That was when Westbrook van Voorhis, the famous March of Time voice, did the intro narration of the pilot episode of The Twilight Zone. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 September 25, 2003) was an American writer. So it went in late 1960 at one of George Plimpton's legendary soirees at 541 E. 72nd St., New York. He could as easily have been my grandfather as father. [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. 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. George Plimpton. **. That phony-baloney feigned British pronunciation thing. 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. 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. But it didnt define him, much the way he refused to be defined by the stiff, upper-crust world from which hed come. By George Plimpton. The clipped English of George Plimpton and William F. Buckley, Jr. were vestigial examples.. He thought Castro might come. Plimpton revisited pro football in 1971,[18] this time joining the defending Super Bowl champion Baltimore Colts and seeing action in an exhibition game against his previous team, the Lions. The Writers won the game with a home run in extra innings, but the highlight was Plimptons hit. And I, of course, was looking them over, too. The Paris Review was a testimony to his literary taste and his sense of glamour. Please educate me. (To read Part One, click here. That made him a great storyteller. In all my years, Ive never heard this accent in person. Daniel Kunitz, managing editor of the Paris Review from1995-2000: I once heard George joking with William F. Buckley on the phone about how they had the last affected accents in New York. The Cuban revolutionaries, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, had just marched on Havana and ousted the US-supported dictator Fulgencio Batista. Plimpton played Tom Hanks's antagonistic father in Volunteers. This was his habit. Was it him? **. 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". Ive always heard it referred to as a patrician accent. expelled from the very expensive, very WASP-y Philips Ive known him forsix months and I just now learned hes not English!. Hear Stories By George Plimpton. The clenched jaw tight-bite bit: the lockjaw dentiloquist. [26] He also appeared in an episode of the NBC sitcom Wings. His final interview appeared in The New York Sports Express of October 2, 2003 by journalist Dave Hollander. 3 people found this helpful . Peter Matthiesen, author, co-founder of the Paris Review:I was in Liberia, of all places, and George met me in Monrovia. [29], With Felix Grucci, Plimpton competed in the 16th International Fireworks Festival in 1979 in Monte Carlo. Would you like Mike to run for you, George? the coach asked. 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. [2] His first wife, whom he married in 1968[38] and divorced in 1988, was Freddy Medora Espy, a photographer's assistant. [32] When lit, the firework remained on the ground and exploded, blasting a crater 35 feet (11m) wide and 10 feet (3.0m) deep. We were bound to play the roles of father and son, unable to simply be ourselves. On Sept. 26, George Plimpton died in his sleep, at the age of 76. Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. Just in time for the Sixties, with all their other pressures towards some kind of anti-Eisenhower authenticity. He was so open to life and all its new and unexpected situations. We made $15,000-20,000. And he stood there ebullient and charming all night; he bid on many items himself. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review, as well as his patrician demeanor and accent. [Then] this August he showed up, pulled the shirt over his head, and said he was ready to bat. "[27], Plimpton was a member of the cast of the A&E TV series A Nero Wolfe Mystery (200102). Plimpton's most memorable writings involved him inserting himself into a daunting situation about which he knew . Sidd Finch was a fictional character George had created for a Sports Illustrated story, supposedly the greatest and fastest pitcher in the world. The picture at the top of this post is of the same Westbrook Van Voorhis who epitomized FDR-era announcer-speak but didnt fit the sensibility of the early-cool-cat-era Twilight Zone. He has the same type of patrician upper-class New Yorker accent as Jane Wyatt. . [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. 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 dad and I could not lose each other, but we could never quite find each other, either. $ 9.19 - $ 32.19. Bill Buckley, Gore Vidal, George Plimpton. Quite sad, as he just had a daughter not many years back. This kept his magazine fresh for 50 years. Plimpton was an omnipresence for much of American cultural lifeboth high and lowin the last third of the 20th century. Even the manliest actors, such as Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable sometimes slipped into this voice-coach mode. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review. I received many notes like this one: The variety of English you are referring to has a name in linguistics: "Mid-Atlantic English". Hows your mom? hed always ask me. So, pairing the Cagney hint with the Kennedy Inaugural, could we date the changeover to 1961? . Greetings From the Vortex of Unpredictability, Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. Its a shot from a YouTube video that itself is a fascinating time-capsule portrait of language change. And the many candidates for the crown of Last American to Speak This Way. Harvard (where he edited the Lampoon), Kings College, [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. He was a great addition to the human race. He had been in the war, if briefly (stationed in Italy towards the end of it, hed missed action, but met the Pope, an early sign of the great good fortuneone of his favorite phrasesthat marked his life). Interesting that the two competitors for his anchor chair were both fully vernacular speakers from the South and West: Mudd and Rather. By George Plimpton. rejoiced in the name of Euphemia van Renssalaer Wyatt. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. He was stationed primarily in Italy, where he worked as a tank driver. Vault. Its strange to think, but he would have been eighty-five this year: fourteen years older than my mom, fifty years older than me. 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. His experience was captured in the book Out of My League. Plimpton, along with former decathlete Rafer Johnson and American football star Rosey Grier, was credited with helping wrestle Sirhan Sirhan to the floor when Kennedy was assassinated following his victory in the 1968 California Democratic primary at the former Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California. 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. He rounded first as if he were about to go for a double, then glided back to the base, with fans waving and cheering. He modestly shrugged off the compliment, but his bright smile betrayed his pleasureand ours. George Plimpton. Here's a look inside the space, where the Paris Review editor hosted legendary parties. 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! #1 was Who Was the Last American to Speak This Way, #3 is Class-War Edition, and #4 is The Origin Story., Who Was the Last American to Speak This Way. (Newsreels ran in movie theaters, of course: what better critique of the high newsreel style than the new movies that jarred against it?). Plimpton sparred for three rounds with boxing greats Archie Moore and Sugar Ray Robinson while on assignment for Sports Illustrated. "I've decided to stay over here in . Plimpton died on September 25, 2003, in his New York City apartment from a heart attack later determined to have been caused by a catecholamine surge. His response was "no, just affected.". I dont give a rats ass about informing anyone about the death of Plimpton. Plimpton was an optimist, a teller of amusing and amazing stories. 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." It was always as if one were setting out with him on a special adventure. Plimpton was associated with the literary magazine in Paris, Merlin, which folded because the State Department withdrew its support.[why?] [47][48] Plimpton has grown. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. The title of the PBS documentary - "Plimpton! 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. 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. **Thats a common name for such an accent. The Curious Case Of Sidd Finch. 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. He was 76.. The young Paris Review editor and other New York literary figures arrived during a period marked by hope for a democratic Cuba. He once said that, in writing Paper Lion, he wanted to reveal the "humor and grace" of football. I think he came down [to the shooting of Paper Lion in] Florida once. He also served as editor of the Harvard Lampoon. Norman Mailer said that George Plimpton was the best-loved man in New York. LL is typified, I think, but an almost clenching of the teeth while talking, producing a mushy sound, if you will. If he couldnt be taken quite seriously, that was fine with him (he took himself lightly, and relished being in on the joke). The coach for the Writers team announced that Plimpton would pinch-hit for the first batter of the game, Daily News sports columnist Mike Lupica, and the crowd roared. Your transparent jealousy is very unbecoming, Carnac. There was love thereactually, his inability to express it sometimes made him positively brim with itbut speak the words, his voice could not. He came from a family where such endearments were not expressed, and phone conversations were curt. Starring George Plimpton as Himself" - is meant as a wink-wink to Plimpton's career as a "participatory journalist." As a writer for Sports . 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. Its a joke to say 500 of my closest friends, but that would have been true with George1,000 of his closest friends, actually. With such a useful explanation, why do I gripe about the name? He was immensely generous in every waygenerous about sharing the work and about giving one a chance to edit things. 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. But he came right down to our level. 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. I never thought that George slept. 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. But he would do this in the most charming and agreeable way. 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. In it Van Voorhis has the formal delivery that would have seemed familiar to many mid-century listeners but which in retrospect we know was on the way out. It came from a different era, shouldn't have still existed, but nevertheless, there it wasold New England, old New York, tinged with a hint of King's College King's English. [citation needed]. Brown & Co. Re-issued George Plimpton Sports Books, 2016. 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 . A lordly accent acquired at St. Bernard's and burnished later at Cambridge, in England, enhanced his distinguished aura, as did elevated stature and a silver head of hair which might have encouraged a career in politics but mercifully did not. 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? He knew we were just as good as he was, but in a different field. 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. I have a memory of George emerging out of the bush, with a terrible sunburn on his nose and face and legs; he was in safari gear, none of it hanging together very well, and over it all he was wearing a nice blue blazer. You're going to play for us-making some sort of big comeback." "That's right," Plimpton replied in his patrician accent. *Originally posted by Phlosphr * After returning to New York from Paris, he routinely launched fireworks at his evening parties. Plimpton was a writer-raconteur and dilettante in the best sense of the word: He co-founded an important literary magazine, the . To me, Mid-Atlantic English is the nom juste for a related but distinct phenomenon (which is also mentioned in Wikipedia). That was the last party for a while., I just got back from a road trip from Michigan. Those of us whose families are from Larchmont (that would be me) just call it lockjaw. Never heard of this decidedly imprecise term. If you are in the big league, God help us all. And they founded this thing called the Paris Review and published poetry and short story writers and did interviews. **. Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. 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. 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. Plimpton brought the Left Bank to NYCpeople like Peter Mathiessen, William Styron, Terry Southern. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. Firstly, then-managing director of SI, Mark Mulvoy, gave Plimpton the liberty to create a hoax.Secondly, SI photographer Lane Stewart recruited his friend, Joe Berton to play the part of Sidd Finch. George was not vainhe didnt care a whit about his image. When Plimpton, the co-founder of The Paris Review, died in 2003 at age 76, The New York Times . "[34] A feature in Mad titled "Some Really Dangerous Jobs for George Plimpton" spotlighted him trying to swim across Lake Erie, strolling through New York's Times Square in the middle of the night, and spending a week with Jerry Lewis. It was as if he was trying out again. Actually, thats not far off from how my mom felt when she first met him. He is connected by blood to Benjamin "Beast" Butler, a rakish pol who told Abraham Lincoln he would be his running mate "only if you die within three. As such, it was popular in the theatre and other forms of elite culture in that region. He wanted to play his own part, but they wouldnt let him. When he found a story to be short of the mark, he rejected it no matter who the author wasan old friend, a Pulitzer winner, an unknown. He could have been a fight trainer, a fight manager! Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2007. In early 1959, George Plimpton was preparing to watch an execution in Cuba. YESTERDAY IS NOT FAR AWAY. The opposing team: the Detroit Lions. He was "George Plimpton"-editor, host . Plimpton would not boast of his feat, so we did. Dan Rather certainly marks the definitive end of the newsreel style and the ascendance of the folksy vernacular: those rustic analogies! No one realized till the next day that this was the weather that created the extreme blue skies of Sept. 11a condition I since learned that pilots call severe clear. The next day, friends called and said, That was the last party. The fake English announcer voice lingered on sporadically until the end of the Johnson administration in newsreels, which themselves ceased production around the same time, but Rod Serlings decision sounded the death knell for that accent. I believe the accent was at one time known as Larchmont Lockjaw. The film used archival audio and video of Plimpton lecturing and reading to create a posthumous narration. On one website, I read about a Choate alumn saying one can still hear the LL (see above thread) accent on campus. So we got together and, after some preliminaries, he popped the question that he was really there to ask. Plimpton scowled, and said he was perfectly capable of running for himself. Description above from the Wikipedia article George Plimpton, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of . I always thought it sounded similar to the accent of William F. Buckley, Jr., who I believe was not reared in Boston. My dad could never say what he feltnot reallyand neither can any of us. I just knew it was going to be something terrible. I had George tell him the story of Sidd Finch. 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. Look out, Wilson! [3], He was the son of Francis T. P. Plimpton[4] and the grandson of Frances Taylor Pearsons and George Arthur Plimpton. [citation needed], In the movie Plimpton! The book offers memories of Plimpton from among other writers, such as Norman Mailer, William Styron, Gay Talese and Gore Vidal, and was written with the cooperation of both his ex-wife and his widow. Was it me? 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 watched the first pitch sail high for a ball, and then hit a rope into left field. For it was George Plimpton the writer, not the editor nor the celebrity, who was honored here . "He speaks with an oddly mannered accent, sounding as though on the verge of a stammer, polite, genteel, perhaps just a little Woosterish. Her mother, a writer and critic for Commonweal and Catholic World. [33] A later attempt, fired at Cape Canaveral, rose approximately 50 feet (15m) into the air and broke 700 windows in Titusville, Florida. That was how it was in New York in those days, George just dragged it out a bit longer." Dudley Plimpton suspects the excess contributed to Plimpton's death in his sleep in 2003, at the age of 76. I have decided, he said, that I have got to jump from a plane. I have worked as poetry editor with editors on other magazines; only with George has the experience been entirely agreeable. Tom Nowatzke, fullback, Detroit Lions (In the 1960s, Plimpton briefly played with the Detroit Lions asresearch for the best-selling book Paper Lion, which was later made into a film):I was the No. Manhattan DVD. 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. H.V. 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. George Plimpton. 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. [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. She was having lunch at P. J. Clarkes with the publisher Bennet Cerf and his son Chris, and my dad swooped over to the table (he was wearing a cape) and introduced himself in that ridiculously gallant voice: Bennet, Chris, what a pleasant surprise! He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review, as well as his patrician demeanor and accent. What exactly is a Boston Brahmin accent? Hed ask what was new in fireworks business and doodle around the facility with my dad, and he would always leave with a package of fireworks, to put on his own show. Return of the Big Bopper. It took the form of a statement: I dont know writers who write about sex better than you. I rose to the bait and answered saying, Thank you. Jonathan Ames, author:Back in the fall of 1999, in preparation for my one and only boxing match, I read George Plimptons great book, Shadow Box, where he recounted his foray into the world of boxing and his famous encounter with Archie Moore. Famed participatory journalist George Plimpton (1927-2003) was a writer, editor, amateur sportsman, actor, and friend to many. Over the years, we held a lot of dinner parties for him, and he brought a lot of people inmany, many writers. As Poling puts it, George was known as an unrivaled raconteur and, in making a film of his life story, it only seemed natural to allow him to tell it.. He had, for instance, a series of antiquated phrases and terms of affection.
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