George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  BILL DOW I was forty-seven, a freelance writer in the Detroit area, where I grew up. That Detroit Lions team from the early sixties was the team that I grew up with, and Paper Lion was, of course, one of my favorite books. As a freelance writer I’m always looking for ideas, tying in articles with anniversaries and so forth; and so in July 2002, I decided to call him up out of the blue, and to my amazement, I was put right through to him. So I said, “Mr. Plimpton, do you realize that next year will be the fortieth anniversary of your ’63 Cranbrook training camp with the Lions?” He said, “Oh, my God, that’s really something.” And I said, “Would you ever consider coming back to Detroit for a reunion of that team? Perhaps it could be for a charity dinner or something like that.” He said, “Oh, I’d be delighted to, if you could do something like that. Those were the favorite times of my life.” So I decided, what the heck? We were able to get twenty-eight of his teammates to come back, including Alex Karras—and, you know, Alex was pretty much estranged from the organization; he hadn’t done anything with them since he left. It took some prodding, because he’s not used to doing that type of thing. The only way he came back was because of George, I know that. The next day, the players were introduced at halftime at the Lions game at Ford Field, and among the last group of players that were introduced were the Fearsome Foursome—Roger Brown, Darris McCord, Sam Williams, and last was Alex Karras, who got a big ovation. And then the next person introduced was Joe Schmidt, who’s kind of like the legendary Detroit Lion—Hall of Fame player, former coach of the Lions. And George was the last one introduced, and I am not kidding, he got the loudest ovation. I mean, Karras got a really good ovation, and Schmidt did, too, but the look on George’s face, the smile, it was just priceless. He was certainly surprised by it. He waved to the crowd, and I could tell he got the biggest kick out of it. At the dinner, of course, he said a few words, which included a couple of stories, one that was typically George, somehow, about how he was in the airport in Texas and this guy with a cowboy hat on recognized him and told him that Paper Lion was the only book he had ever read in his life.

  PETER MATTHIESSEN George was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters only a few months before he died. The timing was great because it really meant a lot to him to be recognized as a real writer, not merely an editor. The academy has a category for people who make significant contributions to the arts, and he certainly qualified for that as well, but he deserved membership as a writer. That series of Mittyesque sports books is masterful, sui generis, and very droll in his fine, self-deprecating way. And here and there his well-turned sentences are truly lyrical and poignant—that last page of the prizefight book, the young boys on the airstrip in Zaire, is my own favorite. There had been resistance to his membership; it might have stemmed from the fairly buffoonish image conveyed by those unfortunate TV ads and the like. Even in the wonderful amateur-among-the-pros books, there was something about his role that bordered on the foolish. But wasn’t that the true nature of his humor? His most appealing quality as a writer, perhaps also as a man, was his affectionate response to human folly.

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON About six months before George died, he was having one of his usual evenings at the Brook Club. I believe it was after dinner, he was sitting in the bar and he rose to go get another drink, and his blood pressure dropped and he passed out. As he came crashing down, he hit his head on the table and was knocked out. He was also bleeding quite profusely. The paramedics were called. Now, George had done another little amateur-among-professionals stint with the fire department, so whenever a fire truck went by as he was walking down the street or riding his bicycle, they would shout out, “Hey, George!” which he took such delight in. Anyway, the paramedics from the local firehouse came, and they recognized him instantly, and they were slapping his cheeks and calling to him, “Hey, George! Wake up!” The maître d’ at the Brook Club took great exception to this, and he turned to them and said stiffly, “At the Brook Club, sir, we refer to him as ‘Mr. Plimpton.’ ” The aftermath wasn’t so funny. We had an intervention to get him to stop drinking. It worked for a month, a long time considering that hardly anyone showed up. Some were afraid of losing his friendship or love; many truly believed he didn’t have a problem; but most of them, I think, had become dependent on George’s high spirits and their friendship wouldn’t be the same if they confronted him.

  DENTON COX George stopped drinking for thirty days as a result of the intervention. And then I received a letter from Sarah saying that he had begun drinking again. I feel that he had a resentment that never went away as a result of it—and I don’t know at whom it was directed. That intervention, which was so valuable and ought to have made a really big difference, didn’t make a difference after a month or so, and it left him feeling resentful.

  THOMAS MOFFETT In the weeks after he fell, he was more uneasy on his feet. He would ask me a lot, “Do I seem okay?” That always struck me as weird. He seemed very concerned about whether he came across differently; he acted a little bit older after that. He seemed to be a bit more cautious; but he would still play softball, which made Sarah nervous. So of course, George would go out and pitch at these softball games, which probably wasn’t the smartest thing, but that was George. The idea of not being able to do something well was really painful to him.

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON In the Galápagos he’d slowed down considerably. He was very forgetful and quite spaced out. I would compensate for all that by doing things for him, whether it was buying equipment or packing his bags or filling out forms. He hated me doing that because it reminded him that he couldn’t do it himself.

  FIONA MAAZEL You remember how he hung his bike up in the Review office? Well, I sat underneath it, and how he hung the bike up became an indicator of how sick he was becoming. We would all sit there and be very nervous, because it was taboo even to offer to help him. We would stand back and watch his arms shaking as he tried to hang this bike, and it just got worse and worse. It was awful. But even when you saw George looking weak, you didn’t think it was serious. He didn’t seem like he was ever going to die.

  OLIVER BROUDY That summer, we were playing The New Yorker at softball. I always play catcher because I’m half-blind. Michael Crawford, who’s one of the New Yorker cartoonists, was up at bat. He swings, and in swinging, he swung the bat backward and launched it and nailed me right in the forehead. I had five stitches in a hospital. The plan was to retire after the softball game to some dive on the West Side. Despite this injury, the blood and stitches, I rejoined the team. George was there, and everyone was gathered around. I walked in, and there was a big roar of welcome because I was the wounded player. George turned around in his chair and saw me there and was so moved that he reached his arms up to me to hug me and started crying. Some little door opened and he saw something there, though I’m not sure how much of it had to do with me.

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON I think the staff believed he was Superman. In your seventies, you can’t go out nightclubbing every night without suffering the consequences. His body began to betray him and it got harder to maintain that exuberant persona. He managed to keep up a pretty good front for the kids downstairs; he was new to them. For most everyone else, the same old routines, the same old stories, wore pretty thin. Toward the end of his life, he struck me as desperate. He didn’t know how to drop the mask, but he kept going on the staff’s adoration. He certainly wasn’t getting much of it from me anymore.

  PATRICIA STORACE What was Ichabod Crane–ish about him was speed and the comic aspect. But also a sense of fear, I thought —trying to outrun mortality. Or trying to outrun adulthood, if that’s possible. Or limitations: That could also be what he was outrunning. And in that way, I don’t see him as just jovial and selfassured; I see him as someone who is conscious of some risk.

  HALLIE GAY WALDEN He came to my Dartmouth twenty-fifth reunion two months before he died. We couldn’t pay his normal fee, but he did it as a favor for me: “Anything for you, Hallie Gay.�
�� So I went up and spoke about him very briefly and sat down, and George got up, and he sort of shuffled to the podium. He didn’t look all that well. He looked frail, and I had never seen him look frail before. His nose kept running, there were little drops on the paper from his nose that he didn’t even notice. That, and his elbow having gone through his houndstooth jacket. It was a very conservative crowd, and he stood up and launched into talking about me, and when I first worked for him, and how people used to line up on the sidewalk and jump to try to look in the Paris Review window. My face was red, and then he launched into his usual speech about participatory journalism, and everyone was kind of looking around, and I was watching everyone, and it didn’t seem like it was going over as well as I thought it should, for the first five minutes of his talk. A lot of the people were from the business sector and didn’t know much about literature, and they were kind of like, “Who is this guy?” Then he started this tale, and people started clapping, and everyone started smiling and laughing. There were eight hundred people there. It was a huge audience. People were roaring back in their chairs, and George said, “I’m rambling now,” around the forty-five-minute mark. “Maybe I’m going on too long?” And people stood up and said, “No, keep going!” When he finished, he got a standing ovation. He just stood there, and he came to the edge of the stage, and he looked frail, and he gave this exceedingly humble bow, just bowing ever so slightly as they gave him this ovation, and I started to cry, because he looked so humble, like he was surprised that his speech had gone over so well.

  JAMES GOODALE Let me tell you about our planning for the fiftieth anniversary benefit for The Paris Review. Well, here we are, a foundation, and someone said, “We’re having a fiftieth anniversary; why don’t we use it to make some money?” We all knew without saying that George had thrown Revels for fifty years and never made a penny. What were we going to do about this? We organized ourselves into a sort of committee which would meet every now and then on the phone to see if we could help George and to make sure George was really going to bring in the money. But every time we got on the phone or got in the meeting, George would talk for about five minutes, then walk out of the meeting, so we had no idea of what he was doing. We threw up our hands. We really began to get concerned as we got closer to the event because it was getting larger and larger and larger, and George seemed to be doing more and more and more of the work. We did everything we could to try and stop him from doing that, and I really think that overexertion had something to do with his heart attack. In the end, we took in a hell of a lot of money, though. We took in eight hundred thousand dollars. The Paris Review had never seen more than seventy thousand dollars.

  THOMAS MOFFETT He was really busy on the day he died. First thing in the morning, he did a spot for Conan O’Brien, some audio thing. He had lunch with someone trying to raise money for something at Harvard. He came back to the office and then had rehearsals for the Ernest, Scott, and Zelda play. He was going to do the play in Cuba. That was the last time I saw him, when he went upstairs for the rehearsal. He went out that night, then he died in his sleep.

  MICHELE CLARK I don’t think he ever thought he was successful. I don’t think he thought he was successful at all. In fact, when we went to look at Cipriani’s Forty-second Street for the Revel—we had already booked it, but George hadn’t seen it yet—he walked in and his face just fell. He looked so upset. I said, “What’s wrong?” He looked at me and said, “We’ll never fill this space. This many people aren’t going to come out for The Paris Review. I don’t know what we’re going to do.” He was very genuinely worried. We had four hundred and fifty people already signed up, which was a very respectable number, when he passed away. That was about two and a half weeks before the event. And we ended up with eight hundred and thirty-five, who brought in eight hundred thousand dollars, maybe a hundred times the previous record for a Revel. The night before he died, he spent two hours with us, going over the invitation list. He was incredibly worried that nobody was going to show up. We already had a very successful turnout by then. But he was still worried. So he called people that night, right there on the spot. He sat there and went through the Common Book to see who’d called and who hadn’t been called, and he made phone calls. So it was incredibly shocking that he passed away that night, because I thought for sure he would hang on through this party.

  PAT RYAN There was a wonderful irony to the last night I saw George, which was at a dinner party we gave at our apartment. Everybody else went home, exhausted. George stayed and stayed. Suddenly there was this noise outside—we live facing the Statue of Liberty—and George says, “I think that’s fireworks.” And we went out on the balcony and watched. It must have been mid-night.

  DONALD HALL George called me from New York the night he died—I think it was about five-thirty. We talked on the phone sometimes. Often he wanted me to advise him on a new poetry editor or on something that was coming up on the magazine. My name is still on that masthead, after all those years, and he did occasionally consult me. This time he wanted me to go to the fiftieth anniversary party, and of course I was the first call to get to. I should have been there. I just couldn’t bear it. Physically, it cost me too much. So I said, “Oh no, I won’t do that. I like it up here.” He tried to persuade me, but not terribly hard. He was not a guilt maker. We talked away. It was a typical conversation in that I felt good afterwards. It was pleasant, even though I was saying sno.

  DENTON COX He died in his sleep from a catecholamine surge, resulting in sudden cardiac arrest. I don’t know whether we could have found something that would have prevented the episode. What you must know about George’s health is that he had an enormous burden of vascular disease—his arteries were heavily laden with plaque from cholesterol, which were monitored yearly. Though he quit smoking when he first came under my care—till then, he had been smoking for twenty years or so—his diet was quite poor. And his blood pressure was terribly high—a problem that went on for years. . . . Just understand that the ever vigorous George, who we saw zipping around on his bike and sparring with champions, had a great deal of physical vulnerability. In any case, there are fifty thousand deaths in the United States every year, between four and eight a.m., from sudden cardiac arrest following a catecholamine surge—in people who don’t even have heart disease. It’s not entirely understood why the surge happens. Perhaps it goes back to our early ancestors, who needed to wake up alert and ready. At any rate, the body puts out a great deal of adrenaline, the heartbeat becomes irregular and then stops. For George it was an ideal way to go.

  ROY BLOUNT The only unlikely thing he did, the only thing that seemed out of character, was dying. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing he would do.

  Paper Lion reunion, September 2003. © Tom Albert Photo.

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON Thursday had been a pretty typical day. The fiftieth-anniversary issue was put to bed a few nights before. I had a terrible cold and had gone to bed at about five in the afternoon. I remember George coming into the bedroom saying, “Laurance Rockefeller’s downstairs, why don’t you come down and say hello?” I had to beg off. They went out to dinner at Petaluma, which is just up the street, and he came home a few hours later. The next morning I woke up just before seven. George slept like a stone when he took sleeping pills, so I always had to check and see if he was breathing. That morning, I leaned over to wake him and he didn’t move. I looked at his face and knew he was gone. I had sensed for some time he was dying and I would panic when I had trouble rousing him in the mornings. So this time, I thought, “Oh, you’ve finally done it.” I just held him. Olivia and Laura were waking up and I told them to hurry up and get ready for school. Livvy just stood there, so I said, “Dad’s very sick and I want to call the doctor. You go on to school.” She started to cry saying, “He’s dead, isn’t he? I dreamed that he died.” The paramedics arrived a few minutes later. They started to try and resuscitate him. I was frantic because I knew he was gone and that would have been the la
st thing he wanted. The paramedics had set this activity in motion and I wanted it stopped. I begged them to stop. Finally they did. I sent them away and brushed his hair and sat with him for a while. He looked so beautiful. The girls were called back from school and I had them come in and sit with him. Laura picked up a toy Canada goose that George had given her for Christmas the year before. She sat it on his forehead and gave it a honk. George would have liked that. It was the sort of thing he would have done.

  THOMAS MOFFETT The week after he died, there was a family-only gathering upstairs. We assumed we weren’t going to be invited up, because it was for family, but at the last minute, Sarah came downstairs and sweetly and emotionally said, “Listen. You guys are family, and I want you to come up and join us.”

  EPILOGUE:

  BLESSED GEORGE,

  WHO COULD BLESS

  ____

  FAYETTE HICKOX Odd people would come to George’s parties, like one friend of his who is utterly malign—whatever’s the opposite of benign. I remember that he came to one of George’s birthday parties and slipped into George’s own office, took the Social Register, and carefully cut out the page with George’s name on it and then handed the volume to him, without that page, as a present. Pretty surreal. He’s writing a book about George himself, he told me. He said, “I’m critical of George. I don’t say nice things about George; but no one ever did me more favors.”