Whoa! I’m Getting Paid for This?

EDITOR S LETTER

Spy magazine, which I co~ founded in 1986 and co-edited for five years, was, as befitted its meager endowment, a ship with a few ill-paid officers on the bridge and dozens of younger, even-more-poorly-paid hands stuffed into the hold. Whenever the outlook for the magazine’s

long-term prospects would wither temporarily—and this happened a lot—my partners and I would round up the staff for something approaching a pep talk. I would rattle on about turning comers and new advertisers and such, subjects that no doubt bored them to death. But what I think did grab their attention was when I instructed them to look around at the other people in the room. They were all in their early 20s; this was their first job out of school and was therefore a defining moment in their lives up to that point. I told them that years from now they would all look back on these uncertain times as the good old days. A decade or more later, most are still close friends, and a number of them have even married one another. Nine of them are on the masthead of this magazine. And I think all of them agree with me:

looking back, those really were the good old days.

It was one of the few opinions I felt on safe ground with, because a decade earlier I had walked into the Time & Life Building and begun a job as a writer at Time, an opportunity that would certainly become one of the defining moments in my own life. New to New York, possessing limited abilities, a wildly incomplete university education, and a single suit, I felt horribly out of place. Let me tell you, the talent was thick on the ground at Time in those days. In the three-year period around my joining the magazine, on a few corridors on the 24th and 25th floors of the Time & Life Building were fresh new talents to make a lesser soul such as myself tremble. “Are all New Yorkers this clever?” I thought many times.

Blessedly, the answer was no. This group was special. Nearly all were in their 20s and all flowered with such an abundance of writerly gifts that over the years they would come to fill journalism’s pantheon. Walter Isaacson, who rose to become the top editor at Time and is now the C.E.O. of CNN, was there. So was Kurt Andersen, with whom I co-founded Spy. He became the editor of New York and a co-founder of Inside .com. Jim Kelly, the current managing editor of Time, was there, as were Steve Smith, a future editor of U.S. News & World Report, and Evan Thomas, the historian and longtime Washington-bureau chief of Newsweek. Four towering figures at The New York Times prowled the hallways at Ime in those days: Frank Rich, now the paper’s cultural essayist, Alessandra Stanley, its former Rome-bureau chief, Michiko Kakutani, the paper’s chief book critic, and Maureen Dowd, its star op-ed-page columnist. The last two went on to win Pulitzer Prizes. James Atlas, the biographer and co-founder of the Penguin Lives Series, was a con⅛ temporary. So was Richard Stengel, a former speechwriter for Bill Bradley who is now the editor of Time.com. We all stay in touch, and I would venture that all regularly look back on that period as something quite magical.

Now, more than 20 years after starting at Time, and a decade after leaving Spy, I find that I have spent close to a decade at Vanity Fair. And not a day goes by when I don’t cherish the moment when I take the elevator to the magazine’s impossibly sleek new offices on the 22nd floor of the Conde Nast Building.

I sit down at my desk, and armed with a pencil and a cup of black coffee I go through the morning mail and then spend an hour or so on the phone with staff members and contributors. In the course of the week I’ll have worked my way through a good part of the masthead, surely one of the greatest collections of writers, photographers, and editors ever assembled under one logo. Three are Pulitzer Prize winners, nine are former editors in chief. There are best-selling authors. Brilliant minds. Big egos. It’s a dream. I’m having a hot flash. No, I just spilled my coffee. Still, it’s beginning to feel very much like the good old days. GRAYDON CARTER