From Irreverent Chronicler to Hollywood’s Good Friend

When it comes to protecting the Oscar trademark, the motion picture academy is notoriously ferocious, often threatening lawsuits for infringements. Except, maybe, if your name is Graydon Carter and you’re the editor of Vanity Fair.

For several years, academy officials overlooked the 18-foot Oscar-shaped topiaries that graced the entrance to Carter’s annual awards-night bash at Morton’s restaurant in West Hollywood. Considering their crackdowns on others, the academy brass could no longer wink at the infraction as the party reached its fourth year. But the message from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences came not in a roaring lawyer’s letter, but on cat’s paws.

“We had been turning a blind eye to the shrubbery that materialized each year outside Morton’s in late March,” the academy wrote, “in the hope that root borers or an incautiously flipped Cohiba [cigar] would eventually save us the awkwardness of raising the issue with you.”

Carter obliged. After all, the man who savaged Hollywood’s elite in his days at Spy magazine had by then become far more agreeable. He now was running a publication that glorified celebrities with soft stories and glossy photos. “If you can get that cover, it’s the gold standard,” Pat Kingsley, Hollywood’s most powerful publicist, said of Vanity Fair’s sway in the movie world.

In recent years, however, Carter has ventured to the other side of Hollywood’s velvet ropes. He has entered into personal business projects with people who have a stake in Vanity Fair’s coverage. Despite his many accolades during the last 12 years as editor, Carter and the company that owns his magazine, Conde Nast Publications, are at the center of a controversy over journalistic ethics.

The issue, simmering behind the scenes, erupted after The Times recently reported, among other things, that Carter had demanded and received $100,000 from Universal Pictures. According to sources familiar with the transaction, Carter believed he was owed the money for encouraging his filmmaker friends, Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, to read an unpublished manuscript, which would later form the basis of their Oscar-winning “A Beautiful Mind.”

Carter is continuing to pursue deals. He’s been negotiating, for example, with American Express Co., a frequent Vanity Fair advertiser, to fund a documentary on the life of his writer friend Fran Lebowitz, a contributing editor. “It certainly might happen,” said American Express marketing chief John Hayes.

That Carter’s extracurricular dealings have drawn so much heat is testimony not only to the high voltage of Vanity Fair, but to the larger-than-life persona the 54-year-old editor has created for himself, complete with dapper suits and a mane of gray.

Few could have predicted the ease with which Carter has gravitated toward the rich and glamorous of Hollywood since he took the helm at Vanity Fair in 1992 from Tina Brown.

Brown had revived Vanity Fair with a sizzling mix of hard-edged stories and profiles of Hollywood power players. The British-born editor had given cover, of sorts, to readers interested in serious topics but who also had a taste for the tawdry. Advertisers adored the magazine’s high-end demographics.

When publisher Conde Nast tapped Brown to become editor of Vanity Fair’s prestigious sister publication, the New Yorker, Graydon Carter’s name was not on many lips as her successor. By all accounts, he was a creative editor but he also seemed to take particular pleasure in delivering a witty kick to the kind of people who might find their way into Vanity Fair’s slick pages.

It was a taste he indulged -- and for which he became best known -- at the now-defunct Spy magazine, which he edited and co-founded. The publication roiled Hollywood and New York in the mid-1980s with its pseudonymous reports on the foibles of developer Donald Trump, super-agent Michael Ovitz, columnist Liz Smith and anyone else unlucky enough to catch its eye.

But Spy’s appeal was limited. As its finances began to crumble, Carter jumped to the moribund New York Observer weekly newspaper. As editor, he set the same irreverent tone for the paper’s coverage of the cut and thrust among Manhattan’s power players. Within a year, he got the attention of Conde Nast Chairman S.I. Newhouse Jr.

With a stable of nearly two dozen magazines, the New York-based publisher is among the country’s most influential. Besides Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, it publishes Architectural Digest, Gourmet, GQ, Vogue and Self.

Newhouse offered Carter a shot to gain national prominence, a break that some associates said he had pursued since his early days as a reporter at Time magazine.

After what many characterized as a shaky start, Carter found his footing with Vanity Fair’s richly compensated journalistic stars. By inside accounts, the magazine’s approximately 70 writers thrive on Carter’s “blue notes” -- handwritten praise on powder blue stationery.

In recent days, some have rallied to his defense. Vanity Fair contributor David Margolick, for one, said Carter “gives his writers the five most essential things: time, space, freedom, respect and he pays you well.”

Although the 1990s brought Vanity Fair increased profit and professional recognition under Carter, the magazine also “went Hollywood.” If Brown pioneered the link between Vanity Fair and Hollywood, then Carter made it an integral part of the publication.

“Vanity Fair changed and became a magazine that is much less interesting to people who like to read real journalism,” said Carol Felsenthal, author of “Citizen Newhouse,” a critical look at Conde Nast. “What’s the difference really between a fashion magazine like Vogue and a fashionable magazine like Vanity Fair?”

The most visible sign of the magazine’s increasing coziness with Hollywood was its annual Oscar-night party, which opened the door to an entertainment community eager to please the host, Carter.

Launched in 1994, the party started as a co-venture with producer Steve Tisch. After two years, Carter asked Tisch to bow out, giving him control of the hottest ticket in Hollywood.

Tisch said he was not surprised by Carter’s enchantment with the entertainment world, given his relentless exposure to its players through his Oscar party, the magazine and his high-profile friendships.

“Hollywood is very seductive and addictive,” Tisch said. “Once you get it into your system, it’s hard to get rid of.”

As Carter’s influence grew, the Hollywood friendships he formed drew him into a glitzy world where the line between journalism and business is often overlooked.

“Whatever lines exist in Hollywood are very blurry and frequently crossed,” Tisch said. “If there’s a firewall, it’s usually made of paper or plywood.”

By 2000, Carter was fishing for business opportunities as his marriage was disintegrating and media friends were racking up paper fortunes in the dot-com boom. Former Vanity Fair writer Toby Young said Carter told him over dinner that he was launching a new media venture.

“He said he’d set up an online company and had some unbelievable investors,” said Young, whose 2002 book “How to Lose Friends & Alienate People” was an inside look at the magazine. The venture never materialized.

Soon afterward, Carter began tapping friends for help in launching a Hollywood career of his own -- though some wondered whether becoming a film producer wasn’t a step down for a man already at the pinnacle of New York’s media world.

“I would call this slumming. He’s a great magazine editor,” said producer Art Linson, who sold Vanity Fair an excerpt from his Hollywood memoir, “What Just Happened?” Linson said he has had no other business dealings with Carter.

Linson believes Carter was drawn not by the need for an extra dollar, but by the urge to play in an arena where he had already figured out the game. “He’s got a great nose for glamour and for what works here,” Linson said. “I think he said, ‘OK, that’d be fun.’ ”

Others said Carter was simply restless, yearning for something new but reluctant to let go of the power and perks of Vanity Fair.

Carter’s first producing ventures were remarkably smooth, thanks to a boost from those he had often celebrated in his magazine. He launched his film career with an evening telephone call to friend Barry Diller, who often appears in Vanity Fair, along with Diller’s wife, Diane von Furstenberg, a contributing editor. Carter’s idea: a documentary about yet another friend and Vanity Fair mainstay, producer Robert Evans.

“I was in my car, going home from the office one night, and I called [Diller] and said, ‘Look. You have no obligation, but I’m going to do this,” Carter told Interview magazine in 2002. “Do you want to finance and release it? He goes, ‘Absolutely.’ ”

By Carter’s account, one of Diller’s executives called within two minutes, and made a deal in “as long as it takes to get from 42nd Street to the West Village.”

The film, “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” based on Evans’ memoir of the same name, got a boost from Vanity Fair. The magazine was peppered with Evans’ photos and stories. The picture won critical praise.

Carter’s second producing venture, the 2002 Emmy-winning TV documentary “9/11,” enjoyed an unusually sweet deal at CBS, thanks to another friend: Leslie Moonves, the network’s chief, who is now co-president of CBS parent Viacom Inc.

Moonves, who sometimes vacations with Carter, approved an extraordinary arrangement under which CBS News assigned four executive producers to help shape the project. The producers reported directly to Moonves, even though CBS had no ownership of the project. It was owned by two French documentarians who captured dramatic footage of the World Trade Center attack.

“The amount of money Graydon made was virtually nothing -- maybe $50,000,” said Moonves, who noted that Carter put many hours of work into the project.

In The Times’ article last month, one of Carter’s friends, screenwriter Mitch Glazer, downplayed the involvement of the Vanity Fair editor in a project the two hoped to sell earlier this year. The idea was based on a story headlined “Somebody Hung My Baby,” a Southern crime story by Vanity Fair contributing editor Nancy Jo Sales.

Glazer suggested that Carter’s interest was so tangential that he actually dozed during the pitch meeting with filmmakers Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick. But that’s not how Zwick remembers it. He said Carter argued that the story should “have a life beyond the magazine,” although Glazer chiefly led the discussion.

The project, which never sold, was represented by powerful Creative Artists Agency, where Carter’s son Ash is working as a summer intern.

“I believe what Graydon’s doing is ill-advised,” Herskovitz said of the editor’s personal business dealings with Hollywood. “He’s putting the reputation of the magazine at risk by doing this.”

In recent days, a 16-page code of conduct was distributed to Conde Nast staffers. Company representatives insist the timing is unrelated to the Carter controversies.

Titled “What Governs Us,” it states: “The integrity of Conde Nast and its employees depends greatly on avoiding conflicts of interest or appearances of such in editorial and business conduct.”

So far, Carter has received no public admonition from his bosses at Conde Nast, where executives privately say the company has been rocked by the controversy.

Company spokeswoman Maurie Perl said: “Management has known and continues to know what Graydon is doing. He’s a very talented editor.”

Carter, for his part, has declined numerous interview requests by The Times. Last week at the Chicago Book Expo, when a reporter asked Carter for comment, he walked away.

Carter was there promoting his upcoming anti-Bush administration book, for which he received a hefty six-figure advance. To help assemble the book, Carter has tapped more than a half-dozen researchers holed up at Vanity Fair’s Manhattan office. Asked whether Carter or the magazine is footing the bill for the researchers, a Vanity Fair representative would say only that they are being “paid appropriately.”

As for Carter, his only direct comment to date on the issues surrounding his moonlighting came in a statement he issued through his staff:

“This story and these outrageous rumors and innuendo are beneath the dignity of the Los Angeles Times and not worthy of detailed response. I have been privileged to edit Vanity Fair for 12 years and would never compromise the magazine or its readers’ trust for personal gain. Those who seek to imply otherwise -- whatever their agenda in doing so -- are wrong.”

Some of Carter’s friends worry that closer scrutiny of his deals could crimp their own plans.

Producer Evans, for one, fears Carter won’t be able to produce a picture based on his next memoir, “The Fat Lady Sang,” inspired by Evans’ devastating stroke six years ago. “I’d love for him to get involved,” Evans said. “But right now, with all the fuss coming out, I don’t think he could accept that offer.”

Manhattan club owner Amy Sacco also is holding out hope.

Pictured several times in the magazine lately, she’s been cooperating with a Vanity Fair story about her adventures as the proprietress of two hot night spots. She’s also shopping a “Sex and the City”-like TV series based on her life. Sacco, according to people familiar with the situation, has boasted to friends that Carter might become involved.

But both Sacco and a spokeswoman for Carter say the two never discussed business. However, Sacco says she’s keeping the door open to a joint venture some day.

“Are we in business? We would hope to be in the future,” Sacco said. “It would be amazing.”