DOUGLAS BURDEN Well, it happened when George invited me to his engagement party to Bee Dabney. It was a lovely party, on Fifth Avenue with a lovely view out the windows, I think it was his parents’ apartment. It was a crowd of people that I knew very well, though I had never seen Bee Dabney before. I knew that George had taken Bee away from Sadruddin Aga Khan—and vice versa—and that she was really a dazzler. At any rate, I ended up sitting down next to her on this couch in the middle of the party. We got talking and had a better and better time, roaring with laughter. And then, sort of instantly, we became terribly attracted to each other. I guess you’d call it falling in love instantly. She was looking at me and laughing and giggling—we both were. And I think I said to her, “You wanna split?” And she burst out laughing and got up off the couch and we ran for the elevator. Of all the horrible things to do on earth, that was it. We were together for five years. I never asked her to marry me for some reason, maybe because of how it started. I felt terrible about it. Peggy Bancroft hired Bee to come and do a mural on the wall of their apartment, going up these beautiful round stairs from the main entrance. The picture she painted was of me on a white horse, with a great javelin, and I had speared George and he was lying on the ground in his armor; you could see his face, and you could see my face, and so you knew who the figures were. And Bee was in the picture, too, all dressed up as a little goddess, and she was smiling. Everyone who came to the many, many parties that Peggy gave instantly recognized what had happened. The picture was the topper—that really did it. At some point I called George and apologized profusely for the terrible rudeness and the horrible thing I’d done, and amazingly enough, he was very, very nice about it. I was just stunned at how kind and nice he was. I never heard about what happened afterwards. I think some of George’s friends never forgave me, like Peter Matthiessen. I think they were always angry at me and still are to this day. It’s a terrible story about a shameful deed.
BEE DABNEY There was too much competition for George’s time. Harold Vanderbilt entered George’s life and whisked him off to Palm Beach and heaven knows where else. George would go because he had a commission to do this story on Harold Vanderbilt and the America’s Cup races, and bridge, and that occupied George’s time, very much so. I began to realize that I didn’t want to get married anyway. The domestic life of having babies—I wasn’t really ready for that, because I was getting so many commissions, and I didn’t want to settle down into a domestic situation. I didn’t feel that George was going to be the domestic person, and my time clock was so different from his. I was an early-bird riser, and George didn’t want to go to bed too early. Nighttime was when George’s morning blossomed, almost. I didn’t think that would be helpful. We always remained very close friends for the rest of our days. I got married first in 1965 to an Italian artist/photographer named Gianni Penati, who entered my life with a camera because he was doing a story on me for Vogue, during which time he had to retake all the pictures because Vogue wasn’t satisfied, so he came back a second time, and by then he was taking me to museums and telling me about his paintings, etc., and we became great friends. By then I was thirty-three, and I felt this was a very fascinating man, and George was very occupied with his world. Although we were great friends and had affections, I decided that was that.
KATE ROOSEVELT WHITNEY I got to know George because he was my school classmate Sarah Plimpton’s older brother. I was a freshman entering Barnard College in New York City in 1954. A few friends and I had launched a literary magazine in high school, so, naturally, I registered for the freshman creative writing course to be taught by George Plimpton. I believe it was George’s first foray into a college classroom as “the professor.” About fifteen female students were seated, awaiting our twenty-seven-year-old teacher, who loped into the room slightly bent over the stack of ten or so books he was carrying in his arms. From the pages of each book were sticking a forest of paper markers. The students were intrigued and curious about his eager yet hesitant and vulnerable manner. At the end of class, besides the assigned reading, he asked each of us to start a journal ( just start writing!), which he would review with us individually on a regular basis. When my turn came two weeks later, George wanted my advice, as a friend—what should he do about the very personal messages some students were writing to him in their journals? If I offered advice I don’t now remember, but George did not teach beyond the first semester. Maybe George the perennial student of life, having tried on the academic mantle, was ready to move on.
KATHY AINSWORTH I met George within three days of arriving in New York for the first time, in the summer of 1958 or 1959. I was sitting in El Morocco with Dick Sabat, who was a lover of my mother’s, and George just walked across the room from where he was sitting and introduced himself. We were very young. I was eighteen, and he was twenty-five [actually, thirty-one or thirty-two]. He told me later that I looked like a little girl dressed up in my mother’s clothes, and he had to find out who this little girl was, sitting in El Morocco with Dick Sabat, who was the man about town at the time. In those early years that I was in New York—modeling with Eileen Ford and becoming well known, I suppose, the girl of the year—he was the first man I made love with. He didn’t look the part of a lover at all, he was like this big, lanky cowboy, like Gary Cooper: tall, lanky, hair flopping in his face, really thin, whip-thin. He didn’t speak with a drawl, but he sort of walked with a drawl. I’d had some heavy petting, as they said in those days, in the back of a car or something like that, but I’d never had an adult gentleman with beautiful manners, lots of fun, a wonderful dancer, who took me everywhere. He was my first sort of knight errant. He introduced me to everything. He told me what to read. Whether it was culinary, literary, or in bed, 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.
MARION CAPRON I was introduced to George in 1955 or 1956 by a professor at Barnard when George was teaching there. I did not have a class with him, but I was taking a course with the professor, who was a mutual friend. We met, and George started going on about The Paris Review. Very soon he said, “Would you like to come aboard?” I was on scholarship at Barnard, and I was already working at the public relations office there, and I liked working a whole lot better than I liked studying, so that’s what I did. I dropped out in my fourth year and went to work at The Paris Review, first at the office on Columbus Circle, then at the one on First Avenue. I also lived in these offices. Of course, when he got his apartment at 541 East Seventy-second Street, I stayed there quite a lot. It beat the hell out of my cot at the office. George would be seeing other girls, but I didn’t care. I wanted him to be with me; I had a terrific crush on him; but, no, I didn’t care. It was just a separate thing. Also I began to see other people. He didn’t mind; in fact, he rather liked it, especially when I saw rich or famous people. Once I accused him of wanting a triangle setup. I was kind of appalled. When I stopped adoring George, it was because of that. To me, it meant that he wasn’t sure enough of himself, whether he liked me, if he had to have it reinforced by the fact that other richer, more famous men liked me. That made it okay for him to like me. That meant that his judgment was okay.
MAGGIE PALEY I was having an affair with a man named Bill Cole. He was a publicist at Knopf. One morning I was at Bill’s, and he said, “By the way, George Plimpton is coming over, and we’re doing an interview with P. G. Wodehouse,” who was a friend of Bill’s. I said, “Who’s George Plimpton?” This was 1963. I had never heard of him. I don’t remember how Bill described him exactly, except that he said, “He’s a neuter, and I know that because he’s with a different woman every night. He couldn’t be screwing them all.” George came over, and here was this handsome, long-necked man, and we sat around in the kitchen for a while and talked and laughed. He was about thirty-five. He was really beautiful. Beautiful skin.
They went off to see P. G. Wodehouse, then Bill called me and told me that George had said, “Who was that enchanting girl?” George began inviting Bill to parties, asking him to bring me. Bill and I were not in love. It was just a wonderful, companionable relationship. Then, I think what happened was that I got a strange card, a black-and-white photograph of people who looked like nomads in the desert, and it was signed, “George.” I couldn’t figure out what this was. It turned out it was George in Lawrence of Arabia. He was sending out a picture of himself in the film as his Christmas card. He phoned me up and asked me for a date. Because Bill had told me that George was a neuter, when he made a pass at me, I thought, “I’m going to save this man. [laughs] Oh, boy! This neuter likes me.” I think he took me on our first date to Le Club. Le Club was one of the first discos in New York. It was run by a man named Olivier Coquelin, and it was a chic place for young people to go and dance, although I don’t remember dancing with George, but I started having an affair with him which went on for a while. Do you remember the big piece about the Paris Review crowd that Gay Talese wrote? It was called “Looking for Hemingway,” it was in Esquire in 1963, and it sort of stamped George as a national celebrity. He described a party at which George was the host, but he left to go out with Mrs. Kennedy. I was George’s date when he came back from Mrs. Kennedy. So it was clear to me, fairly early on, that I was not the only woman in George’s life. I thought he was a wonderful lover. Of course, I was very young. I’ve heard that some girls thought that George was awkward as a lover, but I don’t remember that at all. I remember him being enthusiastic, and I really enjoyed him. I remember sex with him. There have been a lot of men in my life, and many of them were forgettable [laughs]. But not George.
Times Square. From left, Robert Silvers, Didi Ladd, Luisa Gilardenghi, George.
From the collection of George Plimpton.
FRANCINE DU PLESSIX GRAY At this time in my life, I seemed to have a particular taste for Paris Review boys: first Tom Guinzburg, then Blair Fuller, then, a year later, George. I was going to Barnard, and George invited me to one of those big cocktail parties that his parents used to give for the young people at their apartment on Ninety-eighth Street, where George was still living after coming back from Paris. So it must have been 1956 or 1957. Of course, in that milieu, we used to drive everywhere, and George picked me up in his little convertible at my parents’ house on East Seventy-eighth Street. I have no memory of where we went, but he drove me home and gave me a good-bye kiss, and it was the most asexual kind of butterfly kiss I’ve ever had from a man. And it had nothing to do at all with the way a homosexual kisses you on the mouth, either, which is a totally different thing. It was like alighting on your lips for a second. And I thought to myself, “This man will never commit himself to a woman.”
MARION CAPRON George was a strange mixture. Part of him sneered at Society, and part of him was in absolute awe of it. Part of him thought his father was the best model, and another part idolized Harold Vanderbilt, who was busily doing things like getting monkey glands to improve his potency. That was his rage, and George would go to Palm Beach to visit Vanderbilt and listen to this stuff seriously. And then he would come back, having been bored to tears, and would say so but still be enormously pleased that he was included. I disapproved, because I was this earnest, deadpan pain in the ass. Part of it was probably envy. But Norman Mailer once said that I had a built-in shit detector, and I knew I had better instincts about people, certainly, than George did. I think the secret was, George was genuinely fascinated by anything for a while. He could talk to almost anybody. He had that gift. But he was also in awe of money and high social status. At one point, he went to one of these Vanderbilt things or something else, and I said, “George, you’re rather like a used toothbrush. You just park it anywhere.” And he reached across the table—we were at some bar—and slapped me. He was probably drinking; it was the only time he ever did that. I guess it was the nastiest thing I could have said, but I thought somehow he should be earnestly editing books, writing, working harder, applying himself, whatever that meant. Meanwhile, what was I doing? Unloading Paris Reviews from the dock into a Mercedes. That was my high moral vantage point. . . .
LITERARY ENTREPRENEUR
TOM GUINZBURG When I went back to New York in 1953, I got some help from family lawyers, and we went through the whole business of setting up a little company for the Review, and working out the distribution, and dealing with the postman—all the stuff that occupied us for the next year or two and which was critical to our success. The resonance was already there—Time and Newsweek had reviewed us enthusiastically, and people were talking about the magazine. We had an office at Two Columbus Circle, used mostly for storage, mail, and so forth, except I think Marion Capron actually lived there, and then we got another office, or she did, or John Train did, on First Avenue. But Peter [Matthiessen] became much less involved with the magazine very quickly. He was pursuing his own writing and environmental concerns, tracking the bad guys in the world. He was also out in the country, living in Sagaponack, almost from the time he came back from Paris. Humes and Train were in town and still concerned about the magazine even as they, too, got caught up in other things. So it was still George who carried the major weight of the thing.
MARION CAPRON The Columbus Circle office was an incredibly filthy place, through which flashed the neon Chevrolet sign. My pittance of a salary was paid personally by George, and when I complained of being cold in the night, on my cot, his mother trotted down and brought me a blanket. To get to that cot, I had to climb eight flights of office-type stairs—very long stairs—because no one was allowed to use the elevator at night. We hauled Paris Reviews up these eight flights. I went down to the docks to get them in the company car, George’s 250 Mercedes, which he was very proud of. It was a subdued gray, with red trim, so that was a perk for me. We were distributed then by Eastern News. I remember the guy’s name, even: Drucker. George was mighty intimidated by Drucker, who was a burly, quasi-waterfront guy, but Drucker and I got on just fine. At any rate, I went down, and Drucker would help load up the car with boxes and boxes of issues. Lillian von Nickern helped, too. Nicky was the secretary, and the glue, I may say, of the Review at that time. She kept all the records, and without her it really would not have functioned. She and I, we had fun. A nifty lady.
LILLIAN VON NICKERN My first introduction to George must have been at the Columbus Circle office; he didn’t strike me like a bolt of lightning. George would call me up: “So-and-so needs his money! We printed his work! We promised him!” I would say, “We can’t pay him. I mean, it’s nice to promise him, but I don’t have the money to do it. He’s on the list.” And they were. I did not pay in installments—that’s just not the right way to do it—but many a payment had to be delayed because we just did not have the funds. And because The Paris Review was The Paris Review, to be in it was such a wonderful thing for so many of the young writers that they didn’t really object to a late payment. The agents, of course, were different. They made me “business manager,” which sounds so good. It was bookkeeping work, detail work that nobody likes doing. I didn’t mind doing it, I found it interesting, but most everyone else associated with the Review was certainly not interested in subscriptions and ad payments and writer payments and paying the printer and all the rest of it. For that, there was nobody else but me.
MARION CAPRON I had no title in the beginning. I read manuscripts and sent them back mostly, or sent them out to Rose Styron, who was reading at that time. George read many, too. Don Hall read the poetry. I was an associate editor later on, at the same time that Jean Stein was made associate editor—me on the strength of the Dorothy Parker interview, and Jean on the strength of her money and the Faulkner interview. I remember one priceless scene involving both those great interviews, the Hemingway and the Faulkner. Faulkner was notoriously shy of interviewers. Nevertheless, there he was one night in Jean Stein’s apartment on Sutton Place, ostensibly to be interviewed
by her. George and I were there, George to lend a little moral support or seriousness or light-heartedness or something to the proceedings. But for some reason, maybe just a prop for our mission, we had brought the Hemingway interview to work on. It was not a very large apartment, and the living room had a black rug with rosebuds on it, like the carpeting in a hotel corridor. I remember that rug vividly because George and I were on it most of the time, cutting and pasting our interview (late, of course) to send back to Cuba for the approval of the great Papa. Meanwhile, I gathered that Faulkner wanted to go back to his hotel; why, I couldn’t imagine. Jean was amply endowed, and braless, and kept soothing him with drinks, bending over him with these giant . . . It reminded me of the Walter Matthau movie with the lady who threatens to open her dress and he says, “Oh, please don’t let them out! Please!” The novelist, however, appeared to be mesmerized by Jean’s cleavage, and there’s no question but that he succumbed to her allure at some point. But that night, I thought he might be frightened of her or maybe put off by the work on his chief rival’s interview going on around his feet, or maybe he just didn’t want to be interviewed himself. He wasn’t under much pressure, though. The talk was pretty informal, chatty. Eventually we left, and sometime later I took the Hemingway interview down to Cuba, for the great man’s approval.
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