Graydon Carter

there wasn't really an opportunity to expand on anything. So I took the format of Pruce's questionnaire and adapted What I think are seven of the most important questions you could ever ask someone. They are when and where were you happiest? What is the quality you like least about yourself? What relationship, real or fictionalized, defines love for you? What question would you most like answered, What person, place, or experience has shaped to you the most? What would be

your last meal? And can you tell me something in your life that has grown out of a personal disaster. The more people we ask, the more we begin to see what makes us similar and what makes us individual. I've gathered a group of really remarkable people who I am honored and humbled to have had a chance to engage with. My guest today on many questions is writer, editor, producer,

and legendary party thrower Graydon Carter. Grayden co founded the satirical magazine Spy and was editor in chief of Vanity

Fair magazine for twenty five years. After a brief interlude after Vanity Fair, which I believe he called his gardening leave, he created, along with Alessander Stanley, the online weekly newsletter Airmail, which as a subscriber, I can tell you is like getting an email each week from your gossip eist, most well read, well traveled aren't slash uncle, slash friend slash enemy. The Vanity Fair parties celebrating the oscars that Grayden through

were legendary. It was at that party that I really cut my teeth on learning how to interact with Hollywood. I remember I was at the party one year before I was what you call famous, and I'd really ill advisedly borrowed away too casual striped sundress from a friend, and Madonna asked if I had come as a beach umbrella, and frand Liebowitz asked if I was selling ice cream good times. Grading is a man of brevity. He really

is the living embodiment of the short letter. Mark Twain was referencing in his quote, sorry about the long letter, didn't have time to write a short one. Okay, So tell me about this podcast. What's completely hilarious and ironic with this idea of women because I'm sort of invisible and silent after the age of forty five, and then it's only women who sort of stand up and go, no, we're not We're great, and it's like, yeah, but culture doesn't necessarily absolve you of that getting old. And the

reality is I have never been more creative. I've never been making more things that I love, whether it's the book that I just wrote, which is coming out next year, or this podcast, which came out of, you know, the isolation of lockdown and wanting to speak to people wanting

to create. Well, it's like a memoir. In essays, it's a tell most tell some, it's to tell some memoir, with the central thesis that runs through the essays being that things not working out is actually everything working out, and that is just life that we might not be witnessed. Were so used to witnessing everything these days on the internet, seeing every failure and fall down, But it often happens privately. Agree. I agree. And my mother used to throw around the

Christian Questionnaire and it was always really fun. And I also loved Desert Island Disks, which is the English radio program, right, but it was the first page I would always turn to in Vanity Fair was the back page. Okay, very telling, very chilling, Bruce, And you can tell a lot about it person by the way they answered these questions, if they answered them honestly, definitely, and also that the brevity of a lot of the questions belies of deeper response,

like they seem to engender, like it's been fascinating. You know. The funniest one we ever got in twenty odd years of doing it was Arnold Schwarzenegger's What did he say? It was just funny and self dappricating. He was really very funny. Yeah, he is the people. It was funnier than the comedians. He's pretty fantastic. When I first met him, I met him a hundred years ago. He did do this, Hillary, I mean, by today's standards, it would not be allowed at all. But at the time I thought it was

hilarious and awful in equal measure. He was introduced to me and his lovely then wife was next to him, smiling a lot, and I went to shake his hand and he reached out and he just picked me up and he went five pounds that's party drink. He literally did like a guess your weight, and he would have done it to everybody. Yeah, but I told him it wasn't a good idea. No, that would be against everything

is against a lot nowadays, but that's certainly against a lot. Yeah, But guessing a woman's weight, even if you low ball it, you can't ever do that unless it's like when you're at bale Moral apparently where they do wear you when you arrive for Christmas. Did you see that in that film, Spencer? I didn't see that. Now. Apparently the queen weys you to see how much you've enjoyed the food, and then they wear you when you leave and see how much

weight you've gained. The silver ware in your pockets you're way more. And by the way, that's really what they should be looking for, is that that's what I do. They don't call you light fingers guard for nothing. No, no, they don't know. So what do you want from me? I want you to answer these seven questions, and I want you to make the answers perky and excellent. No, I'm not sure I can do that pretty early in the morning here, I mean in my time. But anyway, okay,

I'll do my best. Am I supposed to weep at certain point during this thing, and just absolutely not. In fact, you might be penalized if you do. Okay, So when do we start? Okay, we're gonna start right now. We're gonna start right now. In your life, can you tell me about something that has grown out of a personal disaster. When I was in college, I had a magazine and it was a literary political magazine, and it did nothing

but lose money. I spent so much time on it that I was thrown out of school before I had so many incomplete and they said, basically, there's no point you're ever coming back because you can never graduate. And the magazine folds, and I thought, okay, I'm out here. This magazine I worked on for five years have folded. And I was in my early twenties. I was thrown of the school and I thought, that's it. I mean,

I've got nothing left. So then ten years later I started Spine Magazine in New York and that worked, and it was a huge success, and it changed the course of my professional life. But I learned from my magazine in Canada that to succeed, the thing you do has to have a point. And my magazine in Canada didn't really have a point to it. It just was a magazine that wrote about politics and culture in a maronic way,

the way twenty three year olds dude. And Spine Magazine had a point because it was a satirical magazine about New York City at a very particular time in the city's history. And it was funny and it was fact filmed and it was nonfiction and it did well. And I've had a restaurant that did really well because it had a point in that restaurant that did less well because it didn't have a point. So out of that horrible crisis, and when you're in the early twenties, everything

seems like it's like the end of the world. Something came out of it, and that is just that things have to have a point. I mean, they have to be there for a reason. There has to be a slight audience for it, and it has to be not a complete rip off of what's gone before. That is a really good point. I haven't thought about it like that. It's like a story. William Goldman needs to say that. You have to have a spine of a story that

everything else hangs on. If you don't have that central spine, it doesn't matter how clever, how brilliant the characters, how wonderful the dialogue, none of it matters if you don't have that central thesis, right, I mean, look at the Star Wars. You know, George Lucas, and then something is sort of original. There's eight thousand imitations of Star Wars, but if you want to buy a collectible lego, it's a Star Wars and it's not like Star Gigantica or

some other rip off thing. It's the original and originals it may take a little longer to catch on, but they have longer shelf lives. So how do you figure out what the point of something is? You personally? How do you know what the point is? Is there a need for it? Was there something exactly like this before? Even if you recreate someone from the past as long as it fills a purpose in other people's lives. Because at the end of the day, everybody's in the service industry.

And whether you're man factoring artisanal candles in Brooklyn or making a tesla in Texas, you're in the service centery. You're gonna take that candle or that tesla and give it to somebody else, and they're going to give you money. And that's the service industry. And I suppose other than people in fintech or whatever the hell that is, we're all in the service business. You've got to think about

the other person at the other end. And when I add an a vanity fair and we never did any readership studies or anything like that, but I just thought of some person getting on an eight hour flight and picking up a copy of the magazine, and I just wanted to make sure they were engaged and entertained for a portion of that flight, and I figured if they were,

they'd come back the next month. It's so true. It's so true, And I'm just trying to figure out how it works in like filmmaking, because sometimes it feels like there are films that directors have just made for themselves and yet they do seem to strike a note like the Lobster, for example, is a strange I don't know if you ever saw that movie. It's a strange movie, but you can catch the threat of the creativity and

the strangeness of it, which becomes the point. Maybe it's slightly harder to pin down in films than it is in a magazine or a restaurant. Well, person, you've gotta be talented. You've got to be talented. I mean, there's a lot of untalented filmmakers, and it's hard to make it movie. It's hard to make a bad movie, let alone a good one. It's hard to make a movie, point blank. Yeah. And I've been in some stinkers and some really good ones, and they were all as hard

to make. Yeah, but that's true. That's life. To make a crummy car is just about the same amount of work to make a really good car. I don't know. I mean, to me, the joy in life is about trying to have a job that's less about a sausage assembly line as possible, make it in each individual meal, and try to make it as good as possible because you want the person to enjoy it. I like that

I like that it's a service industry. In the service industry, yes, if you're offering up any kind of cultural content, you're in a service industry for sure. What question would you most like answered, Well, there's the obvious, what's the world going to look like at the end of the century for children, grandchildren? And is their life after death? But I feel we're going through an age of unaccountability and I would like to see some of the miscreants and

criminals of the last eight years. I'd like to see justice done. You know, it's funny. After the savings and loan crisis in the early nineties, people went to jail, and after there were two thousand and eight banking crisis, nobody went to jail. And I thought, you know, you're never going to scare these people off unless somebody pays the price for it. Do you think that we really are in a sort of middle ages. We're in a strange period and we all come out of it, because

we always do. Because the pendulum swings very dramatically in the United States and less so in Britain, less so in Canada, probably less so in Australia. But in America you go from the anti establishment sixties and by three or eighty four you had a Wall Street explosion with the same people. So things do tend to swing. They're going to swing another way, and I have no idea which way that's going to go, but things will be very different in three years than they are now. I agree.

So if it's this era of on accountability, then how is it also this era of sort of witch hunting as well and forcible responsibility. It seems to be these two extremes are happening at the same time. That's a good point, is that part of the pendulum swinging, I mean, is that part of what you think is that when something cannot settle, when it needs to change but it can't figure out where it's going to, that all voices

just become louder. Well, the culture wars are so far out on one swing of the pendulum, do you worry that if the pendulum does swing, those voices won't count at all? Because that's the only way to go. You can't have counting more. And if they don't count at all, you go back to a very dark place where people who are underserved or underprivileged have no say in what's going on. So all I know is it won't stay the same. Never does. So things will shift and I

have no idea which way they'll shift. And if you're in the nineteen sixties and you said, like, the same guys that are protesting the war in Vietnam in the nine Democratic Convention are gonna wind up being the suspender wearing bankers on Wall Street fourteen years ladies say you're crazy. It's so weird because stuff needs to change, like systemic changes. That is a very real happening that America needs and arguably the world needs. A lot of good will come

out of this. I don't know what good will come out of it, but a lot will social and people generally. The end result is something better than before the social people started, right, and that historically that's what it looks like. Yeah, and so four years now things will be better, at least I as him, So maybe they won't be. I'm a half glass full sort of person, so my son said the other day when he was like, I don't I don't understand the glass half full. The glass had empty, Like,

why don't you just refill the glass though it's full? Like, just refilled the glass? What relationship real or fictionalized defines love for you. You know, I've got five children. I've seen the way my children are with each other, and

that is absolutely and utter true love. Even if they haven't seen each other for like four months, because one lives in Los Angeles, one in London, three of them live in New York, that they just sort of pick up a conversation that they left off like six months before and never stopped talking, And that would be it would be my definition of luck. It's the way that they love each other. Right, How do you think that you have thoroughly nice children because they learned that that's

learned that. I feel like it's learned behavior. You know, Like we would go to dinner and they would sit at the table, they couldn't bring any toys before, screens or anything like that, and they either like said nothing or they would have to start talking to each other. It took a few dinners and restaurants before they have sudden they realized that this is it, we have to start talking to each other. And they started and they never stopped. Do you think that conversation is a far

more powerful tool than we give it credit for? I feel like conversation is kind of dissolved now into screaming matches, and that that idea of being able to share ideas or listen to someone else is kind of a bit more remote. Well, there's always been hot button issues within families, within groups of friends, within colleagues, you know. And during the nineteen sixties and early seventies, you know, the war was a very much a hot hot button issue. You know,

climate changes, the culture wars are now. The Battle of the sexes in the sixties was a hot button issues.

So there's always there. So you're going to have sort of elements at a dinner table that you are going to avoid based on your reading of the other people at the table, right, Because interesting getting your children to listen to each other or to even engage, Like it was funny Kate's youngest and my son at the same age, and I took them out for lunch today and they sat there and locked in this awkward silence to begin with, and then I got up to go and talk to

a friend who I had seen and it's so interesting when there isn't any alternative. They really did just start talking. But it's kind of like your their backs have to be against the wall to do it and there has to be no distraction. Yeah, you need something to prime

the pump. I used to do this thing called quiz Masters at the dinner table, and because I got home at five thirty most days and then I've had dinner with my family, we have a thing called quiz Masters, and I would just just make up these things, like for five points, what does you know NBC stand for? For like eight points what cars to general motors make? And you know, things like they are in cultural things

and business things and political things. And as a result, we have something called Loser Nightlife where we have dinner and watched Jeopardy. I love Jeopardy, so my kids, I mean, my kids are astoundingly good to Jeopardy. I think because of quiz Masters, you ran you dinner like trivial pursuit. It primes the pump and conversation. I think it's really good. I'm adding that into my percentages of what parenting is. I think being a quiz master is a legitimate percentage. Sure. Yeah,

And it's like stupid stuff. It's not an important history racle stuff. It's just dumb things that are sort of linked in the culture that you want them to know. About is because they're gonna learn important stuff in school. Definitely, definitely, definitely, And also weirdly, there's a brevity and there's well maybe it's just with children with a short attention span, a short question with a short answer that has a sort

of mind blowing concept. But my son loves that you know the distance from the Earth to the sun, and that's why it's right, why quiz is good. But I do also think it gives you like a foundation of curiosity, which I do think needs to be encouraged, particularly now with the distraction of everything. I agree, I agree, I

agree with that what would be your last meal? Like the actual food elements, Yeah, I mean you can actually expand on where it would be in Hobie with but yeah, the food, I'm not going to say, like you know, your hoody menu went in Winston Churchill like everybody else, and I mean they could be I mean, you know, it's your last dinner. My last dinner would be pretty simple. No, I'm not a gourmand. I don't know about lines or anything like that, or smoke cigars or anything like that.

I'd probably have Italian food and red wine and now ice cream and I'd have cigarettes after the meal, you would definitely are you kidding me? Yes, cigarette before the meal, sigarette after the meal. Good cigarettes. Cigarettes are a huge part of your meal. Man, I wish they were. I know. I'm with you. I will always, I think, be a smoker who chooses not to smoke. Yeah, and I'm a white knuckle non smoker. Yeah. That's actually a good wife

putting it. It's terrible. It's terrible to have done something that I knew was so, Joe, what person, place, or experience has most altered your life? Well, obviously you know, family members and huge part you know, so I knew has had a huge impact of my life. I worked for for twenty years and he was like a father to me, and I learned more from him than I probably learned from anybody in a working situation. And I feel blessed by that. And I got to ride the

concorde at the same time. So that was win win. Hold on, So, did he teach you a lot about life or about specifically working in publishing and being an editor. It's altogether. You know, he hated trickery. He loved you know, the cleanliness of making a magazine is easy to read. As humanly possible, and they're often when you have lunch with them, to be long gaps, and you learned not to fill in those gaps because I was thinking about what he wanted to say, and as a result, I

don't recall him ever saying anything dumb. Ever, everything he said was thoughtful and reasoned, and he had a study of yoda Ish wisdom and this I've also learned that he would have a conversation about a problem in a very socratic method. Rather than saying do this, he said, have you thought of this? And you worked through a problem that way? So what he'd ask you to examine, like have you thought about these different ways of looking

at this? Yes? And you could say, well, I can't do it this way because of this, for this reason and that reason. And I think it came through him organically. I don't think anybody sort of instructed him to do this. It's just the way his mind worked. I found it invaluable when I was working for him, and I find it a value as I work after him. Now, do you think that having a sort of paternal or Evankula

figure in your life was that all pre children? I'm tryingly no, I've I've always had an older man in my life. And you know, when you're in your twenties and somebody in their thirties takes you seriously, you're you know, you're e static. It's very validating. And so I've always been last with any number of sort of older figures. I mean, David Halberstam was a good friend of mine and he was fifteen years older than me, but we

used to talk a couple of times a week. And there was a writer called Michael Hare who had brought a very famous book about Vietnam called Dispatches. You know, I talked to him for hours usday, used to talk to for hours every day to like frandly with it. So it's just there a lot of people in your life that have part in shaping who you've become over the years. And the way you think, yeah, do you

find that you at that figure for your children? Um, you know, you want your child to be able to come to you, but you do not want to be intruding on their lives. They're adults, they have their own lives, their own careers, and then there as a backdrop in case they want to talk about something. And I see a lot of them, and I'm trying to be as supportive and helpful as I can without getting in the way. Where and when were you happiest? I mean, I'm generally

a pretty content person. I can put up with a lot of crap and still managed to get through a good day. But four years ago, almost today, i'd left fanity Fair. I left handy Fair one day. The next day we're on a flight to London on our way to Provence. And the time I spent spent most of the next three years in this little town in Provence, about twenty miles north of Antibe, and I honestly think I was happier there than I've ever been in my life.

I had no stress of a big job in jobs like you know, being the other vanuy Ferrets have an enjoyable job, but it is stressful and it does take its toll. And I just felt like all this weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I got like two thousand letters from around the world, people saying congratulations or whatever, and I replied to every one of them, and I just read and relaxed and went to the Christmas markets.

And we had thirteen family members come for Christmas and it was just the one of the most enjoyable periods of my life. And how long were you therefore, well, about two and a half years, over three and a half year period, and we had to go back to New York for a period, and then we're back in New York. Now that's where I am. Now. So what if we don't associate work with being happy, then why is that the sort of apparently all an end all pursuit. It's like, why are we happiest when we don't have

that pressure? And yet that pressure is about of our lives, it seems all the pursuit of it. Well, there's stress, and there's pressure, and I find that stress comes from external factors. Sure, just sort of something you can put on yourself to do something better, to write something better, to film something better, to paint something better. And I love working and I love my job at Vanni very. I was just really happy when I was done. Yeah.

I love working. Yeah, me too, I love it in moderation. Yeah. The best time is the time between when I know I've got a job and when the job actually starts. I really like that bit in between. That's true, because you need an income and you need to be busy, otherwise you just woind up being a playing golf and becoming a Republican. Yes, those two things do seem to go hand in hand. They do, brilliant. Thank you so much. Okay, Okay, it's the pleasure, and thank you so much. Thank you,

graydon At. You can sign up to receive air mail weekly, and inside airmail is this incredible thing called Arts Intel, which is the only global cultural matrix for finding out what's happening in the arts around the whole world. Mini Questions is hosted and written by Me Mini Driver, supervising producer Aaron Kaufman, Producer Morgan Lavoy, Research assistant Marissa Brown. Original music Sorry Baby by Mini Driver, Additional music by

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