, it looks over its shoulder first.