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CAP D’ANTIBES, France — Graydon Carter had spent weeks gaming out the seating charts, using his hostly omnipotence to decide which Oscar winners should sit next to which private-equity guys from London or share a table with the prince and princess of Monaco.
The food, the wine — all of it had to be the best for this party at the exclusive waterside terrace of the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, and Carter was especially pleased with the gold-rimmed ceramic ashtrays and matchboxes custom-made for the occasion. As a special touch, his team had even engineered the precise angle (45 degrees) at which to project scenes from classic Warner Bros. movies (the studio’s 100th anniversary was the excuse for the fete) onto the surface of the infinity pool, floating on the cliff above the pitch-black sea. Pure magic on a balmy Mediterranean night, which would only work if the wind stayed calm. (It did.) He even had klieg lights scouting the heavens, something he’d always wanted to do at a party during his decades as editor of Vanity Fair, but never did, for some reason.
Graydon Carter’s party at the Cannes Film Festival featured scenes from classic Warner Bros. movies being projected onto the surface of an infinity pool. (Video: Jada Yuan/The Washington Post)
“I think it adds a great sort of Hollywood-premiere, ‘Day of the Locust’ atmosphere,” Carter said.
The idea was to make this party feel like a once-in-a-lifetime event — though, of course, he’d done virtually the same thing many, many, many times before.
On the same terrace. With many of the same guests.
To those who’d been to any of the swanky soirees Carter hosted at the Cannes Film Festival during the 2010s — the last of which was in 2017, the year the entire magazine industry collapsed and Carter parted ways with Vanity Fair — the night felt like a very glamorous déjà vu.
It also felt curiously similar to the party that Carter’s successor at Vanity Fair, Radhika Jones, had thrown just three nights earlier, also in honor of the film festival, also at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, on the same terrace, with many of the same guests. Jones’s, unfortunately, coincided with an unseasonable monsoon that made all of the outdoor spaces unusable, driving away every smoker. In France, as everyone knows, that’s at least half the party.
Was Carter thinking of Jones’s party as he planned his own?
“I think it’s inherent in any human being that you want to do better than the competition, and I’m sort of quietly competitive,” he said. “And I wanted to — I wanted to beat them.”
For 25 years, Carter sat atop the world of glossy New York magazine publishing, the grand conductor of one of the fattest, most fragrant and most celebrity-studded magazines of all time.
His Vanity Fair melded deep investigative journalism with voyeuristic glimpses into the lives of the unhappily rich and famous, and chummy, soft-focus paeans to the movie stars on its covers. In the process, he became famous himself, one of the few magazine editors — alongside Anna Wintour and Tina Brown — recognizable to folks far outside Manhattan. It wasn’t just about glamour and wealth and (mostly White) beautiful people, though. A veteran of Time, Spy and the New York Observer, Carter shepherded Vanity Fair to winning 14 National Magazine Awards during his tenure.
Yet he is probably best known for having mastered a skill seemingly unrelated to publishing that soon became essential to the job: throwing fabulous parties.
The annual Oscars party, which Carter held for many years at Los Angeles’s Sunset Tower Hotel, is the best known, but over time, he and his longtime events designer Basil Walter expanded to the French ambassador’s residence for the White House correspondents’ dinner after-party, and his annual Cannes party, which became a highlight of the festival. International A-listers always filled the space: Isabelle Huppert, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, post-“Revenant” Leonardo DiCaprio, pre-slap Will Smith, Mary J. Blige, Greta Gerwig, Jessica Chastain. An invitation to VF Cannes served as anointment for stars on the rise, who would party on the outside terrace till 4 a.m. (In 2014, I observed a mid-“Hunger Games” Jennifer Lawrence try out a hiccup-curing technique that involved lowering her arms very slowly while chugging a whole bottle of water, with the help of co-star Josh Hutcherson.)
With his departure from Vanity Fair, Carter’s party days seemed to come to a close. Four years ago, on the cusp of 70, he launched a leaner new project, the digital newsletter Air Mail, with New York Times veteran Alessandra Stanley.
“We call ourselves ‘has-beens and rookies,’” said Carter, who describes the staff as magazine veterans from the ’70s and ’80s, plus, “like, 20 young, really smart people.” Together, they put out a what he likens to “the weekend edition of a nonexistent international daily newspaper.” Recent article subjects have included many updates on the fall of Armie Hammer; Jeff Bezos’s fiancée, Lauren Sánchez; and deep dives into what rosé from Provence to buy and whether Athens is the new Berlin.
In other words, sort of an old-school Vanity Fair — but on a start-up budget that didn’t seem to leave room for caviar bars and magnums of Veuve Clicquot.
From March: Michelle Yeoh makes quite an entrance at the Vanity Fair Oscars party
So, it may not have taken much for an unlikely but eager Cannes party co-host to talk Carter into one last heist.
Which is how he came to be greeting every single arriving guest at the Hotel du Cap last month alongside David Zaslav, the embattled CEO of the new Warner Bros. Discovery.
“I think that’s always very important,” Carter said. “It’s exhausting but important.”
The two men — an erstwhile media kingpin seeking renewed relevance and a present-day omni-media titan grappling with an excess of relevance these days — were turned out in near-matching linen cream-colored blazers with pale-blue collared shirts. A coincidence, they said.
It’s been just over a year since Zaslav — after about a decade and a half of leading Discovery, the unsexy purveyor of middlebrow documentaries and reality TV — oversaw the merger that put him at the top of the massive new conglomerate that includes the legendary movie studio with its name, as well as CNN and HBO. But some year, huh? Zaslav quickly found himself under fire for yanking movies such as “Batgirl” from the Warner Bros. slate, pulling the plug on CNN’s $100 million streaming service after three weeks, laying off thousands of workers and lopping the “HBO” off the HBO Max app, to the confusion of many consumers.
No better time for a party? Zaslav initially asked his old friend whether Air Mail could co-host an Oscars party. Carter wasn’t interested in taking on that monster — and the nine months of planning it requires. “But I said we could do the party during the Cannes Film Festival, which I like,” Carter said. They dubbed the party a celebration of “100 Years of Warner Bros.,” an anniversary already being celebrated at Cannes with a documentary and huge posters all over town paying tribute to the likes of “Goodfellas” and “Inception.” Even the invitation — an art deco illustration of Carter driving Zaslav in a convertible down a palm-lined boulevard — hinted at their dynamic, the guy with the Rolodex chauffeuring the one with the wallet.
“To do this with my best friend Graydon Carter at Cannes, … it’s been wonderful!” enthused Zaslav, who waxed poetic about his Brooklyn childhood, going every weekend with his father to the movies that shaped his vision of the world.
“He’s exaggerating there, but we’re great, great friends,” Carter deflected. “We’re not 12 or anything like that, shooting marbles together in the backyard or whatever.”
Zaslav could be excused for a bit of giddy relief, having come straight to Cannes from Boston University, where he was booed throughout his commencement speech by students and protesters sympathetic to the Writers Guild of America strike. Other studios had made it known that they would not be throwing Cannes parties, in solidarity with the writers, including Focus Features, which premiered Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City” the same night as the Air Mail-WBD bash. Carter saw no problem with Zaslav hosting the party. “It is in celebration of writers’ and directors’ craft, so there’s that. It’s not about nothing,” he said. “And knowing David, this will brush off on him. … I told him, ‘If there are any writers picketing outside and they’re dressed appropriately, we’ll invite them in.’”
Security was on high alert, though, for another kind of gate-crasher. “There were hookers outside trying to get in, but we stopped them,” Carter said. Really? “You need, literally, a hooker patrol in the south of France. You’re so naive!”
Carter seemed highly aware of Jones’s party, a collaboration with Prada, and eager to list the ways he thought his was better. Despite the weather, the Vanity Fair party had actually been a fairly cheery affair, with the British actor Lucien Laviscount (Alfie from “Emily in Paris”) dancing under the terrace’s leaky canvas tent alongside fashion models Naomi Campbell, Alessandra Ambrosio and Adriana Lima. Also: prodigy playwright Jeremy O. Harris and young HBO stars Storm Reid of “Euphoria” and Hari Nef and Rachel Sennott of “The Idol.”
And the A-list did send a representative or two to schmooze with Jones, notably De Niro, who showed up late with the French art photographer JR.
“I know,” Carter sniped, “but it looked like it was a hostage incident.”
Jones could not be reached for comment.
Carter’s party certainly had better weather and A-listers of a certain generation: De Niro again, Scorsese, Sting and Trudie Styler, Paul Dano, Jason Statham, Adrien Brody, John C. Reilly. Boy George wore a giant blue bowler hat. DiCaprio and his mom arrived via boat. This was the party that got Lily-Rose Depp, star of HBO’s sizzlingly controversial “The Idol,” as well as the eternally red-hot Scarlett Johansson, who’d come straight from the “Asteroid City” premiere, skipping a dinner with her cast.
But in many ways, Carter seemed to be flag-planting on a tiny patch of territory in a culture war that’s already lost. His party-volley against Jones was the old guard rebranded as the digital new guard making a high society attack on one of the last remaining legacy magazine editors, who is also an Indian American woman who’s made a point of putting people of color on the cover of a magazine that was often remiss in doing so during Carter’s time. And it was coming in a year when the biggest names at the festival — Scorsese, Harrison Ford — are now 80, in a world when screenwriters are fending off ChatGPT, and TikTok is now a Cannes sponsor, and the World Influencers and Bloggers Awards was taking place just three days later down the Croisette.
Of course, for some in attendance, that made Carter’s efforts all the more valuable.
“I’m just so glad somebody is doing something like that, with that level of taste and attention to detail,” said the heiress and musician Daphne Guinness, who had been living at the Hotel du Cap and is known for her signature sky-high Cruella de Vil updo. “I’d kind of lost hope!”
As for Carter? He left around midnight, four hours before many of his guests, so he could get his 14-year-old daughter off to bed and onto an early plane.
“I get exhausted at these things,” he explained. “I can handle about 45 minutes at a cocktail party, so this took me right to my extremes.”
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