George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON There came a time when things were getting out of hand. I was drinking too much and unhappy about it. I started worrying that something bad was going to happen, that we were going to suffer some repercussions from our behavior. That is why I moved out to the house on Long Island and lived there most of the time and went to these little AA meetings right around there. It was the only place where I didn’t pick up a drink. In that apartment, I knew I couldn’t not pick up a drink. So George and I gradually drifted apart. He met Sarah, and I, unfortunately, met another man.

  NANCY STODDART I remember going to see George in the early eighties. He was speaking about something or other at a church on Park Avenue. I spent quite a lot of time with him outside the church, and he was just frantic over whatever Freddy was doing and what was going on with her. She was really circling the drain, and he didn’t know what to do at that point. Apparently, she had gone and married someone. Yet he turned out to be the utter demon.

  FAYETTE HICKOX She met this guy who everybody thought was fabulous, but he turned out to be a demon. That was the person for whom she left George and left behind her family, left it all behind. It was just unbelievable. Everyone thought he was saintly, amusing, handsome, great, and he just revealed himself as this really ugly, diabolical person.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON I didn’t just walk into George’s office one day and say, “I want a divorce.” He knew I was going to see a lawyer, and I reassured him that—“Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask for any sort of settlement at all.” Later he said, “If I thought you would ask for money, I wouldn’t have divorced you.”

  PETER MATTHIESSEN We were going to play tennis with Jean and Steve Smith on their court in Bridgehampton, and George arrived late, very haggard. As usual, he’d failed to bring a racket, expecting others to provide it—with his celebrity had come a firm sense of entitlement. He was great fun to play with, however, very competitive yet always a good sport, cheering on his partner, even a poor one. His court manners were exceptionally gracious. He lacked speed; otherwise he was a very adept and graceful player. But this day was the only time I’d ever seen him play truly bad tennis. He kept missing and flubbing, hardly seemed to know where the ball was. We all thought he had a murderous hangover. Suddenly, he just stopped and put his racket down and blurted out, “I can’t keep my mind on this. Freddy has run off with another man.” He’d just learned of it that morning. He was really suffering, absolutely devastated, poor guy. We all gave him hugs, and Steve said, “I think this calls for a big pitcher of daiquiris!” He marched into the house and made the daiquiris, which we finished off while George talked out the whole thing. He was way beyond keeping his chin up. He had dropped his guard, and his defenselessness was very moving.

  SOL GREENBAUM She wanted the divorce. George said, “You want a divorce, you got a divorce.” She apparently had a relationship and they wanted to get married, so she was very anxious to get divorced. The settlement was ridiculous, from her point of view. As Jim Goodale, George’s lawyer, put it, “Boy, did I work out a great settlement here!” and he did.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON I got married—under subtle but persistent pressure, I now realize. Well, he was a sociopath. He set it up. He set it up so I had nothing and so he would have total control over me. After he married me, he became physically abusive, and I managed to get away from him after three months. I had no expectations of George at all, but he came right down to New Orleans to see me, to see how I was doing, to hear what happened; to be there. George was like . . . my father or a dear uncle or something.

  SOL GREENBAUM After she ran away from her second husband, who turned out to be a wife beater, everything changed with respect to the settlement, though it didn’t have to change, legally speaking. He left the country, and they got divorced, and then she was high and dry, so George continued to support her. He not only bought a house for her in the Hamptons, but he also arranged for her to get a generous monthly allowance to live on.

  DRUE HEINZ I went down to Long Island when George and Freddy were trying to decide what to do with the house, during the divorce. George and Freddy were so sweet to each other and it went easily. They decided to sell the house, I think, and she’d get another house, where she’s living now, and she’s fine. George and Freddy were marvelous together. I used to feel desperate sometimes that there wasn’t a real person there in George. Then I realized that, intrinsically, he was loving and caring. It might have been sheer upbringing, you know what I mean? Certain ways you behave, certain ways you don’t. But he was marvelous in that difficult situation, so kind and so patient.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON I had hurt George badly. Yet when I really needed help, when I had walked off with some crazy guy and felt destroyed and had nothing, nothing—George was the most reassuring, the most helpful, the most generous, the sweetest person. I realized how much he meant to me. What a true gentleman he was.

  FAYETTE HICKOX She now lives in this little house that George got for her in Bridgehampton with wonderful views of the water...it’s certainly a modest house, but she has zillions of birds that come every day, and she watches them and happily creates things and has a sort of spiritual side, and I think that’s what she was seeking. She’s freed. Her status with George was weird in a way, to the rest of the world. She was just seen as an appendage by a lot of people, whereas now she’s a person in her own right. It’s so nice to see someone reach serenity after such an odyssey.

  VII.

  GEORGE IS GEORGE TO

  THE END: 1983–2003

  ____

  Did I tell you about the time I met Yogi Bhajan? The subject of my impending marriage to George came up and he grilled me about my motives. I went through the obvious responses like love and passion, but he didn’t buy it. He just kept at me until I was so exasperated I said, “I’m marrying him because I have to figure out why I want to marry him.”

  —SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON

  SARAH

  NORMAN MAILER I was taken with Sarah. I liked her immediately. She’s got it all. And I thought, “Gee, this is a lady George might really be able to have a marriage with.”

  Sarah meets George, Los Angeles, 1984.

  Collection of Sarah Dudley Plimpton.

  JONATHAN DEE There was a great deal of gravitas when the staff was called up into the living room and told that George and Freddy were divorcing and that George and Sarah [Dudley] were romantically involved—as if that was something we hadn’t already known. Truman Capote had been their beard, so to speak, because she’d been helping George with various research and transcription duties having to do with his oral biography of Capote. But the first thing I did when I came into the office every morning was to call the message service, and there would often be a message or two for George from Sarah from eleven o’clock the previous night, asking in semicoded language if now was a good time to come over; so there was pretty obviously an extraprofessional relationship there. It was all a foregone conclusion. George and Freddy had been married in name only for a decade at that point. I don’t know for sure, but I imagine he was somewhat relieved that, though the marriage was broken, he hadn’t had to be the one who asked for the divorce.

  NANCY STODDART Sarah seems like a very different sort of person. She seems to me like a real straight shooter, like she’d be the sort of person who can kind of handle him.

  PIEDY LUMET I remember seeing Sarah in Sagaponack before they were married, on a bicycle with him, and they looked fine together. I felt that he might become a little bit settled for the first time in his life. She was wearing a sarong and a bathing suit top. He looked quite pleased with himself.

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON We first met in Los Angeles, where I was working for American Express, who were corporate sponsors osf the 1984 Summer Olympics. They were famous for entertaining clients lavishly at sports events, whether it was the Super Bowl or the Olympics. They spared nothing. This was the eighties, so you could imagine. I had been hired to produce a series of speeches, a
nd he was a natural for that, but I had to wrangle him. He had a reputation for getting lost. So the first time I met him, I walked into his hotel room at the Beverly Wilshire and he was stretched out on his bed in his undershorts, papers spread all around him. I mean, how many stories about George begin like that, with George appearing in his boxers? Anyway, there he was. I walked in and instantly felt that I had known him my whole life. I just . . . it was like talking to a member of my own family. I felt so at ease with him. One evening, not long into this, we were in the Beverly Wilshire bar, chatting, and he sort of reached over and put his hand on my knee. I’m so clueless, I thought, “Isn’t that nice he feels so collegial?” It never even occurred to me that he was making a pass. Besides, he was still married, Freddy had just gone to her first rehab, and I was seeing two other people at the time. But he wore me down gradually. Let’s put it this way, he wasn’t that subtle. He wore me down, and finally I gave in. I’ll never forget it because I sort of heaved a sigh, “Oh, all right.”

  BILLY GRAHAM Sarah Dudley was the daughter of my parents’ next-door neighbor in Cold Spring Harbor, on East Gate Road, so I knew Sarah when she was a little kid, when she was a baby; and then I didn’t see anything of her for years and years. I came back to New York in 1976 or ’77 for most of the summer to do a miniseries with Frank Sinatra, and while I was there I would come out to Long Island, and, by this time, Sarah was a grown-up young lady; she was twenty-five years old, I think, and quite lovely, and I used to see her down on the beach. We got friendly, and one thing led to another, and the next thing you know, she was my girlfriend. I don’t think she ever actually lived out here in L.A., but we did see a lot of each other. Well, George beat me out there; I would have married her if George hadn’t. In fact, at one point I was already going with Janet, who is my present wife, and Janet and I had a fight over something or other, so I flew back to New York and I called up Sarah and I said, “Come with me to London; let’s get married in Westminster Abbey.” I think she thought that was a little precipitous, you know. She did come to Yugoslavia with me, though, where I was doing the miniseries on Mussolini, and she spent several weeks there. That was sometime in the eighties. Anyway, we were very close, great friends. Still are.

  DEBORAH PEASE Well, I think I met Sarah only once when I was publisher. I went to the office occasionally for one reason or another, and she stopped by one day on her way to see George. I had the impression that their relationship was entirely work related—she was doing editorial work for him on the Capote book. She seemed a nice, straightforward, down-to-earth person who could be a member of George’s family. You didn’t have that feeling about Freddy.

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON I figured our affair would end once we got back to New York, but he began to call and ask me out to dinner. He was lonely. He didn’t have anyone to talk to once the staff went home. Freddy was pretty well gone—out in Sagaponack most of the time. Taylor was there, but he was small and tended to by various people. Medora was at boarding school. Sometimes I would come over and we’d go out to dinner together at a local place. My two boyfriends drifted away. After a while, with George it became a routine: He would stop by my apartment in the evening after he’d done his rounds. It couldn’t have been more convenient for him. I was next door at 531 East Seventy-second Street and had been since 1976. Sometimes I would give him supper, but most of the time he just wanted to decompress from the day. We’d sit and talk or watch the news together. It just developed from there. I kept him at arm’s length because I knew he was a married man, and I didn’t want to get involved with that. More than anything, I think he just wanted somebody to come home to, and I was there. Once, he bought me a microwave and stocked my refrigerator with frozen dinners so he could have supper on his way home. After a while, I began going to speaking engagements with him. Usually Friday night we would go out and he’d drag himself out of bed on Saturday mornings and get on the jitney for Sagaponack with Taylor.

  MARJORIE KALMAN From Sarah’s point of view, it must have been very odd to be seeing a married man when suddenly his wife leaves him and there he is, available. She’s got to ask, “Does this mean I’m supposed to marry him?” That isn’t what happens, statistically speaking. But in this rare case, it did, though I think it was two years before they got married. I said to Sarah, “Where are you going to live?” She said, “I don’t know.” By that time she had moved to an apartment on Lexington Avenue. George was ambivalent by his own confession. She wanted to be married, and I guess there was no reason he shouldn’t be married, but he was ambivalent about it.

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON Here was a man who was my father’s age and so much more sophisticated than I was. He would ask me what I thought he should do about this or that—serious things, delicate things, practical things. I was a sounding board, true, but I always told him the truth as I saw it. I sensed that many people only told him what he wanted to hear. I think he was very drawn to me for that, and it was a healthy impulse on his part. He knew he was with someone who was honest and trustworthy, someone who would look out for him.

  A. E. HOTCHNER George had been going out with Sarah for a few years, after the divorce, and one night, we’re sitting in Elaine’s at the big table in the back (the one we call the Woody Allen table), and there were about ten of us at this table, packed in. George was there with Sarah, and I’d been with them there at dinner a couple of times, and I was very fond of Sarah. I said, “George, don’t you think the time has come that maybe you should be getting serious about this relationship—how serious is this relationship, anyway?” George became flustered; you didn’t try to penetrate George’s persona like that. So he sort of fumbled around a bit. He said, “Well, Sarah and I, we’re certainly going to be serious.” And I said, “Well, when’s it going to happen? It’s been going on for a couple of years. Why don’t you set a date?” He said, “Oh, well, I’ve got to get around to that.” “No I mean right now.” He said, “What do you mean, right now?” I said, “Right now, here, you’ve got witnesses. Why don’t you just turn to Sarah and say, Let’s do it June fifth, or whenever?” And there was this absolute terror on George’s face. Nobody had ever challenged him like that. And Sarah looked at him, just smiling at him, as if expectant, and everybody got in on it. “Come on, George.” “Don’t mislead this young lady anymore.” “The time has come.” And George stepped right up and said, “Let’s get married.” And he set a date. I don’t think he ever forgave me, but he invited me to the wedding.

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON As for why I married him, I was warned. “You’ve never been married,” people would say. “George isn’t going to change; nobody ever does, why should he?” But I really thought it would be different with me. I truly did not understand how important the magazine and his social life were to him. Besides, I’d been rebelling against warnings like that all my life. So had George—we came from similar backgrounds—only he’d found a way to inhabit both worlds, the conventional and the rebellious. I wanted to learn how to do that, and he wanted someone to share it with. Periodically I would get fed up and call it quits, but then he’d pour on the charm until he got me back. With George, there was always a sense that you were going on some exotic, romantic adventure; nobody else could possibly have so much fun. You felt that this was the best fireworks show there ever was, this is the funniest cab ride I’m ever going to have, this is the best hamburger ever. We used to eat at this dive down the street, a hamburger bar with a canoe strung from the ceiling. We would go down there in the dead of winter, he in his sock-slippers with the leather bottoms sewn on, oblivious to the ice and the snow, and we would sit and eat and talk for hours, and you felt like you’d entered an enchanted world.

  MAVIS HUMES BAIRD You’d have a hard time, I think, finding any mean motive on Sarah’s side of this match. She married for love—meaning, at least, that she loved him and felt herself loved by him. But she was not blinded by it. She knew much of what she was getting into—the age difference, the drinking, his infinite distract
ibility (by women, among other things), and so on. What she doesn’t seem to have known is that she couldn’t change him—at all. This was forgivable. There were people, a few, who thought she had changed him or that something had: the twin girls she’d had, his growing older. But George was George, a living deacon’s masterpiece, all of a piece to the end. And so, as time went on in that marriage, she must have felt hopelessly naive or strangely complacent. But perhaps she was just charmed—bewitched—as only George could charm.

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON The wedding was New Year’s Eve 1991, at my parents’ house in Redding, Connecticut. We only had our immediate families. After dinner George, Medora, and Taylor shot off fireworks. It was a freezing cold, black night and you could hear the fireworks reverberate through the Connecticut hills. At one point a spark landed on Taylor’s jacket; George always said, “I almost burned up my son on my wedding night.” A few days after the wedding, we had a reception at the Colony Club in New York, which was surreal. At eight o’clock, my mother decided that it was time for everybody to go home, and she started flicking the light switch. George and I went out. We just wanted to get out of there; we wanted to be free. I’ll never forget it—we went out into the night and we held hands and we skipped up Park Avenue toward home. Imagine George skipping. We were giddy.