George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  With Sarah at San Simeon, 2001.

  Photograph © Liz Gilbert.

  PIEDY LUMET Sometime not long after the wedding, Sidney and I had a dinner for Sarah and George, and George proposed a toast. I thought, “Maybe it will be about Sarah, or maybe me,” but no, it was a toast to his mother. Pauline must have been thrilled with Sarah—much more civilized and presentable, from a snooty point of view.

  LAWRENCE SHAINBERG I felt a big difference in him when he got with Sarah. He felt much more settled down, much quieter. He had all the same charm, but you sensed you really mattered to him, rather than that you were his temporary excitement.

  BILL CURRY I remember when George found out that my wife and I were going to come up to New York and bring our daughter, Kristin, and her new husband. They’d been married for less than a year. He said, “Why, you must have dinner at our home.” He had this wonderful assemblage of people: the editor of Esquire, “Satch” Sanders of NBA fame, and the Celtics. He had about ten or twelve people, and we sat around the table and had Chinese takeout. Sarah was putting the girls to bed. The food arrived, and George couldn’t find the dishes, and my wife, Caroline, was in there slinging hash and getting the dishes out. So Caroline said to George (because Caroline’s an organizer, and George was totally disorga nized), “Let’s just do trays and eat out of our lap.” “Absolutely not!” George said. “We’re going to sit around the table together so we can have a conversation.” So we ended up next to the kitchen, sitting on footstools, but George and I sat there and went around the table and had a wonderful evening.

  ANNA LOU ALDRICH George and Sarah set up house together about the time when the old Paris Review crowd began to die. Doc was the first, then Terry Southern, then John Marquand. Eddie Morgan and Jackie Onassis died along in there somewhere.

  IMMY HUMES George retained a tremendous amount of affection for Doc when other people—almost all of Doc’s friends—were always, at best, very tense around him. George would take his calls and listen to him when he was in paranoid freak-out meltdown, saying things like “Get your father to call a session of the General Assembly and tell them the world is ending.” And at the very, very end of Doc’s life, we took him out of the hospice to go to dinner at Sarah and George’s, which was just wonderful. Sarah was there—she was wonderful, incredibly nice to Doc, and Doc was very interested in her. It was tremendously sweet. You could see George’s physical affection in the footage I took that night. You can see George touching him, reaching out for Doc’s hand—and Doc was also physical, so they were holding hands, and there was a real palpable kind of ancient friend thing happening there. They were just jawing on about the old days. George was telling these endless stories—about Eugene Walter, “Tum-te-tum,” and various disputes from the old days at The Paris Review.

  GEORGE AS ZEUS

  DAVID MICHAELIS George himself was a big part of the appeal of a job at The Paris Review, George as a model of how to live. Most adults, I thought, had a fixed idea of how things ought to be. George was willing to be surprised and delighted by whatever life presented him with from one moment to the next. It might be a remark someone had made to him, the sight of a beautiful girl, a story he’d just heard, or a person he’d just met, even his own responses to things—his own irritation at something, for example. “Golly!” he would cry, or, “Good heavens!” or, “Great Scott”; people were amazed at the antique purity of his expletives, but what was really amazing was the freshness and openness of the guy who uttered them. Life came at him in little packets of wondrousness. How many times in George’s day did he exclaim, “Marvelous!” and mean it? Certainly more than anyone I knew. At the same time, he had what adults call “strength of character.” But it was always couched, this “character,” in a somewhat ironical distrust of the established system. Conventional people loved George, as everyone else did, but I imagine most of them mistrusted him just a bit—or ought to have done. The George we knew from downstairs was a subversive character. We could feel it when we went upstairs. The apartment was a place of play, or rather, it was where work turned into play; downstairs was where play turned into work. That’s a dangerous place to have a summer internship, with just one easy flight of stairs between work and play.

  JEANNE MCCULLOCH George presided over us, and the hordes who came before and after us, like Zeus presided over his rabble of gods and men—lecherously and jealously sometimes, but mostly with the happier forms of paternalism.

  THOMAS MOFFETT I think he just liked coming downstairs every day and checking in with people and knowing what was going on. I think it kept him stimulated. Sarah always said, “George needs you guys. You keep him young.”

  ANTONIO WEISS The atmosphere was unexpectedly turbulent in the office. There were affairs, deceitful affairs, periods of time when the staff broke into two factions not speaking to each other. I didn’t speak with one colleague for two months. There were fights over women, fights over stories. There were fights over whether or not the editors were holding the line sufficiently against George on a particular piece. I tended to agree with him.

  JAMES SCOTT LINVILLE There was a time when 541 was not such a happy place, and all manner of diverse gossip swirled. Even, so I gathered, about me. Rumors (patently false rumors I should say) that I was about to leave the magazine and become a spy in Berlin, that I was slipping it to a young intern, that I’d become afflicted with a fatal disease . . . that I was about to elope with my friend Elizabeth Wurtzel. I found all this talk fairly upsetting, but George made it a point to teach me to ignore all such gossip . . . some of which he’d no doubt had a hand in unleashing. Up in his office, he adopted a sagelike pose in that Eames chair he had and offered this bit of wisdom: “James, halitosis is better than no breath at all.”

  Huh? I said. “You know,” he explained, “just as long as they’re talking about you, it’s good.” And then, “Heh heh.” All I could manage was to shake my head and pout. Then one night I was having a drink with a woman from Random House that turned into a sort of date. At one point she stopped eating, stared at me intently, and in this serious voice asked, “Is it true you procure black transvestites for George Plimpton?” I burst out laughing, and all of a sudden I had a free feeling. I realized there was not much you could do to control that kind of thing, and better just to learn to let it slide off your back. The next morning I went to work with a spring in my step because, among other reasons, I wanted to tell him he’d been exactly right, and it was true. Well, I went up to see George and I told him, and before I could even finish he hit the roof—“She said WHAT?! Who is this young woman?!” I had to back out of his office saying, “Halitosis, George! Remember...halitosis!”

  MARJORIE KALMAN George used to accuse me of being good. He said, “Why are you always so good?” I didn’t know what he meant. It took me years to realize it was because if he asked me to do something, I did it. I wasn’t remiss. George would have preferred that we were getting high in the bathroom. When I started, Taylor and Medora were young, so we had to be careful what we did in the office, for fear that they’d pop in the door—which they didn’t, I don’t think. I was too good. I was obedient. George didn’t appreciate that at all.

  JAMES SCOTT LINVILLE George liked there to be not too much of a division of labor, in terms of who was in charge of what. So there would always be a little bit of chaos that George could hover over. And it allowed him, like Zeus, to create a little bit of chaos as well.

  FAYETTE HICKOX When I was managing editor, I just didn’t have any organizational ability. Several other people said, “Let me show you how you can organize things.” But I think the only organizational tip George ever gave me was “You know, William Pène du Bois has all these wonderful cans in which he keeps his different-colored pencils.”

  SUSANNAH HUNNEWELL It would be a lie to say I wasn’t aware of George’s constant flirtatiousness. It wasn’t even flirtatiousness so much as it was the pleasure he took in your being a girl. Rather than being offended, I always
thought, “Why shouldn’t he flirt?” He was an obviously attractive man, so it’s flattering. I never felt any pressure from him, though I’m sure he wouldn’t have turned it down were it offered; but I never felt it was a come-on, just his general pleasure in being around attractive ladies.

  DAVID MICHAELIS “Bring a pretty girl.” He always said it when he invited me to a party, and I heard him say it to other young men later: “Bring a pretty girl.” It was like an Irwin Shaw story, that lovely midcentury feeling. There was no sexism, and you felt like a million bucks because he deemed you worthy of being the kind of guy who would bring a pretty girl. I hope that doesn’t sound sexy, you know? It’s not like Hugh Hefner or Norman Mailer. It’s much more Scott Fitzgerald, which isn’t sex. It’s more about the girl as a distant princess.

  HALLIE GAY WALDEN Early on, I made it clear that nothing was going to happen between us, and he accepted it. I remember one surreal incident when he tried to deploy me in a fantasy he had about me and Martina Navratilova, whom I idolized. It was about the time that Personal Best came out, a sort of buddy movie with Mariel Hemingway that played out in a girls’ track team, with all these incredibly erotic locker room shots of flashing female legs and thighs. After the movie, he said, “I have tickets to the Open. Want to come?” He must have been crafting this fantasy in his mind that maybe he could introduce me to Martina, thinking that the instant she saw me, she would just . . . What happened was, I became enthralled with his idea of getting to meet my favorite tennis player and said, “Okay, let’s try it!” And because he was who he was, he was able to get us down into the lower bowels of the stadium, with the photographers waiting for her to come through. He hoped she would see us, and then he would be able to have this wonderful evening with the both of us. Well, it didn’t work. She came through all right, but she had just lost one of the hardest battles she ever had on the tennis court, so the timing was not very good. We got the brush-off. From then on, the Martina story was one of his favorites, and throughout our friendship he always treated me with something like a kind and intimate paternalism.

  DANA GOODYEAR Any man George’s age who wakes up at ten and comes into his office in his boxer shorts is kind of saying, “I’m my own person.” He was just very comfortable in his skin—and you had to be comfortable in his skin, too. But the intimacy of working and living in the same place meant that everybody there might fancy they were a child of his or like some kind of foundling who’d been taken in. The Review did have that kind of extended orphanage feeling. Of course, it mattered whether he liked you or not. That’s what I was always afraid of—that he didn’t like me. I had no reason to think so: I was just twenty-two years old and very aware of seniority and hierarchies, and I could see, just walking in there, who had the special relationships to him. But it would have made me feel self-conscious to try to befriend him in a special way. He was always my friend Taylor’s dad to me. I never was adopted by him, and I never tried to be. I had my own dad. It’s a weird thing to say, perhaps, but George would have been a really fun father figure—I just didn’t need one.

  ELISSA SCHAPPELL I spent a very small amount of time in George’s life, but the people who got to enter that private realm felt very protective of him and felt like his child. He wasn’t looking for that. But he could make you feel very special, and when you were talking to him, you felt very important to him. Everybody felt like he or she had this relationship with George, when in fact George had this relationship with so many people, and everybody had a bit of a hard time with that.

  Book party at Seventy-second Street. From left: Steve Clark, a Batman, Molly McGrann, Dan Glover, George, and Andy Bellin. Photograph by Ann Kidd.

  FAYETTE HICKOX Ah, yes, the parties. Well, I always thought of the people at those parties as divided between the herbivores and the carnivores. The herbivores were by and large the original Paris Review people, the Styrons, Eddie Morgan, plus George’s old Lampoon and Porcellian friends. The carnivores were the media people, with their little laser eyes zapping past you, trying to see who might be of service to them. I remember once in that period having drinks with Bobby Fizdale, the pianist. He said, “Your problem is . . . you’re in that . . . what’s it called? You know, everybody talks about it . . . whatever it is . . .” And then went on, “Oh yes, you’re in the media.” But George loved that carnivorous media world as much as he loved the other.

  MOLLY MCKAUGHAN The first party I ever went to was right after I started. It was Medora’s christening party at the beginning of November ’72. George went over to Jackie’s apartment to talk to Caroline because she was very nervous about what she was going to say. When they showed up, Jackie was dressed gorgeously in a long black slinky dress, and Caroline was in a plaid kilt. What is worse for a girl with big hips than a plaid kilt? Nothing. I was absolutely horrified. I think Caroline was all of fifteen, or fourteen, that awkward age. The party was a very small affair. Then there were these literary parties with all of the authors—you know, like Norman Mailer and all those guys. The one I remember best was after Ali beat Foreman. George had been over in Zaire and had a film of the fight before it appeared on television. He got back from this trip and showed the film. He had Norman Mailer there, Gay Talese, and Howard Cosell. I brought Bill Plummer, my future husband, and my friend Tom Maloney and his wife, Maryanne Maloney; she was at Viking. I had to step out of the party to do something, but by the end of it, when I came back I found Maloney and Mailer wrestling on the floor of the living room. Freddy had gone to bed, and George was trying to pretend that he was the referee, and they’re rolling all over the floor. They knocked over a table, and some Ming vase broke. Finally, Mailer said, “I give up,” and Tom replied, “No, I give up. You’re the great writer, pin me.” So Mailer managed to get Tom over on his back and pinned him. George was asking them questions like a reporter, but they were both absolutely shit-faced. We got Tom downstairs, and he threw up on the side of the building, and then we got him into a cab. George would have a party at the drop of a hat. He’d say, “Call up all your pretty friends, bring them along.”

  JONATHAN DEE As his assistant in the early eighties, I was in charge of the parties. I felt I was the only one in New York who knew their secret—by that time, at least—which was that any time anyone ever called him and said, “May we use your home for a party?” he said yes, because he would rather have three hundred strangers in his apartment on a weeknight than be there alone. He said yes to everything, and he wouldn’t even check to see if he was going to be in town. If it was a book party, the poor author and publisher would be very excited that George Plimpton was throwing them a book party, and then they’d get there and it would turn out George wasn’t even in New York. It was a little embarrassing. There were three parties a week sometimes. I’d go upstairs the day before and tell George that we needed to order booze, which was always a little frustrating, because his idea of people’s drinking habits was more or less frozen in time—no wine, just Scotch. The day of the party, I’d have to go up to the apartment to move the furniture around so things wouldn’t get ruined and to let in the bartenders and the caterers, if there was any food, which there usually wasn’t; then I’d stay there until the last drunk poet had been escorted out, so I could move the furniture back and pay the bartenders. For five years, I was at every one of those parties, from before it started until after it ended, and I got a little sick of it.

  FAYETTE HICKOX Sometime before I left, in the early eighties, a piece ran in The Village Voice by Peter Moscoso-Gongora, who had worked in the Paris Review office. It was this portrait of George, like “Who Is George Plimpton Now?” It talked about how the fizz had gone out of his parties and how The Paris Review and George had sold out. He talked about the women at the parties with their “fuck-me shoes.” I’d never heard the expression before. I looked for them, but I never could quite figure out what they were. Freddy was very concerned about the piece and was really worried about George getting terribly upset. And I guess Philip Roth
happened to call; Freddy explained what her concern was, and Roth said, “I’ll tell you what to do—just overreact, make it into a total drama: How awful, how could he possibly say these things,” and so on. And I guess Freddy did this, and sure enough George goes, “Oh, it’s all right, it’s all right.” But I do remember he wrote a letter to Bartle Bull, who was then the publisher of the Voice and a St. Bernard’s boy. George referred to this—and he finished in a Queeg-like tone, saying, “My memory is long, you know,” as if to say, “I’m not going to forget this, Bartle Bull.” Of course, then I knew that he was going to forget about it instantly.

  JONATHAN DEE I remember one party, where Leonard Bernstein got horribly drunk and insisted on going upstairs and saying hi to Taylor, who was asleep, so Jay and I and some other staffer went upstairs with Lenny. To pacify him, we agreed to open the bedroom door so he could see Taylor; but then he went over to the side of the bed and started caressing Taylor’s head. Then he started actually getting under the covers with him, at which point we pulled him off.