Making a magazine memoir interesting is inherently challenging: A scoop that wowed the world Friday is old news by Monday. A month later, it’s forgotten. Twenty years on? It can all feel tinny, like ink-stained cats batting around moldy balls of yarn. The best a memoirist can do is show that his work was meaningful at the time.
Without straining, Graydon nicely positions his Vanity Fair in the flows of its day. Its ethos and popularity in the 1990s and 2000s were a sort of coda to the “New Journalism” perfected by Esquire during the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese produced long, probing articles and in-depth profiles. Their style of writing went beyond the staid reporting and hard facts that readers had come to expect in print. Instead, they imbued their pieces with the stuff of novels: immersive stories, lyrical writing, vibrant descriptions, pacing on a par with the best propulsive fiction.
On the page, it excelled at—and really owned—the dramatic exposé that unfurled like a thriller.
Vanity Fair embraced New Journalism, but as Graydon puts it in his book, it also “had an asset that no other magazine had in Annie Leibovitz. Annie was already a legend, a photographic visionary of huge gifts.” Leibovitz pushed the boundaries of what made a newsstand cover, from the arresting group photography showcased on Vanity Fair’s annual Hollywood Issue to its iconic image of a pregnant Demi Moore. The magazine mattered, especially in Hollywood and New York.
It left not only a legacy of glamour but also one of notable journalism. On the page, it excelled at—and really owned—the dramatic exposé that unfurled like a thriller. There weren’t many articles in each issue, maybe eight or nine, but they were very long, typically definitive, and they carried the unmistakable scent of the highest-end tabloid: well-sourced tales of Washington intrigue, of fallen royals and CEOs, of Silicon Valley shenanigans and whatever scandal was befalling Michael Jackson at the moment. Also, dead bodies. Lots of bodies. Many pieces made news. Maybe its finest moment, which Graydon orchestrated and which opens the book, was its unveiling of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s fabled Watergate source, Deep Throat, whose real identity had remained a mystery for more than thirty years.