The last time I saw Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair for 25 years, he was strolling along Jermyn Street in London. Graydon was a media-land acquaintance from LA and New York where I worked as a journalist in the 1990s. We gossiped affably for a few minutes about mutual British friends before heading back to our different lives (him to a suite at the Connaught, me to a rented flat in Pimlico).

It wasn’t until I read his entertaining new memoirs, When the Going Was Good, that I realised quite how very different our lives had become ever since I met him at Vanity Fair’s first Oscar party in 1994. Graydon and his team of fixers quickly won over Hollywood by adapting the 1990s media mogul spending mantra of: ‘I gave my wife an unlimited budget and she exceeded it.’ Within a few years, A-listers were begging for invites and I was off the list because, out on the West Coast, the Times of London’s LA correspondent was a nobody.

This culture of almost Medici-like extravagance and salary excess turned Condé Nast into a glossy Mid-Atlantic media court to which a whole generation of US and UK writers (including would-be novelists) and editors (also would-be novelists) gravitated. We felt like the ambitious and money-starved artists who flocked to the Italian Renaissance courts, such as young Leonardo da Vinci, who was a party organiser, set painter and lute player to the Duke of Milan. In his lunch meetings with the owner of Condé Nast Si Newhouse, Carter portrays him as a 20th-century Lorenzo de’ Medici, handing out artistic patronages like a media pope.

‘If Si wanted a writer or photographer,’ writes Carter, ‘he went after what he wanted.’ And usually got it. These included big-names like Christopher Hitchens and Michael Lewis (who began his career in London writing for The Spectator under Dominic Lawson).

There was once a deadlock in contract negotiations between the magazine and the agent of their star photographer Annie Leibovitz which came down to $250,000. ‘Oh, give it to her,’ said Newhouse, not wanting to ‘nickel-and-dime’ her. On another occasion, even Carter’s jaw dropped on seeing the extravagance of food (mostly untouched) at a single photo shoot, which cost more than the total editorial budget of a normal monthly magazine.

My eyes, as a money-conscious magazine editor for 25 years (Spear’s and the Catholic Herald), first started rolling in disbelief when........

© The Spectator