GEORGE’S FANTASTIC ACCESS
TERRY MCDONELL The edge George had with his journalism was how he could get access. Everyone he approached was as interested in him as he was in them, whether it was Warren Beatty or George H. W. Bush.
ROBERT BECKER George’s charm was the real thing, a gift of the gods, and really him. Everyone sensed this—the athletes he interviewed, the children he entranced, the women and men who adored him. And what was the number one quality of his charm? It was curiosity, natural curiosity, and that’s absolutely what George had in spades.
BOB JOHNSON I was with the Philharmonic when George played the triangle in Mahler’s Second Symphony under Leonard Bernstein. There was an aura about George that was unmistakable; it was a kind of a self-assurance that allowed him, or I should say required him, to go wherever action could be found that would respond to his need to articulate. He had a great need, I think, to communicate what people do, how people feel, what they’re thinking, what their backgrounds are. George identified very strongly with the members of the orchestra. He hobnobbed with us, he hung out with us. This was in 1973. He of course had his moments of awkwardness, but he was treated like an orchestra musician—including being hauled in for criticism by Bernstein. He was terrified. In fact, he said that playing in the orchestra was the hardest thing he ever did, because of the tyranny of time: In sports, you can call time-out or you can mop your brow or whatever, but in music, once your piece starts, it’s not over until the measure’s been played, and your part will be noted. There’s nothing else like that in the world of competition. It was very unnerving.
ALEX KARRAS I don’t know if George knew anything about the Lions when he made his choice to do this thing with us, but he fit right in, no problem. And usually, you know, there is some suspicion when someone comes in and really isn’t a football player and is doing this or that. Guys can be rough with someone like that, but with George they just let him come right in. He doesn’t push it, you know. He’s just George. Guys would be in the room playing cards, smoking cigarettes, complaining about something, and he’d just walk in the room, sit down, and say, “Hi, guys,” and just watch.... He would sing his St. Bernard’s fight song. They all made him do that, they loved it. They loved him, every one of them. I guess management introduced him to the guys as a ballplayer from someplace, and it worked until they saw him perform and realized he was not a quarterback. But he pretended really well. He said something about being from the Newfoundland Newfs. They figured it out. I remember Joe Schmidt came down and said to me, “We have really got something going on....” I said, “What is it?” He said, “George Plimpton,” and I said, “Well, he’s a writer.” He said, “Well, I think we’re finding out he’s certainly not a football player.” He could tell stories. He was very good at that. And he was able to back up the stories by going on a football field. I remember when he played four downs against Baltimore, or Minnesota, or somebody, and he didn’t do too bad. He tried to pass one time and it didn’t happen, but it looked like he could possibly be a quarterback. I thought it was terrific for the Lions to let him play with us. I remember when he put his gear on for the first time. I guess he never played the game of football because he didn’t really know anything about what he was putting on, the hip pads and all, and the guys would tell me, they would come in the evening and giggle a little bit and say, “George, you look silly today.” But as I say, we had gentlemen on our team, which really allowed him to do what he did.
JAMES SALTER George wanted to do things with champions but never boasted of it. I remember once he told me of interviewing Muhammad Ali when he was training for some fight, and he went to Ali’s trailer and Ali had to excuse himself because someone else was there. He said, “You’re going to have to wait outside for a while,” and Wilma Rudolph, the famous black Olympic champion sprinter, came into the trailer, and they closed the door. George said he was sitting around outside for quite a while, in fact more than an hour. Finally, Wilma Rudolph came out and went off. Anyway, some years later, George went to see him again and said, “Champ, the last time I saw you was when you were down in Florida, training for the fight.” And Ali said, “I remember: Wilma Rudolph.” That’s the story George would tell about himself. Most interviewers would say, “I’m tight with Ali. I went down and I interviewed him,” and this and that, but George wasn’t that way.
BUD SHRAKE I can remember seeing George in the locker room talking to Ali. Ali always had a good eye; he always recognized someone who was way beyond average, and this was not your routine sportswriter he was talking to. When George walked up, Ali’s eyes would sort of light up with this mischievous little glint, and you could tell he was getting ready to put George on, or have fun with George, or enjoy George’s company.
George interviewing Muhammad Ali in Zaire a few days after he regained the championship from George Foreman. © 1974 Lynn Goldsmith.
LEON GAST Ali always called George “Kennedy.” He just thought George looked like a Kennedy. He did it even in Africa at the Ali/Foreman fight. We shot a scene at the Intercontinental Hotel where George shows up and Ali sees him and says, “Kennedy!” At that same lunch, Stokely Carmichael walked by and Ali sees him and says, “Stokely, Stokely.” Stokely turns around and comes over, and Ali says, “Bundini, search him and see if he has any matches on him. We don’t want him setting anything on fire.” That was in ’74. Who else in the world could get away with that?
JOHN HEMINWAY He and I could do the same thing in the course of a day, but his memory and what he took away from it was almost virtually the opposite of what I took away from it, which was the big picture. He would often home in on one detail, like someone’s nose hairs. And he would say, “Have you ever seen such nose hairs!” And of course I had missed it trying to get a bigger picture. What George would come away with was the funniest, greatest story of all time, and I would come back with a story that had no value at all.
RAY CAVE His description in Bogey Man [1967] of the guy in the Port-o-Let at the U.S. Open is classic sportswriting. George is out on the course standing next to a Port-o-Let with some guy in it. The guy opens the door, and the door squeaks loudly, and when he looks out, there’s Arnold Palmer about ten yards away in the rough, about to hit his shot. So the guy closes the Port-o-Let. And he waits, and he waits, and he figures that Mr. Palmer must have hit his shot by now. But Arnold can’t stand it; he’s been waiting for the guy to finish his business and come out. He says, “George, knock on that door!” One wonders if it ever happened. Enough of it happened. There was probably a squeaky door.
BILL CURRY The first day of [football] practice was no surprise, really, but really hard for him. He looked like a big, graceful guy on the tennis court, but he was forty-two years old and didn’t run well; he wobbled in football gear. He also had an ankle that bothered him, and he appeared to be flat-footed. It was such a struggle for him, and yet he did everything we did. So he comes out the first day, and he’s just standing there. Nobody’s paying any attention, and he announces to the coach, “I want to get in on the drill.” Well, the drill happened to be “the nutcracker,” which is man on man, one blocker, one tackler, one ball carrier. Our coach, Don McCafferty, said, “Well, George, which spot do you want?” “I want to carry the ball.” “You sure?” “Yeah.” So he runs up in there. We had three All World linebackers, the least famous of which was Ray May. Ray would not have injured anyone purposely, but he tackled George and drove him into the ground, and when he did, George was just stunned. When he got up, he was just standing there, his arm flapping painfully. He said, “My God, look at this.” So, everybody kind of looked at each other and said, “Well, that’s it for him. We won’t see him anymore.” That afternoon he shows up, heavily taped, and comes out. He did well at the center/quarterback exchange, traditionally one of the first things you do in football practice. The center, hiking the ball to the quarterback, creates a really explosive boom! The ball smashes into the palm of the quarterback, including the thumb. I
f the quarterback is right-handed, and that right hand is the one that goes under the butt of the center, there’s no way an amateur can take a snap and actually grasp the ball, but George did. When that happened, people started to take him seriously. He got respect from the guys who were already inclined to welcome an outsider, and a couple of weeks later he had everybody eating out of his hand. He never missed a practice.
MYRA GELBAND If there was one word to describe the way George thought when he came to talk to us about ideas for articles, it would be “fanciful.” Not over the top. I wouldn’t say that. I mean “fanciful” in the sense that it would give him delight to think of them. He did a long piece for me once—I was his editor for probably about ten years—a lovely, very fanciful piece on an imaginary bird. He made up a bird. He wrote about going birding with these friends in Mexico, all great birders, and they made up a contest about what would be the most fabulous bird you could imagine, and he wrote about four thousand words on this, if you can imagine, and we ran it. With wonderful illustrations. But it was all based on real birds—a part from this bird, and a wing from that bird, and the beak of this bird, and the tail feather of another—it was fanciful but based on an enormous store of knowledge on ornithology. It was about all the things people who are lifetime birders want to discover.
DAVID MICHAELIS He always said he didn’t mind the constant flying off on speaking tours because he got so much writing done. It was a real lesson. On an airplane flight he would have a legal pad open on his knee, in which he would write these beautifully simple, parsed sentences. He would drop the pad on a desk at the Review. I saw it several times when he walked in the door at 541 from having been somewhere. It would be completely used up, it seemed, with that lovely, straight up and down, increasingly illegible handwriting. He had a fluidity that was really an education to watch. I got the sense that he was writing out of his own idiom—he didn’t have to make himself up, as he’d already done that as a kid, or so I imagine.
PIEDY LUMET He called me up at one o’clock in the morning one night from the top of the Time-Life Building and said, “You’ve got to listen to this.” I heard sort of a wailing noise, a high-pitched keening. I said, “What’s that?” He said, “That’s the wind blowing around the tower. They won’t let me out because my article is past due. I have to finish my piece, so they’ve locked me in. Listen to the wailing.” And then he went on for another thirty minutes about a very small Japanese admiral in a tiny submarine—George being tall at the top of a high, high, high, high building, feeling much like a tiny Japanese admiral, two hundred feet below the surface of the water with his periscope, trying to look out.
FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON People used to ask me what George was like when he woke up in the morning. What was his mood like? How did he answer the phone? How did he open the door? How did he start to work? Look, this is George Plimpton. He’s done some incredible speech the night before and had a thousand people applauding him—a great night. He wakes up the next morning. He looks like hell. He’s in these crumply shorts he slept in; he bumps into things; he can’t smile; he’s grouchy as hell. Has anybody else seen him that way? No. The wife sees it. He goes and gets his coffee and toast. By now, he would have pulled on a pair of pants, zipped up the zipper, but the belt’s still open, and he’s bare chested, so he’s halfway sort of gotten into clothes. He’s walking around the pool table, which is littered with piles of paper, sees something, leans over, picks up a page, leans back, reads it, and puts it back on another pile across the table. He’s editing his latest book as he’s waking up, and he’s got all this in his mind, and I watched this man nobody knew, this writer who wrote all the time.
BILL CURRY Let me tell you about the origin of the title of the book One More July: It was the early 1970s, I was home in Atlanta, and I thought I was going to retire. Then Bart Starr got his job with the Green Bay Packers, and he called ’cause he desperately needed a center. My knee was destroyed, but I thought I could play football one or two more years, so I started thinking about whether I was going to give it another shot and go up for training camp in July, like I’d been doing for most of my adult life. Meanwhile, I was interviewing for insurance jobs in Atlanta. I went into one interview with a good friend of mine, and he said, “Look, Bill, let me put this into perspective for you: If you’re telling me that your passion in life is the insurance business, you’ll be a marvelous representative; but if all you’re doing is looking forward to July, to training camp—if this is just going to be your next July for a while, then you’re wasting your time.” I drove from that interview to another, again with a good friend of mine who was in the business. He sat across from me, looked me in the eye, and said, “What do you really want to do?” and I said, “Oh, my gosh. Bingo.” I grabbed a napkin and wrote, “One more July.” I said, “Excuse me, I’ve got the title of the book that George Plimpton and I are going to write.” That’s how it happened. My whole life had revolved around getting ready for the next July. Sure enough, I did it again that year, and that’s when George and I got in the car and drove up there, talking and recording the talk all the way. Actually, we had been talking off and on for years, often at his parents’ place on Long Island.
BASKETBALL: George at left. Photograph © The Estate of Dick Raphael/Sports Illustrated.
FOOTBALL: George (0) carries the ball. Photograph © Walter Iooss, Jr./Sports Illustrated.
HOCKEY: George in the net. Photograph © John Iacono/ Sports Illustrated.
TRAPEZE: George the flying telephone pole. David L. Wolper Productions.
SWIMMING: George with Don Schollander. Photograph © Henry Grossman.
FILM: Rio Bravo. David L. Wolper Productions.
ORCHESTRA: The tympanist. David L. Wolper Productions.
JONATHAN DEE The low point of my career as George’s assistant came in February 1985 when he called me in on a weekend to type up the last changes on the Sidd Finch manuscript. He had me hand-deliver them to Sports Illustrated. I went over to the Time-Life Building and said, “I’d like to go up to Sports Illustrated, please.” The guard said I couldn’t go up—this was a Saturday afternoon, after all—so I asked if he would please deliver it to them. I handed this envelope to the security guard and I went home, thinking my job was done. It turned out that the envelope then went missing, and I don’t think George had a copy of it anywhere. Come to think of it, making a copy of it was probably my job, wasn’t it? Anyway, it went missing for about a day; I was out of the office and missed most of the excitement, but Jay McCulloch told me later that he genuinely thought that I had stolen it.
MYRA GELBAND Within minutes after I got the manuscript, George called and said, “What do you think?” Now, I don’t remember him being that insecure, but he hadn’t written anything for us for a while, and this was so different and so secret—I mean, we didn’t tell anybody about it. I said, “I’ll read it on the train.” I read it and I called him in the morning and said it was wonderful. He said, “Has Mark [Mulvoy] read it?” and I said, “I’m giving it to him now.” He said, “Well, call me as soon as he reads it.” And of course, it’s not the only story you’re working on when you’re working for a weekly newsmagazine. So I gave it to Mark Mulvoy and said, “George wants to know what we think of it.” I don’t think I was even back at my desk yet when Mark—who’s very compulsive about things like that—called me, laughing, and said, “I’m on page four.” And it was a long piece. So I said, “Well, keep going, it gets better.” I don’t think he even got to the end before he called George himself. This was probably the beginning of February. It ran April first.
Sidd Finch and his creator confer.
maryannerussell.com © ’85.
JONATHAN DEE George had been a wreck while writing that piece. I was amazed to see it, because to me he was a celebrity writer, and I didn’t think, at age twenty-two, that famous writers ever got nervous about whether what they were doing was any good or not. He said he had had an initial burst of enthusiasm, but then he realize
d what a daunting thing it is to tell a joke on a national scale. If it falls flat, you really look bad. He was worried that he had exaggerated it too much. Sidd—which was short for “Siddhartha”—was a Harvard dropout Buddhist monk in training who had accidentally mastered the union of mind and body in such a way that he could throw a baseball a hundred fifty miles per hour, which is about half again as fast as any human has ever thrown a baseball, and in order to do this he had to have one foot bare and the other wearing a work boot. As publication day approached, George was consumed by the fear that he had gone too far and no one could possibly fall for it. The day the issue hit newsstands—April Fools’ Day 1985—happened to be a day when he had to do one of these goddamned speeches, in South Carolina this time. He begged me before he left, “If anybody calls, try to keep the joke going for as long as you can.” Which made me extremely nervous. I didn’t think I could handle that at all. As it turned out, that was a big moment in my relationship with him, because I was able to do it, and I think he was happy to discover that I was on his wavelength enough to be trusted to go through with something like that. Anyway, the big morning arrived, and the phone did not stop ringing all day long. Other journalists called. They thought it was on the level. To give you an idea—the sportscaster at Channel Eleven, Jerry Girard, called the office and said, “I’ve gotten Sidd to agree to an interview on the news tonight. Will George come, too?” I said, “I give you my word that if Sidd is there, George will be there.” The New York Times called because they had sent a photographer down to the Mets’ spring training facility; this guy was claiming that he had looked all over and couldn’t find Sidd anywhere. I reminded them that George’s story had mentioned Sidd’s notorious shyness and so, on a day like this, it wasn’t at all surprising that he would have gone into hiding. Senator Moynihan’s office even called about it, but that one, thank God, went to Sports Illustrated, because I don’t think I could have actually gone through with lying right to Senator Moynihan. The Common Book in the office was filled up with messages like those—pages and pages of them. I wrote it all out for him. He called once or twice from phone booths at airports to find out how it was going, but he really had no sense at all, that first day, of what a sensation it became. He was scheduled to come back home that night, and I left the book open on his desk chair so he could see what had been going on while he was away.
George, Being George Page 21
