I havent heard that he is dead, but if so RIP George. Between 1945 and 1948, Plimpton was a soldier in the United States Army. If you say, I parked my car in Harvard Yard, you are being rhotic. It was scary, because he was never mad, and to see this normally benevolent, white-haired figure of civility fill with pink steam, to hear this gentle man, who loved nothing more than to tell lighthearted stories and laugh, suddenly shout-whisper Dammit at some injustice on the other end of the telephone was unsettling. . George Plimpton gives an auction winner a star-studded walk through the legendary NYC eatery Elaine's. He was so open to life and all its new and unexpected situations. Here's a look inside the space, where the Paris Review editor hosted legendary parties. He got the personality totally wrong, too. Hows your mom? hed always ask me. And the answer may explain partly why it has gone out of fashion: Jonathan Harris, the actor who played Dr. Smith on the television show "Lost in Space.". silk-stockinged New Englander - private schools (he was That life couldnt contain him, hed burst its seams like it was an old coat two sizes too small. In 1955 or 56, he went back to New York. Vault. He had the bearing of Gen. MacArthur, but the soul of Charlie Chaplin. On one website, I read about a Choate alumn saying one can still hear the LL (see above thread) accent on campus. LL is typified, I think, but an almost clenching of the teeth while talking, producing a mushy sound, if you will. So, pairing the Cagney hint with the Kennedy Inaugural, could we date the changeover to 1961? We worked at the Paris Review on the Rue Garanere for several years together. At Harvard, Plimpton was a classmate and close personal friend of Robert F. Kennedy. Big, tall, good-looking guy, easy-going. [47][48] *Originally posted by cuauhtemoc * Among other challenges for Sports Illustrated, he attempted to play top-level bridge, and spent some time as a high-wire circus performer. As such, it was popular in the theatre and other forms of elite culture in that region. As a result, this American version of a posh accent has all but disappeared even among the American upper classes. The Paris Review was a testimony to his literary taste and his sense of glamour. Plimpton also appeared in a number of feature films as an extra and in cameo appearances. Plimpton would not boast of his feat, so we did. Paul McCartney and his then-girlfriend Heather showed up. But he could easily have said, Alice, I have enough trouble raising money for my magazine.. OK? Revolutionary musket, a stairwell and a housemaster), When I eventually went back to be an editor at Harpers, I arrived at his flat, not having been in New York for eight years. But he has never employed that voice professionally, and certainly does not speak that way in real life. Plimpton's most memorable writings involved him inserting himself into a daunting situation about which he knew . We were bound to play the roles of father and son, unable to simply be ourselves. He did these jobs, and many others, as an amateur.. The Writer's Chapbook A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice from the Twentieth Century's Preeminent Writers. *Originally posted by Phlosphr * 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. [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. [28], Plimpton was a demolitions expert in the post-World War II Army. He was also known for "participatory journalism," including accounts of his active involvement in professional sporting events, acting in a Western, performing a comedy act at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and playing with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra[1] and then recording the experience from the point of view of an amateur. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. [citation needed]. Yes he is gone. Here are five things you may not have known about him. Was this sheer affectation? Powered by Discourse, best viewed with JavaScript enabled. He was equally at home on a bicycle or getting out of a limousine with a Saudi Arabian prince. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. Plimpton didnt die. Somehow Georgehad gotten it into his head that I was on the verge of becoming a pharmacist before he had called me up a year earlier to tell me the Paris Review was publishing a story I had submittedperhaps because of the pharmacological bent of the subject matter. Plimpton was a writer-raconteur and dilettante in the best sense of the word: He co-founded an important literary magazine, the . 2) The Role of Broadway and Hollywood, and the Shift from Jimmy Cagney to Marlon Brando. Discussing the accent he used for Washington in an interview with The Onion AV Club, he explained: The accent back then was probably nothing like what we think of as a Southern accent now or a New England accent now, so we tried to find the root of the accents. . And the role of Katharine Hepburn, whose Locust Valley Lockjaw accent was a cousin of announcer-speak: I was just discussing this not a week ago with a friend who has done voice work in film and television, and can adopt this accent in an instant to evoke that period, much to my amusement. I remember getting the news: It was my wife Madeleines birthday, Aug. 7. Even the manliest actors, such as Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable sometimes slipped into this voice-coach mode. Ive lived in Boston for 30 years and have never heard a George Plimpton accent; so I guess it must be a Larchmont accent, *Originally posted by Carnac the Magnificent! $ 3.99 - $ 27.44. Charles McGrath, editor of the New York Times Book Review:I dont think George had played golf in years, but he used to save up oddball tips for me and others. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to these men speak. But Labov said that in post-World War II New York, fancier people started becoming rhotic, and recovering their Rs. After the technology improved the need to speak so histrionically went away, and so did "announcer English.". He was "George Plimpton"-editor, host . We were going to go looking for strange birds. He was not himself interested in poetry, but he read all of the poems every quarter, and he would tell me what he thought of them. . Felix Grucci Jr., of Fireworks by Grucci (Plimpton wrote about the Grucci family, widely held to be the first family of fireworks, in Fireworks: A History and Celebration):George had a very big passion for fireworks. He was smooth. They were born to Plimpton and his second wife, Sarah Dudley, 26 years younger than he, who is chairwoman of the East Harlem Tutorial Program, for which he was a trustee. Above all, he was a gentleman, one of the lasta figure so archaic, it could be easily mistaken for something else. He wanted to play his own part, but they wouldnt let him. Oh, I suppose we should all just lavish praise upon Carnac the Magnificent now for bringing this to your attention, is that it? Ken Auletta, author:Sometime after age 70, when his reflexes dulled, George took to the sidelines in the Artists and Writers softball game in Easthampton, N.Y. Each year his name was announced, and each year he was hailed by the crowd, who paid more attention to him than to the game. Just in time for the Sixties, with all their other pressures towards some kind of anti-Eisenhower authenticity. But he came right down to our level. Plimpton was .the public face of the New York intellectual: tweedy, eclectic and with a plummy accent he himself described as "Eastern seaboard cosmopolitan." . Nevertheless, its a strange thing that one of the great voices of modern storytelling had limitations, restrictions, words, and phrases it was incapable of uttering, matters it could not express: death, love, tragedy. "[27], Plimpton was a member of the cast of the A&E TV series A Nero Wolfe Mystery (200102). And here for the full interview). Its a joke to say 500 of my closest friends, but that would have been true with George1,000 of his closest friends, actually. [citation needed] Some of these events, such as his stint with the Colts, and an attempt at stand-up comedy, were presented on the ABC television network as a series of specials. The most recent was about how to extend the swing though impact, and the trick, George said, was to station an imaginary dwarf several feet in front of your ball and then (you have to re-create those broad Plimptonian vowels here) smack the dwarf in the ass. I dont know whether it works, because I cant think of it without laughing. [citation needed], In 1963, Plimpton attended preseason training with the Detroit Lions of the National Football League as a backup quarterback, and he ran a few plays in an intrasquad scrimmage. Hed done it in Amsterdam, Moscow, and London; hed done it at a PEN benefit; and now he and Norman were going to do it in Cuba. When I spoke to him my voice went up an octave and took on his formal tone and became careful and unnatural; his voice became like his fathersstern, authoritative, disciplinarianwhen his father was the last person in the universe he wanted to be. Almost twenty years ago, writing quirky sports pieces for the Village Voice, I decided to enter the world of championship arm wrestling.Like many young writers, I was inspired by the sports adventures of the gaunt but game George Plimpton, who had made a literary career out of placing himself in . George Plimpton, journalist extraordinaire, trains with and then performs as Quarterback for the Baltimore Colts. By strange coincidence, I actually became quite good friends with his (ex-)in-laws here in Manhattan. He was a Wasp (both of his parents came from old New England families, and had ancestors on the Mayflower). If you didnt know the man, you could, I think, be fooled by the voice. He rounded first as if he were about to go for a double, then glided back to the base, with fans waving and cheering. **Mid-Atlantic. "[44], In 2006, the musician Jonathan Coulton wrote the song entitled "A Talk with George", a part of his 'Thing a Week' series, in tribute to Plimpton's many adventures and approach to life. 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. He thought Castro might come. I dont give a rats ass about informing anyone about the death of Plimpton. See below!) But it didnt define him, much the way he refused to be defined by the stiff, upper-crust world from which hed come. Kaltenborn was a famous mid . Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. They spoke in this manner, and it seemed perfectly natural, evocative of a background spent among the gentry of the northeast.. A friend of the New England Sedgwick family, Plimpton edited Edie: An American Biography with Jean Stein in 1982. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Best-selling author George Plimpton shares his experience as a "Storyteller For Life" with Dean Nelson of Point Loma Nazarene University as part of PLNU's 5th Annual Writer's Symposium By The. But the gentleman amateur - a Harvard. At least, not to me, nor even to my sister, a fact she mentions in the movie. Even Orson Welles on occasion. Isnt that what they call it. 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. So we got together and, after some preliminaries, he popped the question that he was really there to ask. Id like to offer a speculation, for what its worth. Its our anniversary. For such admissions to escape my fathers lips, they always had to be a little removed somehow. Thurston Howell III had the Larchmont Lockjaw accent. Middle class? He died on September 26, 2003 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA. His final interview appeared in The New York Sports Express of October 2, 2003 by journalist Dave Hollander. Showdown in the Pits. [19] Another sports book, Open Net, saw him train as an ice hockey goalie with the Boston Bruins, even playing part of a National Hockey League preseason game. All the good guys have got to go. But for now, just one more category: 3) Changing technology, changing voices. Shadow Box. George Plimpton's duplex apartment on the Upper East Side hit the market for $5.495 million on April 18. Volume 7, 2003-2005, pages 429-432. Ive rarely heard this accent in real life but its often used by actors doing a stereotype character based on other actors impersonations! After running the pilot, Rod Serling realized the narration needed a less pompous sounding and more natural voice himself. Hearing the words Dammit, Im mad as a hornet! uttered in George Plimptons voice made anger sound totally ridiculous, which is exactly what it most often is. The Wikipedia entry is indeed delightful. It was so tiny that if you saw him in it, you couldnt believe hed be able to get himself out of it. My suspicion is that the shift might have begun in the switch away from the two paired styles in American movies, the classical acting of the British School and the rapid patter of popular American actors (Marx Brothers, Cagney, Powell and Loy, etc), and over to the Method Acting style of the Strasberg/Brando/Dean school. Mr. Plimpton was born in Manhattan in 1927 and raised in Huntington, L.I. On Sept. 26, George Plimpton died in his sleep, at the age of 76. Vault. I never thought that George slept. I just heard that George Plimpton has died. And you are going to come with me. expelled from the very expensive, very WASP-y Philips With the evolution of talkies in the late 1920s, voice was first heard in motion pictures. Im having a harder time coming up with clear examples from the other side of the Atlantic, but Ive heard Alfred Molina (Londoner), and Catherine Zeta-Jones (Welsh) put on a Mid-Atlantic accent from time to time.. My fathers voice was like one of those supposedly extinct deep-sea creatures that wash up on the shores of Argentina every now and then. Please educate me. Butch, he says, because he always called me Butch. Did he have the celebrated "Boston Brahmin" accent, or was it a psuedo-Brit affectation? Plimpton scowled, and said he was perfectly capable of running for himself. YESTERDAY IS NOT FAR AWAY. And he stood there ebullient and charming all night; he bid on many items himself. George Plimpton. **. Greetings From the Vortex of Unpredictability, Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. Ill pick you up., I had a hard time sleeping that night, as you might imagine. The first minute is a cameo by Henry Ford II, who speaks in an utterly flat Midwest rather than Mid-Atlantic accent that no one would call elegant but that would sound perfectly natural in 2015. Finally I did. How widespread, numerically and geographically? The title of the PBS documentary - "Plimpton! At one point, there was a tremendous Wagnerian thunder and lighting storm. Look out, Wilson! He was one of her original supporters and had published an article about her work in The Paris Review. I can understand your frustration, but celebrities die every day. I live in Connecticut which is both the richest and poorest state in the union - I think we still are - and we have our fair share of extremely rich folk who sit around all day in their large victorians wearing rockport loafers, no sox, khaki pants and a polo-shirt with the collar up. Her mother, a writer and critic for Commonweal and Catholic World. He appeared in the PBS American Masters documentary on Andy Warhol. 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. The Scout Is a Lonely Hunter. Just listen to very early recordings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, back even before microphones, when singers had to yell directly into a large cone and over-enunciate so that their voices would be recorded into something intelligible on a spinning wax cylinder or disk. Losing, he knew, always makes a better story than winning. To me, Mid-Atlantic English is the nom juste for a related but distinct phenomenon (which is also mentioned in Wikipedia). Its strange to think, but he would have been eighty-five this year: fourteen years older than my mom, fifty years older than me. The limited frequency response of the recording technology of the late 19th and early 20th centuries has left us with only a pale, and sometimes caricatural image of the original sound. Bill, who was from the South, kept saying to me, Can you believe Georges not English? In another cartoon in The New Yorker, a patient looks up at the masked surgeon about to operate on him and asks, "Wait a minute! One night Joe DiMaggio was here, and they had never met, so I introduced them. Plimpton played quarterback for the Detroit Lions and triangle for the New York Philharmonic, an. ), this isnt some kind of morbid contest to see who can be the first to inform the board of some celebritys death. Oh now, Im joking, Carnac ( see? Since all we have are recordings of those long-vanished voices, we do not and cannot know whether people spoke "this way" when they were not being recorded, although I would be willing to wager that they did not. She would not even say goodbye. He also appeared in a featurette about Edie Sedgwick found on the Ciao! 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. For his grandfather, the publisher and philanthropist, see, Calvin Gay Plimpton and Priscilla G. Lewis were the parents of, He was widely reviled for years after the war by Southern whites, who gave him the nickname "Beast Butler." In the early 60s, when I was working at the firework plant with my dad [Felix Grucci], George would pull up in shiny red sports car on his way to the Hamptons. Actually, thats not far off from how my mom felt when she first met him. When George Plimpton Met the Best Bartender in Brooklyn Two New York Legends Collide By Tim Sultan February 26, 2016 The only other person that I had known who possessed a similar charisma to Sunny Balzano's was my first employer in New York: George Plimpton. George Plimpton writer, publisher, amateur lion tamer died in 2003 after 50 years as the founding editor of The Paris Review. 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. Of the Murrow Boys, Eric Sevareid held on to the newsreel style the longest; relying on memory, Im betting that we could actually watch the transition away from that to a more vernacular style in the long career of Walter Cronkite. Look out, Wilson! He has the same type of patrician upper-class New Yorker accent as Jane Wyatt. Final Twist of the Drama. I can understand your frustration, but celebrities die every day. His friendships testified to what an eclectic man he was. [2][43], An oral biography titled George, Being George was edited by Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., and released on October 21, 2008. George Plimpton was a literary man about town who did it all, from co-founding The Paris . Wed gone to dinner and the maitre d comes over and says, Felix, I got a call for you from Monaco., I pick up the phone, and I hear Georges Bostonian accent. I just heard that George Plimpton has died. He could as easily have been my grandfather as father. They all sound just like George. 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. Off screen, George Plimpton and Gore Vidal come to mind. **. The Sidd Finch story was accompanied by a series of photos which managed to convince even the eagle-eyed fans . I didnt know he was from the Larchmont area. They were divorced, and had been for a while, but they still talked, and visited every now and then, and they would sit on my moms porch on Long Island and look out over the pond at the birds and tell each other stories and laugh until the tears came to their eyes, but he could not ask her this directlyHow are you, Freddy? He had lost my mom, at least in part because he had been unable to communicate with her, to show his love. Ever. It came from a different era, shouldnt have still existed, but nevertheless, there it wasold New England, old New York, tinged with a hint of Kings College Kings English. Get a life. George Plimpton, the New York aristocrat and literary journalist whose career was a happy lifelong competition between scholarly pursuits and madcap attempts -- chronicled in self-deprecating. He also appeared in the 1996 documentary When We Were Kings about the "Rumble in the Jungle" 1974 Ali-Foreman Championship fight opposite Norman Mailer crediting Muhammad Ali as a poet who composed the world's shortest poem: "Me? George Plimpton was a literary man about town who did it all, from co-founding The Paris Review to boxing (and dribbling and quarterbacking) with the pros. (And, OK, Im not a linguist, but Im married to one!) In no way do I recall Plimpton talking in a way that is typically associated with LLa style which, as I understand it, is associated with unclear pronunciation of most consonant cluster. Plimpton had a quasi-Brit patrician accent, which in no way corresponds with the official descriptions of LL that Ive read on the Net. He called his computer the machine. At dinner, when offered seconds, he would often decline by saying, Thank you, no, Ive had a gracious plenty. He called my mom Puss (this was also the name of our fat, raccoon-striped cat, though he was Mr. Kennedy died the next day at Good Samaritan Hospital. [29], His enthusiasm for fireworks grew, and he was appointed Fireworks Commissioner of New York by Mayor John Lindsay,[29][30] an unofficial post he held until his death. Never heard of this decidedly imprecise term. The Wikipedia entry for it is quite detailed. He majored in English. You can. The funny thing about Harris was that he did not start out with that accent - as I suspect George Gershwin did not. And they founded this thing called the Paris Review and published poetry and short story writers and did interviews. 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. 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. 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. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd's deciding about yogaand his future in baseball. 1. The list of authors interviewed is extraordinary, and stretches from Hemingway years ago to Amy Hempel (in the 50th anniversary issue that has just been published). George Plimpton, Out of My League: The Classic Account of an Amateur's Ordeal in Professional Baseball, 2016, Little If he couldnt be taken quite seriously, that was fine with him (he took himself lightly, and relished being in on the joke). But dying in sleep: It was as if he was doing what he did when he tried out for all those other things as an amateurballooning, acting, boxing, performing at amateur night. Plimpton was married twice. He had a small role in the Oscar-winning film Good Will Hunting,[22] playing a psychologist. [31][32][33] His firework, a Roman candle named "Fat Man",[31][32][33] weighed 720 pounds (330kg)[31] and was expected to rise to 1,000 feet (300m)[33] or more[31] and deliver a wide starburst. But the average person never talked that way. [citation needed]. Plimpton, George 1927-2003(George Ames Plimpton) Source for information on Plimpton, George 1927-2003: Concise Major 21st Century Writers dictionary.