LEAVE WITH DESSERT

Graydon Carter’s great magazine age.

- BY NATHAN HELLER

A former editor of Spy and Vanity Fair, Carter (pictured with Fran Lebowitz) has been held up as a force of style.

Syle is said to be singular, which makes it difficult to define. It is personal, though its appreciation can be broad, and it is not the same as fashion—many people hold the terms to be opposed. Generally speaking, it rises from confidence in being one thing and not another, and in knowing when to join and when to pull back from the pack. The great promulgator of style, through much of the previous century, was the editor of magazines.

Graydon Carter, a former editor of Spy, the New York Observer, and Vanity Fair, has been held up over the years as a force of style, both in his personal life (he dresses well) and in his expansive vision of creative work. At Vanity Fair, Carter gave the movie industry a layer of polish and championed a particular idea of the good life—affluent and lush, yet seriously engaged in the world. As a New York restaurateur, he helped to promote a certain kind of refined dining: intimate, convivial, and bound to specific neighborhoods. And, as a power player, he remains a background impresario, helping to launch movies, shape events, and assemble people. All these activities are exercises in style, and all, in his telling, grew from his editorial work during an especially prosperous and thrilling era in American magazines. That era is the subject of the memoir “When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines” (Penguin Press), which Carter has written with the ghostwriter James Fox.