Bryan Burroughs, former writer for Vanity Fair during its heyday, has made some astonishing revelations about his time at Graydon Carter’s page turning periodical.
Burroughs, a very accomplished journalist, says he was on an annual contract that paid him almost $500,000 a year for most of his tenure spread over two and a half decades.
This was when SI Newhouse owned and ran Conde Nast. It was the height of magazine mania, before the internet came and in ended a gilded era.
Burroughs recalls in a book review-cum-memoir for The Yale Review: “For twenty-five years, I was contracted to produce three articles a year, long ones, typically ten thousand words. For this, my peak salary was $498,141. That’s not a misprint—$498,141, or more than $166,000 per story. Then, as now, $166,000 was a good advance for an entire book. Yes, I realized it was obscene. I took it with a grin.”
This what journalists always heard about Vanity Fair but never saw spelled out. It’s shocking even now, when, as Burroughs says, he’d be lucky to get $20,000 for one story (and that’s a massive overestimate).
The news comes as part of Burroughs’ review of the legendary former editor’s memoir “When the Going Was Good.” Carter’s Vanity Fair was a must read every month, documenting the nexus of the arts, culture, politics, crime, great wealth, and royalty. When something BIG happened, it was featured in Vanity Fair the next month. Unlike the current version, you had to have it and couldn’t put it down.
Carter has always been generous to his writers. He still is, even in these diminished times, with his monthly Airmail.com.
Burroughs’s Vanity Fair pay was similar to those of his colleagues, but in a world apart from other writing jobs at the time.
He says: “Nowadays, though, such windfalls are a distant memory.” He adds: I was treated like a prince…In Sydney, they put me up in a Four Seasons suite overlooking the opera house. In London, it was Claridge’s…The staff’s perks were posher still. Breakfast—any breakfast—could be expensed. Dinner parties at one’s home could be catered on the company’s dime. Town cars famously stood ready to whisk you anywhere. Editors received interest-free loans to buy new homes; Condé Nast even covered moving costs. Cash advances were a signature away. There was an “eyebrow lady” who swanned in to tweeze everyone’s brows.”
I can tell you that during my concurrent decade at Fox News, I stayed in Holiday Inns, and that was lavish. There was no cash to get an advance from. You get the point!
None of this is in Carter’s book, presumably, but I can’t wait to read it nevertheless when it’s released next Tuesday. This is all Burroughs’s experience. But just this slight piercing of the veil will come as a shock, I think, but not a surprise to those of us slugging it out in the real world.
PS in reference to Burroughs’ comment that $166,000 was a good advance for entire book: another understatement. An advance of $166,000 for any book other than Marlo Brando’s autobiography would have been considered a windfall.
