Gary fisketjon bio

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Fisketjon says he was “strongly impressed” with the paper, even if he didn’t go along with every contrary opinion espoused in its pages. At the back of each book was a series checklist, which Simon & Schuster’s executive editor Sean Manning once likened to “a ballot for some Cooperstown of late-20th-century fiction.”

By the time Esquire put Fisketjon, then 33, in the “Red Hot Center” of its 1987 “Literary Universe” power chart, he had left Random House for Atlantic Monthly Press.

He had circled his hands in the photo of himself with a gold Sharpie and written, “See, not so short!” Graydon sent it back with his own note: “Actually, quite short.” That was the last of it, nothing since then, but the long venal timeline of the short-fingered vulgarian still points with shame at the so-called balanced coverage that landed Trump in the White House in the first place.

Anna Wintour, by then Condé Nast’s editorial director, called Graydon and “blithely” informed him that VF ’s photo, art, copy, and research departments (almost half the staff) would be moving from the magazine to a central unit reporting to her. They felt, instead, that Fisketjon should have been allowed to keep his job if he agreed to go to rehab.

Graydon spent much of Trump’s first term in the South of France and is planning to move back for this one. I’m in Graydon’s memoir (page 118), and—full disclosure—he blurbed mine, The Accidental Life: An Editor’s Notes on Writing and Writers. Without the kind of support Graydon got from Si, she would have to fire many staff members, some of them earning highly inflated salaries by new industry standards, compliments of Graydon and Si.

On the cover of Graydon’s new book is a handsome picture of him in perhaps his 40s. Drinking at lunch, a long-ago publishing tradition, was still the custom for a few veteran editors, Fisketjon in particular. He joined Random House Publishing in the late 1970s, at a time when the literary market was dominated by two forms of books: expensive hardcover and mass-market paperback.

This was scorched-earth cost cutting that would destroy VF as Graydon had edited it since 1992. As Knopf's vice president and editor-at-large, Mr. Fisketjon has worked with a number of acclaimed writers, including Donna Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis, Kent Haruf, Patricia Highsmith, Tobias Wolff, Julian Barnes, Cormac McCarthy, and Haruki Murakami, while also picking out and fostering new talent.

The next VF editor, the gifted Radhika Jones, would encounter the same poisonous office vibe that Graydon found when he followed Tina Brown, but radically diminished resources. His grasp of status, power dynamics, and social engineering shines through in what he wanted for the first one: a single room, so no A and B delineation; likewise, an extremely tough invitation but no status gradations once you got there.

From that first Oscar party on, Graydon wrangled the elites both coastal and not, somehow mocking and encouraging at the same time.

Alcohol “wasn’t something my diabetes particularly cared for,” he says, adding, “If there’s something I can do perfectly, I want to do it perfectly, and that was a complication that fell short of perfection, certainly.”

“Do I enjoy it? In the late afternoons, he could often be found roaming the halls, sometimes visibly intoxicated, looking for a colleague to drop in on.

Fisketjon’s habits were frowned on but tolerated, partly because everybody knew he had done so much for the company, and partly because of Mehta’s hands-off management style.

But there were lots of dinners, including agent Swifty Lazar’s Oscar watch party where Graydon sat at a bad table and got the idea for a Vanity Fair Oscar party. “So when I thought about who I wanted as the sort of North Star of this enterprise, there was only one name that came to mind, and it came to mind immediately: What if I could get Gary Fisketjon?

They never spoke again. Gary wanted to be the champion of your book, not its co-creator.”

When Fisketjon got his start in publishing, Entrekin notes, “Scribner was owned by a Scribner.

Si didn’t smoke in the shower with his arm outside the curtain like one of Graydon’s favorite writers, Christopher Hitchens, but the two of them come off as well as anyone—and Graydon met everyone.

In 2013, Graydon assigned a story on Trump University, the “fraudulent self-help racket,” and they were at it again. Equally unflattering was the malice between Nick and his brother, John Gregory Dunne, who wrote to Graydon calling the VF editor a second-rate, provincial, culturally unlettered ignoramus who knew nothing about good writing at a time when the VF masthead was arguably stacked with more gifted journalists than any magazine in history doing exceptional work.

Graydon’s forensic telling of Marie Brenner’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” from 1996, about whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand going public with evidence that the tobacco company Brown & Williamson had long suppressed proof that nicotine was addictive and that cigarettes contained added carcinogenic material, reads like textbook journalism about textbook journalism.