George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  RUSTY UNGER Obviously there were exceptions: Some of the women went on to become notable, but that’s not why they were there in the first place; they were there because they were hot. On the other hand, these guys were the last gentlemen, most of them, George above all. It was a great thing, that gentlemanly quality. I’d come down the stairs into the crowd and George would catch sight of me and throw up his arms and call out, “Great Russ.” Well, that made me feel like a million dollars.

  NANCY STODDART I came to New York from Philadelphia, and I guess you could say that George launched me. In retrospect, I see that the only power I had was the way I looked. I mean, it’s really sad, in a way, to be a person whose only power is in their looks, unless you find a way to turn it into something else. I was very shrewd about getting entrée. I wanted to get inside, inside all those houses and all those families. So I had a pretty wonderful time, being nobody in particular. Over the years I got myself pretty well educated, and I am pretty interesting to sit next to at a dinner party. If you give me an assignment to get something done, I am a very can-do person. But if I had devoted more energy to that back then, imagine what I’d be doing now—like, ten times more. So I think it’s kind of a curse to be a hottie or to be more beautiful than is normal. I think it’s good to be nice and pleasant and attractive-looking, but not more. That’s what I think.

  JULES FEIFFER People were just coming out of the Eisenhower years—the postwar somnolence, the consensual repression that hung around even after McCarthyite repression dissipated. It was almost as if this entire generation of well-educated young men and women had never been told they had First Amendment rights. So what parties like George’s did was to allow them safely to let it all hang out, to let it all go, to be explosive. Booze was a great way to let things happen that might not ordinarily happen. You could be, or at least feel, more dangerous, more playful, than you’d ever felt in your life. But George’s literary world was part of a general cultural revolt—against conformity, against sexual constraint—but which was also, in the arts, seriously ambitious. There was an excitement at the time that these writers were part of—think of Mailer’s “The White Negro,” Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Fried-man’s A Mother’s Kisses, Heller’s Catch-22.

  RON PADGETT I remember an article in New York magazine about a George Plimpton party. In it was a photograph of me sitting on a couch wearing a suit and tie, holding my son, who must’ve been nine months or a year old. In those days, if you were a downtown New York poet, you just didn’t go uptown to a party with your baby, and yet it was perfectly all right at George’s. That was George.

  IMMY HUMES Do you remember the famous photo taken at George’s with Ralph Ellison, Jonathan Miller, Ricky Leacock, Truman Capote, Willie Morris, Bill Styron, Chandler Brossard? My mother was in it, and Maggie Abbott, and some film producers, Frank and Eleanor Perry. Jack Richardson was in it, and Mario Puzo. It was quite a lineup. Well, all of these writers had signed up as members of Filmwrights Incorporated. Filmwrights Incorporated was another great Doc idea that didn’t go anywhere. It was supposed to get writers involved in Hollywood, to get the best of fiction writers working on film scripts in some kind of a cooperative structure. I’m not sure exactly what the structure was, but it was like what United Artists turned into. So with his gift for publicity, Doc put together that extraordinary party at George’s apartment. It was just another business thing of Doc’s that fizzled out. Nonetheless, I’m told that everybody had a grand old time.

  SARAH GAY PLIMPTON George’s parties were intimidating if you didn’t know people or you weren’t with somebody. I remember those early years in the sixties I just couldn’t deal with what was going on. I didn’t have a steady boyfriend, and I was always going to the parties alone. It was tough for a girl. I think it’s different for a girl. I think it’s hard to try and be a star in those circumstances, in those days.

  JULES FEIFFER If you liked parties with political people, especially Kennedy people around 1960, you went to Jean Stein’s parties. George was an old friend of Jackie’s, of course, but Jackie wasn’t political in my sense of the word. I don’t think the two salons, Jean’s and George’s, were competitive; I thought they were very complementary. Jean had sit-down dinners, and in a way she had the more famous people. George had the up-and-coming generation, the people you really had a better time with. Jean’s parties were fun; I loved being there. But they were fun in the way that sitting next to and talking with powerful people is fun, people after all who would be most cautious about what they had to say around perfect strangers. George’s parties were fun for the opposite reason, because no one was on their best behavior.

  Cocktail party at George’s apartment, 1963. George is seated at left with Maggie Abbott; behind her is Anna Lou Humes. At top, left to right: Jonathan Miller, Gore Vidal, Ricky Leacock, Robert Laskey, and Paul Heller. In background, left to right: Ralph Ellison and Peter Matthiessen. Center: William Styron (seated facing couch with back to camera), Doc Humes (behind Styron to right), Mario Puzo (leaning against mirror), Jack Richardson (tall man, front, right foreground), Arthur Kopit (foreground, right), Frank Perry (left of Kopit), Eleanor Perry (left of Frank), Arthur Penn (obscured behind Eleanor), and Truman Capote (center, on couch).

  © Cornell Capa C/Magnum Photos.

  TEDDY VAN ZUYLEN I thought George’s parties were wild. He gave one for some mafioso, and one of these guys came up and said, “Hey, do I know you from somewhere?” and I said, “I don’t know,” terrified. And he said, “Yeah. Chicago. Aren’t you Vito’s son?” I said, “No.” He said, “Oh, that’s too bad. Hey, George, who is this character?” George said, “Well, he’s from Europe, Bugsy.” “Oh, you’re from Europe?” “Yeah, I am. Yes, sir.” “Tell me something, do you know any bankers in Europe?” I said, “I have a bank in Europe.” “Oh!” he says. “What’s your name?” I said, “Teddy.” “Teddy? Ted. Big Ted. Now tell me, Big Ted, how would your bank like to get a couple of million dollars coming in, a couple of million smackers? You know, if I bring them over like this, just to have?” I said, “I’ve never known a Swiss person to refuse ten smackers, so two million must really make quite an impression.” “Oh, Big Ted, you’re great! You’re great! I’m giving a big party in three days down in the Village. You’ve got to come.” I arranged for the two million smackers to go to the bank; I called them up and they said, “Yes, please.” Bugsy was delighted, and he said, “Big Ted, when you get Bugsy as a friend, you’ve really got a friend. Don’t forget to come to the party. It starts at one o’clock in the morning. That way we get all the pretty dames from the shows, you see. Before that, nothing is going on anyway.” I went, and his place was exactly like a speakeasy. Bugsy came up to me and said, “Hey, Big Ted, are you alone?” I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Oh, don’t you like women?” I said, “Sure, I like women.” He said, “Pick one out. She’s yours for the night.” This gorgeous redhead with green eyes, the goddess of autumn, came in—and I looked, and I saw Bugsy’s face get very dark, and I said, “No, no, Bugsy, that’s your girl. We don’t do that in Europe. We respect the other person’s property. I will not do it.” “Well said,” says Bugsy. “She’s worth two, so you take two of them. I’ll choose them for you.” So he brought in two girls, shoved them over to me, and said, “You take care of them. How long are you staying, Big Ted?” “Three days.” “You’ve got them for three days!” Those were George’s parties: You never knew what you were going to come across.

  Norman Mailer, George, and Alice Roosevelt Longworth.

  Photograph © Henry Grossman.

  NORMAN MAILER Doc Humes and I got into an altercation once, at one of George’s parties. This was before he decamped to London with his family. We were about ready to have a fight, and I remember George seizing me from behind in an iron grip that I could not get out of. He wasn’t seizing me so that Humes could hit me; quite the contrary, somebody was pulling Humes away—we were being pulled apart. George had great strength in his arms; I remembe
r that, for what it’s worth. 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, “Goddammit, that guy is strong.”

  JOHN GRUEN Jane [Wilson, his wife] gave our parties. Our crowd was less intellectual than George’s. We did not have the literary crowd. We had the actors and the painters and the musicians. Betty Bacall and Angela Lansbury and the young Jasper Johns, the young Rauschenberg. Andy Warhol came and brought along his superstars; Viva came and Joe Dallessandro, who promptly took his shirt off and paraded around with Andy sitting in a corner saying, “Gee, wow.” Of course Edie Sedgwick came with her hair all bleached. Later on we had Bernstein, and he would play the piano. George’s parties were not any more raucous or full of drink, because we drank and smoked, too. We tried to make out: People were having little intimate talks in corners and might go home together. Always sexy, and of course, we were all gorgeous.

  GAY TALESE I led my Esquire article on George and The Paris Review with the scene at one of his parties. It was a typical Plimpton evening—only made different by the fact that Jackie Kennedy walked in. But aside from that, it could have been any other of a dozen nights. Average Plimpton crowd. You saw the same people there, which was wonderful because there were a lot of them, and they were from downtown, uptown, East Side, West Side, or more faraway places at times. He had that capacity to embrace, or at least give the appearance of embracing, this eclectic gathering of strays and straights and very social people. And yet, in reality, he had a discerning eye. In that apartment, there were two or three steps where you came in, down to where the pool table is now. When Jacqueline Kennedy walked in, as the First Lady, I remember George stood on the third step; and, tall as he was, he could survey from afar, from above the head level of all the people below, clustered in, jammed into the main living room. And as he looked around this room full of all his associates and friends—Styron, Mailer, everybody—I could see the judgmental George. I could see the eyes moving, and he was thinking to himself, “Now I have my friend Jacqueline Kennedy with me here, as a guest in my house: Who am I going to take Jackie over to meet?” He had a choice of a hundred, hundred and twenty people. As he stood on that kind of stage, at the top of those steps, and with all his life—his nighttime life, his private life, his side street life, his main street life, all the people that his personality and his curiosity had drawn to him at different times—all of this spread out before him. Suddenly within a matter of seconds the appearance of the First Lady had prompted him, provoked him, demanded of him that he decide who it was that he was going to introduce to her. And I could see that the long guest list suddenly got very short. I remember one guy he wouldn’t introduce Jackie to, and didn’t, was Norman Mailer, who was probably the most famous writer in New York at the time. You never knew what the hell Mailer was going to do.

  NORMAN MAILER I remember one evening at George’s when Jackie came in. Well, in 1961 or 1962, I had written a piece about Jackie’s televised broadcast from the White House, her tour of the place. I wrote about how she could have been marvelous but wasn’t marvelous enough. Here was this wonderful, marvelous woman, and she hadn’t been all she really should have been. It was a pretty mean piece, actually. Anyway, Jackie walked into George’s party, and I remember she made a point of talking to Styron for the longest damn time. I was dying. One of the reasons I enjoy talking to you about all this is it’s so nice to be eighty-two and have these sorts of meanness long out of me. But I died seeing those two together. And of course Styron enjoyed it!

  GAY TALESE People seem to think that my Esquire article of ’63 extended George’s celebrity far beyond 541 East Seventy-second Street, the Racquet Club, Debevoise Plimpton, and a few apartments on the Upper West Side. George was much upset about it, not by the confirmation of his celebrity in a prestigious national magazine, but by certain characterizations of the Paris Review crowd as easy, pleasant, handsome, fit, and mostly WASP—in short, upper-class. George’s upset took the form of an easy, pleasant, extremely long letter to me, most of it quibbling with inconsequential details of fact. Doc Humes weighed in with a letter almost as long but far more supportive, contrasting the atmosphere of Paris as it actually had been in the mid-1950s—boiling with barely suppressed political tensions and literary hatreds—with the amiable, comfortable coterie gathering around the nascent Paris Review. No harm came of this three-sided difference of opinion, but that was George’s great gift, wasn’t it, to throw sweet-smelling oils on troubled waters.

  GEOFFREY GATES Not all of George’s parties were at 541. Most notably, the Paris Review Revels—money raisers, supposedly for the Review—were not. At the first spring Revel for The Paris Review at the Village Gate, flushed with vodka, I felt that my duty was to sort of be the bouncer. Bobby Kennedy, Ethel, and their entourage were coming. That word was surely leaked by George. So around the Village Gate, there was just a ring of paparazzi, and as Bobby and his entourage came in, I was waiting, like one of those beefy security people you see in the lobby. I was waiting and eager to please. The paparazzi surged forward, and George noted this: “Geoffrey, they’re coming in.” He didn’t say to do anything, but apparently I stretched my arms out and started going this way and that and knocked them all down. I pushed them back about ten feet into a corner. As they came in, I saw this threat to the integrity of George’s guest list, and for some reason, I was inspired to play bodyguard. I didn’t really give a shit about the Kennedys. I mean, I knew them, but . . . But see, the Kennedys got safely downstairs, you know, and the paparazzi were shouting.

  Jean Kennedy Smith, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis,

  and George, New York, 1971. Photograph by Jill Krementz.

  WALTER SOHIER I was living in Washington during the 1960s, and I saw George a lot there. The Kennedys had a number of dances and parties, and George and I went to one of them, the famous time when Bobby Kennedy supposedly took Gore Vidal’s finger and twisted it because Gore was putting his arm around Jackie or something. Everyone was very drunk. Not the president, but the rest of us. That evening, the president took me around and showed me the pool downstairs. I remember Lyndon Johnson fell down when he was dancing with Jackie, and there were all kinds of funny incidents. Going home, George and I were in a cab with Ken Galbraith and Gore Vidal. Galbraith was upbraiding Gore, saying, “Hey, fuckin’ faggot.” It was very amusing. Nothing personal intended. Very funny. It’s funny about George’s memory, though, because I reminded him about that incident five years ago, and he didn’t remember it at all. Then, not long afterward, he came and stayed with me in Washington for President Kennedy’s funeral. We went to it together.

  FAYETTE HICKOX Was he a snob about anything? I think he was a Kennedy snob. I think he really quite preened himself on knowing that family.

  PIEDY LUMET Once we were going to a party in Washington at Bobby Kennedy’s house and got stuck in the mud. The speedometer kept going, but we weren’t going anywhere. There we were, I in my party dress and George in his black tie, trying to get this car out of a muddy ditch, with the wheels up off the ground. It was hilarious. That was the party where they pushed Arthur Schlesinger into the pool with all his clothes on, and George sang all his St. Bernard’s songs: “We do not mind the winter wind so long as football’s here, so dribble and kick and block the ball, the game’s a good old thing!”

  MARION CAPRON There’s one point I want to make about George’s celebrity. It has to do with his father and his supposedly repressive role in George’s life. That may have been true when George was a schoolboy, but by the time I knew them it wasn’t true. I knew George’s father; in fact, I adored and ad-mired him, and he thought well enough of me to offer to send me to law school. George didn’t get pressure from his father; he was not a disappointment to his father. His father thought it was terrific that George was this creature that was foreign to him in a way, but his father rather admired it—probably envied it. That’s my take on it. George did all
the things that Francis Plimpton certainly never had the time to do, nor was allowed to do, in his rigid upbringing. He was programmed for one thing, and George was left, miraculously, unprogrammed, as were Oakes, T.P., and Sarah.

  MAGGIE PALEY Once, sitting in his little office with him, I saw that he was putting in a new address under X in his address book. He said it was his first X: Malcolm X.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON I didn’t get involved with George until 1963, the year of Gay Talese’s article on him in Esquire and the New Yorker cartoon of the patient on the operating table rearing up and saying to the surgeon in his mask, “Wait a minute! How do I know you’re not George Plimpton?” It was the year, I always thought, when he became an official celebrity.

  “ Wait a minute! How do i know you’re not George Plimpton?”

  © The New Yorker Collection 1967.

  Donald Reilly from cartoonbank.com. All rights reserved.