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Graydon Carter

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The Resume

    (July 14, 1949- )
    Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada
    Birth name was Edward Graydon Carter
    Co-founder of ‘Spy’ magazine (1986)
    Editor of the ‘New York Observer’ (1990-92)
    Replaced Tina Brown as editor of ‘Vanity Fair’ (July, 1992)
    Wrote ‘What We’ve Lost’ (2004)
    Producer or executive producer of the documentaries ‘9/11’ (2002), ‘The Kid Stays in the Picture’ (2002), ‘Chicago 10’ (2007), ‘Gonzo’ (2008), ‘Public Speaking’ (2010) and ‘His Way’ (2011)
    Co-owner of three Manhattan restaurants

Why he might be annoying:

    He attended two colleges and dropped out of both.
    He has been married three times, divorced twice.
    He would smoke at his desk and toss lit cigarettes out the window.
    A former ‘Vanity Fair’ editor said, ‘He has his virtues, but courage is not among them. Anything unpleasant gets delegated.’
    He went from mocking celebrities in ‘Spy’ to fawning over them in ‘Vanity Fair.’
    For extra irony (or hypocrisy), one of Spy’s more memorable pieces was their dissection of a groveling Tina Brown memo begging Michael Ovitz to cooperate with a ‘Vanity Fair’ profile.
    At a party at Elaine’s, he ran into two of Spy’s perennial targets, former New York Times editor A.M Rosenthal and his wife, ‘bosomy dirty book author’ Shirley Lord, who walked up and pleasantly said hello. After the encounter, he noted, ‘They’ve got a lot more class than I do.’

Why he might not be annoying:

    Under his leadership, Vanity Fair won 14 National Magazine Awards (through the end of 2015).
    ’Adweek’ named him magazine editor of the year a record three times (1996,2002,2015).
    A colleague called him ‘one of the best-dressed men on planet Earth.’
    He launched Vanity Fair’s Oscar bash, which succeeded the late Swifty Lazar’s Spago party as the post-awards destination of Hollywood’s A-list.
    At ‘Spy,’ he coined the phrase ‘short-fingered vulgarian’ as a descriptor for Donald Trump.
    In 2015, he revealed that, nearly three decades later, he still regularly receives pictures of Trump cut from magazines with the digits circled and comments like ‘See! Not so short!’ (Carter: ‘I almost feel sorry for the poor fellow, because, to me, the fingers still look abnormally stubby.’)

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 3 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 14 Votes: 92.86% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 17 Votes: 64.71% Annoying
    In 2018, Out of 16 Votes: 68.75% Annoying
    In 2017, Out of 5 Votes: 60.0% Annoying
    In 2016, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying