George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  OAKES PLIMPTON George didn’t talk as much about the Plimptons. By an amazing coincidence, they came from a village in Walpole, just a few miles from the Ameses in North Easton. But our Plimpton grandfather, George Arthur Plimpton, decided he could do better in New York City. And he did, which is how come our father came to be born there—his mother died giving birth to him—and eventually settled there with Mother. Grandfather Plimpton was president of Ginn and Company, the textbook publishers, and a trustee of everything from the New York Philharmonic to Barnard and Exeter and Amherst. Amherst and Exeter, in fact, were sort of Plimpton family schools. Smith, too: Mother went there, and so did Sarah. Our grandfather and father and uncle [Calvin Plimpton, Francis’s much younger half-brother, a doctor and college president] and my brother T.P. went to both of them. I went to Am herst, but Milton before that. George went to Exeter but then to Harvard. Daddy went to Harvard, too, to the law school. So did I, actually. Anyway, our father wasn’t as “family proud” as our mother was, but Grandfather Plimpton was a good man. He collected stuff, old books and portraits of great writers, and cigar store Indians, and he gave Exeter some playing fields and Barnard a dormitory and God knows what else to other institutions.

  SARAH GAY PLIMPTON Mother kept scrapbooks of all our doings, everything that got into print, from school yearbooks to the newspapers. Actually, I started it. When I was young and worshipful, I started a scrapbook with George’s writings and achievements in it, but then Mother took it over. Naturally, George’s scrapbooks grew hugely fatter than ours. I think the scrapbooks were an extension of her family pride. She also wrote books about, or compiled speeches and articles by, Benjamin Butler, her father-in-law, and our father. George wrote introductions for all of them, of course. And she wasn’t shy about getting friends and strangers to buy them. George was like her in promoting The Paris Review.

  OTHER GIVENS IN FAMILIES LIKE HIS

  OAKES PLIMPTON George always used to say that there were two halves to the Plimpton family in our generation, the lower half and the upper half. George and our brother T.P. were “Irish twins,” less than a year apart, and they’re five and six years older than me. That’s quite a gap. Sarah is almost four years younger than me, but we sort of formed a pair. George was born in 1927, a jazz baby, in New York; I was born in 1933, a Depression baby, in Washington, D.C., where my father had gone to work for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Before Washington, they’d been living in France, where he worked for some law firm, so George and T.P. grew up speaking French. From Washington they went back to New York, where Daddy joined the firm that eventually became Debevoise Plimpton.

  Francis T. P. Plimpton and Pauline Ames Plimpton.

  From the collection of George Plimpton.

  MEREDITH BROWN By middle-class standards, Francis and Pauline Plimpton were very well-off indeed. A profile in The New Yorker about George’s father, when Kennedy appointed him deputy ambassador to the UN, totted up the various clubs he belonged to and concluded that most people in the United States didn’t make as much money as the combined annual dues that Francis was paying for his club memberships. Francis was not a Sam Walton rich person, but his running rate had to be pretty substantial, just to keep him in clubs and clothes and travel, his children educated, his houses kept up. On the other hand, lawyers in his day didn’t make anywhere near as much money as they do today. Bear in mind, also, that Whitney Debevoise, the founding partner of Debevoise Plimpton, was getting twice what Francis was getting, I’m told. In the Plimpton household, my guess is that it was mostly her money.

  SUSAN MORGAN I remember going to little musicales at George’s mother’s, and the maid would serve these dusty Pepperidge Farm Goldfish that they poured back into the bag. Six months later, you could swear it was the same Goldfish.

  SARAH GAY PLIMPTON We spent our childhood at 1165 Fifth Avenue, a duplex apartment. The bedrooms were on the second floor, and mine looked out over St. Bernard’s School, where my brothers all went, and over to the East River and the Triborough Bridge. From a side window, I could see the Central Park reservoir. On the first floor there was a library, a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen. Lots of windows, lots of light everywhere. Mother had a series of devoted Irish maids, including the one who took care of her for her last few months. We always had Sunday lunch after church, St. John’s Episcopal Church in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island in the summer, the Presbyterian (the Brick) Church on Park Avenue in the winter. I’m not so sure they were believers. Daddy thought it was a good thing to do. There was always the social aspect to it.

  OAKES PLIMPTON In the summers, we lived out in Long Island, in a place called West Hills, near Cold Spring Harbor, which is not far from where Walt Whitman was born. At that time it was country, there was no one around at all. It was a shingle house with a peaked roof and a lot of windows. Our parents entertained there a lot. George came by his social appetites honestly—our parents were very social people—but I guess he outdid them and then some. Duke Sedgwick, Edie’s father, was one of the people who used to come all the time. And when my father became deputy ambassador to the United Nations in 1961, all of a sudden there were all these parties out there entertaining the second tier of United Nations groups. He had everybody playing tennis, going swimming, but also Ping-Pong and touch football. One famous time, some ambassador from Africa got a football in his face, and nobody would own up as to who threw it. Next door there was a high hill, all natural, the highest hill in Long Island. Our neighbors could see Connecticut. We could see the Great South Bay twenty miles away. During the war, we used to bicycle to the Beach Club in Cold Spring Harbor, which was six miles away, all downhill.

  JOAN AMES My parents [Amyas and Evelyn Ames, Pauline’s brother and sister-in-law] lived in the same small tribal community as the Plimptons. I remember this little telephone table in my parents’ bedroom that held the Social Register; it was the only phone book we ever used. It was a time when you grew up in a circle of people who were very similar to you, a tribe of WASPs who were lawyers and bankers and brokers and architects. In the summer—in the winter, too, some of them—they all rode in the club car together to and from the city. Wherever you lived, up and down the north shore of Long Island, there were all these people you just knew or were related to. We often had Sunday dinner at the Plimptons’ place in West Hills. For me it was heavenly, because they had their own tennis court and swimming pool and a beautiful meadow that swept down from the house. Oakes and George would just be killing each other on the tennis court, along with my brothers, Oakes and Ned, or other visitors and friends. Sarah, George’s sister, was the youngest in the family, and she was always very sweet to me. After tennis, we’d go up the long path to the house and have roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and all the fixings, with a maid and a cook in the kitchen. And my uncle Francis would pontificate. I can remember my parents sometimes rolling their eyes about lawyers: Lawyers were just definitely a lower breed.

  SARAH GAY PLIMPTON During spring vacations, we loved visiting our Ames grandparents at Ormond Beach, in Florida, which had a wonderful natural world, and at North Easton, which was also a wonderful nature preserve: a thousand acres of ponds, grasslands, and forests, which were full of interesting birds and animals and fish. Ormond Beach was the family compound where our grandmother Ames and her sisters had houses. It was on the inland waterway of the Halifax River, near Daytona Beach. Everyone fished there, especially George, who became something of a young naturalist at that point. There was a wooden trestle bridge from Ormond to Ormond Beach, and George told stories about going out there and fishing with all these black people who were also fishing off the bridge and also telling stories. He was introduced to bird-watching, too, by our cousin Jack Stevens, whose favorite swear word was “Oh, fish hawks!” When Stevens pointed out an osprey to him, a kind of fish hawk, George became so entranced by the big bird, with its slightly naughty association, that he determined to become a bird-watcher. He was never as fanatic as Oakes and I, b
ut he was a good one; we used to give each other bird presents at Christmas. George started out as a naturalist, though, and one summer when he was fourteen he went out to California to collect animals for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. He had these skins and skulls and so forth in the West Hills house, in a glass case.

  GENE SCOTT One of the nice things about having a good upbringing is having enough resources to have tennis lessons. By the time you’re sixteen, seventeen years old, if you’re playing against someone who didn’t have lessons, you’re going to beat them, no matter how gifted your opponent is. And it stays with you, too; you’re not going to lose it. George was competitive; he had some grit. And he was cagey. Many people have no idea that some points are worth more than others. They may be very smart off the tennis court, but they are boobs on the court. George wasn’t one of them.

  ELISSA SCHAPPELL George was such a competitor, but also a gentleman. In tennis he took his game up just a notch higher than the person he was playing with. He wouldn’t cream you in tennis; he’d just play slightly better than you. He always won, but he would never humiliate you, because he had this sense that that’s not what one does.

  Advantage, George.

  From the collection of George Plimpton.

  MARY LEE SETTLE His manners were almost southern. In Paris one time, we went somewhere in this tiny Citroën. George was driving along when a car cut in front of him, and he cried, “Espèce de con!” and then turned to me, and said, “Oh, I’m very sorry. I shouldn’t speak that way in front of you.”

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON I was always amazed at his lack of vanity. Part of it was that WASP background, but George carried it to extremes. One did nothing ostentatiously, so it was very, very hard to get George to buy a car that actually worked, or a new jacket, or to replace his torn and stained pants. It was even very hard to get George to look in a mirror when he was getting dressed. To him, it was vanity to have to watch himself put on a necktie or shave, so he was sort of hmm, hmm-hmm-hmm—looking around, looking away.

  George in the Sierra Nevada.

  From the collection of George Plimpton.

  P. J. O’ROURKE Ideologically, George was of a piece with a certain segment of his class—a patrician liberal, a kind long gone. He wasn’t terribly political, but he believed that people needed help and that the government should provide it when they needed it. I believed that people should be left alone; and that was the core of our argument. He would say, “Well, you just can’t leave people alone, they need help.” And I would say, “George, when we set about to help them, it’s almost always disastrous.” But George’s was a munificent and beneficent and decent kind of liberalism. Part of that was the age difference between us. He had at least some sort of childish memory of the Depression. He had an adult memory of the war. He of course had a more mature memory of the civil rights struggle, which I have a child’s or adolescent’s memory of. And then my leftist passions, when I had them, all had to do with the Vietnam War, with always the subtext of saving one’s own butt.

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON He would have hated my saying this, but George had a deep sense of noblesse oblige. It knew no bounds. He loved swooping down and rescuing people. His compassion and loyalty were almost pathological, which got him in a lot of hot water from time to time.

  WANDA URBANSKA He had, so to speak, trace assumptions of the old ruling class. I came to work at the Review just when President Carter botched his Iran hostage rescue attempt. We were in the Review office, below the apartment, and George came down in his pajamas, I think, or maybe his boxers (it was often one or the other), and he was just in a rage. He said that he had fired off a telegram, or maybe he had called the White House, and he quoted himself as saying, “What on earth are you boys doing down there?”

  NORMAN MAILER He had a gift of a sort I never had: He never felt unimportant in the scheme of things. That was something to get worked up about. You know, where does this guy get that absolutely extraordinary, unique sense of cool? That’s why blacks loved him.

  BASIC EXPECTATIONS

  JAMES GOODALE George’s father’s primary motivating desire in life, I would say, was to be respected by the then governing class of his country, and he was. For lawyers in that class, what Francis did was an extraordinary achievement. Debevoise Plimpton isn’t just any old firm; it is still consistently thought to be the top ten, top seven, firm in New York. In fact, it was recently voted the number one firm in the United States by American Lawyer. He wanted to be respected for the quality of the firm’s product. It was as important to Francis to have something perfectly performed as it was to make a lot of money, and the high standards he had with respect to drafting and writing carried Debevoise for twenty or thirty years. That sort of perfection is no longer relevant in this age, but in his age it was, to a great degree, what made Debevoise a giant. I also think that he wanted to be respected for having a firm that had a sense of public purpose. Personally, too, he wanted to be respected for the fact that he did things other than draft documents, such as lead the march against the Vietnam War on behalf of the city bar association and being deputy ambassador to the UN.

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON George told me that his father’s favorite lecture at family dinners was the beauty of the mortgage indenture: “Accuracy is everything! One comma in the wrong place could cost millions!”

  MEREDITH BROWN Debevoise Plimpton was a “white shoe” firm, which I think referred to the people who wore white buckskin shoes in the summer, which meant that they probably weren’t scuffing their shoes too much in the dirt. But even when I joined, in 1966, I would say that Debevoise Plimpton was moving towards being a much more diverse place. One of our main partners was Jewish, which was a big deal in those days. It used to be that there were firms that were almost entirely Jewish and almost entirely not Jewish. Debevoise was a little ahead of the curve, similarly with women and African American partners. Only a few firms were more diverse. I don’t think Francis was a snob in that sense at all.

  SARAH GAY PLIMPTON Father cared about where someone went to college. That was more important for him than who the person actually was. If you went to Harvard, Amherst, Yale, you were obviously good. If you went to some college he didn’t know about, it was already a strike against you. I think, later in life, he loosened up; but I remember bringing home a boyfriend who had gone to Union College, and this just wasn’t possible. Part of it was snobbery—Union wasn’t the “right” sort of college—but for him I think the college you went to was an index of how smart you were or how hard you were prepared to work, especially the latter.

  MEREDITH BROWN As a distinguished graduate of Amherst, Francis was a longtime trustee of that institution—as indeed he was of Exeter, the Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Museum, though these I think he sort of inherited from his father. At Debevoise Plimpton, there was the story about when Francis was head of the search committee at Amherst, looking for a new president. He looked and looked and looked and after an exhaustive search came up with a recommendation that his brother Calvin be the president.

  OSBORN ELLIOTT Francis and I were at a Harvard Board of Overseers meeting that advised the president on suitable recipients of honorary degrees. When Robert Lowell’s name was put forward, Francis pulled a sheet of paper out of his briefcase and, with a great flourish, read a few lines from the famous poem—I forget the title—that Lowell set in Nantucket. “Those lines were cribbed from Thoreau,” said Francis, very severely. “We can’t give a degree to a plagiarist.” When it was explained to the distinguished lawyer that Lowell was deliberately reflecting Thoreau’s work, I remember Francis seeming more offended, perhaps, than embarrassed.

  OAKES PLIMPTON My father had a prejudice against stockbrokers and other people who just made money. I think the real question was whether someone had a true profession, whether they’d acquired a whole bunch of learning. He was a Puritan in that respect. For example, he belonged to an awful lot of clubs, but he looked down upon the Piping Rock Club to a degr
ee, because it was filled with these stockbrokers and people who displayed their riches. He felt that they didn’t deserve the money they got, and he made it obvious. He preferred the Beach Club in Cold Spring Harbor, which had clay courts, not grass, and you couldn’t eat lunch there; no drinks, either. The beach was of rock, so you had to swim from the docks, essentially, and the clubhouse was nothing special.

  TONI GOODALE Pauline had a gang of women, about eight of them, and they ruled New York. They knew they did and they liked it, and they were very intimidating. When Jim went to Debevoise Plimpton from The New York Times, I was told that I had to join the Cosmopolitan Club; they shepherded me in there, then watched me while I went through the tea ritual. There was no questioning it. I would never say, “Well, gee, that’s not really where I want to spend my time.”

  George with his mother, Pauline. From the collection of George Plimpton.

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON I liked his mother. My first real encounter with her was the summer before George and I got married. I was living in a tiny penthouse on Sixty-ninth Street, and one hot August afternoon she invited herself to tea. She wore a linen dress with stockings and heels, and her hair had a fresh blue rinse. I, on the other hand, was sweaty and dirty from digging in my tiny garden. She was very direct: “Sarah, I just want to know one thing—what are your intentions with my son?” Most people would have been appalled by her bluntness, but I found it refreshing and blurted out something like “Well, Mrs. Plimpton, I am deeply in love with your son and I want to marry him.” From that moment we got along wonderfully. I remember she used to exhort me, “Sarah, take control of that household!”