She was the daughter of writers Willard R. Espy[39] and Hilda S. Cole, who had, earlier in her career, been a publicity agent for Kate Smith and Fred Waring. [citation needed], Plimpton's studies at Harvard were interrupted by military service from 1945 to 1948, during which time he served in Italy as an Army tank driver. He once said that, in writing Paper Lion, he wanted to reveal the "humor and grace" of football. Get a life. Plimpton was an omnipresence for much of American cultural lifeboth high and lowin the last third of the 20th century. George Plimpton (1927-2003) was a journalist and the first editor-in-chief of The Paris Review. And the many candidates for the crown of Last American to Speak This Way. George Plimpton | The New Yorker The s. Plimpton was a writer-raconteur and dilettante in the best sense of the word: He co-founded an important literary magazine, the Paris Review, and tried his hand at everything from quarterbacking for the Detroit Lions (which he wrote about in Paper Lion), boxing with light-heavyweight champ Archie Moore (which became Shadow Box), and becoming New Yorks unofficial official fireworks commissioner. His exploits were such that at one point, The New Yorker ran a cartoon in which a patient eyed a surgeon with misgiving and said, But how do I know youre not George Plimpton?, But perhaps foremost among his accomplishments was his elevation of the interview to a literary form, both in the Paris Review and in his two superb works of oral history, Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career, and Edie, a biography of Edie Sedgwick, which he and Jean Stein compiled. Oh, I suppose we should all just lavish praise upon Carnac the Magnificent now for bringing this to your attention, is that it? There was love thereactually, his inability to express it sometimes made him positively brim with itbut speak the words, his voice could not. I can understand your frustration, but celebrities die every day. Consider his duties as host of Mousterpiece Theatre (my first intro to my father as celebrity), a childrens TV show in which he debated the adventures and psyches of Donald Duck and Goofy in that marvelously serious voice: Is Donald Duck really a strident existentialist and a hero? How wonderfulwhat fun!to have a constant reminder emerging from your lips that life was absurd, and identity, too; all of it a great game to be played at, enjoyed. Aldas version was always angry or consternated, like a character in a Woody Allen film, while my dad, though he certainly faced hurdles as an amateur in the world of the professional, bore his humiliations with a comic lightness and charmmuch of which emanated from that befuddled, self-deprecating professors voice. [26] He also appeared in an episode of the NBC sitcom Wings. expelled from the very expensive, very WASP-y Philips Just when Jim and I thought we had finished, and we had been working a long time, George, who loved the result of our efforts, decided he wanted to talk to me as well. The Dudleys established the 36-acre (15ha) Highstead Arboretum in Redding, Connecticut. He was so open to life and all its new and unexpected situations. Of course, my dad had tried out for the role of himself and not gotten it, though he would go on to have a steady film career playing one version or another of a striking white-haired figure with a distinguished, chivalrous voice in bit roles in some twenty or so movies, including Reds and Good Will Hunting. Fortunately, in the upcoming film Plimpton! George Plimpton. An Evening With George Plimpton - 2000 - YouTube George Plimpton | Military Wiki | Fandom Ill pick you up., I had a hard time sleeping that night, as you might imagine. Between 2000 and 2003, Plimpton wrote the libretto to a new opera, Animal Tales, commissioned by Family Opera Initiative, with music by Kitty Brazelton directed by Grethe Barrett Holby. There was intellectual heft in the Plimpton genes too: one Ames was a Professor of Botany, another was Governor of Massachusetts, another relation was a publisher, and yet another a writer-philanthropist fascinated with the subject of how the great figures of the past were educated Young Georges educational path was precisely that of a He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review. Would you admit to there being symbolism in your novels? Oh now, Im joking, Carnac ( see? How widespread, numerically and geographically? Hear Stories By George Plimpton. Was this sheer affectation? George A. Plimpton Papers, 1634-1956 | Rare Book & Manuscript Library He was one of her original supporters and had published an article about her work in The Paris Review. With 'Paper Lion,' George Plimpton Played Pro Football So We Didn't Have To George had three siblings: Francis Taylor Pearsons Plimpton Jr., Oakes Ames Plimpton,[15] and Sarah Gay Plimpton. All rights reserved. The 16th at Cypress Point is one of the famous golf holes of the world, certainly one of the most difficult and demanding par 3's. Future Poet Laureate Donald Hall, who had met Plimpton at Exeter, was Poetry Editor. If you say, I parked my car in Harvard Yard, you are being rhotic. After running the pilot, Rod Serling realized the narration needed a less pompous sounding and more natural voice himself. Paul McCartney and his then-girlfriend Heather showed up. **. The Writers won the game with a home run in extra innings, but the highlight was Plimptons hit. For instance: Mid-Atlantic English was the dominant dialect among the Northeastern American upper class through the first half of the 20th century. George Plimpton boxed with Archie Moore, played quarterback for the Detroit Lions, and played percussion for the New York Philharmonic. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review, as well as his patrician demeanor and accent. He's a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. She was also the great-granddaughter on her father's side of Oakes Ames (18041873), an industrialist and congressman who was implicated in the Crdit Mobilier railroad scandal of 1872; and Governor-General of New Orleans Benjamin Franklin Butler, an American lawyer and politician who represented Massachusetts in the United States House of Representatives and later served as the 33rd Governor of Massachusetts. Plimpton was married twice. Plimpton entered Harvard as a member of the Class of 1948, but did not graduate until 1950 due to intervening military service. The risky pleasures of Plimpton's classic of participatory sportswriting, Paper Lion. In finally hearing the great storyteller tell the one story he would not tell, I could hear, too, his long, reverent silence on the subjectand it reveals his integrity as a journalist, and as a man. He loved the ones that made a lot of noise and racket and excitement. Back to Plimpton I dont remember the LL affect at all. **Your transparent jealousy is very unbecoming, Carnac. He was previously married to Sara Whitehead Dudley and Freddy Medora Espy. Among other challenges for Sports Illustrated, he attempted to play top-level bridge, and spent some time as a high-wire circus performer. By George Plimpton. If you are in the big league, God help us all. Plimpton would not boast of his feat, so we did. Even in the UK we sometimes subtitle various Scots dialects on the news and TV and whatnot, so it makes sense that he wouldn't go full Dundee for the show. Your transparent jealousy is very unbecoming, Carnac. No, my fathers voice was not an act, something chosen or practiced in front of mirrors: he came from a different world, where people talked differently, and about different things; where certain things were discussed, and certain things were notand his voice simply reflected this. These interviews are a collaborative effort, and, I believe, a fascinating contribution to literary history. I mean, if George Plimpton wasnt my father and Id never met him, and I heard that voice emerge from his lips and matched it with his severe Roman features and his usual blue blazer, oxford shirt, and tie, I might have assumed that he was a little pompous or snooty or affected. Shootout at Rio Lobo", "The Smaller the Ball, the Better the Book: A Game Theory of Literature", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_Plimpton&oldid=1137974740, This page was last edited on 7 February 2023, at 10:19. Documentary Shows George Plimpton's Best Story Was His Own : NPR - NPR.org He wanted to play his own part, but they wouldnt let him. So we got together and, after some preliminaries, he popped the question that he was really there to ask. Where are you?, Im at dinner with my wife, I said. Why couldnt we have a good time, too? Ive rarely heard this accent in real life but its often used by actors doing a stereotype character based on other actors impersonations! **Mid-Atlantic. An Oral History of George Plimpton: The Man Does Everything - Observer How do I know you're not George Plimpton? Mr . But for now, just one more category: 3) Changing technology, changing voices. George Plimpton Wiki: Salary, Married, Wedding, Spouse, Family . Few could give a toast or tell a story with equal humor. At one point, there was a tremendous Wagnerian thunder and lighting storm. What stood in our way? Off screen, George Plimpton and Gore Vidal come to mind. 08:37 Dinner at Elaine's. by George Plimpton. Plimpton was .the public face of the New York intellectual: tweedy, eclectic and with a plummy accent he himself described as "Eastern seaboard cosmopolitan." . Off screen, George Plimpton and Gore Vidal come to mind. Its our anniversary. He was equally at home on a bicycle or getting out of a limousine with a Saudi Arabian prince. Being, And Appreciating, George Plimpton : NPR Plimpton and Dudley were the parents of twin daughters Laura Dudley Plimpton and Olivia Hartley Plimpton. Volume 7, 2003-2005, pages 429-432. A similar phenomenon can be noted in the use, well into the 1980s, of the recorded sound of teletype machines in the background of newscasts, a sound still faintly evoked by the bip-bip-bip patterns of music that often introduces news broadcasts, even though teletype machines are long gone The subconscious association of this pattern of sound with news is fading fast with the passing of the years and will undoubtedly disappear entirely in the coming decade as surely as the over-enunciated style of radio speech of the 30s disappeared within a generation of its no longer being needed. "Hut-Two-Three . . Ugh" A writer proves to be a Paper Lion at QB rejoiced in the name of Euphemia van Renssalaer Wyatt. If you say, I pahked my cah in Hahvahd Yahd, like some vaudeville version of a Boston accent, you are non-rhotic. **. [30] Plimpton later wrote the book Fireworks, and hosted an A&E Home Video with the same name featuring his many fireworks adventures with the Gruccis of New York in Monte Carlo and for the 1983 Brooklyn Bridge Centennial. Bill Buckley, Gore Vidal, George Plimpton. George Plimpton was an upper-class guy with a patrician accent who partied his way through life . George Plimpton: Writer, Quarterback, Pitcher, Boxer, Triangle Player I havent heard that he is dead, but if so RIP George. 'Plimpton!' documentary looks at George Plimpton's lives Bill and I met in Rome, several months after the Paris Review was startedwe were, as they say, courtingand he drove me to Paris so George and Peter [Mathiessen] could look me over. He never went all the way, though his authenticity and newly-downstyle speaking could probably be marked in the crisis/triumph stages of his reporting: the death of JFK; the Vietnam report; the moon landing. Orson Welles notably spoke in a mid-Atlantic accent in the 1941 film Citizen Kane, as did many of his co-stars, such as Joseph Cotten. Timothy Seldes, George Plimptons literary agent:Whenever George wanted me to do something for him, he would call me up and say, Hello, Old Tim. One day, I got a call, and heard his voice, and my heart sank. I didnt know he was from the Larchmont area. But the average person never talked that way. [2], A November 6, 1971, cartoon in The New Yorker by Whitney Darrow Jr. shows a cleaning lady on her hands and knees scrubbing an office floor while saying to another one: "I'd like to see George Plimpton do this sometime." In his July 1936 obituary, the New York Times described George Arthur Plimpton (13 July 1855-1 July 1936) as an "internationally known publisher and collector, college trustee and philanthropist." As the materials in the George A. Plimpton Papers testify, those four areas of activity dominated Plimpton's public and private lives. George Plimpton, who has died aged 76, became a best-selling author by not only writing about sporting heroes but by participating in those sports as well. And he stood there ebullient and charming all night; he bid on many items himself. (Every now and then he also called me Sweet Prince, as in Goodnight, Sweet Prince.), Of course, my fathers voice was odd not just in what it said, but in what it couldnt. George Plimpton : Movies - CinemaOne He had it, as does/did William Buckley, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Julia Child. Buckley clearly flaunts it, probably to set himself apart from the hoi polloi of his contemporaries. (My dads been dead nearly ten years: not that he held many in his life, but what grudges could he possibly be holding on to now? He hosted Disney Channel's Mouseterpiece Theater (a Masterpiece Theatre spoof which featured Disney cartoon shorts). Whom is it spoken bymerely the elite, old-money types? [citation needed], In the movie Plimpton! I do believe his accent was decidedly Swamp Yankee. Speaking of which, didnt the young Jackie Kennedy have something of this, along with a kinda dreamy, airy, Monroe-esque (though many degrees less contrived) essence to it? George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. A graduate of Harvard University and King's College, Cambridge, Plimpton was recruited to Paris by Peter Matthiessen in 1952 and signed on to the project shortly thereafter. Paper Lion: Confessions of a Last-String Quarterback As such, it was popular in the theatre and other forms of elite culture in that region. In early 1959, George Plimpton was preparing to watch an execution in Cuba. A friend of the New England Sedgwick family, Plimpton edited Edie: An American Biography with Jean Stein in 1982. Are you saying that the denizens of Larchmont sound like Plimpton did? He watched the first pitch sail high for a ball, and then hit a rope into left field. What fine manners he had! And George had written it straight. Its a shot from a YouTube video that itself is a fascinating time-capsule portrait of language change. **Oh, I suppose we should all just lavish praise upon Carnac the Magnificent now for bringing this to your attention, is that it? (Did Eisenhower speak the newsreel style? The wife is also old money, as Phlosphr mentions, and she talks exactly the same way. We made $15,000-20,000. Eerily enough, one of the messages on my answering machine was from George, with that distinctive accent of his: Hallo, its George Plimpton. With the evolution of talkies in the late 1920s, voice was first heard in motion pictures. But he could easily have said, Alice, I have enough trouble raising money for my magazine.. He wrote, "I suppose in a mild way there is a lesson to be learned for the young, or the young at heart the gumption to get out and try one's wings". I had George tell him the story of Sidd Finch. The name George Plimpton is synonymous with a kind of all-in participatory journalism. These events were recalled in his best-known book Paper Lion, which was later adapted into the 1968 feature film starring Alan Alda. NEW YORK -- George Plimpton, the self-deprecating author of "Paper Lion" and other sporting adventures and a patron to Philip Roth, Jack Kerouac and countless other writers, has died. George Plimpton | Sport | The Guardian Exeter Academy after an incident involving a Here are five things you may not have known about him. Self-help author and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson has a unique accent that, . The enormously popular speech styles of Brando and Dean (and I could add Elvis Presley) clearly pushed vernacular style into a kind of mainstream acceptability, then desirability. Mia had the perfect model! His experience was captured in the book Out of My League. The conservative thinker may have shared an accent with some other men of the same age and social class, but his mannerisms and gestures made him entirely uniqueand occasionally prone to. Everything he did was like this, just a bit odd. The Scout Is a Lonely Hunter. The clipped English of George Plimpton and William F. Buckley, Jr. were vestigial examples.. Peter even came with us on our honeymoon in Ravello, though George didnt. The primary reason [for the accent] was primitive microphone technology: "natural" voices simply did not get picked up well by the microphones of the time, and people were instructed to and learned to speak in such a way that their words could be best transmitted through the microphone to the radio waves or to recording media. George Plimpton - Wikipedia April Fool's Day: Throwback to the time George Plimpton fooled the Old money, would never say the word spanky, and certainly had more money than God could count. You should be very grateful. At least, not to me, nor even to my sister, a fact she mentions in the movie. Typical of George to laugh about something others saw as a defining traithe never took himself all that seriously. George Plimpton: what kind of accent? - Straight Dope Message Board Gay Talese, author:As a young man not long out of university, at 26, 27 years of age, George Plimpton went with his friends to Paris to be benighted in the tradition of Paris culture. You can. . [41] She is the daughter of James Chittenden Dudley,[42] a managing partner of Manhattan-based investment firm Dudley and Company, and geologist Elisabeth Claypool. Ad Choices. After it was published, all of the baseball people were trying to get in touch with Sidd, but he didnt existit was an April Fools joke! She is the product of a line of the original Dutch settlers of New York and grew up in Tuxedo Park and the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan, very exclusive. Plimpton embedded with the Detroit Lions for their three week training camp, an adventure which culminated with him playing quarterback in their annual intra-team preseason scrimmage. He has the same type of patrician upper-class New Yorker accent as Jane Wyatt. Rose Styron, wife of William Styron and former Paris Review editor:My husband Bill was with George when he started the Paris Review. He was a Wasp (both of his parents came from old New England families, and had ancestors on the Mayflower). That tension between what was in his heart and what his voice allowed him to express is the basic tension of language we all face, only heightened. That was when Westbrook van Voorhis, the famous March of Time voice, did the intro narration of the pilot episode of The Twilight Zone. Peter Matthiessen took the magazine over from Humes and ousted him as editor, replacing him with Plimpton, using it as his cover for Matthiessen's CIA activities. Shed wandered out to the balcony of a lonely Manhattan cocktail party, and was standing out there, smoking a cigarette and looking down mournfully at the street far below, when from behind her she heard a voice: I know a better way down.. George Plimpton Biography - life, family, children, wife, school, son On Sept. 26, George Plimpton died in his sleep, at the age of 76. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. [21] The prank was so successful that many readers believed the story, and the ensuing popularity of the joke resulted in Plimpton's writing an entire book on Finch. And I felt such love for my sweet old excited dad at that moment that I thought I would do him the favor of not telling him so, of leaving it unsaid. Premiring on June 21st at the SilverDocs festival, in Washington, D.C., and directed by Tom Bean and Luke Poling, the film contains interviews with notable friends and peers like Hugh Hefner, Peter Matthiessen, and James Lipton, though the majority of this remarkable account is narrated by none other than George Plimpton. December 17, 2022 Rafael Garca. After returning to New York from Paris, he routinely launched fireworks at his evening parties. He could have done whatever he wanted. To me, Mid-Atlantic English is the nom juste for a related but distinct phenomenon (which is also mentioned in Wikipedia). And later I woke upat 6 a.m. Later I called up George, I said, What happened?, I thought it over, he said, and I took mercy on you. And they founded this thing called the Paris Review and published poetry and short story writers and did interviews. [citation needed], Outside the literary world, Plimpton was famous for competing in professional sporting events and then recording the experience from the point of view of an amateur. They spoke in this manner, and it seemed perfectly natural, evocative of a background spent among the gentry of the northeast. The Cuban revolutionaries, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, had just marched on Havana and ousted the US-supported dictator Fulgencio Batista. YESTERDAY IS NOT FAR AWAY. (A variation is the Locust Valley Lockjaw.). There youd be, talking with her on the phone, and shed say, Well, tell him I called, and youd say, O.K., Grandma, good to talk to you, I Grandma?. See below!) It is the kind of study . To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. It evoked a sense of Paris from a time when Paris was still the literary capital of the world, publishing literary giants who were considered obsceneHenry Miller, D.H. Lawrence. He was very understanding of what we did and how we did it. The Wikipedia entry is indeed delightful. H.V. When Plimpton, the co-founder of The Paris Review, died in 2003 at age 76, The New York Times . George Plimpton Dec 1, 2014 In which the venturous author, the rawest rookie pro football has ever known, recounts all the excruciating details of what happened when he called five plays as. During my fight, my nose got badly broken in the second round, but I did last all four scheduled rounds, though I lost. Hemingway on Fiction, Part Two. Think of the accent of Jane Hathaway on the Beverly Hillbillies. And he told everyone that night, and for many years after, that hed diverted me from a career of filling prescriptions. And bolstering this last point, a reader who grew up in Depression-era Chicago writes: All I can think of is that people were imitating FDR. George, Being George: George Plimpton's Life as Told, Admired, Deplored Did he have the celebrated Boston Brahmin accent, or was it a psuedo-Brit affectation? George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. Plimpton didnt die. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2007. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman.

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