Graydon Carter was born in 1949 in Toronto. A journalist and magazine editor, he was the editor-in-chief of the American edition of Vanity Fair between 1992 and 2017. Carter was inducted into the Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame in 2014.
What’s your earliest memory?
Playing with my Fleischmann-HO electric train in Europe when I was really young.
Who are your heroes?
In childhood? Bugs Bunny. As an adult? It’s still Bugs. There is nobody cooler under pressure. Chuck Jones, who helped create Looney Tunes, used to say most men thought they were like Bugs, but the truth of the matter was they came closer to Daffy Duck.
What book last changed your thinking?
It was Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, which I read a few years back. The fact is, I don’t read any more to really learn about the current world. I look to escape it. I probably read 60 or 70 books a year. Lots of biographies. And a good number of what I call warm-weather mysteries – that is to say, ones set in Italy, Spain or France.
In which time and place, other than your own, would you like to live?
The mid-Thirties in New York, Los Angeles, London or Paris. It’s incredible that a period that produced the greatest eras in terms of film, books, music, magazines, cars, clothes, architecture and general design, was bookended by the two most devastating wars in history.
What would be your Mastermind specialist subject?
Canadian hockey stars from the Fifties. And cars from the Thirties to the Seventies.
What TV show could you not live without?
The Phil Silvers Show also known as Sgt Bilko, a half-hour comedy starring Phil Silvers that ran in the Fifties and Sixties. I have DVDs of all the episodes and watch them constantly.
What political figure do you look up to?
I’d have to say Winston Churchill.
Who would paint your portrait?
Somebody named David. Either Hockney or Downton.
What’s your theme tune?
George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
It was a piece of advice I received from the great journalist David Halberstam: wish your friends success. There’s a lot of it to go round. And yes, I follow it religiously.
What’s currently bugging you?
You have to ask? It’s the American president.
What single thing would make your life better?
A Gulfstream. And one of those Turkish men’s hair treatments.
When were you happiest?
The year I arrived in New York in the late Seventies, and then 2017 – the year I left Vanity Fair and settled in the south of France. In the first instance, it was sheer, youthful exuberance in getting to the city of my dreams. In the second, it was an older desire to get some rest and reset my clock.
In another life, what job might you have chosen?
I would have been a stay-at-home dad. I can iron like a French laundry.
Are we all doomed?
Not all. But some. I’m thinking Washington DC right now. And I do hope they know who they are.
Graydon Carter’s “When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines” is published by Grove Press UK
[See also: The West is bored to death]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 10 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Special 2025