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George
Plimpton died in his sleep last Thursday night here
in Manhattan. He was seventy-six years old. Although I met
him many times and even interviewed him once for a cable television
program, I really didn’t know him other than as a passing
figure in the New York cavalcade.
He was one of the great literary men of his age which was the last
half of the 20th Century, not so much for his writing (which was
fairly prolific) but especially for his lifelong work as editor of
the Paris Review.
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George
Plimpton and Sara Whitehead Dudley at the PEN Literary
Gala at The Pierre. April, 2003.
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He also cut
a wide swath on the New York scene, most welcome in the most exclusive
(and/or expensive) drawing rooms and dining rooms. He was also
a habitue of those places where the nighttime crowds congregate – discos,
nightclubs, concert halls, restaurants; uptown, downtown, all around
the town.
He gained fame as America’s most prominent amateur
who wrote about his experiences as an athlete, musician,
and/or actor who played with the pros and lived to write
about it. He was always industrious and enterprising
with his projects literary and cultural, but to this
observer, he just always seemed to be having a good time
taking it all in.
I often saw him at parties – cocktails, book parties, fund-raisers.
He was very generous with his presence in supporting friends and
causes. Tall and lanky, he often looked just a little bit disheveled
like a professor at the end of his day. In the past few years it
was interesting to see the longtime craggy yet boyish looks take
on advancing age because despite the changes wrought by time, he
never lost his youthful aura. George was essentially age-less.
His ancient mid-Atlantic accent was a reference to his Edwardian
antecedents, including an early mentor, the late sportsman and bridge
champion Harold Vanderbilt. He was born into old Massachusetts stock
which traced its origins back to the Mayflower, a connection
without peer in that world. He also came from great, old New England
wealth (the Ames family) on his mother’s side. Unlike most
people of his generation and crusty background, he was able to navigate
comfortably down many roads, high and low, and count among his friends
people from all walks of life.
It was a charmed life, no matter how you slice it. Intelligent, creative,
full of bonhomie and camaraderie, and loaded with privilege unfamiliar
to most of us. His celebrity, however, was not accidental but the
result of a curious and perspicacious mind. He had the ability to
learn from his experiences in the arena, and brought from them a
shrewdness about conducting himself publicly. People will remember
him as they knew him in life, a man who lived out his days to the
fullest, always acquiring knowledge while reveling in whatever took
his fancy.
Although he never attained great stardom or great wealth or highly
lauded distinguished achievement, there were probably few with those
attributes who were not in awe of his joie de vivre and
the freedom with which it graced him.
The following is from the Telegraph in London. |
George
Plimpton, who died on Thursday aged 76, was a
journalist and writer who became a celebrity for participating
in his own stories; thus he boxed with a light heavyweight
champion, performed with an eminent orchestra, joined a professional
American football team and flew with trapeze artists in a circus.
These and other escapades made him one of the most famous men in
America. Yet Plimpton was essentially a man of letters, and the real
love of his life was the Paris Review, a quarterly literary magazine
which he co-founded in 1953.
The magazine has a circulation of some 12,000, and has never made
a profit. But it enjoys a formidable reputation as a journal willing
to publish serious literary work: poetry, short stories and novellas,
and in-depth interviews with well-known authors. Over the years Plimpton
published names such as Beckett, Kerouac, Henry Miller and Philip
Roth. The list of interviewees, meanwhile, is equally impressive.
These have included such figures as E M Forster, Faulkner, Nabokov,
Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch and A S
Byatt. Often the Paris Review is the only publication to which such
writers are prepared to entrust their thoughts, valuing its integrity
and its serious purpose. Scholars teaching English or American literature
are known to direct their students towards the anthologies of the
interviews which have appeared in the journal.
Plimpton also featured unknown writers whom he thought had talent,
and is said to have ploughed his way through some 20,000 unsolicited
manuscripts each year. He was, for example, the first to publish
Jay McInerney, printing a chapter of his Bright Lights, Big City.
George Plimpton edited the Paris Review from an office below his
flat overlooking the East River in Manhattan; in the office there
was a chair nailed to the ceiling, a souvenir of his time attempting
to become a lion tamer.
George Ames Plimpton, the son of a lawyer and diplomat, was born
in New York on March 18 1927 and educated at the Phillips Exeter
Academy, New Hampshire, and Harvard, where he read English. He then
spent three years in the US Army, before coming to Britain to study
at King's College, Cambridge.
In 1952 he went to Paris where, with two friends, he launched Paris
Review before returning to America in the mid-1950s. What brought
Plimpton to public attention, however, was his idea of assuming the
role of the admiring amateur taking on the seasoned professional
sportsman at his own game. This was a good enough idea in itself,
but had the serious purpose of revealing things which could not be
perceived by a mere observer.
One of Plimpton's chosen arenas was boxing. In 1959 he took on the
light heavyweight champion Archie Moore, lasting three rounds, during
which he suffered no more than a broken nose. Plimpton next turned
his attention to tennis, at which Pancho Gonzalez beat him 6-0. Plimpton
also arranged to pitch to eight star batters in the American baseball
leagues. Naturally, he was hit all over the park, and his ensuing
book, Out of My League (1961) was described by Hemingway as "beautifully
observed . . . this account of a self-imposed ordeal has the chilling
quality of a self-imposed nightmare".
Although he had not played American football since his college days,
in 1963 Plimpton decided to join a professional football team. Accepted
by the Detroit Lions, he failed to persuade Lloyd's of London to
grant him insurance. When he made his debut as a quarterback in an
exhibition match, he lost 29 yards in five plays.
His book Paper Lion (1966) told the story of these experiences, and
was hailed by one reviewer as "possibly the most arresting and
delightful narrative in all of sports literature". The film
rights to the book were bought for $50,000. When the picture came
out in 1968, Alan Alda was in the starring role, with Plimpton playing
Bill Ford, the owner of the Detroit Lions. (He had already had a
walk-on part in Lawrence of Arabia, and later appeared in cameo roles
in films such as Rio Lobo, alongside John Wayne, Reds and Good Will
Hunting, as well as in the television drama series ER).
Plimpton also tried his hand at golf, participating as an amateur
in three tournaments on America's West Coast. The results were recorded
in his book The Bogey Man (1968).
Sport was not the only arena to attract him. He enrolled with the
New York Philharmonic as a percussionist, learning to play the triangle,
bells, bass drum and gong, and featured in a performance of Mahler's
Symphony No 4 in Montreal. Plimpton admitted: "I utterly destroyed
[the symphony] by not watching the beat." He went on to perform
as a trapeze artist in a circus, and to lose at chess against Garry
Kasparov.
A Democrat in his politics, Plimpton was a friend of the Kennedys
(JFK admired his abilities as a conversationalist), and helped Robert
Kennedy in his bid for the presidential nomination in 1968 - he was
present at the senator's assassination in Los Angeles, and wrestled
the pistol out of Sirhan Sirhan's hand.
Plimpton stood 6 ft 4 ins tall and was a man of old-world charm who,
in his younger days, was frequently seen in the company of beautiful
women such as Ava Gardner, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Lee Radziwill.
He wrote or edited more than 50 books, was a distinguished ornithologist,
a keen yachtsman and a real tennis enthusiast.
He was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur. In 2002
he was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 1968 George Plimpton married Freddy Medora Espy, a photographer's
assistant. They divorced in 1988, and he later married Sara Whitehead
Dudley. He had four children. |
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