When the going was good, p.19
When the Going Was Good, page 19
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The editors were the absolute key. For one thing, they were generators of ideas. No single top editor can have enough good ideas to fill a big magazine issue after issue. I needed editors to be idea engines as well. Every few months I’d ask all of them to submit a list of stories they thought we should pursue, matching the stories to specific writers. I’d collect all these “ideas memos” and spend several days reading, then return the memos to the editors and meet one-on-one. I wanted the editors to also function as their writers’ managers, inasmuch as most of the contributors were on exclusive annual contracts and received healthy monthly stipends. It was our responsibility—both for the finances of Vanity Fair and the writers’ careers—to keep them working on stories that went on to appear in the magazine. This also involved a certain amount of psychiatry, hand-holding, confidence management, career advice, and, in the end, actual editing.
Vanity Fair editors were deeply involved with their writers. At any one time, there were five or six text editors under me and they would spend hours upon hours upon hours editing copy, both grammatically and in scope—often with the writers sitting alongside them. Each editor had a roster of between six and ten contract writers and perhaps another dozen outside writers who wrote occasional articles. When their contract writers were on assignment, the editors would deal with them almost on a daily basis. And then they would work closing the stories with the fact-checkers and lawyers. An editor’s job is not just to be a grammarian; we had copy editors on staff to fix things. An editor’s job is to tell a writer that this is the most important thing they will ever do, get the story in, and then a few months later convince them that this next story is the most important thing they’ll ever do and reel that story in. It’s also about being appreciative of how difficult it is to be a writer. Much more challenging, certainly, than being an editor—editors never have to stare down at a blank piece of paper. At the same time, the glory goes to the writer rather than the editor, which I think is only fair. They were the ones who got their names on the cover of the magazine. Not the editors.
Wayne Lawson was the longest-running editor at Vanity Fair, and was not only a dab hand with a pencil but a ferocious booster of the writers he worked with and a legendarily wonderful colleague. He had grown up in the Midwest, made it into Princeton, drifted into books and then to magazines. He was a martini man, in the good, old-fashioned sense. He loved opera and the ballet; being single, he would often conscript one of the younger members of the staff to join him for dinner and a trip to Lincoln Center. He had been hired away from The New York Times by Richard Locke before the 1983 relaunch and retired more than thirty years later.
Dominick Dunne’s stories worked in large part because of Wayne. Nick brought in the good raw material, and Wayne would work with him to turn it all into compelling magazine narratives. When Maureen Orth was covering the Michael Jackson trial, Wayne flew to Los Angeles to work with Maureen on site, ensuring that the article made it into the next issue. As Maureen, Marie Brenner, Bob Colacello, and many others knew, Wayne could both shape and sharpen. With Hunter S. Thompson, Wayne would use what was usable almost exactly as Hunter wrote it—but a lot of what Hunter sent was diffuse or off topic. “I would come home, in those days, and find long messages from Hunter on my message service,” Wayne remembers. “Along with exhortations like ‘Hey, Wayne, we’ve got these bastards on the run.’ ” Wayne was especially good at handling the art historian John Richardson, who was always at work on his magisterial four-part biography of Picasso. I found John to be prickly on occasion, but in Wayne’s hands he would purr. Wayne was also a gifted talent scout. He knew good copy when he saw it. He noticed a Texan writer named Mark Seal who was writing mostly for an airline magazine and a few local publications. He commissioned him to write a piece for us, and Mark went on to become one of the magazine’s star contributors. His classic stories included the Rupert Murdoch–Wendi Deng breakup, the Hatton Garden jewel heist, and three news-making dispatches on the Madoff scandal.
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I had taken all sorts of part-time jobs when I was growing up in Canada. Parents there didn’t give their children any kind of pin money. You had to earn it yourself. There was a graveyard near us called the Beechwood Cemetery and every spring they put out an announcement for high school kids to come and dig graves. Ottawa was so cold that for about six or seven months of the year, the ground was completely frozen. In late May, when the ground had thawed, I signed up. They gave you a shovel, and then you were to spend the day digging graves. It was backbreaking, and that, combined with the whole ghoulish aspect of the endeavor, drew the curtain on my career as a gravedigger. I quit the next day. (When I was named the editor of Vanity Fair, I was interviewed by a British reporter and I mentioned this day of digging graves, and the headline was something like “From Gravedigger to the Editor of Vanity Fair!”)
As much as I hated some of my part-time jobs, the funny thing is, these are all the things I look for in somebody else’s résumé. I love seeing the history of a young person who has worked in retail or a restaurant. If you can handle three or four tables of difficult diners, the magazine business is a breeze by comparison. I don’t warm to a résumé filled with gold-plated internships and performative volunteer work.
You’re only as good as your assistant, and to be an assistant at Vanity Fair required specific skills. Aimée Bell had changed my life at Spy. She was phenomenal and made me realize what a difference a good one can make. At Vanity Fair, my two assistants sat outside my office and processed the stream of visitors, phone calls, letters, and complaints. It was a lot of air traffic control—incoming, outgoing—because there was not much in the way of hierarchy at Vanity Fair. We had perhaps 150 employees on the floor, and I dealt with about 60 of them on a regular basis. My door was never closed. I liked to spend an hour and a half in the morning editing and going through my notes. Then I would go into the planning room to see how the magazine was progressing. I’d have a regular daily meeting with Chris, and then I’d see the editors.
The assistants had to set up my office in the morning, which meant going through the mail and organizing it in folders. I can work through any kind of noise or dust, but what I can’t work through is chaos on a desk. So I tend to keep things orderly. I told my assistants two important things: don’t use my bathroom, and keep my pencils sharp. I’m very particular about sharpened pencils—I have them everywhere. I’m also particular about the type of pencil I use. I buy vintage 5H ones online because old pencils have graphite and keep the point longer. My issue with pencils goes back to my childhood. My father was one of those people who sharpened a pencil with a knife, which left it about as sharp as the end of your finger. When I became an adult, one of the first things I bought was a proper pencil sharpener. I have probably a thousand pencils sprinkled throughout my office, apartment, and house. This is what your upbringing can do to you.
My assistants’ survival depended on how well they managed a first line of defense; how adept they were at giving me some time and space and keeping my desk uncluttered; and how skillfully they judged and sifted the phone calls, importunate slips of paper, and general gatekeeping.
The best assistants are calm, anticipatory, discreet, and diplomatic. They’re the first people visitors see when they come to the office. Mine were instructed to call people Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. until they were told otherwise. Before hiring them, I would test them on the phone and make sure that they had appropriate phone manners and were respectful. I’d check their handwriting to see if it was legible. At Spy, we used to give prospective interns and assistants a quiz to see if they shared cultural references similar to mine and Kurt’s. “What was the name of the dog in the Thin Man series?” That sort of thing. I instructed all assistants at Vanity Fair to not talk about the office when they went out to dinner, because young people eat at restaurants where the tables are about the size of a legal pad and separated by a space that would snag dental floss. Other people can hear you. Use code words. Don’t talk shop in the elevator. At Condé Nast, the competition rode up and down with us. Be curious. Ask a million questions. If you’re not asking questions, you’re not learning. By the end of my time at Vanity Fair, three of my assistants had risen through the ranks to become editors at the magazine.
One of my first assistants at Vanity Fair was Pat Kinder, a serious, professional executive assistant who had previously worked with CEOs. She was English, and a bit Miss Marple-ish. She had a beady eye and she knew her stuff. But because the office called for two assistants, I needed to find a second one. I was at the Royalton one night and noticed Dana Brown. He was working as a barback—as it sounds, the person who stacks the bottles at the back of the bar. When we’d have dinners at our apartment at the Dakota and Brian McNally catered them, Dana would be there. I liked the way he moved around, the way he addressed people. He had a certain crisp charm to him. I asked Brian if it would be okay if I hired him, and Brian reluctantly, but generously, said yes. Dana had dropped out of school and had never even thought of a career in the magazine world. Anytime I spotted an assistant trudging slowly through the office, I would tell them to watch Dana and walk like him. Eventually he became one of my most valued editors, looking after Buzz Bissinger, A. A. Gill, Rich Cohen, and many others. His writers absolutely adored him. Dana was always a quick study and in time became a fine writer in his own right.
One night at a dinner at the Dakota, Diane von Fürstenberg dropped out sick. So I told Dana, who was helping set up, “Dana, put your jacket on, you’re taking Diane’s spot at the table.” He was seated beside Georgette Mosbacher. Although her husband had been in the Reagan administration, she had carved a path for herself, and I liked and admired her. She was a cosmetics entrepreneur and a Republican activist, and she later served as American ambassador to Poland. Georgette was also a character. Lee Radziwill happened to be sitting at another table. Dana had no idea who anyone was, but he had brushed up and turned on the charm. At a certain point, Georgette had to fly back to Washington, so she left the dinner a little early. I could hear the phone ringing in the kitchen at the end of the hall. I whispered to Dana if he could answer it. He got up from the table and went to the phone. On the other end was someone from New York Hospital asking for Lee Radziwill. Dana thought Georgette was Lee, so he said, “I’m so sorry, but she’s left.” As we discovered the next morning, it had been the hospital calling to say that Jackie Kennedy was in the last throes of life and wanted to say goodbye to her sister, Lee. We felt dreadful about the mishap. But as I say, Dana was a sponge for telling detail, and from that day on, he made it his business to know who everyone was, and in all realms of Vanity Fair’s prescribed world.
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For students of masthead cryptology—and, if you are, bless you, you’re a dying breed—“contributing editors,” at least at Vanity Fair, generally fell into a number of camps. There were writers who produced superb work on a consistent basis. There were writers who produced good work on a sporadic basis. There were writers who, for one reason or another, barely produced anything at all. And then there were people we thought of as fixers. These were people in society or in a particular field or city whom we leaned on to provide introductions when writers were dispatched to unfamiliar territory. These contributors could also provide informed background on the subjects the writers were reporting on and make sure they were generally pointed in the right direction and knew who was who.
The first port of call for any writer heading to England or Europe was our London editor, Henry Porter. His role required a number of skills: writer, editor, counselor, as well as fixer. I had hired him almost immediately after I got to Vanity Fair; I wanted a London editor I could trust. I had met Henry shortly after we started Spy. He came over to do a story on us for the London Sunday Times and showed up with his Beethovenish head of hair, a leather jacket, a rakish scarf, and a fountain pen and notebook. The next time he came to New York, just as a visitor, he called me up and we had lunch, and we’ve been friends ever since. Henry is more robust than a lot of Englishmen. We loved the same things—predominantly fishing, painting, and books. Henry left The Sunday Times for a number of top jobs. He edited The Illustrated London News for a few years, and I wrote a column about New York for him. Then he edited the Sunday Correspondent magazine, and I wrote for him there too. Along the way, he has produced a bookshelf of acclaimed thrillers.
At Vanity Fair, most of our writers were New York–based, and when an assignment sent them across the Atlantic, Henry would set up guides to help steer them through the thickets of a story. That he was, aside from being an accomplished journalist, also funny and charming made him immensely popular with the staff. Henry also has what I would politely call a mild temper. He was frequently storming out of jobs and quitting. And about every two years or so, something would happen at Vanity Fair that was to his disliking, and I’d get a phone call. “Ha! Okay, fine, you can do without me!” he’d say and threaten to give his notice. I would just ignore him and pick up the thread a few days later—after he’d forgotten that he’d quit. I think his time at Vanity Fair—he left when I did—was the longest at any job he’d ever had.
Because of his somewhat short fuse, it was a particular delight to play mild pranks on him. We had the actor and director Bradley Cooper on the cover one month, and in the photograph, he was playing billiards. We designed it so that the coverlines curved around three balls in the foreground of the photograph. The one at the front and the one behind it were quite large and then there was a small one off to the left, half in, half out of the frame. We had two editions of the magazine, the U.S. one and a British-European one. They were generally identical but with different advertising. Sometimes we’d make tweaks on the British cover. In this case, on the half-in, half-out ball off to the left, I put “nry orter ex ape.” Because the left side was out of frame, you couldn’t see an HE, a P, an S, or a T.
I called Henry a few days after the issue came out and asked him how he liked the issue. He said he liked it very much.
“What about the cover?” I asked.
He said, “Yes, I saw it.”
“And have you taken a really close look at it?”
“Hold on a second,” Henry said.
I could hear him going to find the magazine. Then he came back to the phone and unleashed some highly creative malediction.
A singular addition to the magazine was the arrival of Cullen Murphy. I had once heard him speak at the publishing program at Sarah Lawrence. He was a rising writer, but what set him apart was not only a flowering head of russet-colored hair, but the fact that he wrote the Prince Valiant comic strip that was for years illustrated by his father. That, I thought, was really something. He was the managing editor of The Atlantic when, in 2006, the owner, David Bradley, decided to move the magazine from Boston to Washington. Cullen is a northeasterner through and through and decided to stay put. I must have read this in the paper somewhere and called him. We met for lunch at Sant Ambroeus on West 4th Street near my house.
Within minutes I knew that his skills and taste were what I was looking for in my desire to continually elevate the magazine. Cullen called me a few days later. He had compared the contents of The Atlantic with those of Vanity Fair. And following this thoroughly unscientific study, he thought that about 75 percent of what appeared in The Atlantic could have run in Vanity Fair and about the same percentage of stories in Vanity Fair could have run in The Atlantic. The remaining 25 percent resulted in the difference between economy and first-class airfare. He had just finished work on his book Are We Rome? and said that he was up for a new adventure. With Cullen I also got William Langewiesche, one of the finest long-form journalists working at the time, and the great Mark Bowden, author of, among other nonfiction classics, Black Hawk Down.
Cullen also brought in Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize–winning economist. He corralled Masha Gessen to do the first major profile of Putin, an article that became the basis for Masha’s subsequent authoritative biography The Man without a Face. Cullen was the editor for a pair of legendary investigative reporters, Don Barlett and Jim Steele, and for Todd Purdum, who wrote elegant stories from the recent past that were absolute charms. Patti Smith and Anjelica Huston wrote for us, and Cullen edited them as well. He did all this from Boston and came down by train twice a month. He was a revered figure in the office, someone always willing to spend time schooling or bucking up a younger staff member. He returned to The Atlantic after I retired from Vanity Fair, where he continues to school and buck up younger staff members.
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I was ever alert to receiving an email from someone whose last name was Newhouse. I was attuned to the name in the way moths have infrasonic sensors to detect the presence of bats. I could almost anticipate them before they landed in my inbox. I had Si in New York and Si’s nephew Jonathan in London. And, occasionally, I’d get a social note from Steven, who was also in New York. One day my stomach fluttered and a few seconds later there was a ping, and, lo, there was an email from Jonathan. It was a note suggesting that I consider bringing Daphne Guinness on board as a contributing editor. Daphne became a singer and songwriter in later years, but at that point my best estimation was that she was a socialite with international reach. I assumed that what Jonathan had in mind was some sort of occasional fixer role in London, or in whatever world capital she happened to be at the moment.
