George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  MONA ESPY SCHREIBER There was a time when Freddy would buy presents in New York and then go around writing little notes on them, saying, “Love, the Easter Bunny.”

  FAYETTE HICKOX George was already heavily into doing commercials by the mid-1970s. Jed Horne, our mutual friend, used to say, “Who is George Plimpton? Jean Cocteau or Crazy Eddie?” George really was becoming a ubiquitous figure on television. It was Dry Dock Savings Bank one week, then it was Carlsberg beer, then it was Saab. So George would drive a Saab and he’d have cases of Carlsberg, which we all drank in the office. His drink, of course, was always Dewar’s. What else did he flack for? Pop Secret popcorn, though that was later, I think.

  CHRIS CALHOUN He was quite skillful doing these commercials on TV. But there was something about Plimpton: He had this sort of tremendous remove, very dignified, yet I don’t think he was making it ironic—and he got caught up in promoting some very silly stuff. He did a local pool ad, I remember, out in the Hamptons in the nineties, where he’s coming out of the water. Nobody can look very good getting out of the water and going into a sales pitch, even in your thirties or forties, and he was in his late sixties. Anyone else would have looked like an absolute ass. It wasn’t the same as looking like an ass playing pro football or something, because then there was always a fantastic book or essay to follow. But there was no story to be written about shilling for some of these insane products, there was no follow-up, there was no literary excuse. There was money. Yet he pulled it off. I think that if you saw James Salter, or even Dick Cavett, lending their names to these things, you’d think, “What a stink bomb. How much money do you need? I mean, is there anything you won’t do, you old bore?” But it would never occur to you to say something like that about George. I think he had this sort of wink, this weird part of his sensibility when he’s pitching these products that you’re not taking too seriously, and yet he’s keeping his dignity—and doing it without putting ironic quotes around anything.

  SOL GREENBAUM George was concerned about his image. Thirty or forty years ago, he was offered to do Saab commercials. He told me, “I’m going to come across like a pitchman, and I’m not a pitchman. I might fail. I just don’t know.” I asked how much they were paying him for these commercials, and he said it was fifty thousand dollars. I said, “How long will it take to do them?” He said it was three or four days of work. I said, “George, after taxes, you’ll be earning a thousand dollars an hour.” He decided he would take it, and the commercials were a huge success.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON He didn’t want to know anything about his money. Eventually he reached a stage where he was always worried about money, I can’t pinpoint when that happened, but perhaps when the second or third book had not sold as well as he had expected and we were in the middle of doing the house or something. I can’t pinpoint it, but all of a sudden, he became distracted by how much money was being spent and how he was going to make enough, and all of this.

  MARY JO PARKER The second summer that my sister and I were Taylor and Medora’s nannies, Mr. Plimpton was concerned by how much the grocery bill was costing. They got all the food from a little Hamptons deli and had it delivered, too. It was exorbitant what they were charging for the exact same things you’d find in any old supermarket. I said to them, “Why don’t we just go to the supermarket, and Jane and I can pick out the food and bring it home ourselves?” I saw it as such an easy, everyday sort of thing to do, going to the supermarket. Mrs. Plimpton was just amazed that we could go and do that. And Mr. Plimpton was very appreciative because we cut the food bill in half—at least. They thanked us over and over again.

  SOL GREENBAUM He was so happy when he picked up a big fee, because he knew that would carry him for a while. For example, when he got a hundred-thousand-dollar advance on a book, he knew he could pay all the bills. Or when he got a new publisher. Usually in the summer, The Paris Review would run dry. Marjorie would say, “I don’t know how to make payroll next week, George,” and he would say, “Do I have any money in my account?” He would start scrounging. Once I remember he turned to Celeste Cheatham. Actually, I did it myself. She was married to one of his friends. Steve was a stockbroker, very successful. I called Celeste and said, “Steve’s old friend George Plimpton’s Paris Review needs money, and I would like you to write a check for ten thousand dollars.” She sent a check. George was always able to bring in money.

  DEBORAH PEASE This is how I got to be publisher of The Paris Review: One day, I called George to ask him if he knew of a good way I could help small literary magazines. I’d been reading them and sending out my poems to them for years, and I knew how crucial yet fragile they were. This was in 1982. I’d known George for about twenty years, but we hadn’t been in touch for a while. As always, he was wonderfully welcoming. I mean, you could count on a joyous welcome if you were a friend. So I posed my question, and he made George-esque noises for an interval of about ten seconds: “Well, let’s see, kiddo, gollee . . .” Then he burst out: “How about becoming the publisher of The Paris Review? We just lost our publisher, he’s gone into rehab and his check bounced, and we don’t have any money!” I shrieked and he hollered, and the gist of it was “Yes! Wow! When do I start?” That was that. “Just keep us afloat, sweet one”—he called lots of ladies “sweet one.” We didn’t sign a contract or have lawyers do anything official. It was all done on friendship, enthusiasm, and good faith. He sent me a dozen red roses, and the next night he took me to dinner. Norman Mailer passed by on his way out and George exclaimed: “This is our new publisher!” Mailer’s response was to smile indulgently and punch a wall. A few days later, I went to George’s apartment to be introduced to the team, and we all had lunch. All the editors and interns were there, sitting in the living room in a circle, everybody beaming. Things were off to a great start, and I stayed on as publisher for ten years [1982–1992].

  NILE SOUTHERN We have a letter from George where he’s joking with Terry about all the money he, Terry, is earning in Hollywood and how Terry ought to fly George out for a story session or something. It’s true that when Terry went to Hollywood, he was making more money in a week than he’d made in a whole lifetime of writing, which was pretty surreal. George was quite aware of that. Terry downplayed it. I don’t think he responded to that letter.

  STARLING LAWRENCE I don’t think anybody has enough money, but George really didn’t. Or if he did, it was always a scramble to figure out where the next piece of change was going to come from. I remember when Norton was paying him a retainer to edit this sports anthology, and I kept calling Tim Seldes, the politest man in town, wonderful man. I kept saying, “Tim, what gives?” and Tim had no fucking idea, so we took George to lunch to read him the riot act, and he completely disarmed us by telling us the story of the man in the flying lawn chair, which was later part of a book that was published posthumously. We were at the New York Yacht Club, where you’re not supposed to hoot and roll in the aisles, but I guess we walked away from the lunch thinking that we’d gotten our money’s worth or something.

  RED AUERBACH He was one of these people that never carry any money. He came out to my basketball camp for a week, and he’s got maybe two or three dollars in his pocket. One day, he and two of my counselors go out to play golf. And he loses some and he’s got to come up with eight dollars. He doesn’t have eight dollars. He’s got to write a check for eight dollars. I laughed like hell. How can you leave home and take two, three dollars with you?

  MATTHEW BRUCCOLI I remember once, about two years before he died, we were having breakfast, and he said that he couldn’t pay the printing bill for the next issue of The Paris Review, and he needed an infusion of money. It just so happened that an out-of-town, wealthy friend of mine was staying at the Princeton Club, and I said, “Come on, I’ll take you over to the Princeton Club and introduce you to somebody I know.” And within half an hour, forty minutes, George had the money for the printer.

  TERRY QUINN My first visit to 541, I asked him, “How did yo
u get all this space right on the East River? It must have cost you a million dollars.” And I think he said that when he and others in the building outbid some developers for the whole block of apartments, his piece cost sixty thousand dollars. He said it was the only good financial decision he’d ever made.

  LILLIAN VON NICKERN George once requested that the Review pay him rent at 541. We had money, someone gave us some money, and of course, immediately, it was “Well, now we can do this, that, and the other.” And we did pay him rent; we paid for a while. As with everything else, it went by the boards, because the magazine didn’t sustain itself. And, sadly enough, George was the one who ended up carrying all the expense, really, of that office. I can remember having about ten dollars in the checking account at a time when any bill over twenty dollars seemed a vast amount, because we didn’t have it.

  LARRY BENSKY As early as the mid-sixties, George kept coming up with these moneymaking schemes that seemed plausible enough—the Review booth at the World’s Fair of ’64–’65, book publishing, the Revels, the poster project. The booth I remember painfully: He paid my way to come back from Paris to help out. When I arrived George said, “Tonight we have to go out to Flushing. The fair is opening in a day or two, and our booth isn’t built yet. You have to sign union contracts to get electricity and to get construction, and we don’t have that kind of money, so we’re just going to do it ourselves.” So, we get out there, and the pile of wood to build the booth is lying there, and there’s a chalk line about ten yards, fifteen yards long, from our booth to where the electricity central drop is, and it’s blacktop. “We’re supposed to tunnel,” George says, pointing to a pickax. We did it. It took us all night, but we did it; my hands were sore and blistered and bleeding, and so were his. Some other volunteers showed and knocked the plywood and the wood stanchions up and painted it. I don’t know how it got finished, but it was very festive—designed by Billy du Bois, I think. I went home and soaked my hands for a few days.

  The Paris Review booth at the New York World’s Fair, 1964.

  Photograph © Richard Marshall.

  HARRY MATHEWS George created the first Paris Review Editions—another moneymaker, he hoped. And the first book they published was James Salter’s wonderful A Sport and a Pastime, which was cover-to-cover sex and did well. The second was my second novel, Tlooth, which was a totally weird book, but I worked on every sentence. The story that George always used to love to tell is that on pub day, they would hire a plane to inscribe the letters TLOOTH in the sky above New York to create wonder and bewilderment in the populace; but the winds weren’t right, and it was too expensive anyway. Of course, the book—well, it didn’t go nowhere, but it didn’t do very well.

  JOHN GRUEN I was so pleased when George asked Jane Wilson, my wife and a great American artist, to take on his poster project. Never in a million years had Jane ever been asked to do what George Plimpton asked her to do, which was to round up every great American young artist there was to do a poster for the Review. Actually, she quite enjoyed it. The hard part was to get them to finish it after they said they’d do it. She was talking to Warhol, Motherwell, all the great artists you can think of. Then out came these really gorgeous posters, which I think benefited The Paris Review quite a lot.

  DRUE HEINZ Underwriting the printing of the poster series was the first thing I ever did for him. That was the very beginning, in the early sixties. And he said, “I have this idea to ask artists to do Paris Review posters. They can do anything they want, but the words Paris Review must appear somewhere in some form. We’ll do so many of them, and then really promote them.” I said yes. Before he died, he was trying to get me to find them all again, because he thought I had all the originals somewhere, and he wanted me to give them back to him to put them up at auction. I couldn’t root them out quickly enough for the fiftieth anniversary benefit. In any case, the posters put us on the map. People were really keen on getting them. Now the ones I had have been given to the Morgan Library for the Paris Review archive.

  MARJORIE KALMAN When I first started looking after George’s cash flow, I suddenly found myself having to answer questions, because he thought I might be stealing his money. He would holler at you all of a sudden, “Where’s all my money going?” He knew his income, or part of it. He went to Woolworth’s every year and he got a very small date book, and in that date book he wrote down where he was going and how much they paid him. He lectured a lot. As far as expenditures, I think he suffered from the same problem a lot of men do at one time in their lives, when a woman pays the bills, whether it’s your wife or someone like me, where he really didn’t know how much Con Edison was charging him or the telephone company—things like that; but he’d get angry, maybe once a year, and actually, when I came along, Sol said, “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here, so he can holler at you now.” It was the way he got information. George trusted everybody. George had a great sense of trust and allegiance; but then he’d suddenly mistrust his trustingness and get angry: “Where’s all my money?”—that was a common refrain. I did initially get this feeling that I needed to go down and make details and write everything down; and then he’d forget about it. By the time I got organized, he didn’t really want to hear the answer. I don’t think he really wanted to be bothered with the details of taking care of his finances; he just wanted to make sure that if he trusted you, he was right to trust you. There were times when I think he would have liked me to steal, so he could be angry and go around saying, “My accountant stole millions of dollars from me!” It would have been a story for him.

  SOL GREENBAUM In the late seventies, Francis became upset that George was spending a lot of money. He felt that George wasn’t meeting his obligation to his family, which by that time he had—two children and Freddy—so he wanted to have a meeting with George and I. We met at George’s apartment, and what came out was, he asked, “How much money does George need to live?” I said, “About two hundred thousand a year.” Francis wanted to know, “What if something happened to you?” I said, “Francis, let’s assume the worst: that there isn’t enough money in George’s estate, because he spends everything that he makes, and someone has to take care of the children. I would look to you.” So I put Francis on the spot, which was not something he was used to, but he was very charming about it. He said, “I have this many mil-lions of dollars. My first responsibility is to Pauline. I guess I have enough to take care of the children, also.” I remember when I said two hundred thousand dollars, George gasped and said, “Oh no, Dad! I don’t need that much.” After the meeting was over, I said, “George, it was more than two hundred thousand. I brought the figure down for your father.”

  VI.

  PUSS AND MISTER PUSS:

  1973–1983

  ____

  For some reason, that cat, Mr. Puss, was essential to George. It was as if he inhabited Mr. Puss in a way. Or maybe the cat was his familiar. Either way, he and Mr. Puss were one.

  —ANN WINCHESTER

  “ORDINARY PLEASURES”

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON You know, I’d hate it if you pictured this marriage as filled with nothing but parties, booze, fireworks, and wandering around. We had our ordinary pleasures, too, he and I. One thing we loved doing together was looking for stuff for the apartment, or the house in Sagaponack when we got it, stuff that looked like it had been around for generations, old WASP stuff. I went to the Salvation Army with him—we bought our big, fat, simple sofas there and just had them restuffed and re-covered. It’s the way I like to do rooms, not with French antiques. Our most fun was when each thing arrived—we would try it in this place or that place, find a home for it. We also had children, for God’s sake! Medora in 1971 and Taylor in 1976, and made a home for them. George wasn’t a good father by ordinary standards, but when he was there for them, he was the best: He was terrific with children, including his own. I was less terrific for a while there, but good enough, as they say, at the beginning of their childhood and toward the end of it.


  DAVID AMRAM The night of the Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier match in Madison Square Garden, George asked me to be with Freddy, because she was pregnant with Medora, and George had to run all over the place, covering the fight. We had good seats, but LeRoy Neiman beckoned me to come hang out with him, right down next to the ring. So Freddy said, “David, go ahead.” At which point José Torres, who was the light heavyweight champion, also a great friend of theirs, came over and said, “Don’t worry, David. She’s safe with me.” Freddy tells the story of how, during the fight, she was sitting on José Torres’s lap, because José wanted to be certain that George’s wife and baby would be safe. It was just one of those great New York nights that George was at.

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON George loved a skinny little teeny-bopper-type person, so when I got pregnant with Medora, he didn’t like it—the whole idea of my suddenly turning into a woman with large breasts, lactating, and my belly as big as—well, he didn’t like that at all. He happened to be there the morning I started going into labor, and so, the way I recall it, we walked several blocks to New York Hospital, because somewhere George had heard that when you’re giving birth, it’s very good to be up and about, as he put it. I was in quite a lot of pain, so it was quite difficult to do this, but I did it. Once we got into the hospital—this was 1971, so George was at the peak of his celebrity—everyone crowded around him, and all they wanted to do was talk to him about his experiences, and they were going, “Ho-ho-ho, you better deliver this baby and write about it”—you know, things like that. So the whole birth was about George. People who were supposed to be doing things for me were being entertained by George out in the hallway. George wanted nothing to do with the actual birth. It was the same when I had Taylor. Taylor was born in August of 1976, right as some hurricane was blowing into town. Women in Southampton who were close to the end of their ninth month were asked to come into the hospital because the pressure drop of the impending storm could cause them to go into labor. So the hallways were filled with gurneys full of moaning women, myself among them. After the birth, George came in to see Taylor, and he said, “Hello, hello, hello! Good job, Puss, good job! Thank God it wasn’t a girl, or I would have had to name her Beulah.” He thought that was the name of the storm. [It was Belle.] I wanted to kick him in the teeth. Was he pleased to have a son? I don’t know. He called his mother right away, and she came right out so she could be the first to hold the baby.