When the Going Was Good, page 15
“Do you know how many animals had to die for you to wear that coat?” one of the protesters yelled at her.
She stopped, turned, planted her feet on the pavement, and shouted, “Shut up! Do you know how many animals I had to fuck to get this coat?”
It was hard not to admire this woman.
Everybody at Vanity Fair had an assistant. All the deputy and senior editors. The photo editor. The art director. The fashion editor. At Condé Nast, there were interest-free loans to buy houses or apartments. Even the moving costs were covered by the company. Cynthia and I desperately needed a bigger place for our growing family—in a short time, with the addition of our daughter, Bronwen, there were now four kids—and so we bought an apartment in the Dakota. Like so many New Yorkers, I had always been entranced by the building. It loomed large in both old New York history and the city’s contemporary culture. Much of the fascination was due to the people who had lived there—not just John Lennon and Yoko Ono, but also Leonard Bernstein, Lauren Bacall, Jack Lemmon, and, in the 1950s, Boris Karloff. Can you imagine being a kid there on Halloween and knocking on his door? It was, and is, a fortresslike anchor at the corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West that had been designed by Henry Hardenbergh, who was also the architect of the Waldorf Hotel and the Astoria Hotel, which were at one point combined to form the Waldorf Astoria and then torn down in the 1920s to make way for the Empire State Building.
The architect Basil Walter came in to design the millwork and oversee the renovation. We filled it with old pieces from our parents and French flea market finds. At Thanksgiving, we’d take the kids up to the roof to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. And for the first time, I had an office at home. It was small and windowless, but it was mine, all mine—away from the hectic, glorious antics of four children. I papered the walls with 1940s ordnance survey maps and hung from the ceiling a huge model of a DC-3 that I had bought at a flea market in Connecticut. It’s where I could think and edit and plot out the next issues.
* * *
It took a while to adjust to the job. I remember, early on, the first Annie Leibovitz cover shoot I went to. There might have been about thirty people milling around the studio. There was a stretch of folding tables end to end, groaning with food. I thought, Who eats this sort of food before getting their picture taken? I discovered that it was for the crew. I went back and saw that the food budget was more money than we’d spent on all the editorial content for an entire issue of Spy. There was one issue of the magazine when we were running low on money and Kurt and I wrote about half the issue under pseudonyms. (P. G. Wodehouse had done the same thing at the old Vanity Fair. He’d written so many articles for one issue that Crowninshield said he couldn’t have three Wodehouse bylines and asked him to come up with another name. Wodehouse came up with C. P. West, which came from Central Park West, where his apartment was.) After witnessing the catering extravaganza of Annie’s shoot, I returned to the office and said to Chris, “Look, they can live like us at the office, they can order in, they can order pizzas like we do on late nights.”
About halfway through my tenure at Vanity Fair, I bumped into Susan Morrison on our floor. Susan had gone from being our stalwart deputy editor at Spy to a brief stint following me as the editor of The Observer and had then landed as an editor at The New Yorker, a floor below. I asked her if she was visiting Bruce Handy, an editor at Vanity Fair and a colleague from our days together at Spy.
“No,” she said, “I’ve come for the eyebrow lady.”
“What do you mean, the eyebrow lady?”
“The eyebrow lady. The one who comes every month to do everyone’s eyebrows. She’s the best in the city. I’ll show you.”
We walked through the office down to the photo department. The eyebrow lady, Maribeth Madron, had set up base camp in one of the offices, with the tools of her trade neatly organized on a desk. And there was a line of about a half dozen staff members chatting and waiting their turn. I walked away dumbfounded.
I went to see Chris.
“Chris, do you know there’s an eyebrow lady on the floor? And apparently she comes every month or so.”
Chris gave me the sort of look you’d give someone who just noticed that the bathrooms had running water.
“Maribeth’s the best in the city.”
“Yes, yes, so I’ve heard. But how long has this been going on?”
Chris thought for a moment and said, “Oh, I don’t know. Twenty years?”
This, in its essence, was Vanity Fair. Younger people would never understand the expense-account stories of the time, because that all disappeared with the Great Recession, in 2008. But at Vanity Fair in those early days, anyone on the editorial floor could take out pretty much any amount of reasonable cash just by signing a chit. Aimée had perfected the expense-account system. She figured out early that the accountants budgeted your expenses based on what you spent the previous year. This meant that what you needed to do was set a high bar early and build on a large amount of expenses. And I was fine with this. I wanted my editors out in the field, meeting with writers and bringing in ideas. The last thing I wanted was to have editors eating at their desks.
* * *
As flush as the operation was, I knew I had to change the culture at Vanity Fair if I was to survive and perhaps thrive. Both socially and journalistically. I edited every single word that went into the magazine—and continued to do so for the next quarter century. At the beginning, I wanted to change the voice, which mostly meant cleansing the florid baroqueness of the language. In the Vanity Fair I inherited, a restaurant wasn’t a restaurant, it was a “boîte.” A book wasn’t a book, it was a “tome.” A party wasn’t a party, it was a “fete.” People didn’t say something funny, they “chortled” or “quipped.” I issued a list of words henceforth banned from Vanity Fair copy. Out went words like abode, opine, plethora, and passed away (for died). Out went glitzy, wannabe, and even celebrity. Out went chops (for acting abilities), donned (as in put on), A-list, boasted (as in had or featured), coiffed, eatery (for restaurant), flat (for apartment), flick (for movie), fuck (okay in a quote, but not with regard to the actual sex act), honcho, hooker, schlep (as in to lug something somewhere), scribe (as in writer), and Tinseltown. All found their way into the copyedit boneyard.
I also had to make the culture less poisonous—because poisonous it most surely was. You could feel the venom in the corridors. Changing this certainly wasn’t easy, but gradually, Chris and Aimée and I tried to soften the office atmosphere. I wanted to take it from the viperish nest it had been and make it a warmer, more collaborative place. About two years in, I came to the somewhat belated conclusion that the animus came from four offices—all of which were filled with leftovers from the ancien régime.
There was Marina Schiano, the style director or, as her masthead title had it, creative style director, which I always found funny. Surely style director should have implied a certain amount of creativity. She had been a muse for Yves Saint Laurent in her younger days. The men in the art department found her exotic. I had trouble getting over her bitter attitude toward just about anyone in her orbit. She once said to me that Franca Sozzani, then the editor of Italian Vogue and one of the more gentle, welcoming members of the Newhouse tribe, was “one of my best friends. But she is a pig!” Marina couldn’t stand me, and try as I might, I couldn’t get her around to my way of thinking. She was paid upward of $350,000 to do the styling for eight magazine covers per year. I was told by somebody on the staff that one of her duties during Tina Brown’s reign was apparently to show up at her apartment and help style her clothes for the day. I wasn’t sure whether that was true or not, but I had been dressing myself in the mornings since I moved out of shorts and had no real need for this service.
Then there was Sarah Giles, an import from London and someone the new Vanity Fair hands like Aimée and Matt believed was a plant, left behind to shower dinner-party mates with tales of our incompetence. Her parents were Lady Kitty Giles and Frank Giles, of “Hitler Diaries” infamy. Sarah didn’t really have a function at Vanity Fair, as far as we could tell. She had had the reputation of being an effective story fixer—although I think it might have been Sarah who told me this. To everyone’s amusement, she did have a pet rat, named Ratty. What her purpose was at that point, aside from delivering dispatches about my inadequacies around town and protecting her friends in the magazine’s pages, escaped me.
Michael Caruso was a senior editor who bristled at every edit I made to his copy. There were a number of stories in Page Six during this period pitting him against me, and in all of them he came out as the white-hat savior of journalism and me as something far less than that. He once said to me that he’d never had a meal at a restaurant in the past ten years that he didn’t order off the menu. My back started getting itchy when I heard that.
And finally there was Charles Churchward, the art director. He was certainly talented. But in the end, he struck me as the sort of person who worked better with a stiletto pinned to his neck. My brand of attempted collegiality, for lack of a better word, just never gelled with Charles. He left of his own volition and decamped to the Vogue floor, where he worked for the next decade or more.
The first three—Schiano, Giles, and Caruso—I let go all the same week. It was more people than I had fired in my life up to that point. I simply told them that this wasn’t working for me and that I thought it was time for them to spread their wings elsewhere.
I said to each of them, “The trouble is, you’ve confused politeness for weakness.” Caruso was in a state of disbelief. He said, “You’ve got to be joking.”
I said, “No, not joking at all.”
I was surprised by the result of the purge. Rather than have the rest of the office in an uproar, the staff was quietly thrilled with what I had done. And despite the fact that I am, at heart, a beta male, this moved me, at least in some eyes, closer into the alpha category.
As far as the office environment went, it was like pulling open the curtains at Miss Havisham’s. Everything seemed sunnier. I may have actually developed a spring in my step. People started working with each other in a noncombative manner. Interoffice memos were being signed off with an unheard-of “Thank you.” I began to bring Cynthia and the kids into the office. Things had changed. Even rumors of my imminent sacking began to die down, helped very much by a piece the columnist Liz Smith wrote after a lunch with Si Newhouse, saying, in effect, Graydon’s not going anywhere.
At Condé Nast, the top editors of the various publications called themselves “editor in chief” on their mastheads. My feeling was that this was a faintly ridiculous title. I went with “editor”—aside from David Remnick when he took over The New Yorker, the only one in the company to do so.
One major advantage in these rocky early days was that there was no budget at all—that is to say, the budget had no ceiling. I could send anybody anywhere for as long as I wanted. The cost and the expenses involved were sometimes enormous. One article, about the near collapse of Lloyd’s, the London insurance market, on which there will be more later, may have been the most expensive per word magazine story ever written. And we never published it. I had the excitement, as an editor, of being able to commission the best working writers and photographers anywhere, and to offer them exclusive contracts.
* * *
The first person I reached out to with my new checkbook was Christopher Hitchens—who had so politely turned me down when we were launching Spy. I first met him in the 1980s at a party in Greenwich Village, when he was writing for The Nation and was then known mostly to the tribal Left. Christopher was among the last great liberal public intellectuals, but he was one with wit and charm—which made him much more palatable to people in the middle and even to conservatives. By the time I got to Vanity Fair, he was writing for Lewis Lapham at Harper’s. I called Christopher, and with Si’s checkbook in hand, got him to sign on. Christopher and I went to Elaine’s that night to celebrate and, God, if we didn’t bump into Lewis—the same Lewis who had treated me so generously when I first came to New York. Christopher told him that he was going to be leaving Harper’s to work at Vanity Fair. Lewis handled the news with supreme elegance. I think he realized that it would be better for Christopher to be introduced to the much wider audience Vanity Fair would offer. We sat down and had a drink. Well, many drinks.
Christopher was to write a column each month as well as articles and profiles. His well-calibrated but unflagging intake of alcohol and nicotine produced nothing but swift and faultless prose, even after lunches or dinners where others would be hors de combat. Dinner was a bacchanal of anecdote and erudition, recitations from Flashman and Wodehouse giving way to declamations from Gibbon and Homer. He was infinitely funny, better company than just about anyone. As for the writing and drinking, I remember going to lunch at La Goulue when Aimée and I were at The Observer. Christopher had a couple of scotches before the starter, a couple glasses of wine with the main course, and then a brandy to wash things down afterward. Back at the Observer offices, we plunked him down in front of a typewriter and he banged out a review of a thousand words of near perfection in less than an hour.
I never saw Christopher drunk but occasionally I witnessed the physical effects of such attrition on his system, a pointer to his early death. He wrote about the subject during his book tour for God Is Not Great. Hitchens even smoked in the shower, arm extended beyond the curtain, and claimed that this was where he’d come up with the book’s title. “Fueled with scotch and above all with nicotine—an Irish newspaper described me in this period as taking ‘rare oxygen breaks’—I managed a series of epic eight-day weeks on the road, and the grand memory of it will always linger. Except that I became abruptly and horribly convinced that there would be no fond memory upon which to dwell. A voice began to speak insistently inside my skull: ‘You aren’t going to live to spend a dime of these royalties.’ ”
One year we invited Christopher to an annual Vanity Fair gathering for the advertising sales staff at the PGA National Resort in Palm Beach. The off-site get-together was ostensibly to get the business side charged up for the sales season ahead. Editors had to attend and would bring along a few of the writers to liven things up. The editor’s job was to give a rough road map of the year ahead, editorially. I’m sure there were editors at some Condé Nast titles who knew exactly what was coming up from month to month. I was not so blessed. Given that Vanity Fair reacted to the news, and that news in the future hadn’t yet happened, it was almost impossible to explain in detail what we had in store for the next year. I would nevertheless stumble my way through an exciting but largely fictitious plan for the year and then turn the podium over to one of my colleagues.
There was a lot of drinking in the evening. Christopher came, and as the night poured on, someone at the hotel put on calypso music and brought out a limbo pole. It all went downhill from there. The next morning, as we were checking out, a lovely young woman from the hotel came to me and asked if Mr. Hitchens was part of our party. I told her that indeed he was. She brought me over to a window that looked out on the first tee. Young, fit men were walking around in their golf finery, waiting to tee off, and there, leaning on the ball washer, was Christopher, still in the wrinkled off-white linen suit from the night before, heaving up everything he had consumed at dinner. I went over and gingerly escorted him off the course.
The great cause of Christopher’s life as a writer, he said, was “to oppose manmade delusions, the ‘mind-forged manacles,’ as Blake calls them, of superstition and religious totalitarianism.” He originated “Hitchens’s razor”—a proposition to go along with Occam’s: “That which can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” When Christopher arrived at Vanity Fair, he had to be looked after, as did all the writers. My philosophy has always been that if you take care of the talent, so to speak—the writers, the photographers, the illustrators—you’ll get better work out of them than if you threaten or browbeat them. So I set Christopher up with Aimée. She became his editor and then one of his closest friends up until the day he died.
* * *
Writing is a tough business—especially the sort of detailed, rigorous, long-form narrative journalism that Vanity Fair came to be known for. And this sort of reportage has its own unique set of demands. Vanity Fair writers were sent to the far corners of the earth to report. They would leave their families for weeks or months at a time and return home and on deadline had to assemble all the reporting and write a good tale—almost like a condensed book. Every one of their facts then had to be backed up by the researcher—or researchers—checking the article. And then the story had to be reviewed by the legal editor. Sometimes this process, from idea to final copy, would take three or four months. Stories that ran as long as seventeen thousand or twenty thousand words might take even longer.
If there is a scoop in a newspaper story, it’s often in the first sentence. If there is a scoop in a weekly magazine story, it’s generally in the first paragraph. But in a long-form magazine piece, the scoop could be in the seventeenth paragraph. This is because the newsbreak has to take its place within the thread of the narrative. I believe that all great magazine stories must have a combination of the following elements: narrative (that is to say, a beginning, a middle, and an end), access (to the principals, or those on the immediate periphery of the principals), conflict (always a welcome addition), and disclosure (moving the scholarship on the topic at hand along—in other words, new information). You can get by with three of these necessities. But with four, you have a great chance at producing a memorable work of journalism. A perfect Vanity Fair piece would slip in somewhere between the news reports on a particular story and the inevitable book on it. Our articles were bolstered by on-the-spot reporting—we flew correspondents to wherever they needed to be—and by narrative skill and length. By the time we got to a story, there would often not only be a beginning and a middle but also, blessedly, an end. The arc of the tale was set.
