Ms. Brown added that she accepted the job only after her mother agreed to move to New York to help with the children. “Never at any time throughout all this did Graydon’s name come up to me as a possible alternate candidate,” she wrote, adding that she was “so bedeviled by Graydon’s angry recollection.”
“Si was extremely secretive and precipitous in his decision making,” she continued, adding: “He never asked me whether I thought Graydon would be a good editor of Vanity Fair! Most people thought that if I left I would be succeeded by Adam Moss, and I was surprised by the Graydon pick as he had no experience with glossies, but he turned out wonderfully well.”
In a phone interview, Ms. Brown said, “I would like to point out that when I left The New Yorker six-and-a-half years later, why didn’t he give it to Graydon? He gave it to David Remnick!”
Mr. Carter said he worried during his first years at Vanity Fair that he would be fired. “By that time,” he said, “I had three kids and a fourth child on the way. I wasn’t even an American citizen, so I just wanted to keep my job. If I’d taken over Sports Illustrated, I’d be going to sporting events.”
In the book, he writes that, at first, advertisers and the staff were in revolt. A few holdover Brown allies — who dubbed Mr. Carter’s version of the magazine “Vanishing Flair” — were “deeply hostile and subversive,” making the workplace culture “poisonous.” Finally, he fired the loyalists, and a cloud lifted.
“Despite the fact that I am, at heart, a beta male, this moved me, at least in some eyes, closer into the alpha category,” he writes. After that, he climbed ever higher, procuring 300 pages of advertising at almost $100,000 a page, he reports — impossible to imagine now. Despite the fact that he had once spilled ice coffee on Mr. Newhouse’s white rug, turning it pinto, the two formed a close bond.
