My Vanity Fair Hazing

The staff hated me. The advertisers were in revolt. And the tabloids were saying my days were numbered before I had even begun. How on earth would I survive?

- GRAYDON CARTER

In 1991, I was named the editor of the New York Observer; a desperately sleepy Upper East Side weekly broadsheet that I hoped to turn into a must-read. About a half-year in, the paper was where I wanted it to be, it was getting noticed, and so I started sending a couple of dozen complimentary copies to friends, many of them editors in Britain and Europe. I didn't know this at the time, but Si Newhouse, the head of Condé Nast, would take a twice-yearly tour of all his international properties, with stops in Milan, Paris, and London. He was on one of these trips in early 1992, and, as he told me later, everywhere he stopped, he would see copies of the Observer in his editors' inbaskets. Si returned to New York under the misguided impression that the paper was a huge international hit-that everybody was reading it. About three months later, he called me and asked if I would like to get together for a coffee after work. I said of course. This was a Thursday. The meeting was set for Monday.

I fretted all weekend about how I was going to handle whatever he was going to say or offer. Like just about everyone else in New York's various publishing industries, I was dying to be a part of Si's glittering literary empire. On the Monday, I hopped in a cab and headed over to Si's apartment at U.N. Plaza. We settled in a long window seat that overlooked the East River.

Si got right down to it.

He said, "I have two magazines, and I wonder if you'd be interested in either one of them." I braced myself. "Vanity Fair and The New Yorker." My heart skipped a beat, and I could feel the dryness on my lips. I swallowed. At Spy, the magazine I had co-founded before going to the Observer, we'd made an industry out of making fun of Vanity Fair, relentlessly-the writers, the editor, the content, everything. It was constant and withering. But I had read The New Yorker since I was a kid. I explained my very awkward history with Vanity Fair and its staff and contributors.