Graydon Carter arrives at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in Beverly Hills, Calif. in 2015. (Danny Moloshok/Reuters)

The Graydon Carter era of Vanity Fair will soon come to an end. After 25 years as the magazine’s top editor, Carter will step down from his post in December.

His departure was first revealed in a New York Times interview. “I want to leave while the magazine is on top,” Carter said. “I want to leave while it’s in vibrant shape, both in the digital realm and the print realm. And I wanted to have a third act — and I thought, time is precious.”

While it’s not clear what his third act will be, or who will replace him, Vanity Fair under Carter was characterized by buzzed-about covers, controversial photo choices, major celebrity gets and investigative scoops. Here’s a brief look back:

Publicly identifies Deep Throat

It was one of Washington’s most enduring mysteries: Who was Deep Throat, the secret source behind The Washington Post’s Watergate scandal reporting that led to President Nixon’s resignation? The answer was made public via a July 2005 Vanity Fair story, in which Mark Felt’s family revealed his identity to John D. O’Connor.

Barebacked photo of a 15-year-old Miley Cyrus

Some of Vanity Fair’s most talked about photos have come courtesy of Annie Leibovitz. One featured a 15-year-old Miley Cyrus holding a bedsheet against her with her bare back exposed.

This was years before she twerked on the MTV Video Music Awards, years before she bared it all for her “Wrecking Ball” music video, when Cyrus was mostly known as a Disney “Hannah Montana” star. Entertainment Tonight aired shots of the cover ahead of its release, prompting an outcry from some parents.

Cyrus subsequently issued a statement, saying she thought “it was supposed to be ‘artistic’ and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed.” A Disney spokeswoman said “a situation was created to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines.”

The magazine defended the photo and Leibovitz. “Miley’s parents and/or minders were on the set all day,” a spokeswoman said. “Since the photo was taken digitally, they saw it on the shoot and everyone thought it was a beautiful and natural portrait of Miley.”

Those Oscar parties

It’s hard to imagine the glitz and star power of Oscars night without the Vanity Fair party, which has become an institution in recent years. It began in 1994 as an intimate dinner and has since evolved into a star-studded affair where Halle Berry and Mick Jagger rub elbows.

The Vanity Fair parties were preceded by the regular Oscars parties thrown by Irving Paul “Swifty” Lazar and his wife, Mary, until Lazar’s 1993 death. From Vanity Fair:

According to Vanity Fair director of special projects Sara Marks, it was then that Graydon Carter, who had attended Lazar’s party in its final year, “decided that maybe we should go out to L.A. and have a small dinner on Oscar evening.”

“When Swifty died, I had been the editor of Vanity Fair for about a year and a half,” Carter says. “I had seen what he had done, and I thought this would be a very good thing for the magazine. But I wanted to do it in a very small way. My feeling is, if you’re going to fail, do it in small company.”

Caitlyn Jenner says hi to the world

The magazine introduced Caitlyn Jenner after she transitioned from Bruce with a highly-publicized Vanity Fair July 2015 cover emblazoned with the quote, “Call me Caitlyn.” The photos were shot by Leibovitz and showcased a glamorous Jenner. Together with the interview, her appearance in the magazine became a cultural moment as the country debated transgender issues.

Spiking the GOOP story

Throughout 2013, rumors persisted that a story about Gwyneth Paltrow and her lifestyle site “Goop” was in the works, that the actress warned her friends to not talk to the magazine, that the piece would be devastating.

Carter addressed the controversy himself in a March 2014 essay, writing that the resulting story that the writer turned in was “such a far cry from the almost mythical story that people were by now expecting — the ‘epic takedown,’ filled with ‘bombshell’ revelations — that it was bound to be a disappointment. What to do? I decided to sit on it for a time.” He didn’t publish it.


Gwyneth Paltrow on May 6, 2017. (Jordan Strauss/Invision/Associated Press)

Carter wrote:

We were in uncharted waters. At Vanity Fair, we tend to keep stories we are working on under our hats. It’s not easy being a monthly magazine in an Internet age, and since most of the publications we compete with are weeklies or dailies, when it comes to the stories still in train, a certain amount of institutional secrecy is required. The Gwyneth Paltrow saga had clearly just gotten away from us. My instinct was to continue to let it sit until people had forgotten about it, or at least until expectations had diminished. The fact is the Gwyneth Paltrow story, the one we ordered up, as delightfully written as it was, is not the one the anti-Gwynethites expect. That it has generated more mail and attention than many of the biggest stories we’ve ever published only makes the situation more complicated.

Breaking-silence interviews

One of the magazine’s staples have been exclusive celebrity interviews, especially after high-profile events. Jennifer Aniston granted Vanity Fair her first interview after her split from Brad Pitt in 2005. Martha Stewart’s first post-jail interview, also in 2005, was with the magazine.

Celebrities have also revealed secrets previously unknown to the public, including traumatic experiences, such Teri Hatcher’s 2006 interview in which she talks about having been sexually abused as a child.

Carter’s ongoing Trump feud

The Vanity Fair editor became a Trump nemesis long before he took charge of the magazine. Their feud began decades ago, and Carter liked to tease Trump about the size of his hands — which came up during the presidential campaign, too. Carter profiled Trump in a 1984 issue of GQ, and in an April 1988 issue of the magazine Carter co-founded, Spy, Trump was famously referred to as a “short-fingered vulgarian.”

From The Fix’s Callum Borchers:

It was Carter who first revealed one of the president’s best-known insecurities. Carter is (indirectly) the reason Trump felt compelled to tell the world during a Republican primary debate that there is “no problem” with the size of a certain appendage.

You see, Carter is the one who — more than three decades ago — started this whole thing about Trump having tiny hands. Without Carter, Marco Rubio might never have said this while campaigning against Trump in February 2016: “You know what they say about guys with small hands — you can’t trust ’em!”

Trump couldn’t resist the urge to respond to Rubio’s wisecrack at a debate three days later: “He referred to my hands. If they’re small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there’s no problem.”

In December 2016, a day after the magazine published a devastatingly bad review of the Trump Tower restaurant, Trump Grill, the then-president elect had this to say: