At its best when Carter is the underdog biting at ankles, or a Don Quixote who learns to tilt at the right windmills ... Catnip for those of us still addicted to magazines, who still harbor the delusion that we’ll get to that pile on the table as soon as we can. Carter seems to know how fortunate he was to ride the wave and thrive as a shot-caller back when that meant something more than it does today. The going was indeed good.
Carter’s book will make some readers itchy. I quickly and (mostly) happily consumed it anyway. The journalism stories and the character analysis, as Elizabeth Hardwick liked to call gossip, are first-rate ... The prose is basic ... Carter is not one for introspection ... There is not a great deal about Carter’s marriages (three) or children (five) in this memoir. He is proud that he reserved his evenings for them, he says. He does not attempt to reconcile this comment with the fact that, being a varsity socializer, he appears to be out every night. Such are the contradictions of being Graydon Carter, homme du monde
Details most readers will come for and Carter, who at 75 remains a symbol of magazine glamour and excess – a fact somehow vested in the whimsy and extravagance of his comic-book hair – doesn’t short-change us ... He is a gossip at heart; casting an eye back on his life, he can’t help but dish the dirt. And thank goodness for that ... [A] joyful memoir.
Fox, known to be a great ordering force, has helped turn Carter’s extremely un-Richardsian life into a winsome book—brisk, bright, and full of well-told anecdotes about bold- and semi-boldface names—without straying from Carter’s aloof and sometimes chilly sybaritism.
In between the recountings of droll exploits and copious name-dropping, there’s a ghost casting a pall from beginning to end: the death of American magazines as a source of power, taste, and money ... It’s certainly not Carter’s fault that media went belly-up, but there is something slightly sleazy about this growing subgenre of memoirs by industry titans who held rarefied positions—of the kind that will likely never be known again by any working journalist—going out on top, then turning around and trading in wistfulness predicated on dearth, without even giving an honest accounting of how we got here, who won, and who lost.
Delightful ... A heady account of a bygone era when printed publications held power in public life. Carter is both humble and wry in his retelling, acknowledging the many enviable opportunities afforded to him as well as the setbacks he once faced trying to make it as a wide-eyed wordsmith.
He is an odd character – ebullient, apparently confident, he confesses in this memoir that he is always anxious ... How good an editor was he? Judging from the amount of space he devotes to it, he seems to think that his greatest achievement was setting up the Vanity Fair Oscars party.
Carter’s delight in the chaos, effort, stress, and exhilaration of his editorships generate the effervescence and depth of this enthusiastically detailed chronicle.
Intimate ... Carter’s wry tone and hard-won insights make this a must-read for aspiring journalists and those who lived through the good old days of print magazines. It’s a blast.
