When the going was good, p.35
When the Going Was Good, page 35
I attended precisely one editorial meeting at Vogue when I was on contract there. Condé Nast was still at 350 Madison in those days, and as I got off the elevator onto the Vogue floor, I could almost smell the fear. Attractive young women skittered by with terrified looks on their faces. I was ushered into Anna’s office for the meeting. The chairs were arranged in a V formation, with her desk at the point and the seats fanning out from there in a sort of flying wedge. I looked around at my fellow attendees. I’ve seen cheerier faces in hostage videos. I made my way to the back row and sat beside Billy Norwich, a columnist and writer who was also on contract with Vogue. Many of the story suggestions were met with cold stares. Billy had some very clever ideas, but none seemed to pass muster. I had come with an armful of suggestions myself, but I thought it best to keep them to myself.
After the 2016 election, Anna asked to see me. I told her I’d come to her office. I took the elevator up and walked down the long, wide, empty corridor until I got to her domain. She was behind her desk, and I was seated on a small metal chair in front of her. She said she wanted me to come to a meeting. I told her that sounded fine. She then told me it would be with Trump. I must have given her the sort of look that said “Are you kidding me?” because she told me that it was a command performance.
“We’re just going to have to learn to work with him, Graydon,” she said.
“Well, you can,” I replied. “I have no interest in that. We can do just fine without his help.”
But in the interest of conciliation, I said yes, I would come.
A few days later, I joined Anna and my colleagues at the other Condé Nast titles in the company’s conference room. It was a long corporate table surrounded by editors with expressions that indicated a cross between forced march and this might be interesting. Kellyanne Conway was there, in the Trump camp, as was Hope Hicks. Trump came in and shook everyone’s hand. He eyed me warily and then sat down. Anna introduced him. And then he began talking. The meeting was off the record, which meant that it was an essentially pointless affair. It was quite windy out that day and apparently, after he got out of his car, Trump required some fluffing before entering the building. At one point an editor who was sitting beside Kellyanne noticed the text she sent Trump, saying how great his hair looked. I did note that he kept his hands hidden and under the table most of the time.
* * *
In the late fall of 2016, I was about to fly to San Francisco for our annual New Establishment Summit, a conference of sorts that had grown out of our New Establishment issues. Events like these were a popular sort of thing for magazines to do at the time. Ours were organized by Betsy Lack and Stephanie Mehta, along with a host of Vanity Fair staff members. Publishers loved such physical get-togethers because they “brought the magazine to life” and because they could reel in extra revenue from sponsorship. They were enormously labor-intensive. And for my part, they were quite stressful. I’ve never been comfortable in crowds, and I not only had to introduce and host the two-day affair, I had to do one of the interviews, none of which played to my strong suits.
We were packed and almost out the door when my assistant called to say that he had Anna, who by then had been appointed Condé Nast’s editorial director, on the phone. As blithely as you would tell someone you wanted to change the color of their drapes, she informed me that there were going to be some changes at the company. The changes involving Vanity Fair that she laid out were dumbfounding. Our photo department, art department, and copy and research departments—almost half my staff—were going to be moved from the magazine to a central unit. This was serious business. I had worked with the heads of these departments and their staffs for decades, and they were the lifeblood of Vanity Fair. These were the people who gave the magazine its unique look and feel and the people who checked every word that went into the magazine and ensured its accuracy, both in terms of fact and usage. Inasmuch as not a word of this had ever been discussed previously, I was completely and utterly stunned by what she was saying. For a while, I was silent. But before I got off the phone, I asked who these people would be reporting to.
“To me,” she said matter-of-factly. They would be reporting to her managing editor and her design director.
This left me speechless. As we drove to the airport, I tried to relay the conversation to the other Anna in my life. The foolishness of it, and the pointlessness of it, gnawed at me the whole way to the West Coast. We got through the summit, and when I returned, I gathered my staff and told them of the phone call. Chris, Aimée, Cullen, Dana, Beth, David, and Doug were all there. As were our art director, Chris Dixon; our photo director, Susan White; our legal editor, Robert Walsh; and our head of research, John Banta. I asked them for their thoughts on the matter.
With the notes from the meeting, I wrote a detailed letter to both Anna and the head of the company, Bob Sauerberg, explaining why this was an unnecessary and potentially catastrophic move. Chief among my concerns was the matter of liability for the magazine. The way it was proposed was that we would no longer have our own fact-checkers, who knew the Vanity Fair writers and their strengths and weaknesses. Everyone would be dumped into a pool. We could get a fact-checker from Teen Vogue on a ten-thousand-word story on Israeli politics. To put the Vanity Fair people under the direction of Vogue staff members seemed bizarre. And fraught with unknown dangers. Also, aside from the stories, much of Vanity Fair’s allure to readers and advertisers was its look—something we paid great attention to. I was not about to deal with a new assortment of photo editors and art directors.
At one point, Anna came down to my office with Raúl Martinez, her design director. She was on a mission to persuade me to see the reorganization her way. Chris Garrett joined me for the meeting.
Anna was going on about the glorious efficiencies of her plan when I got a bit heated and said, “The thing is, you never discussed this with anyone in the company—at least nobody in the editorial departments.”
She admitted that this was true. “Well, I discussed it with many others,” Anna said.
“Others?” I replied. “Like who?”
“People in Silicon Valley,” she said.
I was almost speechless. “What the hell would they know about how a magazine is put together?”
And from there, things began a slow decline.
My contract was coming up for renewal and I said that I would only sign it if this reorganization of Anna’s excluded Vanity Fair. She fought the exclusion for a bit, but then I got a call from my lawyer, Allen Grubman. “They’re leaving things as they are,” he said. “Sign the contract.” And I did. But I could see the shape of things to come. You never know when you’re in a golden age. You only realize it was a golden age when it’s gone. And the magazine business, brutalized not just by the great recession of 2008 but also by the relentless appetite of the internet, was in the beginning of a period of rapid decline.
This great era of magazine invention and influence that had so driven the culture for the past three quarters of a century was most surely coming to an end. It wouldn’t end immediately, but I thought that, like bankruptcy, it would happen slowly, then all at once. I agreed only to sign a nine-month contract. This would take me through to the end of December 2017. I would have been at Vanity Fair for twenty-five years, and I wanted to retire—to see if there was any fuel left for another editorial journey. By May, my decision had already been made for me. Anna and I had rented a house about a twenty-five-minute drive from Cap d’Antibes—fifteen minutes if you drive like the French. The lease started in late December. I was going to step down. And I was going to try to control the narrative of my exit.
Chapter 21.
The South of France and One Last Swing at the Bat
After all my years at Vanity Fair—where it was difficult enough to control the daily narrative of your professional life—I wanted to at least have a hand in directing the narrative of my tenure there and my retirement. And always in the back of my mind was the fate of my chum Art Cooper. He had been a stalwart editor of GQ for two decades. He stepped down in early 2003 and a few months later had a stroke after lunch at his favorite restaurant, the Four Seasons. He died a few days later.
When I was going back and forth over whether to stay or to go, a friend suggested that I see a psychiatrist who specialized in executives, mostly from the financial sector, who were about to leave the office, the perks, and the plane behind as they tiptoed toward retirement. I truly liked the man I saw, but after about a half dozen meetings with him, I decided that I was going to leave the magazine. I still had a few sessions left on the meter with him, though, and I found myself concocting arguments on both sides of the issue, just so I wouldn’t bore him.
A major factor in the decision I ultimately made was a chance meeting I’d had a few years earlier. My wife, Anna, and I were in San Francisco one fall when Tom Steyer, the billionaire climate activist, invited us to lunch at his house at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. Anna was seated beside Jim Coulter, the cofounder of the enormous private equity firm TPG. I hadn’t really heard of the company, and to be frank, I had only the vaguest idea as to what private equity was. But I had Jim’s wife, Penny, on my left, and we hit it off, as did Anna and Jim. Sometime later, Jim came to see me at Vanity Fair, along with a deputy, Adam Mendelsohn. Adam had been Arnold Schwarzenegger’s communications chief when Schwarzenegger was governor of California. Over the course of many conversations, Jim said that whatever I wanted to do after Vanity Fair, he’d like to be a partner. Now, I wasn’t really planning much of anything after I left the magazine. My thought was that we’d settle in the South of France and I’d lie on my back and be inactive until something hit me.
At one point Jim suggested we approach Condé Nast about buying Vanity Fair. This I was reluctant to do. First of all, I didn’t think the Newhouses would have any interest in selling it. And second, I wasn’t sure I had any interest in continuing with it. But we approached CEO Bob Sauerberg, and as expected, Jim and I left with our hats in our hands. I bumped into Cullen a few days after that meeting and told him about it. He said something that stuck with me, to the effect of, in his opinion, young people are much more likely to trust the word of a new news venture over a legacy one. Cullen is liberal in attitude, but very much a conservative person in manner and dress. I thought that if he thinks this, then that’s the way it is.
* * *
Anna and I were looking forward to living in Opio, in the hills above Cap d’Antibes. The house was a glorious find. The photographer Lartigue had lived not too far from us. Our property had been designed and built by Tom Parr, a legendary force in interiors who had been a co-owner of the British fabric firm Colefax and Fowler. Tom had decorated the house himself. It looked out over a rolling mixture of cut-glass topiary and cypress trees, with the Mediterranean in the distance. The Anglo-French couple who ran the property, James Boekee and his wife, Pascale, were among its most attractive assets. James had worked in hospitality for the British government and Pascale had grown up in the restaurant business. Her father had for years been the maître d’ of the Colombe d’Or, in Saint-Paul de Vence. We enrolled our youngest daughter, Izzy, for the winter term at an international school in Mougins. The die was cast. I was going to leave this wonderful job and retire to one of my favorite spots in the world. I just hadn’t informed the company yet.
Outside of my family, I had told only three people about my desire to step down: Chris, Aimée, and Beth. They had been with me throughout my time at the magazine and I trusted both their silence and their judgment. They went to work on a plan for my exit. The Brexit referendum—Britain’s vote to leave the European Union—had just taken place, and so, as a joke, Aimée began referring to my leaving as “Grexit.” I wanted to let the company know in early September 2017 that I would be leaving that December, in order to give them time to find a replacement. My final issue would be the March issue—the Hollywood issue—which I would edit from France. Beth approached Michael Grynbaum, the media reporter for The New York Times, to see if he would be interested in writing the story of my retirement. He said yes. David Kamp, Aimée’s husband and a longtime colleague going back to Spy days, would write the story for the Vanity Fair website.
For the day I was to let the company know, Chris, Aimée, and Beth had worked out a complex plan. At 11:25, I would inform Anna, and then go up to see Bob Sauerberg to let him know. At 11:45, I would see Steve Newhouse, on the same floor. At noon, I would address the senior staff at the magazine, and then at 12:10, the full staff. Meanwhile, The Times would release Mike’s story, and a few minutes later, Vanity Fair would follow up with David’s. That was the plan. I hit my mark with Bob, who was completely caught off guard. But Anna hadn’t been in her office, and neither had Steve. So I made my way down to the Vanity Fair floor and let the senior staff and then the full staff know. When The Times released their story, they also issued a news alert, and a number of friends, seeing my name pop up on their phones, told me later that they had assumed I had died.
My wife, Anna, and I had long planned to have dinner with Steve and his wife, Gina Sanders, that night at the Waverly Inn. And we went ahead with it. I worried that the dinner would be awkward, but they could not have been more gracious and indeed brought a bottle of what I later learned was insanely expensive scotch to mark the occasion. We also had a long-planned dinner the next evening with Sherry Lansing and Billy Friedkin along with Candy Bergen and her husband, Marshall Rose. Sherry couldn’t get over the fact that the story of my stepping down from the magazine was on the front page of that morning’s Times. “Graydon, dictators get the front page when they step down!” Many days I look back on her statement and take it as a compliment.
In mid-December, with Anna and Izzy standing nearby, I said my final goodbyes to the staff, and the next day, the three of us were on a British Airways flight to London, where we stayed for a week, and then flew down to Nice and went on to Opio by car. I had asked the company if Nathan King, my chief assistant at Vanity Fair, could come with me, and he joined us for a week and brought our dachshund, Charley. Anna’s dad, Ken, and all the Carter kids joined us that Christmas. I can’t recall when I’ve ever been so relaxed and happy. Once everybody left—minus Izzy and Charley—we settled in. First things first, I sat down and replied to the almost two thousand people who had written me upon the announcement of my retirement. We spent time tootling around the area, having lunches in the square of the nearby market town, Valbonne. I was down to about a cigarette a day by that time, and I gave that up. I swam laps every day. Louise Grunwald came for a visit, with our friends André Bishop and Peter Manning. Our dear friend from London, Lucy Cornell, paid us a visit. Bette Midler and her husband, Martin von Haselberg, spent four days with us. Aimée and David came for a visit. As did Basil Walter and Sara Marks.
After a month or two of this, I began to get a bit itchy. I’m a strange combination of inherent laziness and sporadic busyness. I can’t really explain it. Anna thinks that all I do is spend hours reading the papers in the morning, have a leisurely lunch, and then take a half-hour nap in the afternoon. And she’s not completely wrong in this assessment. But in my non-reading, non-lunching, and non-napping hours, I began to noodle an idea similar to one I’d had years before the internet. I was in the habit of reading the international papers in the morning, and as I went through them, I would find stories that weren’t in the American papers that I thought friends back home would be interested in. I believed I could put together a weekly dispatch of interesting stories from abroad that would find a welcome audience in America and elsewhere. Jim Coulter and Adam Mendelsohn had business in Europe and dropped in on us. I told them about the idea, and Jim was enthusiastic in his support.
So I went to work drafting a plan for a digital dispatch that would be filled with what I thought were unusual and compelling stories from Britain, Europe, and beyond. It would have the same sort of mix as Vanity Fair: political stories, business feuds, literary finds, art-world scandals, dynastic dramas, society dust-ups, and whatnot. And cartoons. I liked the idea of having it come out first thing on a Saturday morning, when most readers want features rather than the grim news of the day. I wanted to produce a dispatch that would be like what I imagined the weekend edition of the International Herald Tribune would be like, if that paper was still around. And I wanted to build it so that I could edit it from France. For years I have used old airmail envelopes, with their distinctive red-and-blue borders, as bookmarks. The shelves of our places in New York and Connecticut are filled with books clamping tattered envelopes that stick out of the tops. And in Air Mail, I had my name for this new venture.
I drew up an editorial prospectus, but I needed someone who could help me with the business aspect of the plan. I’m fairly hopeless with numbers and had no idea what the financial elements of the prospectus should look like. I don’t think I’d ever seen a proper business plan. Max, my number-two son, after going to Oxford, had settled into a career at Christie’s. He took some time off to get an MBA, and then an MA in Indian history, at Columbia. One of his classmates at business school was a student his age whom I liked the look of. His name is Bill Keenan and, like Max, he’d grown up in New York. He’d somehow managed to play enough hockey in the city that he made the team at Harvard and then played pro in Europe before ending up, as so many kids do these days, at a bank. Bill wrote a book about his hockey career and one about his time at Deutsche Bank. I contacted him from France and asked if he would help me draft the business plan, and he said sure. From there, he just grew into becoming Air Mail’s chief operating officer.
