The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  Above his desk was this from Ikkyu, the iconoclastic Japanese Zen Buddhist priest, poet and calligrapher:

  Having no destination,

  I am never lost.

  —

  PETER WAS BURIED on a clear, sharp day with no clouds and a slight breeze off the ocean. Perhaps a hundred people, almost all of them locals, gathered on that patio off Peter’s long living room, many spilling out onto the lawn among the cedar trees and the more than one thousand tulips and daffodils Maria tended each year. I met many more family members than I’d known Peter had, and his sons spoke.

  Farmers who had known Peter stood back shyly at first and then delivered simple words with great power about how Peter had loved the land that gave them pride, and about how they loved “Peter’s birds,” and that best of all Peter had understood the connections that could only come from working the land. One older, very heavy man with an eastern European accent who must have been in his eighties said that he loved the dirt and just looking at the fields early in the morning, and that Peter had loved that too and in the same way.

  Before I drove back to the city, I walked to the tiny cemetery on Sagg Main Street where Peter was buried that morning, his grave marked only by rocks and feathers and shells.

  −ENDIT−

  III

  Don’t get too annoyed if I say that I write in the way that I do because I am what I am.

  —GRAHAM GREENE

  Elaine, Francis and Louie (1,619)

  PLACES TO MEET WRITERS and talk about story ideas or just talk about writing were important, especially certain bars in San Francisco and New York. For a while you could score coke at some of them, although that didn’t matter because the drinking always came first anyway.

  Elaine’s was the only place where you always had something to eat. Elaine Kaufman made you eat, but that wasn’t the only reason Elaine’s was different. It was on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and the insouciant glamour of the place was an organizing principle. She really did direct someone to the bathroom once by telling them to “turn right at Michael Caine.” When she died, that’s what her friends put on her prayer card.

  There was a large photo of Hunter Thompson hanging high on a back wall and there was a bust of George Plimpton next to the bar, although most people didn’t think it looked much like him. By the time I knew them, George and Elaine didn’t talk much—no long conversations, anyway. It was as if they had gotten all they needed to say to each other out of the way. Hunter never talked to Elaine, but that didn’t matter because she’d known all about him before they met and that was enough. Plus, Hunter was difficult to understand in bars because he tended to mumble.

  Who Elaine liked to talk to the most, except for maybe Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, was Bruce Jay Friedman, and she was quick to tell you that he was the handsomest man who ever came through her front door—along with Frank Sinatra (whom she and Plimpton both called Francis).

  With Elaine, you didn’t have to talk, and you could definitely talk too much, sometimes disastrously if you were drunk or full of coke or both. Quiet was fine, especially if you stayed late and spent a little money. Elaine’s friendship requirements called for dignity, generous tipping and no whining—and she always helped you with the dignity.

  A story Bruce told was about one night in the late ’70s when Sinatra was eating dinner with Plimpton, and Elaine was sitting with them. Bruce was at the bar, ten feet away, nursing what he still calls the worst hangover of his life, feeling vulnerable. He noticed Elaine whispering something to George, who got up and came to the bar, put an arm around Bruce and said, “Francis would be delighted if you would join us.”

  Bruce says he barely had the strength to apologize and wave George off, and it troubled him afterward that he didn’t stumble over to say hello. “Who knows,” he would say later. “I might have been the most sober person Francis met all that week.”

  Bruce felt bad, though, as if he had missed an opportunity that should have been more important to him, and would have been, as he wrote in his autobiography, Lucky Bruce, if he didn’t drink so much. He had left something on the table without even sitting down. After all, who wouldn’t want Francis to know you by name, especially if you were making a living in “the show business”? But if Elaine liked you (and she loved Bruce), she opened possibilities so relentlessly you could take a pass once in a while, even with someone like Francis. Later that night she told Bruce, “When you don’t feel like it, you don’t feel like it.”

  —

  I WAS LATE TO THE PARTY, as they say, which meant Elaine introduced me to people I already knew about—not Francis but some movie stars and, more important, people I admired, like Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper’s, who was from Northern California, like me. But unlike me, Lewis had come east to prep school, where one of his roommates had been John Knowles, who went on to write the coming-of-age standard A Separate Peace, while my high school friends mostly hung around gas stations. I admired Lewis as a superb writer and what a New York Daily News sportswriter who was around Elaine’s then called “a skyhook of literary sophistication.”

  The night I met Lapham, Elaine stopped me on my way to turn right at Michael Caine and introduced us with a nod toward me and two words to Lewis: “Help him.” When Lewis said he was uncertain of her meaning, Elaine said, “You’ll figure it out, Louie.”

  I never heard anyone else call tall, elegant Lewis Lapham “Louie.” It was a wisecrack full of love.

  That first night, Lewis asked me if I regretted that I had not gone into banking. This was years before investment banking was interesting to anyone except investment bankers. I had no such regrets. Lewis told me he did, which surprised me. “The numbers, the money,” he said, “interest me more and more.” I said the “Harper’s Index,” which he had invented, was interesting to me. He sighed and invited me to sit down.

  Once I relaxed at his table with a drink in front of me, I naturally wanted to impress Lewis with some smart talk about his editing and writing, and I had questions about why he seemed to hold the West is such disdain. Instead we talked about the private school our sons attended. I didn’t know then that his family had been “in shipping,” and that his grandfather had been the mayor of San Francisco, his great-grandfather one of the founders of Texaco. Elaine told me all that later.

  “Yeah, that Louie,” she said. “Classy as it gets.” I wondered if she had introduced Louie to Francis. Of course she had.

  Elaine’s was supposed to be a kind of writers’ club, with Elaine playing an ironic Wendy to all the Lost Boy writers. But there were often as many cops, lawyers and producers in the place and, as far as the club went, a lot of those writers thought of Elaine’s as a place to get work done. “Writer work,” that is, which included divulging confidential sources, spitballing story ideas and trolling for book contracts. One evening, for example, the somewhat dubious “Cocaine Etiquette” piece I had assigned to P. J. O’Rourke for Rolling Stone evolved into what would be the best seller Modern Manners, for P.J. and his editor Morgan Entrekin at Atlantic Monthly Press. We all agreed on how flattering the light was in the men’s room. Plus, as P.J. put it: “It’s better to spend money like there’s no tomorrow than to spend tonight like there’s no money.”

  Elaine’s was a great place to hire someone or assign a piece because nothing was more flattering to a junior editor or out-of-town writer than to be introduced to Elaine and have her say, “Of course,” like she already knew who they were. The truth was, she never paid any attention to anyone until they showed up at her place. What she knew was how the world worked, what people wanted to hear.

  When I was fired from Esquire, I called Elaine. I was ashamed and embarrassed—clueless, really, about why I was suddenly out—but thought I should try to explain what had happened because she had always been so encouraging, helping me find my way when I’d arrived in town to edit Rolling Stone, introducing me to important writers and editors, like Louie, and sitting with me and whoever
I brought with me from Newsweek on late closing nights. She had even invested when I was raising money to launch Smart, which made enough noise for a year or so to get me considered for the Esquire job in the first place.

  “I heard,” she said.

  “Everybody’s heard.”

  “Fuck that!” she said, and asked if she would see me that night. I said no.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” she said, and we hung up.

  The next time I went to Elaine’s, people congratulated me on my many job offers. All the nonexistent ones Elaine had told them about.

  And she was there to help with every magazine I edited for the next seventeen years. One night after I got to Sports Illustrated, I packed the senior edit staff into her side room for dinner. I was new on the job and thought to be a dicey choice because of my lack of sports experience and contacts. What I didn’t know until Elaine sent Michael the waiter to fetch me was that George Steinbrenner was coming in, and there he was sitting with her, just the two of them at a large table in the back.

  “Help him,” she said to Steinbrenner, who offered me a chair.

  “You need to fix that rag,” he said.

  Elaine sent Michael the waiter back to the side room, where my colleagues were about to be served, to tell them to start without me because I was going to have to spend some time with Steinbrenner. “George was insisting,” he told them.

  —

  WHEN ELAINE WAS NAMED a New York City “Living Landmark” in 2003, some of us bought a table and went to the benefit in one of the big hotels. During drinks, before we sat down and she had to go up to the head table, Elaine said it was embarrassing and that she didn’t want to speak. I thought she was nervous, perhaps troubled by how to thank a roomful of society people. I asked her if she knew what she was going to say.

  “They probably won’t like it,” she told me.

  When it was her turn, when Liz Smith and others had finished praising her, she popped up and said in a loud, firm voice, “You should have given this to George Plimpton,” and sat down. George had died six weeks before.

  −ENDIT−

  George Plimpton (4,922)

  IT WAS DUSK, and we were walking a ranch road in eastern New Mexico. According to George, we were birding—on the trail of the elusive burrowing owl, which lives in prairie dog holes—but we were going about it in that deeply civilized way that allows you to bring your glass of wine or whatever along on your after-dinner expedition. In George’s case, it was always Dewar’s with a little water.

  We had seen no owls, but George had pointed out a bat or two when he set his drink on the ground, pulled his white T-shirt over his head and flung it in the air.

  “Tadarida brasiliensis mexicana,” he explained. “Mexican free-taileds.”

  The shirt, peaking at perhaps twenty feet, drew a half dozen bats, and they tracked it to the ground like tiny dive-bombers, squeaking their shrill bat squeaks. A second throw doubled the number of bats. And so on until I had counted more than one hundred and the light was almost gone. The trick, George explained, pulling his T-shirt back over his head, was to give the bats something that would come fluttering up on their sonar as potential food.

  “Like a gargantuan moth,” he said, taking a sip of his Dewar’s.

  It was predictable of George to pull something like bat expertise out of nowhere. But of course it wasn’t out of nowhere. When he was fourteen, he’d spent the summer hunting bats in California’s Sierra Nevada and donating their “specimen skins” to museums. It was the kind of summer job you had if you were George Plimpton. When I was fourteen in California, a good summer job was mopping up at night in a fruit cannery. Listening to his stories about life as a bat hunter was like hearing about the adventures of a young prince. But it wasn’t his privilege that struck you; it was his curiosity.

  —

  GEORGE’S QUESTIONS were like trampolines, a technology he admired. They bounced you higher—to the next question. This was particularly true when he was talking about writers and writing.

  “Did you know that the great Camus played goal for the Oran Football Club?” he asked me when we were walking past an Algerian restaurant near his apartment on Seventy-second Street. I was unaware but said that I did think Gabriel García Márquez had written a soccer column for a while in Bogotá.

  “Alas,” George sighed, “Le colonisateur de bonne volonté was never moved to write about it. Imagine, the existential goalkeeper.”

  “Alas,” I said, and he gave me a look.

  To be or not to be was never a question for George. What to do next was his question, although existential imaginings were at the heart of all his stories. He would develop ideas—What would it be like to…?—then find a way to put himself into the action. I asked if he had considered becoming a soccer goalie. He had, but he had already written about guarding the hockey net for the Boston Bruins.

  “So are you going to write that memoir?” I asked. Several publishers were interested, and one had offered close to $1 million.

  “I don’t want to write about my life,” he said.

  “That’s what you do now,” I said.

  “Well, shouldn’t that be enough?”

  The memoir came up often. People were always asking when he was going to write one, and thinking about it darkened him. He said it smacked of vanity. If he wound up having to do it for the money so be it, but not yet.

  The lure of the memoir for publishers was that George knew everyone and had many stories about them. Any list would be incomplete: Sinatra (neighbor and late-night drinking cohort); Hugh Hefner, whom everyone called “Hef” (offered him the editorship of Playboy many times); Warren (Beatty would call and shout, “Is this the man who has never eaten an olive?”); Jackie (his brother Oakes said George had “dated” her); Elvis (both Presley and Costello)…But no matter who you were, if you were with him or just at the same party, his manners pulled you in, making you feel comfortable and in on at least some of his secrets.

  George couldn’t remember names, especially men’s names, but that didn’t matter. “There’s the great man,” he would say at his parties, and the unnamed guest would beam. “There’s the great man” is how George once greeted a kid delivering a pizza.

  The Lesson of George, I came to think, was “Good times should be orchestrated and not left to the uncertainties of chance.” This was the most important thing A. E. Hotchner said he learned from Hemingway, and George said “Papa” had taught him that same lesson. There is nothing sadder than small regrets, and when I first met George I thought he had very few of those. When I knew him better, I wasn’t so sure.

  A story I heard over and over about George was that he’d been very nervous before his first wedding—to Freddy Espy, who was even more beautiful than Lauren Hutton, the model who made her acting debut playing Freddy in the movie of Paper Lion. George’s friend Thomas Guinzburg tried to calm him by praising Freddy and suggesting that whatever else George was thinking, he should realize that after he was married he would never be lonely again. The punch line was George’s response: “But I’ve never been lonely in my life!”

  I believed that story, but I also believe that as he got older George was bothered by the transience of the people he knew and loved, and there is no deeper definition of loneliness than that, even as the party swirls around you. When famous friends die, do you miss them more? That was a question I wondered about. George said no, but you were reminded more often that they were gone.

  We went out a lot—to book parties and sports events at Madison Square Garden, where all the floor security guys knew him, and, mostly, we went to dinner, and George would order macaroni and cheese or a simple pasta that was close to it. There were the parties at his house, too. It was the 1990s now and the celebrities there weren’t as bright as they had been in the ’60s and ’70s, but the parties were still crowded with good-looking, accomplished people. At least the kids at the Paris Review office downstairs were good-looking, especially the youn
g women, who, unbeknownst to George, were having a contest to see who could wear the shortest skirt.

  The pool table would be covered so food and drink could be laid out, and there was always another bar in the kitchen. A long wall of windows looked out on the East River. The boat traffic on the flat water at night was beautiful but few guests noticed, more interested in where George was standing, what George was talking about.

  When John Kerry was running for president, George gave him a fund-raiser at the apartment. Kerry went on too long, and the crowd was fidgeting. I looked at George and could see that this was bothering him. When Kerry finally wrapped up, some of the crowd gathered around him but just as many collected around George.

  “Please go say hello to the senator,” George told them. “It’s his party.” But of course it wasn’t.

  —

  FROM ITS FIRST ISSUE, in 1954, Sports Illustrated kept careful record of freelance assignments on four-by-nine index cards, noting subject, deadline and fee. One of the tallest stacks belonged to George, a collection that I didn’t discover until I was writing his obit. The first card was from 1956, only three years after George began editing the Paris Review, the literary quarterly he founded in 1953 with Peter Matthiessen and several other friends. It was a hot start-up before anyone used the term, and much has been written about the good times in Paris and the careers that came later.