Book excerpt: “When the Going Was Good” by Graydon Carter

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In his new memoir, “When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines” (to be published Tuesday by Penguin Press), former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter recounts the glory days of magazine publishing, and of his stewardship of the trend-setting title for two-and-a-half decades.

Among the colorful highlights Carter writes about from his career at the venerable Condé Nast property is the subterfuge required to protect Vanity Fair’s 2015 scoop of Caitlyn Jenner’s transition.

Read an excerpt below, and don’t miss Jane Pauley’s interview with Graydon Carter on “CBS Sunday Morning” March 23!

“When the Going Was Good” by Graydon Carter

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We were always on the lookout for covers that would fly off the newsstands and, in years to come, go viral on the internet. Sometimes the quest took us down unexpected byways. If the unmasking of Deep Throat was the biggest journalistic scoop of my time at Vanity Fair, the biggest scoop with regard to the overall culture was our cover exclusive about Caitlyn Jenner. I remembered Jenner as an Olympic decathlete who as Bruce Jenner had appeared on Wheaties boxes—once among the highest accolades an athlete could aspire to.  Jenner was tall and still good-looking—later, with a bit of help from colorists and surgeons. There had been a minor and desultory film career early on, and by the time of transition, Jenner was a stepfather getting ordered about by sundry Kardashians on their reality television show. Jenner had become a slightly tragic figure. But word began to seep out that there was going to be some dramatic news.

One day I called Jane Sarkin into my office and said, “What about Bruce Jenner?” There were stories floating about that Jenner was going through reassignment surgery. I said, “At some point Jenner’s going to make an announcement. Why not in Vanity Fair? Why don’t you see if we can get it?” Our initial approach was turned down flat. Then Jenner switched to a public relations person Jane was friends with. After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, Jane had some news. Jenner was game to do it with us, she said.

To get the cover and the inside pictures and the story, we went into deep-secrecy mode. As we had done with Deep Throat, we set up a special room at the office and covered the windows with kraft paper. Nothing suspicious about that! We had one key for the room, and a computer to handle traffic on a server separate from the one that handled the rest of the magazine. Only eight people in the office knew about the project. I assigned Annie Leibovitz to do the pictures and Buzz Bissinger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of Friday Night Lights, to do the story. I thought Buzz would be ideal. He could talk sports, and given that he had dabbled with a bit of cross-dressing, he could converse in the language of women’s finery as well.  Buzz made a number of trips west as Bruce began the process of transition. The plan was that Bruce would have surgery and then recuperate in isolation at his home in Malibu. Our agreement was that no one else was allowed to visit him during this period. Only Buzz. As the reporting progressed, we had issues to contend with, including finding women’s clothes for a six-foot, two-inch former athlete and then smuggling the most famous photographer in the world into a house that was surrounded by paparazzi. Word had gotten out about Jenner, and there were even news helicopters circling overhead. We put security guards around the perimeter. And then we put the entire staff for the shoot in two large vans with darkened windows. Jane and Buzz were in one of them, as was Buzz’s editor, Dana Brown. Later, Jane described walking in with Annie’s team. “The house looked out at a beautiful vista of Malibu. Very modest house. But a beautiful pool. You walk up the steps, and as I come up, this person is coming towards me in a silk robe with marabou feathers, and kitten heels with marabou feathers. Her legs are glistening with satin oil. The hair is down, and the hands are huge. She says to me, ‘Hi, I’m Caitlyn.'”

Once we had the story and the shoot, it was time to pick the cover and figure out what to say on it. We toyed with any number of options. Finally, I just wrote the line “Call Me Caitlyn.” I figured that, by the time the issue hit the  newsstands, her name would be everywhere, and we wouldn’t have to say much more than that. We were still in relatively primitive digital times, but we decided to make it the first cover we ever released online. No waiting around for the printing and binding and delivery trucks—all constant sources of leaks. We prepared a brief description and a short video that had been filmed during the shoot. At noon on the appointed day, we released our story to the world. A dozen or so of us sat at a long borrowed conference table, watching the traffic on a big TV monitor. It started slowly and then, as the minutes clicked by, the graph arm just began to climb until it was completely vertical. I have no idea whether you can “break” the internet or not, but if it is possible, we surely came close.

From “When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines” by Graydon Carter, published on March 25, 2025, by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Graydon Carter.

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