We also came up with some basic rules for the project at those meetings. The most important of these was set by the oral biography we chose as our model: George and Jean Stein vanden Heuvel’s Edie, about Warhol’s 1960s superstar. This was oral biography at its purest, which meant that George’s story, like hers, would be told exclusively in the words of the interviewees, with no editorial intrusions other than, of course, the massive intrusion of selecting and arranging those words (for reasons of space, context, intelligibility, etc.) in the first place. I’m responsible for that, as George and Jean were in Edie.
All of us at the planning meetings were friends of George, many of us friends of each other through George, and all of us would probably say, at the very least, that George was the most exhilarating person we’d ever met. We loved him for that, but also for his faults: To most of us, even these seemed liberating. This disposition might have led us, as interviewers and editor, to favor the sunniest memories of our protagonist, and to scant the sorrows and damage that personal liberation sometimes entails, not least on the liberator. But this hasn’t happened. Interviewers were free to ask any sort of question, and interviewees were encouraged to offer any sort of answer. Sarah Dudley Plimpton was so emphatically not the stereotypical “guardian of the flame” in this process that I, her interviewer, was sometimes stunned by her candor. Her aim, like mine, was simply to gather the most telling account of George’s life and character.
I should say something about the winnowing by which some contributors’ text-bites made it into the published book and some did not.
The first step was to manage the logistics and finances of all that interviewing: nudging people to sit down and do the interviews, having them transcribed (by no fewer than twenty-three transcribers), getting the raw transcripts to me, and arranging for everyone to be paid. This hugely complicated job fell to Jonathan Dee, the novelist, journalist, and former Paris Review staffer, and he did it without a glitch or a whimper. Then, as the interviews came in, I would mark them up with marginal notes and signposts indicating what text-bites I wanted to keep and under what heading I wanted to keep each one. Then, with all the interviews in and cut up, at least on paper, three extremely well-organized young poets, Diana Fox, Anne Yoder, and Cate Peebles, helped me copy the text-bites into the computer, each with its designated interviewee and topic, each on its own separate piece of paper.
Day after day, for more than a year, I conducted a triage around my dinner table, sorting and resorting those sheets of paper according to some mental map of where I thought they might “do.” I wish I could say that my choices were guided by some principle, but, looking back on it now, the process seems thoroughly anarchic and invidious: Whose account was more vivid, more amusing, more idiosyncratic, more complete, more powerful, more affecting, more useful in advancing the story of George’s life?
The map seems awfully arbitrary, too. Chronology was of some help, especially for George’s early years. But after he returns from Paris and settles down in New York to construct, incredibly swiftly, virtually every feature of the life he loved, chronology becomes almost irrelevant. One can’t even say that his life “went on”; it unfolded like a flower, or perhaps like one of his adored “chrysanthemum” fireworks, going off on radiant lines that hardly changed from day to day. There was the Review to edit and the staff to hang out with; games to play at the Racquet Club; books and articles to write for anyone who would pay for them; New York ceremonies to MC; girls to make love with; and always, from every direction, the endlessly seductive pull of friendship to respond to. The only big changes in his life that followed chronology were his marriages—which, notoriously, hardly changed anything in his life. His apartment might grow and grow: More wall space would disappear behind more posters, pictures, photographs; more furniture and souvenirs would accumulate; more rooms, whole stories, would be added. Children would be added. But George, being George, remained George.
This astonishing continuity of character and activity accounts for the loose, baggy later chapters of this book—as it does also for the absence of chronology in the post-1973 subchapters on The Paris Review. Members of the staff—interns, editors, publishers, and “the business side”—appear in them without regard to when they appeared in George’s life. They do follow one another thematically as the staffers speak of themselves starting out on the job, of George as an editor, of George as a boss, and of George’s last years. But George was George: the man they worked for in 2003 was much the same guy that an earlier generation worked for in 1973.
The book is dedicated to “the contributors,” as it should be. Without their witness, the protagonist of the book would not exist. Without their eloquence, humor, and insight, the book would not exist—we would have dumped it long ago. There are two contributors, however, whose accounts of George must have been painful to give, and to them, Freddy Espy Plimpton and Sarah Dudley Plimpton, I am especially grateful.
Beyond these two, I want to acknowledge my thanks to a whole roomful of people who gave me, and not only through their interviews (or, in a few instances, any interview), insights and puzzlements about George without which this fascinating man would have appeared even more mysterious than he does in these pages. At random: Norman Mailer, Sarah Gay Plimpton, Bob Silvers, Peter Matthiessen, Peter Duchin, John Train, Jonathan Dee, James Scott Linville, Bill Wadsworth, David Michaelis, Jeanne McCulloch, Oliver Broudy, Maggie Paley, Marion Capron, Buddy Burniske, Fayette Hickox, Tom Martin, and Diana Fox. I’m also grateful to three Random House editors, Abby Plesser, Millicent Bennett, and Frankie Jones, for crucial last-minute help with collecting photographs, releases, contributor biographies, and only they know what else. Heartfelt thanks, also, to the three poets who helped me input the text-bites, without whom I would have certainly gone mad.
Finally, I want to thank two noncontributors whose efforts on behalf of the book were, in that new old word, “existential.” Amanda Urban conceived of the idea that George, and readers, would be well served by an “oral biography.” Rather more daringly she conceived of me as the editor of it. Bob Loomis, the editor’s wonder-working editor, has been drowning in accolades since entering a second half-century of almost mythic accomplishment at Random House. I will say only that every suggestion he gave me in the making of this book was astonishingly deft, as simple to carry out as it was delightful to see on the page. And he delivered these suggestions with a combination of authority and deference that I wouldn’t have thought possible in his or any other profession. Perhaps his most brilliant proposal was his last. It was also the one he put no authority behind, and which I resisted long into the production process. It’s the text-bite with which I end the book. He thought it would be perfect, and it is.
Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr.
June 17, 2008
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
After Paris and New York, BEE DABNEY ADAMS returned to Massachusetts, where she raised her son and continues to draw, paint, and find ways to encourage young people to explore the arts.
KATHY AINSWORTH, when she is not traveling, lives on an island in Scotland.
ANNA LOU ALDRICH first met George Plimpton in the mid-1950s when she went with Doc Humes to a party at Bee Dabney’s apartment. She now divides her time between New York and Stonington, Connecticut.
NELSON W. ALDRICH, JR., is the author, most recently, of Old Money: The Mythology of Wealth in America. He first met George during his 1957–1958 stint as Paris editor of the Review.
JOAN AMES is a writer living on Martha’s Vineyard, and a first cousin of George’s.
JONATHAN AMES is the author of four novels and four essay collections, the latter including the forthcoming The Double Life Is Twice as Good.
DAVID AMRAM, as he has for more than fifty years, travels the world as a conductor, soloist, bandleader, composer, visiting scholar, and narrator in five languages. Over the years he has worked with Thelonious Monk, Willie Nelson, Charles Mingus, Leonard Bern-stein, and Jack Kerouac.
BRIAN ANTONI first met George twenty years ago in the Bahamas. He is the author of Paradise Overdose and South Beach.
RED AUERBACH was the legendary coach of the Boston Celtics when George, for one glorious moment, played with the team.
MAVIS HUMES BAIRD practices addictions and trauma therapy, combining neurological, behavioral, spiritual, and body-centered approaches. A short list of her extended family relationships would locate her as a daughter of Harold (Doc) Humes and Anna Lou (Humes) Aldrich, as stepdaughter of Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr., and as little sister to Alison Humes and big sister to Immy Humes, Alexandra Aldrich, Liberty Aldrich, and Arabella Aldrich. She spent time with George off and on during several periods of their lives.
EDWIN BARBER served as editor in chief at Harcourt Brace, and as director of both the college and trade divisions at W. W. Norton & Company. He worked with George Plimpton on four books, notably The Norton Book of Sports.
JOYCE BARONIO, a 1976 graduate of Yale, was introduced to George at a book party for her first volume of photographs, 42nd Street Studio, in 1980. She exhibits with the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York.
ROBERT BECKER was eighteen years old when he started working with George in 1977. He is the author of Nancy Lancaster: Her Life, Her World, Her Art and is writing a book about nineteenth-century American missionary families in Hawaii.
WILLIAM BECKER was instrumental in assembling the collection of Janus Films and its sister company, the Criterion Collection. He is chairman of both.
TOM BELLER is editor and cofounder of Open City Magazine and Books, and creator of the website Mrbellersneighborhood.com. He is the author of three books, Seduction Theory (stories), The Sleep-Over Artist (a novel), and How to Be a Man (essays).
LARRY BENSKY was Paris editor of The Paris Review from 1964 to 1966. He is well known for his work with the Pacifica Radio station KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California, and for the many nationally broadcast hearings he anchored for the Pacifica network.
HAROLD BLOOM, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, is the author of twenty-eight books. His best known include The Western Canon, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and The Book of J, as well as his pioneering study The Anxiety of Influence. He is a MacArthur Prize Fellow.
ROY BLOUNT, JR.’s forthcoming book is Alphabet Juice. He is a panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!, a columnist for The Oxford American, and president of the Authors Guild.
OLIVER BROUDY is an ex-managing editor of The Paris Review, and now a freelance writer living in New York City.
MEREDITH M. BROWN practiced law from 1966 to 2004 at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP (as the firm is now known), where he chaired the mergers and acquisitions group and the corporate department. Early in his career, he worked closely with Francis T. P. Plimpton. Brown has written many books and articles on legal topics, several articles on American history, and Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America.
MATTHEW J. BRUCCOLI was the Emily Brown Jefferies Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of South Carolina and president of Bruccoli Clark Layman publishers. He was the author or editor of one hundred volumes on American authors.
After serving in the Navy, DOUGLAS BURDEN became one of America’s top ski racers and competed internationally until a near fatal ski racing accident in Italy in 1954 ended his career. He continued playing tennis and golf and became “coach” to friends and family. He passed away on January 26, 2008.
BUDDY BURNISKE was a Paris Review intern in the summer of 1990, after which he returned to Chapel Hill to study English. When he died in 2006, he was a tenured professor at the University of Hawaii.
RIC BURNS is an Emmy Award–winning writer, director, and producer of documentary films. Among his best-known works are New York: A Documentary Film, Coney Island, The Donner Party, Andy Warhol, and The Civil War, on which he collaborated with his brother, Ken Burns, and Geoffrey Ward.
CHRIS CALHOUN met George at a Paris Review party in 1985 and became a contributing editor to the magazine shortly thereafter. He is a literary agent in New York City.
MARION CAPRON worked for the Review in the mid-to late 1950s. She has lived in Haiti and, most recently, in Florida.
RAY CAVE assigned and edited stories by George for Sports Illustrated beginning in the mid-sixties. Their close working relationship continued for a decade. In 1980, as editor of Time, Cave persuaded George to help cover the Summer Olympics in Moscow, an assignment that upset the culture of Time but not Plimpton’s prose.
CHRIS CERF has been a contributing editor to the National Lampoon and an award-winning (Grammy and Emmy) contributor to Sesame Street. He is president of Sirius Thinking, Ltd., and is currently producing Between the Lions for PBS.
BRONSON WINTHROP CHANLER knew George at Harvard. He was George’s investment adviser until 1968, when he moved to Rhinebeck and became a country gentleman.
MICHELE CLARK knew George Plimpton for fifteen years and worked briefly at The Paris Review. She is a business development consultant who lives and works in New York City.
TOM CLARK edited the poetry section of The Paris Review from 1963 to 1973. His latest book is Light and Shade: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2006).
GERALD CLARKE is the author of Capote, the biography of Truman Capote, and Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland. He also edited a book of Truman Capote’s letters: Too Brief a Treat. He lives in Bridgehampton, New York.
JOEL CONARROE, an author and editor, is president emeritus of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
BERNARD F. CONNERS, a former publisher of The Paris Review, is a novelist and entrepreneur. After the Army, Conners was an FBI agent in charge of night operations of the Chicago and New York divisions.
DENTON COX was George’s primary-care physician for many years. He was murdered in 2007.
BILL CURRY played pro football from 1965 to 1974 and later spent seventeen years as a head coach in the college ranks. He is now an on-air game analyst for ESPN.
JONATHAN DEE is the author of four novels, most recently Palladio, and a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. He worked at The Paris Review from 1984 to 1990.
CLEM DESPARD first met George in 1949 when he joined the Harvard Lampoon. He was occupied in various business endeavors until 1981 when he began doing artwork (box constructions). He is represented by Gallery Henoch in New York City.
MILTON DEVANE graduated from Exeter (where he was acquainted with George but did not know him well) and from Yale. He attended King’s College, Cambridge, with George, and thereafter, following three years in the Navy, he attended law school and practiced law in New Haven, Connecticut.
TIMOTHY DICKINSON, famed among journalists as a polymathic “source,” was a friend of George’s for more than thirty years. He lives in Washington, D.C.
BILL DOW organized the 40th Anniversary Reunion of the 1963 Detroit Lions (“Paper Lion”) team. It was held just four days before George’s death. He also wrote the afterword to the 2003 and 2006 editions of Plimpton’s bestseller Paper Lion, published by the Lyons Press.
PAMELA DRAPER is a single parent and personal chef in Manhattan. Her professional background is in theater, dance, and the arts; her family background (of great interest to George) includes Paul Draper, the tap dancer, Ruth Draper, the monologist, and Dorothy Draper, the interior decorator—respectively her father and two great-aunts.
PETER DUCHIN is America’s preeminent dance-band leader and the founder of Peter Duchin Entertainment. A successful recording artist and author, he is also honorary chairman of the Glimmerglass Opera and a member of many boards.
OSBORN ELLIOTT was editor of Newsweek in its glory days, and subsequently served his hometown of New York in many capacities, including that of depu
ty mayor.
DAVID EVANIER was hired by George as a Paris Review reader in 1976, and from 1979 to 1986 he was a fiction editor and, later, a senior editor. His books include The Great Kisser, The One-Star Jew, and Making the Wiseguys Weep: The Jimmy Roselli Story.
JULES FEIFFER is a cartoonist, playwright, and children’s book author/illustrator. Among his better-known works are his play Little Murders, his film Carnal Knowledge, and his Pulitzer Prize–winning sociopolitical cartoons, which ran for forty-two years in The Village Voice.
BRUCE JAY FRIEDMAN is a novelist and short story writer, best known perhaps for A Mother’s Kisses and The Lonely Guy stories. He lives in New York.
MICHAEL K. FRITH was the Harvard Lampoon’s president just fifteen years after George. He was an author/illustrator and a Random House editor/art director, and then, for twenty years, art/creative director, executive vice president, of Jim Henson’s Muppets.
ANNE FULENWIDER became George Plimpton’s assistant and an editor at the Review in 1995. She helped him complete his biography of Truman Capote, which was published at the end of 1997. She is senior articles editor at Vanity Fair, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter.
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