Graydon Carter A No-Show At His Own Funeral

There are so many things wrong with the way Conde Nast does business that this Graydon Carter anecdote (from Keith Kelly, no less!) merely feels like icing on a deflated cake. As if the McKinsey evaluation uncertainty that’s been hanging over 4 Times Sq. these past few months isn’t bad enough, Vanity Fair honcho Graydon Carter apparently couldn’t even be bothered to show up to relay yesterday’s bad layoff news himself.

Vanity Fair yesterday took some of the deepest staff cuts at Condé Nast, but Editor Graydon Carter didn’t deliver the bad news himself. Although Carter was said to have been at his restaurant, The Monkey Bar last night, he was a no-show at the office during the day.

Vanity Fair’s layoffs were said to be in the double-digit range, and hit as high as senior editors and as low as fact checkers, and were deep, in part, because Carter largely ignored the edict to chop 5 percent late last year.

According to Gawker, Carter may have been on a private plane to Bermuda. Which is sort of icing on the icing. So here’s the question: Has Carter always been this checked out of his responsibilities at the magazine? He’s obviously an excellent public face for the brand, but perhaps this sort of behavior is de rigueur and we’re only just finding out about it now that the Conde facade is crumbling. Let’s hope that’s it anyway, because otherwise Carter’s absence is pretty sickening.

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