It’s difficult to think of anyone in New York who has hosted more book parties than AIR MAIL Co-Editor Graydon Carter. Over the past five decades, he’s celebrated books by everyone from Salman Rushdie to Christopher Hitchens, to LeBron James, to Gay Talese. So it was surprising to find Carter on the other side of the equation at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in Tribeca last Tuesday night, when former mayor Michael Bloomberg rallied what seemed like the entire New York media world to toast the publication of Carter’s memoir, When the Going Was Good.
The 93-year-old Talese was one of the first guests in the door and seemed to be locked in a tacit endurance competition with Martha Stewart—both of whom outlasted the crop of twentysomethings in attendance. Stewart chatted with her self-professed doppelgänger, Diane Sawyer, who was there with her granddaughter, Saskia Jensen. Ronald Perelman, whose name is on the building, also made an appearance. Meanwhile, Candice Bergen, Barry Diller, Christine Baranski, Victor Garber, and Tony Danza ensured that Hollywood was well represented.
Near the back bar, the mastheads of Carter’s previous publications took human form. Editors and contributors from Spy, Vanity Fair, and The New York Observer toasted and paged through copies of Carter’s memoir as if it were an old yearbook at a college reunion, rattling off how long they’d worked for him—in most cases, long—and where. (Among this cohort, working for all three is tantamount to winning an EGOT—only a small handful of people have done it.)
In his speech, Bloomberg called Carter “a quintessential New York success story,” and the impressive collection of Carter’s former and current colleagues was a testament to that. Among them were Aimée Bell, Jim Kelly, David Friend, Jane Sarkin, Jon Kelly, Mark Rozzo, Jonathan Becker, Bob Colacello, Sara Marks, Patrick McMullan, David Kamp, Amy Fine Collins, George Kalogerakis, Susan Morrison, Michael Hainey, Anne Fulenwider, Chris Garrett, Maureen Orth, Marie Brenner, John Brodie, Sarah Ellison, Lili Anolik, Rich Cohen, Riza Cruz, Spy co-founder Kurt Andersen, and, naturally, Carter’s AIR MAIL Co-Editor, Alessandra Stanley.
And that’s to say nothing of the guests from magazines and newsletters Carter hasn’t edited. They include New York Times editor Joe Kahn and his wife, Shannon Wu; New York editor David Haskell; Harper’s Bazaar editor Samira Nasr; The Wall Street Journal Magazine editor Sarah Ball (a former V.F. hand); New York Times Styles editor Stella Bugbee; and Substack rabble-rouser Emily Sundberg.
Mid-evening, Carter took the mike and gave an impromptu speech not only to thank Bloomberg for hosting and his friends for attending but to bemoan missing out on the scoop of a lifetime, which Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg had received the day before in the form of an errant Signal message containing the Trump administration’s war plans. No one found this crack more affecting than Kahn, who doubled over after its delivery—though whether it was with laughter or jealousy was hard to tell.
In his memoir, Carter references the influence that playwright Moss Hart’s own autobiography, Act One, had on him. Looking to Hart’s book, we learn of parties ended by waitstaff who sang songs “with guests’ names and camp catchphrases scattered through them,” and who “clowned and cavorted and created a general bruhaha until the buses and cars left.” It would be a lie to say that Bloomberg’s staffers went quite that far, but by evening’s end more than a few guests had said it was as enjoyable a night as they could remember. The party reaffirmed that, though the golden age of magazine publishing may be over, the going is still plenty good.
Jack Sullivan is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL
