Background and career
Edward Graydon Carter, Order of Canada (CM), is a Canadian journalist who was the editor of Vanity Fair from 1992 until 2017. He co-founded, with Kurt Andersen and Thomas L. Phillips, Jr., the satirical monthly magazine Spy in 1986. In 2019, he co-launched a weekly newsletter with Alessandra Stanley called Air Mail for "worldly cosmopolitans".
In a 2026 interview by Gyles Brandreth, Carter confirmed he has two siblings and that he was born on July 14, 1949. He was named after his father Edward, who was married to his mother, Margaret Carter. His birthplace was Toronto. His father had been a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot. After World War II, the family relocated to Germany for four-years, where Carter was cared for by a local nanny, then they returned to Canada and resided in Trenton, Ontario. At age 19, Carter worked at Symington Yard in Winnipeg as a railroad "groundman, at $2.20 an hour" (rather than as a higher-paid lineman because he "had a fear of heights"). During this time, he pretended to be Jewish. He explained, "I was reading a lot of Kerouac and a lot of Ginsberg ... and I thought, If you’re going to be an intellectual in New York, you gotta be Jewish." Carter, while attending the University of Ottawa, and Carleton University, married for the first time, but did not graduate from either college.
In 1973, Carter co-founded The Canadian Review (TCR), a general interest monthly magazine. By 1977, TCR had become award-winning, and the third-largest magazine of its type in Canada. Despite its critical success, TCR was bankrupt by 1978, reportedly owing $100,000. In 1978, Carter moved to the United States and began working for Time magazine as a writer-trainee, where he met Kurt Andersen. Carter spent five years writing for Time on the topics of business, law, and entertainment before moving to Life in 1983.
In 1986, Carter, Kurt Andersen, and Thomas L. Phillips Jr. founded the "hip humor magazine", Spy, which premiered in print in October 1986, after a $2.8-3.0 million initial fund-raising round (including $30,000 from Phillips Jr.'s father). They ran Spy until February 1991, when European investors Charles Saatchi and Jean-Christophe Pigozzi acquired a majority stake in the company. Carter and Phillips exited immediately and Anderson left two years later. Ultimately, publication of Spy came to an end in 1998. During the final years of Spy, Carter was an editor at The New York Observer, subsequently rebranded The Observer.
In 1992, S. I. Newhouse, the chairman of Condé Nast, gave Carter the choice of editing either Vanity Fair or The New Yorker. Carter chose The New Yorker, with his salary to be set at $600,000. The morning he was to be announced as the editor of The New Yorker, however, it was decided (with the reasons why being unclear) that Tina Brown, who was then editing Vanity Fair, would be the new editor of The New Yorker, and that Carter would take over at Vanity Fair. Carter took the helm of Vanity Fair from Brown in July 1992. Carter's Vanity Fair combined high-profile celebrity cover stories with serious journalism, identifying Mark Felt, as the Deep Throat (Watergate) source and a focus on Jeffrey Epstein's profile, in 2003. Carter was depicted with an idiosyncratic personal style, in the book, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, by former Vanity Fair contributing editor, Toby Young and in a 2008 film adaptation of that book, Jeff Bridges portrayed a character closely based on Carter. On September 6, 2017, Carter announced his departure from the editorship of Vanity Fair in interview with The New York Times, he stated he would be on a "garden leave" until the end of 2017. Since leaving the magazine in 2017, Carter spends part of each year living in France with his third wife.
In a 2015 The Daily Beast article, former Vanity Fair journalist Vicky Ward wrote that she had interviewed the family of two young sisters (later identified as Annie and Maria Farmer) and discovered credible reports of molestation amidst a 2003 profile assignment on financier Jeffrey Epstein. The allegations were—Carter claimed in communications with David Folkenflik of NPR—removed from the profile as they did not meet the magazine's legal threshold for publication at the time.
