After our interview, Graydon Carter emailed me. “Did I do okay yesterday? Too boring? Too indiscreet?”

This was something I had failed to notice about Carter during his plummy, powerful quarter-century astride a glittering Vanity Fair. This one-time social arbiter, who ran a wildly successful magazine in the peak era for glossies, has social anxiety.

How could the man who caused so much social anxiety, when he decided who was in and who was out for the most exclusive parties on the planet, including his white-hot Oscar parties, have social anxiety? “I’m not cool — I’m the squarest person you’ve ever met,” he says, unconvincingly.

We both started at Time magazine in the early ’80s. I knew Carter only slightly back then, but he sure looked confident and debonair to me. Unlike a lot of the men at Time, he wasn’t condescending to the few women writers there. My impression, when I met him, was of a Canadian who seemed to want to dress and talk like a Brit, with dandy aspirations and an upper-crust pronunciation of rather as rah-ther.

“It was a British suit,” he affirmed, laughing. “Well, you know, nobody’s going to buy a Canadian suit.”

As Walter Isaacson, the biographer and a former head of Time, recalled: “Graydon had both more style and more of a sense of adventure than any of us. I always envied the fact that he spent his time huddled with Kurt Andersen figuring out how to start Spy magazine when the rest of us were just typing away.”

Isaacson said Carter belongs to the pantheon of illustrious editors who followed in the footsteps of Clay Felker at New York and Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone — journalists loaded with flair who defined the golden age of magazines.

Carter’s new memoir, “When the Going Was Good,” recounts his odyssey from the Canadian provinces to New York’s Manhattan, where he started Spy with Andersen, edited The New York Observer and landed at Vanity Fair in 1992. For the next 25 years, the magazine was at the pinnacle of media, politics and celebrity, helping to shape the culture. It was the home to distinguished writers (Christopher Hitchens, Dominick Dunne, Michael Lewis) and photographers (Annie Leibovitz, Herb Ritts, Mario Testino).

Carter’s book — written with guidance from James Fox — goes into what it was like to be a celebrity editor when such creatures were more common. He tells a charming tale of how he navigated the Empyrean kingdom of Condé Nast while managing the egos of his beloved, neurotic stable of writers and palling around with and sometimes angering the media titans in his magazine’s orbit. He also describes his decades-long relationship with a certain real estate developer turned two-time president. And, yes, there are some juicy pages about his fellow celebrity editor, Anna Wintour.

These days, Carter, 75, works with Alessandra Stanley co-editing his online creation, Air Mail, which hits inboxes Saturday mornings.

Carter was not only a maestro of parties, the New Establishment list and the International Best Dressed List, but he was also an impeccable editor of the written word, right down to the captions, according to those who worked for him. Whether it was stationery, a menu, a place setting or the Zippo lighters that he used to give as party favors at his Oscar dinners, he likes to design things down to a granular level.

Carter has also produced several acclaimed documentaries about Robert Evans, 9/11, Elizabeth Holmes, Jerry Weintraub, Fran Lebowitz and Hunter S. Thompson. He has also popped up in cameos in movies and on television (“Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” “The Paper,” “Arbitrage” and “She’s Funny That Way”).

Carter’s book starts with an account of Vanity Fair’s scoop about the identity of Deep Throat, the anonymous source who helped The Washington Post crack Watergate. He goes on to detail the thrill of breaking the internet with the first cover story on Caitlyn Jenner, who appeared wearing a satin corset from Trashy Lingerie in a portrait by Leibovitz. He also takes readers through the two-year libel case brought by Mohamed Al Fayed in response to an expose by Maureen Orth.

Carter always liked assigning stories on great feuds, and he had a few choice ones himself. But, he decided against score- settling in this book.

He had a good relationship with Wintour before he arrived at Condé Nast. He found her “enticing,” and he wrote for Vogue now and then. But after she was promoted to Condé Nast artistic director in 2013, he saw the “Nuclear Wintour” side when she called to tell him the company had decided to move almost half the Vanity Fair staff to a central unit that would report to her.

He could see that the internet was brutalizing the magazine business and the golden age was coming to an end. He left at the end of 2017. “I have great affection for Anna, but she took to power rather than being the cozy, conspiratorial friend she used to be,” he told me.

Carter talked about the rough transition from Spy, which maliciously mocked the rich and famous, to Vanity Fair, which more genteelly chronicled the rich and famous. The people targeted by Spy, he said, were mostly “at the top of the game, and we figured they could take it. We picked on overdogs rather than underdogs.”

Carter said he finds much of modern journalism “very hair shirt.”

“People with earphones, computers with partitions, no longer freewheeling,” he said. “Editors became clerks rather than editors, just at their computer terminals all day long. In the past, it was about moving around and talking to people.

“The magazine business was killed by the internet and the recession and the absence of newsstands.”

As we said farewell, Carter insisted once more that, all evidence to the contrary, his life is square, not spectacular.

“We watch ‘Frasier’ before we go to bed every night,” he said.