Tuesday, August 31, 2004
The Guardian: The angry editor
As the slick editor of Vanity Fair, America's celebrity bible, Graydon Carter has never shown much interest in politics. But now he has written a passionate diatribe against George Bush. Here he explains why
Extract from the book
Emma Brockes
Tuesday August 31, 2004
The Guardian
Perhaps it is his long, girly eyelashes or Tintin hair, but Graydon Carter has the air of someone not altogether serious. He edits Vanity Fair, the magazine of lush exteriors, a position he has held for 12 years and which confers on him an almost aristocratic status in American journalism. When we meet in a London hotel, Carter practically glides into the room, propelled by the sail-power in his billowing white shirt. He once founded a satirical magazine and has kept the habit of sardonic delivery. "Oh, completely, always," he says drily, when asked if he gets unfairly categorised as a fluffy celebrity-worshipper; he smiles and looks away with a distant, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger sort of look. "But that's natural."
Carter fights his reputation as a lightweight, but even he admits that he is surprised by the book he has just written. During his editorship of Vanity Fair, the 55-year-old has made a point of neither voting nor buying shares, a position of lofty disinterest from which he descends with a 340-page polemic attacking Bush and comparing Donald Rumsfeld to Hermann Goering.
What We've Lost: How the Bush Administration Has Curtailed Freedoms, Ravaged the Environment and Damaged America and the World is a book that has been assembled rather more than written. With great recourse to lists and bullet-point breakdowns, it audits Bush's shortcomings across every department of government, opening each chapter with one of the president's goofy quotes ("It's clearly a budget. It's got lots of numbers in it") then slamming home wave after wave of damning facts and anecdotes: that Bush tried to reclassify "manufacturing" jobs to include people who worked in fast-food joints; that teachers in Missouri were ordered to remove every third light bulb from schools to save money; that parents of soldiers in Iraq were in some cases forced to buy their children's own body-armour vests ("$1,500 retail"), plus hundreds of statistics attesting to Bush's failure to help America's poor, sick and discriminated against. The result is so overwhelming that it reads a little as if someone has fed "Bush, presidency, fuck up" into a search engine on the internet and loosely organised the results. Carter says he intended to write a short handbook, but that the more he and his researchers looked into it, the longer the book got.
"We had meetings on the research every couple of days; we went through 30,000 reports - it was daunting, what the Bush administration had done," he says. "I went into this thinking I knew maybe a 10th of it; I didn't know the 1,000th of it. I'm really crummy at deadlines - which is strange, 'cos I'm a very punctual person usually for lunches - and a really slow writer, but I had to do this in four months and worked till 2am every morning. I was saying to my kids, the one thing this book did was use my brain cells, 'cos I've been an editor so long. An editor rarely uses his brain; he uses his gut more than his brain. My brain was worn out, the tips of my fingers were worn out."
With this book and the Vanity Fair editorials in which he rehearsed its outraged tone, Carter joins what might be regarded as the cultural opposition to Bush, a loose alliance that numbers among its members Michael Moore, the comic Al Franken, and the shock-jock Howard Stern - and which some suggest has done more to help dislodge Bush from the White House than full- time politicians like the anaemic John Kerry. Carter downplays his own influence. "I'm sort of flattered to be included with those guys," he says. "They are more vocal than I am, but I try to stay independent. The fact is that their greatest influence is in the Democratic states; when the cultural elite endorses a candidate anywhere else, people tend to run for the hills." Is the fact that people like Moore and Carter put so much energy into trashing Bush an indication of John Kerry's failure to do so? "No. I'm not in the least disappointed with Kerry. I think he's a perfect candidate; honest, forthright and he plays fairly. He is a very brave man. The thing people forget is that the only reason Bush looks presidential, is because he is president. You could stick Michael Moore on Air Force One and he'd look presidential, too."
Carter's Vanity Fair editorials, formerly chatty introductions to the articles in that issue, now bolts of hellfire, can sit a little strangely with the Annie Leibowitz celebrity love-ins, although this, he says, is the magazine's magic: soft on the outside, hard on the inside. Carter has been angry before, of course; he characterises himself as a "very angry young man" in the years when he set up and edited Spy, the satirical magazine, with Kurt Anderson, which mocked the very world Vanity Fair now celebrates. But, says Carter, you can't carry on being furious like that and as he got older, got married and had four children (he is divorced now and engaged to Anna Scott, a British PR), he found he was quite content, not a good stance for a satirist. "But this got me up again," he says, "in the way I haven't felt since my early 30s. It was a sense of outrage as you went along." The thing that most shocked him was the discovery that "the Bush administration is doing everything in its power to cut back the benefits for veterans, both of past wars and of the troops in Iraq now".
Does he at least think Bush believes he is doing the right thing? "I don't know. I don't know how you think you are doing the right thing by having a tax system that barely affects the middle class, and makes life so much easier for so many wealthy people. America has almost too many wealthy people and the tax cuts were designed for them."
Some of Carter's friends warned him off doing the book - "You gotta be crazy," he recalls them saying, "they'll come after you" - but in fact, if anyone is going to come after Carter, it is more likely to be his cohorts in the media. Already, bitchy remarks are circulating about the number of researchers Carter used (nine), which he responds to with a sigh and says: "The fact is I have a full-time job and four kids and I'm not much of a researcher myself. The fact is, unlike a lot of writers, I credit the people who help me. A lot of writers out there have a ton of researchers and they don't get credited in the book. So."
Earlier this year Carter found himself attacked simultaneously in the New York Times and LA Times, with stories about a payment he received, some $100,000, for recommending the novel A Beautiful Mind as a film project to the producer, Brian Grazer, and the director, Ron Howard. It is not unusual for film ideas to come from magazines - another Russell Crowe flick, Proof of Life, came from a long Vanity Fair article about the kidnap and ransom industry - but there were whispers about the propriety of the magazine's editor having a stake in a film which, through his magazine, he was in such a good position to promote. The surrounding furore took oxygen from a certain dislike of Carter's style, in the same way that his predecessor at Vanity Fair, Tina Brown, was so eagerly mocked for her failure at Talk magazine. But there was also a genuine unease at the relationship of journalists such as Carter to the people they report on; Howard and Grazer appeared in the Vanity Fair top powerbrokers list and the film, which won an Oscar, was obviously well covered in the magazine.
"Confused, not bruised," he says of the episode. "I had no idea where it was coming from. It was just a ... I was being criticised for being successful. I do documentary films on the side, one of which is called 9/11 and is about these two documentary film-makers and the twin towers, and one called the Kid Stays in the Picture, about the life of Bob Evans. I loved doing them, they're really fun and they did well. And I think that in some circles it's going to cause some envy and I think this came from envy more than anything else, and envy is a characteristic I literally can't understand."
This is the kind of defence to get Carter detractors howling, proof of how far he has come since his days at Spy, an egomaniac who, by his own admission, oversees every caption and headline in the magazine, having tried delegation and found it "didn't work". Against the weight of his new book, Carter enemies might posit a daffy exchange he once had with Nicole Kidman, who interviewed him for another magazine.
NK: What keeps you curious? Isn't that a lovely word? What's your favourite word?
GC: My favourite word? It's canoe. I love the word canoe and all that it implies and the history of the canoe and all the rest of it. The canoe is a big part of Canadian culture.
NK: That's very strange. Canooooo, canooooo . . . It is a nice word.
GC: What's your favourite word?
NK: Bliss.
Carter rolls his eyes at this and in his best sardonic drawl says: "Canoe is still one of my favourite words." He insists he isn't grand - "Grand in what way?" he says, looking bemused - that he always eats "in the same crummy restaurant" in his neighbourhood in New York, that he doesn't go to black-tie events, that at the Vanity Fair Oscars party he doesn't work the room. Jesus, he's not even American, he's Canadian, from a modest upbringing outside Ottawa.
Nevertheless, I suggest that there is a problem with the power exerted by the Hollywood PR machine over magazines such as Vanity Fair: don't they have to suck-up to succeed?
"I think that's absolutely non-existent. I think it's the most oversold story in the world. Because I've never found any kind of obstruction, pressure, anything, ever."
This isn't what I've heard; Lynn Barber, for example, had to leave Vanity Fair after offending one of Hollywood's most powerful PRs and being told, in not so many words, that she would never work in this town again.
"Well, the trouble is for Lynn to work, you've got to get the other person to sit down. Well, you can't put a gun to someone's head and say you have to sit down in this chair opposite Lynn. If Lynn could do her job without co-operation, she'd still be on staff. But it only works if you get a willing subject, and we ran out of willing subjects in the US."
But surely that's an example of the power of the PR handlers? "No, I don't know if it was that or not. I think she did a story on Michael Caine that he wasn't thrilled with. But it's not about that. That is the single most oversold, erroneous story in journalism."
Whenever he can, says Carter, he tries to get a non-film star on the cover - "even a musician is better" - while trying to keep "the utterly loathsome" off the front page. It is getting harder; "the level of celebrity in America now is so low," he says, "so unbelievably low."
Meanwhile, the staff at the magazine are proud he has added its voice to the political debate; if the book sells just one copy, he says, he'll "have felt I have done my part". There is a point in What We've Lost wherein the two sides of Carter meet, a classic, Vanity Fair moment in which he quotes from a phone-in that took place last year on the political TV channel, C-Span. Half way through the conversation, it becomes clear that the caller complaining about Bush is an entertainer of some sort; after pressing for her identity, to no avail, the presenter eventually says in amazement: "Is this Cher ?" It is.
The lesson is clear: when even the celebrities are getting mad with Bush, we had jolly well better sit up and listen. This year, Graydon Carter will be voting.
Extract from Graydon Carter's book
We've lost lives and allies, liberties and freedoms. In the age of George Bush, we have lost our way
---------------
|
|
 |
