George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  George, “T.P.,” and Pauline with Oakes and Sarah Gay at Borderlands, the estate of Oakes and Blanche Ames. Courtesy of Sarah Gay Plimpton.

  JEANNE MCCULLOCH The Paris Review staff had this running joke about his mother, who used to come by all the time, and we always called her “George in pearls.” She was this vision of a Plimpton at the prow of a ship that would sail forward with the pearls first, going, “George!”—“Yes, Mutha!” and they would go off to lunch together. I always got the sense that he was never going to come into himself fully until she died. She hung around for way too long.

  RUTH TALBOT PLIMPTON The truth is that Pauline adored George far and away above her other children, so much so it was almost shameful, criminal.

  REMAR SUTTON George loved to tell the story about how his mother once saved his life. It was the time he and Freddy went rafting with Bobby Kennedy on the Colorado River, and he fell overboard. The water was rough and running fast, and George seemed to be making no headway swimming toward shore. In fact he went under—twice, as he told it—but then, as he was going under for the third time, he had this vision of his mother collecting his things after his death, poking around the apartment, and finding a few reels of a movie called The Nun’s Delight that he’d stashed away in a wooden box. Instantly he found the strength to struggle to the surface and swim to shore.

  OAKES PLIMPTON Our parents were both very puritanical and believed in hard work. My report cards from Buckley are full of parental jottings saying, “He has to work harder.” I think George received some of the same advice. They didn’t believe in coddling kids at all. We were spanked with hairbrushes and belts and things, by either my father or my mother, depending on who was around and how serious it was. Of course, being belted by your father was more unfortunate. They definitely believed in corporal punishment, no doubt about that. My mother was the type who did not accept apologies. If I broke a lamp or something and said, “I’m sorry”—well, that just wasn’t going to work. One weird thing: My parents believed in not getting clothed all the time, so we actually saw our parents naked, which is sort of different from the way I brought up my kid. There was some sort of doctrine that they’d read that it was important for kids to see grown-ups without their clothes on.

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON If you read some of his classmates’ notes in Francis’s yearbooks from Amherst and Exeter, people thought of Francis almost as a minister, incredibly pious and scholarly. He was chained to his sense of obligation, so naturally he thought George was having way too much fun—not making the academic grade. On the other hand, Francis’s letters to George when he was working his way up the ranks in the Army were full of pride, and by the time George was in his thirties, writing well-received books, hobnobbing with the Kennedys—the people, after all, who appointed Francis deputy ambassador to the UN—they were actually very proud of each other. Yet I don’t think George ever accepted that—that his father could actually be proud of him.

  SARAH GAY PLIMPTON Everyone in the family had to live up to Father’s standards of performance. Achieving them wasn’t complicated; he thought: “If you work hard enough, you should do very well.” That’s the sort of person he was. All his children came up short at one point or another, and his solution was always “Work hard.” It’s a very simplistic way of looking at things. George, Oakes, T.P., I—we all bore the brunt of it when we were growing up. Sarah [Sarah Dudley Plimpton] thinks George was a textbook case of attention deficit disorder. T.P. had a lot of difficulties. We all did. I think it skewed how we approached things, too. We were supposed to grow up to be like him: overachieving WASPs who fit into New York Society; and none of us did—rebelliously or not—except George, in his odd way. Odd, I mean, in the view of New York Society.

  GEORGE BECOMES GEORGE

  PETER MATTHIESSEN George never ventured very far from his family background. Any child in the household of Pauline and Francis T. P. Plimpton had excellent manners or else. He never used four-letter words and was generally circumspect in his language. Even when drunk, he very seldom turned himself loose entirely, and his dress was faithful to his upbringing. One had to admire his unflinching loyalty to the shirt and tie, V-necked sweaters, sports jacket, gray flannels, and fedora. He kept a tight rein on himself and minded his mother. I remember the time in the late fifties when George and I were both involved with beautiful, very smart, funny young women. George was absolutely nuts about his girl, but at a certain point, he let it end or let her end it for him. I remember he blurted out, “Well, y’see, old fella, she wasn’t quite . . . socially acceptable!” I was aghast. I said, “This is ridiculous!” and George said, “I know.” He was truly miserable.

  JOAN AMES You might not have seen him for years, but George’s family feeling was strong and warm. All of his cousins would call him periodically, even though we weren’t au courant with him in any way. He would treat me like a long-lost sister. He’d be there for me on the other end of the phone—he’d call me “love” and my heart would melt, that’s all I could say. You know, he was this older cousin, he was famous, he was busy, but he had all the time in the world for me.

  SARAH GAY PLIMPTON How did George cope with parents like ours? Well, he tried really hard to live up to their standards; and maybe he got credit for trying. We all did. But maybe George was more sensitive to their intellectual challenges, to being reprimanded, to being called to account, than the rest of us were. I know that except for games he hated contention and criticism, not only to protect himself, but all of us. Of course I was much younger than he was, but by the time I came along, whenever he was at home, I saw how extraordinarily good he was at deflecting even the possibility of confrontations. He did it with stories, with self-deprecating humor, with a gentle sense of absurdity, with unfailing good humor. He coped with our parents by entertaining them. He made them happy. This required tremendous emotional self-control, especially in someone as young as George must have been when he began. It also required a great gift from somewhere. The rest of us didn’t get it.

  CHARLES MICHENER George was someone who figured out early on that it was easier to get through life with a persona. He became George Plimpton.

  George as Prospero, St. Bernard’s School, 1939.

  Courtesy of St. Bernard’s School Archives.

  JAMES GOODALE In the St. Bernard’s alumni bulletin, there are some great stories about George. One that struck my fancy was about George as the pitcher on the St. Bernard’s baseball team. Apparently, he read books on how to pitch, or perhaps studied other pitchers very carefully, and one day came to school with a pitch that no one else at St. Bernard’s could throw: an underhand fastball. Now, what sort of kid thinks of throwing a fastball underhand, other than a person who is conscious of his own persona? So, as a young fellow who is developing a particular persona, and if you’ve got a gift for telling stories in a charming way, a gift of great charm, charisma even, why wouldn’t you work on that, too, especially as it might be an effective way of keeping your parents off your back? He could really charm his way out of, and into, almost anything. He probably figured that out as a little kid, and he got away with things, even with someone as tough as Pauline. He discovered a way to make room for happiness, his own and others’.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON George never tried to change anybody to make himself comfortable, not for a minute. He worked his own way through to a point of comfort, and if he could do something to make others comfortable, which he almost always could, he did that, too.

  JEANNE MCCULLOCH He must have spent so much time trying to keep his parents at a bearable distance, by keeping things light, by keeping them amused; he had no choice but to keep doing it all his life. But, God forbid, don’t go to the deeper emotions.

  NANCY STODDART Was it Mailer? I don’t know, but somebody called him a smokeless Vesuvius—anger, but no sign of it. But because George was so genial and charming, he could pretty much make things purr along in a manner that pleased him. There wasn’t much reason for anger. Anger wa
s for when someone nipped the edge of a boundary of his, and then he let you know. He was like a well-trained animal. Well-trained animals will behave perfectly well until you violate a boundary. He was a strong person in that way. Otherwise, being so genial and charming, if he didn’t have that boundary thing, he would have been awful.

  BLAIR FULLER I used to think of George as a psychological tragedy. The unfailing courtesy, generosity, curiosity, the insistent self-deprecation. Yes, of course, that was the secret of his charm, as a storyteller and as a social creature, but how much self-deprecation can an ego take before it becomes self-mutilation?

  HIS ACCENT

  MICHAEL FRITH I remember a number of years ago New York magazine ran one of those “Best of New York” articles, and for “Best Accent” they chose George’s. There was a little footnote saying, “By the way, where did he get that thing?” But of course, if you’d met George’s father, you’d know exactly where he got that thing. If anything, it was even more patrician than George’s.

  ANTONIO WEISS You would never understand his accent until you spoke with his mother. Whatever you thought of his accent, it was a very watered-down version of hers.

  SUSAN MORGAN He was the only person I know who could say Gore Vidal’s first name as though it had four syllables in it, the pitch rising and falling—“I think we should talk to Go-ah-r-ahh.” You should see the TV show he did, on the making of Rio Lobo, the one where he’s playing a cowboy: He’s trying to say his one line in a cowboy accent, and it’s hilarious. He can’t do it. He couldn’t not speak in that accent.

  HUGH HEFNER When we were planning a Playboy twenty-fifth anniversary TV special for ABC, I wanted George to read a voice-over. ABC didn’t want him. I insisted, and they used him. I liked the fact that George had a kind of Kennedyesque, eastern voice, and I thought it was right for an overview, not only of the history of Playboy, but the history of pop culture and politics of the past twenty-five years. He was the perfect choice, and as a result he was offered a whole lot of work, voice-overs and commercials.

  JAMES ZUG He told me that at Cambridge [University] he’d read for a production of As You Like It and was rejected because they thought his accent was so bad, he must have grown up in Brooklyn.

  CALVIN TRILLIN I had this strong feeling that it wasn’t an affectation. It was an accent that might exist elsewhere; you just hadn’t met any other people who spoke that way, and you probably hadn’t met them because you really weren’t haute enough to be allowed into their presence. They surely existed somewhere, but only God knows where. It was exciting, the idea that he was a representative of a people who would one day come here to be with us.

  HARRY MATHEWS He never talked any other way to anyone. George was candor itself. Anybody who was with him for more than one minute knew that he wasn’t trying to act superior, that that was just the way he was. He was a model example of the fact that being very open about who you are is the best way to inspire people’s trust.

  BRUCE JAY FRIEDMAN When I closed my eyes and listened to him, it was like listening to Katharine Hepburn. I never heard anything quite like it. I thought if you woke him in the middle of the night, he’d say, “You talkin’ to me?” He’d sound like De Niro.

  DAVID MICHAELIS All I remember of George’s own description of his accent was “eastern seaboard cosmopolitan.” Something like that. I thought that it must have come from St. Bernard’s and that it was very much a part of his self-created persona, but something that he was entirely comfortable with. At the same time, there was this whole sense of, as Don Hall said, “You can’t have a voice like George’s and be taken seriously.” Was he entirely comfortable with that, with George Plimpton being a kind of joke? It’s hard to imagine, but perhaps this was the plan, or a happily unintended consequence of the plan. I don’t know: I just always understood the accent to be part of himself.

  II.

  SIGHTINGS OF GEORGE

  AT SCHOOL: 1934–1952

  ____

  We do not mind the winter wind

  Or weep o’er summer’s bier,

  Nor care a jot if cold or hot,

  So long as football’s here;

  And fat and thin can all join in,

  The sport is all the same;

  There’s health and fun for every one

  Who plays the good old game. . . .

  There’s naught to choose

  ’Twixt win and lose—

  The game’s the game for all.

  —ST. BERNARD’S FOOTBALL SONG

  ST. BERNARD’S

  BUZZ MERRITT St. Bernard’s School at that time was one of the three best private boys’ schools in New York City. It’s on East Ninety-eighth Street, right next to where the Plimptons lived. The faculty was almost entirely British. When George and I started, there was only one American, and he was the athletic director. The fellow who headed the school—Mr. Jenkins, by name John Card Jenkins—had come over as a young teacher from Britain with a partner named Tabor after World War I and started this school, really as a moneymaking venture. Mr. Jenkins was very attractive, as were his number two and number three, and they were constantly asked out to dinner parties by kids’ parents. Their marketing was very low-key. There were two other good schools at the time: Buckley and Allen-Stevenson; but they were not British, and St. Bernard’s had a cachet all to itself, which we’re quite proud of.

  PETER MATTHIESSEN One good thing due to the presence of British teachers was that we learned how to parse a sentence. We were given sentences of increasing complexity, and we were able to assign the grammatical function to every word, which was invaluable for a career in writing. To my amazement, ages later, I found that many of my college students had never learned this, and they were incapable of saying what part of speech “however” is.

  BUZZ MERRITT We had our own little caps, along with the traditional uniforms of gray flannels and white shirts, and in the summer, gray flannel shorts. We always had to have our caps on when we came to school or there were serious consequences. The academics were very rigorous, and we were generally quite terrified of our teachers. There was one little fellow, a Mr. Edwards, an English teacher, a very high-blood-pressure type, who would stand us up and kick us in the butt whenever we did bad things. In Latin, we were lined up against the wall every morning to recite our vocabulary—five or six new words, every day. Those who missed went to the end of the line. At the end of the line, we got either a whack with the ruler or we had chalk thrown at us, etc., etc. It was the British “public school” attitude, where there was a lot of discipline and a good deal of fear. George and I had a teacher who actually kept a shillelagh prominently propped against his desk. He never used it, but the threat was always there. In hindsight, we received a great education, particularly for memory.

  BILLY GRAHAM We had a lot of interesting people in our class—or, at least, the children of interesting people. Punch Sulzberger was one of them, who later became the publisher of The New York Times. Who else? Charlie Morgan, whose grandfather was J. P. Morgan. I remember a teacher once said to him, because Charlie was rather slow, “Charlie, the Morgan family is like a baby carriage rolling down a hill.” Charlie just smiled. I think we kept up with each other more than most elementary school classmates do, but I’d guess that the longest-running friendship was between George and Peter Matthiessen. They were both literary, and of course Peter gave George the editorship of The Paris Review, which was as close to a “real” job as he ever had.

  BUZZ MERRITT George was extremely good at baseball. He was a pitcher, a little wild, but very good. I think he won every game he pitched in the two years we were on the so-called first team. I was his catcher. When I would go out to the mound to steady him down, George reacted well. He got better. We were also great fans, and we got into collecting autographs any way we could. We would go downtown to all the hotels where the visiting teams were staying and try to get their autographs in the lobby in the morning. Usually we’d be thrown out by the floorwalkers and try t
o sneak back in. We knew every single doorway, the garbage entrances, the service entrances, of all the hotels. We were rabid collectors.

  George pitching for St. Bernard’s.

  Courtesy of St. Bernard’s School Archives.

  NELSON ALDRICH George told me a story once about going out for a weekend in the country with Punch Sulzberger. They were driven, of course, by a uniformed chauffeur in a limousine, but about midway in the journey, they got a flat in the right rear tire. What followed was not the worst of George’s lifetime of mortifications, but he vividly recalled his squirming embarrassment in the backseat as the chauffeur got out of the car and set about changing the tire. He remembered how the tails of the man’s black uniform jacket flapped crazily in the wind of the passing traffic and how the sweat stood out on his face as he worked the jack up and down, up and down, while the rear of the car, with the little boys safe in their soft gray seats, went up, up, up.

  BUZZ MERRITT In those days, our class enemies, so to speak, were the Irish, known as “Micks”—a terrible scourge. On weekends, they would come out to Central Park where we were playing and challenge us to football games. They always insisted, “You kick off first, and we’ll receive.” Of course, if you went with that, as we did the first time, you kicked the ball, and it ended up miles away in what is now Spanish Harlem. The blacks were way up in the north of the city, so it was the Micks who taunted us. Our caps were what did it. One day, I remember this particular group came up to steal a baseball bat or something, and a tough-looking big Irish kid, with six or seven others, confronted us. We were all trembling, wondering what to do, and suddenly Toby Wherry cracked and surged forward—he was a big kid, but always very retiring—and started quoting Macbeth, I think it was: “Out, damned spot!” This Irish kid just melted. They all ran away.