George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  WALON GREEN I know a guy who is a well-known screenwriter—a brilliant, well-educated guy who taught in the Ivies for a time. However, when his wife is impressed by someone, he has to trash that person. So Ann, my wife, called her and said, “We’re having dinner with George Plimpton. Do you and [let’s call him] Bruce want to come?” and Bruce’s wife said, “I’d love to meet George Plimpton.” As soon as I heard she’d said that, I thought, “Oh boy, this’ll be Bruce on his bad behavior.” Still, I’d put George in the room with anybody. I thought, “I’ll just clue him in a little bit.” So when we picked him up, I said, “Bruce So-and-so is a very smart guy, but I don’t know how well he’s going to behave tonight. It should be interesting for you.” So we got there, and sure enough, Bruce started taking all these shots at George. His wife got so mad, she grabbed my wife and went and locked the two of them in the ladies’ room and went into a full tirade that you could hear outside the restroom. Meanwhile, Bruce was going at it with George. But interestingly enough, not only could Bruce not get to George, but George never showed a flicker of being offended. Bruce was trying to elicit some sign of dishonesty, and it just wasn’t there. Bruce basically thinks that everybody is a liar, a phony, and that he can expose them. But he couldn’t find any of that in George. He just couldn’t find it. George was an incredibly intuitive reader of people. He could see where they were going and head them off without them even being aware of it. Here was this difficult person out to savage him, and George let the guy in the end come around and savage himself. My wife was immensely impressed. You could say it’s the patrician attitude, but it wasn’t that. I’ve seen aristocrats deal with situations like that, and they feel, “Well, I am who I am, and so what?” But George was actually much better than that. Bruce was blowing professorial credentials all over the place. I remember him saying something about Robert Penn Warren, telling him that he, Bruce, was the new Hemingway. George didn’t say anything. He just let this guy go on until finally the guy thought, “What kind of jerk am I?” Then out loud, he said to George something like “I guess what you’re thinking is, maybe I shouldn’t be saying that about myself.” Now, I’m not sure if George meant to have this effect by being silent, but the fact is, he actually made this guy a better person that evening.

  EDMUND WHITE When Ned Rorem first proposed George for the American Academy of Arts and Letters, I seconded it, then unseconded it. That’s true. Ned said, “Won’t you do this for me?” and I loved Ned, so I said, “Okay.” And then I thought about it: “What’s he ever done that’s so great? I mean, why should he be in the American Academy of Arts and Letters? He’s sort of an ‘after-dinner speaker,’ not a major American writer.” And I think the American Academy, unlike the French Academy, actually has very good people in it. I think they really are the best writers. Recently they’ve been getting in bad people, even the old ones, people like Garrison Keillor. But I remember that when he did get in, George gave this talk at the winter dinner where new members are invited to speak. People usually get up and say, “I’m terribly honored, and it’s much too good for me.” But George got up and gave a real after-dinner speech, and it was charming and people cooed. He was that kind of person who would make cultured older women coo, like, all the pouter pigeon crowd.

  JACK RICHARDSON I remember I saw him once hosting an homage to Mickey Mouse on TV. It had something to do with Mickey Mouse. I don’t want to say he was a Walt Disney shill. I don’t know what drove him. He had the ability to, as they say today, morph into other people, to try on these roles for about a minute. It was a clever gimmick, and it brought him fame, money, and the love of beautiful women, the same things that would drive anybody else. I don’t think I could go any deeper than that.

  FAYETTE HICKOX We’re always ready to suspect “social” people, aren’t we? Their charm and good manners can seem false and manipulative, sometimes with good reason. And when the other guy is so extravagantly blessed with social virtues and graces as to be, like George, a blessing to everyone around him, a few people may actually need to see him as a phony. Plus, there’s the inevitable wrinkle that people like George will often seem to be promising more than they can possibly deliver.

  NORMAN MAILER “Socialite” is a word that’s pinned on upperclass WASPs; but he was a social light, if you will, because he was a point of focus. I think what was extraordinary about him is that he was like a socialite of the greatest possible inclusiveness. In other words, he invented performances involving himself but held them wide open for others in a way that no one else had ever dreamed of. He had the life he wanted to have, which was no small gift for the rest of us. At his memorial, speaking extempore, I came up with an idea that I hadn’t thought of before—about love. There are many people we love in New York in a pure way; and many people in New York who we remember with love. We might only see them twice a year or once every five years; it didn’t go anywhere; we didn’t have deep relationships with them, but it didn’t matter. We loved them. That is the way I loved George, and still love George. So many people loved George. It’s possible that he was loved in that manner more than anyone else in New York. It’s even more possible that he loved more people in that manner than anyone else in New York.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON Once he was not legally bound, or in any way bound, to another person he was attracted to, then he could get close to them and be endearing, and he wasn’t scared, and he was truly George. George’s love was uninhibited. It knew no bounds. There wasn’t enough space in the world for it, and there weren’t enough different ways that he could feel it, for real. Except for marriage, of course.

  RIC BURNS We didn’t know exactly what we had in him. He understood something, at a deeper level than walking around, about what it is to be alive, to be there at the end of your own fingertips. The miracle of personality is so tied to real time. That’s the thing: He had an amazing personality, and it existed in real time. That’s where his artistry was, and that’s why he won’t be remembered maybe for his books, but for the spirit that he had in every interaction. And it’s gone. Once it’s gone, there is no way to convey what that was to somebody.

  OLIVER BROUDY I’ve been thinking about this a lot, the mystery of George’s personality and character. He really seemed like he wasn’t quite on the same plane. I’m sure you’ve heard this a lot. When you actually had his attention, you felt like there was a shift in the weave of things. You felt like some spotlight had been turned on. It was a hyper real moment. To the last days, I felt like that: highly self-conscious, highly aware.

  HAROLD BLOOM I don’t like to think of myself as pugnacious or aggressive, but I suppose, for one reason or another, I have struck a lot of people as being pugnacious or aggressive. But George was one of those rare people I ever knew who I wished I could have a blood transfusion from. I would have been a much better human being, I always felt, and a lot easier to be with, or live with—even for myself to live with or be with—if I could have had some trans-fusion of that essential quality, which was absolutely authentic in George. And it’s so difficult to describe. It’s too banal to call it just goodness, but it was goodness: absolute goodwill.

  CHARLES MICHENER There was always a sense of astonished admiration in George. He was astonished by everything. He would often say, “Could you believe” something. “Could you believe that!” There was a note of incredulity. “How remarkable! How astonishing! I couldn’t believe it!” After which his astonishment would often give way to admiration. George was the greatest, most effective communicator of infectious admiration I’ve ever known.

  GEOFFREY GATES What was unique about George’s presence was that whenever you saw him, or came up to him, or went to his apartment, it seemed that everything was fine. Things were fine, and in his presence, you began to feel the same way. There’s no one else in the world I’ve ever known like that. He was enchanting, literally.

  PAMELA DRAPER I had one experience with George that literally changed my relationship with him forever. It happened w
hen George was visiting L.A., where I was temporarily living. It was a Sunday night and he suggested that I accompany him to the Playboy Mansion. George and I had some drinks and then he led me down to the swimming pool and through an archway of enormous rocks into what was called “the grotto.” Inside, the light was all muted gold and purple and orange with wisps of steam meandering upwards from the surface of the water. There were ledges in the rocks where you could perch like a mermaid. Here you had a house full of people several hundred yards away and not a single, solitary soul was there but us. George said, “Let’s go for a swim.” We flung off our clothes, dove in, and splashed around. Then George pointed to a passage in the stonework, and in moments we had swum into the outdoor pool. It was very, very late at night. It was dark, but the pool was all lit from the depths, and it was magnificent to swim about and breathe the night air. All of a sudden, George said, “Let’s go into the tunnel now.” I was startled. “What tunnel?” “Well,” George said, “there’s a tunnel down there. If we dive down and go through this tunnel, we’ll come back out in the grotto.” I looked down and about three feet below the surface of the water there was a narrow opening. It was lit but, again, it was three feet underwater. It was not like a tunnel where you could surface for air, and once you got in, you couldn’t exactly turn around and try to get out. You had to make a commitment to get to the other end. I said, “George, I’m not going to do that. I can’t do that. I can’t swim underwater. I don’t even want to put my head under. I’m not good at it.” He said, “Oh, sure you can.” We didn’t have to do this, but once George knew I had this tremendous fear of it, it intrigued him. We went back and forth, as I remember. “Nothing will happen to you. I’ll be there.” “No, no. I’ll drown, I’ll die, I can’t do it!” “I’ll keep my eye on you. Nothing will happen!” If you’re scared of something, you really have to do it, he said. He of course would do anything; the harder the challenge, George would do it. I wasn’t George. I didn’t want to go underwater, I didn’t want to die. But with George I had to believe I wouldn’t. I mean, there was no way we’d have come to be friends if I were a wimp. Right? I took a deep breath, dove down, and followed him right through the tunnel. Every three seconds or so he turned his head back to make sure I was okay and I nodded. After what seemed to me an endless time underwater, holding my breath, I surfaced inside the grotto. He was so pleased with empowering me, and I was so pleased with my accomplishment, we clapped hands and laughed and laughed and the noise echoed from the top crevasses of the grotto, which made it even better. “Damn, I was scared,” I said. George laughed some more and got me to say I’d do it again. We were alone. We celebrated. We rejoiced in that experience and in each other.

  NORMAN MAILER At eighty-two, I’ve gotten to that point where urination has become one of my preoccupations. In other words, I am never, ever in a place for long without knowing where the bathroom is. In St. John the Divine, where George’s memorial service was held, I had explored the joint, so I knew that the men’s room was like a quarter of a mile from where I was sitting, all the way down in the basement. So when the service ended, I headed for a side door, and I passed Phil Roth. Phil and I have had an edgy relationship for thirty or forty years. He said, “Where are you going in such a hurry, Norman?” and I said, “Well, I have to tell you, Phil, I’ve got to urinate. When you get to my age, this becomes a desperate matter. In fact, let me warn you, when you get to my age, you’re going to be looking around for telephone booths in which you can relieve yourself.” And Phil said, “Norman, I’m there already,” and I said, “Well, Phil, you always were precocious.” And then we both laughed. It was the first time in our lives that we had both laughed together. I attribute this to George’s spell.

  PETER MATTHIESSEN When you hear some of the adulation poured over the iconographic George, it’s tempting to say, “You didn’t know George”; but those of us who saw his human frailties loved him more. We knew who we loved, we knew who we had there. When he let his guard down, he was heartbreakingly touching.

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON Everybody downstairs in the Review office felt that in some way they were blessed and that this was a gift that he had given them to pass on. I definitely felt this after he died. He taught me how to give. He taught me how to open my heart when it seemed the blackest. Many of those twelve years of marriage were hugely painful for me, and for him—after all, his life was beginning to slip away from him, which he found unbearable. I had to pull out all the inner strength I could possibly summon. He was a teacher, he really was a very gracious teacher. I like to think that the best of him is still with me.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON The reason I use the word Bodhi sattva to describe George is because his generosity was such a quiet, understanding giving. And he never asked for anything in return, ever.

  PIEDY LUMET This is a story about George’s graciousness, or something more than that. He asked Leslie, my daughter, to be godmother to Medora. Leslie was stunned. She didn’t understand why or wherefore. She was young, maybe twelve, and shy, but she loved George. So Chris Cerf read something that was incredibly funny, and Francis read a dazzling thing that George might have written, and Caroline Kennedy read something fine. Leslie said, “I can’t get up in front of all those people.” I told George, and he said, “It’s okay, it’s fine.” And then George spoke for Leslie and said, “Leslie would like a Zen breath for Medora, so I’m going to sound this gong,” and it went bong, and it was beautiful—the contrast, the quiet, then the single sound. That was typical of him. He was perfectly accepting of how you wanted to be and made it right—his uncommon grace.

  NORMAN MAILER His nature was to keep everything open, keep every possibility open, because who knew when someday or other there wouldn’t be a huge payoff. Not for himself, but for the sheer spirit of amusement. You see, this is what I got to understand about him last of all. It was that there was something immensely impersonal about George—he wasn’t doing it for himself, he was doing it for the spirit of the universe. Or rather he was doing it for the spirit of the occasion, because if you improve the spirit of the occasion, maybe that wouldn’t be altogether bad for the spirit of the universe. I think that’s as close as he came to mystical philosophy.

  LAYETTE HICK OX I called his home on the day I found out about his death, and someone I didn’t know answered. I said, “I should just say that George was so nice to me, so kind to me,” and she said, “He was kind to everybody!” Like, good-bye! And I was like, “Wait a minute, no, no, he was especially kind to me! Don’t you realize?”

  EDITOR’S NOTE:

  HOW THIS BOOK WAS MADE

  George, Being George is not a biography. Not according to any common use of the word. No would-be biographer, for example, need be put off his own project by the existence of this one. On the contrary, he or she should be delighted with this trove of anecdotes, judgments, and feelings, all nicely prepared for quotation, like spices for a proper meal.

  Moreover, such is the nature of this kind of book, whatever it’s called, that one can easily imagine another editor taking the raw material I worked with and fashioning out of it a very different account of George’s life. In fact, one can easily imagine scanning the thousands of pages of transcribed interviews that we’ve assembled, plus any number of additional ones, plus any number of comments on the interviews, onto a Wikipedia-style site from which might be made an infinite number of books like this.

  What I can’t imagine is what, collectively, to call those books. I only know what it’s like to put this one together. People would ask me about that while I was doing it, and the metaphors came easily to mind. I’d say it was like making a collage, a mosaic, a documentary biopic, a New England farmers’ wall. But mostly, toward the end, it seemed like pasting thousands of scribbled Post-it reminders on a tailor’s dummy.

  I liked that one. It captures the pastiche character of what I was doing. And with it, a suggestion of a treasure hunt—the reader plucking one little clue after another off the poor d
ummy’s body. It also captures the peculiar experience of reading a book like this. Reading Edie, I remember being enticed to go on and on, enchanted, as I met all these different people having their say about her. Each fragment of their talk brought its own special note to the hunt for who she was, and whatever note it brought, it held me for a moment as I tried to imagine the speaker—who he was, what his interest in her was, whether I’d like him if we met. A book like this is a twofer: You learn something about the subject, George or Edie; but you also, at the same time, get to play an intriguing game of hide and seek, of glances and glimpses, with the people who are telling you about them.

  So what kind of book is this? In the end, I’d say it’s a kind of literary party, George’s last, so to speak, where everyone, including the reader, is gossiping about the host. That is to say, where everyone is more or less consciously working his or her way to some understanding of the good life—a social book, in short, about a supremely social man.

  The project began in the imagination of Amanda “Binky” Urban, our agent, who persuaded Sarah Dudley Plimpton, George’s widow and literary executor, to commission it. Binky then sold the idea to Bob Loomis, the legendary Random House editor. That much was accomplished not long after George’s death in September 2006. The following June, eight of us convened for the first of six or so planning meetings at George’s apartment. Sarah presided over these meetings with skill and humor. Chris Cerf, John Heminway, Fayette Hickox, Ben Howe, Jeanne McCulloch, Susan Morgan, Jonathan Dee, and I developed a general list of potential interviewees, from which each of us selected people we particularly wanted to interview. The original list numbered over 400 people, of whom 374 were actually interviewed, and their words transcribed on disk and hard copy. Of the 374 only about 200, unfortunately, will see their contributions in print.