George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  MARY JO PARKER When my sister and I first started taking care of Taylor and Medora, as summer au pairs, I was surprised by how young Mrs. Plimpton was. I guess I didn’t realize the age difference between the two of them. I thought she was very enthusiastic about the projects that she was doing and that she wanted the best for her children that she could possibly give them. She was a little high-strung, and very concerned that they were well taken care of. There were some days where she would just close herself off from the rest of us and just decompress or whatever. I think that’s what we were there for. It was our job to take all those burdens from her—well, not “burdens,” but the care of the children and other household responsibilities. The house on Long Island was a big house, and they needed people to take care of it.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON I had never known what being in love was until I had Medora. Never. I had never known that heart-flipping, heart-stopping, ear-ringing, eye-bulging, heart-thumping...back in the city, I’d see the nanny pushing her up the street. I’d walk over to meet them halfway, and when I’d see that carriage coming, I would just get so excited to see her and hold her and smell her and touch her. I guess no one had ever allowed me to love anyone that much, that’s what it is. But that’s how much love I had. And that was news to me.

  George and Mr. Puss. © Nancy Crampton,

  from Writers: Photographs by Nancy Crampton.

  ANN WINCHESTER I spent a lot of time with them out on Long Island. I know people actually wondered why I was there; they probably gossiped. And the funny thing is, it was probably the most innocent thing in my life. Now that I look back on it, I think that George was to me like my brother had been—a passionate friend. I had an affair of the heart with my brother through our exuberant sharing of childhood. In much the same way, George and I behaved like total children inside the grown-up world of New York. We shared a huge sense of the ridiculous, which was most often channeled through the medium of Mr. Puss. And that cat took himself very seriously indeed. Freddy, on the other hand, was like my mother. She was a lot of fun, yet felt compelled to keep things tidy, and in control. She thought of herself as the adult of the group and pointed out that the rest of us were like children. And she was absolutely right, you know. Freddy was a very good mom, the den mother, the responsible adult—and yet very much up for a great laugh as well. Like my mother. With George it was total childishness. Anything less than utter childishness made his eyes glaze over. For some reason, the cat, Mr. Puss, was essential to him. He was George’s straight man. And George certainly inhabited Mr. Puss. Or . . . maybe the cat was George’s familiar. Freddy didn’t understand Mr. Puss; she was good to him, looked after him, but she just didn’t get his point. The cat, I mean. He was gigantic! You could hardly pick him up, could you? I have wonderful photographs of Medora with him—and of Taylor, attacking Mr. Puss in a tae kwan do stance. George loved him; George and he were one. So a lot of things ended when Mr. Puss died. Certainly our friendship tailed off then.

  MARY JO PARKER Mr. Plimpton seemed almost childlike when he was with the children. He’d be very attentive, very much into building a sandcastle or whatever it was that they were interested in doing. When Medora was into putting on her own plays, he would get anxious and excited to see her perform. He was delighted with whatever she did. He was just enthused that he could do things with them.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON We belonged to this little club, the most elite club on earth, I think, called the Devon Yacht Club. They were the most uptight group of people I’ve ever met in my life. No Jews, no blacks, no—and this is the seventies. It was appalling. If people brought anyone to the club who looked at all different, you could see them all whispering and glancing at you, sort of making remarks against you. Anyway, one time George had asked his circus friends from the Wolper TV series—the trapeze artist and his wife—to come out for the weekend. That’s all. And then he took them next door to the Devon to play tennis, which they had never really played before. But he introduced them to a lot of people. “Hello, this is my friend. He’s a trapeze artist.” Anyway, he was trying to get into the Maidstone Club at this time, a place even more appalling than the Devon, because it was a great place to play tennis on grass. And the word got out that George had brought circus people—midgets—onto the tennis court at Devon. Thus he was not allowed to join the Maidstone.

  MICHAEL THOMAS I’ve been to the Devon Yacht Club. It’s in Amagansett on Gardiners Bay. Devon has sailing, which the Maid-stone hasn’t, and perfectly decent tennis courts. If you’re black-balled at the Maidstone, as George was, and if you’re George, you would join the Devon. They have these incredibly stuffy dinners on Friday night where you have to wear a necktie. Being a yacht club, they still observe the sunset protocol, cannon fire, the flag going down, members standing respectfully. I have a friend named John Alexander, a painter, who lives in inland Amagansett; he used to trap raccoons that were bothering me, then he would drive them all over to the Devon Yacht Club and release them in the garbage there.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON Some of the most romantic times I had with George were our trips to Africa. We went on several safaris together. At first it was all about Hemingway. George loved Papa Hemingway, and he wanted the experience of being a big-game hunter in Africa. He wanted the big five: the buffalo, the elephant, the lion, the leopard, and the rhino. All of Papa’s trophies, he wanted. He didn’t put it like that, but he said, “Papa would have loved that!” as he shot a buffalo or something. Later, I think he just wanted to see Africa. Neither of us thought we would fall in love with it the way we did. We didn’t want to go home. I didn’t like the idea that George was shooting animals, but I understood it and forgave it. Sometimes we’d start giggling and we’d walk off into the bush without telling anybody, like children.

  WALON GREEN George’s African adventure was for a Wolper show in which George was to be a Life wildlife photographer and to try to get a cover picture of the largest elephant in the world, named Ahmed, who lived in the north of Kenya. Wildlife photography was just coming into its own in those days. At night we built this big fire that we would sit around, and people would come from neighboring camps. George had this kind of Jungian vortex thing, where interesting people just started showing up. Within a couple of days, this guy John G. Williams arrived, who had written Birds of East Africa and was taking these two ladies on safari. Then a friend of mine, who I didn’t know was in Africa, showed up with this woman named Eva Motley, who had come there to make films. One night, we were telling stories around the fire, and I heard Eva Motley talking about how she’d first come to Africa. She was in the film business in England as a young woman, and she wanted to work on this film in the Congo called The Nun’s Story, starring Audrey Hepburn. Meanwhile, George and I could hear this woman on the other side of the fire who was talking about having first come to Africa as a nun in the Congo. Suddenly it dawned on both of us that the woman who’s talking about having come to the Congo to make the movie about the nun who came to the Congo is now sitting across the campfire from that very nun. It was an extraordinary moment. George was a catalyst for things like that. You went someplace and talked to people, and you would suddenly find out that there was something rather extraordinary about them. It had happened earlier, during our trip up there. We stopped at a warden’s house at some park and a guy came up in a Land Rover and joined us on the porch, and we had tea and talked for a while. This guy knew all about the water-courses and the area we were going to. When he’d been introduced, I noticed that George perked up. I didn’t even catch the name. George tried to invite him to dinner, but he got in his car and drove away. It turned out that he was this explorer named Wilfred Thesiger, who’d written Arabian Sands, on the marsh Arabs, and George was thrilled. He said it was a unique opportunity to meet this guy, because he never comes where anybody can see him. Then, when we went to the coast, it happened again when he found this old guy named Barr Allen, living in the Arab section of the Lamu. He had been some big northern frontier
guy in his day, back in the thirties, when it was a wild and woolly district. I can’t even remember how George found him, but suddenly he said, “Oh, you must come immediately, I’ve found Barr Allen.” I said, “Who’s Barr Allen?” He knew all about him, of course.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON In Nairobi, George always took me to the Nairobi Zoo’s snake pit to pay homage to the Gaboon viper, which is a horrible sluggish snake that’s too big to slither quickly out of your way, like most snakes do; so if you stumbled on one, it bit you, and if it bit you, you’d be dead in a matter of seconds. George felt that his chances of survival were better if he acknowledged it before heading into the bush. There it was: a big fat thing that didn’t move at all. And there George would be, bowing to it!

  WALON GREEN We wanted to get some footage of George very close to elephants, so someone suggested that we put him up in a tree, and then when the elephants gathered, he’d be six or seven feet above their heads. We got George up the tree—literally out on a limb—and the elephants came. They were right under the tree, and I was getting kind of worried about him, because they could start whacking the tree and knock him out of there. I mean, he was right over their backs, looking down at them. I can tell you he was kind of like, “I’m awfully close to these elephants right now....” These are wild elephants. We had no control over anything, and soon they were rubbing themselves against the tree, moving it and shaking it, and we thought, “What if they shake it so hard, he comes falling out?” Suddenly George drops out of the tree into the middle of a herd of elephants. But that went well. We also walked him up on a pond with a huge python in it and didn’t tell him it was there. Someone said, “A python! Let’s catch it, George!” So he had to wrestle a python out of the pond. George would do anything. He was a good sport. He didn’t like snakes particularly, but he was game for it.

  ANN WINCHESTER George was there to take a picture of Ahmed that was good enough for the front cover of Life—not an easy feat. My main memory of him is sitting around the campfire watching him pick ticks off his legs. We were all doing it, but as George always had the most (having been tracking Ahmed in the bush on foot), we were very afraid that he would get tick fever, which you can die from.

  WALON GREEN We had no problem finding Ahmed every day—he was easy to find—and for a while, though we always hoped something really exciting might happen, all George was able to do was watch Ahmed consume immense amounts of food. At Lake Manyara, however, there was an elephant named Boadicea who was guaranteed to charge. We were told she’d rush up to the Land Rover and tear up the bushes and throw them up in the air. She never actually hit a Land Rover. She always stopped short. Or so they said. But who could tell for sure whether that charging behemoth was really Boadicea? We didn’t tell George the whole story. He knew it was a setup, but he didn’t know exactly what the setup was. We said, “Oh, let’s drive out and look at these elephants, and we’ll film over your shoulder.” We edged up, and edged up, and we knew Boadicea was there, and we knew that when we got to a certain point, she’d come booming out of the bush. Which she did, and we got a really great sequence.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON I’ll tell you one story from the Hemingway period of our trips. George and his guide went out after a rhino we had spotted some distance away. We pulled the Jeep over to the side of the road, and I got up through the top to see, and George and the white hunter and Choshi, my favorite tracker, went out, crouching down, to try to get within shooting distance—all of a sudden it puts its head up, it snorts and starts to paw the earth. I can see all of this. That rhino came at them so fast, and they looked like those cartoons of people running, with their arms pumping and their knees right up to their chests. It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. They were so embarrassed.

  WALON GREEN George wrote his own script for the Ahmed show. I kind of outlined what we would do and where we would go, and George did the rest. Nobody could write like George—same with the interviews. I never told him what to go for; he was better at reading people than I was. He’d get a good interview out of a rock. He was able to get the kind of universal nugget that connected all humanity, whether he was interviewing a good guy or a bad guy. One guy I remember bragged about shooting down elephants and watching them fall, saying how there’s nothing greater than the sensation of seeing that bullet smack and to know you’d done a well-placed brain shot. But what was remarkable about it was that George managed to touch the core of the guy’s passion. The same day, George could’ve interviewed one of the great conservationist leaders of Africa, and he would’ve gotten the guy weeping about the death of a salamander or something.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON Africa was an intensely romantic place for both of us. In those days, there wasn’t anything out there but a silhouette on the horizon, and man, you wanted to know what it was. We loved the tents, and learning Swahili, and the problems with the funky latrines—just the ways of Africa. When we were back in New York, George would zip his raincoat and say, “Hodi! Nataka chai?” (“Greetings! Do you want tea?”)—just like the “boy” who woke us up in the morning, unzipping the tent to bring us our tea.

  TWO PRANKS

  WARREN YOUNG We started planning the Dynamite Museum in George’s apartment. The formative group was George, of course, John Train, Christopher Cerf, Michael Frith, George Trow, and Michael O’Donoghue. One of the offerings to subscribers of the museum was that you could adopt a turkey. You could adopt either an unhatched egg, which you could name, or a real live turkey that was scooting around some farmer’s yard. And you would be sent a monthly status report on this turkey. Let’s say its name was Claude: You would get a note saying that Claude is gaining weight fast, he’s eating well, he’s socializing with the other birds, mother and father are quite proud, and we have great hopes that he will be a fine, fine turkey. Each iteration would be a postcard, and you would not only have a picture of this turkey, but you would have all the vital signs and growth patterns as well. The punch line, a month or so later, would be that we regret to say that the farmer’s truck rolled over Claude and we would like to know where to send the remains, or that Claude got mixed up with another lot which unfortunately are in Stop & Shop, and we would replicate the label in case they wanted to look for him there. And who was going to write these offerings? It could be Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Bill Buckley, or a famous basketball player. George would round up the people. After many planning meetings, the whole effort was to be announced at a gathering at none other than Elaine’s, where we invited a hundred and ten handpicked, creative people. I remember it went from Capote to Mao Tsetung. The letter came from the committee, signed by George, of course, inviting them to this grand dinner, RSVP to this address, and indeed we locked up Elaine’s for the night and took it over. Of course, Elaine herself was on our list—not only as our hostess, but because she was a character in her own right—but she couldn’t come. We had picked the one night where she had another engagement, quote unquote, and I leave it to you to come up with the reason why Elaine would not attend a soiree like that.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON I have such good memories of the Dynamite Museum. Here in our apartment were a bunch of people I loved, having so much fun throwing out concepts and running with them. And the laughter! In those days, there was so much lightheartedness. Nobody’s life had gotten too serious yet. It was more fun than anything else could’ve been.

  CHRIS CERF I remember Jed Harris having a wonderful idea for the Dynamite Museum, called the Bottom Party: He was going to send an invitation out to anyone whose name ended in “bottom,” and he’d never tell anybody why they were invited and just let them go into the party and discover that that’s what they all had in common. The basic idea was to pull off colossal hoaxes, but that’s what we didn’t explain properly. George strongly felt that we didn’t really have to do very many things, we could just take credit for them, you know, the idea being that if something weird happened to be going on, we would say the Dynamite Museum did it.

  MICHAEL FRITH
That night at Elaine’s, I was mostly in the back room. I think the group spilled out into the front room, but it certainly filled the back room—jam-packed, shoulder to shoulder. We had a good dinner. I don’t know how we paid for it. I remember that wine flowed freely and the room was so thick with smoke, you could barely breathe. Of course, there was this enormous sense of anticipation—“What is this all about? What is going to happen? George is gonna speak! Oh, my God, isn’t it amazing we’re all here? It’s the cream of creative, artistic, intellectual, humorous society in America today and perhaps even the world!” There was this wonderful, electric sense of self-importance in the room. So the evening got later and later, with more and more wine, more and more smoke. Finally, as dinner was winding down and last drinks were being served, ding, ding, ding on the glass, and George gets up and makes this speech. All I remember was sitting there with this enormous sense of anticipation: There’s no one who would be able to sell this like George. He stands up on the chair in the front of the room, over by the window, and a hush falls over the room. Everybody is just so focused. He’s like, “So here we all are, to learn about the Dynamite Museum,” and so on and so forth, “and it’s going to be this amazing group, all of us here today, and we’ll work together to...create...certain...items. There will be items like Mrs. So-and-so in Dubuque, and we’ll let her know that she is going to get a turkey. And then every few weeks we’ll send her a bulletin about the progress of this turkey!” And the room was like, “Where is this going?” Totally downhill, is where. He never really finished off with his lady in Dubuque, what she would get with this turkey, and why she would care about the life of this turkey that was being fattened up for Thanksgiving. Then he started saying that this was only one of the items, and there would be many other items, and of these items, some of them would be mysterious, some of them would be funny, some of them would be baffling. All these items. And as he went along with all these items, people started going, “Okay,” looking at each other, and then they started picking up their drinks again. The level of conversation began to rise, gradually filled the room, and George, as I recall, kind of looked around and said, “Thank you very much.” Everyone went, “Hurray!” And that was the end of the Dynamite Museum. But somehow it was all strangely wonderful. And the thing of it is, it could never have happened without George.