George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON I remember when the offer came in. We were sitting on the deck with Peter Matthiessen and Jean [Kennedy] Smith when George was called up to the bridge for a ship-to-shore call from New York. He was gone for a long time. Finally my curiosity got the better of me so I went up there. He was looking pale and shaken. I thought something had happened to Freddy, or the children. When he finally got off the phone, he told us he had been offered all this money to write his memoir. At first I thought he was just being modest about it. But he said, “I don’t want to do this. I’ve already written the stories of my life, what more is there to say? It’s like putting the nails in the coffin. I don’t want to write about my life.” He thought about it, worried about it, made notes about other people’s lives, but I think he was just interested in the money. By then he was running through his savings at a pretty good clip.

  WILL HEARST Well, I do think he could have written, if he’d wanted to, a Henry Adams–type history. As Henry Adams was to the nineteenth century, George could have been to the twentieth century: “Here’s how it was, here are the people that I met, here’s what they thought; some of them were fools, some of them were ambitious fools, some of them were well-intentioned fools, some of them were great men.” It’s a shame he never wrote that book.

  GERALD CLARKE I told him long ago that he should write a novel or memoir. With his connections and everything, he could have written a wonderful book on the manners and morals of his time and place and class. George knew his world as Evelyn Waugh knew his. It wasn’t any of my business, but I often wondered why he never wrote such a book. One possibility goes back to the early 1970s when I was doing a piece on him for Time. I asked him about what seemed the great theme in his sports books, which was failure, his failures, and he made a very curious comment: “The successful man of any profession I know of somehow rues his success.” I gather that toward the end of his life George got a chance—that is, a big advance—to write his memoir. It came too late for him to take advantage of it. But the possibility is that he would have been too rueful to go through with it.

  PETER MATTHIESSEN Sometimes, when he thought he was unobserved, he tended to let his face collapse, let his jaw hang open like a dead man, and at these moments he looked driven, really quite awful, the saddest man in the city. I don’t know how much of that I read into his expression and how much was a quirk of physiognomy. I don’t think George was fundamentally depressed, but he sure looked like he was fighting something dark.

  ELIZA GRISWOLD Why didn’t he write the “big book”? My guess is loneliness and sadness. I think George’s humor came from a much deeper sadness, as great humor usually does; and the sadness, I think, originated in a strong sense of lost possibility. It’s all over his work. I think his drinking was a way to turn off a deeper question, but what that was I wouldn’t know, and I doubt he did, either. But whatever it was, drinking did take it off, chemically, of course, but also because it was an essential enabler of his boundless social life—another wonderful painkiller.

  JAMES SCOTT LINVILLE For a few years I was in a little office upstairs between George’s and the billiards room. His assistant Antonio Weiss, though not much of a Star Trek fan, used to call it the Bridge. When George would fly off to Omaha or wherever to give a speech, I’d slip in there and sit at his desk, spin in his chair, like a kid trying on his father’s shoes. Then I’d prepare to make my Important Call. One day George had gone off and left his diary sitting open right in the center of the desk. Of course I had to look. He’d written, in the center of the page, “When one goes on a journey of self-exploration, one should go heavily armed. —Verlaine.” So George.

  LARISSA MACFARQUHAR Even though a lot of George’s journalism is about himself, it’s still somehow remarkably egoless. It’s self-deprecating, and that’s part of it; but he’s actually using himself as a vehicle to convey the sense of where he is and who he’s talking about, while maintaining his respect, his great appreciation, of them. He withdraws himself out of respect. That’s very hard to do and very rarely done. Usually when people are using themselves as a participatory center, a protagonist, it ends up being about them. But with George, you always have the flavor of, yes, he was there, but it’s always a story about somebody else.

  OLIVER BROUDY He himself was not one of the things he paid close attention to, except as this comic figure, this persona that he created for his books. It must have been baffling, perhaps painfully so, the prospect of writing a memoir. I don’t know that he knew who he was. He just sort of was, like an idiot savant.

  ROWAN GAITHER You had to sift through the stories to get down to the underlying emotion. It was always there, but often masked in a fluid style that placed you at somewhat of a remove from what you sensed was the real emotional experience. Like the Esquire piece he wrote about driving around Jersey City, was it, with Archie Moore, the Mongoose, looking for the Mongoose’s mother. It was told with meticulous detail and with a clarity that allowed you to ignore the fact that George was actually telling a completely heartbreaking story. Or take “The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair,” the story that many people who knew him seem to think was quintessentially his. The flight was a success, but the story ends with the man killing himself, all alone out in a wilderness somewhere. I’m not sure that George ever wanted to reach out and really go after the feelings aroused by those images. They would be there in the writing, but he never seemed to want them to come to the fore.

  LYNN NESBIT He could have done a great memoir of New York Society, with his wit and distant, urbane point of view—but I think it would have bored him. He would have needed to tell it; he needed an audience. To write, to do great writing, you have to be alone, to have privacy, a private life. He was the most thoroughly social creature I’ve ever known. I think George experienced private life as a terrible deprivation; I think he would have preferred not to have one. We’re all social creatures to some extent, artists to the least extent, perhaps, George to the greatest extent possible.

  RIC BURNS My idea of heaven is, you’d be in some sort of wonderful place and George would simply be retelling the story of the time he was a consultant to the fireworks display for the centennial of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1983. He told me he was climbing up very high on the bridge one night, up over the harbor with one of the Gruccis, and there, out of breath, two hundred and seventy-five feet above nighttime New York, he leaned over the iron parapet and saw that on the backside of it someone had written in chalk, “You’ve Come a Long Way Baby, Now Let’s See How Far You Can Fly.” That to me is the classic George thing, where you go out on a long limb, and when you get there you find something that you could never possibly have expected. If you get to the end of the limb and the expected comes, why bother having climbed out there and brought anybody with you? He had a tremendous sense of the theater of anecdote and language, where the audience has a whole set of ideas of why you’re going out on that limb and, in that context, is waiting for something completely different. George always knew that that was really a theatrical presidium in which he was manipulating your mood—the height, the image in your mind of New York—and like any good comedian or dramatic actor, he gave you something that was startling and chilling and strange, with no resolution. There was never a moral to George’s stories. They were not allegorical. Which is to say, they never revolved back inward either to George or to some point or lesson. They always opened outward into the density of human experience. It’s about alertness and awareness, not about presumption having been confirmed. So it’s never about vanity. It’s always about wonder and the world. And that’s why he stayed as young as he did. If George were a piece of music, he would be an unresolved chord.

  THE ONCOMING BUS

  JONATHAN DEE My guess is that it would have been terribly painful for George to write his memoirs. People forget how little of George’s later life was given to writing and how much to working with the words of other people—editing anthologies, editing oral biographies, editing intervi
ew transcripts. The editing of transcripts was a talent he honed from the beginning of the Paris Review interviews, of course, and he made them into an imperishable brand. But even many of the books nominally written by him began to feature less and less of his own actual writing. Books like Paper Lion or Shadow Box had a tremendous voice running through them, but by the time you get to later books like One More July or Open Net, he’s turned the stage over to his subjects almost entirely—huge block quotes, with only a kind of stage direction surrounding them. The oral biography form was kind of perfect for him: Some of those books were truly great, like Edie, while others like the Truman Capote and Diana Vreeland books were slighter and more perfunctory, but the significant thing is that George himself, as an authorial voice, is nowhere in them. And then there he was at the end of his life, in the Ernest, Scott, and Zelda show, literally speaking the words of other writers.

  THOMAS MOFFETT In the late 1990s, I think, George was inspired by a dramatic reading that Terry Quinn had composed out of the Nabokov-Wilson correspondence and began assembling something out of the Hemingway-Fitzgerald correspondence. George worked with Quinn on editing it in the later stages, but in the early stages, he was doing it himself. He had all these books, and he would underline the parts he wanted from each letter, then I would type them up. Then he would do another draft and put them together. There was a lot of back-and-forth, starting with the original letter, then meticulously working our way to putting it in dialogue form.

  TERRY QUINN George and I had spent seven months working on a number of drafts and came up with nothing, which was probably due to the fact that we went at this from very different perspectives. His approach to the material was much more chronological, historical—a close editorial interest, I would say. Mine was much more dramatic: How will this work for an audience?

  LAWRENCE SHAINBERG They did the play with Mailer as Hemingway, George as Fitzgerald, and Norris Church [Mailer] as Zelda. By the time I started talking to George about my doing an article on it, they had already done it in a number of places. It was a complicated thing because they couldn’t get royalties. The Hemingway and Fitzgerald estates controlled the whole thing. So they did it for expenses. Basically, they were all in it for the love of working together.

  NORMAN MAILER I don’t know who literally put the show together, it may be like the founding of The Paris Review. Of course, there was the built-in comedy for George and myself; he was playing Fitzgerald and I was playing Hemingway. While Fitzgerald was about my height, and Hemingway was about George’s height. I have a deep, growly sort of voice, while in recordings, Heming-way, to my surprise, had a fast, highpitched voice. Anyway, I decided, since I’m half Hemingway’s size, I’ve got to get a very big voice into it, which I did. I played him with a big, authoritative voice, a strong voice. A man who knows what everything is made of. George played Fitzgerald extremely well, and Norris, who was a talented actress, did splendid stuff with Zelda. The combination worked. First, we did it in Vermont, and then we did it in East Hampton. We did it in New York a couple of times. Then we went on a European tour: Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Moscow, and London. We were performing pro bono, for the James Jones Literary Festival in Paris, for this or that fund-raiser, and of course, for the glory of it. But then at some point, because George was always in need of money, and I, with my many children, was always in need of money, we thought we could really put this show on the road and make a fortune. It would have been sensational. Believe me, it worked. God, it worked.

  Norman Mailer, George, and Norris Church Mailer as Ernest, Scott, and Zelda.

  Photograph © Helayne Seidman 2002.

  LAWRENCE SHAINBERG In Europe we would come into the city, whatever city, and they’d rehearsed once or twice, usually once, and then they’d go onstage with George wearing his little orange Princeton tie and Norman in his safari jacket. Zelda in a way was the most powerful character in the play, and Norris did her in a strong southern accent.

  NORMAN MAILER It was more fun than I’ve had doing almost anything in the theater. And we were good; the play was good. You began to feel the loss that these guys felt even as they were living it—the knowledge that they were so talented, but they were not necessarily going to get the most out of their talent; that the parts of them that were there to destroy them might prove stronger in the end than their strengths.

  NORRIS CHURCH Traveling with George was just so much fun. You never knew what he was going to do. In Amsterdam, I got this call from him: “Norris, I’ve gone off without my script and I don’t know where we’re supposed to go.” He was totally lost, but he always had people running after him trying to give him his tickets and his passport and things. He just jumps into the cab, his white hair flying in the wind, as someone throws the tickets after him. So, thank God, I was there. He didn’t have a clue where to go to do the show; but then he always walked in at the last minute, with hair perfectly in place, and performed. It’s amazing. Somehow, it always worked out. He had some kind of guardian angel chasing around after him.

  LAWRENCE SHAINBERG Norman was the dominant figure. They had big press conferences everywhere, TV appearances. I remember there was one press conference in Berlin where Norman started off by saying, “The first time I came to Berlin, I got an erection when I got off the plane.” That was his introductory remark. He didn’t want to talk about Iraq; he was talking about China as the big threat to the United States. And George, at this press conference in Berlin, said he thought that really the best thing we could do with China, because they were so obsessed and successful with Ping-Pong in the Olympics, was to send a lot of tennis rackets over there. Then some reporter from Stern came up to him and said, “Mr. Plimpton, I want you to know that your remark about the tennis rackets is the most intelligent thing I’ve heard all through this conference.”

  NORRIS CHURCH I think we might have gone on, doing Zelda, Scott, and Ernest, touring South America, doing Broadway, taking our show on the road forever. We never knew how ill he was, and there he was, at the end planning a trip to Cuba. We weren’t able to go, but he said, “Oh, I’ll pick up some actors on the plane. It will be fine.” I’m sure it would have been.

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON He would bicycle everywhere, white hair flying, no helmet. I can’t tell you how many helmets we bought him and tried to place on his head. I can’t tell you how many scrambled brain stories I told him. He absolutely refused to wear a helmet. His excuse was that, well, if you went to a restaurant, you would have to check it. That’s pretty lame. Anyway, he loved having that long white hair flying in the wind. And he loved having people shout from the sidewalks, “George, where’s your helmet?” So many people would tell me they saw George riding his bicycle downtown without his helmet. This is the child in him. He used to tell me how, when he was pedaling home from the Racquet Club or the Brook, he would go up Lenox Hill on Park Avenue to Seventieth Street, and then he would always see if he could coast from Park down to York. Imagine a seventy-year-old man seeing how far he could coast downhill on his bicycle. That’s pure George.

  George on his evening rounds.

  Photograph © Ron Galella.

  RICHARD PRICE The last time I saw George was the most memorable experience I had with him. There was a guy, Flip, from Gotham Book Mart. The Gotham Book Mart had won box seats at Yankee Stadium, and Flip decided he was going to call a couple of writers. It was me, Flip, George, and Don DeLillo, a strange combination of characters going up there. Flip is this crazy bookstore guy, and DeLillo’s like the gray ghost, slim as a blade, and the whole way up there, George was saying, “I have this idea for this great series of books! We’re all going to pick a mineral. . . .” I don’t know what he was talking about. He was saying, “We’re going to have this adventure! And I’m going to have writers write backwards!” We got there, and I’ve never had seats like that in my life; you could see if Derek Jeter had popped that zit yet. But the game wasn’t really that interesting. By the sixth inning, Don had left; and by the seventh, Ge
orge and I left. So Flip was in this empty box seat. I shared a gypsy cab with George back into the city, and he was still coming up with all these ideas: “Let’s join the Afghans! No, let’s set up a soccer field in the Tora Bora Mountains!” It was probably August. It was the only time I was ever alone with him.

  THOMAS MOFFETT He went to the doctor a lot. He seemed preoccupied with checkups. His main doctor, Dr. Cox, was across the street. He had to go for a colonoscopy on my birthday, the summer before he died. He was joking about dreading going and doing this thing. He said, “Listen, they tell me they need someone to come get me afterwards. Sarah’s away. Can you?” I said, “Sure.” When I walked over, the nurse said he was still waking up, and I just remember seeing his feet come down. He was looking for his shoes. He walked out and sat down, and he was utterly charming about it. He was saying, “That was a terrible procedure. I’m sorry. It’s your birthday, kiddo. What an awful way to spend your birthday.” We walked back toward 541, and he was saying, “How old are you? Twenty-five, that’s a great year. I remember when I turned twenty-five.” Then he started telling me about when the first review for Paper Lion came out, I think because he was getting ready to go to his reunion with the Lions that fall. He said he was so hung over. He was in a hotel room somewhere, with one of the worst hangovers he ever had. He said, “But I knew then that my life was going to be different.”