FIONA MAAZEL In my day, George being around seventy years old, there were probably fewer parties upstairs, probably fewer parties for George to go to elsewhere. So, often he’d go out somewhere on an adventure of some sort, and he took the editors everywhere with him in the evening. I remember him deciding one night that what we had to do was go to a club called Life. We went in there, and it was like that Scorsese shot in the movie GoodFellas, where you see them walking through the restaurant, bypassing all the lines and ropes and people waiting to get in. You would walk with him all the way back to the VIP room, where he would order his Dewar’s, and you’d sit and chat until all hours of the night. He loved his magazine, and he loved his staff. Whoever the staff was at the time, he loved them. He would do anything to help someone on the staff. He always hung out with them. Of course, I thought he was crazy not to hang out with his own coterie of friends, but I was happy and grateful he didn’t.
ANNE FULENWIDER One night, George took us all to Elaine’s for dinner, all six or eight of us, and Doris Kearns Goodwin and her husband came in. George was introducing us all around, and Doris Kearns Goodwin sort of looked at us and was like, “You mean, all of these people work for you in your house every day?” And George was like, “Yeah, yeah, we have a great time!” And she looks at her husband and she’s like, “This is what we need! We need six kids to be running around our house all the time.”
The Tortola Junket. Front row, from left: James Scott Linville, Brigid Hughes, Anne Fulenwider, staffers. Back row: Egbert Donovan, restaurant owner; Steve Clark and Daniel Kunitz, staffers; George and Remar Sutton, friend.
Photograph by Mona Donovan. Courtesy of Remar Sutton.
SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON From my perspective, upstairs, they looked to me like a highly dysfunctional family with all its intrigue and rivalries. George used to laugh affectionately and call them “my paraplegic outfield.” For a bunch of paraplegics, these kids thought their association with the Review, with George, was a kind of anointment.
ELIZABETH WURTZEL On the Tortola trip it was me, Jamie Linville, the kids from the Review, this one other guy, and George and Remar [Sutton]. There was something that struck me as just crazy about this—why was George doing this? It was hard to know whether to think it was wonderful or to think, “You really should be home with your wife and kids, being a serious adult.” Looking back on it now, now that he’s gone, you tend to want to look at it as all very wonderful. But we were just baffled as to why it was that he wanted to be around all these kids.
BRIAN ANTONI One time in Miami, I lost my car and we were walking through alleys looking for it. I said to George, “Take a cab, go home, I’ll find the car.” And he said, “No, I’ll stay with you.” I was afraid for him because he was older, he was all dressed up, and I was worried that somebody would mug us. All of a sudden, these three thugs came out, and I was thinking, “Oh, my God, this is the end: George Plimpton dies in the alley with Brian Antoni and it’s all his fault.” And then one of the thugs says, “Sidd Finch!” which was this fantasy he wrote about a guy who could pitch a ball a hundred ninety miles per hour. We stayed and had a long conversation, and he just kept saying, “I love Sidd fucking Finch.”
THOMAS MOFFETT One time we all went to a Radiohead concert together. George came late. Security said, “Oh, right this way,” and put him in a freight elevator with Gwyneth Paltrow. She looked up at him and said, “Oh, Mr. Plimpton, I went to Spence with Medora,” and George was just smitten. He was wearing a seersucker suit at the Radiohead show, which just looked so out of place.
DANIEL KUNITZ For a number of years in the nineties we had a regular Friday night doubles game at the River Club. What would happen was we would take the last court time at the River Club at eight o’clock, and we could play for two hours, until ten, and then go up to the bar and drink. George, even in his mid-seventies, was a fantastic tennis player. Steve Clark, who was twenty-eight at the time and the best nonprofessional tennis player I had ever seen in my life, said that George beat him. He wasn’t about power. He had beautiful touch. The man had serious game.
OLIVER BROUDY One day, the Underground Literary Alliance challenged us to a debate. The ULA is a ragtag bunch of bad writers who have collected together into a group whose main mission is to grouse about how excluded they are. It’s hard to be angry at them and to get your back up about it, because it’s really just kind of sad. Anyway, George is a good sport, and when we showed their challenge to George, thinking that he might get a laugh out of it, he said, “So why don’t we go on down, see what they can do?” We were like, blink, blink, “What?” So that’s what we did.
TOM BELLER Hardly anyone showed up, but I was there with some people from my magazine, Open City, and George was there with Team Paris Review. The Times had a reporter there, I think. Some speeches were made. Then George made the most brilliant rhetorical move I’ve ever seen in a public situation. Amazingly, in a classic example of how sworn enemies have so much in common, Karl Wenclas of the ULA, or someone in his gang, started going on about Hemingway. Finally, George has had all he can take and he says just one word, in that full-on, unashamed, unironic patrician accent—and the word was “Nonsense!” Three times he said it, and the third “Nonsense” fell like a sledgehammer.
OLIVER BROUDY How anyone could maintain that interest and excitement in life for so long is . . . freakish. I remember walking down the street with him once. We’d just gotten out of a play in the East Village. They were putting on The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair, based on George’s New Yorker piece. Afterwards, we’re walking down the sidewalk, and there’s this hubbub in the East Village, and he said, “Isn’t that amazing? Look what’s going on in there! And in there! Everyone’s doing something!” We passed one place after another, and he was just thrilled and delighted by all of the activity, and curious always.
THE MASTER OF CEREMONIES
SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON Any organization that was in some way dedicated to improving the quality of life in New York City, he made himself available to. He gave very generously of his time and his energy, not necessarily his money. He didn’t have a lot of money to give. In fact, I remember Russ Hemenway telling me how cheap he was, and I said, “Maybe financially, but not with his time, nor with his self.” He gave time to the Explorers Club, to all the arts organizations, and, as far as I could see, to every settlement house in New York, plus PBS, the Philharmonic, the Municipal Arts Society. Some weeks it seemed like he was out every night giving a speech for some organization or other. To individuals, too, his friends and relatives, he was almost infinitely responsive. He spoke at their christenings, their birthdays, their graduations, their weddings; when they were being honored for something, when they were running for office; and then, of course, when they died. At his memorial service, a number of people came up to me saying how disappointed they were because he was supposed to speak at their funeral. In his time, he was master of New York’s ceremonies.
NORMAN MAILER I think if there were a rivalry between George and me, it would be at giving toasts. I have to say, he was the best toastmaster in New York. I always felt as if I were the second best, and on occasion could win. He was wonderful at toasting to people. He was sort of like Pete Maravich on a basketball court when it came to giving toasts. He could do things no one else could do. It was his sense of the particular on the one hand, and of the ridiculous on the other. There was one occasion when we were visiting a certain country and for some reason, Norris and I had been put up at a good hotel, while George was put up at another place chosen by the charity for which we were doing the reading. Well, George had a mean existence for a couple days, while we were having a splendid one, and when he found out, he was furious. But I don’t think he was even aware of how annoyed he was until he got up to toast the man who had put him up in this hotel. It was George at his best. He described the quality of the sheets and the heat of the coffee in the morning, and the wonderful company. He was up in the morning all prepared to talk to a few
of the wonderful people at the place, and there they were, going off in limousines and Mercedes-Benzes, while he was left alone for hours wandering around these grounds that were well kept, but not exceptionally well kept. It wasn’t that he really minded when he stumbled and almost fell, because he didn’t fall, and those things happen when you’re walking through a garden that is kept up, but not totally kept up. On and on he went. He had the entire audience absolutely roaring with laughter at the guy who ran the thing. That was the only time I ever heard him do something like that. He was like a marvelous writer, taking a premise and running with it. That’s where his real writing would come in. He didn’t need to know what he was going to do when he started, but he had a notion of where the ridiculous was, and he would play with it. That’s the true test of a toastmaster.
GEORGE PLIMPTON, SPEECH AT ANNUAL EXETER ALUMNI DINNER, DECEMBER 5, 2001 I think I should start off by saying that I didn’t do very well at Exeter. In fact, I was a complete failure. I was asked to leave three months shy of graduation because of a multitude of sins, both academic and secular. . . . My marks were terrible. I had the strange idea that in class, even if I were daydreaming of something else, my brain was still absorbing all the material like a kind of specialized sponge, and the next day at the exam I could scratch around in the appropriate corner, in the detritus, and there would be the appropriate answers. Of course it didn’t work that way, and my marks, the C’s, the D’s, the occasional E—the latter always in math—showed it.
These elicited letters from my father—the only letters I ever got, with his familiar, dreaded handwriting—and they were stiff with reprimand. . . . Genetically speaking, I was supposed to soar through Exeter. Wasn’t the family tree full of outrageous successes? . . . And now, at the end of the line, like a caboose with two wheels missing, dragging along the ground, shooting up sparks and igniting forest fires, this. . . .
I used to sit in study hall and curse my brain. I used to imagine taking it out of the top of my head and beating it sharply with a pencil. Why had it let me down? True, I hadn’t studied, but why hadn’t my brain compensated properly out of thin air? Somewhere in Melville’s Moby Dick is the line “my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded.” Which is apt, thinking back on it, because my head, when I was at Exeter, was ever off somewhere else, funning it up with the heads of the few others who were having difficulty. We beheaded few, we band of brothers.
At nightfall, I went down to the Plimpton Playing Fields and drop-kicked field goals with Buzz Merritt, just the two of us in the gloaming, often with a thin moon shining above the pines, above the river. No one drop-kicks footballs now, or did then either. Why did I do this when I should have been studying Tacitus for the exam I knew was coming up the next day? Buzz got away with it somehow, but I didn’t. Sometimes, to escape the exams, I went to the infirmary. There was a secret way, which I’ve now forgotten, to drive up the temperature on a thermometer. If you were careless, you could drive it up to 110 degrees. I always thought Dr. Fox somehow knew, perhaps by the panicky face he was looking at, what the true trouble was, and he would put you in the infirmary for the day.
When I wasn’t on detention, or probation, or sitting in study hall, I spent, at least in my final years, a great deal of time in an institution one can hardly believe existed—the butt rooms, where one learned to smoke. There was more smoke in one of those rooms than there is in the funnel of an old-fashioned locomotive. We sat in there and we were suave. I’m surprised we didn’t wear green eyeshades and hats. At night I would lie in bed and, in the moonlight streaming through the window, practice blowing smoke rings. As they oozed thickly up toward the ceiling, I’d say to myself, “Wow! If only Susie Mills”—the girl who had a driver’s license and drove her father’s Plymouth with the top down—“could see me now!”
But what really got me into trouble were the little things I thought were funny—like sneaking in at night and turning all the benches around in the Assembly Hall because I thought it would be funny to have my classmates sitting backwards when they came in for assembly. . . . I was caught all the time. It was as if I were attached to an invisible leash at the other end of which was an authority of some kind. I’d be called in to see Dean Kerr in his offices. Shuffling in and asked to explain myself, I would open my mouth—and nothing would emerge. Sometimes in answer to a probing question of his (“Why did you think to move that stuffed rhino head?”), I would murmur, head down, “Yessir.” I never looked at Dean Kerr. I didn’t dare. Out of sight, out of mind. . . .
I wanted so much to succeed, to make a noise. I wrote for the Exonian, but if you were on probation you couldn’t use your real name. My pen name was “Vague,” thought by many to be my state of mind most of the time. . . .
I tried out for varsity sports. Bill Clark, the baseball coach, never took the care to find out that he had a youth, “a barefoot boy with cheek,” who could throw a lazy, roundhouse curveball. I was cut. Football, the same. Hockey, the same. Tennis, the same. Tall as a reed, fragile as a stick, I ended up in the band playing the bass drum. . . .
I tried other things. I took piano lessons from Mr. Landers. He assigned me a Debussy piece called “Bells,” as I recall. . . . The next week I appeared at Mr. Landers’ quarters and sat down to play. Mr. Landers said, “Well, that’s very fine, but that’s not Debussy’s ‘Bells.’ ” . . .
I tried out for a play called Seven Keys to Baldpate. They found a minor role for me, that of a young widow. . . . I was required to let out an unearthly scream, perhaps at the sight of a corpse, I’ve forgotten what. . . . My scream carried far out over the quadrangle, down the hill past Langdell and into the Jeremiah Smith Building, past the mailroom with its letterboxes—where in those days I received my father’s letter, once a week, with its admonitions—and up the stairs to Dean Kerr’s office, where he sat comfortably smoking his pipe, when suddenly this high-pitched shriek wandered in, and his blood curdled and he said aloud, “My God, what’s Plimpton done now?”...
My main nemesis was Bill Clark, who taught math (E-) and was the football and baseball coach. He was the master of Soule Hall where I lived that senior year. One night I was chasing Spennie Welch down the curved stairs with a flintlock musket my grandfather had given me—a relic of the Revolutionary War. As I was going down, suddenly, around the curve of the wall, on his way up to see what all the commotion was, came Bill Clark, also referred to as “Bull.” He gave this little scream. I don’t really blame him. The barrel-end of the musket looked like the mouth of a tunnel. A fairsized rocket could have emerged from it. I knew I was doomed, as Holden Caulfield would say. If he had toughened it out and said, “What are you doing with that flintlock musket when you should be in your room applying yourself,” it would have been all right. But he had given this little scream, and he knew that I knew, and I knew that he knew that I knew. And that was it.
Could it have been that, having failed in all departments at Exeter, I was driven in later life to compensate, to try once again to succeed where I hadn’t? I’ve wondered, on occasion, whether these exercises in participatory journalism for which I am known were as much to show my mentors at Exeter that I had somehow managed to intrude onto the highest plateaus of their various disciplines. . . .
I have come to the conclusion that my life, whatever there is of it that might be termed successful, was indeed very much due to Exeter’s credit . . . that I had somehow to vindicate myself. And I am grateful for Exeter, terribly grateful, and I wish my grandfather had never given me that flintlock musket.
ANDREW LEGGATT George always claimed that when he was at Harvard, his father gave a dinner for some of his most distinguished colleagues, at the end of which his father rose to his feet and said, “Gentlemen, my son George, editor of the Harvard Lampoon, will now make a funny speech,” and sat down. He had not said a word to George. George claims that he said in response, “I threw my trousers out of the seventh-floor window.” And then he had to think about what to say next. The point about
that is I think that he created for himself the obligation to improvise.
SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON He told me that his beginnings as a public speaker were not auspicious. The first speech he ever gave was to Pauline’s friends at the Colony Club. He’d prepared something and nervously rattled through it in about five minutes flat. Afterwards, he told me, he leapt from the podium and headed straight for the men’s room. He was so mortified by his performance that he wept.
George, gold medal MC.
Photograph © Henry Grossman.
CALVIN TRILLIN After I knew him, it was sort of as if I had always known him, because, for one thing, we took turns doing the benefit for the East Harlem Tutorial Program year after year. When I say “took turns doing,” I mean we took turns being the MC or something similar. We often ended up in some kind of benefit as either the speaker or the MC or something like that. There were about four or five of us in New York who did the MC’ing—usually for events on book publishing, or the future of journalism, or something like that: George, Roger Rosenblatt, Roy Blount, Jr., and me. It was seasonal work in a way—not work, I mean it was unpaid—but I remember doing two or three in the same week and saying to my wife, “Where the hell is Plimpton? I can’t imagine why I’m doing all these benefits. He must have fled the country, knowing that this week was coming up.”
P. J. O’ROURKE George was the most effortlessly gifted public speaker I have ever seen. There is a little lake club up here in New Hampshire, call it the Wampum Lodge, and George was somehow prevailed upon to come up and speak at this club for their centennial-year dinner dance. There were fireworks involved, and I think that may have been what got George there. I picked him up at the airport, and he’d just had some operation on his eye—a sty or something. Part of his face was swollen; he obviously wasn’t feeling very well. So we go over to my house and we have a couple drinks and we’re having quite a jolly time out on the patio. Then we go to the club and proceed to have a cocktail hour that lasts about four or five hours, and then there’s a dinner and attendant drinks. It rolls around to being about as late as it gets up there, which is to say ten o’clock. By this time we’ve been at it since noon. And George is called upon to speak. And I realize, just as the president of the club is introducing him, that George has not given a single thought as to what he’s going to say. He knows nothing about the Wampum Lodge, and if it was possible to care less than he knew, he would have. And he just stands up and starts to talk! Being unable to find any connection between the Wampum Lodge and any of his knowledge or interests, he manages to tell a couple of stories that have nothing to do with anything, and then brings us around to fireworks, and then brings fireworks into the celebration of centennials in general. I don’t remember a great deal of it because I myself was . . . “Friends say he needed rest” was the comment that I think would have been made about me. But he pulled this off, and it just left everybody gobsmacked, in awe of his performance.
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