The Sunday Stories
Feud: S1 E1 “Graydon and Me”
Before there was Ryan Murphy, streaming platforms and curated vulnerability of social media there was Graydon Carter and Vanity Fair magazine.
Ryan loves a good Feud. So do I. Murphy and I, in fact, have more in common than I find comfortable to acknowledge.
Most of you remember my very public Feud with Andy Cohen. That season opened, as all prestige dramas should, with a screaming match on television. Low stakes. High ratings. It ended seven years later at The Polo Bar neither of us entirely sure what we’d said, or why we’d said it, or if we’d meant any of it. Time edits, aggressively.
But Feud: Andy vs. Carole was Season 2. While Murphy stages his Feuds in a writer’s room, mine are staged in my memory. Carefully catalogued in my unusually large hippocampus. To re-visit Feud Season 1, I’ll need to take you back two decades.
S1 E1: Graydon and Me
It was a twenty-two-year feud that began in 2003 and ended a few months ago in an over-decorated apartment inside The Dakota, best known for the murder of John Lennon and now the ending of my first great Feud.
There were no public screaming matches, no twitter fights, no dramatic reckonings [though there was some of that]. My anger was so quiet it sometimes felt theoretical. For the most part, I think Graydon Carter moved through the world unaware there was anything to forgive—even afterward on the rare occasions we found ourselves in the same room, politely ignoring each other. But it was never about revenge—revenge is messy. Instead, my anger settled into a soft, enduring fantasy of his irrelevance and a lifetime of erectile dysfunction.
Anyway, back to Vanity Fair: To understand the power of magazines in the 1990s and early 2000s, you have to perform a kind of Jedi mind-sweep. Erase YouTube. Delete Twitter. Quiet Instagram, TikTok, the 24-hour, seven-day-a-week algorithm that hums like white noise from your HVAC unit. Imagine the silence, then hold a thick glossy magazine in your hand and open its pages.
Magazines were the cultural gatekeepers before social media. They didn’t chase the mood—they set it—and the stories they published carried an outsized ability to frame public opinion. Today, instead of a single voice shaping the cultural moment, tens of thousands compete for attention. Where there was once cultural canonization, there are now trending spikes that rise quickly and disappear just as fast. The 1990s favored depth over dopamine loops – more focused, more cohesive, less hungry for constant reaction.
And in that regard, Vanity Fair was a kingmaker -- the epicenter of cultural and celebrity events. A cover could redefine a celebrity’s status overnight. But unlike other celebrity magazines, Vanity Fair had real journalistic muscle –– hiring writers like Micheal Lewis and Christopher Hitchens to dissect financial excess and cover Washington power dynamics. Publicists depended on editors and there was no more powerful editor in 2003 than Graydon Carter. He curated taste and shaped narratives. His Vanity Fair Oscar Party riveled the actual event.
I’m saying all of this so you understand the influence and power that Graydon Carter wielded when he published a salacious, misogynistic, tabloid-style excerpt from the first book by Ed Klein, which dissected the relationship between John Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. That Klein had written the drivel was no surprise, he’d made a boat load of cash writing misogynistic tomes on Hillary Clinton, Katie Couric and now, Carolyn. A man so discredited even Rush Limbaugh once questioned his veracity. I mean….
The surprise was that Graydon would publish it. It didn’t meet even the most basic journalistic standards. Ed Klein was widely regarded as a hack—trafficking in salacious conjecture that read more like fan fiction than biography. And Graydon and I were friends, kind of—or at least friendly. We shared a small circle of friends, mutual dinners, overlapping loyalties.
The book excerpt appeared in the August 2003 issue of Vanity Fair, only a few years after the plane crash that took their lives, when the loss was still deeply palpable. Those early narratives published by cultural juggernauts set the tone.
Those of us who loved them instinctively knew we would always be fighting against deeply misogynistic framing that would harden into history.
And as I said in this Sunday Story — it was the hill I was prepared to die on.