. . . What then happened was simply a power play. . . . Jean suddenly announced that she would not allow the manuscript to be published unless I relinquished my position as co-author. She would be listed as the book’s sole author—this despite our agreement. . . .
After an anguished week or so I finally decided to let Jean have her way. My rationale was that she had done the bulk of the work in terms of time spent, it was her project originally, and it was finally more important to have the book appear than quibble over marquee standings.
. . . After Edie was published I went out on tour and did my best to promote the book. Jean refused to do this—quite understandably because she isn’t comfortable doing that sort of thing. Being more in the public eye, and thus able to get booked on TV and radio shows, I was left to do it. I think this increased the strain between us: it could well have seemed, being on as many shows as I was, and concentrating on the worth of the book rather than who its authors were, that I was taking too much credit. Indeed, I’m sure there were interviews during which I didn’t mention Jean’s name at all. The interviewer who pushed the book onto the bestsellers list was Joan Rivers on the Johnny Carson show. She talked admiringly about the book for five minutes. I don’t remember saying anything.
Frankly, I am dismayed at what has happened over the years. I’ve known Jean since she arrived in Paris. I liked her then, very much. She did a fine Faulkner interview. She showed a bit of muscle back then, I might add, insisting that we could only publish the interview if I made her an editor of the magazine. . . . I admire what she has done with Grand Street, and have written her so. We have a good time when we find ourselves seated next to each other at dinner. [no date]
ROBERT GOTTLIEB I do know what happened between George and Jean, but I don’t know that this needs to be aired twenty-five years later or whatever it is. You can say that the Edie experience, which started out very amicably and positively, ended in an ugly dispute between Stein and Plimpton, mainly about credit. I eventually came up with a compromise that both of them accepted.
FREDDY GIVES UP
FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON We had this humongous apartment, as you know, but the Paris Review staff had it, too. We slept on the third floor, where George’s original apartment had been. That’s where our bedroom was, and Medora’s and Taylor’s, too. But the whole second floor—living room, pool room, kitchen, and dining room, everything but George’s office when he was actually working in it—was open to the staff downstairs, and they loved every nook and cranny of it. Some of them were less intrusive than others. They understood that it was a private home and didn’t just go roaring up there. But others would walk in without knocking—have a beer, shoot pool, whatever. I had absolutely no privacy. It was like having a burrow at the bottom of the stairs, a very busy burrow full of rabbits or something. I complained about this over and over to my therapist. I said, “I’ve got this situation. It’s driving me crazy. I feel like killing everyone.” He suggested we put in a spiral staircase to give me my own territory. And we did.
JONATHAN DEE The early eighties, when I was there, was the tail end of that marriage, and the two of them were rarely in town at the same time. On the first day of every month, in fact, I would type up for Freddy George’s schedule for the month to come, his speeches, his travel plans, etc. That was her only way of knowing where he was, because I don’t think they were speaking much at that point. There was a long period where by many people’s standards they would not have been considered married at all. Freddy was on Long Island, trying to stay sober, while George was in New York, or else it was George on the Island and Freddy in New York. They were almost never in the same place at the same time. I don’t know how long it had been like that, but by the time I got there, in 1984, that was the status quo; they effectively weren’t sharing a life. It was civil, but functionally, it was a separation. That evolved slowly; and then, as I understand it, the end came quickly, because Freddy hit it off with somebody else.
FAYETTE HICKOX I can’t say exactly when I first noticed that the marriage was in trouble, but I remember one dinner in the Hamptons, the thousandth time they’d taken me out to a good restaurant, when George launched into one of his tried-and-true stories and Freddy said, “Oh, George, that’s so boring; do we need to hear that one again?” Her tone was utterly contemptuous. Not a good sign, contempt.
DEBORAH PEASE They were still together, or at least living in the same apartment, in ’82. At the inaugural party that George gave me, the new publisher, Freddy was there looking beautiful. I remember she had a hairdo that made her look like Julie Christie in her curly phase. So Freddy was very much there, at least for that event. But what I recall most vividly, about a year later, was when I called George out in the Hamptons. Freddy answered and said, “My husband is sleeping, I don’t want to wake him.” She was very proprietary. People don’t normally say to someone they know, “My husband is such-and-such,” they say, “George is . . .” I got the sense that she was asserting herself as the primary person in his life. Maybe she was, but as things developed I’m not sure that he was the primary person in her life.
REMAR SUTTON In the early eighties, I was almost more worried than I could handle about where things were going with George and Freddy. Once, George and Freddy and the kids came down to Boca Raton, to a house we’d gotten together on the canal, a lovely Spanish-style house. Freddy was in one of those moods, fueled by too many drinks. We would be sitting there at dinner, and if one of the kids brought up the wrong bottle of ketchup, Freddy would get an edge in her voice. We would all begin to get that feeling of tension, and then Freddy would go crazy. The kids would run out of the room, and George and I would get into the car and go off someplace and leave Freddy there alone. George can’t bear any type of conflict, so he just stepped away from Freddy, the kids, everybody. They lived in the same space, but that was a very tough time, particularly because George loved Freddy. But he did not know how to handle the relationship when it started going south. George is the one who got Freddy partying and brought her along way too quickly into many things in life. Then he started backing away from everything.
MOLLY MCKAUGHAN Even in the early 1970s when I was at the Review, Freddy was making a life of her own on the edges of George’s life. She wasn’t an alcoholic yet, but I remember her telling me that she never really spent any private time with George except for in the summers. She’d say, “George will be gone for five days, and he’ll come back, we’ll get dressed up in black tie and go to a dinner party, then at six the next morning he’ll leave again.”
NANCY STODDART The way people treated Freddy was really awful. They made it sound like he could have married anybody, but he married her. And I think some article along those lines got into either Time or Newsweek: “George Plimpton, who could have married Jackie Kennedy, Candice Bergen, some other social star...instead just married this photographer’s assistant.” It was very hurtful, as I think a lot of their marriage was. He was always center stage. It’s kind of, like, you’re married to the Great Man and you’re the Curator of the Great Man, or the Barely Tolerated Wife of the Great Man. Whatever it is you are, you have to be in somebody else’s shadow. But she chose the bed that she lay down in by choosing this guy. You know you’re going to be second fiddle to him. Everybody worships him, and everybody kind of tolerates you because you’ve married him. Most men won’t tolerate being the satellite of a great woman because, you know, their egos won’t take it. On the other hand, George did not protect her, and he could have and should have. He never took her hand and said, “This is my wife.”
KRISTI WITKER I really liked Freddy. In those days I never had many plans, so I was always hanging around their wonderful town house. I loved being there. It was so much more interesting than being alone in my little apartment because there was always something going on. Strange people would come in—some circus people would walk in one door and a nun from 110th Street would walk in the other. It was always totally unpredictable and alway
s fun. I remember thinking, “Oh, I wish I were Freddy, just to have this life—it’s so interesting, so fascinating. You could never feel lonely, you could never be bored!” Of course, as time wore on, I realized that this was not necessarily the case, and perhaps it never had been.
FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON George and I both adored Marianne Moore, but we had quite different relationships with her. She thought I was this waif, and she thought that she was necessary in my life, and I thought she was this waif and that I was necessary in her life, and it was just very touching. She saw George as an interesting and courtly man who invited her to do entertaining, if puzzling, things with him. She never seemed to realize that we were a couple. Miss Moore would invite me to visit her at her apartment on Tenth Street, where there was just room for a bed and a few shelves and stacks and stacks of books and a tiny kitchen, and she had all these odd little animals around that she collected and wrote poetry about. I would sit at the foot of the bed, and she would be propped up against the pillows. I don’t know what we talked about. We always gave each other little presents. She knew I liked to paint, so she gave me watercolors. When I left, she would insist on giving me cab fare to get me home safely. I have never had a relationship like that with anyone—one of loving interest and quiet hand-holding. George wanted Miss Moore to do certain things to enhance whatever it was he was writing about. I often worried that she was too frail for such outings. When George was with Ali, for example, Miss Moore would sit there under her tricorn hat trying to think up a line for a poem that she would help Ali write so that George could write about it. Ali loved that. I remember he leaned down in this gentlemanly fashion—and he was a big man—he leaned down when everybody was sitting at a table and talked to her under her hat.
With Marianne Moore. Photograph by Jill Krementz.
WALTER SOHIER I didn’t know too much about the marriage. Freddy was a bit of a complainer and used to complain about George, but I didn’t want to sit there and listen. I liked Freddy very much, and I liked them together very much. I don’t think they had a very happy time. I don’t know that George would be a very easy husband, probably in the same way that I wasn’t, because he was probably uncommunicative, a bit indifferent. He hadn’t had a warm, close family upbringing, and it’s very hard for somebody without that to be a good family person; but that’s just speculation. There’s a lot I didn’t know about George, and for all of his gregariousness, he was a very private person.
CHRIS CERF She couldn’t change George, but who would want to change George? George was George. As Mel Brooks said, “You like the nose, you buy the face.” Imagine that you actually could change George, and somehow he was just a great family man who gave up his lecture tours (much of his livelihood, by the way) so he could be with you, and wasn’t mischievous, and didn’t disappear for a week to set off the world’s biggest fireworks—what’s the point? That’s what made him so wonderful.
CYNTHIA BAGLEY I came back to New York in 1981, and I saw George then. That’s when I met Freddy. My son was then four, the same age as Taylor, so they would play together. I would keep that lad overnight, and he was so difficult, but by then I had been working with Ronnie Laing in London as a child psychologist, so I was able to deal with him, and I started trying to change his diet, to try to get him to calm down, because he had these strange eating problems. And George was just so unhappy. If you went to his house, the situation was such that even when George wasn’t there, Freddy’s strings were pulled so taut that you just didn’t know quite where to put yourself. Without George there, it was like you were dealing with someone who was so high-strung, so on the edge of madness all the time. She was scary.
NANCY STODDART There was a very unattractive period where George started hanging around with this really horrible man. I was just completely shocked by the idea that somebody I really looked up to, whom I considered an older person, had gotten into a creepy drug thing—until I got into one for a brief period myself years later.
MAVIS HUMES BAIRD I remember at one point with Freddy, he was really scared. He loved her to pieces, but he was scared by how angry the exchanges were between them. It wasn’t all her fault. George was an impossible person to be married to; but she would get really pissed off and start needling or getting an attitude. She’s so incredibly witty, she’d come up with these barbed digs that were a riot if you didn’t care about anyone’s feelings. She’d sort of invite everyone to go on the ride with her. It was a treacherous social exchange—if you didn’t let her know that you saw her point and that you approved of her humor, she felt hurt and betrayed by you.
FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON Through all the bad times George and I had with each other, he never shouted, he never got angry, he simply went his own way. Sins of omission rather than sins of commission. But those are the hardest ones to bear. When you just had a baby, for example, and your husband takes off on this trip and that trip, and doesn’t really acknowledge that this has happened to you, that’s hard. Giving birth to Medora, then Taylor, were the biggest things I’d ever done. I mean, the whole experience was amazing for me. But I didn’t get any acknowledgment from George, which is all I really wanted. And George was unable to give that to me, whom he adored—and he did adore me. I mean, he was such an acknowledging person to his friends, to the Paris Review staff, to strangers. Why couldn’t he give some of it to me?
ANN WINCHESTER She and I had been to Disneyland with the children, and she was behaving very oddly then. It’s probably the same summer that I was staying at the apartment and pretty much looking after Taylor because she was a bit off-the-wall. I was there because I was doing the sculpture for Elaine Hart, that weird lady across the road who couldn’t go out. Well, one day Freddy just freaked out. She was just shaking and shaking and shaking. It was something I’d never seen before; I don’t scare easily, but I was positively alarmed. No, terrified. I wanted to call an ambulance, but she absolutely wouldn’t let me. I thought, “Well, it’s her house and I’m her guest....” But in the end I overruled her and sent her to the hospital. And I was left with the children. From there she went into detox; I think she would have died otherwise. I didn’t see her again, basically. She took against me, big-time. She wouldn’t see me or talk to me or anything. Fortunately, someone at the detox place told me to expect this, as it is a very common reaction to the circumstance. Apparently they can’t again face the person who saw them in that desperate state—not at first and sometimes never again. I have called her over the years, but she’s not indicated a wish to resume our friendship. I’m not the kind of person who lets go of old friends, and it is sad. But I am truly happy she is well.
JOYCE BARONIO I saw him sort of falling apart. I think Freddy was in Colorado at that time, in rehab, I think, and there would be these phone calls from Colorado, and he would get very upset. She could really upset him. There was something very out of control about her, and he didn’t know how to deal with that. “You’re supposed to be better by now,” he’d say, “why aren’t you better?” And I heard all the stories, from Bill Becker mostly, about how she had, you know, slept with all his friends. But George never mentioned it. He never mentioned the specifics. It just really upset him.
A. E. HOTCHNER George was an enigma, he really didn’t show you a lot. George was George. He had a set persona, and that was gonna be it, hell or high water. So I know that when he and Freddy were mired in their deepest problems, Freddy was suffering over it. But not George. George was just riding through it. Not happily, but you would never know he was going through what he went through.
CHRIS CERF If someone deeply hurt George, that’s not something he would talk about. He would make it into a story. It took extraordinary distress for him to be more than an anecdotalist.
JOYCE BARONIO I was trying to get him to talk about Freddy and what was going on in his life now and to try to be okay with it. So, he did that. He was just very nervous about it, what she was going to do. He could still not quite bring himself around to getting divorced, but h
e knew that that was pending. And it was just like some horror that he had to continually face that he had never been prepared for.
DEBORAH PEASE He did talk about it freely, Freddy leaving him. Not when there were people listening—although you never knew, when you called George, how many people were in the room—but he did say that Freddy was drifting away. I can’t remember his exact words, but it did upset him. I remember him using the words sleep over; I mean, “When she comes to New York, she doesn’t sleep over here.” She was spending most of her time—all of it, really—in Sagaponack. He also told me that Freddy led a “shadow life.” That’s how he referred to it. And he didn’t say it in an unkind way or in a judgmental way at all. But I don’t think George liked shadow lives very much; he didn’t understand them. When he said that, I had the feeling he just meant a diminished life. Not a clandestine life. An insubstantial life. That’s how he meant it. But long before that, in the seventies sometime, I remember seeing the two of them, George and Freddy, at a little dinner party that George Trow gave in his loft down on Grand Street, before that neighborhood became so fancy. It was always clear that George was sexually available to anyone, and that evening, I felt he and I would probably get together at the end of the evening. We hadn’t seen each other for a long time, several years, I think. Even in the sixties, with Freddy officially installed at 541, he never gave the impression of being unavailable. It wasn’t in his nature to be monogamous. I had the feeling that Freddy was a little bit desperate, even then. I was working as a salesgirl at Design Research in New York, and they came in together, and George was not interested in being there, while Freddy was desperately trying to interest him in the merchandise. She was picking up items and extolling their virtues, and George was really bored. I’d never seen him that way before.
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