Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter Just Won't Shut Up About 'The Philadelphia Story'
Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter has a very very strange and deep obsession with the 1940 romantic screwball comedy "The Philadelphia Story." He named Spy after the paper for which Jimmy Stewart's character Macaulay Connor writes. He aped the expression "yar" as in "Nicole Kidman is yar" from a nautical term of endearment C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) calls the super bangable Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn not Traci Lords) . He even blathers on about the movie on Turner Classic Movies. The latest manifestation of Carter's TPS obsession is his non sequitur quote about said film in a Telegraph piece about, basically, Vanity Fair invented the world including portraits. Regarding a 1929 photograph of Douglas Fairbanks Jr and Joan Crawford Carter said “That picture is one of my favourites...It’s so beautifully composed. It’s The Philadelphia Story in one image.” I mean, it is in black & white, there is a man and woman (there were men and women in the Philadelphia Story) and there is a bathing suit. But other than that, Gray-Gray, it's more the story of Joan Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr in one image.