George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  BILL CURRY We were in the proofing stages of One More July when there was a major blowup between George and me—the only one that ever happened. One of the things that I told him about was me being a southern kid, coming from Georgia, growing up in a racist society and arriving in Green Bay for the first time, to play with the Packers. And there’s Willie Davis, and Herb Adderley, David Robinson, Willie Wood, and Elijah Pitts—those guys adopted me, treated me just—I will never understand it. They were just wonderful. They took me in and helped me make the team, and we became good friends, and some of them actually ended up coming to Atlanta to visit with us, which was unheard of in those days. It was great. It changed my life. In the process, I learned something about African American culture, including their language, the nuance of profanity, such as the various derivations of the MF word and its inflections; I shared it all with George. At the time, we were drinking beer, sitting at his parents’ house on Long Island; but when I saw it on paper, that language, knowing that my mother and grandmother were going to read this book . . . I remember, I was standing in the Atlanta airport, and I called George and said, “I just finished reading this, and we gotta take out the chapter on language.” He said, “Take out what!? It’s the best GD material in the book!” I said, “I don’t care what it is, pal. It’s coming out, because my grandmother is not going to pick this up and read it. She might die. She might croak on the spot.” George’s response was “You’re going to turn this book into pabulum.” That was his word. “It’s going to be pap, pabulum.” He was furious. I was furious at myself for even letting him know that I could talk like that! Bubba Smith had taken great pains to teach me the derivation and etymology of all that stuff. I just couldn’t do it. George loved it, but I made him take it all out, which he thought really hurt the book. He was okay after a year or two.

  PETER MATTHIESSEN There was something about him—in those antics—that bordered on the foolish, or buffoonish almost. But that was the source of his humor, and it was wonderful. His craft was based on self-deprecation; it was the source of his charm and his wit. His wide-eyed and buffoonish look at things like the guy going in the flying lawn chair. He loved that sort of quirky thing. He’s laughing at the absurdity. I think it’s one of his most appealing qualities: the self-deprecation, but also the laughter at human folly.

  CHRIS CERF There’s a theory that George’s “amateur” was, deliberately, a buffoon. But one of the things that made these events so sweet and sad, in a good way, was that George really cared that he would do well in those games. He tried to do well, and it was heartbreaking when he didn’t. For example, one of the most painful events in George’s amateur-in-the-world-of-professional TV shows was being a stand-up comic in Las Vegas. His lack of success as a comic troubled him much more than his lack of success as a trapeze artist, which he did in the same series, because he figured that an erudite man of letters should know how to be funny. But of course he couldn’t be funny in their way. The cultural differences between a Las Vegas comic and George were just too great. He couldn’t make the break to their style. In fact, once you see him trying, you can’t imagine him doing it. That’s what made the show, and all the others, successful and funny, but I think George was troubled by that one. Because he fell flat on his face in something that involved intellect and presentation, rather than not being good enough at some sport or not being able to play the clarinet.

  FRANCINE DU PLESSIX GRAY I thought that amateur-among-the-professionals thing was a kind of WASPy, self-demeaning sense of humor. There’s a certain kind of self-deprecation to WASP humor, which George’s was very much a part of. I would have thought that in the long run, it might be depressing to find yourself so repeatedly on the edge of humiliation. One might even consider the possibility that there was a masochistic ingredient in it.

  JAMAICA KINCAID In his “participatory” journalism, George did something very American that Americans don’t do. It is a very English tradition to take the amateur’s part against the professional; but Americans are just too serious: “What? You’re mining for gold? You’re a gold miner.” As opposed to, “Let’s go mine for gold today, and tomorrow we’ll be tennis pros.” Yet this optimistic, protean idea of who you are is really very American. So what George did was kind of pure, really.

  CALVIN TRILLIN Now, it was an important element of George’s presence, in life or in books, that he made fun of himself. Of course, it took a lot of confidence to do that. To start with, there’s that voice of his: It took confidence to think of it as an accent instead of a speech impediment. It took self-confidence and talent to play a piano piece at the Apollo, or to play tennis with whoever it was, Bobby Riggs or Pancho Gonzales, or to play quarterback in one of those scrimmages. But part of that self-confidence came from background. With many writers, no matter how talented they are, what George did just wouldn’t work; it would be a joke. Or not a joke, it would be pathetic. George could do it because he had the background he did.

  TOM BELLER Self-deprecation is fine, but in the literary aristocracy that Plimpton embodied—it’s a dangerous position. Precisely because it’s sort of debonair and easy, he somehow exempted himself from really trying—from what the athletes had had to do to get where they were or, for that matter, from the dangerous, emotionally daring thing that the writers he ended up publishing in the Review did.

  JONATHAN AMES There is an aspect to his writing which seems Jewish, because Jews have mastered that kind of self-deprecation. There was a Jewish quality to the way he would put himself down in Out of My League and Shadow Box and Paper Lion.

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON I think his books are very democratic in that what he is saying in all of them is “Look, it’s me, George Plimpton, and I’m in the company of all these phenomenal athletes.” He’s going to fail, you know, but he succeeds in many other ways. He succeeds because he got inside that magic circle. It took great physical courage for him to go there, but he lived to write about it, and wrote about it so beautifully.

  TIMOTHY DICKINSON George wrote in the great age of emphasis on the media, of the people who are making things happen for the public. George was very significantly part of that. Fifty years from now, most of the people in any of the sports he deals with will be remembered not from faded newspaper, but because a certain number of people will be reading The Bogey Man, or Shadow Box, or Paper Lion, or Out of My League. George wanted to be the man who is outclassed by the people he is dealing with but handles that with perfect grace. He brushed off the superiority of the pros on our behalf because he was a gentleman and a connoisseur. The charm of the matter was that any humiliation he suffered was a product of his own self-mocking: a preemptive strike against the superiority of others. So, in a way, they could never win against him; or if they won, it would be irrelevant. That was his charm for other people, people who knew they weren’t so good: being not so good, handled with incomparable flourish.

  MICHAEL POLLAN Paper Lion had a big impact on me. When did it come out, ’66? I was fourteen, I guess. I remember I had a hardback copy that my parents gave me for Chanukah. I loved that book. But I subsequently realized, when I started teaching writing and giving interviews on my own writing, that I had been influenced by him more than I knew. I’ve often tried to put myself in stories, not only as a way to get a fresh perspective, but also for the humorous opportunities it opens up: It allows you to create a character who is not the omniscient journalist, but is someone who has lots of foibles and is failing as much as succeeding, and is also someone with whom the reader can identify. Plimpton understood that if you got your hands dirty in a certain way, it would be a lot of fun to write about, and you would be able to create a persona that was more accessible to the reader. I’ve used that trick many times. I wrote a piece about the cattle industry where I bought a steer, made myself a baby rancher. I realized in retrospect that the whole approach came from Paper Lion.

  MYRA GELBAND By the 1980s, of course, the magazine evolved, and the kind of journalism George did fo
r SI, which was his signature journalism and I would guess his most commercial, took a backseat to the type of hard-sports journalism that became prevalent in the 1980s with the advent of things like ESPN and cable television. I think it became harder for George to figure out stories that would work for the magazine, because his interests had changed, too—he wasn’t gonna go suit up and play football for us, and we weren’t gonna run those kind of stories. So it became a little more challenging for him to get into the magazine.

  JONATHAN DEE By the late 1970s, George was spending a great deal of time on the road, giving his “amateur among the professionals” speech and making very good money at it. In the 1970s, too, of course, he was doing those David Wolper specials on TV—George as a nature photographer in Africa, George doing stand-up comedy with the greats at that game in Las Vegas. The irony is that his whole “participatory” method was devised as a way to get a better picture of the subject—it wasn’t supposed to be about George. But over time, and more or less against his will, his celebrity became such that it overshadowed whatever else he might have wanted you to get out of the story. His persona was his livelihood, and it was also a kind of trap for him. But then that happens to a lot of successful public figures. If you want to say he was complicit in it, I suppose it was only by reason of the extraordinarily hard time he had saying no.

  THE SWORD IN THE CAKE

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON It must have been within a year or two of JFK’s death that I met Bobby Kennedy. Here was a man whose hands were trembling, who was looking at the floor, who found it hard to talk, and who couldn’t meet your eyes. He was kind of short. I felt like wrapping my arms around him and saying, “It’s all right, sweetie.” I’ll never forget that first meeting with him, because he changed over the next few years so incredibly. I’ve never seen anyone come out of whatever he was in, in such an amazing way. He turned into this forceful, convincing, gentle, charming person. George, of course, had known Bobby for a while. And as Bobby became more sociable, we began to see a lot of him and Ethel in Virginia. I was overwhelmed by that particular Kennedy family: twelve children, and action always going on. We went along on the Colorado River trip, with all the kids, and Freckles, the dog, and Bobby, and Jim and Blanche Whitaker. It was all about goofing around and teasing each other, taking risks. If Bobby had to go somewhere, there were times when he’d call us up and say, “You have to come with me, I’m having a hard time making decisions, maybe we can talk it through.” He made the decision to run for president on one of these trips, after months of indecision. George and I were there with him on the Learjet when he finally made up his mind to go for it. He said, “It doesn’t matter. This could really backfire and I could be once more known as the ruthless bastard, and everybody would just hate me. But,” he said, “my belief is so strong about the war, and about the injustice done to people in this country, that I am going to run.” That was in 1968, five years after George and I started dating. A whole life-time of things happened to us in 1968. For one thing, we got married.

  ANNA LOU ALDRICH Everyone had a theory or a story trying to explain the inexplicable—that is, George’s getting married. Not just married to Freddy, to anyone. Most of the stories I heard were about Freddy wearing him down.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON The reason I’m going on about Bobby is because during these years, George and I talked about what we should do. We tried separating from each other, and that didn’t work. We always got back together again. George just didn’t want to get married. One day, after he had decided to run for the presidency, Bobby called George and said, “Why don’t you and Freddy come over to the UN Plaza. I need to talk to you about something.” So we went over to his apartment, and he greets us and sits cross-legged in this huge wing chair. There was a couch opposite that, where George and I sat. Bobby looked so small and vulnerable, I just wanted to go over to him and eat him up. He said, “Why don’t you two get married?” George said, “What?” Bobby said, “Ethel doesn’t like it. She thinks it’s bad for the kids. You’re always going places together, staying in the same room, and you’re not married.” He said, “So I think you should get married.” That’s what finally pushed George into it, I think. So, shortly after that, we went down to get the marriage license, at City Hall. It was a pathetic scene, because you filled out papers at these little children’s desks. Imagine George in one of those—so cramped, so unhappy. He was kicking viciously at the desk in front of him, in a rage, in an absolute rage that he was down there—he, George Plimpton, in a marriage license bureau—he couldn’t get over it. He didn’t talk to me for a few days after we got our license. He couldn’t forgive me for having put him through that, and months went by before I heard anything about an actual marriage ceremony to follow the marriage license.

  PIEDY LUMET I was on a ski lift at Stowe, and the guy taking the tickets said, “George Plimpton wants you to come back right now”—and it was freezing, with a big wind and eight feet of snow—“because he’s getting married.” I called up, and Freddy answered the phone. She sounded as if she were under a lot of stress. Needless to say, I did not go, not in that weather. It must have been some wedding.

  ANNA LOU ALDRICH Out of the blue, George called up and said, “I’m about to do this terrible thing, this insane, stupid thing, and I want you to come. Freddy and I are getting married this afternoon.” Of course, Nelson and I went. It was at Joe Fox’s apartment. It was a very nice wedding, but it was clear to most of us that Freddy would be unhappy very soon.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON I was still working as a photostylist at the time, and on the day of my wedding I was on an early morning shoot in Central Park, wearing my scruffy jeans or whatever. We got back to the studio around noon, and Jill Krementz was there, waiting to take my picture for New York magazine, as the “young girl about town.” So she’s shooting me when the phone rings. It’s Charlotte Curtis: “Darling, what are you still doing there?” I said, “What on earth are you talking about?” She said, “Just a moment, I’ll call you back.” So Jill and I continue, and we get a call from Joe Fox saying, “Freddy, we’ve decided that we’re all going to meet here at four. . . .” George had forgotten to call me and ask me to marry him. He just made the decision. He didn’t say anything to me at all. He was so terrified, he just neglected to tell me anything about it. I said to Jill, “Apparently I’m getting married at four.” She said, “That’s three hours away! Let’s go get you something to wear.” She took me to her apartment, and she was quite a bit larger than I was, but she had this Mexican wedding dress that was divine, a sixties love child wedding dress. She took up the hem, and I bought a pair of shoes, and she gave me a couple of tranquilizers, and I thought, “Boy, these make me feel okay.” I was getting married. So what?

  ROBERT SILVERS I have only a blurred memory of different moments of that day. It came as a surprise: I had no clear idea in advance what would happen. I seem to remember taking a taxi from Harper’s to meet George at Tiffany’s and him silently hesitating for a while and then poking his finger at a ring—no words, no jokes. Then I remember us walking down Fifth Avenue next to the park, scuffing leaves in the dusk. George seemed knotted up. He just said, “The poor girl, the poor girl.” And then we reached Joe Fox’s lit-up flat on Central Park South, and suddenly we were making our way into a cluster of old friends, and there was a festive glow with champagne and a minister hovering—it would all be for the best!

  MAGGIE PALEY Joe Fox’s apartment was in the Gainsborough, a building on Central Park South with two-story windows over-looking the park. There weren’t very many of us, maybe twenty or thirty people, plus a minister. I remember George nervously trying to make conversation with me before the service, saying, “What is Presbyterianism all about? I haven’t the vaguest idea.”

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON Jackie was a very faithful friend to him: She got to the wedding on the same short notice as everyone else and brought Caroline. George, of course, was completely loyal to her, too. After the president died, when her kid
s were little, Jackie turned to people like George. He was so wonderful with children.