George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  Freddy and George’s wedding, 1968. From left: Robert Silvers, the minister, the couple, Willard Espy. Photograph by Jill Krementz.

  TOM GUINZBURG George decided that he would go through with it. I gather he made the decision at ten a.m.; the wedding would be at four that afternoon, at Joe Fox’s apartment. It was like a squash court; the bedroom was the balcony, sort of, and beneath it was standing this group in a line, Terry Southern next to Mrs. Plimpton and so on. But they were not starting the wedding because Jackie hadn’t arrived. She was coming from Hyannisport with baby Caroline. George was up there pacing around, but no-body had any confidence that we’re going to have a groom, so we’re taking turns going upstairs and trying to calm George, urging him to come on downstairs, the minister’s here. He says, “No, we have to wait.” Clearly, it’s not just that Jackie hasn’t arrived. He doesn’t want to get married. Then it’s my turn to calm him, so I’m up there thrashing around in my head for something to say—and I hadn’t been married all that long myself to Rusty—so I said, “Oh, George, look at it this way: You’re not ever going to be lonely again!” And George, like a wounded elephant, staggered towards me, threw his arms around me, and said, “Tombo, I’ve never been lonely in my life.”

  CHRIS CERF I was at Freddy’s first wedding, a fellow called van Dereck Haunstrup or something, and I remember the ceremony and I remember laughing with her about it, the same day, because it was an Ethical Culture wedding, and the guy who married them didn’t believe in traditional marriage vows, so he went, “Now, you guys, you’re gonna be nice to each other, right?” It was really hip-pie. It amused me, imagining Freddy in that marriage and then, a few years later, imagining her with George Plimpton. But maybe, come to think of it, the same amount of seriousness went into both of them.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON I didn’t even have time to invite my mother or call my sisters. After the wedding, I told everyone, “I didn’t know about this until one in the afternoon.” They just looked at George like he was some kind of...like, How did you get away with this? He was so scared of this kind of commitment, so scared of love, of family. And forget a real wedding party. We went to Elaine’s! That was it.

  WILLA KIM There was a big dinner at Elaine’s. I remember that Billy [Pène du Bois] got up on his chair and made a whole speech in gestures without saying a word, and then everyone applauded. All these writers and their words. He was quite drunk, I’m sure.

  MAGGIE PALEY Afterwards I went with Terry Southern and Peter Matthiessen back to Peter’s pied à terre and smoked some dope and had a good time. It was a momentous occasion. I didn’t think George would be a good bet for a husband, but I didn’t particularly want him to be married to anyone else. So I was sort of annoyed. I wasn’t the only one.

  BEN LA FARGE One night several months later, I went to Elaine’s for a nightcap—I had been one of her earliest customers, along with Frank Conroy and many others. That night I had to wait awhile, as all the tables were taken, even in the back room, where, Elaine told me, the just-married Plimptons were having their wedding party. Elaine must have tipped Freddy off, because Freddy had a plate of the wedding cake sent out to me. Some months later, Freddy and George invited me to spend the July Fourth weekend with them at a house they were renting in the Hamptons. After that, I ran into George now and then, but I never saw Freddy again.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON The next day, George had to fly to Gary, Indiana, to make a speech for Bobby Kennedy. I went to work as usual, at eight-thirty. I don’t know how I did it. The telephone rings, and it’s George: “You’re going to have to come. I can’t go alone. You’re going to have to come with me.” I said, “Why? What’s wrong?” He said, “I feel awful, just awful. I need your help. I can’t go alone.” So I went. The plane was leaving at eleven, and I didn’t have time to go home. George said, “Just come and be with me.” So, I’m on this airplane, sitting next to George, who has grabbed on to both of my hands and is shaking from head to toe. Then I realize that he’s asked me to come along so I could commiserate with him over the fact that he’d married me.

  TOM GUINZBURG By the time Bobby Kennedy asked him to marry Freddy, she was pretty close to giving up on George. He didn’t want to be married, and if he hadn’t been taken with his Kennedy connections, I doubt he ever would have been.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON We landed in Gary, Indiana, and we’re met by all these women in mink stoles and mink hats and flowered dresses. They take one look at me and say, “Goodness! We need to get you something to wear!” They took us to a Quality Motel because we had to stay the night. The sign in front of the place had a big, bright yellow sun, and in the center, instead of saying, “Special Tonight: $1.99 Steak Dinner,” it said, “Welcome, Newlyweds: Mr. and Mrs. George Plimpton!” Just what George needed. We had two rooms, so I said, “George, I think I need to be alone.” And I went in the other room and shut the door. About ten minutes later I opened the door and said, “You know, we could always get divorced.” And that night he made a fabulous speech for Bobby, it was incredible, everybody was cheering, and they presented us with this huge wedding cake onstage. George was given a long knife to cut the cake: He held it like this, over the cake, point down, and just dropped it into the cake. That’s just exactly what happened. It sort of went boioioing, wobbled, and dropped onto the dais. There was an audible “Wahh!” from the audience, like he had decimated their values or something. He might have been able to tell himself that it would be funny, cutting the cake that way. Funny was to take away from sadness, or difficulty, or irritation, or negativity. So what better way to cut the fear than to cut the wedding cake in that silly way? And then, to get even further away from the fact of marriage, he took me down to the Vanderbilts’ in Palm Beach for a honeymoon—can you imagine! Gertrude didn’t like me at all, and neither did Hal. Hal didn’t want George married; George was his beautiful young man, and he was Gertrude’s beautiful young man, too. And there was I, not looking any too good! So I went out and bought myself a whole lot of Palm Beach–type outfits. I would come down after a bath, mid-morning, and every single morning Gertrude would say, “Ooh, George, who is that? She’s much better looking than yesterday’s woman. She’s quite charming.” And I had to live with these two for five days. Why did I do it? George was himself again—perfectly charming. But he had taken me to the one haven where he knew he had someone backing him that he shouldn’t have gotten married. I’m sure that he didn’t think it through, but it was still not nice.

  FIRECRACKERS AND SHOTS

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON Three days before the California primary, George and I drove through Chinatown with Bobby in his car, the three of us sitting up on the backseat, top down. Bobby was waving, waving, and these shots suddenly rang out. They turned out to be firecrackers, but George and I just fell on top of Bobby, like that. I’ve never seen anyone so exhausted and so pale and shaky as Bobby was. You just suddenly realized, My God, he’s been waiting for that moment, every moment.

  LARRY BENSKY The night before the California primary I went to this cocktail party at Blair Fuller’s house in San Francisco. George, I think, was with Freddy, and both were traveling in Kennedy’s entourage, and I remember being in Blair’s kitchen, getting Blair and George, who were on different sides—Blair was for McCarthy—into a raging fight about this. I was goading them on, saying how can you say this about Kennedy when McCarthy blah, blah, blah. Everybody was standing around just enjoying this bullfight between these two partisans of these extremely, as far as I was concerned, flawed people. And then comes the next night, primary night, and Kennedy is assassinated. It was a horrible, horrible time.

  KRISTI WITKER My very first job was at American Heritage magazine. I had been hired as an editorial assistant, but on the spur of the moment my editor decided to send me off to California to cover Bobby Kennedy’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. I was very naive and really didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but I had been a big fan of The Paris Review, and through it I’d gott
en to know and admire George Plimpton. When I discovered that he and Freddy were also on the campaign, I was delighted, and I spent most of the time hanging out with them. I became sort of the campaign mascot. I was young and had long blond hair and wore little miniskirts. I certainly didn’t look or act much like a serious journalist. I was also anything but objective. In fact, I absolutely idolized Bobby Kennedy. The night of the California primary, I was really happy to be included in a small group of journalists that Bobby had invited to his suite in the Ambassador Hotel to watch the returns with Ethel and several of their children. And I was even more excited when Bobby asked me to his victory celebration, which would be later that night. George had a rental car, so I asked if he could give me a ride. He said, “Sure, but here’s what you have to do so I don’t lose you in the crowd: just hold on to my jacket when we leave the stage, because it’s going to be a total mob scene and I’m going to work my way straight to the car.” It was even more of mob scene than he’d imagined. I remember that when Bobby finished his victory speech that night we all started moving forward on the stage, and then someone said, “No, we’re going out the back,” and we reversed our direction. I was holding on to George’s jacket for dear life and I wasn’t aware that we’d gone into the kitchen. I wasn’t aware of anything except a crush of people pushing and shoving. And then, suddenly, I heard what sounded like firecrackers. They weren’t really loud, but they seemed to be in a pattern. First, there were three, then a pause, and then—during what seemed like an eternity—there were five more. I heard voices shouting, “Get the gun...get the gun!” and at that moment I realized with horror that we were being shot at, probably by a large number of people. Most people in the crowd began screaming and stampeding out of the kitchen back toward the hotel ballroom. But I didn’t move. Everything seemed totally unreal. I remember thinking, “This can’t be happening because I already have tomorrow’s schedule!” And then, “Why run? If they’ve killed Bobby, what’s the point?” The man on my left suddenly fell to the floor. He was bleeding from his head onto my shoe, and I remember just moving my foot. And then others were shouting, “This woman’s been shot!” She was right behind me, clutching her stomach, and I glanced at her and thought, “Who cares? Don’t you realize that Bobby’s been shot and probably killed?” At that moment, I had no interest in anyone else. Bobby was the only one who mattered. As the gunman—and now I saw that there was only one—kept firing, George and Rafer Johnson were desperately struggling to get the gun out of his hand, and finally they succeeded. We were only about four feet away and Bobby was slumped on his back on the floor. I closed my eyes and clung to George. I felt that as long as I didn’t let go of him, life as it had been only moments before would suddenly snap back into place. Of course, it never did.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON I was on the stairs to the left side of the stage, facing front. George was on the floor below me, taking notes. Bobby and Ethel were supposed to turn right, to go out a different way. Somebody changed the plan and had them go through the kitchen, so they turned left and passed me, where I was standing. Bobby went ahead. Rafer Johnson and Jim Whittaker, two of his three bodyguards, were around him. George and I were right there. Ethel was further behind with Rosey Grier. We entered the kitchen with a lot of people traipsing after us. It was pretty clean and open, and there were a lot of busboys standing to the left. We went past them, and one of them leaned and stretched his arm out, and Bobby reached over and shook his hand. Then Bobby turned, and this other white jacket suddenly appeared at the end of a long, shiny table and put his hand out and shot Bobby in the head, just like that. All I wanted to do was get a doctor. George went for Sirhan, and so did a couple of other guys, and they pinned him down. I went through the swinging doors at the end of the room and shouted for doctors, police, medics, whatever—there was no one down there. I heard a lot of gunshots in that kitchen. By the time I got back, Bobby was on the floor and somebody had given him a rosary. We were just in shock. Rosey Grier, this huge tackle, just fell apart. He started crying. He went into a nervous breakdown. George and I got him up to his room in the hotel and stayed with him. Then someone located George and me and asked us to come to the hospital. Bobby wasn’t dead yet. Frank Mankiewicz, who was his press secretary at the time, made the announcement that he wasn’t doing too well. The family was filing into his room, and George and I went in, too—it was awful. There was nothing there, no sign of life in him.

  George wrestling gun from Sirhan Sirhan, June 5, 1968.

  © 1968 Los Angeles Times. Reprinted with permission.

  BILL DOW George told us that when he was later called as a defense witness at the trial, he said that Sirhan had this look on his face when they were wrestling—I think George had his hand on his throat or something—this very peaceful look on his face and this kind of dreamlike look in his eyes. I think the reason that he was called as a defense witness is that he had told the police how calm Sirhan looked, and I think the defense was figuring that that showed either insanity or else that he didn’t do it because he would have been all scared and nervous with all the commotion. I remember George telling us that when he walked into the courtroom, Sirhan had, like, this little grin on his face, and George said he was thinking, “Like, I’m going to help you, after what you’ve done?”

  FIONA MAAZEL I remember a night at a club called Life when George had so many Dewar’s that he ended up weeping. I had never seen him cry, but he was telling me about the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, and he was falling to pieces. He was sobbing. I was just sitting there thinking, “I can’t believe he’s telling me this story,” because I know he didn’t like to talk about it that much. He described in such amazing detail the way they piled on top of the guy, but instead of attending to Bobby, too many people were focused on apprehending the guy. The whole experience seemed to change his life dramatically. He never wrote about it.

  JONATHAN DEE It’s something, isn’t it, that a man who made a career writing beautifully about his own amazing autobiographical exploits would never have touched the most amazing exploit of all, would never have written about it in a million years. I remember once I was in the Paris Review basement looking for something in a file cabinet and I came across a clipping of an old AP photograph taken seconds after the RFK shooting, showing two men pinning Sirhan to the ground. The caption identifies them as “Rosey Grier and an unidentified man,” and the unidentified man is George. I brought it upstairs to show it to the others, and as I’m doing so, George walks in. He takes a look at what everyone is passing around, and I swear, the color just drained right out of him. It was very clear from his demeanor that he was not going to discuss it. I’m told that in later years he loosened up about that somewhat, and would actually answer questions about it if asked.

  ELIZABETH WURTZEL Obviously George didn’t want “access” to Robert Kennedy’s assassination, and maybe simple horror or real modesty got in the way of his ever writing about it. It was also hardly an occasion for his self-deprecating humor, or any humor, perhaps. But I was awfully close to 9/11—a wheel fell through the roof from one of the planes—and I don’t think I’ll ever write about it because whatever you say sounds wrong. If you make yourself sound too involved, you’re not nearly as involved as the people who died. On the other hand, if you’re not involved enough, you sound like a person with no feelings. So maybe that was the problem for him. It takes a really amazing writer—not to say that George wasn’t that writer, I don’t know that he was or was not. He might have just thrown up his hands and said, “I can’t do it.”

  ED BARBER The first proposal that came in to me when I became editor in chief at Harcourt Brace around 1970 was something from Phyllis Jackson, who was a grande dame of agents. She was at ICM, I believe, and she represented Jean Stein vanden Heuvel. Jean had been on the Bobby Kennedy funeral train and had run up and down interviewing people. You know, get the tape recorder out and here’s Milton Berle and his wife, here’s Art Buchwald and his wife—this big collection
of high-end people. So she had all these interviews, about three hundred of them—would I be interested in making a book out of them? Well, I could see that this was a very difficult book to put together, but I liked the interviews and signed it up. Then I looked around for somebody to work on it. First, I tried Pete Hamill, and Pete was fine with it. But he was a journalist with a unique style. He would write sizzling prose with a lot of Tks, you know, and I could see that he wasn’t going to work very well, because it was going to be half horse and half cow, part interviews and part Hamill. I wanted it to be all interviews. So next I called George. George came around, we had lunch, he looked at the stuff, and he really just fell in love with it. The book was about five years too late, because the Bobby Kennedy surge had receded. But George and I set forth and divided all of these things up with Jean, who’s a powerhouse. So she and George were working on it, and I was working on it a little bit, and it would go back and forth until things gradually shaped up. Those two didn’t quite get on as well as they might have, but that often happens with collaborations.

  $200,000 A YEAR

  CHRIS CERF He needed money more than usual after his marriage, obviously, and more than that after his children were born. He sometimes had to do things that he probably thought were funny, and were, but in ways that he probably didn’t appreciate, like those swimming pool commercials. My dad and George had many things in common, of which this is one. My dad did television shows when all the other publishers said, “How could you stoop to being on What’s My Line?” My dad had all kinds of brilliant excuses about why it was good business for Random House, and so it was. But he also loved doing it. He was a ham; he loved the public eye, and I think George loved it, too. George’s being on TV and in the movies delighted me, and I don’t think it did him any harm at all, except among people who were hopelessly stuffy to begin with. It also helped keep The Paris Review going.