George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  CHARLES MICHENER In Francis Plimpton’s generation, journalists were from a rougher background. They tended not to be Ivy League, white-shoe boys, which George was certainly the epitome of. When I came into that world, I was at Yale and people would say, “Why do you want to be a journalist? It’s sleazy. That isn’t for people like you.” But then came the New Journalism, so-called—Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, George. They all developed a personal style, a persona, that covered everything from the clothes they wore (Wolfe’s and Talese’s eight-piece suits, George’s schoolboy Brooks Brothers) to their quirks of punctuation and syntax. George became the most unlikely sort, the Brahmin as amateur journalist, the man who loves his subjects, who wouldn’t be caught dead rummaging around in someone’s dirty laundry. Indeed, he was sometimes criticized for dodging the dark side of things.

  ROY BLOUNT George was always more literary than we were, but without writing literarily. André loved that. Back then they liked quirky things. Frank Deford wrote a great story about a traveling whale—a man who carried a whale around the country, a dead whale, to show people. George fit right in.

  PAT RYAN George never did his expense accounts. At SI, if you go back into the Time Inc. records, it will look like George had a lot of stories fail, more than you would think; but that was because he’d go to Manila or someplace, and he never drew any money in advance, and he wouldn’t save any receipts. So he was out all this money. You’d call the Paris Review office and you’d say, “I need these expense accounts so that he can get some money.” It was hopeless. So I finally thought to give him kill fees for various imaginary articles that we turned down, supposedly. The kill fees were meant to cover what I thought was probably his expenses.

  TIM SELDES I think the first time I became aware of this participatory journalism that George had in mind was when he told me, “I’m going to do some rounds with Archie Moore and write about it.” He was the middleweight or heavyweight champion at the time. We all said, “You’ve got to be joking,” but not at all. We all showed up at Stillman’s Gym, and Archie was very nice and sort of bomped him around, and that was the beginning of George’s amateur-among-the-pros thing. I wasn’t his agent at the time; he called me as his friend to come and carry him away if necessary.

  BLAIR FULLER Archie Moore was at the absolute peak of his career, the light heavyweight champion of the world after many a year in the boondocks. He had just won a terrific bout up in Montreal, defending his title against a French-Canadian fighter named Yvon Durelle—by a knockout, I think, in the eleventh round. So people began to collect at Stillman’s Gym. George had asked some, and Archie some, Miles Davis, for one, who was dressed in a camel’s-hair coat. George had asked me to be in his corner with George Brown, a gym owner who taught boxing, a good guy. Hemingway had put George in touch with him. Eventually Archie comes into the gym, just beaming. We go back to the dressing room, a plastic cubicle with a bench over here and a bench over there. Archie is in his fight clothes; he just takes off some sweats, and there he is. He starts taping his own hands; he didn’t need anyone to do it for him. George did. George Brown is taping his hands, and Archie says, “Kid, I just wanna tell you something. Just go out there and do the best you can. I’m gonna make you look good.” Well, that was a relief. But then, having relaxed us a bit, Archie thought he’d better tighten the anxiety a bit and began telling stories to his entourage. “Say, what happened to that last guy I knocked out? Is he still blind?” That kind of stuff, and horrific anecdotes came one after another. George, meanwhile, looked kind of zoned out. But then Archie, having taped his hands, got up and came over to the wall that George and I were sitting against and socked that wall with such force that the medicine cabinet jumped its moorings and flew all the way across the room. Finally we go out to the ring. There is a clock—three-minute rounds. There is a ref, but I’ve forgotten his name. People were in both corners with their buckets and sponges and stuff. And the bell rings. And George simply goes out there, no little dance you see boxers doing at the outset of a fight, he just goes forward toward Archie Moore, sticking his left hand out. Trying, in fact, to box. For quite a while in that first round, Archie clowned. He wasn’t really trying to make George look good, but he was trying to make him look like an amateur, when he wasn’t even that. Archie, on the other hand, was a great professional. When George tried to hit him with a left jab, Archie would just knock it away. And then he would just kind of tap George, showing that he could do it, you know. It seemed to me a very, very long round, and toward the end of it Archie’s clowning really wasn’t so funny now, because George kept coming at him. I mean, George didn’t enter into the spirit of the joke, shall we say. He simply went on doing what he could, which was to keep moving forward. The second round was more of the same, with George moving forward, still forward. But then—I couldn’t see what happened—but then suddenly the champion of the world slipped onto one knee. In other words, he’s down. That’s terrible, of course, and George stood there looking surprised. So up gets Archie with a smile and breaks George’s nose. Blood is streaming out of his nose, but George does not stop. On he went doing this forward shuffle. Archie did not go any farther, thank heaven, because he could have put George away. He didn’t, and then the bell rang. George Brown uses the styptic pencil on George’s nose, and out George goes again for the third round. It’s the same thing as before. But then I see something moving in my peripheral vision: George Brown is advancing the clock. Maybe he thought Archie was getting bored and might do something drastic, just to get out of there. I don’t know, but I believe I was the only person in the place to notice what he did. I never said anything to George. But Brown was advancing the clock. And he saw that I saw it, and he winked at me.

  George v. Archie Moore, Stillman’s Gym, 1959.

  © Herb Scharfman/Sports Illustrated.

  DAVID AMRAM When George and Archie Moore were going to fight, someone apparently told Archie that George was a champion boxer in college and was going to try to knock him out, for a book George was writing. None of this was true, of course. Archie Moore got a different look on his face and said, “That ain’t gonna happen.” So, the first few moments of the fight, Archie started flicking a few little left jabs. George had a good-sized nose, and splat, George’s nose was bleeding almost from the beginning. Miles Davis was there, and he came up afterwards and said, “George, is that black blood, white blood, or red blood?” George turned to him and said, “That’s blue blood.” That was the story as George told it to me, but there are many variations of it.

  MYRA GELBAND It was Out of My League, with that terrific blurb from Hemingway—George as the explorer of the dark side of Walter Mitty—which launched him as a literary sportswriter. But he didn’t really make his mark until the early sixties, with Paper Lion.

  MARION CAPRON That was a title I gave him, by the way: Out of My League. He never liked it. It was brilliant on my part.

  ROBERT SILVERS 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.

  I shared the flat there with George for over a year. The night I arrived from Paris after seven years abroad I went to 541 East Seventy-second Street from the airport and George said, “Where are you going to stay?” I said I was about to phone some hotels. “No,” said George, “you can stay here.” He had the kind of instinctive generosity you never forget.

  George pitching to the All-Star lineup, Yankee Stadium, 1959.

  © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

  A. E. HOTCHNER About that great blurb Hemingway gave him for Out of My League, I was with Hemingway when
he wrote it. It was toward the end of his life when he was at St. Mary’s Hospital, attached to the Mayo Clinic. George had sent him galleys of his book. So Ernest says, “You know, George sent me a galley of his book and I read it and he’d like me to send a comment, but I’m having a lot of trouble being able to get things on paper.” And so while I was there for two days, he fretted about it a couple of times, and I said, “Well, why don’t you just do a couple of sentences, whatever you think,” and I sort of urged him to give George a quote. It was a very good quote, but it was difficult for him.

  DONALD HALL One year after Out of My League came out, several writers were invited to try out for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and I was one of them. I was a terrible athlete, and I knew it. I weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. Anyway, the night before I suited up for the first time, to meet the players, I called George in New York and I said that I was nervous. George talked to me very soberly and very practically; he advised me to get to know a particular player, make him into a friend. Then he said, “Above all, Donald, don’t be sullen.” I said, “George, do I sound sullen?” He said, “Donald, you sound as though you are walking into the valley of the shadow of death.” And of course, I ripped it off. I printed that whole dialogue. It was the beginning of my essay.

  JAMES SYMINGTON You knew that George boxed Archie Moore, I’m sure, but did you know that George drove a sulky for the Travis Stakes at Saratoga? Well, he did. A sulky is perfect for George. You sit stiffly erect and the horses go pitter-patter-pat down the track, gliding along in a wonderful way, and George actually came in first. So I had the pleasure of awarding my old St. Bernard’s classmate this enormous silver cup. It must have been the first time in his career as an amateur among professionals that he actually won something.

  STARLING LAWRENCE Sportswriters are a pretty earnest bunch of folks. By and large, they take the home run and the no-hitter very seriously. Then there’s George, who has a wonderful way of mocking himself and everything else. I don’t know another sports-writer who was coming from quite the same place or had the same touch.

  JONATHAN DEE By the late 1970s SI had changed a great deal; as the years went on it became harder and harder for George to sell them his sort of article ideas, with the huge exception of “Sidd Finch.”

  HOST

  GEOFFREY GATES I was just back in New York from the Marine Corps in the late 1950s, really ready to go. My mother had thrown me out of her house, because my first night out on the town, I had behaved badly and slept on the doorstep of the little brownstone where we lived. I moved in with a friend of mine, and he knew George, and he knew a little bit about The Paris Review. He said, “What we’ve got here are a lot of young editors and writers, and a lot of girls, and all the liquor you could drink.” I said, “I’m very interested,” and that evening, we went up to the apartment at 541, small as it was then. This was what I’d been waiting for since college: this waft of conversation, liquor, perfume, smoke, and the exact noise level I’ve always liked. Then there was this great tall guy who, when we were introduced, acted as if I was the greatest thing that ever happened to him. For five seconds, I was in heaven. We did the “Do you know?” a little bit and then broke to the cheese platter and the bar. He told me he had these parties quite often. I wasn’t shy, and I managed to get the dates of each and every one in the next month or two. After that, I simply started crashing them. Despite that, and the fact that I was not quite on the intellectual level of some of the more serious lit types, we became very good friends. I made a lot of noise and laughed and had a good time.

  George’s characteristic party greeting. The masked man is actor Patrick O’Neal. Photograph © Henry Grossman.

  DAVID AMRAM I came back to New York from Paris in the fall of 1955. The second week I was there, I was playing with Charles Mingus, by a miracle, and going to Manhattan School of Music in the daytime and sleeping even less than I did in Paris. I got a phone call, and I heard that unmistakable voice. I was living on the Lower East Side, where there wasn’t even that much English spoken, between Avenues B and C on Eighth Street. I heard those cultured tones, and he said, “Hullo, boy! David, I see you’re in the phone book. Welcome to New York! This is George Plimpton.” I said, “Oh, my God, George, how are you?” He said, “I thought you were going to call me.” I said, “George, I’ve been so swamped,” and I told him all the things I’d been doing. He said, “You’ve got to come up and see me. We’re having a little party up here.” I said, “Where are you?” and he said, “My friend Norman will come and pick you up. I gave him your address in the phone book. I assume that’s correct.” I said, “Right, 319 East Eighth Street.” He said, “Well, I imagine you don’t have a bell in that neighborhood. Just come down in front of the building. He’ll be there at two p.m., and he has curly brown hair. You can’t miss him.” So I went down, and sure enough, at about quarter to two, this guy shows up, and he had curly hair. I said, “Are you Norman?” He said, “Yes, you’re David. Hop in! What’s your full name, David?” I said, “I’m David Amram.” He said, “I’m Norman Mailer.”

  NORMAN MAILER I don’t know when I first met George, but my earliest memory of him may be of arm wrestling with him at a diner on Sheridan Square. And I remember he won, which irritated me. It went on for a while, but he won. Normally I didn’t care whether I won one or lost one. But I didn’t really like George at that point. I didn’t trust him particularly. He seemed so, oh, I don’t know. Much too—I have to think what the word is that I didn’t quite like about him. Part of it, the lower part, was probably just a touch of envy. Here I’ve written a couple of novels, this and that, and here’s this guy who strikes me as a bit of a skillful playboy who is putting out this magazine with a couple of other playboys. Through the years I knew him, there were so many things about him that I had to respect more than I wanted to. But these were all undercurrents. They never flared up. There was never any verbal artillery when we met. Nor did we work with foils in terms of wit. When we met, we enjoyed seeing each other, but there was a false element. He never did anything unpleasant, but there was something that I felt was just not fair. The gods had given him too much. From his side he may have thought, for all I know, “Why the hell did the gods give all that talent to that guy over there when I could have done so much more with it?” Which he could have, too, if he’d had a huge literary talent.

  DONALD HALL I went to two or three parties at George’s after he became the Elsa Maxwell of his time. Artie Shaw would be there, and Peter Duchin, and there was a big black guy and a little black guy. The big black guy was Archie Moore, light heavyweight champion, and the little black guy was Jimmy Baldwin. These contrasts were incredible. I was never there with Jackie. I was there when Boris, the drug dealer, came by sometimes. Boris was a guy with a Brooklyn accent, well dressed, with a little case; he would go back into the study with certain people who were there and close the door. I was there the night Brendan Gill of The New Yorker told Norman Mailer that he, Mailer, didn’t know anything about the Irish. Mailer was terribly drunk. There were suggestions of a fistfight. One time I went to one of his parties and I passed out for the night on a spare bed that he had. When I woke up in the morning, my wallet was still there, but all the money was gone. So George loaned me twenty bucks to get to the airport. I had the ticket.

  GEOFFREY GATES I was going out to these black-tie events with my friend Peggy Bancroft, who needed an escort, because her husband refused to go to them. George knew Peggy and went to her parties, so did Dougie Burden. But it was a different kind of connection. The whole point of George’s parties was really George’s beatitude. You walked in and he could be hosting the most solemn folks, like his parents’ friends, old and gray, quietly muttering to each other, and George would act as if, “Thank God, Geoffrey’s here!” Then Jim would come in, and Ed, and Sally, and it would be, “Thank God, they’re here!” He made everybody mix. It was effortless. He just said, “You must meet So-and-so,” then shuffled you on to So-and-so.

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p; CHRIS CERF George didn’t categorize people. Of course, he probably noticed what categories they might fit into, but he didn’t make a point of it. José Torres is a good example. He was the light heavyweight champion of the world and a real interesting guy, but I’m sure there were members of the Porcellian Club who had never met him (and probably wouldn’t have wanted to). George was very comfortable with all people.

  ANNE ROIPHE In ’60, ’61, George was having parties just about every Friday night, and we were invited, my first husband, Jack Richardson, and I. This was before there was an Elaine’s; in fact, George’s apartment served at the time as an Elaine’s. There were painters, most of whose names I don’t remember because painters were not my thing; also they don’t talk a lot. There were other writers—Styron, Mailer, 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. What was going on was social-sexual interaction. It was interaction among intellectuals, yes, but did I ever hear a conversation that I found so absorbing that I never forgot it? I think it was more about one big bull bumping up against another big bull. A lot of joking, a lot of talk about who’s the most famous person in the room. Women were not considered full participants in these parties. In fact, despite the sexual overtones, I think the most important intimacies at that time were male to male, not male to female. I’m absolutely not suggesting homosexuality. I’m suggesting something much more serious. It wasn’t about sex; this was about love and hate and ambition and other things that get the fires burning, and I don’t think that any woman I met there was particularly central to those matters.