George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  BLAIR FULLER I thought of George as someone witty and interesting. I was of a more serious mind than George seemed to be. He was actually a very serious fellow, a stringer for the Boston Herald, I believe, and extremely well read, and so on. But my ambition was to be printed in the Harvard Advocate, and here was George, clowning around at the Harvard Lampoon stunts and looking giddy in costume. I thought it was rather undignified and embarrassing. It surprised me that he would do it. I have to admit that George seemed to me not quite bright in those days. George did not talk about books. He never said, “I’ve been reading Turgenev,” or something. A lot of the people I knew did say things like that. But George was bright, of course, and whatever he did, he made it his kind of thing.

  CHRIS CERF The Lampoon inspired George. The Common Book is a great example. That’s a Lampoon tradition, and The Paris Review just took it over lock, stock, and barrel. Everybody wrote in the book. If I had to tell you that so-and-so was going to drop off an ad this afternoon, it would be in the Common Book, but so would some silly idea I had for something I wanted to write, or something clever and nasty that I wanted to say about somebody. There were lots of running jokes, often about Elmer Green. Elmer was the Lampoon janitor. He was an incredible ham. He appeared in just about every issue of the magazine, and they always photographed him—often in costume—for every Lampoon parody. He was remarkably good-natured about having to clean up the mess the students would leave for him after their weekly dinners (someone would invariably write “I KWIT. ELMER” in the Common Book on such occasions). Some of the “Poonies” would torment him in other ways, too—I remember John Berendt rolling logs down the metal staircase to the basement apartment where Elmer lived in semisqualor year after year. But Elmer never complained.

  With Farwell Smith outside the Lampoon building,

  costumed for a prank. Courtesy of Farwell Smith.

  FARWELL SMITH To get on the masthead at the Lampoon you had to pull some sort of prank, so I entered the Boston Marathon about four hundred yards from the finish line. I looked like a runner. I had a sign on my rear that said, “Property of the Harvard Lampoon,” but it looked to everybody like I was in the race, actually behind the number three guy. The crowd was screaming, “You can catch him, kid!” I started to catch up to him, and this guy who had just run twenty-six miles looked around, saw me, and he put on a burst of speed that could have killed him. The crowd was screaming. So I started catching up again. When I got to the finish line, the guy, with every ounce that he hadn’t wasted putting on that last burst of speed, took a swing at me. The cops didn’t know what to do. They could see the sign on my rear. I never felt more out of place in my life. They finally just threw me out; I didn’t get into any particular trouble. Postscript: Very close to the end of George’s life, my daughter went to see him perform in Seattle. George starts out—I have a recording of this—telling how he once ran in the Boston Marathon, my story. Laura went up to him afterwards and said, “You just stole my father’s life!” And George said, “It’s just too good a story. I couldn’t turn it down.” He wasn’t embarrassed at all. I don’t care at all, either. I thought it was very humorous. I was a little surprised that he had to go outside of his life for an amusing story; God knows he had plenty of his own.

  CLEM DESPARD George, the editor at the time, would preside over dinners at the Lampoon. Every Thursday, you’d pay two bucks, and you’d have a dinner at the Lampoon. Sadri Khan was the secretary, and he had to arrange the dinner, and the only place he knew where to get the food was from some fancy place in Cambridge. All you had was a tiny little breast of chicken and a hard roll. That was the whole thing. I came up with a game called Kick the Khan, which he didn’t like much. Then, when he served that dinner, I said, “Let’s all have a vote of thanks to Sadri for this marvelous dinner by getting up and throwing our hard rolls at him,” which we all did. Sadri was a little pretentious, but he had a good sense of humor. He’d wear a snap-brim hat and these big-lapel suits, and he would drive into Boston for arrangements made by Ilio Bosco for teenage girls to entertain him. Bosco was touted as the chairman of the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund; but he also supplied the Lampoon with “sporting films,” porno films, which were quite yellow and dusty and not so good. He would always show up at the Lampoon with his violin case with these sporting films in it, and he would set them up. Plimpton arranged that, and Sadri carried it on the next year when he became secretary.

  BLAIR FULLER You’d never have taken George for a jock at Harvard. He never went out for any varsity team, not even tennis or squash, which he was very good at (as I learned to my chagrin early on) and which he played every chance he got before he died. You wouldn’t have taken him for much of a student, either. He was in [Archibald] MacLeish’s creative writing class—as was I; as Doc Humes was, and as was the first Paris Review poetry editor, Donald Hall—and this carried tremendous cachet in literary circles, at Harvard and beyond. I think he was also on the Advocate, the “serious” literary magazine, as well as the Lampoon. But he didn’t seem very literary, either, any more than he was a jock. I think he was much too busy with the Lampoon, with his club life and social life, to get all caught up in anything that demanded a lot of arduous concentration—which, of course, serious writing and serious athletics do. He was having too much fun.

  TEDDY VAN ZUYLEN What did we do at the Porcellian? Well, the drink was copious; the food was better than in the houses; and you could study there. But mostly you went there to be with your club-mates. There’s a peculiar sort of social distance that’s observed in clubs like the Porcellian, in most men’s clubs, I think. It’s somewhere between intimacy and acquaintanceship but far from both. There’s actually a word for it, clubbability, that goes back to the eighteenth-century coffeehouses. George was bred to be clubbable. I don’t see George talking about problems he had with his wife or his girlfriend or anything else. It was not the correct thing to do. You don’t talk about money in clubs. You don’t talk about women. That’s your problem. There’s no way one would have brought it up: “Oh, by the way, do you ever sort of comfort your girlfriend when she’s feeling down?” I can’t imagine even thinking of saying that to him. He would have said, “What? I don’t know what you’re talking about. She never has bad moments.” That was off bounds with him, completely off bounds. I think that he was brought up that way, and it stuck with him, in his clubs and out in the world.

  NANCY TUCKERMAN The coming-out party circuit was pretty elaborate. There was a stag line, and the men there would go and cut in on people. George liked to hang out in the stag line, talking to friends and not getting into the dancing part, because you might get stuck with a girl and then never be able to get away. The ones that were the most attractive and appealing, like George, would spend a lot of time in the stag line until they saw some really glamorous woman, like Jackie [Bouvier then; Kennedy and Onassis, to be], and they’d go up to dance with them.

  BEE DABNEY I was seventeen. I think it was 1949, and I was invited to a party in Long Island by Lucy Aldrich, and it was a beautiful party. I was very excited because it was the first time I’d ever been to a party in Long Island. That was just before I came out. I took the train down from Boston with a friend of George’s named James Walker. Jackie was there, and Alexander Aldrich—it was very exciting. At the piano was George. I was immediately attracted to him—this romantic figure playing the piano with his long wrists and fingers. He was singing a song, something like “Her hands wandered over me like huge busy whiskbrooms. Now, what’s got into me since I got into you,” or something like that. It was terribly amusing, and soon people began to gather around the piano, and George began to look up at me, and I really don’t remember too much more about this party, excepting that I really thought he was extraordinary. It stuck in my mind all the way back to Boston on the train, and I started to draw little sketches by memory of who I’d met there. To my great excitement, soon after this, George called me up in Dover, and he began to take me out. He was at H
arvard, and I was about to graduate from Beaver Country Day School and then go to the Museum School of Fine Arts. That’s when I met him, and we saw a lot of each other. He would come out to Dover in his gray Pontiac convertible car. Mother thought he was wonderful. Everyone always thought he was wonderful because he was enchanting. Every time he spoke, something extraordinary would come out of his mouth. He had a way and a style about him that was just glorious.

  BLAIR FULLER I don’t know how long I’d been at Harvard when I first met Bee Dabney, but there was a football game, and George was going to have a party after the game, and I was asked to go to it, and into the room—fairly crowded—came this charming little person. She looked about fourteen, fifteen at best. She had on saddle shoes and bobby socks and a pleated gray flannel skirt, and she had a little suitcase in her hand that had stickers on it, and the stickers said “Colgate” and “Yale.” This was my introduction to Bee Dabney. From the first, I thought, “Oh, George! This person is too young.”

  Bee Dabney.

  Photograph by Otto van Noppen.

  BEE DABNEY One of the most entertaining moments that I had with George was on one of our first dates. He always had a sense of adventure about him, and he said, “I want to take you to North Easton, where my grandmother has a house.” This was in the cold of the winter. So we drove to North Easton, and the house—an enormous stone house—was totally locked. I don’t know if he had a key or how we got in, but everything was covered in white sheets. We crept around and went into this extraordinary room where there was a balcony that went all the way around the room, a library on the second floor. It was all open. There were these extraordinary books about nature, birds, flowers. I think his grandfather was a botanist. This was an extraordinary collection, so we spent hours looking at these things. Then George said, “Now we’re going to go ice fishing!” So we put on what we could find in the closet, and we tramped out to this frozen lake and went ice fishing for pickerel, or would it be perch? Some such fish. It was very exciting, and he seemed to know exactly what to do. It was freezing out there, so when we got back into the house, George said, “We have to get under the covers, and I’ll cook you up something warm.” He was fantastic at cooking spaghetti or rice. Those were his favorite things to cook. I think we had spaghetti in this case, but nothing much on it. We got warmed up, we got very warmed up. After that, as we progressed with seeing each other, there were declarations of how much we cared for each other. That was my first big outing with him, and it was an adventure in every way.

  BLAIR FULLER One of the complications of going to college after having been in the service during the war was sex. Girls were available everywhere I went in the Navy, but there were things about being in college which seemed to make you juvenile again: debutante dances out in Manchester-by-the-Sea or someplace where every girl was a virgin, or behaved like one. I didn’t feel like courting those girls, attractive though they were. I kind of stopped. One girl and I became friends, but when you courted somebody, they expected you to marry them. I didn’t want to be married. George certainly didn’t want to get married. On the other hand, he wanted Bee Dabney, who, if not a virgin—well, I don’t know anything about that. He may have felt some of the same confusion that I did, but I don’t know. I did find Bee alluring, but she was always taken, so to speak. We were friends. Later, when Bee was involved with Michael Canfield, a cousin of mine, he went to Boston, and he saw, not just Bee, he saw the mother. Her mother said to Michael, looking at Bee crossing the lawn, “Delightful little strumpet, isn’t she?”

  BEE DABNEY We went to lots of Lampoon parties, and that was always very exciting for me because I could meet other artists. Fred Gwynne, the actor, was a great friend. We were involved with pranks a great deal and mischief. John Updike was there, and Michael Arlen, and Mickey Child. I liked that group. Those were my favorites. The people in the Porcellian Club were great fun also. I liked them very much. So we saw a great deal of each other, this group. I saw George constantly. Everyone else I knew dropped and paled by the wayside. We went to functions on the weekend a lot: football games, and baseball games in the spring; gatherings of the brothers.

  CLEM DESPARD George didn’t always have Bee to himself. Sadri Khan and he were always competing for Bee, but Sadri had the better car, a Daimler convertible. That went on for some time, especially after George graduated and went to Cambridge University.

  Dear Mother and Daddy,

  I have been talking to many people here at college about the advisability of going abroad next year to college. In particular, I’ve been trying to find out whether Oxford or Cambridge would be best suited for my needs. The evidence seems pretty conclusive that Cambridge would be far better. There are fewer Americans; the facilities for English study seem better.

  I’ve talked to Archibald MacLeish about it. He far prefers Cambridge, thinks it would be an enriching experience. He is trying to find out what college would be best and under what tutor I should study. However, I won’t be seeing him for two weeks, so in the meantime, I’m going to write letters to Jesus and Trinity Colleges, Cambridge, and since Oxford is easier to enter, Merton and New Colleges there, in case of difficulty with Cambridge.

  I’ve also applied for two scholarships to Cambridge, the Lionel de Jersey and the Fisk, and one for study in France. Though I applied on the recommendation of Mr. Finley and Dean Bender, I’m not relying at all on the possibility of being chosen.

  The Colleges are hard to enter and it will need your help, Dad. I will send you carbon copies of the letters I write and receive from England to keep you posted on my progress.

  May I again say that I am more particularly interested in Cambridge at the moment, and the epistolary offensive should be directed towards that University.

  Squash season is over. With the Championship of the Ivy League at stake, we lost at Yale last weekend. I played no. 5 and lost after a two hour five set match which I came within a whisker of winning.

  Everything else continues to go well. They’re selling violets in the subway stations now, so spring must be just around the corner.

  I plan to join you [in Florida]; my Havana plans are nebulous since I’m way behind work on my novel, and might spend the vacation at Ormond working on it. Will need money for trip to Fla., regardless. . . . [spring 1950]

  Portrait by Bee Dabney.

  Courtesy of Bee Dabney Adams.

  BEE DABNEY When George said he was going to King’s College, Cambridge, he asked me if I would wait for him, which I thought was terribly romantic. He wrote me a great deal from Cambridge that [school] year [1950–1951], and I wrote him; but in the meantime I had become great friends with Sadri Khan. He knew George, so this caused a big friction in my life, because I’d found these two people who were fantastic, really unusual, so I was very absorbed with both. Then, Sadri invited me to travel in Europe with him and his mother and father for the summer. I thought this was an extraordinarily exciting invitation. I had always wanted to go to Europe. It was one of my dreams, and I also wanted to see George, who said he would be spending the summer in Paris between terms.

  WILLIAM BECKER George told me this wonderful story about his graduation at Harvard. It seems that for his last term, he had to satisfy a science requirement, so he took a gut course in geography and dutifully read all of the texts, but he never went to class. He took the final examination and thought he did quite well. But the professor flunked him. George went in to see him, and the professor looked across the desk at him and said, “Mr. Plimpton, do you realize this is the first time I’ve ever set eyes on you? If you think for one minute that I’m going to pass a man in my course who has never set foot in my classroom, you’ve got another think coming!” George flunked. That caused all kinds of problems because it meant he couldn’t graduate. He didn’t have the credits he needed for graduation. So he went back to summer school in the summer of ’50 and was ignominiously handed his degree in September. I’ve always loved that story, and George took great pleasure i
n telling it.

  FARWELL SMITH One weekend we went down to Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island; somebody had a house there, and maybe a dozen of us went down and had a picnic on the beach. It was one of those beautiful spring days. We put our baskets down, and George and I went walking; he was looking at birds. Everybody else had scattered, too, and when we came back to the picnic site, there were two kids, maybe about ten years old, stealing our stuff. You could see them as we came around a corner; they were rifling through our stuff and taking things. George and I came roaring at them, and one kid went one way and George followed him, and the other kid went the other way and I followed him, and we caught them both. I remember being outraged that somebody would do anything like that and cuffing this little kid. I came back dragging him screaming by the hair. I don’t know what I was going to do with him—give him to the cops or something like that—but I was really treating him roughly. And George came back from the other direction, hand in hand with the little kid, who kept calling him Georgie. George’s way of dealing with it was to persuade him that he’d been bad and to not do it again. It was one of the most touching, true parts of George, and it made me feel like a terrible bully.

  KING’S COLLEGE

  WILLIAM BECKER I went to see George in Cambridge at least once, maybe twice. He was in King’s College. I was at Oxford on a Rhodes, but I’d never seen Cambridge, so I went over and he showed me around King’s Chapel, which was one of the most breathtaking buildings I’ve ever been in. Oxford, which is a rather dirty, somewhat industrial town, is not a thing of great beauty; but Cambridge, with the Cam flowing through it and all these trees, was a thing of unbelievable beauty. I was rather jealous.