From Cooper Street to Condé Nast: A Footnote in a Media Giant’s Origin Story

Title: When the Going was Good: An Editor’s Adventures during the Last Golden Age of Magazines
Author: Graydon Carter with James Fox
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780593655900

Review by James Forrester

The pinnacle of The Canadian Review magazine was the May 1976 issue, with Peter Gzowski on the cover promoting his ill-fated 90 Minutes Live late-night CBC television program. At that time, I was listed on the masthead as an associate editor, working on a special issue devoted to Canadian cinema. The editor and fellow university student was none other than Graydon Carter.

My experience was not unusual, as the informality of the business model welcomed anyone who came through the door, willing to work for “future considerations.” By the late 1970s this was a well-established tradition, where Canadian writers and editors sought employment elsewhere, following their apprenticeship on small Canadian magazines. Inevitably, someone upon hearing the name The Canadian Review, for the first time, asked me “of what?” There was an assumption that the publication was some kind of academic journal. There’s still no Wiki entry for The Canadian Review. Now that’s obscure.

The recent news that Graydon Carter was releasing a memoir of his career as an editor/publisher of Spy, The New York Observer, most notably Vanity Fair and finally the Air Mail international digest came as a pleasant surprise. Former CR staff expectations did not exceed a brief footnote mentioning Canadian Review as part of Graydon’s reflection on his forty-five-year adventure at the centre of American media (both print and film) in NYC and Hollywood.

Well, it seems that our shared experience of growing a “literary magazine” into a monthly publication distributed on Air Canada flights left an impression on Mr. Carter in that he devotes Chapter 4 (“A College Magazine to the Rescue”) to his first experience as an editor at the University of Ottawa, 1974 -1977.

Here’s Graydon’s description of how he became involved with the university-funded literary and poetry publication: “I didn’t have much time for contemporary poetry, but I was interested in the literary bit. I asked if they needed help, and Graham [Pomeroy] said that they could use an art director. I told them that I could draw, and so the job was mine … A year or so in, Graham got either bored or tired of the interoffice squabbling and departed, leaving me as the de facto editor.”

The chapter has some interesting details of the evolution of the publication after it left the “hot house” environment at the university student centre and rented premises on Cooper Street near Elgin downtown. Here is Ron Poling’s image of Graydon in the Jock Turcot Student Centre which appeared in the Ottawa Citizen (1976), and my photo of his desk at Cooper House:

I would recommend When the Going was Good to anyone interested in North American publishing and the media generally. Graydon is a great raconteur and tells the story of his rise to the top of the journalistic trade in an engaging manner. The philosophy which guided him is summarized in a few lines at the beginning of the book: “There is no school for editing, like there is for dentistry, cooking, or even real estate sales. Journalism is a lead-from-your-instinct business. You just have to be really curious, and care, about everything.”