Norman Mailer, author:George had a rare gift. He was 76. He plays the 'fancy pants' to our outhouse Americana," Flaherty asserted. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. He watched the first pitch sail high for a ball, and then hit a rope into left field. Plimpton[2] was born in New York City on March 18, 1927, and spent his childhood there, attending St. Bernard's School and growing up in an apartment duplex on Manhattan's Upper East Side located at 1165 Fifth Avenue. Anyhow, I asked Terry Gross from Fresh Air and George Plimpton to be auctioneers. Plimpton would not boast of his feat, so we did. May a diseased yak squat in your hot tub. The Mid-Atlantic accent, or Transatlantic accent, is a . Book excerpt - George Plimpton on why Hole 16 at Cypress Point is one Hed have that and a scotch on the rocks, his favorite drink. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. Paper Lion: Confessions of a Last-String Quarterback 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." Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review. This book is the party that was George's life-and it's a big one-attended by scores of famous people, as well as. On one website, I read about a Choate alumn saying one can still hear the LL (see above thread) accent on campus. [33] A later attempt, fired at Cape Canaveral, rose approximately 50 feet (15m) into the air and broke 700 windows in Titusville, Florida. George Plimpton, journalist extraordinaire, trains with and then performs as Quarterback for the Baltimore Colts. Plimpton was a writer-raconteur and dilettante in the best sense of the word: He co-founded an important literary magazine, the . If you listen to Grossman (who is originally from Boston) starting about 15 seconds into the clip below, youll see that he uses a split-the-difference UK/US hybrid that is literally mid-Atlantic, in the sense of combining accents from both countries, but is different from the newsreel announcer voice: You should talk to William Labov [JF: I will try] , pioneering sociolinguist, whose landmark study into New York City speech led him to ask the same question you have. 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. Queen Elizabeth doesnt say car, and neither did Franklin D. Roosevelt, nor did the newsreel announcers or movie actors of his day. Would you admit to there being symbolism in your novels? Mr . George Plimpton Net Worth [3], He was the son of Francis T. P. Plimpton[4] and the grandson of Frances Taylor Pearsons and George Arthur Plimpton. He grew up in New York City with bona fide WASP credentials; became the longtime editor of the Paris Review, working with many of the great novelists of the day; contributed to the New Journalism. $ 4.19 - $ 17.92. George also approved, I think, of the fact that I lost. He once said that, in writing Paper Lion, he wanted to reveal the "humor and grace" of football. 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. Several readers wrote in with specimens of Americans who had gone to England and ended up speaking in this mid-Atlantic way. Kennedy died the next day at Good Samaritan Hospital. George Plimpton was born on March 18, 1927 in New York City, New York, USA. 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. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review, as well as his patrician demeanor and accent. Now the interview is perfect!. 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. The Writer's Chapbook A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice from the Twentieth Century's Preeminent Writers. All the good guys have got to go. He was stationed primarily in Italy, where he worked as a tank driver. And being good at losing was one of Georges many gifts. (A variation is the Locust Valley Lockjaw.). 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. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review, as well as his patrician demeanor and accent. In this campaign, Plimpton touted the superiority regarding the graphics and sounds of Intellivision video games over the Atari 2600.[24]. [29], With Felix Grucci, Plimpton competed in the 16th International Fireworks Festival in 1979 in Monte Carlo. Now, in George, Being George, 200 friends, lovers and rivals detail Plimpton's remarkable exploits. He was a Wasp (both of his parents came from old New England families, and had ancestors on the Mayflower). For such admissions to escape my fathers lips, they always had to be a little removed somehow. Richard Howard, poetry editor, the Paris Review:I worked with George for 10 years on the magazine. I remember the Lowell Thomas documentary films of the 50s where Mr. Thomas' mellifluous tones and distinct radio-style pronunciation gave him a respectability that a similar huckster could hardly hope to replicate today by the mere application of such an artifice. 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. 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. He was one of her original supporters and had published an article about her work in The Paris Review. For instance: The American-British television presenter Loyd Grossman, who has described his accent as Mid-Atlantic. Oh, I suppose we should all just lavish praise upon Carnac the Magnificent now for bringing this to your attention, is that it? 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. If he couldnt be taken quite seriously, that was fine with him (he took himself lightly, and relished being in on the joke). *Originally posted by cuauhtemoc * George Plimpton was an upper-class guy with a patrician accent who partied his way through life . After her transformation, I noted that Mia sounds precisely like her mother, Maureen OSullivan, who had that patrician manner of speaking on and off screen. Isnt that what they call it. Did he have the celebrated "Boston Brahmin" accent, or was it a psuedo-Brit affectation? Here's a look inside the space, where the Paris Review editor hosted legendary parties. Never heard of this decidedly imprecise term. 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. George Plimpton - Biography - IMDb 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! 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 Plimpton appeared in the 1989 documentary The Tightrope Dancer which featured the life and the work of the artist Vali Myers. $ 9.19 - $ 32.19. Peter Matthiesen, author, co-founder of the Paris Review:I was in Liberia, of all places, and George met me in Monrovia. Whats the matter?, Well, he said. With a little more practice, you could give us boys in the big leagues a run for our money. . George, Being George: George Plimpton's Life as Told, Admired, Deplored . Where are you?, Im at dinner with my wife, I said. They spoke in this manner, and it seemed perfectly natural, evocative of a background spent among the gentry of the northeast.. 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. Eerily enough, one of the messages on my answering machine was from George, with that distinctive accent of his: Hallo, its George Plimpton. I can understand your frustration, but celebrities die every day. 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. Future Poet Laureate Donald Hall, who had met Plimpton at Exeter, was Poetry Editor. 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. George Plimpton, Author And Editor, Is Dead at 76 (This is not to belittle Lowell Thomas, but to recognize the artifice that served him so well in his career). Revolutionary musket, a stairwell and a housemaster), "He speaks with an oddly mannered accent, sounding as though on the verge of a stammer, polite, genteel, perhaps just a little Woosterish. *Originally posted by Phlosphr * This brings us back to the why things changed question. 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. Even if it had nothing else going for itsomething very far from the truth Shadow Box by George Plimpton will forever remain a bastion of boxing literature because of the image it contains of the "Near Room," a place of dreadful foreboding which Muhammad Ali once described to the famed . He was also an accomplished birdwatcher. See below!) After his discharge, Plimpton returned to Harvard and finished his undergraduate education. Hear Stories By George Plimpton. During our time in Paris, he had a famous little car, a dark blue Peugeotit was mine originally; I sold it to himand it had to be seen to be believed. Youll get another shot at the big time, trust me. It was so violent that it brought a lot of people to the windows. (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. His final interview appeared in The New York Sports Express of October 2, 2003 by journalist Dave Hollander. **. 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. And they founded this thing called the Paris Review and published poetry and short story writers and did interviews. It was as if some old gentlemans code prohibited us from interacting as human beings. 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.". Peter even came with us on our honeymoon in Ravello, though George didnt. All contents 2023 The Slate Group LLC. 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. The opposing team: the Detroit Lions. Alan Alda, portraying my dad in the movie version of Paper Lion (his book on playing quarterback for the Detroit Lions), didnt bother with his voice at all. George Plimpton boxed with Archie Moore, played quarterback for the Detroit Lions, and played percussion for the New York Philharmonic. There was love thereactually, his inability to express it sometimes made him positively brim with itbut speak the words, his voice could not. **. 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. Old money, would never say the word spanky, and certainly had more money than God could count. Kaltenborn was a famous mid . How widespread, numerically and geographically? I dont give a rats ass about informing anyone about the death of Plimpton. (Newsreels ran in movie theaters, of course: what better critique of the high newsreel style than the new movies that jarred against it?). For instance: Mid-Atlantic English was the dominant dialect among the Northeastern American upper class through the first half of the 20th century. Losing, he knew, always makes a better story than winning. What fine manners he had! A few days after, I went to a Paris Review party and showed off my damaged nose and two black eyes to George. News children today have no concept of the Mid-Atlantic accent. Just in time for the Sixties, with all their other pressures towards some kind of anti-Eisenhower authenticity. Vault. So it was that George Plimptons accent could not be imitated. 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. Thanks for the scores of replies that have arrived in the past day, in response to my post asking why the stentorian, phony-British Announcer Voice that dominated newsreel narration, stage and movie acting, and public discourse in the United States during the first half of the 20th century had completely disappeared. Among other challenges for Sports Illustrated, he attempted to play top-level bridge, and spent some time as a high-wire circus performer. After returning to New York from Paris, he routinely launched fireworks at his evening parties. Ive rarely heard this accent in real life but its often used by actors doing a stereotype character based on other actors impersonations! I didnt know he was from the Larchmont area. 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. 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. Indeed, the police deposition the filmmakers managed to uncover may be the only time my dad ever spoke about the tragedy, publicly or privately. He looked for ways in which he could make himself a ridiculous figure, and not only on the football field, but in all walks of life. [40] They had two children: Medora Ames Plimpton and Taylor Ames Plimpton, who has published a memoir entitled Notes from the Night: A Life After Dark. 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.. Starring George Plimpton as Himself, which documents his life, adventures, and work as participatory journalist and editor of the Paris Review, my dad will be playing himself one more time. You can. He was going to put on a reading of his play Zelda, Scott, and Ernest. LL is typified, I think, but an almost clenching of the teeth while talking, producing a mushy sound, if you will. Several weeks later at a book party, he spotted two writers who had played in that game. It was always a surprise. When Muhammad Ali was fighting, George Plimpton was always there. 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. George Plimpton: Writer, Quarterback, Pitcher, Boxer, Triangle Player George Plimpton, Out of My League: The Classic Account of an Amateur's Ordeal in Professional Baseball, 2016, Little ESPN.com: GEN - George Plimpton dies Starring George Plimpton as Himself, directed by Tom Bean and Luke Poling, was released. I think it was an affectation people adopted because they thought it made them sound much more intelligent! 1) The linguists have a name for it: they call it Mid-Atlantic English. I dont like this name, for reasons Ill explain in a minute. Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. Paris Review - Writers, Quotes, Biography, Interviews, Artists He modestly shrugged off the compliment, but his bright smile betrayed his pleasureand ours. He saw athletes as heroes he. *Originally posted by bordelond * He joined us in Monte Carlo when we won the international [fireworks] competition. [citation needed] In 1958, prior to a post-season exhibition game at Yankee Stadium between teams managed by Willie Mays (National League) and Mickey Mantle (American League), Plimpton pitched against the National League. Actors Nathan Lane (from Jersey City, NJ) and Robin Williams (grew up in SF Bay area) often adopt this accent.