Princess Margaret's faux pas
Revelations of a great editor
Hello, and welcome to Mag Hags, where we dive into the glossy archives of women’s magazines to find out what’s still hot and what’s definitely not.
We’ve wrapped up Season One of our podcast (listen here!) and we’ll be getting started on Season Two very soon. In the meantime, follow us on Substack as we dive in to the culture and history that every modern woman should know.
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First up, apologies for the lateness of this newsletter. I have some mental health stuff going on and therefore I’ve not been running at optimum levels. I’m hopeful that normal service will resume soon ❤️
Dispatches from Mag Hags towers: I am surrounded by freshly purchased vintage magazines, ready to dissect what’s still hot and what’s definitely not.
Franki and I are gearing up for Season 2 and could not be more excited. We’re at the point where we get to do the most fun, joyful and energising bit about the entire venture: looking at old magazines and chatting about them with our mate.
Some cursory tidbits to amuse your bouches: using astrology to find your perfect partner, courtesy of a sex-obsessed title in 1993; an interview with an up-and-coming British star hot on the heels of his breakout performance in indy hit Withnail and I; and a 1970 advert for a vaginal deodorant.
Watch this space.
Have you listened to Series One? Check it out here.
Attempting to launch a magazine career in 2010 felt a lot like showing up to a house party at midnight. Yes, there was still some fun to be had – but the crowd was already thinning out and all anybody could talk about was how much better everything was before you got there.
Working on magazines pre Global Financial Crisis was – if the industry veterans are to be believed – thrilling, borderline anarchic, but joyful. Budgets were plentiful, publishers could take risks, and nobody did any work on Fridays.
I’m occasionally skeptical about how much it is true – but I tend to land on the view that it doesn’t really matter. I enjoy the stories about When Journalism Was Good and will always be an eager audience for any senior colleagues wanting to take a trip down memory lane.
Nonetheless, there will always be a twinge of envy that I didn’t get to work on magazines in the 90s.
But even the headiest days of British magazine journalism pale in comparison to the excesses of our counterparts across the pond. Enter Graydon Carter, the erstwhile editor of Vanity Fair and successor to Tina Brown.
His memoir, When The Going Was Good: An editor’s adventures during the last golden age of magazines, came out this week. Hands up: I haven’t read it yet. I’m waiting for the audiobook release later in mid-April because I like listening to memoirs. But I *have* devoured the reviews, in particular this long read from The New Yorker and I cannot wait to fully immerse myself in the excesses of this most glamorous of jobs, at the most glamorous of titles.
Some highlights that whetted my appetite.
“Vanity Fair had no budget”
Or rather, it had no limit to its budget. Every senior editor had an assistant, and the expenses filed are unfathomable to my mind. Breakfast and lunch covered (Carter was apparently phobic of lunch al desko), reporters put up in the finest hotels while covering important stories.
Bryan Burrough, who worked under Carter during his tenure, revealed in this essay for The Yale Review that he was contracted to write three pieces per year (admittedly long ones, 10,000+ words) for which at his peak he was paid – I shit you not – $498,141.
Carter’s belief was that putting out the best work required cash – empowering writers to do their best work, but also enabling editors to scrap something sub-par and replace it with something else. Another revelation in The New Yorker piece is that not long after he took over, Carter spiked a feature by Pulitzer-winner Norman Mailer – already prolific for more than 40 years – on the ‘92 Democratic Congress because it wasn’t up to scratch.
Spiking? It’s when an editor decides not to publish something a writer has filed. Sometimes it’s because the work isn’t good enough to publish, even with a heavy edit. Sometimes it’s for some other reason beyond everyone’s control (say, a competitor publishes a very similar piece).
Oscars afterparty
What could be chicer than hosting the most sought-after event in Hollywood? The Vanity Fair Oscars afterparty is Carter’s legacy; he established it in the early 90s, not long after he took over the editorship, and following the death of Irving “Swifty” Lazar, a talent agent famed for throwing legendary parties, including one following the Oscars. Carter, apparently, was prevented from entering one in the early 80s when he was a reporter for Time magazine.
It’s unclear from the reviews whether this was Carter’s motive for filling the newly created gap after Lazar’s death. He was probably just shrewd – but I like to think there was a streak of petty revenge there, too.
Dinner
The following passage from The New Yorker piece delighted me so intensely that I must leave it as it is. Suffice to say, I am looking forward to more indiscretions about Princess Margaret.
‘One comes away from Carter’s memoir with a sense that his natural art form, even more than making magazines, might be dinner… His editing style, with its big budgets and nonconfrontational leadership, feels akin to hosting. Carter has keen ideas about the correct practice of dinner: the guest list (lunch is for people who might stress you out; dinner is for those who delight you), the table settings (place cards should be double-sided, to help people find their seats and remember whom they’re talking to), and, most of all, the time to leave: “the minute dessert hit the table.” He cannot abide the after-dinner drift or those who linger. Once, for reasons never satisfactorily explained, he found himself obliged to host Princess Margaret for dinner in his apartment. She stayed past midnight. Carter recalls it as one of the great traumas of his life.’
*chef’s kiss*
Read the memoir? Let us know your favourite bits.
See you next time!
