George Plimpton

It can reasonably be said that “A Dance to the Music of Time,” Anthony Powell’s monumental 12-part novel about English manners, society, politics and power, still begs for an American counterpart. Lush and majestic, the book traces the years from 1921 to 1974 — pretty much the period we like to romanticize as “the American century.” But if no novel over here quite tracks Powell’s course, the life of George Ames Plimpton, impressively recorded in this glorious new biography, “George, Being George,” offers a potential substitute. Powell, in his novel, described four types of men: the artist, the romantic, the man of will and the cynic. The first three were embodied in our boy George. And the parallels reach farther. For one thing, Powell and Plimpton both began their WASP parables in the Jazz Age. Powell’s narrator, Nick Jenkins, goes from Eton to Cambridge and then on to the war. Plimpton went from Exeter to Harvard, the war and Cambridge. And just as Jenkins becomes a writer and biographer, Plimpton does too­ — of Edie Sedgwick and Truman Capote. And like Jenkins, he makes his inevitable way to Paris. In Plimpton’s life, as in Powell’s novels, there are all manner of collapsed romantics like Charles Stringham and available beauties in the mold of Pamela Flitton, as well as debutantes and dinner dances. Alas, there is no ambitious, climbing Kenneth Widmerpool in the Plimpton saga, unless it’s Plimpton himself. As to the professional heights he ascended, one detects wonderment not only from his chums and detractors, but also from Plimpton.

“George Plimpton’s Life as Told, Admired, Deplored, and Envied by 200 Friends, Relatives, Lovers, Acquaintances, Rivals — and a Few Unappreciative Observers,” the subtitle of this sprawling, hugely entertaining oral history of the man who all but invented the genre, is a play, I suppose, on Plimpton’s own “Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career.” And the book is superbly edited by Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., a former editor of The Paris Review, who now contributes to highbrow journals like The Nation, The Atlantic and Harper’s.

As literary lives go, Plimpton’s was a doozy. Well born, well bred, the father of four, a witness to the great, the good and the gifted, he epitomized the ideal of the life well lived. He sparred with prize­fighters and competed against the best tennis, football, hockey and baseball players in the world, and along the way he helped create a new form of “participatory journalism.” He palled around with Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and William Styron, and drank with Ernest Hemingway and Kenneth Tynan in Havana just after Castro’s revolution. He also edited and nursed that durable and amazing literary quarterly, The Paris Review, which published superb fiction and poetry and featured author interviews that remain essential reading for anyone interested in the unteachable art of writing. For someone like me, who grew up in the Canadian provinces, Plimpton was, like Bennett Cerf before him, the public face of the New York intellectual: tweedy, eclectic and with a plummy accent he himself described as “Eastern seaboard cosmopolitan.”

I will henceforth call him George, because everybody in the book does. It’s a cheap familiarity on my part though, because I never really knew him beyond a breezy “hello,” and it is my loss. At parties, he was unfailingly polite, but he appeared to be the sort who didn’t suffer fools, and I worried I just might be one of those fools he wasn’t about to suffer. I remember getting a call some years ago from a television casting agent looking for a patrician type to play an editor who liked to go shooting rats in Central Park. I asked the agent if she had approached anyone else. As it happened, she had. Lewis Lapham said it was beneath him. George Plimpton agreed to do it, but he had a scheduling conflict. So she ended up with me. And the show went off the air within the year.

When people reminisce about the recently departed you can tell whether they really liked the person or are merely following convention in not speaking ill of the dead. George’s friends — and my God, he had a lot of them — most certainly belong to the first camp. And every­body gets their say: authors (Styron, Mailer, Vidal, Peter Matthiessen and Gay Talese); editors (Ray Cave, Hugh Hefner, Osborn Elliott, Terry McDonell, Victor Navasky, Robert Silvers); sportsmen (Red Auerbach, Bill Curry, Alex Karras) among many, many, others. There are no doubt young Plimptophiles who don’t know about his friendship with Muhammad Ali (who used to call him “Kennedy” because he looked like one), or that he was at the side of his Harvard classmate and real Kennedy, Robert F., when he was shot and killed in the kitchen passageway of the old Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles 40 years ago. George was not only on a private plane with Bobby when he decided to run for president, he helped wrestle Sirhan Sirhan to the floor moments after the shooting.

He loved having well-born beauties around — I mean, who doesn’t? — but he was no snob. He could talk to anybody, and as his fame grew, they all wanted to talk to him. George hungered for celebrity, and got it. That fame bent some noses out of shape — never more so than when Talese wrote a much discussed article about him in Esquire in 1963 — but so what? George loved being famous. When he landed a walk-on in David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” he sent out a Christmas card that year with a still from his scene in the movie. A cartoon in The New Yorker a few years later showed a man who is about to be operated on, looking up and asking the surgeon: “Wait a minute! How do I know you’re not George Plimpton?”

The Paris Review was no small part of the composite public profile. “Without it, what would his celebrity have consisted of?” Matthiessen asks. “He was a good-looking, charming, very well-mannered son of the WASP establishment. But an awful lot of people fill that category, nothing very unique about it, so there had to be some other element that set him apart.” George was criticized for squandering (and at the same time amplifying) his fame on print and television ads for Dry Dock Savings bank, Carlsberg beer, even Pop Secret popcorn. But he had a family and a magazine to feed. At one point, he was paid $50,000 for three or four days’ work for a Saab commercial, just slightly less than the $60,000 he paid for his spacious East Side apartment, apparently the only wise and considered financial investment he ever made.

It was all part of the fun. “The thing that I liked about George was that he was this combination of Long Island Lockjaw and ‘Why can’t I do that?’ ” Richard Price says. “I have a hard time having fun, period, and he was the paragon of fun.” A wise man once said that 9/11 marked the end of the age of irony. Well, George would have none of it; he was an ironist to the end. He was not only in on the joke of being George Plimpton, he created the joke. More than anyone else I can think of, he embodied two signal strains of WASP-hood: he worked very hard to make it all look terribly easy, and in his charming, Mitty­esque way he personified the gifted amateur who was game for just about anything. And that was the George Plimpton his friends and the public saw.

But Pat Ryan, George’s longtime editor at Sports Illustrated, saw another side. “What I did mainly was protect George and his copy from legions of less talented and envious staff,” she tells Aldrich or one of his many collaborators on this “literary party,” as Aldrich puts it. “They had no conception how hard he labored at his writing. (How could they? It looked effortless.) And because they didn’t know him, they slammed him as a dilettante.” Freddy Espy Plimpton, his first wife, remembers how he would wake up in the morning, throw on a pair of pants on his way to the kitchen and “walking around the pool table, which is littered with piles of paper, sees something, leans over, picks up a page, leans back, reads it and puts it back on another pile across the table. He’s editing his latest book as he’s waking up, and he’s got all this on his mind, and I watched this man nobody knew, this writer who wrote all the time.” Indeed, in addition to more than 150 issues of The Paris Review, the Capote book, the Edie Sedgwick oral biography he did with Jean Stein, a history of fireworks and a children’s book, “The Rabbit’s Umbrella,” he wrote some of the most cherished articles and books on sports, almost all of them arising out of his willingness to give it a shot and submit to varying degrees of humiliation.

Plimpton tried his hand as a stand-up comic in Las Vegas, drove a sulky at Saratoga, worked as a trapeze artist and played the triangle for the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein during a performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony in 1973. He had talking parts in “Rio Bravo” opposite John Wayne, and played the editor Horace Whigham in Warren Beatty’s “Reds.” Overcoming the limitations of his impossibly lanky, foldy, 6-foot-4 frame, George swam against the Olympic gold medalist Don Schollander, sparred with the boxing legend Archie Moore, quarterbacked the Detroit Lions, tended goal for the Boston Bruins, played singles tennis with the top-ranked Pancho Gonzales, and hit the PGA Tour with Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. Matthiessen says: “There was something about him — in those antics — that bordered on the foolish, or buffoonish almost. But that was the source of his humor.” Chris Cerf adds that “one of the things that made these events so sweet and sad, in a good way, was that George really cared that he would do well in those games.” And of course there were the fireworks, a hobby that became a passion and culminated in his being named honorary “fireworks commissioner” for the City of New York by Mayor John Lindsay. Rose Styron recalls a Fourth of July celebration when Plimpton brought a bag of fireworks to John Marquand’s place on Martha’s Vineyard. His show went off and “all of a sudden, all these Army planes flew over. It was the same year they had the movie ‘The Russians Are Coming,’ and someone had alerted Otis Air Force Base that they’d seen fires, rockets, bombs, explosions of all sorts. . . . And they sent the whole Air Force over to see what was ­happening.”

Born in 1927, George was eased into life an Ames and a Plimpton, both fine New England names. His father, Francis T. P. Plimpton, helped found the white-shoe law firm now known as Debevoise & Plimpton, and served as deputy ambassador to the United Nations during the Kennedy administration. The Plimptons lived well in a duplex on Fifth Avenue and spent summers out on Long Island. George went to St. Bernard’s School, practically next door to their apartment, where other sons of the privileged were classmates, including Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who became the publisher of The New York Times, and the grandson of J. P. Morgan. It’s also where he met Matthiessen, who would later hand him a thread that would weave through the fabric of his entire adult life. At Exeter, where Vidal was a classmate — and where he heard the news about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor — he was already considered something of a sophisticate. But George was also a dutiful son, writing touching, detailed letters to “Mummy and Daddy,” an obligation, or a joy, that he maintained into middle age. He landed at Harvard in 1944. Almost organically ­clubbable, he joined Hasty Pudding, The Harvard Lampoon and Porcellian, the most exclusive of all. Even George’s short military career seemed blessed. He was first stationed in New Jersey, close enough to New York for dinners at the Plaza Hotel, and arrived in Europe two weeks after the fighting ended. He spent much of his time there on the Lido in Venice, where, as a British friend, Sir Andrew Leggatt, remembers, “he had the stupefying good luck, even for George, to be assigned to teach social graces and military techniques” to his fellow conscripts.

There was a return to Harvard and then two years at King’s College, Cambridge, where he led a Bertie Woosterish life of tutorials and visits to the Continent and parties in London. He sat opposite Princess Elizabeth at a dinner dance at the Savoy Hotel. And in a letter home to “Mother and Daddy” recalled: “Halfway through dinner I leaned across the table and lit her cigarette for her with a French match that sputtered badly and gave off that obnoxious odor peculiar to French matches. . . . By about midnight I had steeled myself to asking her to dance. I was just rising out of my chair to go around the table to ask her when the orchestra gave vent with a Mexican hat dance — certainly not the sort of music suited to the occasion of one G. Plimpton dancing with the future queen of the British Empire. I sank back into my chair.” He might well have been Bertie, explaining the evening to Jeeves the next morning.

Like so many other smart young men of his age and wherewithal, George followed the example of the Lost Generation and headed to Paris. Back at home, there were headlines about the Korean War and Joseph ­McCarthy. On the Left Bank, says Bill Becker, a Harvard classmate: “We were living like kings. In Paris, on the black market in the mid-1950s, you could exchange a dollar for 600 francs.” Hotel rooms cost 300 francs a night; a decent meal with a bottle of Beaujolais was a little more than half that. Styron came. So did Terry Southern and James Baldwin, and Robert Silvers and Peter Duchin lived on a barge docked near the Place de l’Alma. A number of this new generation were secretly recruited into the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency — the cold-war offspring of the wartime O.S.S. (nicknamed Oh So Social).

It is a common misperception that George founded The Paris Review. He did not. Like so many other things in this gilded life, it was given to him — in this case by its creators Matthiessen, a classmate at St. Bernard’s, and Harold Humes, known as Doc, who asked him to be its editor. Arguably though, without him the magazine, like so many similar small journals, would have sputtered and died after a few issues. The first number, with a minimal circulation in England, the United States and Europe, established the DNA for what it would remain for the next half-century. Donald Hall, who later became poet laureate, served as poetry editor. Styron, already celebrated for “Lie Down in Darkness,”wrote the introduction. And the first of volumes of Paris Review interviews kicked off with one with E. M. Forster, the man who, it was said, became more famous with every book he didn’t write. George had made the connection with Forster at Cambridge. And Andrew Leggatt, a former classmate, says, “It was typical of George’s luck, wasn’t it, that he should have known personally such a great literary figure from the past who would be prepared to give him the kind of interview that would subsequently become a classic.”

I am reliably informed that little magazines comprise four elements: shabby, cramped quarters; meager wages; attractive interns of independent means; and boundless enthusiasm. They are also excellent excuses for throwing parties. In Paris, the canteen was the Café le Tournon, near the magazine’s tiny office on the rue Garancière. Friends say George lived a particularly elastic Left Bank/Right Bank existence, editing during the day followed by drinks at the bar of the Ritz or the Crillon. When he relocated the review to New York, he brought his social-­engineering skills with him. He held fund-raising “Revels” at bohemian palaces like the Village Gate and later at his home at 541 East 72nd Street, which doubled as living accommodation for him and his family and offices for the magazine. A consummate host, he shouted a guest’s name above a crowd as a form of welcome. “Bring a pretty girl,” he would tell interns like David Michaelis, who worked at the magazine in the mid-’70s. “He always said it when he invited me to a party, and I heard him say it to other young men later. . . . It was like an Irwin Shaw story, that lovely midcentury feeling.”

And indeed, there were all manner of interesting men and interesting and pretty young women. Talese’s Esquire article on George opens with one of his parties, and on a night when Jackie Kennedy came by. And there is that famous Life photograph by Cornell Capa, taken the same year, of a party at George’s that is as much a midcentury New York period piece as Billy Wilder’s films “The Seven Year Itch” or “The Apartment.” Throughout the vast living room are women in pinch-waist cocktail dresses and men in smart suits with thin ties. In the picture you can spot Capote, Styron and Vidal, as well as Ralph Ellison, Frank and Eleanor Perry, Mario Puzo, Arthur Penn and Arthur Kopit. At one of George’s parties, Mailer and Humes got into a fight. “I remember George seizing me from behind in an iron grip that I could not get out of,” Mailer says. “Because he was around so many people, boxers, football players, who were stronger than him, he never bothered to discuss his strength. But I remember thinking, ‘God damn it, that guy is strong.’ ” Those lucky enough to afford an internship got caught up in the boozy movable feast too. “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,” Anne Fulenwider, a Paris Review intern who worked with George on his biography of Capote, recalls. Introductions were made, and Goodwin, amazed that they all worked in George’s house, told her husband: “This is what we need! We need six kids to be running around our house all the time.”

Acting on Evelyn Waugh’s adage that you can say pretty much what you want about a man, however negative, and he’ll take it so long as you say he was good in bed, Aldrich is generous in parading a procession of Plimpton “girls,” most of them admiring. His male friends incorrectly thought actual sex wasn’t part of George’s equation. Women knew otherwise. He treated sex like a sport, and once in the sack, he had great admiration for the female athlete. And like his stabs at making it on the gridiron or diamond, whatever George lacked in technique under the sheets, he made up for in enthusiasm. “He introduced me to everything,” Kathy Ainsworth remembered. “He told me what to read . . . he taught me everything. I expected there to be another George in my life, but there never was. There was either passion and no manners, or there were lots of manners and no passion, or they didn’t read, or I don’t know. He was a whole man.”

Another WASP trait George carried was an almost allergic reaction to introspection. He was offered $750,000 for his memoirs, but felt he had written so much about his life already that he’d just be “putting the nails in the coffin.” Sometime after the offer came in, James Scott Linville recalls seeing a quotation from Verlaine in his diary that had been left open on his desk. “When one goes on a journey of self-exploration, one should go heavily armed.” George would often complain that because of the review and the need to make money, he never got around to writing the Big Book, to enter the Pantheon of greats the way Mailer and Styron had. “I could have been a contender,” Maggie Paley remembers him saying. “If I hadn’t done The Paris Review, I could have been a major writer.”

Like so many principals in the novels of Powell and Evelyn Waugh, the man George became was directly related to the playing fields of his old boarding school. He had been kicked out of Exeter following an altercation with the school’s baseball coach Bill Clark, known as Bull, George’s second wife, Sarah, recalled: “He told me his father didn’t speak to him for a year after his expulsion, which devastated him. I think it was at the heart of much of what he did in his career. I think it was a prime motivator — ‘I’ll show the world — I’ll prove to the world that I can succeed and that they were wrong. I am good.’ ”

The title of the first volume in Powell’s dodecatet, “A Question of Upbringing,” came to him while driving with a friend. In order to avoid a head-on collision, his friend grabbed the hand brake and said, “This is just going to be a question of upbringing.” Which must certainly be the answer to the question of George Plimpton. When he died in his sleep, just blocks from where he was born 76 years earlier, it was like retiring a favorite blue wool blazer that had been worn well, and seen everywhere. In these crazy, mixed-up times, George is a character to be fondly remembered, a hero of sorts, and a charmed and charming partner in his own spirited dance to the music of time.