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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Graydon Carter explains how Vanity Fair ended up outing Deep Throat -- and reveals what the magazine paid for the scoop.
Jun 6, 2005 | Graydon Carter was on his way back from his honeymoon last Tuesday when his magazine revealed the identity of the most famous anonymous source in the world. The way the Vanity Fair editor tells it, the fact that he was sitting on the media scoop of the century, the identity of Deep Throat, had temporarily slipped his mind.
"I completely forgot about it," he says. "I was in a small airport in the Caribbean, and I called the office to check in." His colleagues told him that the story had broken and the media was world buzzing with intrigue. The Washington Post's Watergate duo, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, had refused to confirm or deny that the former FBI No. 2, Mark Felt, was Deep Throat. For the time being, Vanity Fair was on its own. The story was out -- but Carter was still not completely confident it was right.
"We fact-checked this thing through alternate and overlapping sources. The chief fact checker had been through it dozens and dozens of times to fill in the gaps. But the ultimate confirmation could come from only two sources." But calling Woodward, or Bernstein, who is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, was out of the question.
"We skipped the last two phone calls," explains Carter. "If Bob knew what we were going to do he could have got it up on the Web within two hours, but we wouldn't be able to get it on the newsstands for at least two weeks." One of his colleagues warned him he would need "brass balls" to see it through.
Brass-balled is not the obvious description for Carter, who has just married Anna Scott, a Brit 18 years his junior, whose father is an equerry to the queen. He is a dandy of the old school. When he comes to London he stays at the Dorchester; he gets his stationery made in Paris at Benetton; he is out of the office every day by 5:30 p.m. and out of most cocktail parties within five minutes. "You go in, you go right to the guest of honor, and you go right to the host," he once explained. "You never take off your coat, you never pick up a glass, and you never say goodbye. Sometimes I do four or five of those in one night." But when it came to this story, the brass balls were firmly in place.
Staff in Vanity Fair's Times Square office told him the Washington Post planned to make a statement in the next seven minutes. "I was terrified they were going to say it was someone else," he says. "I thought if they say it's some other guy this is going to be a long trip back to the United States. I was 95 percent sure and I thought that was about as sure as I'm going to be. Sometimes you've got to close your eyes, pull the trigger and hope for the best."
Only when Woodward finally released himself from his pledge never to reveal Deep Throat's identity while he was still alive did Carter know that he had hit the bull's-eye. He arrived back in New York from his honeymoon to a hero's welcome. "The identity of Deep Throat isn't the most earth-shattering story in the world," he says. "But among journalistic secrets this is the Holy Grail."
It was the culmination of two years of intermittent discussions with Felt's representatives that started with a phone call out of the blue in March 2003. "Graydon, you've got someone on the phone who wants to talk to you about Deep Throat," his assistant said. "It was funny because my assistant had no idea who Deep Throat was," says Carter. "I think people under 30 still think you're talking about the porn film."
