TASTE MAKERS : E. GRAYDON CARTER

Calendar’s choices of Taste Makers--people who move and shape our arts and entertainment in 1988--run the gamut. If the eight faces on the cover form a rather curious collection, it’s because creative abilities come in many forms.

As a result, our group’s pursuits range from directing the distinguished PBS series “American Playhouse,” to fronting the hard-living, hard-rock band Guns N’ Roses. All eight individuals have been significant players in 1988 and we feel will continue as leaders and creators in the future--as have the Taste Makers of previous years.

In this fourth annual survey, we hope to present an insight into what stimulates and influences these people of influence.

Editor of New York-based Spy magazine. His concern: To keep the comfortable on their toes.

Anyone even mildly familiar with Spy, the clever-nasty New York City satire magazine, would be highly suspicious of editor E. Graydon Carter’s claim that he goes to church with his family on Sundays.

But he swears it’s true. Despite his job launching preemptive satire strikes at the well-known and pretentious, Carter says he leads a normal, peaceful home life. He even puts on elaborate puppet shows for his two children and regularly reads them beloved bedtime stories like “Goodnight Moon,” which he enthuses “is a great book.”

Yet Spy faithfully reflects his own tastes and values--for good and ill, Carter said over the phone from the magazine’s cramped, crowded and humble offices in Manhattan’s Puck Building.

The 2.25-year-old magazine’s tone seems to have struck a chord in a country where irreverence and nasty-tinged humor are increasingly in vogue. Spy’s hipper-than-thou swagger and lust to look down on the rich and famous have won it 145,000 subscribers. Thick with trendy ads, Spy screams of New York City. It’s relentlessly smart, self-conscious, mouthy, opinionated and fun-loving--and devoutly mean and snotty to local big-shots like Donald Trump, CBS’ Laurence Tisch and Mayor Ed Koch.

Impossibly information-dense, wildly laid out, its pages carry snide quasi-journalistic mutations like exposes of “the peculiar, sex-starved, high-IQ world” of Mensa, the complete history of Billy Martin’s baseball brawls and this month’s exhaustive, multi-sidebarred number on the bell-bottomed 1970s, “the Century’s most embarrassing decade.”

Along with the Spy map (a regular guide to such things as famous New York corruption sites or never-built public-works boondoggles), there are Big-Apple-o-centric features like the “The Times,” a column devoted solely to sniping at the personal foibles and purported journalistic indiscretions of the editors and owners of the New York Times. It’s Spy’s best idea, Carter said, even if it did come from his pal Jann Wenner.

Meanwhile, in the back of Spy lurk monthly columns by the likes of Celia Brady. One of Spy’s several pseudonyms (and a suspected composite), her sharp but unsympathetic eye regularly surveils the Hollywood crowd in “The Industry” column. This month Brady scratches out a mostly unflattering character sketch of “Die Hard’s” Joel Silver, who’s described as “a shrieking, twitching, 36-year-old caricature of a producer.”

Carter, 39, insisted humbly that he’s not Spy’s only father, nor its only editorial guru. He and co-editor Kurt Andersen co-hatched the magazine during 18 months of long lunches while both were still working as writers at Time magazine. And there would be no Spy at all, Carter said, without the wallet of publisher Thomas L. Phillips Jr., the businessman of the founding troika.

Spy’s typical reader makes $80,000 a year, a figure that Carter admitted was a little embarrassing, though not nearly enough to make him turn in his Green Card and go back to Toronto, where he grew up as the upper-middle-class son of a Royal Canadian Air Force jet pilot.

A contributing editor to Vogue and a regular New York columnist for the Illustrated London News, Carter gets up at 5 to write before his boys Ash and Max wake up. He never works nights or weekends and he insists--just a little defensively--that despite his full work schedule, he is “not an A-type, go-go guy.”

On weekends, he and his wife Cynthia often leave their West Side apartment and repair to their home in Connecticut, where Carter is building a puppet theater for his kids, complete with floodlights and marquee. Carter confessed that not only does he let his wife drag him off to church, but their kids go to Sunday school.

“You have to give kids something to rebel against,” he explained, slyly rationalizing the incongruity of such George Bushian behavior. “You can’t like their music--you have to call it noise. It’s incumbent on a parent.”

Despite his East Coast-elite-sounding name, his strong taste for opera and his house-in-the-country life style, Carter has a wide populist streak. He admits to liking MTV, colorized movies and good American and English food (which, he insisted, is not a contradiction).

Carter, who grew up always wanting to be a playwright but never graduated from college in Ottawa because he was too busy putting out a literary political magazine, said the only people he really hates are leveraged buyout specialists, “the most odious single group in America.” The only personal vice Carter would own up to is that he gets his clothes made in England, which he says would be instantly understandable to anyone who has ever put on a handmade English suit.

He names Canadian writer Stephen Leacock, who died in 1944, as a major influence and one of few humorists whose “stuff holds up.” Other influences include P.J. Wodehouse, Bill Murray and the “Saturday Night Live” show, Mad magazine, John Cleese and Monty Python and the British satire magazine Private Eye.

He just finished reading Martin Amis’ collection of essays about America, “Moronic Inferno,” and Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities.” Wolfe, along with his own father and former Private Eye editor Richard Ingrams, are Carter’s personal heroes while Amis, he said, “is the most consistently excellent and entertaining writer in English now.”

Not surprisingly, Spy’s made plenty of enemies and elicited retaliation from such regular victims as New York columnist Liz Smith and Donald Trump, the zillionaire Spy regularly calls a “vulgarian.” After Spy sunk its teeth into New York Post editorial page editor Eric Breindel, whom Carter identified as “a popular member of the Northeast right-wing elite,” the conservative political magazine American Spectator ran an article accusing Spy of being squishy soft on liberals.

It’s a charge Carter good-naturedly refuted. Although he’s personally soured on politics, he confessed that he and Anderson were left of center politically. But he said the magazine itself, which has attacked both the Kennedys and Reaganauts, was centrist.

Spy’s sacred cows are not people so much as issues like the homeless and AIDS, Carter said, and Spy’s detractors were there from the very start. But his job is not to be popular, he said, but to carry out Mencken’s mandate that journalists should “ ‘comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.’ And our task is the latter.”

This project was edited by David Fox, assistant Calendar editor.