George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  George and Hemingway at a tienta outside Madrid, 1954.

  Photograph by Mary Lumet.

  DEWITT SAGE George relished telling the story of his quest for a Hemingway interview for the magazine. He said it began in the spring of ’53 when a bunch of reprobate Harvard Porcellian types, as he described them, were in town for the wedding of Joan Dillon, whose father was U.S. ambassador to France, to Jimmy Moseley. The enormous reception took place at the embassy, just off the Place de la Concorde, I think. George said they were behaving “terribly”; people were drunk, throwing tables out of windows; there couldn’t have been more ghastly behavior. Douglas Dillon had more or less hidden away from the whole thing. Meanwhile, George, with a bottle of Dillon’s finest Bordeaux, goes in through the front door of the Ritz, not far from the party. He’s walking down a long corridor to the bar at the rear of the hotel, which is now called the Hemingway Bar but then, I believe, the Little Bar. He looked up, he said, and he saw this apparition. “For the first and almost the last time in my life,” he said, “I saw someone actually reading The Paris Review. It was the first issue. And then I saw that the apparition in front of me, with the gray beard and the unmistakable profile, was none other than Ernest Hemingway. I became immediately sober.”

  JULES FEIFFER It’s interesting how George deified Hemingway: On a personal level, you’d think that George’s world and his persona were much closer to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  Dear Mother and Daddy . . .

  I came down [to Madrid] ostensibly to interview Ernest Hemingway. He is not well, sadly, and I’m not sure he feels up to an interview. I’ve had lunch and drinks with him, and yesterday with his helpful advice I was able to stay in a bullring on a bull breeding farm outside of Madrid and successfully pass with the cape a fighting calf the size of a small spaniel. Bullfighting, I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear, is not a profession for me. At one point during my fight my right foot got under the cow’s hoof and the cow stood on it for an appreciably long time while she looked for me with her horns. I have a profound admiration for the professionals fighting here in the Playa de Toros every afternoon. . . . [spring 1954]

  PIEDY LUMET I saw him in Madrid in ’54, maybe. Peter [Gimbel, her husband at the time] and I were there because we were going to see the bullfights in San Isidro, you know, that bullfighting thing in Madrid in May—like Pamplona, but much more sedate. George was looking for Hemingway, and because Peter’s father had been friends with Hemingway, we went each day to the bullfights with him. When George heard that, he sort of hung around. And he did find Hemingway, obviously. We used to go in the morning to the Palace Hotel opposite the Ritz in Madrid, and Hemingway would be there, this mountain of pink pajamas in the bed—it was very dramatic to me, who was just this person from the Connecticut suburbs—and Hotchner would bring a huge pitcher of martinis—ice all melting by the time he got to the room, and the bullfighter Ordóñez came in with Ava Gardner. They’d never met, she and Hemingway, and they just reclined together on the bed and talked. She hopped onto his bed; he beneath the covers and she beside him on top of them—murmuring, laughing. The language! So obscene! They had a fine time. George must have come with us, and then we all went for a big lunch after the three martinis in Hemingway’s bed. Then, on to the bulls.

  Dear Mother and Daddy . . .

  I had a very splendid time down there [in Madrid]. I didn’t get much of the interview done, simply because Hemingway doesn’t much like to talk about writing and I didn’t press him, not [wanting] to talk about writing when there’s a man around who’d rather tell you about elephants and the shooting thereof, big game fishing, and who has much to say about the Mau Mau and the hyena. Spain is a country I loved, and of course I had the best guide in the world to show it to me. Not that he did, but I saw him enough to feel I understood one large facet of it. . . . [no date]

  A. E. HOTCHNER One of the first times I met George was when he came to Madrid to talk to Hemingway about maybe doing an interview. He did the interview later, then sent it to Ernest, and Ernest really rewrote a lot of it in order to conform to whatever Ernest thought he should be saying. So that was the beginning of the time George came to Hemingway. I don’t think he really was around Ernest all that much.

  ROBERT SILVERS George described to me being down in Pamplona with Sadri Khan, the youngest son of Aga Khan, who had been at Harvard with him, and there, sometime after the running of the bulls, George put it to Sadri that The Paris Review needed a publisher, and Sadri said he would do it, which meant that he was going to pay the bills. It was a marvelous moment a few weeks later when Sadri arrived at the offices of The Paris Review, a very well-dressed, smiling, very diplomatic, very courtly young man. We took him in to meet Colette Duhamel, the publisher of Éditions de la Table Ronde, who was immensely happy to meet him for many reasons, one being that the heavy debts of The Paris Review, for which she as gérante was ultimately responsible, now seemed very likely to be paid. I don’t know just what arrangement George worked out with Sadri after he left for New York, but from then on we had money in the bank to pay the bills.

  Sadri’s decision to back us was a crucial point in the life of The Paris Review, and this was all George’s doing. I remember Colette saying to Sadri, “Est-ce que vous êtes à Paris main tenant?” He said, “Mais oui, en principe,” and I saw an immediate relief in her eyes. Here we had found for a publisher the son of one of the richest men in the world; indeed, Sadri was a candidate at that time to be his successor. But these crises continued all George’s life. He would find a new publisher, a record producer or an heiress, and he’d tell you, “I’ve just found So-and-So and he’s going to take it.” But then their businesses didn’t go on as they wanted or they grew bored, and they would quit. George never seemed disheartened. I’d see him again and he’d say, “Well, I found another one!”

  LEAVING FOR NEW YORK

  JOHN TRAIN I left Paris when I got mobilized and had to go back to the States. After a while I got out, but because I had started this company in Paris, I went back and forth often. In fact, I was pretty responsible for the office that the Review occupied after the one on the rue Garancière. It was on the rue Vernet, parallel to the Champs-Élysées where our credit company was. The man who owned the building was a part of the enterprise and found the room for them. Oddly enough, I also found an office for the Review in New York, on First Avenue near where I was then living. It was fifty bucks a month, not a bad price. That was in 1955 when George had moved back to New York himself, leaving Bob Silvers managing things at the Paris office.

  The Two Rescuers, Robert Silvers and Sadruddin Khan, and George.

  From the collection of The Paris Review.

  ROBERT SILVERS The second night I was at the Review, George and I went over to the printer, a dark, oily shed of a place, smelling of very cheap wine which the pressmen drank rather steadily. We had on the press a long story by, of all people, Pati Hill. The pressmen spoke not a word of English, by the way, so the words no one, for example, looked like noone. Proofreading these long galleys, full of these errors, George would cry, “Golly, another one!” and the typesetter would say, “Quel ennui, votre journal.” Not the most congenial atmosphere, and later, when the issue was printed, we were horrified how many “noones” we had missed. About this time, too, I was introduced to the Common Book. It was a legacy of George’s Lampoon days. It was a big, ledgerlike volume where we would enter messages, jokes, or anything that occurred to us. George spent quite a lot of time writing in it, but its big champion was John Train. I remember reading a letter that Train had posted in the book, from the manager of the American Library in Paris, a small library on the Right Bank that had some of the latest English novels and biographies. The letter said, “Dear Mr. Train, I’m writing you because Miss Jane Wilson [not her real name] has given your name as her reference, and she has not returned five books to the American Library. We ask that you contact Miss Wilson and have her return these long-overdue books as soon as possible
.” Beside this was pasted Train’s reply, saying, “Dear Mr.___, I’m sorry to be writing you in my own hand, but the machine on which I am used to compose these letters was last seen in the hands of Miss Jane Wilson. Yours faithfully, John P. C. Train.”

  PATI HILL George wasn’t overbearing as an editor and he didn’t seem all that persistent, but he usually got what he wanted. Once he came to see me at my tiny apartment on the Île Saint-Louis to try to scratch up a piece for the Review. He had already published excerpts from both my books and I didn’t have anything left over to give him. George said, “Well, you can just sit down and write about anything at all.” I said, “I don’t have anything at all to write about,” and he said, “You like cats, write about cats,” and I said all right. But George said, “I can see you’re not going to do it so I’m going to sit here until you’ve written about the cats.” And he did. He sat there until I wrote it and it wasn’t that bad because he hit on the right subject for me. He didn’t try to order things to his wishes. He never tried to get people to write his ideas for him. I think he valued surprises.

  Dear Mother and Daddy . . .

  I’ve written Cabell Greet that I’m definitely coming back next fall and will take up the post at Barnard College teaching [creative writing]. At least until midyear (January 15th). I’m not satisfied at all in my mind that I’ll want to continue teaching—in fact I quite definitely don’t want to—but at least it will give me a chance to inspect the field. The classes are on Tuesday and Thursday—another half-day for conferences—and that should certainly give me enough time to continue my own work both for the Review and my writing. Much more time really than I’ve had here. I’ll be leaving the magazine in good hands, at least so it would appear at the moment. It is still a mill-stone to the extent I must always be prepared to save it if a real need should arise, but it is worth it whatever the circumstances. I cannot let something die I’ve worked three years to start. It is not a play-toy for an interim period in my career. . . . [spring 1955]

  IV.

  MOUNTING CELEBRITY:

  1955–1963

  ____

  George knew so many more people than I did; he was having so much more fun in New York than I was having. I felt that whatever enjoyment I was having, I had earned; and there is nothing that excites envy like the feeling that you received no more than you earned, while there was George, who had received so much more than he had earned. . . .

  —NORMAN MAILER

  SOCIALITE

  HARRY MATHEWS George had a funny reputation in Society. He was from a distinguished family on both sides, but he was too glitzy for those people, even before he became a celebrity. He was still a prankster, as he had been at St. Bernard’s and Exeter. Rules, traditions, conventions were excellent things in his view, but never to be taken too seriously. Others might never know what they could get away with, but he did, and he did get away with it. He may have felt that the strictures of Society—what was left of it—were pour encourager les autres, not him. But I doubt it. He didn’t have that sort of arrogance. Still, Society sensed something mischievous and anarchic about him and vaguely disapproved.

  PIEDY LUMET One time, he came to a birthday party in East Hampton that I gave for Sidney [Lumet], and it was all Sidney’s friends, most of them Jewish, except for the waiters. Everybody made toasts, and George said, “I look around this room and there’s Gene Saks, and Saul Steinberg, and Peter Stone, and I see that I’m in a minority. I’m not really used to that, and I don’t really like it. So could all those people who are not Jewish please wave to me?” So the waiters all waved, and I waved, and Keren Saks, who is half Jewish, gave a half wave, and George said, “Thank you.” It was terribly funny, because they were all friends of his.

  Dear Dave,

  I believe Marion Capron has called you on this sad matter—not teaching next year. I was prepared to come back to it, but at the last minute Sports Illustrated offered me another job to do—a profile on Jock Whitney. I’m not sure that in accepting the offer I haven’t committed a blunder of sorts. I certainly don’t want the reputation of being a writer whose only topic is the sporting life of the extremely rich. But I’ve done it.

  And in doing so recall almost nightly Prof. Greet’s description of free-lance writers finishing out their days at the bar of the Century; pathetic, frayed, tremble-handed drunks, all of them regretting the day they decided to undertake an article on Jay Gould’s court-tennis prowess.

  I hope that if you sense one day that I am about to join their ranks you will take me back where I probably belong. . . . [January 26, 1957]

  GAY TALESE There are places in New York that define your social position, none better than the Racquet Club. People that belong to the Racquet Club, they might also belong to Sure Fire Bowling Lanes and they might also be out with the fishermen in Staten Island, you know, but their defining place was the Racquet Club, George’s Racquet Club. He could be at ringside in Sunnyside, Queens, watching José Torres beat up some Puerto Rican, and he could have his arm around Torres and have dinner with him in some little place in Brooklyn. But there was still a time when George was going to be at the Racquet Club. But I never, never saw him insult anyone. I never saw him mean-spirited. He wasn’t snooty, he wasn’t arrogant, he wasn’t full of himself—well, he was full of himself, but in a nice way. It isn’t often that you get from that privileged background a man who would be almost always acceptable and approachable.

  ROBERT PARKS There’s a very interesting letter of Donald Hall’s in the Paris Review archive at the Morgan Library. It’s from the late fifties, I think, in which Hall says, “Dear George, I picked up Vogue and there you are. I look at something literary and there you are with Ginsberg and Corso and others. I really don’t know who you are.” It really gets at something that people have noted about him and have been perplexed about.

  ANN WINCHESTER At one point, he was listed, in Esquire I think, as one of the most attractive men in America. He was stunned and a bit embarrassed. He just didn’t quite understand it. I don’t think he had any sense of his own attractiveness, so he didn’t know how to deal with this concept of himself as a male sex symbol. Eventually he decided that it was terribly funny. He always thought about following his dreams, but he really didn’t think about how he appeared.

  GEOFFREY GATES I thought George was broad-gauged but also subtle and elegant in his pursuit of women. When I was taking out Candy Bergen . . . no, I was feeding her, I wasn’t taking her out, by which I mean only that whatever my intentions or desires were, I ended up paying for dinners. Anyway, there were a couple of other men in her life at that time, one of whom was George; none of us knew about this. George certainly had an active eye. There were all these little cuties, pretty girls from the lit world, and a few of the Muffies and Alisons from old WASP Society with a capital S, and the odd Café Society woman, like Nan Kempner; but George never showed any of that kind of focused, aggressive, or predictable behavior. He was always laid-back, cool, very charming, with great manners, and of course he was a good-looking guy. In the early days, you didn’t know who he was with. He never stood with his arm around a woman or some gauche thing like that. You never knew who was his date that night, or if he even had one—unless Bee was there, and even then you couldn’t be sure.

  BEE DABNEY George and I came back on the plane together to the United States. That was in 1955. I think it might have been the spring. Then George and I continued to see each other. He’d take the train to Route 128, near Dover, with his books and his work, and he’d spend weekends with me and my mother. Once we went to Bermuda together. At the same time, I was thinking that I needed to get away from Dover immediately and go to New York, because that’s where all my friends were then. All the people in Paris were coming back. I had started drawing people’s children around Boston, and I found that I could get good likenesses, and I continued that when I went to New York. That was 1956. I lived in a perfectly wonderful apartment that I rented from a friend on Eighty-firs
t Street. I continued to do portraits of my friends and people’s ponies and horses and dogs and children. I had a show at the Westbury Gallery, and from then on, I always painted seriously: murals, commissions of any kind. In that way, I made enough money to stay in New York.

  PIEDY LUMET I think that when Bee came home, she was just broiling with suitors. She was so particularly charming. And so was George. That’s not a good couple, when they’re both the star. Somebody has to defer. Still, I know that a good deal of George’s life was spent daydreaming, a lot of it about Bee. I don’t know in what sense he thought they would be a couple. It may have been over before they came home from Paris, where I think she took up with Sadri and probably others. I remember asking him when he was back in New York, “Do you ever see her and talk to her?” “Oh,” he said, very emphatic, “oh, I talk to her, I talk to her often.” More than that was the fact that the connection existed and was important to him. I think she was annealed onto his life. There was almost a severity, an edge to his voice, when he said, “I talk to her often.”

  JOHN HEMINWAY The last time I saw George, in the late 1990s, I was about to get married. I called him up and said that I’d love him to meet Kathryn, my fiancée. He’d met a number of my girlfriends along the way and always had lovely things to say about them. We went to Elaine’s, of course. He sat down and he wanted to find out about Kathryn’s background. And the question of her mother came up and she said, “Well, she’s divorced from my father, but she’s living with somebody called Dougie Burden.” And he went, “Oh, my God.” You could see a story coming in behind his eyes. And it went like this: Years before, he was in love with this woman called Bee Dabney. He just adored Bee Dabney. They had an engagement party, and everybody came, including Dougie Burden, who George said was the handsomest man in New York (I heard him say this several times about several different people, so take it with a grain of salt). Dougie had never met Bee. George watched out of the corner of his eye as she and Dougie introduced themselves, got into a conversation, and talked and talked all night long; and that was the last time George saw Bee Dabney. To me that was quintessential George—he took such pleasure in telling a story about what great sadness he’d had.