The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  For George, the Paris Review became a spiritual hideout for fifty years. He admired writers and creativity even more than he admired athletes and beautiful women, and he could exercise that admiration through the Review. It paid nothing, of course, so George had decided to make his way as a journalist until he settled on what his more serious work might be. In the meantime he would write about sports, and have some fun at the same time.

  In the fall of ’58 George visited SI’s first managing editor, Sidney James, with an idea he was uncertain of himself. A group of major league baseball players were staging an unofficial postseason all-star game at Yankee Stadium, and George thought he could write an interesting article on what it was like to participate—pitching, say, to Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. The only problem would be arranging it.

  In those days, the most influential man in sports was Toots Shor, whose boozy, eponymous restaurant was a couple blocks from the SI offices. James led an expedition of editors there and bought drinks as he and George explained the idea to Toots, who said the solution was simple: offer $1,000 to the winning team. By evening, word came back to the bar that George’s pitching exhibition was on, whereupon Toots pulled him aside for a question: “You gonna box, too?”

  George was flattered. The saloonkeeper understood that George was building on the work of their shared sportswriting hero Paul Gallico, who had spent a round in the ring with heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey back in 1923. But what George had in mind was more complicated than just looking for “the feel,” as Gallico had put it. George wanted to unlock the secrets kept on the highest level of the games—the ones he believed you could share only in an NFL huddle or a conference on the mound.

  On game day at Yankee Stadium, the public-address announcer bungled George’s name, calling him George Prufrock, an irony not lost on George, a T. S. Eliot aficionado of sorts who had lived for a time in the same room used by the poet when he had attended Harvard. George did not write about this, but he used it in his storytelling with a reference to a famous line from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “Well, my arm was rather like a ‘ragged claw.’ ”

  The setup at Yankee Stadium was for George to be a facsimile batting-practice pitcher, with the hitters allowed to wait for their perfect pitch. George got Mays to pop up, but many of the hitters made him throw a dozen or so pitches—Ernie Banks let twenty-two go by—and after nine National Leaguers had batted, George called for a time-out. He could no longer lift his arm. I have a photograph of George taken in the dugout after he came off the mound. He looks shell-shocked, his eyes blank and faraway.

  —

  THE EXPANDED SI STORY would become George’s first best seller, Out of My League. Ernest Hemingway wired George from the Mayo Clinic, where he was being treated for depression, that it was “beautifully observed and incredibly conceived [with] the chilling quality of a true nightmare…the dark side of the moon of Walter Mitty.” It was a gift from Hemingway intended as a marketing blurb but, intentionally or not, it spoke to a truth beyond that cliché about the moon.

  Hemingway was George’s greatest hero, and George knew him well enough to call him “Papa” without affectation. They had been together in Spain and Cuba and New York and, of course, Paris, where George first saw Hemingway in the Ritz Hotel, buying a copy of the Paris Review.

  “It was the only time I have ever seen anyone actually purchase a copy of the paper,” George would say. He always called it the paper, as if to deflate any pretension, but he had great ambition for it, especially when it came to the Review’s interviews with writers, the “Art of Fiction” series, which George refined by pushing his subjects for clarity with back-and-forth editing, often for months after the interview.

  His interview with Hemingway began in a Madrid café with Hemingway asking George, “You go to the races?”

  “Yes, occasionally.”

  “Then you read the Racing Form,” Hemingway said. “There you have the true art of fiction.”

  The interview was brilliant, deconstructing as it did every detail of how Hemingway worked and how he thought about the work of writing. At the end George coaxed out a quintessential Hemingway sentence. You can see both of their minds working in the interchange.

  PLIMPTON

  Finally, a fundamental question: as a creative writer, what do you think is the function of your art? Why a representation of fact, rather than fact itself?

  HEMINGWAY

  Why be puzzled by that? From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

  —

  GEORGE HAD MANY HEMINGWAY STORIES. One he told often was set up with George’s puzzlement by the white bird that flies out of the gondola in the love scene between the young countess and Colonel Cantwell in Across the River and into the Trees.

  “Papa,” George asked after a day of fishing, when he was carrying a picnic hamper on Hemingway’s dock in Cuba. “What is the significance of those white birds that sometimes turn up in your, um…sex scenes? I’ve always—”

  George said that Hemingway stopped and whipped around toward him, and he could see that he had made a mistake.

  “I suppose you think you can do better,” Hemingway shouted at George.

  “No, no, Papa,” George said. “Certainly not.”

  George would say that Hemingway’s eyes had become small and “his whiskers seemed to bristle like an alarmed cat’s.”

  A story I heard only once from George was about being fitted for a safari jacket at Hemingway’s Finca Vigía on another visit. The jacket was made of antelope skin and Hemingway already had one like it. George had his new jacket on and the tailor was adjusting the sleeves when Hemingway said the fit was wrong and began smoothing it on George’s shoulders and back.

  “It went on too long and made me uncomfortable,” George said. “But it was the only time that happened.”

  It was one of the stories he would never include in that annoying memoir, if he ever wrote it. I was not surprised, and it was no big deal anyway. One way or another, everyone fell in love with George.

  —

  THE BIG QUESTION ABOUT GEORGE among his friends was why he spent so much time on the Paris Review instead of on his own writing. Some of his oldest friends from the Review—especially Matthiessen, Styron and Terry Southern, great writers all—were even a little arrogant about it. Why wasn’t George tormenting himself with the ambition to write important books like they were? Whenever this came up, George would get mad. If it went deeper, to the enigma of why he was writing so much about sports, George would turn silent.

  The Review was where he felt most comfortable, but in sports George could test himself in ways so personal he seldom spoke of them; courage was a word he never used, although that’s what you were reading about in those pieces. Plus, Sports Illustrated paid the bills for the Paris Review even as he was redefining sportswriting as a participatory journalist—a label he characterized as “that ugly descriptive.”

  I had read George’s SI pieces long before I met him, and when I first got a job in New York, I asked people about him—and the Paris Review. “Good parties” was often the answer. When I met him myself and told him I liked the Review, he asked me if I wanted to “help out.” As an editor, I was flattered until I figured out that George asked many people that same question and that it was his feeble attempt at fund-raising—which embarrassed him. But that never seemed to show, because he looked so good. When people described George, they inevitably used the words “tall” and “handsome.” I sensed nerve behind his looks, and his audacity echoed for me in his reputation. Hemingway’s Walter Mitty analogy had a surface truth but overlooke
d the obvious difference that in Mitty’s daydreams he always succeeded, while in George’s real-life adventures he always failed. This truth—that his work had more to do with Everyman than Mitty—was always obscured by George’s careful, self-deprecating prose, which made him so easy and hilarious to read. Plus, Walter Mitty was a wimp. Not George.

  Far from being unsuited for sports, George was a graceful athlete. Otherwise he would never have succeeded in his failures. He had to be good enough to compete or his attempts would have been silly or sad. His tennis was strong enough for him to play with Pancho Gonzalez; he swam credibly against Olympian Don Schollander; and he could perfectly throw any ball he’d ever picked up. “It was the first instrument of superiority I found myself owning,” he told me about his pitching, which surprised me because it seemed so far out of character, a brag, almost.

  We were talking about his most notorious piece, the April 1, 1985, hoax “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch,” which he had concocted with SI’s managing editor at the time, Mark Mulvoy, the two of them pushing the fool-around quotient in the traditional writer-editor compact to a new level. The key to the story was Sidd’s arm—an instrument of superiority.

  The piece broke the news that a young Buddhist pitcher with a 168-mile-an-hour fastball was under wraps at the Mets training camp, and the club went along, helping SI stage bogus photos. Everyone fell for the preposterous Finch, who could throw a strawberry through a locomotive, made credible by the magazine and George’s stature as a sportswriter. When he called me at Newsweek with a heads-up that he had something “quite surprising” coming in that week’s SI, I said I would get a reporter right on it.

  “No,” he said. “You should take a close look at the top of it yourself.”

  The subhead of the article ran: “He’s a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd’s deciding about yoga—and his future in baseball.” The first letters of those words spell out “Happy April Fools’ Day—ah [a] fib.”

  When the prank was exposed, bumper stickers appeared proclaiming SIDD FINCH LIVES, and George got endless questions about Sidd’s progress in the world.

  “How’s Sidd doing?” someone would ask, often as a way to approach George at a party.

  “I do have a phone number for him, but when I call no answer,” George would say. “But then just the other day it was busy…”

  The Curious Case of Sidd Finch was published two years later. Of his thirty-six books, it was George’s only novel.

  —

  ABOVE HIS DESK in his apartment on Seventy-second Street, George had a photograph of Hemingway walking a country road in Ketchum in winter, kicking a can high in the air just days before he killed himself in 1961. In my office I had a photo of George wrestling the gun from Sirhan Sirhan’s hand moments after he shot George’s friend Bobby Kennedy in Los Angeles in 1968.

  I was in George’s office often, although he was never once in mine. Not at Rolling Stone, Esquire, Sports Illustrated or anywhere else. This had nothing to do with the arrogance of never going to another man’s office. George was just too busy. Counter to his reputation for never missing a party, George guarded his calendar and spent most days when he wasn’t traveling at his desk under that picture of Hemingway, where he wrote, and where he edited the Paris Review. He was hard about it, like he was about a lot of things—his writing, of course, and also the work of editors who edited him.

  George could be irascible as both a writer and an editor, a tough edit on either side of the desk. As an editor he was unbending, but he also liked to warn fellow writers of the “tin-eared butchery” they might suffer at the hands of magazine editors other than himself. Even the best editors could be problematic. He said he was never happier than when he was on assignment for Sports Illustrated, except that he had been terrified of the magazine’s second managing editor André Laguerre, whom he nicknamed “Heavy Water,” as in what it took to make atom bombs.

  Being spooked by Laguerre was part of SI’s informal initiation and George sailed on to the masthead as a “special contributor,” which made an indignity he suffered there years later under the Mulvoy regime all the more harsh and baffling. None of his deep history with SI or his co-conspirator relationship with managing editor Mulvoy mattered when it came to the butchery done to his story on President George H. W. Bush in 1988.

  The piece had started as an assignment to play horseshoes with the president-elect but wound up edited into a survey of the Bush family as athletes. Zzzzzz. Worse, according to George, clichés were salted into it and he saw none of the changes until he opened the magazine. George first told me about this when we were working on a piece for Smart about what it was like to mouth-catch a grape dropped from the top of Trump Tower. Something about the seriousness we were applying to something so silly made George even madder about the Bush piece and his betrayal by SI.

  But then, like everything with George, the disastrous story had a coda, perhaps apocryphal but unchallenged. George was invited to pitch horseshoes again with Bush, this time at Camp David, and after the horseshoes there was a game of tennis with the president, which was interrupted by the ringing of the ominous red phone. The president’s face darkened as he crossed the court but brightened after he picked up the receiver.

  “It’s for you,” the president said, holding the phone out to George.

  Whenever George told this story to writers and they asked him, as they inevitably did, who was calling, he would lean close and whisper, “Mulvoy, wanting another piece.”

  George never wrote another story for SI, although after I was hired there, he would praise it as a writer’s magazine that, when finely tuned by a good editor, “could soar like a great tabernacle choir or a troop of chacma baboons in full-throated roar.” He would then add, “You should do more of that.”

  —

  WHEN SI NAMED LANCE ARMSTRONG its 2002 Sportsman of the Year, George came with me to the ceremony at a silly midtown nightclub with a sixteen-foot-tall Buddha and pools of carp. He remembered Sportsman ceremonies in tuxedos. Lance had been my choice as editor. My job now was to make the case for him exemplifying the ideals of sportsmanship in winning his fourth straight Tour de France, then present him with the trophy—a ceramic replica of an ancient Greek amphora. Retrospective ironies aside, it was funny enough at the time to be passing a fake Greek artifact to a cyclist under the eyes of a giant fake Buddha, but I was nervous.

  “I wish you could do this,” I said to George as we watched the room fill with a couple hundred people, who would be standing around drinking while I made my remarks.

  “It’s good to be nervous,” George said. “Edward R. Murrow called it ‘the sweat of perfection.’ ”

  I got through the presentation and Armstrong said he was honored and together we called Robin Williams to the stage. They were close then, and called each other “dawg.”

  “Dawg?” George greeted me, when I joined him just offstage to listen to Williams’s seemingly effortless monologue—using the amphora and the Buddha as running gags. Afterward we congratulated both of the dawgs, and both told George they had always wanted to meet him.

  Later that night, George told me that sprezzatura was an important component of humor. Had I not read that in the Paris Review? It had all been explained in any number of issues, sprezzatura being a certain nonchalance that made whatever one said appear to be effortless, natural, without any thought about it. That dawg Robin definitely had sprezzatura, but George was talking about himself.

  There were many levels to George’s humor and he layered them for his own amusement. Those roaring baboons, for example, would have been far less amusing without the specific identification as “chacma” and the context supplied by the tabernacle choir. The craft of it amused him, especially late in his career, when he was trapped in his own celebrity and people simply assumed he would be amusing. It’s a cliché he would have hated, but my theory is that George was always amusing because he was a
lways amused.

  He didn’t tell jokes, he told stories. And like his questions, his stories had a trampoline effect, bouncing you to the next story—with George making fun of himself. He loved parody, self-parody most of all, even enthusiastically appearing as a deranged version of himself in an episode of The Simpsons. He had already been the punch line in a New Yorker cartoon: a patient on an operating table opens his eyes and confronts his surgeon with “Wait a minute! How do I know you’re not George Plimpton?”

  When George was the host of Mouseterpiece Theater, a parody of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre, presenting cartoons instead of classic drama, he wrote and gave commentary, as well as background information before and after each cartoon. The shows had themes, like Goofy’s character arc as Everyman, and asked challenging questions: “Is Donald Duck really a strident existentialist and a hero?” It ran late in the evening on the Disney Channel and was especially popular among baby-boom stoners. President George H. W. Bush was also said to enjoy the show.

  —

  WHEN HE WAS SEVENTY-FIVE, George was finally elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the highest formal recognition of artistic merit in the country. George’s literary friends were almost all members, as were many of the writers he had discovered and edited, but there had been resistance within the academy over the years to tapping George. The novelist and creative-writing teacher Edmund White said George was “sort of an ‘after-dinner speaker,’ not a major American writer.” George was stung by that.

  When the day finally came, it was a long, hot afternoon at the academy grounds in upper Manhattan. George was crisp in his blue-and-white seersucker suit, but he looked tired. I kept thinking about something he had said in When We Were Kings, the film about the Ali-Foreman fight in Kinshasa.