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TOP OF THE POP
Canadians Graydon Carter and Bonnie Fuller are more than just magazine editors. They are the entertainment gurus of our pop culture universe.

Text: SIMON HOUPT

On some nights in Los Angeles, you can taste the air, and it is sweet. Last year on March 24, the heady perfume of hyacinths wafted through a cavernous white tent erected on Melrose Avenue for the annual Vanity Fair Oscar bash. Here members of the American royalty convened, with their perfect skin and borrowed diamonds, forever ready for their close-ups.

Sidney Poitier and Denzel Washington embraced. The young actress Selma Blair perched giddily next to legendary producer Robert Evans. Movie moguls and the heads of international media corporations gawked at Renée Zellweger, while Oprah whispered something empowering to Gwyneth.

Like loyal family members at a Mafia wedding, even the biggest box office stars showed up to pay their respects to the man in the middle of it all: Canadian-born Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. Under Carter’s watch since 1992, Vanity Fair has become a prime pillar of the cultural establishment, a tastemaker with sweeping influence over what people choose to watch, wear and read.

Far away from the fun, in the cramped midtown Manhattan offices of Us Weekly magazine, tense photo editors scanned thousands of pictures flying across the wires from paparazzi staked out in L.A. Overseen by Canadian-born Bonnie Fuller, a bedraggled team of reporters and editors worked until dawn throwing together flashy photo spreads for a special Oscar issue.

Fuller had been appointed Us -editor-in-chief less than one month before in a desperate attempt by the owners to staunch a series of losses since Us went weekly two years before. Her solution? Give readers what they want: behind-the-scenes glimpses into the lives of celebrities that tear away the burnished images of perfection constructed by other media (like, say, Vanity Fair). Usually, that means reporting all the spats and smooches in star romances, like Britney and Justin or J.Lo and Ben. For the Oscar issue, it also meant reporting that Selma Blair didn’t wash her hair that day and that Paul McCartney whistled his Oscar--nominated song "Vanilla Sky" backstage in the men’s restroom. Fuller’s message to Us readers is that despite the riches, fame and privilege, "Stars – They’re Just Like Us." She’s selling the fantasy of reality.

In many ways, Vanity Fair and Us Weekly couldn’t be more different. One typifies the gold standard of soft celebrity coverage, using it as window dressing to draw readers into a carefully crafted general interest monthly that offers talented writers telling stories about politics, world affairs, business and high-society scandal. The other magazine takes a no-holds-barred approach to the stars and sees its primary mission as entertainment of the fluffiest order.

The magazine’s bosses, too, are studies in contrast. Where Graydon Carter is a consummate insider, an urbane, self-created man about town, Bonnie Fuller is a suburban mom who revels in her status as an outsider. As they forge two different future paths for magazines – a medium once thought to be on its way to the graveyard – Carter and Fuller are celebrities in their own right. More important, from their opposite ends of the spectrum they’re helping to define what we consume as entertainment.

"For us, here in America, our royalty are our TV and movie stars and our rock stars," Fuller explained to Charlie Rose last year. "I’m probably as obsessed with celebrities, personally and professionally, as my audience."

You may scoff at the unflattering paparazzi shots in Us, the exclamation marks sprinkled like rain in Vancouver or the tacky close-ups of Reese Witherspoon’s engagement ring. But Fuller is a proven genius at sales. Taking a page from British celebrity magazines like Heat, Hello! and OK!, where saucy covers are dreamed up even before the articles are assigned, Fuller crafts cover lines with the accuracy of a lapidary.

She honed that vital skill as an editor of fashion magazines, beginning at Canada’s Flare at age 26. In 1989, Fuller moved to Manhattan to edit YM, bumping circulation from 700,000 to 1.75 million. She then launched the U.S. edition of Marie Claire, which led to her most high-profile job: displacing the legendary Helen Gurley Brown in 1996 as the editor of Cosmopolitan. There she perfected her talent for shameless sexing up, which she later continued at Glamour. ("Get Moregasmic!" read one cover.) At Glamour, she came under fire from the journalism watchdog Brill’s Content for making up quotes and anecdotes, but aimed as it was at a women’s magazine, the accusation was greeted with a collective shrug.

In May 2001, Fuller’s rocket ride to the top of the publishing world stalled when she was fired from Glamour, reportedly for usurping her position in the Condé Nast stable of magazines, which includes Vogue. "Everybody counted her out after her flame-out at Glamour," says Lisa Granatstein, general editor of Mediaweek. "And yet now here she is, back bigger than ever. Bonnie is like Cher. She has more incarnations than you can ever imagine."

Celebrating her one-year anniversary at Us this month, Fuller can boast a double-digit increase in newsstand sales, a prime -indicator of a magazine’s vitality. Her bosses at Wenner Media, owner of Rolling Stone and Men’s Journal, say they’re thrilled with her performance. Of course they are: In a brutal economic climate, Us is actually reeling in new advertisers and readers.

Yet at Us, sexy cover lines are nowhere to be found. "Listen, Us is an entirely different book," says Fuller from her spacious office decorated with photographs of her four children. "The reader isn’t looking to solve personal issues; she’s looking very much to relax and be entertained. So the cover lines have to speak to that mindset."

Fuller has made Us a certifiable pop culture touchstone. It has been mentioned on The West Wing and Saturday Night Live. Us editors appear on TV entertainment shows as experts, like fashion director Kelli Delaney weighing in on the meaning of breasts in the A&E Network documentary Cleavage. Sure, lots of critics are saying the magazine’s evolution is just another step in the dumbing down of American culture. But for the first time in its 26-year -history, people are talking about Us.

As for Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter has made sure people talk about it. "You have to have a magazine that figures in the social and intellectual agenda," says Carter. He downplays the importance of celebrities on his cover, insisting they’re the only way he can get people to pick up the magazine and discover the real journalism between the covers. "Look, I don’t even know whether people want to read about celebrities, but we sell between 400,000 and 600,000 copies on the newsstand each month. That’s a lot of copies for a magazine that doesn’t have ‘10 Ways to Improve Your Orgasm’ for a cover line."

"Graydon isn’t looking for a mass audience like Bonnie is," notes Mediaweek’s Lisa Granatstein. "He’s looking for an elite audience, a certain class, be it the media class, Wall Street or the entertainment industry. Vanity Fair is a must-read for anyone in any of those circles."

From Carter’s classic, elegant corner office on the 22nd floor of the glistening new Condé Nast tower, you’d never know he was at the cultural centre, circa 2003. A framed poem by Dorothy Parker adorns the wall above a manual Olivetti typewriter on his desk. On the coffee table is an antique Speed Graphic camera of the sort used by early paparazzi photographers, which Carter uses to take photos of his four children.

Born in Toronto and raised in Ottawa, Carter grew up with a longing to play in the big leagues of the New York magazine world, but without a clue about how to get there. "The only person who had the closest approximation to this world was the Newsweek correspondent for Canada, who lived down the street from me," recalls Carter. "To me, he was like a celebrity."

After two years editing the Canadian Review in Ottawa, Carter parlayed a brief assignment for Time into a full-time job in New York. There he plotted with co-workers to launch Spy, modelled partly on the satiric British magazine Private Eye. Perfectly timed with its 1986 launch to mock the Decade of Greed, Spy hit Manhattan like a stink bomb, delighting all those who thought the ruling class could use a little rap on the ego. But Spy was never much of a money-maker, and Carter had a family to support. He moved over to the New York Observer in 1991, turning the sleepy weekly into a gossipy must-read for the same class once pulverized in Spy. A year later, he was plucked for the top job at Vanity Fair when former editor Tina Brown moved to The New Yorker.

His appointment shocked many, who felt the fox had been given the keys to the henhouse, but it proved to be a sage move. Carter was ready to grow up and play by the rules, albeit with an occasionally ironic twist. With a lifelong anglo-philia that expressed itself through bespoke London suits and a hunger for stories about high society, Carter was well positioned to perform a classically Canadian task: translating British traditions and making them palatable to Americans. Carter understood the British class system and realized that the U.S. had a class structure, too, even if it didn’t like to admit it. He turned Vanity Fair into a chronicle of the American ruling class. In time, he made friends with that ruling class and even became a member himself.

Last year, he sealed his membership in the club by producing two films. He executive produced 9/11, a documentary aired on CBS that won Carter an Emmy Award. He also produced The Kid Stays in the Picture, a charming and wistful biographical documentary about the Hollywood -producer Robert Evans, which was funded in part by Carter’s friend, media mogul Barry Diller.

"Graydon is the establishment," says Simon Dumenco, a columnist for the publishing trade magazine Folio. "Here’s a guy who says, ‘I’m going to have the best Oscar party; I’m going to eclipse Tina Brown as the tastemaker,’ and he can do it. He has the cultural power at _his disposal."

Yet Vanity Fair often comes in for criticism for its sometimes slavish celebrity coverage in an age where the power of personal publicists is enormous. With some magazines, publicists such as PMK/HBH, which handles hundreds of movie stars, are guaranteed veto power over the photos and articles and even placement on the front cover. Carter insists Vanity Fair makes no such deals. "We just figure out who we want and then we just get them, and we don’t have to make deals," he says. In the last year, Fuller has upset the cozy celebrity-industrial -complex of publicists and entertainment companies by turning Us into a heavy customer of paparazzi photos. "Magazines like People and Us, they don’t even need PMK," says Carter. "They bypass them."

Fuller has also taken direct aim at People magazine, whose offices are just across the street. While newsstand sales of Us are up, People’s are down. People and the new In Touch Weekly (which was launched last fall) are looking an awful lot like Us, with busy designs, cheeky humour and even more celebrity coverage. Time Inc. is toying with launching a People spinoff exclusively about celebrities, not the "real people" it often features.

With Us’ cheesy photos and bite-size stories, Fuller courts the open ridicule of her colleagues. Morale is plummeting among staff members, who pine for the days when Us published actual articles instead of "charticles." "She has made it a mind-numbingly dumb magazine," says one long-time writer. Another says, "I don’t even write anymore. I think up photo captions." Staff are turned off by the changes and Fuller’s allegedly harsh treatment of personnel (more than a dozen reporters and editors have been fired). "Us Weekly isn’t really a magazine," says Folio’s Simon Dumenco. "It’s something else. It’s a form of television."

And just like a weekly TV series, readers are hooked on their favourite characters, brought to us on a regular basis by both magazines. Maybe you get your cues from the high-toned Vanity Fair; maybe you prefer the proudly lowbrow Us. But there’s no denying it’s a Graydon Carter-Bonnie Fuller world out there. We just happen to live in it.

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Graydon or Bonnie?
Would you be a discreet, behind-the-scenes player or a dishy, tabloid-style tattler? Take our quiz and find out.

It’s down to the wire on deciding the next cover. You choose:
A) the gorgeous babe touted as The Next Big Thing.
B) the star whose scandalous behaviour is water-cooler talk this week.

Your magazine gets a pop culture shout-out from:
A) the former employee who writes a gossipy tell-all book.
B) Grace on Will & Grace, who reads it in the bathroom in three minutes flat.

The photographers for your magazine are:
A prestigious fashion and portrait shooters (museum/art-house cred is an asset).
B really good at crouching in bushes (paparazzi experience is an asset).

Calista Flockhart’s son misbehaves in an L.A. park. You:
A) could not possibly care less.
B) run a play-by-play page of tantrum photos and captions.

A signature feature in your magazine is:
A) "Out & In" (a definitive monthly charting of the Zeitgeist).
B) "When Bad Clothes Happen to Good People" (celebrity fashion crimes).

Mostly A’s: Graydon. Sophisticated and above the fray, your magazine is a must for discerning readers. You are a master at capturing them with style but keeping them with substance.

Mostly B’s: Bonnie. Sassy and streetwise, your magazine is a guilty pleasure for celebrity gossip seekers. You are a master at capturing their attention in the supermarket checkout line.