"No Way Carrie Bradshaw Could Afford All That?" Uhh, Maybe She Could!

A former Vanity Fair writer’s salary revelations make Carrie’s $40K on shoes feel like pocket change.

One of the pervasive “let’s rehash the past in an attempt to stave off our collective despair” beats is wondering how Carrie Bradshaw, a columnist at the fictional New York Observer, was able to afford a lifestyle in New York City that saw her shopping, lunching, boozing and clubbing. Sure, she had a rent-controlled apartment, but even then, it was hard to rationalize and easy to pick apart (BuzzFeed once did some math to conclude that Carrie would have been $1,221,984 in debt by the end of the original series) what seemed like a totally unrealistic lifestyle. And yet, thanks to a recent admission from a former Vanity Fair writer, maybe there’s reason to believe that Carrie, too, benefitted from the golden age of media, a time when a single article could net writers of certain regard upwards of six figures. And this in the ‘90s, no less, when six figures stretched way farther than today.

Graydon Carter is in the midst of a press blitz surrounding his new book, When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines. And when he writes “golden,” he means it in every sense of the word. Fellow journalist Bryan Burrough recently wrote a piece for The Yale Review with a particularly salacious headline:

“Vanity Fair’s Heyday: I was once paid six figures to write an article—now what?”

In the story, Burrough writes that though he’s “probably breaking some unwritten law of publishing,” he’s going to lay it all out there to prove a greater point.

“For twenty-five years, I was contracted to produce three articles a year, long ones, typically ten thousand words. For this, my peak salary was $498,141. That’s not a misprint—$498,141, or more than $166,000 per story.” 

But it wasn’t just the salary. There were the profits from having his articles be optioned for films, the expense accounts, the town cars, etc. Burrough even says that editors received interest-free loans to buy new homes and dinner parties at one’s home could be catered on the company’s dime. And this wasn’t even his full time job! The fuck?!

If that was the golden age, next came the dark age. Swiftly and without warning. But how?