George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  ANDREW LEGGATT He was twenty-three when he arrived at Cambridge. We first met when we were both freshmen at King’s. We lived in the Garden Hostel, which held, I think, fifty-two of us, in single rooms—each room probably had a shower and a place to boil a kettle. It opened in the year in which we went up. So we were two of fifty-two first occupants. We both had rooms in this hostel for a year, and of course we had to get to know each other pretty damned well because by the end of it we decided in the following year we would apply to share rooms when we moved into college.

  MILTON DEVANE King’s College Hostel, as I recollect, was of rather ordinary architecture, three stories high. The architect didn’t know how to signal that the building had come to the top when it did. So he put granite balls on the top of it, and since the chapel was well known to have been done in the perpendicular style, the undergraduates promptly named the new hostel as being in the “testicular style.” George told me that they put the heating in the floor, which was a new venture, because most of the places didn’t have heating at all. George showed me with great delight on one occasion a communication from the bursar saying, “Gentlemen will please be careful, as they step out of bed in the morning, to test the temperature of the floor before putting full weight down.”

  ANDREW LEGGATT We had a rather tiresome housekeeper during our first year. She’d been chatting to George for a long time in his room one day when he had been recovering from flu. After a while, in order to get rid of her, George said, “I must ask you to leave now, Mrs. Denton. My favorite radio program is just coming on.” As she paused expectantly in the doorway, George switched on the radio and the sprightly announcer said, “Come now, children, clap your hands!”

  Dear Mother and Daddy,

  . . . There is no mountain climbing here, East Anglia being notoriously flat, but there is a wonderful sport called roof-climbing. Roof-climbing is not to be confused with wall-climbing which every undergraduate is forced to do to get back into his college if he is out after midnight. Roof-climbing requires cat-like nerves coupled with extraordinary bravado—both acquired, I’m told, from a bottle of Gilbey’s gin. The favorite target for roof-climbers is the King’s College chapel and the height of success to put some article on one of the four spires of the tower 160 feet in the air. Articles discovered in the light of dawn (all climbing is done at night) have included umbrellas, a “Save Ethiopia” banner, glass tumblers, and a Union Jack. The college has to pay a steeple jack 20 pounds sterling to get the articles down, and of late an expert with a shotgun has been shooting them off. He demurred, however, when faced with the Union Jack. . . . [October 27, 1950]

  ANDREW LEGGATT The only sense in which we would have been in class together is attending the same lectures. I don’t recall if we did, mainly because George didn’t go to many. I don’t remember him ever going to a lecture, but it would be an exaggeration to say that he never did. One can only say he would have been extremely selective. He never worked as studiously as some. He would sit at the table thinking, and writing when the inspiration occurred to him, and he read a good deal, of course. But I don’t have a memory of him studying very intently.

  BEE DABNEY I saw George in Paris that summer of 1951 [after George’s first year at King’s]. My mother and I took the boat from Canada, and we landed in Le Havre, and Sadri came and met me, much to the discouragement of George, who was in Paris on vacation. George knew Sadri and liked him, too. Mother and I stayed in this hotel together, the Bristol, and there seemed to be lots of people from Boston around. I think people knew about these two men in my life, and there came this discussion of “What in the world is she going to do?” This was really a dilemma for me. George and I had a wonderful, happy reunion. But I kept on with my trip, and said good-bye to Mother, and went off to Switzerland with Sadri and Princess Andrée, his mother. We met his father in some extraordinary hotel on Lake Geneva, and then we all seemed to be following each other around by car on this tour all over Switzerland and ended up in the South of France at Sadri’s mother’s house, where I spent the summer. I was already struggling to stay forever in France and threatening my parents that I would never come home, but that didn’t work. Then I realized that the Atelier des Beaux-Arts would be the place for me to transfer to, to get to Paris, where I really wanted to be, because George was there. Sadri introduced me to his cousin, who was absolutely lovely, and she connected me to the right person at the Atelier to whom to send my portfolio.

  PIEDY LUMET I think George just loved Bee. She always moved on—George, too, though I imagine with Bee in possession of more of his heart than he possessed of hers. He was always so devoted to her. She loved him, too, but I couldn’t make out where Bee stood most of the time. It was too confusing. But she was adorable and engaging—everybody loved her. She had a smile that went right around the corner—a little bit off center, very beguiling.

  BEE DABNEY I came back to Boston at the end of the summer of 1951, and I told my great friend Jeanne Hannan, who was studying at the Museum School with me, that our dream of going to Europe would come true for sure because we had this name, Sadri’s cousin. So we put together our portfolios and sent them to Europe. Our families, meanwhile, said, “No way are we going to send you to Paris.” My father was adamant: “Bee, you’re going to go back to Boston. You’re going to get a job. You’re going to do what everybody else does. You don’t need to be traveling around in Europe.” Well, when the Atelier des Beaux-Arts sent the acceptance, all in French, this document on parchment with this embossed ribbon with a gold stamp on it saying, “Mademoiselle Beatrice Dabney has been accepted,” all in French, “to this Atelier des Beaux-Arts,” etc., and Jeanne got one, too, I showed mine to my father and he almost died of excitement. He went around to all of his cocktail parties and said, “Look! My daughter has been accepted to the Beaux-Arts in Paris!” And this ribbon flowed out of this document, and everyone was agog, and so off we went. That was how I got back to Paris in the summer of 1952.

  ANDREW LEGGATT During his two years at Cambridge, George read English and derived great encouragement from Dadie Rylands, the great Shakespearean scholar. Dadie supervised me one-to-one for my first year at Cambridge, because I had thought to read law for all three years that I was up, but they wouldn’t allow that thinking. They required that you read something else for first year, so that at least I would have an element of humanity in my education. Supervision by Dadie was the greatest teaching experience that I have ever had. I used to leave his rooms on occasion literally leaping in the air because of the physical uplift of the experience.

  Dear Mother and Daddy . . .

  I completed a short story the other day and read it aloud to Mr. Rylands during a supervision. He was very excited about it and suggested sending it off to a magazine called the Cornhill, a quarterly with an ancestory (sp.) of three centuries. . . . [no date]

  MILTON DEVANE George and I were drinking other people’s sherry all over the college. We decided in the spring that we had to do something to pay back all of our debts, and George came up with the idea that we would introduce the English to the American martini. We did it in his quarters at King’s College. There wasn’t much ice in England in those days. We left it that I would take care of the liquor and George would take care of the ice. George’s search for ice was much more adventurous than mine for liquor because all I had to do was go down and buy the stuff. George found the ice in the fish store, because that was the only place where you could get a block of it. We stuck it in the bathtub and proceeded to lose about half of it as we tried to get the smell out. We finally did. Gin in England in those days was a lesser proof than it was in the United States, only eighty proof, I think, so George decided that the true introduction of the martini should be at full strength. We mixed the things and stuck them in the icebox and only served them after they came out. The damn things were lethal! After we said good night to our supervisor, Dadie, who had stopped by for a drink, we closed the door and then opened it up five minutes later
to let somebody in. Our supervisor of studies lay there, passed out, in the rain. That’s the way we introduced the martini.

  Dear Mother and Daddy,

  . . . I’m spending the first part of Easter Vacation with the Dowager Lady St. Just who was one of the people Mr. Lamont gave me an introduction to. She ought to feed me up a bit. Don’t for heaven’s sake send over any gin. That addition of the gin to the list was not supposed to be taken seriously at all. I was trying to be funny. I shall not again. . . . [no date]

  Dear Mother and Daddy,

  . . . Somewhat to my surprise I’ve been elected to a Cambridge club known as the Pitt, a sort of large scale Porcellian filled with (as Andrew puts it) “decaying horse-men.” Andrew thinks I was elected because of my plum-colored waistcoat (called in some circles “Old Wine”) and that seems to me as good a reason as any. . . . [October 27, 1951]

  ANDREW LEGGATT Morgan [E. M. Forster] had rooms in Cambridge when we were up; we used to see him there, of course, and talk with him when we were undergraduates. And that’s how George had the connection to do that first Paris Review interview. 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.

  PETER STANFORD George had this worshipful attitude toward Forster, which I didn’t share at all. Forster was well known for despising Americans for their warlike ways and their perpetuating another empire to replace the British Empire, which he hated. He lived just one floor above me, and he never spoke to me, even to say hello.

  E. M. Forster in his Cambridge rooms.

  Photograph by Edward Leigh, Cambridge, held at King’s College Archive Centre, Cambridge.

  GEORGE PLIMPTON, UNPUBLISHED INTERVIEW WITH FRAN KIERNAN Bowden Broadwater called me one day and said he’d been browsing around in the Strand bookstore and he bought a book and he opened it up and out fluttered a postcard that had some writing on it. He read the postcard, and it said, “Dear Lou, No, I do not wish to have dinner with your friend Plimpton tonight.” And it was signed “Morgan.” And of course, that’s E. M. Forster. It had the King’s College crest on it. Bowden said, “George, this thing fluttered out and there’s your name and there’s Morgan Forster. Can you remember about this?” And I said, “Bowden, I certainly do. It was when I’d just arrived at Cambridge.” I was at King’s College there, which is a very snooty college. Most of the Etonians go there, and when I went there they didn’t talk to me. I was just shunned. For about two weeks, no one would talk to me, not even the guy who was sitting next to me in Hall. At any rate, I had a friend there called Lou Connick, who was an American, and E. M. Forster had asked him to have dinner with him. So he thought that he could bring me along. There were no phones in the college. Everything was passed around in these sorts of notes. And Lou had gotten one and slipped it into a book. Of course, then I became a great friend of E. M. Forster’s, but not at that time, and I did not go to that dinner. Lou probably sold all of his books, and it ended up here in the Strand. I’ve always thought I should write an explanation—otherwise scholars will think I was sort of a pariah.

  ANDREW LEGGATT During our second year in college, we lived five floors up at the top of a winding stone staircase. It was mighty cold in winter, and I vividly remember how George’s day used to begin crouched over the gas fire, wearing nothing but his khaki underpants, relics of his military experience. He would then toast a slice of bread on a toasting fork and proceed to prepare himself for the day. You have to remember that when I say we roomed together, we had one bedroom with two beds in it and one living room. And a place where you could boil a kettle. So we lived in pretty close quarters in that cold ambience which is Cambridge in the winter. He was particularly tidy. That’s right. And he was slower to recover from the night before, I always used to think. It took him some time to warm up. Some of us spring to instant action, don’t we, and others only do it slowly, and George was a supreme example of the slow beginner to the day.

  Dear Mother and Daddy,

  . . . The books also arrived after being held up by a Customs Official under the impression I was running a book shop. Your choice was excellent. I was particularly impressed by the Maxwell Perkins letters. A really engrossing fine Yankee character shines through them. I have almost definitely decided (not because of the Perkins letters mind you) to go into publishing when I return to the U.S. whether or not my writing pans through. . . . [no date]

  ANDREW LEGGATT On weekends George would go up to London and stay at the Cavendish Hotel, which in those days was still presided over by Rosa Lewis, the Duchess of Duke Street, as she was known, famous if not infamous for her hospitality as well as for her cooking. Most of his accounts of his visits began with the words “The door opened and there stood this wonderful girl.” After one of these expeditions, when he had a stick on account of a skiing accident, there were dog-bite marks on the handle. According to George, the dog had been occupying itself with the stick while he enjoyed the ministrations of its mistress.

  Dear Mother and Daddy,

  . . . Last Sunday I had a very pleasant day in London with the Cowles’. We had lunch at Claridge’s and then were shown through the Holbein exhibition in the Royal Academy by Oscar Kokoschka, the famous German painter who has done a portrait of the Cowles which raised quite a controversy in Minneapolis circles. His interpretations of the Holbeins we looked at were interesting if rather over-arty and abstract. Mr Cowles was bewildered at times, I thought. At one point he interrupted the verbiage to ask, “Well now, let’s see, Oscar. Just whom is number one in this painting business?” Kokoschka’s artistic sense was obviously shaken by this question but after considerable hedging suggested Titian as his choice for “number one.” “Ah,” said Mr Cowles. “Well now, if Titian is Number One, who then might we call Number Two.” “Tintoretto,” barked Kokoschka curtly, quite angry now. Fortunately, Mr Cowles didn’t continue the progression. He said: “Well now, if Titian is ‘Number One’ and Tintoretto is ‘Number Two’ I guess we can consider the rest of ’em sort of supernumeraries.” . . . [no date]

  Dear Mother and Daddy,

  . . . I put on grandfather’s white tie and tails last weekend and went to a dance at the Savoy where I sat opposite Princess Elizabeth. I, unfortunately, did not make the most of the occasion.

  My one conversation with her occurred in the reception line prior to the dinner when I bowed (rather stiffly in grandfather’s white tie and tails) and said “How do you do, Ma’am?” She smiled at me but had nothing to say as to the state of her health. She, however, looked pretty, and very healthy.

  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. She again smiled at me. I had nothing to say.

  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.

  There then followed a cabaret during which I composed a very amusing hypothetical conversation which presumably would take place between the Princess and myself on the dance floor following the end of the cabaret.

  When the cabaret ended, I rose and went around the table. The Princess rose. I bowed (stiffly) and the Princess smiled at me and swept out of the ballroom, home to Buckingham Palace.

  The orchestra was playing a slow and very danceable tango. . . . [no date]

  PETER STANFORD Lou Connick, an Iwo Jima veteran, and George decided to hold a “going down party”—going down from university, that is—in my rooms, because they were going to be torn down to make way for some other facility there. The idea was that they could smash it up. They went out and bought a lot of dead chickens and dead
rabbits, which they put in glass aquarium bowls. So I had these dead animals hanging out of these bowls. That was the beginning. Then they gave out little hammers so the guests could hammer all of the plaster in the rooms—this mock medieval room with a big fireplace and so forth. This was in June, during the summer vacation, and I can remember George coming in with Jacqueline Bouvier, suited up with her sister—quite a different lady than the great woman we knew as President Kennedy’s wife. She spoke in a rather shrill voice, smoked a cigarette, and sat on the piano. I was terrified that she would put out the cigarette on the piano! That was another George party; George was always the animator of these things.

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON George told me that before he left Cambridge he had to sit for a three-hour final exam on one topic. The question was: “Who was Charles James Fox?” George drew a blank, so he began to improvise: “Charles James Fox was a rather mediocre second baseman for the Cincinnati Reds . . .” and spent the next three hours describing his career.

  ANDREW LEGGATT As soon as we came down from Cambridge I got married, and George gave a speech at our wedding. He was, of course, an incomparable speaker, and the speech was an inevitable success. Nothing untoward occurred. But I did remember with apprehension a wedding in which he was an usher and the seat of his pants split as he was unrolling the red carpet down the aisle. George asserted that thereafter he had to walk upright down the aisle, clutching his trousers to his backside and kicking the carpet before him. I was, of course, never quite sure to what extent situations like that were embellished in the telling.