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16 March 2025 21:01

Пока Ксюша Соловьева штудировала интервью Гордона Картера в NYTimes по случаю выхода его мемуаров "“When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines”, я изучал профайл Картера в любимом журнале.

Удивительно, но факт мемуары написаны не Картером а гост-райтером Джемсом Фоксом. "It is not for us to wonder how Carter, who came up as a writer and editor, feels about the double byline on his life, but the choice of Fox, the writer behind Keith Richards’s excellent “Life,” from 2010, reflects both Carter’s good taste and his instinct for cachet. If you must collaborate, why not with the ghost of the grooviest Stone? 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."

В Vanity Fair Картер попал абсолютно случайно, а изначально выходил в Конде Наст работать в New Yorker на весьма кругленький оклад. "That spring, Newhouse invited Carter to his apartment and offered him the editorship of either of two magazines he owned: Vanity Fair or The New Yorker. Carter chose the latter, where his starting salary was set at six hundred thousand dollars, or about $1.4 million today."

Но как это обычно бывает в Конде Насте — без драмы не обошлось. "On the morning when press releases were to announce Carter’s appointment, he received a call. Accounts differ about who insisted what to whom, but Newhouse and Tina Brown, then the editor of Vanity Fair, had decided between themselves that Brown should take over The New Yorker, leaving Vanity Fair to Carter, who was less than thrilled. As he puts it: “I thought, Oh, fuck.”

Все, что вам нужно знать о том, на какую широкую ногу жили американские журналы до 2008 года. "When the O. J. Simpson trial began, Carter flew Vanity Fair’s courtroom correspondent, Dominick Dunne, to Los Angeles and installed him in the Chateau Marmont for the length of the eight-month proceedings.

Об успехе AirMail. "And, at last tally, Air Mail had in excess of four hundred thousand paid subscribers, which is more (but who now is counting?) than Harper’s or Fast Company."

Гениальное про увольнение из VF: "In 2017, after twenty-five years at Vanity Fair, Carter decided to resign. When an alert announcing the news popped up on his friends’ phones, some later told him, they assumed that he had died."

Но жизнь после VF у Картера сложилась, прямо скажем, неплохо: "Carter went off with his wife and the youngest of his five children to live in the hills above Cap d’Antibes, on the French Riviera—a place where, one would like to think, the going never stops being good. He had asked his chief assistant from Vanity Fair to come with him and, in a wonderful vestige of golden-age practice, assigned this talented and carefully selected young person the task of travelling with his dog."