Accidental lives (on Purpose) --I REGRET ALMOST EVERYTHING: A Memoir by KEITH MCNALLY and WHEN THE GOING WAS GOOD: An Editor's Adventures by GRAYDON CARTER

I REGRET ALMOST EVERYTHING, a memoir by Keith McNally, the restaurant entrepreneur behind Odeon, Balthazar, Lucky Strike, One Fifth (to name a few) was always thinking about the next restaurant, before the one in process was finished.  In his excruciatingly honest and darkly funny memoir, McNally examines his seemingly “accidental” life, where little was expected of him. Born an average “bloke” to a working class family in Britain, he didn’t excell in school or sports and wasn’t suited to “trade.”He did possess an insatiable curiousity about the world outside his insular  neighborhood.

It was no surprise, when like many kids he left school at 16 to “work.” What his family, who might have objected, didn’t know was that he found work as an actor, playing:”boys” in a variety of  plays and theaters. He was good enough to attract the attention of New Wave playwrights, like Alan Bennett (The Madness of King George, The History Boys). Though most of this group were born aristocrats, their plays took aim at Britain’s class system, an irony not lost on McNally, though he was glad to be taken under their cultural wings. His ad hoc education wasn’t just theater and great writing. Surrounded by beautiful paintings and artifacts in historic family houses, whose owners cooked fabulous meals, McNally was in an alternative universe. 

Visual art became a lifelong interest, as did architecture and  fabulous meals. He also learned how finance worked in theater and real estate–alterations and building. McNally characterizies his younger self as an actor with some talent–including being in the right place at the right time.Though he didn’t pursue theater, he kept lifelong friendships with his mentors. In the 1960s he wanted to explore the world and survive. Typical of the time, he traveled with a backpack, little cash, and an address of a post office or personal contact. 

Some carried books in back pockets, often picked up along the way, in the search for meaning. They hitchhiked, took cheap flights, sometimes landed broke. McNally journeyed to Marrakech, Morocco, with a  stop in Amsterdam, where he picked up dishwashing work. An address for a possible  place to “crash,” became a casual romance. The ritual of “finding yourself” and staying alive was a test of adulthood, pre-internet and credit cards. When McNally returned to England, he got a job as a waiter, and later did the same in New York with a vague aspiration of someday having a restaurant.

Finding partners was in the back of his mind, when at One Fifth, he met his first wife. A hostess, she later became his partner. His self-apprenticeship meant learning elements of a well-run restaurant, what people wanted; essentials of food and mood for the right crowd. Location, style, and the all-important chef were keys to his restaurant concepts. With success backers lined-up to invest. McNally was an inspired entrepreneur, building restaurants, as though it was a form of conceptual art. 

He loved making money, while thrilling guests and creating jobs for enthusiastic staff. Brilliant chefs made food that was surprising, legendary, unexpected, or classics unlike others in his employ. Why would anyone regret such ambition and success? What could be wrong with a love of food, creative people and “scenes”?  McNally savored the life he enjoyed and the beauty of his work. All the time, he seemed aware his life was a kind of miracle, considering his upbringing and rudimental education. Then came his”wake-up” call, among the roughest, any human might endure. And the timing….

He had a fabulous new restaurant in mind, finally found a location and backers.  It’s very risky but why Not? He’s good at this! He was happy with his second wife and the unexpect arrival of two young children (in addition to his grown children with his first wife). Out of nowhere, McNally experienced excruciating pain, as fell victim to a paralyzing series of strokes. Unable to walk or talk, a prisoner of his own body, he became frightened–wondering how his life had come to this strange reckoning? 

I REGRET ALMOST EVERYTHING begins with the strokes, as he loses everything…Then moves forward to the boy he was, the man he became and the ever widening scope of his self-made world. In his long arduous process of regaining some functionality, McNally examines and begins to understand the personalcoste of his incessant ambition on himself and his families. Were the strokes “Nemisis,”some source of just retribution?  

A self-made man, a legend in our American dreamscape, he wonders who now can he be?  What is left for a person,  who practically willed his fate? This memoir, both ironic and honestly funny, carries a hint of  reconciliation with himself and life.  His struggle offers something larger than riches and fame–the enigma of happiness. 

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Graydon Carter’s memoir, WHEN THE GOING WAS GOOD:  An Editor’s Adventures during the Last Golden Age  of Magazines is celebrated as a paen to the “golden age” of magazines, yet this memoir is more personal than that. Like McNally (they are contemporaries and may know each other) he is also a self-invented man, but one who became more of what he seemed in the beginning. Talent, on target wit, a willingness to fail, if it meant learning something useful or just to see the result–seem essential to Carter. He started out in the Canada of the 50′s, when middle class schoolboys weren’t given pocket money, but were expected to earn it over school vacation– in mens’ jobs. 

When he became a line-man for electrical companies, he was an adolescent on a team of grown men doing a dangerous job. He climbed to the top of telephone poles, hammering metal “holds” for others who followed him. He suffered harrowing weather, ill fitting maloderos boots and gloves used by others. He ate bad food, when it was available, slept wherever possible–before the next day’s work. He earned enough to keep himself at the university. The job also prepared him for a world, where if he was at all fortunate he could do better. But in college, like high school, he likes to read but is abysmal at sciences, maths or homework. He got in somewhere, reads what he wanted and realized he might flunk out..But then he finds the literary magazine! Lots of poetry, sent from all over canada. He has to figure out what to publish, how to pay for it, who will work for free and where are the readers? He lunks out, but finds a girlfriend, pals and a vocation-something he’s good at. But soon he’s got no school, diploma or the magazine. He needed a job, but the best magazines were in New York City. How?

The beginning in this memoir is not his origin story but the memorable coup of his life as an editor at Vanity Fair, the release of the identity of  Deep Throat post Watergate. Carter’s ability to find and work with the right people at the right time, meant he had an unexpected connection to the major magazine coup of that era. But was his source correct? He was at an airport on the way back from his honeymoon,when he got the call from his deputy that the identity is finally confirmed. Vanity Fair had worked on this story for two years, had finally gone to the presses (knowing they might have been wrong). 95% was a gamble. A monthly magazine had ten days to two weeks between the time it left the printer and hit the newsstand. Carter was the editor.. 

Before he went to New York, he was a Canadian college drop-out with few skills, contacts or proper clothes.This young man wrote a prescription for his future happiness: 1)living in NYC, Greenwich Village, 3)Becoming the Editor of a big general interest magazine, 4)Being 1/2 of a wonderful life. 4)Having a large happy family and a dog. That he got this life was probably no fluke–How he got there is a tale with some fun Chapter titles–Candide in New York, “From Life to Glorious Days at Spy, the Great Billionaire Proprietor, A Charm Offensive and the Oscar Party, the Writers were the Franchise, Meltdowns and Veledictorians, the Golden Age Beings to Tarnish, The South of France and the Swing of the Bat. 

Living life on your own terms? Is it really a matter of being in the right place at the right time with the right skills?  Perhaps in Carter’s life, character really is destiny? He didn’t die as an adolescent line-man climbing poles, some did.. He skewered people like the Trumps in Spy Magazine (a kinder, gentler time?) Spy treated everyone as fodder for a laugh, it was outrageous enough to also make careers. Was Vanity Fair a fluke for a guy who wasn’t known as a celeb pleaser?  Yet he managed to please Newhouse?  Wasn’t Hollywood a stretch? But that’s another story in this wise and entertaining memoir by the current Editor of Airplane. That’s an on-line celeb magazine?  Maybe. I’m not in that neighborhood, but there’s some fun profiles…

S.W.

Source: https://notanotherbookreview.blogspot.com/2025/08/accidental-lives-on-purpose-i-regret.html