High life | 26 March 2011

Twenty-two years or so ago, I wrote a column for the New York Observer, a weekly paper owned by a tycoon named Arthur Carter, a man who had come up the hard way and had made his fortune on Wall Street, but one who had retained his loathing for those who had made it the old-fashioned way, mainly by inheriting and the old-boy Wasp network. 

The reason I was hired was Graydon Carter, no relation, a good friend of mine who went on to become the big Pooh-Bah at Vanity Fair these past 20 years. Mind you, my column made Graydon very nervous. Arthur Carter was climbing the greasy social pole, and complained non-stop to his editor about the cheap shots a columnist of his took at such social icons as Mercedes Bass, Henry Kravis, Michael Bloomberg, and the social moth, one Jerome Zipkin, no longer with us.

Graydon nevertheless stuck by me, even after I committed the greatest of sins — as a joke — writing that Si Newhouse, the honcho of VF, Vogue and every other glossy that counts, was the only man who buys two tickets when he visits a zoo. One to get in, and the other to get out.

Graydon used to have his assistant, a pretty, extremely capable and charming girl called Amy Bell, make sure I was held in check when he was away. The trouble was Amy and I were buddies, and when Graydon left for a brief holiday I wrote that if Abe Rosenthal, the ex-editor of the New York Times and a columnist for the Times after his retirement, made love the way he wrote, I felt very sorry for his wife. (Rosenthal was a terrible writer but a very good editor.