Graydon Carter dishes about his glory days at Spy and Vanity Fair
Yes, of course there's tea — or dish, as the old folks say. This is Graydon, after all. Deep, deep dish. Kurt Vonnegut commanding a foe to get cancer. An apoplectic John Gregory Dunne ranting about actresses 'dressed like sluts.' Magazine magnate Si Newhouse being good in bed.
Waltzing, stumbling, dining, wining and twerking through 'When the Going Was Good,' Graydon Carter's memoir of his editorial glory days astride the New York Observer, Spy and Vanity Fair, are witty people doing anecdotal things. Vonnegut once told Carter that his wife didn't drop names; she merely 'had a lot of famous friends and liked to talk about them.' The same is voluptuously true of Carter, and you'll like the book largely to the degree that name-dropping doesn't bug you. In any case, each of the friends comes fitted with a mononym — Tina, Barry, Nora, Fran, Hitch — that readers will either not recognize or recognize so profoundly that they'll refuse to accept that these are no longer boldface names.
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