Graydon Carter

It was terrifying at times.

You're worried that you'd get sued and that sort of thing.

But it was just a romp.

And these people, they were all really smart.

In my book I write, it was very sort of Hellenic.

It was just the perfect situation.

When we decided we had to sell, we realized we were running out of money.

And Cy Newhouse had tried to buy the magazine two years before.

He ran Condé Nast.

He ran Condé Nast and Random House.

Cy was the most important cultural figure in the city and one of the most important in the country.

But we thought it was too soon to be taken over by a large company like Conde Nast that owned Vogue and Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.

And we had said no, and it was probably one of the stupidest things we'd ever done.

Yeah, we sold it to Charles Saatchi and Johnny Pagazzi, and I left.

And what did you do?

I took over this newspaper.

I wanted to do a newspaper in New York, a twice-a-week newspaper.

And I took over this weekly newspaper called the New York Observer.

And it was a sort of broad sheet of salmon colored.

And it was unrelentingly dull.