When I started working for Vanity Fair in 1995 I remember coming into the office one morning to discover that most of the senior editorial staff had disappeared. They weren’t at their desks, and phone calls went unreturned. Was this a Jewish holiday? It turned out to be the day Graydon Carter had set aside to write the ‘Editor’s Letter’, a monthly column at the beginning of the magazine signed by him but which he almost always asked one of his staff to write at the last minute. None of them wanted to be the poor schmuck saddled with the task.
The reason I mention this is because the previous book Carter ‘wrote’, a series of gripes about the George W. Bush administration, was a loosely stitched together collection of those letters. Which raises the question: which down-on-his-luck hack was roped in to ghost When the Going Was Good?
Below Graydon’s name on the title page are the words ‘with James Fox’, which sounds like the answer. But in the acknowledgments, Graydon says ‘The writing is mine’, and thanks Fox for ‘guiding me along the narrative path’, whatever that means. He adds that he and Fox were ‘assisted’ by Hannah Lack, as well as by a former colleague, Cullen Murphy: ‘He edited my copy when we were at Vanity Fair’ (he wrote the ‘Editor’s Letter’, presumably) ‘and he edited this book.’ Graydon then thanks a fourth person, Ann Godoff, his editor at Penguin Random House, who gave the manuscript ‘a skilled and spirited edit and polish’.
A few pages into what Graydon calls ‘this slim volume’, I began to think that the real author might be Craig Brown.
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