(Graydon Carter, When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines. Penguin Press, 2025)
In late 1985, out of that sense of desperation, I rekindled an idea that I had been kicking around for a few years – a satirical monthly about New York. By this time, I believed that I had a fair grounding in the ways the city operated. I was attuned to the social and business circus acts that made regular appearances in the local gossip and business columns. And alone among my friends, I had actually edited a magazine before. The Canadian Review was a failure, but out of it I had learned a valuable lesson. Whatever you do, whatever you build, it has to have a point. The Canadian Review was neither right nor left. It was neither highbrow nor lowbrow. It was neither super smart nor super entertaining. It was just a magazine. And it was one edited by people who had never even worked at a magazine before, a fact that was no doubt evident to its readers.
This new magazine would have a point. It would be called Spy, and it would be a smart, funny, fact-based monthly about New York. Rigorous in its reporting and fact-checking. And fearless. The name came both from the illustrator Leslie Ward, who signed the caricatures he did for the old British Vanity Fair as “Spy,” as well as from the magazine Jimmy Stewart worked for in The Philadelphia Story. In the film, Spy was part of a publishing empire called Dime and Spy, a take-off on Henry Luce’s Time & Life.
Looking back, I honestly don’t know what I was thinking. Who was I to start a magazine that poked holes in the bloated egos of the city’s grandees? I had only been in New York for seven years. I had stumbled through five years at Time and then two years at Life. I do think that sheer ignorance of the trials ahead is often a blessing. What I didn’t know couldn’t derail me. I didn’t want to do it on my own, though. I needed a partner, someone with a similar outlook and with complementary skills. I approached Jim at one point, but he passed on the idea. I think he just knew what lay ahead of him: the editorship of Time. I brought up the magazine idea to Kurt over lunch. We had discussed it before, but only in the most casual way. By the end of our meal, he said he was in.
In the beginning, when we weren’t discussing the magazine over lunch or playing the video game Gravitar at the Playland arcade off Times Square, Kurt would come up in the late morning to my office at Life and we’d try to figure out our editorial vision. Neither of us had a head for business, and we figured we needed someone who did. As it turned out, Kurt’s wife, Anne, who had gone to Radcliffe, knew a fellow who had gone to Harvard at the same time and who was at the Rothschild bank and looking to get out. This was Tom Phillips, and he was the beau ideal of a young publisher: tall, good-looking, and athletic. He still is. He loved the idea of the magazine. He was bored with his job and said he’d come in with us.
By this time, Kurt and I had all but set up a Spy home base in my office at Life. I have no idea if anyone on the magazine’s staff cottoned on to what I was up to. If they did, they never said a word about a Time writer spending a couple of hours each day in my office. Tom left the bank shortly thereafter and joined us, doing research on his early Macintosh computer and assembling a business plan. (In those days, Macs were the computers favored by business types and IBMs were the computers of the creative class. A decade later, those two allegiances switched completely.) At one point, Tom suggested that we come up with a hundred story ideas for the business plan. Kurt and I went down to the Time Inc. cafeteria with pads and pencils. And we just sat there for what must have been an hour. Finally, Kurt said, “Things Found in the East River.” Hmmm. And then I came up with “The Ten Most Annoying New Yorkers.” Hmmm. And then Kurt came up with another one. And so on. In a week we had our hundred potential story ideas.
We worked on the proposal for months. At one point, Kurt and Anne and Cynthia and I decamped to a beautiful old house in Tyringham, in the Berkshires. It was part of a privately owned Shaker village that belonged to George and Betty Kramer, longtime friends of Cynthia’s parents. George had been an original investor in New York magazine. And Betty’s father-in-law, Hawley Truax, from her previous marriage, had been a chum of Harold Ross and his circle. Hawley invested in The New Yorker when it first launched in 1925, and then served on its board of directors for almost half a century. Kurt and I worked in their library in Tyringham filled with signed copies of the output of the greats of early- and mid-twentieth-century American literature and criticism. In addition to lending us their house, George and Betty would come to invest in Spy, which, given their family history with upstart, New York–focused magazines, we took not only as an act of supreme generosity but as a good omen.
But before that, we had no money and no properly printed prospectus. We had an outline of what Spy would be, the most rudimentary of business plans, and those hundred story ideas, all of which we cheekily had printed at the Time Inc. facility in the building. We put together a couple of dummy covers. I had recently written a profile of the supermodel Paulina Porizkova for GQ magazine, and so when we needed a cover subject for a story on how “anyone can be a fashion designer,” I asked her if she would pose, and she said yes. The other person in the photo was Matt Nelson, acting as the designer to Paulina’s mannequin. He was Ash’s babysitter from across the street. And so we began courting money. In all our lunches, if the potential investor said yes, they picked up the tab in celebration. If they passed, they paid as a sort of consolation prize.
There was no shortage of hiccups along the way. Martin Peretz, the owner of The New Republic, was going to come in with an investment, but backed out because his wife, a Singer sewing machine company heiress, thought we weren’t going to be predictably liberal enough. Which was interesting, because his New Republic was anything but predictable or rote liberal. His partner in this investment was going to be Ivan Boesky, who was married to the daughter of the man who owned the Beverly Hills Hotel. He was also a Wall Street arbitrageur who was later tried and convicted for insider trading. At the time of our investment talks, as we later learned, he had, at the request of the federal government, begun wearing a wire. The year we launched, a talk he delivered at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley reportedly became the basis for the “Greed Is Good” speech Gordon Gekko delivers in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. Boesky became a living symbol of the rapacious financial figures of the mid-1980s. A decade after Marty backed out of his investment, his daughter Evgenia came to work at Vanity Fair, first as an intern, then as an assistant, and later as a gifted and highly valued writer.
Henry Beard, a Harvard Lampoon alum, introduced us to John Goelet. John’s family, originally French Huguenots, had been figures in New York going back to the middle of the 17th century. It was said that at one point, they owned most of the land on the east side of Manhattan from Union Square to 48th Street. John agreed to put in $500,000 – which would make him our largest investor. The others were remarkably blue chip given the scrappy nature of the enterprise, not to mention the outsider status of its founders: Kurt (Nebraska) and me (Canada). We had a Washington Post heir. An E.F. Hutton heir, who also happened to be an heir to the Safeway supermarket chain. The CEO of ConAgra, the giant food processor, became an investor. We had a member of the Frelinghuysen family as an investor. Tom’s father was CEO of Raytheon, the giant defense contractor. He came in. So did Kurt’s parents. Nancy Peretsman, at Salomon Brothers, invested. Bob Montgomery, a partner at the white-shoe law firm Paul, Weiss – and the lawyer for a string of notables including Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol, and Cole Porter – served as our counsel. And he invested, along with two of his partners, Jay Topkis and Ernie Rubenstein.
The original plan was to raise $750,000. We went to George Green, the former president of The New Yorker, for advice. He looked at our business plan and said, “Double it.” Then, after a pause, he added, “And then double it again.” We did manage to double the amount we raised before we launched.
About two weeks before closing, John Goelet completely disappeared on us. This was in the days before email and cell phones. To disappear was to disappear. This was not good. And finding $500,000 in half a month was a daunting thought. That week I happened to have lunch with Gary Fisketjon, the editorial director of the Atlantic Monthly Press. Gary was a rising star as an editor of new American fiction, having brought in, among other books, his pal Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. In passing I mentioned the case of the missing Goelet. Gary thought for a moment and then suggested that we should meet Carl Navarre, a champion shot, the owner of Atlantic Monthly Press, and, not incidentally, a Coca-Cola bottling heir. We went to see him, and Carl stepped in and replaced Goelet’s half-million-dollar investment just days before we were due to close.
With no grand plan to do so, we launched in the fall of 1986 at what seemed like a perfect moment in the never-ending trajectory of New York. The city had recovered from its near bankruptcy in the 1970s. Financiers and the life-forms that had grown around them – investment bankers and lawyers – were awash with money. The downtown art world was booming. Yuppies, in all their young, upwardly mobile professionalness, were cornering the market on BMWs, yellow ties, and high-tech kitchen appliances. Hip-hop culture was exploding around us. New York had become a city of big hair and egos and long stretch limousines. It was the time of the “ladies who lunch” while their husbands were off draining the bank accounts of widows and orphans. At the same time, AIDS was on its long, deadly march through the gay community. Kurt and Tom and I believed that we knew enough to gin up the perfect magazine for ourselves and our friends. And we were foolish enough to think that all this rampaging and bridge burning wouldn’t have an effect later.
In Spy, we wanted a magazine of wit, satire, and what Kurt called literate sensationalism. We wanted humor combined with hard reporting. We wanted the voice to be a mixture of Time-ese from the 1940s, with its dense, fact-filled writing, and the saucy manner of London’s Private Eye. To the best of our knowledge, this hadn’t been done before in the U.S. – a combination of shoe-leather journalism and bracing satire. There were great journalists. And there were great humorists. But we had to find journalists who could get the story and then write it with a dash of distance and irony.
There were writers out there who were both good reporters and funny. The Style section of The Washington Post in those days was particularly fertile ground for writers with a keen, observational eye and a wicked voice. Sally Quinn, Marjorie Williams, and Lloyd Grove were standouts. At The New York Times, Maureen Dowd, William E. Geist, and Alessandra Stanley accomplished the near impossible: getting funny, contemporary writing into the paper’s gray, bloodless pages. We couldn’t afford them, though. Besides, nobody was going to leave a job at one of the nation’s celebrated broadsheets for a risky magazine start-up. We needed to develop our own farm team of Dowds and Quinns.
Mad magazine was a huge influence on us. Both Kurt and I read it all through adolescence. Aside from the jokes and the parodies, it did something that we attempted to do at Spy. It explained things – how things in the adult world worked. It’s where I learned about Madison Avenue, cocktail parties, sororities, movies, TV shows, and all manner of other aspects of American life and industry. Strangely enough, another influence was Looney Tunes, the Warner Bros. cartoon unit. Where Disney animated characters were wholesome and generally uplifting, there was something about Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Marvin the Martian, Foghorn Leghorn, and the rest of the Looney Tunes lot that was darker, more sophisticated, and vaguely anarchic – catnip to young boys of the time. The first images I had ever seen of movie stars like Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, and Charlie Chaplin were in caricature form in Looney Tunes cartoons when I was a preteen. Bugs was downright inspirational – cool, collected, and funny in the face of adversity. We wanted to be outsiders on the ramparts picking off the big shots. We wanted to champion the underdog and bite the ankle of the overdog.
Our first issue had the DNA for much of what would come later. We had a feature on the ten most embarrassing New Yorkers, including the thunderous Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and a certain “short-fingered vulgarian” – a slick developer making his debut in the magazine, Donald Trump. A photo essay on what nightclubs looked like in the morning was shot by Sylvia Plachy, the mother of the then 13-year-old future Oscar-winner Adrien Brody. Another story attempted to sort out things that back then got mixed up a lot, like Sakharov and Shcharansky, Euripides and Sophocles, and bathos and pathos. A map of gangland New York pinpointed mob landmarks. We ran unflattering stories on John Lydon (Johnny Rotten), Keith Haring, and the writer Tama Janowitz. And we outlined the dietary requirements in a Beach Boys concert contract.
We held the first of several Spy “balls” in the vast ballroom of the Puck Building at Houston and Lafayette in SoHo and hired the Kit McClure Band, an all-women swing orchestra. We had them kick off the night with “Sing, Sing, Sing (with a Swing),” the 1936 jazz standard composed by Louis Prima. It became the opening song for every Spy event thereafter. Since we had no money for decorations, we made the evening black tie, thinking that the dressed-up guests would be the decor. The turnout was something of a hit with the art, literary, and downtown worlds. A number of bold-faced names, like Andy Warhol and Malcolm Forbes, came to the event, sniffing around to see what all the fuss was about.
We had leased office space on the top floor of the Puck Building. It seemed fitting to us: a century before, the building once housed Puck, America’s first humor magazine. The space had huge windows and arched, brick ceilings. The offices hadn’t been finished when we moved in, and for the first four months construction raged around us. There was no air-conditioning that first summer, and at the end of a day of noise and construction dust we returned home drenched in sweat and looking like we had been working in a chalk mine. We borrowed old desks and chairs from our landlord. A lovely old Austrian man in a military-like uniform operated the cage elevator.
SoHo wasn’t quite SoHo then. The name itself was a recent real estate portmanteau for the area South of Houston. The cast-iron architecture provided the neighborhood with proper bones that in years to come would attract the great fashion houses of Paris and Milan. But before that, the cobblestone streets were quiet and shops were mostly one-off affairs, a lot of them selling vintage clothing and furniture. The Gaseteria, an all-night service station, was across the street. Details and Paper magazines were close by. Mob hangouts were around the corner on Mulberry Street. Clubs like Milk Bar, Area, and Danceteria were nearby and became hangouts as we settled in. Robert Mapplethorpe was a regular at the NoHo Star, the restaurant we went to for lunch most days – which gave it high marks in our books.
SoHo was also rife with the criminal element. One snowy afternoon before Christmas, I bumped into a fellow in the alley at the side of the Puck Building. He asked if I wanted to buy a Sony camcorder. I did. I most certainly did. My second son, Max, had been born, and I desperately wanted to take home movies. But I didn’t have the $300 that camcorders cost. The fellow showed me the box, and it looked like it hadn’t been opened. He said he’d sell it for $125. I went to a nearby ATM and met him back at the appointed time. We made our exchange, and I raced up to the office with my new purchase. The others gathered around as I opened it. As I got further through the unwrapping, my heart began to sink. I pulled away at the paper, and soon all that was left was a small piece of concrete with some wires wrapped around it. Kurt picked up one of the wires and said, “So this would go where?” The dear ones at the office took up a collection and the next day presented me with a certificate that I could redeem for a real camcorder. I was incredibly touched by this gesture. I thanked them, returned the check, and decided to buy my electronics through more traditional channels going forward.
Kurt and I spent a lot of time in those early months working on the house voice for Spy. We wanted a bemused detachment but witheringly judgmental. As I said, we borrowed heavily from Private Eye and the Time-ese writing of the newsweekly’s earlier days. Time labeled people with unflattering epithets along the lines of “jug-eared lefty” and was famous for its inverted sentences. Wolcott Gibbs published a profile of its founder, Henry Luce, in The New Yorker in the mid-’30s, and wrote the whole thing in an over-egged version of Time’s style back then. “Backward ran sentences till reeled the mind…. Where it all will end, knows God.” We figured that once we got the voice down, the other writers would essentially parody it and then just write like it. Which is precisely what happened.
We made fun of a cast of regular subjects, thinking that the more they were mentioned, the more readers outside the city would care about what we said about them. We also gave them adjective-heavy epithets. Donald Trump was already our “short-fingered vulgarian.” Abe Rosenthal, the successful former executive editor of The New York Times and later a less successful columnist, became “Abe ‘I’m writing as bad as I can’ Rosenthal.” His wife, Shirley Lord, was always the “bosomy dirty-book writer Shirley Lord” in the pages of Spy. The poor couple detested us. And with good reason.
One day one of our interns mentioned that he had been at the video store and Abe was in front of him at the cash register. “You didn’t happen to see what he rented, did you?” I asked. He had indeed. And the films were a lot bluer than the sort of fare you’d expect from an esteemed Timesman. A day or two later, I was having lunch with a friend who worked at Vogue, where Shirley was beauty director. In a story meeting the subject of sleep had come up and Shirley described the five-pillow formation – including one between his legs – that Abe assembled prior to nodding off. I combined the video rentals and the intimate details of his sleep choreography and gave the information to our Times columnist, the pseudonymous J. J. Hunsecker, named for the lethal gossip columnist played by Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success. Hunsecker duly put all of this in the next issue. I can only imagine the paranoia this level of domestic intrusion must have set off in the Rosenthal-Lord household.
When Larry Tisch, of the New York Tisch real estate family, bought CBS and began firing hundreds, we ran a column on him and gave Tisch the epithet “churlish dwarf billionaire.” My pal John Scanlon called the day the issue hit the newsstands in something of a rage. “Graydon, you’ve gone too far this time!” he bellowed into the phone. John was working for Tisch, and in the course of our call, he pointed out that, first of all, Larry “is not, technically, medically, a dwarf.” I wrote this down and in the next issue we reported on the call, quoting a CBS factotum as having given us that correction in those very words. I received an even more furious call from John afterward.
The thing is, by and large, we didn’t really know any of the people we were writing about. There was an element of safety in that. It meant that we wouldn’t be bumping into our subjects at night. Editing Spy was like carpet-bombing at 25,000 feet – as opposed to hand-to-hand combat. That’s not to say the subjects didn’t bite back. One month we ran an article called “Gore Vidal’s 8 Bonus Tips on How to Feud.” Tip number eight was “When all else fails, sue.” A few days after the issue hit the newsstands, I got a call from Gore. He said that if we didn’t print a retraction, he’d sue. Years later when we were working together at Vanity Fair, I asked him if he saw the contradiction, or at least the irony, in him threatening to sue over being called litigious, and he said that he didn’t. I left it at that. In the Party Poop section another month we ran a photograph of Jill Krementz, the wife of Kurt Vonnegut, identifying her as “champion namedropper and celebrity photographer.” Vonnegut called me in a fury. He said that his wife did not name-drop – she simply had a lot of famous friends and liked to talk about them. “Let me leave you with this,” Vonnegut said, ending the call, “if you don’t already have cancer, I hope you get it.”
The core group of editors would meet in our conference room for a lunch-cum-editorial-meeting once a week. Most of the men wore jackets and ties and the women wore tailored pants or skirts. Our tacit bond was the idea that revolutionary writing would have more weight if you didn’t look like a ruffian. Kurt sat at one end of the long table, and I sat at the other. We had all carved our initials into it.
There was SM for Susan Morrison, who had worked on one of Lorne Michaels’s shows and had done a stint at Vanity Fair. She was the only one with a proper Rolodex and was our outreach to established writers. She was funny and quick and edited or wrote much of the copy that Kurt and I didn’t get around to. We thought of Susan as a true sophisticate, an impression that was ever so slightly tarnished one day when she told me excitedly that a herd of elephants had just come through one of the tunnels into New York.
“They do it every year,” I told her.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s for the circus,” I said. “They even have a name for it: ‘Elephant Walk.’ ”
Forever after, I’d torture her with the expression any time she suggested something that was painfully obvious or well-known.
There was BH for Bruce Handy, a lanky, good-looking Californian who had gone to Stanford and had the slyest of wits. GK stood for George Kalogerakis, the only native New Yorker, who had come from a dead-end job at the Times. His application arrived on Drones Club stationery – something he had had printed up based on the club frequented by Bertie Wooster and Gussie Fink-Nottle in the P. G. Wodehouse novels. He had a wry signature style that we called on when we later published a history-cum-anthology of Spy. JM was Jamie Malanowski, a cheerful veteran from the political world whom Scanlon had sent our way. He was there from the beginning too. Jamie’s chief asset, he said when we interviewed him, was that he had “a lead ass” – the inference being that he was a worker. And he was. Joining us later were TF – Tad Friend, just out of Harvard, who looked like an extra from one of those old MGM Andy Hardy movies – and JC for Jim Collins, a tall, funny Harvard alum who had more talent than ambition. PS, Paul Simms, yet another Harvard grad and later a hugely successful showrunner, joined us as well.
The outside world thought of the Spy creators as miserable misfits. In fact, they were incredibly sociable, well-dressed, and balanced. They knew their Negronis from their stingers. They knew Wodehouse and Perelman and Waugh. And they were as versed in funny stories from the old National Lampoon as they were in high-minded criticism in The New York Review of Books. It was positively Hellenic. What set them all apart were their brains and wit. A whole generation of gifted writers flew through our offices, some staying for years, before heading off for the more lucrative playing fields, writing for The Simpsons or Late Night with David Letterman. It’s rare for me to watch an episode of The Simpsons and not see a name in the credits that had once been on the Spy masthead. They all wrote beautifully, but Kurt was the best of the lot. He composed the funny, lyrical essays that opened each issue. He was able to thread two or three storylines of the previous month’s news into a seamless, exquisitely written piece of journalism that just bowled me over.
Life at Spy was by and large a collegial, convivial affair. There wasn’t drinking during office hours. But alcohol did lubricate things once the whistle blew. We assumed that many of the younger members of the staff, who would gather at bars in the neighborhood after work, were seeing each other in a manner that can only be described as nonprofessional. One such couple, Aimée Bell and David Kamp, who both started as interns at the magazine, got married and are still happily together. (I am godfather to their son Henry.) Word of the sheer fun we were all having spread quickly, and in no time, I was getting calls from people at Condé Nast and Hearst desperate to come over. Our pay rates dimmed their appetite for working at a scrappy downtown magazine considerably, and all pretty much stayed at their stations. Other magazine editors, desperate to get “edgier” writing, whatever that meant, into their pages, sent emissaries looking to lure our writers for freelance assignments. We had a rotating cast of receptionists, many of them actors and performance artists and all of them more colorful than the people they were answering the phones for.
We strong-armed a number of friends who were proper writers to contribute – Roy Blount Jr., Walter Kirn, Andrew Sullivan, Holly Brubach, Bruce Feirstein, David Owen, Ellis Weiner, Paul Rudnick, and John Heilpern, among others. I approached both Christopher Hitchens and the illustrator Bruce McCall to contribute, but both turned me down. They loved the idea of Spy; not so much our pay rates. Young writers like David Kamp, Ted Heller, Nell Scovell, and Henry Alford, all of whom went on to illustrious careers, got their start scribbling away on Spy stories.
At one point, the staff writers announced that they were going on strike. They were all getting about $100 a week and wanted something in the region of $125. Kurt and I both hated the idea of an organized protest in the office. Eric Kaplan, yet another brilliant young Harvard grad who went on to a celebrated career writing for television, was working as an intern at $50 a week. He joined the writers in protest. One day he was listlessly sweeping the floor outside Kurt’s and my offices, and I started humming “The Internationale.” He picked up his pace a bit. Rather than confront the writers as a group – there were only five – we met with them individually. In each case, I would push a piece of paper across the desk with a single name on it: McLean Stevenson. In each instance, the writer asked who that was. And in each case, I said, “Exactly.” I told them that he was a cast member who left the hit television show M*A*S*H after the early seasons and was never heard from again. In the end, we raised their salaries commensurate with their worth and talents. And so ended the period of labor unrest at Spy.
Spy’s art direction received almost as much attention as its writing. We had a series of art directors, including Stephen Doyle, B.W. Honeycutt, Alex Isley, and Christiaan Kuypers, all of whom added their own embellishments to the look of the magazine. We wanted elegance in our typefaces, not the goofy fonts so often associated with humor magazines. Our editorial and photo budgets were minimal. We developed a look that included floating heads. These came from public relations photos – which were free to use. We then silhouetted them by hand and used them on a regular basis. They helped give the magazine its distinctive look – a look that has been copied by more established publications for years.
Its sheer shock value made Spy an early hit. We wrote about and lampooned everybody who was part of New York’s social and professional life, and circulation soared. There had been nothing really like it before, and it caught the city by surprise. In truth, Kurt and I just wanted to come up with story ideas that would make the other one laugh. Tad Friend and Paul Simms spent almost half a year working on Spy Notes, our parody of CliffsNotes, the collegiate study guides for great literature, with plot summary, major characters, and themes. We applied them to Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis and the rest of the literary brat pack of the ’80s and their books Bright Lights, Big City; Less Than Zero; Slaves of New York; and The Rules of Attraction. “Even funnier than the originals,” we said on the cover. CliffsNotes sued our book publisher for trademark infringement. The case went to court and we won, resulting in a landmark verdict. A feature on mob restaurants and residences in the city was either daring or foolhardy, given the fact that many of them were located perilously close to our offices in the Puck Building, which was on the edge of what could still legitimately be called Little Italy. The Gambino family’s Ravenite Social Club was only a couple of blocks away, on Mulberry Street, and John Gotti, the head of the Gambino family before he was sent to prison, where he died, was a common sight in the neighborhood. Lisa Lampugnale, one of our fact-checkers, who went on to a successful career in stand-up comedy, remembered, “I’m walking near the offices and John Gotti walks by and I think it’s because of the mob address map and Gotti is mad and I’m going to get killed.”
Instead of trying to cover the entire media landscape in our magazine, Jann Wenner gave me the idea of just concentrating on The New York Times – then a Kremlin-like fortress of inscrutability and intrigue. To write about the Times in anything other than groveling praise was to court certain career death. Our monthly column by J.J. Hunsecker regularly poked fun at the editors of the paper. The day the column came out, work would all but shut down at the Times while the reporter-level hands photocopied and passed it around. We did a similar column on the then most powerful talent agency in Hollywood, Creative Artists Agency. This one was also written under a pseudonym – Celia Brady, a bastardization of the name of the narrator in Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon.
We had so much inside information on the goings-on at the agency that its head, Mike Ovitz, reportedly hired a private eye to track down the identity of the writer posing as Ms. Brady. The detective failed in his mission. Celia Brady’s identity, along with Hunsecker’s, remains a secret to this day. Years later, when I was editing Vanity Fair, Si Newhouse and I happened to be in London at the same time and we were both staying at the Connaught. We had dinner with some friends of his at the hotel’s grill, and at one point Si whispered to me, “You know what I always wish you’d done when you were at Spy?” “No,” I replied. “What?” He said, “I wish you’d had a column similar to the Times column, but about Condé Nast.” “Really?” I said. “Why?” He smiled and said, “So I would have known what was going on!”
We had a superb and very diligent lawyer, David Korzenik. I remember once we were arguing a point and I wouldn’t back down from something he wanted removed. I felt he was being overly cautious.
Finally, I said, “What are you going to do if I don’t take this out?”
And he said, “I don’t know, Graydon. I think I might call your parents.”
I thought that was funny, so I made the change.
Our notable scoops often took months to assemble – a whole year in the case of creating the complete client list of Ovitz’s pathologically secretive CAA. Not even the agents knew all the stars, directors, and writers the company represented. The full list encompassed pretty much all the above-the-line talent in Hollywood at that time. Agents were suddenly busy mollifying stars who weren’t getting the scripts they thought they should be after seeing their rivals on the list.
We published a positively groveling letter that Tina Brown had written to Ovitz asking for an interview. Tina had been the editor of Tatler, and then had been brought in to edit Vanity Fair. Bruce Handy provided a spirited annotation to the letter. Among her entreaties, Tina had written: “Right now, the most hackneyed prevailing perception of you is as a ‘packager.’…It seems to me that a better term for your role in the life of Hollywood would be a catalyst: activating creativity by a gifted sense of talent, material, timing and taste, plus, of course, extraordinary business acumen in putting it all together. Probably no one since [Irving] Thalberg has seeded so many creative partnerships or brought so many movies to the screen.” She closed off by saying that, just in the last two months, the following people had written to tell her they read Vanity Fair cover to cover: Henry Kissinger, Calvin Klein, John le Carré, Louis Malle, Brooke Astor, and the U.S. ambassador to the Philippines.
The letter, which we had gotten through somewhat nefarious means, had been kept (I was later to learn) in the offices of Jane Sarkin, the magazine’s emissary to Hollywood. Jane was on her honeymoon with her husband, Martin O’Connor, at the Coral Beach Club in Bermuda when the issue of Spy with the annotated letter was published in the summer of 1990. A call from New York was patched through to her room. Picking up the phone, Jane endured a blistering tirade from Tina. Calls like this persisted for the rest of her honeymoon. I can only imagine Jane’s horror when, two years later, I was appointed to be the editor of Vanity Fair. She was worried that she’d be fired. I, not really having any appreciative juice with Hollywood, worried that she’d quit. In the end, we spent 25 incredible years working together. The topic of the letter and dear Jane’s botched honeymoon only came up two or three times a year. It was something we could both, quote-unquote, laugh about.
We didn’t set out for Spy to be mean, but, like Mad magazine, we did want to present what we thought were unvarnished truths about how things worked. What it was like inside the highly secretive Bohemian Grove, for example. It was and is the old-school version of the Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference. At Sun Valley, large corporations are traded and fortunes made. At Bohemian Grove, a 2,700-acre campground a couple of hours north of San Francisco, former presidents and establishment elders, who already had their corporations and fortunes, traded nations and engaged in naughty-boy juvenilia, like telling off-color jokes and peeing in the redwood forest. It’s where the Manhattan Project, established to design and build the first atomic bomb, was launched in 1942. The rules held that no talk of business was permitted, but aside from that, some highly strange and puerile rituals took place.
My brother-in-law Todd Williamson was then working at a restaurant in San Francisco. He told me that the managers at Bohemian Grove were looking for waiters to help out with that year’s reunion. And so with a good deal of advance work and planning, we managed to smuggle the writer Phil Weiss into the Bohemian Grove, posing as a waiter. He got the most extraordinary copy, including overhearing Henry Kissinger (an esteemed foreign policy expert in the pages of Vanity Fair; a “socialite war criminal” in the pages of Spy) telling not particularly funny CIA-KGB jokes. It was seriously good reporting and good writing. And it caused a furor. Three decades later, a member of Bohemian Grove invited me to join him there. I told him that I would dearly like to come, but there was the matter of the story we published way back when. After I recounted some of the details of the report, he thought better of the invitation. “They have long memories,” he said.
It was never great to find yourself in the pages of Spy. But it was worse never to be mentioned. Nora Ephron told me that when Spy came out, she’d rush to the newsstand and leaf through a copy and be relieved when she didn’t see her name in it. And then she’d be slightly miffed. There were enough proper nouns in an issue that not having any purchase in Spy meant you didn’t really matter that much.
I thought it would be good to have a few advisers for the magazine. So I reached out to Jann, Lorne Michaels, and Clay Felker – all at the top of their various games in the creative-industrial complex. Jann had founded Rolling Stone 20 years before and was still its operating force. Lorne was running Saturday Night Live, the show he had created a decade earlier. And Clay had made a name for himself publishing writers like Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Pete Hamill, and Jimmy Breslin in the weekend magazine of the old Herald Tribune. The newspaper folded in 1966, and out of the ashes, two years later, he created New York magazine. Clay was in a professional limbo at the time, but still a formidable figure in the magazine world.
I had gone to Lorne during our fundraising period. He turned me down in the nicest possible way. His rationale was that creative people don’t invest – others invest in them. To celebrate Spy’s impending launch, he took me to a Yankees game. It was my first trip in a stretch limousine. Also in the car was Keith McNally, a restaurateur and the brother of one of my closest friends, Brian. And Chevy Chase, whose career Lorne had launched on Saturday Night Live. Chevy had just made Fletch and National Lampoon’s European Vacation and at the time was in some ways the biggest male movie star in the world. He was the host of the Academy Awards the next year and the year after that. That day at Yankee Stadium I watched as a line of dozens of fans snaked up the aisle to get Chevy’s autograph.
A quarter of a century later I ran into him at the Chateau Marmont. His career had suffered following far too many confrontations with colleagues and a number of box-office misfires. I was having dinner in the hotel’s lobby with friends. There was a piano beside us, and Chevy came over and asked if we minded if he played. We said not at all. For the next three hours, this former movie star and former host of the most important night in Hollywood played the piano – beautifully, I should add – and not a single person came over to ask for an autograph or say hello. Los Angeles, one of the sunniest of American cities, is also, hands down, the coldest.
When it came to Spy, Clay’s early advice was to run party photos up front so that advertisers had an indication of the sorts of people who were reading the magazine. We did run party photos, but not in the way he suggested. Ours caught the subjects off guard and in their cups, with funny captions written by Susan Morrison. Clay was a complicated figure. A Time magazine story about him in 1977 had this to say: “He is variously described by associates and acquaintances as autocratic, devious, dishonest, rapacious, egotistical, power mad, paranoid, a bully, and a boor.” He had been close to the Spectator columnist Taki and his wife, Alexandra, but after Taki was arrested in 1984 for possession of cocaine and shipped off to Pentonville prison, which once hosted Oscar Wilde, they didn’t hear a thing from Clay. A few weeks after Taki had been jailed, Clay finally called Alexandra – but not to wish Taki well or find out how he was faring. He called to get the name of the chintz they used for their living room curtains.
Still, to me, he was a big, successful editor, and I wanted to get his read on our prospects. About nine months after we launched, I went over to see him at the apartment on East 57th Street that he shared with his wife, Gail Sheehy. The apartment had a double-height ceiling and a Juliet balcony at one end of the living room. I couldn’t believe editors could live on such a level. He told me that he had been studying Spy carefully.
“What do you think we should do?” I asked.
“Fold it,” he said. “It’s not going to work. You’re not going to get the readers you want. It’s just not going to work.”
Fold it? I thought he was kidding at first. But he wasn’t. I was completely numb.
Just then he got a phone call. Clay said, “Hi, Herb.” Now the only Herb I knew of was Herb Lipson, who owned a number of city magazines. He had founded Manhattan, inc., a smart monthly edited by the truly gifted Jane Amsterdam that studied New York through its various industries. We were big fans of it at Spy and considered it high-level competition. Based on my hearing only one end of the conversation, I could tell that Clay and this Herb were agreeing to something – I just wasn’t sure what. That evening, I went with some friends to Elaine’s, the Upper East–side canteen for the literary and show business set. We were sitting at one of the round tables along the right wall that Elaine set aside for writers and friends.
Clay and Gail came in. As they made their way through the restaurant, I could see that he was being congratulated for something. We said hello and he continued on, shaking hands and basking in the glow of the attention. I turned to the Vienna-born historian (and later Vanity Fair colleague) Frederic Morton, who was sitting at the next table: “Hey, Fred, what’s this all about?” Fred just looked at me and said, “You haven’t heard? Clay was just made editor of Manhattan, inc.!” I was dumbfounded. He’d taken a job at one of our competitors on the same day that he’d told me to fold our magazine. I never spoke to him again.
Clay’s warning notwithstanding, Spy was a local hit, then a national hit, and then an international one. Not a week went by when a print reporter or a news crew didn’t shimmy into the office for a story on this cheeky New York monthly. To some degree, it gave news organizations cover to repeat some of the outrageous things we wrote about our subjects without having any ownership themselves. One time I was on MTV News with Kurt Loder, which was very much the voice of the new generation. DJ Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince (Will Smith, as he is now called) were also on the show that day. As we were leaving the studio after the taping, they came up to me and asked where I got my overcoat – a Chesterfield in fawn-colored whipcord with a muddy-green velvet collar.
“At Anderson & Sheppard,” I said.
They asked who to contact there. I said, “Ask for Mr. Halsey.”
Now, Mr. Halsey was, as noted, Norman Halsey, one of the chief tailors at the firm and a throwback to the Edwardian era, both in dress and demeanor. I was more than prepared to hear from him with a query along the lines of Mr. Carter, we have a Mr. DJ Jazzy Jeff and a Mr. Fresh Prince here and they are inquiring about that Chesterfield coat we made for you a few years ago. I shuddered with happiness.
At Spy, we wrote and produced a number of half-hour comedy shows for NBC, one hosted by Jerry Seinfeld and the other by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and these were done before they started working on Seinfeld. At one point we thought it might be good to get a professional agent. Nancy Josephson, who would one day run ICM, suggested Sam Cohn. Now, Sam was truly a legend in the business. He handled much of the big-name New York talent of the time, including Woody Allen, Mike Nichols, Paul Newman, and Meryl Streep. He was famous for his regular booth at the Russian Tea Room, for his habit of eating paper to ease his nerves, and for not returning phone calls. He took us on. After a year or more of complete inaction on his part, we decided to look for another agent. We thought it polite to tell him this before we made any change. The problem was, we couldn’t get him on the phone. After months of trying, we just threw up our hands. He stayed our agent, and we never produced another TV show again.
Kurt, Tom, and I paid ourselves $37,500 that first year. I had two sons, Ash and Max, by the time we launched, and Cynthia stayed home to take care of them. We were blessed by having a rent-stabilized apartment. It had high ceilings, a small library, a living room with a fireplace, French pocket doors, a dining room, and a second bedroom. I paid $280 a month for it. A different time. Today, the apartment would probably rent for 25 times as much. Even so, I constantly had to figure out ways to earn extra money. I began drawing a monthly caricature for Emma Soames when she became the editor of Tatler in London. They were nothing to write home about – and indeed few subjects or readers did. Emma was a spirited and lively editor. But her magazine was considered too astringent for the Sloane Square set Tatler aspired to. That Emma was the granddaughter of Winston Churchill only made the class betrayal sting more.
Emma was let go a few years after taking over and her replacement was a woman named Jane Procter. She wasn’t a popular figure in the office, and one of her first directives upon taking over – and a wise one at that – was to rid herself of my wretched drawings. Which she did by fax.
I also wrote a semi-regular column on the comings and goings in New York for the Evening Standard, London’s then widely read afternoon paper. The column was on a par with my Tatler caricatures, and once the paper was taken over by Paul Dacre – a legend for his furies and rudely picturesque language – he got rid of me too. Again, by fax. I then wrote occasional columns for the Daily Mail, which Dacre himself had graduated to. Fortunately for him they were rarities, so no need for him to get rid of me in any sort of formal manner.
Though the Spy staff itself was paid a pittance (half of them were $50-a-week interns), we arranged for a series of barter deals to help compensate them. One was with a dental office, Lowenberg and Lituchy. They got advertising pages, and the staff got free dental care. They are still my dentists. A number of barter arrangements were with restaurants – most of them in Greenwich Village or farther downtown. They got advertising pages, and we got credit for the amount of the contract at the restaurants. At the end of every issue, we used our barter money to take over one of the spots and have what we called “Closing Dinners.” They were raucous, liquid affairs that left most of us straggling late into the night. I don’t know of another magazine that did this. Those nights were important. They brought the staff together on a regular basis, and like so much of a journalist’s life in those days, they were just plain fun. At Christmas, I would put on a Santa costume and hand out Secret Santa gifts to the staff, who would come up one by one and sit on my lap. Kurt and Tom included. I stole a sort of guttural wolf-growl, faux-licentious style from the old Bob Hope movies. It was the kind of thing that would give HR departments conniptions today.
Editorially, we had a hoot. Henry Alford compared Elvis’s weights on other planets. The New Yorker didn’t accept letters to the editor, so we reached out and ran them ourselves. The New Yorker didn’t have a masthead either, so we spent six months assembling one. We ran a story on Anne Bass, Mercedes Kellogg, Nan Kempner, and the sleek chatelaines then running the salons of the Upper East Side. The story, written by Nell Scovell, then married to one of the lower-ranking members of the Tisch family, was called “Too Rich and Too Thin.” This was her first sentence: “In New York there is an inverse relationship between a woman’s dress size and the size of her apartment. A size 2 gets a 14-room apartment. A size 14 gets a two-room apartment.”
Back in the day, when books mattered more than they do now, certain books could make a certain segment of the city stop. People just sat down and read them – in part so they wouldn’t be left out of the conversation. William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice was like that. So were David Halberstam’s The Powers That Be, Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s Barbarians at the Gate, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, and David McClintick’s Indecent Exposure. In 1989, The Andy Warhol Diaries was published. The book didn’t have a narrative beyond the detailing of what Warhol had done every night over the past few decades, including the people he ran into. He had plenty of catty comments. It was a doorstop of a book, coming in at just under 900 pages. Everybody was reading it. But it didn’t have an index. This was driving both subjects and readers slightly batty. So we decided to produce one. For the next three weeks, a dozen or so interns pored over the book, creating an index that was true both to the diaries and to the voice of Spy. We bound it into the next issue. A sample entry:
- Taylor, Elizabeth
mysterious trips to the bathroom with Halston, 49
resemblance to “fat little Kewpie doll,” 115
“Very fat, but very beautiful,” 177
“John Warner wasn’t fucking her,” given cocaine by Halston, 178
We devoted an inordinate amount of time creating a “Celebrity Pro-Am Ironman Nightlife Decathlon.” This involved sending two interns, John Brodie and Bob Mack, into the night to track and record the activities of British journalist Anthony Haden-Guest, Carl Bernstein, and publisher Morgan Entrekin. Brodie and Mack followed each of the contestants as they made their ways through the pleasures of New York’s evening demimonde. An important note: the contestants were blissfully unaware that they were participants in the Ironman Nightlife Decathlon. Our reporters produced detailed accounts of their activities in ten categories, including “hours spent out, number of celebrities seen, number of drinks drunk, and so forth.”
And then, of course, there was Donald Trump. In 1983, Art Cooper, the editor of GQ, had asked me if I was interested in writing a story on him for the magazine. I wasn’t, but I needed the money, so I agreed to do it. Trump was at the beginning of his florid tabloid residency, and since this was going to be his first major bit of national exposure, he let me hang around with him for three weeks. He hated the story when it came out. The piece portrayed him as an outer-borough sharpie with taste that veered toward the showy and the vulgar. And worse, I made the observation that his hands were a bit too small for his body. He was on the cover, and as I later discovered, wanted to keep that issue of GQ away from as many of his fellow New Yorkers as possible, so he had his staff go out and buy up copies on the newsstands. (Years later, Si told me that it was the brisk sales of the Trump GQ cover that led him to urge Random House to publish Trump’s ghostwritten The Art of the Deal, which led to the reality TV show The Apprentice, which led to where we are now. As they say, a butterfly’s wings.)
Trump was not a successful real estate developer and bestselling “author” to us at Spy, though. He was a joke. He threatened to sue us and regularly fed rumors of our demise to gossip columnists. At one point we got fed up, and after consulting an actuary – giving him Trump’s physical details, age, eating habits, and whatnot – we began a monthly countdown to his own demise, under the headline “Death Be Not Short-Fingered.”
I regularly called my old friend from Ottawa, Steve Probyn. Steve was by then working in Whitehall on energy policy for Margaret Thatcher, and despite being a serious academic and political savant, he had a wonderful and mischievous sense of humor. One day he said he had a story idea for me. “Why don’t you try to get rich people to endorse really small checks?” I liked it. Kurt did too. And so began a yearlong project of seeing whether we could get rich New Yorkers to go to the trouble of signing and then depositing checks in increasingly insignificant amounts. We set up an account for a company called National Refund Clearinghouse. We had a letterhead made up. And the checkbooks arrived from the bank. We sent checks for $1.11 to the home addresses of 58 well-heeled subjects including Si, Leonard Bernstein, Michael Douglas, Salomon Brothers head John Gutfreund, CBS chairman William S. Paley, and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times. In those days, you had to endorse checks on the back and then someone – presumably an underling – would go to the bank and physically deposit them. Within two months, 26, or almost half, of our subjects had endorsed and deposited the $1.11 checks.
We wanted to see if we could entice the thirty-two people who didn’t sign those checks by upping the ante. We sent them refund checks for $2. Six of them went to the trouble of endorsing and depositing them. This list included Carly Simon, Candice Bergen, and Richard Gere. At the same time, we wanted to see what the threshold was for the ones who had signed the $1.11 checks, so we sent them refunds of $0.64. Over the next few months, 13 signed and deposited the $0.64 checks. This list included Si, Rupert Murdoch, Henry Kravis, Cher, Adnan Khashoggi, and Donald Trump. We decided to push our luck further, by sending this last group checks in the amount of $0.13.
Now remember, this project had taken almost a year of mailing, waiting, remailing, and so forth. The checks for $0.13 went out, and we continued about our business. Within a few months we had our finalists – two men of wealth who took the time and trouble to endorse and deposit checks for $0.13. One was Khashoggi, at that time the most notorious arms dealer in the world. And the other one was a certain short-fingered vulgarian. One of the few wealthy New Yorkers we didn’t send checks to was Leonard Stern, the owner of the Hartz Mountain pet-food empire. That’s because his son Eddie was the one who did the story – under the pen name Julius Lowenthal.
On the editorial side of things, Kurt and I ran the show, with Susan, George, Tad, Bruce, Jamie, Jim, and Paul as our deputies. Kurt and I ate lunch together, worked a few feet apart, had regular dinners, and even socialized with each other. It was about as close to a marriage as you can get without the touching or taking out the garbage. I wish I could remember a serious disagreement – just for dramatics’ sake – but I can’t. Well, there was a heated discussion with Joanne Gruber, our gifted managing editor, who also handled copyediting duties, over the words careered and careened. But that was about it. And in Tom, we had the most simpatico of business partners. He wasn’t the greatest ad salesman. But he was a clever strategist. And his chief love in the whole enterprise was the writing in Spy.
My schedule was fairly routine in those days. I got into the office around 7:00 and left at 5:30 so I could be home for a family dinner. Once the kids were off to bed, I would edit manuscripts and plan the next day at a small desk in the living room. During the off-school months, I was what was known in New York in the old days as a “summer bachelor.” I would stay in the city during the weekdays while Cynthia, Ash, Max, and our third son, Spike, spent the summer in Washington, Connecticut. We had a 200-year-old colonial on the town green that was always badly in need of something – paint? repair? demolition? I found it a haven and imagined myself living there well into old age.
Our apartment building had an ancient wiring system that caused fuses to break with the addition of any sort of extra electrical device. We had an air conditioner in the bedroom that I could only turn on in the summer months if I unplugged the refrigerator. So, from the end of Memorial Day through Labor Day, I had cool air at night, but absolutely no refrigeration. Our landlord, Sol Haselnuss, was justifiably furious that we had this huge, rent-stabilized apartment in his building. If I was even an hour late in paying the rent, an eviction sign would go up on the door.
We couldn’t afford to send the kids to camp, and besides, we all loved being with each other. So I came up with “Camp Carter” – a loose assembly of activities that included a version of our own Olympics. I even had medals made up for them. I loved fishing, and after an early dinner I would head over to the Shepaug River near our house for an hour with my fly rod before it got dark. Birthday parties in New York were extravaganzas with clowns and magicians and ponies and whatnot. All things that we couldn’t afford. I can juggle and manage a few magic tricks, and so one year I bought a clown costume, figuring that I could use it at my own kids’ birthday parties and amortize it over a few years. The first time I tried it with a few tricks like pouring a pitcher of milk into a rolled-up newspaper or poking a large needle through a balloon or juggling four tennis balls, the five-year-olds were either catcalling me or just bored. I retired the getup after that first performance and stored it at our house in Connecticut.
Brian McNally and his wife, Anne, lived near us. Their son James was with us one year on his birthday. Anne was in Paris and Brian was tied up in New York with a problem at one of his restaurants. We got a cake for James, and Cynthia suggested I do some magic tricks to keep him occupied until Brian arrived. I put on the costume, with its bald head and tufts of hair, big floppy shoes, and a wire around the waist that made me look enormous. I had just entered our kitchen prepared to do my tragic assortment of tricks when Brian walked in. He had a camera in his bag and quickly took a snapshot – a photograph he continues to haunt me with to this day. I look like one of those demented serial killers who chases children through corn fields in horror films. Brian gave the photograph to our friend Mitch Glazer, and when I stayed with him and his wife, Kelly, at the house they rented in Martha’s Vineyard, they had dozens upon dozens of copies of the photograph made up and taped to every conceivable surface, including under the toilet seat. I wish there was a happy ending to this story, but there isn’t. Two of my best friends steadfastly refuse to give up this photo.
I phoned my parents in Canada every week. They were happy that I was happy, but I don’t think they ever completely understood what I was doing. They certainly never commented on anything in Spy. My mother once said that she couldn’t understand the magazine at all. Her only compliment during those years came after I was named by Maclean’s magazine, the Canadian version of Time, as one of the “10 Sexiest Canadians.” She saw the story and called me to tell me how incredibly proud she was.
In 1989, three years after our launch, Vanity Fair commissioned Annie Leibovitz to take a group photograph celebrating the new magazines on the newsstands: publications with names like Sassy, Wigwag, Taxi, Spin, Model, Egg, and Fame. The ’80s were an explosive time for magazine start-ups in New York, and there were some gifted editors in the picture, including Adam Moss (7 Days), Betsy Carter (New York Woman), Terry McDonell (Smart), Annie Flanders (Details), and Susan Lyne (Premiere). Kurt and I were in the photo, holding copies of Spy. Those titles are all pretty much gone now. Publishing a magazine is a brute when it comes to the finances. You have your staff and rent and electricity, all of which must be paid on a regular schedule. You have to pay the writers, photographers, and illustrators. The magazines are then sent all over the country to wholesalers and then individual retailers. The magazines go on the newsstands for a month. And maybe ninety days later, you get paid for the copies sold. Similarly, advertisers – even the flush ones – only paid after sixty to ninety days. The less-flush ones often didn’t pay at all. This is all to say, the more successful we got, the more strained our cash flow got.
About two years in from our 1986 launch, Si Newhouse had asked to meet with us, expressing interest in buying Spy and bringing it into the Condé Nast fold. In those days, Si ruled over a significant tranche of the city’s creative engine. It would not be unreasonable to say that his sway over the minds of America’s highbrow and upper-middle-brow readers was without precedent, before or since. On the books side of things, he controlled Alfred A. Knopf and Random House and all their various imprints. With Condé Nast he oversaw Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Gourmet, GQ, and Architectural Digest, among other titles. Writers, photographers, editors, stylists, socialites, and Hollywood stars – they all wanted to get before his eyes. I think Si was fully aware of his influence over the upper reaches of American print culture, but he wore it all lightly. He might well have been the least boastful powerful person I have ever met.
Kurt and Tom and I put on jackets and ties and headed to the Upper East Side apartment of John Veronis, then the publishing industry’s major banker. After the meeting, which lasted an hour, Si gave us a lift back to the office. His car was something uncharacteristic for him: a stretch limousine. They were in favor in the 1980s, but by the ’90s had been replaced by more discreet-looking town cars. Along the way, trying to make pleasant chitchat, one of us asked him what magazines he found interesting. He mentioned October, an obscure journal published by MIT that focused on contemporary art. It was a choice we found both mystifying, in that we had never heard of it, and impressive, in that, again, we had never heard of it.
The car dropped Si off at the old Condé Nast offices, at 350 Madison Avenue, tucked into the west side of the block between the Paul Stuart store and the flagship Brooks Brothers store. It then took us down to the Puck Building. We discussed his offer on the ride and then back at the office. As much as we would have loved to work with Si – he was Si Newhouse, after all – we all felt that it was important for a magazine, especially one like Spy, to stay independent in its early years. Also, and this is important, we were having too much fun doing it on our own. The next day, Tom called Veronis and said that we would be declining a sale, at least for now. This was a decision made perhaps rashly and foolishly.
By 1990, the magazine was in trouble financially. Our business plan and fundraising were premised on Spy being a largely New York magazine with a circulation around 25,000. By the time the Vanity Fair photograph of all the editors ran, our circulation was international, and we were selling upward of 150,000 copies a month. It looked good on the outside. But the math just didn’t hold up. The gap between when we had to spend the money and when we would get paid for advertising and copies sold was still uncomfortably wide. The initial outflow – on staff, rent, writers, and paper and printing – had grown dramatically, and it dwarfed our initial predictions. We had spurned Si’s advances to buy the magazine, and that was the last time anyone came knocking. After a long and wrenching conversation in our conference room, Kurt, Tom, and I decided that we had to sell Spy.
We sold the magazine to Charles Saatchi, the British adman, and Johnny Pigozzi, an investor, heir to the Simca car company, and, like Charles, a noted art collector. Shortly after finalizing the sale, Kurt and I were invited to come see Charles and Johnny in London. We were sent tickets for the Concorde. This was about a zillion steps up from the economy seats at the back of the plane that we had become accustomed to. New York to London on the Concorde was supposed to take three hours, but somewhere off the coast of Ireland one of the engines blew. The plane went from 1,400 miles an hour to under 700 miles an hour in a few seconds. It was like hitting a brick wall. We made an emergency landing at Shannon and waited for another British Airways plane to be rounded up. In all, the trip took us about eight hours, just slightly longer than it would have taken aboard a 747.
We had dinner with Charles and Johnny at Charles’s house in London. There was a Magritte in the foyer. And a Carl Andre installation of loose bricks on the floor near the door. Charles and Johnny said that they wanted Spy to compete with Vanity Fair. Which to us was a tall order, in that for the past five years we had been essentially the anti–Vanity Fair. And we were operating on a shoestring. It was difficult not to like them both, but for me, the change in ownership and the requested redirection of the editorial mission was unsettling – a bit like the flight over from New York. Kurt was more sanguine about the new order in the Spy offices. Faxes would come in from Johnny telling us to do this and that story and put this or that celebrity on the cover. In those days, I used to bristle easily. I felt that it’s one thing to coedit a magazine you’ve started. It’s a completely different matter to do the same job under the thumb of someone else. Charles and Johnny didn’t ask us to sign employment contracts. Which was somewhat hurtful. But also liberating. For reasons that escape me now, I had a relatively positive attitude about the future.