Do, Write George Plimpton Has Made A Career Throwing Himself Into Improbable Jobs And Living To Write About It
Is there another writer who’s had more fun than George Plimpton?
He’s played quarterback with the Detroit Lions and Baltimore Colts, tended goal for the Boston Bruins, pitched at Yankee Stadium, flown through the air on a circus trapeze, served as New York City’s fireworks commissioner, tracked down the four great rare birds of Africa, chewed through bit parts in several movies (from a Bedouin in “Lawrence of Arabia” to a shrink in “Good Will Hunting”) - all the while editing The Paris Review and writing or editing 26 books, many about his various exploits.
“I’ve had such fun with quests,” Plimpton exclaimed, sitting amid a clutter of art, manuscripts and memorabilia in the office of his East River townhouse. “Searching for something - that’s the key to happiness in life.”
Plimpton is 70 now. His stamina these days is tested more by a different sort of challenge - Laura and Olivia, his 3-year-old twin daughters. 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.
Plimpton has grown children - Medora, 25, and Taylor, 21 - from a long marriage that ended in divorce in 1989, three years before he wed Dudley. Having more kids in his “twilight years” was not his idea.
“The deal, when we decided to have children,” he said, “was I wouldn’t have to do any domestic duties.” He paused.
“However, this arrangement has broken down somewhat.” He seems not at all unhappy about the development.
“It can be quite miserable, but there are also wonderful joys. The other day, I had the girls outside in our little park, teaching them how to kick a soccer ball.”
They all live in a massive two-story spread that once comprised four apartments. “So we have eight bathrooms,” he said with a comic shrug. There’s plenty of space even to preserve separate rooms for his older children when they come to visit.
Despite the new strains, Plimpton, by all accounts, is pretty much the same fellow he’s been his entire adult life. His 64-year-old brother, Oakes, who lives in Arlington, Mass., said, “George can’t really run anymore because of a ski injury, but other than that, I would say he’s hardly changed over the years at all.”
A tall, trim figure with a mop of white hair, George Ames Plimpton travels nearly everywhere in Manhattan on bicycle - most frequently to Elaine’s, the restaurant that’s been a writers’ hangout for decades, or the Racket Club, where he plays “court tennis,” a bizarrely outsized version of the game devised by monks.
“Henry VIII was playing this game when they brought him the news of Anne Boleyn’s death,” he merrily remarked in his not-quite-English accent that makes him seem all the more like a charming upper-crust character from a screwball comedy of the ‘30s.
He carries the same insouciant jauntiness one recognizes from his demeanor in decades-old photos and TV clips. He even tends to dress like a prep-school boy - blue blazer, V-necked sweater, Oxford shirt, Brooks Brothers loafers.
It all reflects an attitude about age.
“I was at a big party downtown the other night,” he said with a smile. “There were these girls of astounding beauty talking with me about ‘Good Will Hunting’ and some other things I’ve been in. I sure didn’t feel 70 then.
“But sure,” he went on, “everybody wants to stop time, especially at my age. Who doesn’t have fantasies of a time machine so you can go through it all again?”
The significant phrase here - and the remarkable thing about Plimpton’s life - is that, given the opportunity, he would “go through it all again,” as opposed to “do it all differently.”
His grandfather, George Arthur Plimpton, was a publisher and philanthropist, and his father, Francis T.P. Plimpton, a prominent corporate lawyer and United Nations ambassador. The oldest of four children, George went up the elite educational ladder - St. Bernard’s, Exeter, Harvard - but stepped off when the time came for career.
“Participatory journalism,” he called his trade when he carved its pathways 40 years ago. “I remember,” he said, “looking down at a huddle in a football game and thinking, ‘What’s going on in there? What do they say to each other on the bench?’
“It’s a secret world, and if you’re a voyeur, you want to be down there, getting it firsthand.”
He didn’t seek out this line of work. Like much else, it practically fell into his lap.
In 1952, two years out of Harvard and a first lieutenant in the Army Reserve (he earlier had served three years of active duty), Plimpton was about to be called up to fight in Korea. Desperate for an academic deferral, he wrote to several graduate schools for admission.
“By luck, the head of Kings College at Cambridge was an admirer of the Harvard Lampoon, of which I had been the editor,” he recalled. “So I escaped.”
During spring vacation of his second year, he went to Paris and ran into a childhood chum, Peter Matthiessen, now a best-selling outdoors writer, who was just starting the Paris Review and asked Plimpton to run it.
“I had no idea what to do with my life,” Plimpton recounted. “I didn’t think I was good enough to be a writer, but editing - that could be interesting. At that age, you just sort of tumble into things.”
Two years later, still running the magazine, he returned to New York and taught English at Barnard College. One day, on a train to Long Island, he met an editor from Sports Illustrated who was having a hard time finding someone to write a profile of Harold S. Vanderbilt, scion of the Vanderbilt fortune, a former World Cup yachtsman and inventor of the scoring system for contract bridge.
“Vanderbilt was very shy of the press,” Plimpton said, “but he turned out to be a Harvard man - we were members of the same Harvard club, in fact - so it became rather easy for me to get to him. Blood brotherhood, that sort of thing.”
Plimpton wrote a four-part series about him, which led to a job at the magazine and a farewell to academia.
One fateful day in 1958, he went in to the editor and said, as he recalled, “Baseball’s the game for me. Yankee Stadium - I’d like to pitch in it, write about what it’s like to play there.”
What happened next is the stuff of legend. As a pregame frill to a post-season exhibition game, Plimpton would pitch to a lineup of American and National League all-stars, and whichever side got more hits would win $1,000 from Sports Illustrated.
After a few brief triumphs - not the least, forcing a routine pop-up from the mighty bat of Willie Mays - Plimpton found himself tiring so traumatically he couldn’t even finish the inning and barely limped back to the dugout.
He met a similar fate in 1963, when he persuaded the Detroit Lions to let him go through the team’s training and play quarterback during a scrimmage.
In the course of five disastrous plays, he lost 32 yards. Yet as he came off the field, the stadium crowd roared with applause.
Some of it, he wrote later, was probably in “appreciation of the lunacy of my participation … but most of it … was in relief that I had done as badly as I had: It verified the assumption that the average fan would have about an amateur blundering into the brutal world of professional football: He would get slaughtered.
“If by some chance I had uncorked a touchdown pass, there would have been wild acknowledgment … but afterward the spectators would have felt uncomfortable. Their concept of things would have been upset.
“The outsider did not belong, and there was comfort in that being proved.”
And so the theme was set for dozens of subsequent such assignments: Plimpton as improbably privileged Everyman. Ernest Hemingway, witnessing one venture, called it “the dark side of the moon of Walter Mitty.” But Plimpton delighted in prancing around the craters and wrote unflinchingly about his pratfalls.
Plimpton wonders, even now, why he embarked on some of his schemes, especially his three rounds in the ring with Archie Moore, who bloodied and possibly broke his nose.
“The thing is,” he gamely explained, “I’m at a cocktail party with a very pretty girl and she asks, ‘What are you going to do next?’ And I say, very confidently, ‘I’m going to box the light-heavyweight champion of the world.’ All of a sudden, I’m stuck; I’m committed to that.”
Couldn’t he just back down and tell her at the next party that the fight fell through?
“No,” he replied, as if that would break some ancient code of honor. “You can’t do that.”
Somewhere along this route, perhaps when he donned pink tights and joined the circus, he recalls his father wondering aloud goodhumoredly to Brendan Gill, the New Yorker writer, “What are we going to do with George?”
His own friend Matthiessen once confronted him and asked more seriously, “Why do you keep doing this? You ought to go back to teaching.”
Plimpton recalled thinking, “‘Why shouldn’t I keep doing this?’ His saying this made me want to do it even more.”
Even now, some call Plimpton a “professional dilettante,” which riles him a bit. “I think there’s envy in that,” he said.
“Is your outlook through a glass darkly or lightly? That’s what measures people and what they do. My books, God knows, are not serious.
“The person I still read over and over is Mark Twain. His attitude is refreshing and fun and funny. It has a more lasting effect than the pompous, the serious, the weighty.”
In the center of one of Plimpton’s four large living rooms is a pool table, and it was on that table that he put together his book about writer-ranconteur Truman Capote, a very different sort of gadfly.
Like previous biographies Plimpton wrote, also on the pool table, about Robert F. Kennedy and heiress-turned-Warholite Edie Sedgwick, the book - baroquely titled “Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career” - takes the form of oral remembrances.
“The image that I had at the beginning,” he said, “was that it would be like a cocktail party. You come and listen in on the comments, which, fortuitously, are arranged chronologically.”
After conducting, editing and cross-indexing hundreds of interviews, Plimpton laid out the transcripts and cut and pasted them into 15- or 20-foot strips that he calls “snakes” or, if they ended up longer still, “pythons” - one for each chapter.
“The raw material of biography is absolutely riveting,” he said, when asked why he chooses this form. “Rather than reading someone’s interpretation, you have the stuff itself.
“It has to be about an interesting subject, of course, preferably someone who’s sifted through any number of segments of society. Truman was born in Monroeville, Ala., this tiny town, yet this little man, no more than 5-foot-2, with his lispy voice, rose to be this sought-after success, not only as a writer but as a social arbiter, a social lion, the darling of New York.”
Plimpton has long traveled in Capote’s social circles himself, and the book has triggered an outcry from some of his fellow denizens.
Plimton was also once a friend of Capote, until he wrote a scathing parody of Capote’s prose style in the early ‘80s. After that, Capote, who died in 1984, never spoke to him again, though, Plimpton said, “I was told by some mutual friends that Truman would ask people to read it aloud to him while he lay in bed and that he roared with laughter.”
He concedes, but doesn’t care, that Capote never wrote any truly weighty works.
“Somerset Maugham once said, ‘I think of myself as being at the top of the second tier,”’ Plimpton recited. “Truman fits there, too.”
Where would Plimpton place himself in this hierarchy?
“Oh, dear,” he replied and stared off for a few seconds blankly. “Is there a third tier?” He laughed.
Plimpton isn’t sure what he’ll do next. “I have to come up with some major book,” he sighed. Meanwhile, he wants to track down the eight great rare birds of South America and go look at penguins in Antarctica.
He’s writing a screenplay about Paris in the 1950s. And he has a couple of participatory projects in the works - hanging around backstage at the City Center Ballet and the Metropolitan Opera.
Will he dance? And sing?
“Well,” he mused, “there’s a scene in ‘Swan Lake’ where the prince enters, sits down and doesn’t do much. I could do that. And in the fourth act, I think, of ‘La Boheme,’ two soldiers come out. One says, ‘What are you carrying in that basket?’ The other says, ‘Nothing.”’ He nodded sagely.
“That could be me. I could sing” - and here, he broke into an Italian operatic contralto - “Niente!”
Staff illustration by Bridget Sawicki
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Capote book George Plimpton’s new book is titled “Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career” (Talese/Doubleday, $35, 498 pp.)