Graydon Carter, Restaurant Promoter
Graydon Carter may have been wasting his time launching and editing magazines all these years. The 58-year-old's true calling is restaurant promoter. Carter's Vanity Fair is doing fine, at least among the middle-aged middle-American women who make up the core of its readership: the glossy title is a carefully-disguised supermarket tabloid. But Carter has had greater success recently with the restaurant the Canadian bon vivant opened up just a few doors from his house. The Vanity Fair editor was a regular at Da Silvano's on Sixth Avenue; he and his friends lent the Italian restaurant an allure, which brought a celebrity clientele, and press mentions. But look at this chart of mentions of the restaurants in the Nexis press database: Carter's new restaurant, which drew Lindsay Lohan and Cameron Diaz last Friday, has eclipsed his old haunt.