Graydon Carter

And...

Most of my friends made fun of me when I took it over, but I thought I could do something with this.

I worked out a six-month, 12-month, 18-month plan of how I would make it a must-read.

And within like eight months, all of a sudden it was a thing.

It was being read by people on the Upper West Side and the Greenwich Village.

So I started sending copies, complimentary copies to friends of mine who were editors and writers outside the city.

And unbeknownst to me, Cy Newhouse, he would make a twice-a-year trip of his European properties.

So he'd be stopping off in Milan and Paris and London.

And each time he goes to visit one of his editors, he sees a copy of the New York Observer on their desk.

So he comes back to New York under the wildly misguided impression that this was an international hit.

And he called me, and he said, I've got two magazines, and I wonder if you'd be interested in either one of them.

And I was actually quite happy at The Observer.

I didn't much like the man who owned it, but I was happy with the way it was going.

I loved my schedule, and the paper agreed with me.

But he said, I've got The New Yorker or Vanity Fair.

He was offering you the editorship.

Of either one.

We had made great fun of Vanity Fair when we were at Spy for five years.

We had made fun of the editor.

We had made fun of the house writing style.