After, presumably, watching (or hearing about) Todd Purdum’s CNN appearance, where he defending against allegations his article on Bill Clinton “insinuated” anything, VF editor Graydon Carter finally got around to weighing in on the controversy: “The responses from the former president and his camp are very saddening in their own ways. Characteristic, but nevertheless shocking.” [NYO]
It’s just like when we learned Graydon was smoking again. Characteristic, but nevertheless shocking.
In the movie version of Toby Young’s How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, Graydon Carter isn’t the pompous blowhard he’s depicted as in media reports. He’s the pompous blowhard who discards bad fashion. [P6]
When not issuing belly laughs and chortles at the Waverly, Graydon Carter is turning on his charm for this new thing called web video. He’s using it to plug the new issue of Miley Cyrus porn Vanity Fair, the June issue, and you can tell he’s making his best effort at comedy. Giving us a tour of June’s pages, Carter also reminds us of those timid NY1 anchors doing “In The Papers.” Video here.
Supposedly, it’s Graydon Carter’s idea to make VanityFair.com more of a destination site. Err, rather: “A fun, funny, spunkier version of the magazine.” Okay! So that explains why the new site “will include regular weekly postings of events and increase its coverage of A-list diners at the Waverly Inn to a few times a month on the restaurant’s un-bylined blog.” As if Mediabistro’s list of Michael’s patrons weren’t grating enough.
Cindy Adams, who publishes her column by stringing together press releases and the parts of the day when she’s conscious, brings us news of Tuesday night’s party opening the Tribeca Film Festival, thrown by Vanity Fair, which has had blue balls ever since Graydon Carter canceled the Oscar party. No-need-for-first-names Seinfeld, Gandolfini, von Furstenberg were there, as were L. David, A. Huffington, H. Weinstein, and R. De Niro. So what, besides the guest list, did the uninvited miss? CONTINUED »
When we saw Graydon Carter bumbling down West 10th Street the other week, with his wife and a dog (child?) in tow, we thought to ourselves, “Hey! He’s looking so much less bloated these days!” Turns out, our petty assumption is true: The Vanity Fair editor is losing weight — by smoking. News of which will send sales of the May eco-friendly Madonna issue skyrocketing by the fives and sixes.
“In the next five years in Graydon Carter’s world, you’ll walk onto a plane, or a subway, or a soon-to-be-invented mode of transport, and you’ll tuck a little electronic book under your arm. Inside that little book, which will be very expensive at first but soon will cost $150, there’ll be a series of mylar “pages,” and there will be small buttons off to the side, and once you hit one of them, whoooosh, words and photos from Vanity Fair will suddenly appear. ‘You’ll subscribe to five magazines and six newspapers,’ Mr. Carter said. ‘That is what I see as the future. … That I know is coming.’ ‘Ultimately, there will be some sort of device!’ said Peter Meirs, the vice president of production technology at Time Inc.” [NYO]
Um, you mean like the $399 Kindle, which already exists? Which is very expensive now but will eventually cost less? That there are small buttons you can push where the words and photos from magazines appear? Where you can already purchase, download, and read Time Inc. titles like Time and Fortune?
Five years is SO far away!
Vanity Fair’s July 2007 Africa issue, guest-edited by Bono, was Graydon Carter’s best-selling issue last year. Why so successful? Our money’s on the twenty different covers Annie Leibovitz shot for the issue, letting customers scoop up at least a few of the covers to display on their Design Within Reach coffee tables. [min]
As if there exists an alternative argument to be made, Britain’s Guardian wonders aloud whether Vanity Fair, prone to give covers only to celebrities carrying untold sob stories, is merely a glossier downmarket celeb rag that’s actually on par with the Us Weeklys of the world.
Even Graydon Carter’s brand extensions – the Vanity Fair Oscar Party, the Waverly Inn – are brash excuses to traffic in celebrity.
VF’s entrée into the National Portrait Gallery is the newspeg here; the walls are adorned with the magazine’s celebrity portraits, with much owed to Annie Leibovitz’s constantaly resigned contract. CONTINUED »
WAVERLY INN’S NEW GATEKEEPER Start phoning David Foxley to make your reservations. The New York Observer feature writer is Graydon Carter’s new assistant. [P6]
Every day the WGA and the producers are like, “No, we’re getting close. Keep watching TV. We’ll have new programming soon.” And every day nothing happens, except American Idol is more inexplicably popular than ever.
And with the Academy Awards only a few weeks away, things need to get settled if People wants to run its standard 40 pages of Oscar Glamour spread. Writers are threatening to picket, and you know actors. They’ll do coke in public, but crossing a picket line will ruin their reputation.
But now it doesn’t matter if the Oscars go on, because its raison d’être has been abandoned. In sympathy with the striking writers, Vanity Fair has canceled its party.
“There will be something sort of liberating about ordering Chinese food and watching the Oscars in bed,” Graydon Carter said.
Well put. Now stars really will be like us. Except we prefer pizza.
At last, the end result of what we’ll simply call “a stab at multimedia content“: It’s Vanity Fair’s holiday card, popping up in the unprepared mailboxes of Vanity friendlies across town, starring Graydon Carter as Santa Claus. And Bono as … a leather daddy elf. Naturally, Annie Leibovitz is responsible for this.
“Say it, don’t spray it” has long been our philosophy when it comes to spitting while talking and celebrity profiles.
Janine Gibson at The Guardian seems to agree in her piece on Graydon Carter. With comments like “[Vanity Fair] is like running the Metropolitan Opera in a way,” we’re beginning to think that in between all the self-rationalizations, Toby Young might have had a point. Our favorite quotes after the jump. CONTINUED »
Graydon Carter can really hook it up.
The Vanity Fair editor has set up his old Spy magazine friend, Kurt Anderson, with a one-year, two article contract. And for 10,000 words surrounded by Louis Vuitton and Burberry ads, Anderson will get a payday in the mid-five figures.
And suddenly, all of our friends in journalism seem useless.
Vanity Fare, Seeking Correction: Hugely hyped “celeb-centric” Waverly Inn earned a not-too-shabby score of 18 for food. But give Zagat a big fat ‘F’ for spell-checking. Or lack thereof. Don’t know who “Grayson Carter” is, but if media titan Graydon Carter were publishing this guide, then heads would roll in the copy-editing department.
Good luck getting a reservation now, Zagat.
Note to strip club aficionado/sometimes editor Col Allan: It’s never a particularly good thing when the best compliment Graydon Carter can bestow upon you is that you can “drink just about anybody I know, with the exception of Christopher Hitchens, under many tables.” [NYMag]
If only because Jeff Bridges is playing him. And, apparently, Bridges is a “sex symbol.” [P6]
• When asked to clarify his feelings on Dow Jones, Ron Burkle winked and said, “Yeah, you know I’d like to get a piece of that,” before reaching up for a high-five.
• Ivanka Trump has zero interest in joining morning trainwreck otherwise known as The View.
• Impossibly, the Conrad Black jury claims they’re utterly incapable of unanimously reaching a (guilty) verdict.
• Michael Moore “live-chats” with HuffPo about healthcare, politics and, of course, how much he hates Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
• Amy Jacobson ‘devastated’ over termination. “I thought they would suspend me and then support me,” she tells the Chicago Sun-Times.
• Reputed rivalry between Tina Brown and Graydon Carter gets exponentially more heated boring.
• Busted! Chicago reporter Amy Jacobson fingered for showing up at a friend of a friend’s poolside BBQ wearing a “swimming top.”
• Dan Patrick is leaving SportsCenter! Related: MediaWeek capitalizes on opportunity to use outdated colloquialisms “scuttlebut” and “scotched.”
• Graydon Carter may have inadvertently made a big mistake in choosing Shia Laboeuf over that far more lucrative dead horse.
• Katie Couric is a not a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She’s simply a woman who likes to bitch and moan about her $60 million contract.
You know what’s (almost) as embarrassing as finding out you’re this-close from edging out Richard Nixon in the category of “Worst Presidents Ever?” Finding out you almost lost the Vanity Fair cover to a dead animal.
GRAYDON Carter doesn’t believe in flogging a dead horse. The Vanity Fair editor-in-chief said neigh to the idea of putting Barbaro on the August cover. Instead, “Transformers” star Shia Labeouf got the nod. Sources say Barbaro - the 2006 Kentucky Derby winner who captured hearts after he shattered a hind leg in the Preakness and struggled for months to survive - actually market-tested higher than Labeouf. But Carter vetoed the equine cover. So Shia is featured, saving the actor from being beaten by a dead horse. A VF spokeswoman said, “We don’t comment on covers.”
We can’t decide whether our favorite part is the gratuitous punning (Photo finish! Beaten by a dead horse!) or the fact that Barbaro actually market-tested higher than Labeouf.
Either way, we’re glad the Transformers star ultimately triumphed over Barbaro—even if he did only win by a nose.
Editorial Director
