Print magazines today are editorial starvelings. Journalism is among the most regretted college majors. Carter often had 400-page issues, with 140 pages of editorial to fill. In those pre-internet days, his staffers lived well. They expensed meals and flowers and hotel rooms and long black cars. (“Fashion is about long black cars when you need them,” the Harper’s Bazaar editor Liz Tilberis once commented.) Nearly everyone had a cheerful, attractive and often well-born assistant or two. Interest-free loans and car leases could be had. Employees could take out cash by signing a chit. An eyebrow lady came around to perform work for women who desired it. Carter lived better than the rest. His passport photo was taken by Annie Leibowitz.
Carter would sit down after every issue and write a thank-you note to each writer, photographer and advertiser. The former rebel had taken over the empire. Initially he was hard to seat at dinner parties, he writes, because he’d made fearsome enemies at Spy. He managed to smooth ruffled feathers. He became a canny observer of dinner parties, in fact, noting that in Los Angeles “husbands and wives sit together. In New York, husbands and wives sit at the same table but not together. In Europe, husbands and wives sit at different tables — all the better, apparently, for post-dinner gossip picked up during the meal.”
Carter offers detailed and mostly fond portraits of figures such as Newhouse, an ideal publisher in that he was generous and disinclined to meddle; the Hollywood superagent Sue Mengers, who helped Carter achieve the level of Californication he needed to host Vanity Fair’s annual Oscar’s parties; and the writer Dominick Dunne, who covered the blockbuster trials of the 1990s, including O.J.’s and the Menendez brothers’, for the magazine.
Less fond is his portrait of Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, who he suggests helped push him out of Condé Nast in 2017. Her efforts to seem intimidating were comical, he writes. He mocks her habit of wearing sunglasses indoors and of eating her meals (“steak, rare”) with the speedy efficiency of a McKinsey consultant. He refers to her Met Galas as close to but “not quite on the level of a protection racket,” in that advertisers are forced to buy tables for $250,000 or more — or else. He could almost “smell the fear” in her offices. Wintour tended to greet Carter either like a long-lost friend or like the car attendant, he writes.
Old messes are tidied up. He pushes back, for example, against the idea that Vanity Fair deliberately went easy on Jeffrey Epstein in a 2003 profile. There is not a great deal about Carter’s marriages (three) or children (five) in this memoir. He is proud that he reserved his evenings for them, he says. He does not attempt to reconcile this comment with the fact that, being a varsity socializer, he appears to be out every night.