Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr., Editor. George Being George. Random House 432 pages. $30.00
Gustav mahler’s Fourth Symphony is considered his most accessible, so it is perhaps fitting that the late George Plimpton — writer, editor, journalist, inveterate shape-shifter but assuredly not a classically trained musician — would pick for his New York Philharmonic debut a performance of Mahler’s Fourth, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Plimpton was the percussionist that evening; he botched things, and badly. “Gustav Mahler’s Fourth Symphony has a section of bells at the front of it,” he would later recount, “and I misplayed them, made a terrible mistake and absolutely destroyed the symphony. Bernstein had a fit and fired me.” Plimpton got another chance, though, and at a subsequent Philharmonic performance, that of Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony, he struck the gong with such vigor and aplomb that Bernstein, it is said, actually laughed while conducting from the podium.
Plimpton was known for that sort of thing, for willingly getting himself into scrapes and uncannily getting himself out of them. It was so in his professional life as editor of the Paris Review, surely, but especially in his stints as a so-called participatory journalist: Among his exploits, he went three rounds in the ring with Archie Moore, the light-heavyweight champion of the world at the time; quarterbacked four plays for the Detroit Lions and, later, four plays for the Baltimore Colts; pitched to Willie Mays and Ernie Banks, raced cars at Saratoga, golfed with Arnold Palmer, even tried his hand as a trapeze artist — and emerged to write about all of it. (Of these exhibitions, many of them quite daring, Plimpton said manning the triangle for Bernstein “was the most frightening of all.”)
In his personal life, too, Plimpton was something of an escape artist. He was one of those incredibly public people, always surrounded, drawn to the limelight, who is able to be among the crowds but not of them. George Being George, a collection of recollections from, as says the subtitle, some 200 of his friends, relatives, lovers, acquaintances, rivals, and a few unappreciative observers, reveals more about Plimpton than could possibly be gathered simply by reading his writing or the news accounts of his rollicking parties, or even by attending them. A man for whom introspection was at the very least foreign and probably foul has managed, through this book, to have 200 others do all the introspecting for him.
First, the facts. Plimpton was born in 1927 in New York City to Francis T. Plimpton and the former Pauline Ames, both scions of heralded New England families. Francis was a founding partner of Debevoise & Plimpton, one of New York’s most prestigious law firms, and an ambassador to the United Nations, and his father was an author and founder of the Ginn publishing concern. Nothing to sniff at. And yet the Plimptons’ pedigree was simply not on level with the Ames’s. According to George’s sister, “Our mother may have looked down on Daddy a bit. It wasn’t his fault, of course, but Daddy wasn’t an Ames.”
Who was an Ames? There was Great-great-grandfather Benjamin F. Butler, governor of Massachusetts and candidate for President of the United States in 1884. He garnered the nickname “Beast” as governor general of New Orleans during the Civil War after ordering executed a man who stomped on the Union flag. And there was also Great-grandfather Adelbert Ames, who led the charge at Gettysburg and became governor of Mississippi and a U.S. senator. George Plimpton would often illustrate the Ames’s breeding by noting that when his mother attended meetings of the Mayflower Society — at which the names of Mayflower passengers are read aloud and a member stands when her ancestors are acknowledged — she would rise five or six times.
Plimpton attended St. Bernard’s and then Exeter, from which he was expelled several months before graduating, and then Harvard. His Harvard stint was interrupted by World War II, when Plimpton was lucky enough to be stationed on the Lido, in Venice. He was also lucky enough to arrive in Europe two weeks after the fighting was over. Back to Harvard and to Eliot House, a residence he shared at the time with the grandsons of James Joyce and Henri Matisse and with Prince Sadruddin (Sadri) Aga Khan, who would later become the first publisher of the Paris Review. Plimpton was at that time a stringer for the Boston Herald, editor of the Harvard Lampoon, and member-in-good-standing of the Porcelain club, Harvard’s most exclusive. He graduated (barely) and shipped off to King’s College, Cambridge. His roommate there, recalling whether he and George shared any classes, said, “The only sense in which we would have been in class together is attending the same lectures. I don’t recall if we did, mainly because George didn’t go to many.”
George Being George is packed with great stories, and here’s one of them, told by Plimpton’s Cambridge friend Milton Devane:
George and I were drinking other people’s sherry all over the college. We decided in the spring that we had to do something to pay back all of our debts, and George came up with the idea that we would introduce the English to the American martini. We did it in his quarters at King’s College. . . . George found the ice in the fish store, because that was the only place where you could get a block of it. We stuck it in the bathtub and proceeded to lose about half of it as we tried to get the fish smell out. We finally did. . . . After we said good night to our supervisor, Dadie [i.e., Dadie Rylands, the famous Shakespeare scholar], who had stopped by for a drink, we closed the door and then opened it up five minutes later to let somebody in. Our supervisor of studies lay there, passed out, in the rain. That’s the way we introduced the martini.
The penchant for hosting gin-soused partiers manifests itself early, it seems.
In 1952 plimpton left Cambridge and traveled to Paris to join Peter Matthiessen, his old friend from St. Bernard’s, and some others who were starting the literary magazine that would eventually be called the Paris Review. (Its name was decided only after extended debate, during which the options Baccarat and the Druids’ Home Companion were among several considered.) Plimpton was to be its editor. The Paris Review group — Plimpton, Matthiessen, Russ Hemenway, Billy Pene du Bois, John Train, William Styron, Harold “Doc” Humes, Terry Southern — was something of a reprisal of the Lost Generation writers who decades earlier had also made Paris and its cafés their home. Said Hemenway, “We felt just as important as Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway and all the expatriates did after World War One.” But unlike Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s crowd, the Sad Young Men, Plimpton’s gang glowed with Ivy-League burnish and was neither impoverished nor particularly angsty; they moved about Paris elegantly, with smiles on their faces. Gay Talese wrote about them in his celebrated Esquire article “Looking for Hemingway”:
They were the witty, irreverent sons of a conquering nation and, though they came mostly from wealthy parents and had been graduated from Harvard or Yale, they seemed endlessly delighted in posing as paupers and dodging the bill collectors, possibly because it seemed challenging and distinguished them from American tourists, whom they despised, and also because it was another way of having fun with the French who despised them.
The Paris Review office (unofficially, it was the Café Tournon) was a courtyard room at 8, Rue Garanciere, “furnished,” Talese wrote, “with a desk, four chairs, a bottle of brandy, and several long-legged Smith and Radcliffe girls who were anxious to get onto the masthead so that they might convince their parents back home of their innocence abroad.” At 6 p.m. each evening the courtyard was locked and any editors working late could go home only by dropping to the street from a second-story window. The magazine, its founders agreed, would not be hyper-literary, would not be a vehicle for criticism, would not be political; it would simply be a place for worthy, creative fiction. The first issue, dated Spring 1953, contained, among other selections, several unpublished poems by Pablo Neruda and an interview with E.M. Forster, who was a don at King’s College, Cambridge, and with whom Plimpton had had contact. “Everybody called him Morgan,” Plimpton said of Forster, “and I knew him as well as anybody.” The Forster piece put the new magazine on the map.
The author interviews became a staple of the Paris Review, and Plimpton had the pointed ability to land top-notch subjects for them, the list of which includes William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, Robert Frost, and T.S. Eliot. In the Spring 1958 issue was published an interview with Hemingway. How did it happen? Plimpton, as he told the story, had left an obnoxiously raucous party at the U.S. Embassy in Paris and wandered into the nearby Ritz Hotel. He walked to the bar at the rear of the building and found Hemingway there — reading an issue of the Paris Review! (It is a story, after all.) Plimpton later followed Hemingway around Spain, ostensibly interviewing him but in reality getting very little, because Hemingway disliked talking about writing and dispensed the merest tidbits only now and then. Upon returning from Spain, Plimpton aggregated and plumped his sporadic notes, composed the piece, sent it to Hemingway (who rewrote substantial portions of it), published it, and shortly after received a heated letter from his subject, who had for some reason grown sore about the final product. Hemingway later reconciled with Plimpton, though; their friendship was reaffirmed at the Colony restaurant with a good-natured knuckle-crushing handshake competition.
The Paris Review, for all the acclaim it garnered and despite its unexpected longevity (original plans were that it would publish for only several years; it of course continues to publish to this day) did not make Plimpton a household name. The magazine has never had more than a few thousand subscribers. Most readers actually became acquainted with Plimpton through his sports writing — his participatory journalism. After returning to New York in the 1950s, where he continued to edit the Review and briefly taught a class at Barnard College, Plimpton started to write idiosyncratic articles for Sports Illustrated: Basically, he would compete with professional athletes and then recount the experience. The pioneer of this approach was the writer Paul Gallico who had boxed and played tennis, golf, and football with professionals for his 1938 book Farewell to Sport. Plimpton expanded and personalized the genre, and he wrote several books in participatory-journalist style. His articles about pitching to a lineup of all-star hitters in Yankee stadium in 1959, for instance, became the basis for Out of My League. Years later, Plimpton described his experiences on the mound: Both Richie Ashburn and Willie Mays had popped-up, but then Ernie Banks came to the plate and tripled off the left-field wall. “I knew my control had disappeared. Then stepped up a man named Frank Thomas . . . . He took a look at this little curve ball I threw him and put it up in the triple tier, one of the longest home runs ever seen there. As a matter of fact, it was hit so far that my own reaction was that I had somehow helped to engineer this extraordinary feat; it was something that he and I had done together. That’s not the way the pitcher is supposed to feel.” Plimpton’s practice regimen for the major leagues was slightly unorthodox. Robert Silvers, cofounder of the New York Review of Books, remembers it in George Being George:
For Out of My League, the idea was that we’d prepare for this pitching ordeal by standing on either side of Seventy-second Street and throwing a baseball to each other. I’d leave the office at Harper’s in the afternoon and we would throw these balls across the street. It was the only way to do it. You couldn’t do it on the sidewalk without hitting pedestrians, but across the street was all right, as it dead-ended right there at 541 East Seventy-Second Street, overlooking the East River.
That address — 541 East 72nd Street — became a famous one, and not because of the two grown men pitching baseballs across traffic in front of it: 541 East 72nd Street was Plimpton’s home. When he returned to Manhattan from Paris in the late 1950s, the Paris Review found a New York City office on Columbus Circle (it kept its Paris space, too, until 1973) and Plimpton found for himself a rent-controlled, one-bedroom apartment at 541. In the 1970s, the building became a co-op, and Plimpton purchased and joined four apartments. One (the basement) was for the magazine. Former Paris Review editor Ben Ryder Howe recalls the rather unique setup:
The Review office was on the ground floor, with windows giving onto the tiny overlook of the river. There was an intercom to George’s office on the second floor, and underneath the intercom, if you looked, there was all this random scribbling on the wall, years and years of scribbling by generations of staffers doodling while they answered George’s buzz from above. . . . The building smelled old, and we had to leave when the oil truck came, you noticed the dead vermin and cockroach traps in the cellar beneath us. The managing editor was always bumping his or her chair up against an intern’s chair or two interns’ chairs. There might be six or seven staffers in that room, or there might just be you.
But long before the basement of 541 was jammed with interns, the first floor, with its pool table and club-green walls ornamented by hunting trophies, was jammed with revelers. Plimpton’s parties were legendary, and they spanned the decades, from the 1950s to 2003, when he passed away. (In fact, just before his death, Plimpton was planning another major fete: the Paris Review’s 50th-birthday party.) “In ’60, ’61, George was having parties just about every Friday night,” recounts the author Anne Roiphe. “There were other writers — [William] Styron, [Norman] Mailer, [Philip] Roth, Terry Southern, Doc Humes, etc. — and a few Wall Street and Society people. Were all these people brilliant? Probably not. My own feeling is that most of the time everybody was too drunk to be brilliant.” Sounds about right. Jonathan Dee, Plimpton’s assistant in the 1980s, told the New York Times about his boss’s party preparations, “He would always order 38 bottles of Scotch, one bottle of white wine, and a bottle of Dubonnet. And it was always a struggle to get him to order food.”
The gatherings quickly became well-known in literary circles, and attending a Plimpton party evolved into something of a right of passage for young, aspiring writers and editors who hoped to encounter there the bold-faced names whose work they had long read and admired. Oftentimes these parties, their antics and social miscues, were legendary. Once, in the early 1960s, Jacqueline Kennedy, who had been fast friends with Plimpton since their college days, and Norman Mailer were in attendance on the same evening. Mailer, it so happened, had recently produced for Esquire an article in which he offered several unflattering observations about the first lady. Unseemly or at least awkward confrontation was averted by Plimpton, the consummate host, who managed to steer Jackie Kennedy about the party, making the requisite introductions, while keeping one eye on Mailer and studiously avoiding his coordinates.
What fun. but George Being George does not omit stories about the less fun side of Plimpton’s life — usually such recollections have a thematic likeness, too: that of a man who in many ways hasn’t grown up and doesn’t really want to. His relationships with women are revelatory. Plimpton’s sex life (sadly, one would be hard-pressed to call it a love life) was casual; he flitted from girl to girl, and they, too, flitted to and away from him. But casual morphs to weird. Particularly odd is the story of Plimpton’s first engagement, to a woman named Bee Dabney, who ran off with another man she met at her engagement party. It’s a dreadful tale, but Plimpton, according to his friend John Heminway, loved to tell it: “To me that was quintessential George — he took such pleasure in telling a story about what great sadness he’d had.”
Odd in a similar, pathetic-seeming way is much about the relationship that Plimpton had with his first wife, Freddy. Here’s one example, as she recalls it:
No, it wasn’t only when he was traveling that we’d see other people. But what happened when he was around was really weird. I’d have dates. And most of these forays began at the apartment at 541, where, sometimes, he’d be. So this guy would come to pick me up, and while I was getting ready he’d wait in the living room, and then George would come out of his office and greet the fellow as only George could: “Oh, how do you do?” or, “Well, hello, John, would you like a drink?” And then he’d sit down and they’d start chatting each other up and having a good time.There’s something to be said for impeccable manners, for ensuring that no moment is unsettling and that a good time is enjoyed by all, but isn’t this taking things a bit too far? George Being George makes clear that Plimpton didn’t expect loyalty and commitment in romance from others, and he was taken aback and often made angry when others expected it from him. Marjorie Kalman, Plimpton’s longtime accountant, says, “I think George thought [about Freddy], ‘What do you want from me? You have a great life. You can do whatever you want.’” But of course the ability to do whatever one wants, whenever and wherever one wants to do it, is not generally considered the foremost component of a healthy bond.
Almost everyone who contributed his thoughts to George Being George talks about Plimpton as a man magnanimous and generous. Surely many examples bear out this description. But readers will also find Plimpton acting profoundly selfishly and hurtfully, especially when to act otherwise would mean doing something he doesn’t at all want to do — doesn’t at all feel like doing.
Take, for instance, his marriage to Freddy, which, according to more than one account, occurred only after Robert Kennedy implored Plimpton to go through with it. Freddy recalls that Plimpton didn’t speak to her for days after they had gotten their marriage licenses because he blamed her “for having put him through” it. Months later, Plimpton awoke and spontaneously decided, at 10 a.m., that he would have a wedding ceremony on that same day at four in the afternoon. He called a few friends (including Jackie Kennedy) and invited them to the event, which was to be held in a buddy’s apartment. Among those he neglected to call was his wife, who heard about the ceremony three hours before it commenced and who therefore wasn’t able to invite any of her friends or family to it. Oh well.
And then we read about the threesomes, the orgies, stuff that indicates that Plimpton and his circle really ranked self-satisfaction atop just about all else. According to friend Deborah Pease,
He did everything so easily, without friction. Something occurred to him to do, and if there was no obstacle he could see, not even a categorical one — like “This is my wife, this is my mistress” — then he would do it. There were no demarcations. That way, he would be able to be married and love his wife and see other people. But even saying that makes it seem like some sort of agenda or plan or arrangement, when there weren’t any. I think he just did as he pleased. Perhaps he was a little like Jack Kennedy in that way; he did what came naturally to him. If there were any hurt feelings incurred, it would not have been intended.The notion that not intending to hurt the feelings of others is akin to absolution for hurting others’ feelings is particularly infantile. The above words are not Plimpton’s description of himself but a friend’s description of him; nonetheless, their likeness recurs throughout George Being George in one formulation or another, from the mouth of one person or another. What’s telling is that the friends, relatives, lovers, etc. who transmit that meaning — namely, that Plimpton’s philosophy could often be reduced to “I do what I want, so sorry if you don’t like it” — usually present their depictions positively, as if Plimpton’s selfishness were an admirable form of independence. This says a lot about the circle Plimpton attracted.
Nevertheless, what an original he was. Few if any have been as eager and able to put themselves “out there,” so to speak, to offer themselves as the ordinary person entering the world of the extraordinary and accept whatever humiliation and punishment resulted. What was so often a major weakness, Plimpton’s inability to notice or observe boundaries, was perhaps his greatest strength: Why not play for the Celtics, tend goal for the Bruins, dance with the Queen of England, or act in Hollywood pictures?
And by almost all accounts, he was an honest person and capable of real generosity and magnanimity: After Freddy finally left him and ran off with another man, and after that other man abused her and left her abandoned with no money or home, Plimpton was there to support her. “I had hurt George badly,” she says. “Yet when I really needed help . . . and had nothing, nothing — George was the most reassuring, the most helpful, the most generous, the sweetest person. I realized how much he meant to me. What a true gentleman he was.”
Plimpton had his flaws, surely, but he is best remembered for his so-public demonstration of what it means to, as they say, suck the marrow out of life. What shines through the brightest in George Being George is that he awoke each day excited and eager to live it. And that is a wonderful, beautiful thing to do.
