Graydon Carter

I did a lot of listening.

Finally, one week, I realized I've had it with three of these employees.

I let all three go in over a two-day period.

And then it changed.

I had the next 23 years were slightly, I mean, the wheels are always falling off if you're running something.

But I had a wonderful, pleasing run for the next 23 years.

It wasn't anything like that.

There were a lot of great stories.

It was probably the Swifty Lazar, who's a famous agent in Hollywood and represent a lot of great writers and actors.

And he'd been given the nickname Swifty by Humphrey Bogart.

who was a client, and he invited me to lunch after I became the editor of Vanity Fair.

And I think he took a shine to me, so he invites me to his Oscar party, because he invented the Oscar party.

And he had it at this restaurant called Spago, which was like north of Sunset.

And I went and I saw what he did and how he did it, because I didn't know that many people, and so I got a lot of chance just to sort of people watch.

and then he died that December.

This was in March or February.

He died that December, and I thought, you know, we could take this over.

We could assume that.

And we only had two or three months to plan it, so we did it small because my feeling is always if you're going to fail, fail before as few eyes as humanly possible.

So we had 150 people for dinner, and then we invited 150 people from the Oscars afterwards.