Graydon Carter

George Lazenby.

Oh, no.

Yes, I would go over and try to rescue them or introduce them to somebody.

Yes.

It's why we let them bring their manager or their hairstylist.

So they've got someone to talk to.

A crutch.

It was slowly, you know, it's incremental steps.

I wanted to produce a magazine that I wanted to read.

And, you know, producing big stories, some of them run 20,000 words.

It's a big, complicated business and very expensive.

And so for a big story to have a lasting impact when it comes out, it needed four elements.

You needed access, and that is you needed sort of access to the people who were involved in the story or on the periphery.

You needed narrative, meaning that you needed, by that time, a beginning, a middle, and an end to the story.

There had to be some sort of culmination.

You needed conflict, which is always good.

A story about one person sitting in a chair is one thing, but two people fighting over the same chair, that's conflict, and that's better.

And you needed disclosure in that you had to advance the story in some way.

It is a tall order.

But after a while, after four years, I knew exactly where the story would go in the magazine.