Canada Files | Graydon Carter | Season 2021

♪ >> Hello.

Thanks for joining us on another edition of Canada Files .

I'm Jim Deeks.

As a lifelong magazine reader, I'm particularly pleased to have Graydon Carter as our guest on this episode.

Born in Toronto and raised in Ottawa, Graydon has been a magazine founder, editor and writer for his entire career.

Most notably as the editor of the wildly popular Vanity Fair , for roughly 25 years until 2017.

Instead of retiring then, he launched a brand-new, weekly on-line magazine called Air Mail .

which we will talk about.

>> Graydon, thanks for joining us on Canada Files .

>> Very nice to be here.

>> Let's start at the beginning.

Tell us about your background in Canada before university.

As famous as you are, there's a lot of people that won't know much about your early years.

>> I grew up in Ottawa.

My father worked for the government.

My mother was a Sunday painter.

I grew up playing hockey and touch football.

I went to the University of Ottawa.

I noticed a bunch of young guys in an office there.

I poked my head in.

They were starting a magazine.

It was called Canadian Revue , a political literary magazine.

Ottawa is frozen for a good part of the year.

At least it was in those days.

My life was reading.

I read everything!

We subscribed to Esquire, Newsweek, Time and Life .

The thing about newspapers is they tell you about the events of the day.

Magazines tell you about worlds outside yours.

We subscribed to many New York-based magazines.

Much of what I dreamed that I might do came from magazines.

When I saw these two guys starting a magazine I asked if they could use some help.

They need help as an art director so I said I'll do that.

I'd painted a bit so I was the art director for awhile.

Then I became the co-editor.

It's funny.

I eventually got thrown out of school for skipping 90% of my classes because this became consuming.

I know you go to university to find out what you want to do in life.

And I did!

But in a very unorthodox way.

When they said there was simply no point in you continuing.

You have too many incompletes to ever graduate.

I left and worked full-time on this magazine.

Like all small magazines, it ran on the shoals of near bankruptcy.

We sold it to Saturday Night magazine.

Then I didn't have a job.

I was sharing a house in Gatineau with a friend of mine.

She noticed an ad for an editing program outside New York.

So I wrote them and went to this program.

They had brought in a lot of editors from New York.

Editors from Time, Saturday Review, Foreign Affairs,Harpers.

I got to meet all these editors at this program.

I wrote to them afterwards.

I came back a month after the course was over, for a number of interviews lined up.

In those days, you got off a plane from Canada on the tarmac, rather being airlifted into the airhub.

I didn't own a suit.

I had a Harris Tweed jacket, about a 1/2 inch thick.

I arrived in the middle of July, in New York.

The door opened in the plane.

I'd never felt heat like this in my life!

I had an interview with Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's that day.

I got a cab from the airport.

I had a small bag with me.

I was perspiring like Albert Brooks on Broadcast News .

I popped into the Sheraton Russell on lower Park Avenue..

The hotel is gone now.

I went to the men's room and sponged-bathed myself.

I was just drenched!

I went in for the interview with Lewis.

He said, "I'm really sorry.

We don't have a job for you."

"I gotta go somewhere but you should sit in front of the air conditioning and cool off."

My last interview that week was with Ray Cave, the editor of Time Magazine .

Time was then really the place to be.

It had a vast masthead.

I thought it would be a good place for me.

On that last day, I was offered a job.

I came back for my stuff, drove down to New York and started at Time .

It was a life-changing experience!

>> You've just answered my first four questions!

Thank you very much.

That was fantastic.

A very good brief history of Graydon Carter's early years.

Let's skip ahead.

You spent about five years ultimately at Time Life .

Then you and Kurt Andersen, and another partner, started Spy Magazine in 1986.

Were you and the other gentlemen just cynical young men?

Or did you actually see a good business opportunity with a satirical magazine?

>> We were both slightly cynical and really bad at business.

I'd spent five years at Time .

Then I went to Life Magazine .

I was able to get my work done in the first three hours of every week.

I would set up my office and Kurt would come up.

We'd work on a business plan.

He was at Time Magazine, a few floors below.

A friend, Tom Phillips, who worked at the Rothschild Bank, would come over.

He had the old-fashioned Macintosh, about this tall... which he would set up on my desk.

We would have meetings there for seven hours every day.

>> On the Life payroll!

>> On the Life payroll... on the editors and writers corridor.

We even got the printing facility in the building to print our prospectus for Spy .

I'd been in New York about eight years.

I knew enough and didn't care enough about burning bridges.

I was in my mid-30s.

It was a good time.

New York was exploding, having come out of a really bad recession.

There were a lot of characters with tons of money flowing.

It was like a vast, colourful circus.

So many of the magazines were lap dogs to this new class of rich New Yorkers.

We decided to go the other way.

We raised the money-- from the most established financial people...heirs from Coca Cola, Safeway supermarkets, EF Hutton, and Washington Post .

It was old money with a new idea.

>> Let's skip ahead because there's so much to cover after those years.

In 1992, you had left Spy.

You were invited to take over the editor's desk at Vanity Fair .

Was this best thing that happened to you in your life, at that point?

Or were you absolutely petrified at taking over such a huge opportunity with a major publication?

>> After I left, we sold Spy to Charles Saatchi, the advertising king in England and Johnny Pigozzi, an investor playboy around the world.

I left and worked on a newspaper.

I turned around the New York Observer, a slightly sleepy, upper Eastside newspaper.

I turned it into something people started to read!

I'd met Si a number of times before.

At one point, he wanted to buy Spy and foolishly we didn't sell it to him.

I knew Si as the proprietor ofCondé Nast which owns Vanity Fair, Vogue, The New Yorker .

He asked if I'd come by and see him.

I came by after work, wasn't sure what it was about.

I'd just picked up a fishing rod from Orvis.

Had shorts on.

He didn't care, he's a casual fellow.

I go to his apartment at the UN Towers.

We're making pleasant industry chitchat.

He said, "I've got two magazines for you."

I asked, "What do you mean?"

He said, "I've got The New Yorker and Vanity Fair .

Would you be interested in one of them?"

>> Are you kidding me?

>> Sure!

>> We had done nothing but make fun of Vanity Fair for the last five years at Spy.

I'd read The New Yorker my entire life.

So I said, " The New Yorker !"

He said, "Okay."

We agreed on a salary.

He said, "You can't tell anybody for two weeks."

So I worked on a plan of how to make subtle changes over 6, 9, and 18 months.

I could talk to my family about it but we had a codename for it, called The Pencils .

In case we were at a restaurant and anyone overheard us.

They wouldn't know what we were talking about.

This went on for two weeks.

The day it was to be announced, I get a call from Anna Wintour who says, "It's going to be the other magazine."

I said, "What do you mean?"

She said, "Si is going to offer you the other magazine."

"He's going to call you in a few minutes.

Act surprised."

Si calls later and offers me Vanity Fair .

I desperately needed the money.

I had three kids with a fourth on the way.

I never made a lot of money at Spy .

I didn't make any money at the New York Observer .

So I was very interested, "Yes, of course, I'll take this one."

I had to start the next Monday.

The staff hated me at first.

Because we had made fun of the magazine for 5 years.

The first two years at Vanity Fair were incredibly rocky.

Then it turned around!

I only fired three people in 25 years there.

I fired them all on the same day.

All of a sudden it was Miss Havisham .

The curtains open, the sunshine came in.

I felt safe to bring my children into the office.

I wouldn't let them in before because it was a poisonous, horrible atmosphere.

>> Did you have any sleepless nights knowing the magazine was going to hit the newsstands the next day and there might be a very harsh, questionable article about somebody?

And were you worried about the impact and possible lawsuits that might be coming against you or the magazine?

>> We had two major lawsuits, both of which were in London.

Which is the Liberia of libel actions.

Those I did not see coming.

I do remember when we figured out who Deep Throat was.

This was a story that took us 2.5 years of work.

I was leaving on my honeymoon.

We weren't 100% sure we had the story correct.

This was during the Bush Administration where, as a journalist, if you got a story wrong, you were in big trouble.

I could have called two people to double-check and finalize-- Carl Bernstein who was on our masthead, or Bob Woodward.

I figured if I called Carl, he'd call Bob.

If I called Bob, he'd jump the gun and put it in The Washington Post .

This is pre-internet.

We had a secret room to close this story.

We had one fact-checker and one copy editor on the story.

We had to photograph Mark Felt in secrecy.

We had to get it into the magazine, to the printer and ship it across the country.

Which took about 15 days once it left the printer.

You were praying that everybody would maintain this secrecy.

We tried not to make a big deal of it.

I went away on my honeymoon.

My wife and I were in the airport in Nassau, Bahamas on the way back.

I didn't have a cell phone in those days.

She got a call on her flip phone from the editor, who worked on the story, David Friendly.

He said, "We're releasing the Deep Throat story today."

I said, "OMG.

I completely forgot about this!"

He said, "I'll let you know what happens."

A delay with the plane, we're sitting in the terminal.

He called back, to say we've released it.

Woodward and Bernstein are making an announcement in half an hour.

I said, "I have to get on this plane in 20 minutes."

Boarding call started, people lined up and I kept delaying as long as possible until we got a call from NY.

I was praying the answer would be the one we wanted.

Just as we got to the gate, he calls, "Woodward and Bernstein just confirmed it was Deep Throat ."

That 40-minute period was as stressful as it got the whole time at Vanity Fair .

It was on the front page of every newspaper in the world the next day.

>> Was that the proudest story you ever ran for you personally?

>> There's a million stories-- it's funny, the things you remember.

A crazy story we did about people called plushies , furries People who liked to dress up in furry animal costumes.

Done by George Gurley, a really funny writer.

It was the nuttiest story I had ever read.

They have sex with these things on.

They meet each other at conventions-- dressed like Scoobie Doo, and large bunny rabbits.

If I had to name one story that I remember above all, of the 5,000 stories published at Vanity Fair , that would be it!

>> You spent 25 years as the editor of Vanity Fair .

Built a huge profile for yourself.

Why did you leave?

>> I lived through the golden age of magazines.

I think Vanity Fair was at the pinnacle.

My staff and I had the most ridiculously wonderful life.

We worked hard; we're all still friends.

It was a great 25-year run.

But it was exhausting for me by the end.

I started at 42 and I was done at 68.

I'd done everything at Vanity Fair .

There was nowhere I could take it to.

The magazine business was not in the greatest shape.

Vanity Fair was still hugely profitable.

I wanted to leave it on top.

I wanted a change!

Those jobs are fun but they are tough.

They take it out of you.

I was editor through eight presidents, ten editors of Time , five New York Times editors, or more.

It's a long time to be in one job.

>> One might have thought you would retire at that point.

But you rather quickly turned around and started Air Mail .

Let's talk about Air Mail .

It came out two years after you retired.

It's an online, subscription-only publication.

>> I don't know if you call it a publication.

>> We call it a digital weekly.

>> I have been a subscriber almost from the beginning.

I would say, and suspect Air Mail readers would agree, it seems you picked up where you left off from Vanity Fair .

The quality of articles is outstanding.

Is it a fair assessment to say it's an online version of Vanity Fair ?

>> Not the worst thing to say.

There's elements.

Three staff are from Spy Magazine, so elements of Spy .

I'm an old dog so I can't completely learn new tricks.

So elements of Vanity Fair , a certain world view but very international.

60% of the stories are from outside the US.

There was enough coverage of the Acela Corridor : Boston, New York, Washington.

I wasn't going to get wrapped up in the box score-keeping of what's was going on in Washington at the time.

We covered Trump.

I wrote a lot about Trump.

It was designed to survive a post-Trump era.

I think some publications will have trouble without Trump around.

He was good for the media business.

He provided copy.

Biden is a really competent administrator.

You don't check the paper in panic every morning.

You just check in to see what he's doing next.

He's like a refrigerator that works really well.

You appreciate it and it keeps your milk cold.

But you don't have to check it every 5 minutes.

>> One major difference is that Air Mail is weekly, and Vanity Fair is monthly.

Was it a big adjustment for you to go from a monthly publication to a more frantic schedule of putting together a publication every week?

>> This may surprise people not in the magazine business.

A monthly is much tougher than a weekly.

A weekly, you reflect a lot on what happened the week before.

A certain segment of your stories are quite current.

A monthly: Sports Illustrated, Vanity Fair or Cosmopolitan, is not about the month that just happened.

It's about a world view and stories you may take 3 months to 2.5 years to finish.

You make sure other people don't cover it to death.

by the time you come out.

You think it will be a story that will have some currency three months after you came up with the idea.

There's no closing schedule with a monthly.

I never knew what I was supposed to do on any given day.

It was really well-managed but not by me.

With a weekly, I know exactly what I have to do on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.

There's something quite orderly about this.

It hass given me better precision in my life.

>> The other difference is Air Mail is digital only.

Vanity Fair is print.

Is Air Mail the future of magazines?

Will there be any print publications in 10 years?

>> It's the way forward.

Magazines will be here forever.

I can't imagine going to a magazine news shop in NY.

There's no newsstands left in NY.

They're basically gone.

There used to be one in every single office building.

Now they sell Lotto tickets, flip flops and chewing gum.

We were in One World Trade Center thatCondé Nastmoved to-- they didn't have a newsstand!

The only tenant was a magazine company!

A digital weekly is brilliant.

It's like home delivery.

You press a button.

It goes around the world.

We don't have truckers or printers We can do something fast, slow.

You can design it beautifully.

We do it with 35 staff members.

Air Mail is put together with half the staff from Vanity Fair .

NVanity Fairfact-checking, copy editing, photo research, etc.

Old fashioned values with new-fashioned delivery system.

It could easily be printed.

I would never print something on a weekly, or monthly basis again.

>> Who is the most interesting celebrity-- doesn't have to be a movie star, that we would all know that you've associated with.

>> One person who became a friend of mine was Artie Shaw.

He was the greatest clarinetist of the world in 1930s and 40s.

I met him in his eighties.

He lived to almost 100.

I asked the same question in my introduction for a book onThe Hotel du Cap.

I asked the staff who was their favourite guest.

Every single person said the same thing: Robert De Niro.

That would be my response as well.

Bob De Niro is one of the more interesting finest people I've ever met in the job.

>> Has being Canadian had any influence: positive or negative?

Or point of difference in your career in how you approached being an editor?

>> Funny that most of the editors in NY-- I can only speak for editors, have come from outside NY.

There are very few locally-born NY editors of note.

Canada is in a unique position.

You're right up against the US.

Canadians are always looking at the window.

The Americans look like they're always having more fun-- slimmer waist lines, and all the rest.

We're up there--it's colder and more conservative in Canada.

We had hockey.

For the first part of your career, it's really good to be an outsider.

You're less worried about bridges that may, or may not, be burned.

You know enough but not everything... so you're still a sponge.

People generally like Canadians.

It's a safe haven for a lot of people.

Growing up in Canada gave me great values.

I'm still best friends with two of my old friends from Canada, one for 65 years.

Canadians don't screw people over.

They're competitive but not ruthless, is my experience.

All the Canadians I know in America who have done well, are really fine people.

>> I was going to ask you the question I ask all my guests but you basically answered it.

I'm still going to throw it out there.

What does being Canadian mean to you, assuming you still feel very much Canadian, after living over half your life in the US.

>> It comes down to this-- youúre watching the Olympics with an American and a Canadian sprinter.

Who do you root for?

I root for the Canadian.

My wife gets so tired of this.

Weúll be watching a movie and Iúll say, "Canadian".

She'll say, "How do you know?"

I say, "I can tell".

Either I remember them from childhood or before.

I can tell a Canadian show by the lighting, sound quality.

Nothing made me happier in the last 2 - 3 years tv-wise than Schitt's Creek doing so well.

Catherine O'Hara is a friend of mine.

To see those people create that thing.

I watched it from the very first episode.

I prayed it would catch on.

And it did!

>> Like the stars of Schitt's Creek, you have had a remarkable career.

I'm sure all our viewers will join me in wishing you all the best with Air Mail .

Graydon, thanks so much for joining us on Canada Files .

>> Great pleasure and thank you.

>> And thank you very much for joining us.

We hope you'll join us again on the next edition.

♪

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