During his 25-year run as editor in chief of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter was one of the rare editors to become famous in his own right: a nattily dressed icon with a distinctive swoop of gray hair who greeted the glitterati every year at the magazine’s Oscar party, whose keen attention to social dynamics was such that he personally handled the seating arrangements at his hip Manhattan restaurant the Waverly Inn, and who, chiefly, of course, oversaw a very, very successful magazine. A magazine that, depending on the story — or perhaps on whom you asked — could either shine a flattering light (plush celebrity cover stories) or a harshly revealing one (deeply reported investigative articles).

Recently, though, Carter’s editorial decision making came into question when the journalist Vicky Ward claimed that a well-sourced accusation of sexual misconduct was removed from an otherwise critical 2003 Vanity Fair profile she wrote about Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and, later, convicted sex offender. (Carter has said that Ward’s reporting on this aspect of the article did not meet Vanity Fair’s legal and editorial standards. Ward disputes this.) This controversy came just before the launch of Carter’s post-Vanity Fair project, a subscription-based digital-news platform called Air Mail.

It’s a complicated turn of events for a man, now 70, who told me, “The only reasons you should go into journalism are to do good things, have a great time and make a bit of money. In that order.”

One criticism of Vanity Fair during your tenure was that it could be too cozy with the powerful people it covered. Was that a fair criticism? I always told friends, “Listen, I’m not going to go out of my way to destroy you, but if you get into a fistfight with your coequal at another company, that’s a Vanity Fair story.”

Were you ever conflicted about developing friendships with, say, Hollywood producers, who worked in a world that Vanity Fair covered? Or about the fact that, at times, you had a financial interest in that same world, like when you got a finder’s fee for “A Beautiful Mind?”1 None of that felt too comfortable? I didn’t think it was cozy. I thought it was pretty straightforward. The fact is, I told friends, “if you stick your hand into the buzz saw, we’ll report on that.” The same thing went with our advertisers. We did a story when LVMH was in a big battle for Gucci. Nobody came out looking great in the story, and it was a very touchy subject given that some of our largest advertisers were involved. But Bryan Burrough did a great story and treated everyone fairly. That has been my overriding mantra: Treat people fairly.

In the past, you worked directly with Mario Testino2 and Ken Friedman,3 who have since been subject to allegations of sexually inappropriate behavior. In retrospect, did you miss signs that you should have seen? We’ll start with the photographer. Vanity Fair didn’t shoot models. We shot established people. Mario Testino would shoot Princess Diana for us. So his behavior wasn’t a factor as it perhaps was with models allegedly. With Ken, he was a great partner, he was a really good restaurateur, and I feel badly for him that this has happened and feel badly for the staff.

So you weren’t aware of any signs? Harvey Weinstein was my across-the-street neighbor for 10 years. You sort of guessed it with him. Not with these other people.

Carter at the offices of Condé Nast in 1992, the year he became editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

As the editor in chief of Vanity Fair, you have the reputation of being kind of a power broker. Are you at all personally drawn to the notion of having power or status? If a big part of your ambition is to be powerful, you wouldn’t have done a magazine like Spy,4 which basically burned every bridge around us. And I didn’t apply for the job at Vanity Fair, Si Newhouse5 hired me for it. There were a lot of stories at Vanity Fair that involved friends, which caused rifts in our relationship. There was one we did on Jeffrey Wigand,6 and one of the people involved in the story was John Scanlon,7 who was a dear friend of mine. He did not come off particularly well, and we didn’t talk for 18 months. But I just loved doing what I do. It had nothing whatsoever to do with perceived power. Because, believe me, as an editor, you don’t have that much.

Did you have to do any horse trading to get the famous people you wanted on the cover of Vanity Fair? Were there any discussions with publicists along the lines of, “We’re willing to put your up-and-coming star in a section of the magazine if you’ll give us your bigger star for the cover?” No. That may go on, but we were Vanity Fair and did not have to do any of that. We were fortunate to have a buyer’s market.

How do you think Vanity Fair has been doing since you left?8 I’m not going to say anything.

You could say something positive! It’s going from strength to strength.

It’s clear that Vanity Fair, in its current iteration, is more focused on diversity than it was before, both in terms of subjects and staffing. Were you thinking about diversity during your time there? Definitely in terms of cover subjects and subject matter. Less so on the hiring. We basically just hired based on talent.

Everyone says they hire based on talent. Isn’t the deeper thing whether or not you’re being open to new ideas about what kind of talent you might hire based on, and who might have it, and how it might manifest itself? As long as the writing is good, I’m open to anything. Obviously diversity is more of a concern now than it was, say, 15 years ago.

Can you talk more about how Vanity Fair approached diversity in terms of cover subjects? For years the magazine tended to stick actors and actresses of color on the inside gatefold of its Hollywood special-issue covers. I think it wasn’t until 2014 that black and white actors appeared alongside one another on one of those special issues’ cover.9 What accounts for that? I suppose the biggest criteria for putting those Hollywood covers together was the prominence of the actors. I think that there’s been a rough period for minority actors in Hollywood. It’s only been recently that they’ve been pushed into the forefront. The cover decision was based on popularity and success at that point.

So that was the calculus, as opposed to any sense that a certain type of cover sold better? Over all, we tried to make the covers as wide-ranging and diverse as possible and, at the same time, to try to reflect what was going on in Hollywood at the time.

I guess it’s good that diversity changed in 2014. Yes.

Vanity Fair obviously did lots of investigative reporting on rich and powerful people behaving nefariously, but it was also clearly intended to be an aspirational publication for its readers, and from what I understand Air Mail is intended to be that, too. How do you think the country is feeling about aspiration and affluence these days? America is an aspirational country, and up until recently when people who were living affluent lives were displayed in magazines, the country was fine with that, because readers had a chance at those lives. The financial crisis in 2008 changed the rules dramatically. The aspirational aspect of American culture has diminished because chances are, you can’t achieve affluence the way you could’ve 25 or 30 years ago. It’s much harder for people.

Vanity Fair’s April 1996 Hollywood Issue cover. Annie Leibovitz/Vanity Fair/Trunk Archive

Does that change how you approach your work? Of course it does. We didn’t actually cover rich people that much at Vanity Fair. We covered people who were in positions of power who were doing great things or slightly nefarious things. But Air Mail’s audience is not automatically an affluent audience. It’s an audience with a catholic range of interests.

When I went back and read profiles written about you over the years, an implicit question they raised for me was how you went from being the guy at Spy who used to throw stones at the rich and powerful to being the guy who hosted the Vanity Fair Oscar party10 every year. I didn’t find any clear answers. Did a part of you always want to be an insider rather than an outsider? I didn’t really have an opinion one way or another there. From 1978 when I got to New York and for about the next 20 years, my principal goal was to keep a job. Because if I’d lost my job my H1 visa disappears. And I had four children I had to provide for. I never even thought of my work as a career. I thought of it as, I need this job, and I’m going to make this job as enjoyable as possible for me and my family and the people around me.

Do you agree with the idea that Spy was a tonal progenitor of a lot of Internet writing? I disagree. The internet is filled with bile and snark and accusation. Spy was much subtler. We copied a bit of the writing style from Private Eye and 1940s-era Time. Very adjective-filled, dense, fact-filled writing. It wasn’t this freewheeling spitball contest that the internet is now. It was probably much more elegant. There’s some great and funny writing on the Internet, obviously, but I don’t think there’s any correlation with Spy.

I read about this speech you used to give people about the seven rooms of status in New York.11 What are the seven rooms exactly? I don’t know because I’m probably only at room three. But a version of that is how at some parties there’s a roped-off area where the better people are — when you think you’ve made it, there’s always something else. At Spy, I thought we knew everything. But by the end of Spy, I realized I didn’t. There’s always another room.

What’s an instance when you glimpsed a new room? If you bump into a few millionaires then see how billionaires live, it’s a very different thing.

Can you give me a story about a famous person acting like a pain in the ass at the Oscar party? There were lots of pains-in-the-ass. I remember Courtney Love came to me and said: “Graydon, you’ve got to help me. I need my manager to come in. He’s got my car keys, my wallet, and my drugs.” I said: “Look, I can’t do that right now. I’m sort of busy here. Go and talk to Sara Marks, who organized the party.” So she goes to Sara Marks and Sara won’t let anybody in. In those days, we had cameras outside so you could see who was arriving. Courtney Love goes out and in front of all the cameras says, “I’ve got an important announcement to make.” All the cameras focus on her. Then she goes, “Sara Marks is a [expletive].” I admired her use of technology.

Your mentioning Time magazine a second ago reminds me of something you wrote earlier this year in that essay you did for The Hollywood Reporter. You had this aside about working for Time beginning in ’70s and having lunch with a famous Italian actress. I won’t say who it was. She’s still alive.

Then it was probably either Sophia Loren or Gina Lollobrigida — but the thing that piqued my interest was that you had a researcher there with you at lunch who was taking notes for you. Was that common? Yeah, somebody would be handling it for me. Time in those days was luxurious. They brought dinner trolleys around the office on Thursdays and on Friday nights with china and wine. There was a bar set up at the end of every corridor. They sent you home in a car service. A bunch of us rented houses out in Sag Harbor, and at 2 o’clock on a Saturday morning you would see all these yellow Checker cabs going over the hills heading towards Sag Harbor or Sagaponack. I remember there was one writer who was going up to the Berkshires. The cab driver said: “Look, it’s going to take us forever to get there. Do you like flying?” So they go out to a private airport on Long Island and the driver’s got a little Cessna, and they get in the Cessna and he turns it over and the battery’s dead. So he wheels the Checker cab up and uses it to boost the Cessna. The expenses were just incredible. Those were the days.

Carter with co-editor Kurt Andersen, left, at Spy magazine’s Manhattan office in 1988. Marty Reichenthal/Associated Press

I still can’t quite tell if the perspective that Spy used to have on the powerful, which was suffused with this real sense of “look at these [expletives],” was a perspective that you yourself ever really shared. First of all, the ’80s were a fantastic time to have a satirical magazine in New York. You had a lot of money being made after a decade where there hadn’t been a lot of money being made. So people were very showy. It was great. It was like Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade with millionaires. It was fun to cover them, and mine was a 36-year-old’s sensibility. It was much more in my character then to shoot spitballs at my betters. As you get older, you realize that everybody has their own problems. There are a few sane people that are happy with their lives.

So I have to ask you about the situation with Vicky Ward and the Jeffrey Epstein profile she wrote for Vanity Fair. She’s saying that she had credible sources claiming sexual misconduct on the part of Jeffrey Epstein, that she had originally included those allegations in the profile, and that you had them removed. You’ve said that Ward did not have three on the record sources and that what she did have did not meet Vanity Fair’s legal standards, therefore the allegations were cut. [Editor’s note: Ward says she did have three on-the-record sources – a mother and her two daughters – at the time. The Guardian has since contacted the mother, who confirmed the three spoke to Ward in 2003, on the record.] But I’m having a hard time understanding why one credible account of sexual misconduct wouldn’t have been enough to warrant inclusion or at least make you reconsider the profile? This is 20 years ago. I’m not going to get into the details, because I don’t even remember the details. The fact is that editors make tough decisions every day, and at Vanity Fair we had an army of fact checkers and lawyers and other editors to help us make the right ones. It’s easy for people to question those decisions 20 years on.

But what I was asking about was this apparent in-house rule about needing to have three on-the-record sources. Can you explain the rationale behind that and how it was applied in this instance? We wanted people to go on the record. Whoever Vicky Ward talked to, they were unavailable to us. At the time this was the first or second major profile of Jeffrey Epstein. He was still a private citizen, and the libel bar is much higher on a private citizen than a public figure. We had great lawyers and a great fact-checking team and a great legal editor, and the accusations didn’t make it into print.

Doesn’t the practice of requiring multiple on-the-record corroborating sources advantage somebody like Epstein in a situation like the one that’s being cited? He only has to say “no” but the accusers have to — I didn’t invent the system. I just lived by the system.

Was that system broken? In the instance of the whole #MeToo wave of accusations, the system probably held that back.

Held back people’s being able to come forward? Yes.

Would you handle the Epstein story differently today? The rules of engagement have changed slightly.

How? I think that the #MeToo movement has been a great window into activities that have been going on for a long, long time. But who knew this about Jeffrey Epstein at the time? You could suspect things. You could hear rumors. You can’t get those things into print.

So you’re saying Vanity Fair’s editorial decisions were being made in a different cultural climate? They were made by the structures of a magazine that had legal review and fact-checking and editing processes.

Carter at Vanity Fair’s 2011 Oscar party in West Hollywood with, from left, Barry Diller, Anna Scott Carter, Mick Jagger and Fran Lebowitz. Christopher Polk/VF11, via Getty Images

Do you now have reason to reconsider those practices? All I can say is that the practices that we practiced back then were practiced pretty much across the entire legitimate magazine industry.

Do you think you missed the much more important Epstein story? I kick myself over missing multiple stories. The fact is, that story was the toughest story done on him, probably over a 10-year period. He hated the story.

Did the existence of even one seemingly credible accusation of sexual misconduct against Epstein make you consider further pursuing that aspect of the story? I don’t think we saw any details. I don’t think the facts were presented in a way that would have made it into print.

So what you’re arguing is that Vicky Ward is retroactively making the situation seem more clear-cut than it was at the time? I’ll let you say that.

Vicky Ward also says that Epstein visited you to discuss the profile, and after his visit, the sexual misconduct accusations were removed. Did that visit happen? Absolutely not true. Every once in a while an editor is brought into a story to help with access or to try to talk the subject into posing for a picture. She had asked me to speak to Epstein about going on the record. I did speak to him, and it was a cat-and-mouse game, and I don’t think he ever did. Then as we were closing the story, I’d asked him to pose for photographs, and he showed up at the office one day and he was sitting in our lobby. I don’t know how he got there. I asked him to pose for pictures, and he didn’t do that either.

So contrary to what Vicky Ward has also said, there was no deal that happened where you said you would take out the accusations if Epstein provided you with photos to accompany the profile? Never. I’ve never done that in 25 years at Vanity Fair.

I know you’re aware of the piece that a former Vanity Fair writer, Kim Masters, wrote for The Hollywood Reporter in which she suggested that you did personal face-saving favors for subjects of Vanity Fair articles by removing unflattering details. She talked about two people, one of whom I know in a cocktail-party situation and not well. The other person, I don’t think I’ve ever met, and I’ve certainly never spoken on the phone to him.

The two people you’re talking about are Jake Bloom12 and Mike Myers?13 Yes.

There’s definitely a belief out there that wheel-greasing goes on between editors and subjects at a publication like Vanity Fair. Maybe I’m being cynical, but because some wheel-greasing in more unserious instances seems likely, it is easy to conflate that with what is supposed to have happened with the Epstein profile. Is that not what happened? I do not recall a single incident of what you call wheel-greasing in my 25 years there.

You’re telling me that neither wheel-greasing nor making editorial decisions based on personal considerations regarding subjects ever occurred at Vanity Fair? I can’t remember a single one.