George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  CELEBRITY ATTAINED

  GERALD CLARKE George was very annoyed by the piece Gay Talese wrote for Esquire. He was rather bitter about some of the things he said were inaccurate—which I thought was odd because the piece seemed delightful to me and was certainly favorable to George.

  WALTER SOHIER I remember the early sixties when I was first living at 541 East Seventy-second, just below George’s place. Sometime around then, Frank Sinatra had an apartment across the way, and when I took a taxi home the driver might ask, “Is that Frank Sinatra’s apartment building?” But it wasn’t very long before they started asking me, “Is that George Plimpton’s building?” He’d gotten into that league.

  DAVID AMRAM It was a strange sort of celebrity he had, in the context of his writing. He was always the observer with a sense of adventure that made him able to be part of any event but not the event itself. He was just like you, the reader. So for him to suddenly become any part of the story himself, as a celebrity, was so bizarre to him. It was such a surprise that he, the amateur among the pros, should become the point of it all. He used to say, “Isn’t this amazing? I don’t know quite how to handle it.”

  BOBBY ZAREM For George it just happened. I don’t think he consciously, actively sought publicity. His books and articles were unique. They always got great publicity because the story idea was great, and the publication he got his pieces in would publicize it. He would also create events that would lend themselves to great publicity, like the Paris Review Revels. I think he became quite conscious of his image and sometimes had to try and protect it, but his image was so close to being himself, doing just what he loved to do, he didn’t have to run after publicity. It just happened.

  GEOFFREY GATES Later, you began to hear people whispering that as a celebrity he sometimes got paid to go to people’s parties. Well, they got their money’s worth. He entertained people. People paid him to come to events to give some sort of festivity, some sparkle. To my mind, he had a lot to sell—more than the Windsors, anyway. Then, of course, he did those commercials. I’ve seen a couple of them. There was a terrible one he did late in life about a pool. Some people snooted George about this, but it’s not exactly some sort of disgrace. This is the twenty-first century. Image is everything.

  JAMES SCOTT LINVILLE The only time I saw George nervous was when he was about to interview Andy Warhol for the magazine. There was something in Warhol’s voice, which had always been so flat, almost inhuman-seeming, but here . . . well, I thought: My God, he really wants George to like him. I realized he’d have had to have been hurt by the Edie book years before, and here he was talking to him. And George, George clearly did not like him, but he was fascinated by him. I suddenly realized these two guys had in some sense studied each other, for decades, how the other fashioned himself in the media—George of course with his effortlessness, the patrician thing, and Warhol . . . well, whatever he was. It was clear they had each paid attention to how the other had moved through some grid of public awareness.

  PETER MATTHIESSEN In those years, when he was first gaining his celebrity, there was something very driven about George. He had to keep on being seen; he couldn’t stop. I do not remember him being like that when he first got to Paris, because he wasn’t a celebrity then. He deserved to be a celebrity if he wanted to be one; he’d earned it. He certainly put in the hours. But I think that the heart of it, if you trace it all the way, goes back to The Paris Review. Without it, what would his celebrity have consisted of ? He was a good-looking, charming, very well-mannered son of the WASP establishment. But an awful lot of people fill that category, nothing very unique about it, so there had to be some other element that set him apart.

  TIMOTHY DICKINSON George wanted always to be seen to be “George Plimpton”—the whisper that goes through a room, “There’s George Plimpton”; the heads turning. George was “George Plimpton” all right, but the question was conveying “George Plimpton.” There was necessary artifice in injecting “George Plimpton” into the national bloodstream; but this did not involve changing George. Some people, you feel, lose their inner identity precisely by it being consumed by their outer identity. George never felt consumed by his public. He was at a great distance from his public. He was not going to get worn out by his fans. His superb manners were largely a protective mechanism, preserving, in Burke’s phrase, “the unbought grace of life.” Yes, George had that. It showed, above all, in his ability to live off a public, but neither to despise it nor to owe it more than the basic service.

  V.

  GEORGE AGOG:

  1963–1973

  ____

  To me the most Georgish of expressions that you’d see on his face was when he was looking agog. What does that mean? Well, here’s the Random House dictionary definition of it—“1. highly excited by eagerness, curiosity, anticipation. 2. In a state of eager desire; excitedly . . . Syn. awe-struck, enthralled . . . MF en gogues; see A GOGO.” That’s George. A display of skill, an eccentric character, a great deed, a fine folly, a beautiful woman, a splendid paragraph—all left him agog, and he loved them for it.

  —FAYETTE HICKOX

  RIVER GIRL

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON I first met George when I was seventeen or eighteen years old. I remember sitting at a table at P. J. Clarke’s, in the middle room. There was a round table reserved for VIPs. There were three of us, Bennett Cerf, the founder and publisher of Random House, his son Christopher, whom I’d known all my life, and me. It was the summer I worked at Random House for Jean Ennis, in the publicity department, doing things like babysitting Moss Hart’s kids in the park while he was having lunch with Bennett. Anyway, that evening at P. J. Clarke’s, I was facing away from the back room, and Bennett was on my left, facing that room, and all of a sudden he looked up and half stood, and from behind me came this tall man wearing a cape. I remember the cape very well. My mouth dropped open, because he was quite an apparition—I mean very dashing. Bennett introduced him all around as George Plimpton, and I remember George sort of leaned over to Bennett and conspiratorially, looking at me, said, “Aha, and what do we have here?” I had no clue who he was. I just thought this was some odd, wonderful, romantic figure.

  LARRY BENSKY I think George and Freddy met at my good-bye party in the summer of 1963. She was my girlfriend at the time—or rather my soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend. I went to George’s parties, but I didn’t hang out with him much. I just was sort of doing my life at Random House and rising through the ranks there. And then, sometime in 1963, early in ’63, I decided that I didn’t want to work at Random House anymore. I wanted to live in Europe. Anyway, I think that’s how Freddy and George connected, through me at my good-bye party.

  ANNA LOU ALDRICH Before he married Freddy, I always thought there were two sorts of girls in George’s life. It was a curious thing about him that you could never tell, at one of his own parties, who his girl was—if indeed he had one that evening. He was the host; there was no hostess, and never would be. But in the early days, the fifties and sixties, you would see him out often enough with someone who was probably his date. I thought of these women as George’s “Society girls” because you knew them from the social gossip columns—Nan Kempner, Candice Bergen, Jane Fonda, Jackie, Kathy Ainsworth. Whether there was anything sexual going on there, I never knew. But with the other sort of girl—like Marion Capron, Maggie Paley, Freddy—we all knew that sex was part of it. I thought of them as the “river girls” because that’s where the sex went on, presumably—at his apartment by the East River. Freddy of course eventually made the leap from river girl to wife, but how she did that was one of the great mysteries.

  Freddy Espy and George.

  Photograph © Henry Grossman.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON The second time I saw George was when Larry Bensky was going to Europe—eventually to manage the Review. I was Bensky’s girlfriend at the time. There was this huge good-bye party for him; the whole publishing world was there. I was on the balcony, having had quite a few drinks
, and was feeling a little maudlin, when out comes this man who looks familiar to me, this very tall, handsome man. George had called several times after that first time we’d met at P. J. Clarke’s, but I didn’t go out with him. I had read that Gay Talese piece in Esquire, in 1963. I’d fallen madly in love with him; but when I read that piece, I thought, “Oh God, here’s a guy who’s full of himself, and full of shit, and I really don’t want much to do with him, because I can tell he’s a bad one to focus on.” My father knew George and really wanted me to go out with him, and I remember how stubborn I was about saying, “No, no, no. I really don’t want to go out with him; he’s a snob, famous, rich, you know. I don’t want to go out with him, I’ll have my heart broken.” So anyway, there we were on this balcony. It was a little bit cold. I said some stupid thing like “I’m going to miss Bensky so much that I should jump off this ledge right now!” George said, “I know a better way down,” and he took me from the party. Waiting downstairs was a car, and he asked me where I lived, and I told him, and he took me home. He got my telephone number and said, “I’ll call you.” Now, how many times have I heard that? But he did.

  HARRY MATHEWS It seemed evident to a lot of people why Freddy would have liked to be with George, but it wasn’t very clear why George would have liked to be with Freddy. Freddy was very glamorous. I found myself looking at her legs a lot. But there were many good-looking women around. I felt that she was frail somehow and that this touched him in some way. She didn’t look frail. She was dazzling. But I sensed that there might be some kind of vulnerability in her that brought out an otherwise undetected older brother in George.

  CHRIS CERF Freddy Espy was my very, very good friend. She and her three sisters lived one road away from me in Mt. Kisco. They were all attractive, Freddy by far the most so, and they were all flirts, every teenager’s dream and nightmare. I had a crush on Joey as much as on Freddy, and Joey was the first girl I ever kissed. My father [Bennett Cerf ] had nicknames for them. Freddy was Miss Upper Plate, Joey was Miss Lower Plate, and Mona was known as Bite. He knew them well. Whenever there was any drama in the family, and there was a lot of drama, they’d all come and talk to my parents. Freddy was delightful but there always seemed to be a streak of trouble in her life. This made her all the more lovable to me, because she seemed so vulnerable. But there was a dark side of Freddy, always.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON How he found me, to invite me on our first date, I’ll never know. I was working for a photographer, Jacques Simpson, as a stylist. We were shooting in a bowling alley in New Haven, doing men’s pants for Sears, Roebuck catalogs. I had to pin their crotches, so the models were standing spread-eagle, with this bowling alley going straight through their legs. A phone rang in a booth in the corner. It rang and rang until finally one of the assistants picked it up and said, “Freddy, it’s for you.” It was George. He said, “Can you get back to Manhattan to have dinner with the president this evening? We must be there before the president arrives.” This was at four in the afternoon. He said, “I’ll make a reservation for you to fly into Newark, and then I’ll send a car, and you can go home and change.” This guy’s got the whole evening figured out. It was just amazing. So I said bye to the bowling alley, got into the cab, flew from New Haven to Newark, was picked up by this limo and taken to my stepmother Louise’s house, who had run out to get me something to wear for dinner with the president. And George and I managed to get there ahead of the president—I was a complete nervous wreck. The dinner was at Jean and Steve Smith’s. It was a very small party, and the president was with his favorite friends, smoking cigarillos and being utterly charming. George seemed delighted that I was there. I was so nervous, all I could think of to do, in talking to the president, was to ask him how to do things, like “How do you remember names?” He said he asked himself, on meeting someone, who or what he or she reminded him of and later remembered their name from that. He went around the room, pointing out everybody, and said, “Okay, her name is . . . because she reminds me of blah, blah, blah.” George just left me with the president and went over and talked to the other people. After dinner we went down to Raffles, and the president was very happy because he had eluded the Secret Service. Now it was just about escaping, going to a fun place. George and I got up and danced. The president just watched because his back was not in good shape that night. I really can’t remember how it all ended, but I do remember getting into a cab with him and going around the block and up Madison Avenue and back to Fifth Avenue, dropping the president off at Fifth, at the back entrance. It was early October, I remember, because the president died a month later.

  MAGGIE PALEY Freddy came on the scene gradually, as I remember it. There were always a lot of beautiful women at these parties, and which one would stay was always just a matter of who would outlast the others. I saw these other women. I didn’t know who they were, but I imagine a lot of them would have been happy to stay. I of course assumed that George had invited me to stay. But when Freddy came on the scene, things changed. She dawned slowly. He and I were still having an affair, and he was still seeing other women. I remember one afternoon, I was there in the apartment, and we were in the middle of something. Freddy came in and knocked on the door, and then just walked in. I guess she wasn’t being paid enough attention. Anyway, she stomped out and George went running after her. I thought, “That’s the kind of thing that I would never be able to do,” but Freddy did it, and it worked. He moved her in next door.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON One of our best, weirdest memories of that time before we were married was being robbed. We were constantly robbed by this guy who would come in from downstairs, then open the bedroom door—which was the whole upstairs living room area—he would open the bedroom door in the early morning, always, around four. If you were awake—George and I were usually dead drunk asleep, but sometimes we would have just gotten home—in would come Mr. Peterson, as we called him. The first time Mr. Peterson arrived, he stole a Universal Genève watch with all kinds of diamonds on it that George’s family had given me as a gift. I put it on my bedside table and went to sleep. That morning it was gone. We didn’t know anything that night. The next time, we did know that there was someone in this shaft of light, entering the dark bedroom; this hesitant person standing there. George sat up and said, “Who goes there?! What do you want?” The guy said, “I’m looking for Mr. Peterson”—hence our name for him. George got up out of bed, ran after the guy in his underwear, ran down Seventy-second Street for two blocks, actually climbed up inside a building to the roof, and Mr. Peterson had already jumped to the next roof. The thing about Mr. Peterson was that he always came anyway. Those were the days when I was trying to get George to be someone; you know, to buy a pair of Gucci shoes. Mr. Peterson must have been the same shoe size, because every time I’d buy him a pair, he would steal them. Two times he stole them, and George said, “I’m not supposed to have a pair of Guccis.” Frank Sinatra wanted to protect us from Mr. Peterson. I had met him just after he broke up with Mia Farrow. Chris Cerf’s parents asked me to come and be Frank’s date at their house. Afterwards, we all went out to a nightclub, and Frank took me home, and it turned out that he lived at the end of Seventy-second Street, across from us. He got out of the limousine and walked me to the door, and I found I didn’t have my keys. He said, “Not a problem. Is your window open?” I said, “Probably.” So he went up the fire escape to the third floor, goes in my window, and opens the door. Later I told him the story about Mr. Peterson, and Sinatra started coming over to visit us at strange times of the night. He gave us a gun to protect ourselves with. I didn’t like having this gun around. It was in a certain drawer for years and years. One day, I got paranoid and threw it into the East River. I’ll always wonder whose fingerprints were on that gun. I just wonder who had handled it. It would have been interesting to know.

  PETER DUCHIN I was really fond of George, and I was in awe of some of his qualities—his energy and cheerfulness and his support of the Review all those y
ears—but I never thought of him as being really serious about women. I thought that he was far more curious than serious about women. And the women I admired in the world couldn’t take him seriously, either. They would joke about the idea of even sleeping with him, not to mention marrying him. They found him to be a sort of remote, slightly shy, but charming curiosity. And there was something awfully comical about George. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was a power thing, personal power, or his lack of it. A friend of mine knew George very well, and Bee and Freddy, too. He told me that he thought it never would have worked, the love affair between George and Bee, because George lacked command, and Bee needed that. Whereas with Freddy, their love did work in a way, because Freddy was all command, a sort of coiled spring of sexual command, and George found that irresistible. He needed it; they needed it as a couple, and she was the one who happened to have it.

  DREAM JOBS AT THE REVIEW

  JED HORNE It was not long after all the magazine operations moved to New York in 1973. I must have been almost twenty-four. I had bailed out of a graduate program at Harvard in philosophy and was driving a cab in Boston to supplement my scrivener’s wages working for an alternative weekly called the Phoenix. I came down to New York and dropped in on the Paris Review office because a friend of mine was working there. And there was George, very cordial and chatty and inquiring as to who I was and what on earth I was doing there. He pointed towards a stack of manuscripts and said maybe I ought to read a few of them while I was there. And so I read some manuscripts; and later it developed that if I was going to stick around and read some more manuscripts, maybe I would need a place to live, and George said, why didn’t I take So-and-so’s apartment since the whole building was going co-op, and there were some vacant spaces that hadn’t been grabbed, and if I wanted to, I could rent this apartment for about a year or two, for fifty-eight dollars a month. So I said, “Fine, I’ll take it.” Of course, I had no furniture. George said I should take John’s bed, John being John Chancellor, the newscaster for NBC at that time who had walked away from the co-op opportunity, leaving me with manuscripts to read in George Plimpton’s study and my own little apartment. It had a small fire escape perch from which I could see the East River and smoke my cigarettes and think poetic thoughts and be a New York writer on East Seventy-second Street.