According to Jennifer Senior of New York magazine:

Today, Carter no longer needs to trim his biography with extra filigree. He's the Jay Leno of the magazine world, the king-size personality controlling the world's glossiest showcase for the formerly, currently, and would-be famous. Nervous, ubiquitous, and impossibly fabulous, Carter, in the words of his friend Jim Wiatt, president and co-CEO of the William Morris Agency, "has transcended being a great editor -- he's really a celebrity."

When he first replaced Tina Brown as Vanity Fair's new editor in 1992, Carter was dismissed as a lightweight, a mere caretaker at the helm of his predecessor's creation, like a replacement Grizabella in Cats. But since he took over, Vanity Fair has won four National Magazine awards and increased its advertising pages by more than 60 percent. This year, the magazine overtook Vogue to become the second-most-profitable in the Condé Nast empire. (Glamour is the leader.) And Vanity Fair's annual post-Oscar bash, a Carter innovation, has replaced the late Swifty Lazar's Spago party as the postgame destination of tout Hollywood.

How on earth did this happen? How did the creator of Spy, a magazine that made toothsome snacks of the same celebrities and power brokers Vanity Fair now so happily lionizes, wind up the darling of his former victims? How did a penniless military brat, a college dropout, a Canadian, wind up one of the best-paid editors (roughly $1.5 million annually) in the Condé Nast building?

"Graydon is endearingly, sort of brilliantly, self-invented," says David Owen, a staff writer at The New Yorker. "And I mean in the way Cary Grant was self-invented: pretending to be someone until he became that person."

Growing up in the suburbs of Ottawa, Carter fantasized about a perfect Manhattan life, one based on a diet of old Esquires, Damon Runyon novels, and classic movies -- particularly Sweet Smell of Success, Alexander Mackendrick's noirish paean to Gotham intrigue and celebrity dish. And that's exactly what he's got now.

Today Carter flies through Manhattan in a chauffeured car, wears custom-tailored shirts, and lights his cigarettes with a tarnished silver Zippo. He lives in a Bank Street townhouse, spends his weekends in Connecticut, and dines almost nightly at Da Silvano, usually in a cloud of smoke, usually in some Lazy-Susan combination of writers (David Halberstam, Fran Lebowitz, Michiko Kakutani), moguls (Barry Diller, David Geffen, Brian Grazer), fashion people (Diane Von Furstenberg, Kenneth Cole), and visiting Angelenos (screenwriter Mitch Glazer and his wife, actress Kelly Lynch).

"Graydon is a man who has decided to create the world he dreams of," says Jim Kelly, incoming managing editor of Time and one of Carter's closest friends. "And he has been more successful at it than anyone I've ever met."

Quotable

"I don't vote. I find both parties to be appalling and OK at the same time. I find it harder for anybody as they get older to feel 100 per cent strongly behind one party. There's lots more grey than when I was younger. I'm a libertarian."

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