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Magazine editor Graydon Carter spent decades steering the cover stories of other notable people. Now, he’s ready for his own tell-all.
In a new memoir, “When the Going Was Good,” the former head of Vanity Fair — who oversaw the publication for two decades and minted its signature Hollywood issues and Oscars afterparty — chronicles his life as a reporter and editor during what he calls “the golden age of magazines.”
Carter used the book to reveal the big gambles and bigger-named photographers, writers and stars at the heart of his success at Vanity Fair. Replete with name-drops, one of the biggest in the novel was Harvey Weinstein, whom Carter revealed caught the ire of his publication long before falling out of public favor.
The famed film producer, now serving prison time for a conviction on sex crimes charges, was the only person ever banned for life from the Vanity Fair Oscar Party, Carter reportedly revealed in his memoir.
Weinstein “regularly showed up with more guests than his invitation indicated and would bully the staff,” Carter wrote, per People and Page Six. Before he was permanently barred from the Oscars soiree for lashing out at event organizer Sara Marks, Carter claimed he had attempted to confront Weinstein over his treatment of the staff.
“It was both the correct thing to do and a foolish gesture, in that he was certifiably the reigning producer in Hollywood at the time and he could tell the stars in his films to give us a wide berth on Oscar night,” he added, according to People.
USA TODAY has reached out to Weinstein’s representative for comment.
How the Oscars afterparty ‘institution’ was born
In a “CBS Sunday Morning” interview that aired Sunday, Carter revealed that with the Oscar party, “It became not how to get people in, but how to keep people out.”
“We had no VIP sections,” he said. “Once you got in, everybody’s the same. And with a party, it’s about the right curation of people.”
As for how the Oscar party was born, Carter recently told “PBS News Hour” that he’d been inspired by Hollywood power agent Irving Paul “Swifty” Lazar, who worked with stars such as Humphrey Bogart, Truman Capote, Cher, Cary Grant, Ernest Hemingway, Gene Kelly, Madonna and former President Richard Nixon.
“I’d gone to Swifty Lazar’s last Oscar party, and he invented the whole notion of the Oscar party. I went to his last one. Then he died in December (1993). And I decided that we could probably take his place the next March,” Carter said. “So we scrambled to pull it together. And we had, like, 150 people for dinner and maybe 150 or 200 people from the Academy Awards afterwards.”
He continued, “And my philosophy is always that if you’re going to fail, best do it with the smallest audience possible, but it was a success. And so each year it grew and grew and it became eventually an institution.”
Contributing: KiMi Robinson, USA TODAY
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