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. 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. What exactly is a Boston Brahmin accent? 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. Old money, would never say the word spanky, and certainly had more money than God could count. Plimpton also appeared in a number of feature films as an extra and in cameo appearances. Those of us whose families are from Larchmont (that would be me) just call it lockjaw. So think of Margaret Anderson or Amanda and you can place George. Angelo Dundee, trainer for Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard:George was such a great guy. It was always as if one were setting out with him on a special adventure. [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. 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. Heres a sampling for today, with more planned in the days ahead. 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. He died on September 26, 2003 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. Plimpton also appeared in the closing credits of the 2006 film Factory Girl. At the time, he was getting ready to pitch for the Yankees,and we would throw pitches across 72nd Street in preparation. If you didnt know the man, you could, I think, be fooled by the voice. Vault. Oh now, Im joking, Carnac ( see? 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 76.. Bill, who was from the South, kept saying to me, Can you believe Georges not English? His response was "no, just affected.". I knew that between the time Id asked Plimpton to do the auction and the night itself, he had probably received five invitations for a better evening, but he would never have reneged. After the technology improved the need to speak so histrionically went away, and so did "announcer English.". He very much approved. OK? And they founded this thing called the Paris Review and published poetry and short story writers and did interviews. We had the book party for my selected poems, Sailing Alone Around the Room, at Georges house on Sept 10, 2001. 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. I can understand your frustration, but celebrities die every day. Off screen, George Plimpton and Gore Vidal come to mind. 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. And he stood there ebullient and charming all night; he bid on many items himself. 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! [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. George Plimpton. Think of the accent of Jane Hathaway on the Beverly Hillbillies. A reader writes: Ive wondered about this myself when I see old Jimmy Cagney moviesand the date of his last starring role might give us a hint towards the date range of the change: "One, Two, Three" in 1961. 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. Ill try to give a representative range, and I am grateful for the care and thought that have gone into these responses. 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. 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. He modestly shrugged off the compliment, but his bright smile betrayed his pleasureand ours. In fact, my dads farewells seemed loquacious in comparison to his mothers. Few could give a toast or tell a story with equal humor. Plimpton was .the public face of the New York intellectual: tweedy, eclectic and with a plummy accent he himself described as "Eastern seaboard cosmopolitan." . Butch, he says, because he always called me Butch. Cambridge. He wanted to play his own part, but they wouldnt let him. ), this isnt some kind of morbid contest to see who can be the first to inform the board of some celebritys death. 3 people found this helpful . After St. Bernard's School, Plimpton attended Phillips Exeter Academy (from which he was expelled just shy of graduation), and Daytona Beach High School, where he received his high school diploma,[16] before entering Harvard College in July 1944. 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. Jean Stein became his co-editor. Besides, third is a very respectable showing! I have decided, he said, that I have got to jump from a plane. 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! For instance: The American-British television presenter Loyd Grossman, who has described his accent as Mid-Atlantic. He rounded first as if he were about to go for a double, then glided back to the base, with fans waving and cheering. 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. 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. In the April 1, 1985 issue of Sports Illustrated, Plimpton pulled off a widely reported April Fools' Day prank. Articles From This Author. Manhattan DVD. Everything he did was like this, just a bit odd. Ever. . 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. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. I always thought it sounded similar to the accent of William F. Buckley, Jr., who I believe was not reared in Boston. He was 76. I think all the editors who worked at the magazine can recount a time when they ascended to his office to argue for a particular story that had been submitted, certain that George hadnt read it or hadnt read it closely enough, only to stand gape-mouthed as he reeled off, from memory, its every deficiency. :rolleyes: Ive got news for you, buddy, youre not even second in line! 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. But he would do this in the most charming and agreeable way. I think it was an affectation people adopted because they thought it made them sound much more intelligent! George . But he came right down to our level. He was respected by all. There was love thereactually, his inability to express it sometimes made him positively brim with itbut speak the words, his voice could not. 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. Jean Harlow, one of my favorites, is all over the map with this, sometimes sounding like a tough streetwalker, other times like a society matron, and, oddly, slipping in and out of both dialects in the same role, or even in one sentence. George also approved, I think, of the fact that I lost. 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. "[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. The Writer's Chapbook A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice from the Twentieth Century's Preeminent Writers. Were taking off from Teterburo, N.J., at 4 a.m. tomorrow. I just heard that George Plimpton has died. Labov suspected that WWII had something to do about it. I can understand your frustration, but celebrities die every day. Read more. 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. rejoiced in the name of Euphemia van Renssalaer Wyatt. He was so open to life and all its new and unexpected situations. 3: Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". In all my years, Ive never heard this accent in person. Besides, third is a very respectable showing! Now the interview is perfect!. 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. At one point, there was a tremendous Wagnerian thunder and lighting storm. People two or three deep stood looking out at the East River. Dan Rather certainly marks the definitive end of the newsreel style and the ascendance of the folksy vernacular: those rustic analogies! 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? As a result, this American version of a posh accent has all but disappeared even among the American upper classes. 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! When Plimpton, the co-founder of The Paris Review, died in 2003 at age 76, The New York Times . 26 Feb 2023 12:18:23 Big, tall, good-looking guy, easy-going. When he was on the scene, everything was a big happeningan event. [37] His son, Taylor, described it as a mixture of "old New England, old New York, tinged with a hint of King's College King's English."[14]. Its a shot from a YouTube video that itself is a fascinating time-capsule portrait of language change. Whom is it spoken bymerely the elite, old-money types? 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. The Writers won the game with a home run in extra innings, but the highlight was Plimptons hit. By George Plimpton. 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. I have worked as poetry editor with editors on other magazines; only with George has the experience been entirely agreeable. For more than fifty years, his friends made a circle whose circumference was vast and whose center was a fashionable tenement on New York's East Seventy-second street. By George Plimpton. Rose Styron, wife of William Styron and former Paris Review editor:My husband Bill was with George when he started the Paris Review. It sounds like Somerset Maugham, was a favorite putdown. On one website, I read about a Choate alumn saying one can still hear the LL (see above thread) accent on campus. When Muhammad Ali was fighting, George Plimpton was always there. 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. Sidd Finch was a fictional character George had created for a Sports Illustrated story, supposedly the greatest and fastest pitcher in the world. So it was that George Plimptons accent could not be imitated. Ive always heard it referred to as a patrician accent. I dont give a rats ass about informing anyone about the death of Plimpton. Several readers wrote in with specimens of Americans who had gone to England and ended up speaking in this mid-Atlantic way. There was one more matter I never heard my dad discuss. 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. But the average person never talked that way. 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. That phony-baloney feigned British pronunciation thing. Suddenly, a New York cop remembered a long-ago murder. Talking about sports with Georgeor, even better, reading George about sportswas more fun than sports themselves. [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. They spoke in this manner, and it seemed perfectly natural, evocative of a background spent among the gentry of the northeast.. Vault. It was then that the majority of audiences first heard Hollywood actors speaking predominantly in Mid-Atlantic English, British expatriates John Houseman, Henry Daniell, Anthony Hopkins, Camilla Luddington, and Angela Cartwright exemplified the accent, as did [a long list of North Americans, from Elizabeth Taylor and Grace Kelly to Richard Chamberlain and Christopher Plummer]. Both of Plimpton's maternal grandparents were born with the surname Ames; his mother was the granddaughter of Medal of Honor recipient Adelbert Ames (1835-1933), an American sailor, soldier, and politician, and Oliver Ames, a US political figure and the 35th Governor of Massachusetts (18871890). George Plimpton is beautifully connected. [Then] this August he showed up, pulled the shirt over his head, and said he was ready to bat. One reader writes: I've wondered whether that "announcer English" was at least partly caused by poor loudspeakers and microphones. [35], Plimpton was known for his distinctive accent which, by Plimpton's own admission, was often mistaken for an English accent. Above all, he was a gentleman, one of the lasta figure so archaic, it could be easily mistaken for something else. This kept his magazine fresh for 50 years. He knew we were just as good as he was, but in a different field. (What else happened that year??? He was very understanding of what we did and how we did it. He was smooth. Plimpton was associated with the literary magazine in Paris, Merlin, which folded because the State Department withdrew its support.[why?] With the help of the New York Mets organization and several Mets players, Plimpton wrote a convincing account of a new unknown pitcher in the Mets spring training camp named Siddhartha Finch, who threw a baseball over 160mph, wore a heavy boot on one foot, and was a practicing Buddhist with a largely unknown background. Plimpton appeared in the 1989 documentary The Tightrope Dancer which featured the life and the work of the artist Vali Myers. Id like to offer a speculation, for what its worth. 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. Brown & Co. Re-issued George Plimpton Sports Books, 2016. George Plimpton (1927-2003) was a journalist and the first editor-in-chief of The Paris Review. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. By George Plimpton. It includes clear pronunciation of each and every consonant cluster. "[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. Her mother, a writer and critic for Commonweal and Catholic World. **, In this case, Mid-Atlantic refers to speech in which the attributes of British English and American English meet halfway. And being good at losing was one of Georges many gifts. Plimpton brought the Left Bank to NYCpeople like Peter Mathiessen, William Styron, Terry Southern. I think he came down [to the shooting of Paper Lion in] Florida once. [13], Plimpton's son described him as a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant and wrote that both of Plimpton's parents were descended from Mayflower passengers.[14]. That made him a great storyteller. silk-stockinged New Englander - private schools (he was 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. Norman Mailer, author:George had a rare gift. In 1966, George Plimpton's book Paper Lion, recounting his attempt to play football with the Detroit Lions, allowed millions of Americans to vicariously live out their childhood dream of playing in the NFL. He was previously married to Sara Whitehead Dudley and Freddy Medora Espy. 1. After several problems with transporting and preparing the fireworks, Plimpton and Grucci became the first competitors from the United States to win the event. I want you to go [to the shop] pull out the biggest firework you have and go out and light it up, because you just won the firework contest in Monaco!, I was so stunned, all I could think to say was, I dont think I can get a permit that fast!, Alice Quinn, director of the Poetry Society of America, poetry editor, The New Yorker:When I was an adviser at Columbia Magazine [a journal run out of Columbia University], we were scraping barrel, with no money in the bank, and I said to the students we should have a benefit auction. George Plimpton. Back in the 1960s and '70s, I would nightly sit alone in front of a TV set in a darkened room in the Midwest munching on potato chips watching late night talk shows out of New York CityJohnny Carson and Dick Cavett in particularand Plimpton was a regular on those shows. He once said that, in writing Paper Lion, he wanted to reveal the "humor and grace" of football. * For more than five decades, author and journalist George Plimpton delved deeply into an array of high-profile and often physically grueling experiences, including professional baseball, boxing . Update: This post is #2 in the announcer-speak series. He thought Castro might come. Mr. Plimpton was born in Manhattan in 1927 and raised in Huntington, L.I. "He speaks with an oddly mannered accent, sounding as though on the verge of a stammer, polite, genteel, perhaps just a little Woosterish. He majored in English. Congratulations Carnac, for posting about George Plimptons death at 3:44 PM. Elaine Kaufman, owner of Elaines restaurant:Over the 40 years I knew him, George came in often, sometimes twice a week, usually on his way back from a cocktail party. Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. This speech pattern might be common among US expatriates in the UK, of which Grossman would seem to represent just the most ostentatious example. Bill Buckley, Gore Vidal, George Plimpton. So, pairing the Cagney hint with the Kennedy Inaugural, could we date the changeover to 1961? [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." [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. 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. 2) Truman v. Kaltenborn, 1949. George Plimpton was an upper-class guy with a patrician accent who partied his way through life . Even the most basic conversation was often a struggle. "I've decided to stay over here in . Okay, then, are you saying that Plimpton has such as accent? She would not even say goodbye. Hemingway on Fiction, Part Two. 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. Did he have the celebrated Boston Brahmin accent, or was it a psuedo-Brit affectation? We were going to go looking for strange birds. George was the one who read my name out to the commissioner. Even Orson Welles on occasion. He had a small role in the Oscar-winning film Good Will Hunting,[22] playing a psychologist. George Plimpton, who died last week at his town house, on East Seventy-second Street near the river, was a serious man of serious accomplishments who just happened to have more fun than a van. 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. [3], He was the son of Francis T. P. Plimpton[4] and the grandson of Frances Taylor Pearsons and George Arthur Plimpton. 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. If you are in the big league, God help us all. Future Poet Laureate Donald Hall, who had met Plimpton at Exeter, was Poetry Editor. One thinks of the glorious character actress, Kathleen Freeman, as the voice coach Phoebe Dinsmore in Singing in the Rain: Round tones, Miss Lamont. In Woody Allens Radio Days, Mia Farrow has an impossibly thick Brooklyn accent until she takes voice lessons and becomes a successful radio purveyor of celebrity gossip. The clipped, non-rhotic English accents of George Plimpton and William F. Buckley Jr. were vestigial examples. He had it, as does/did William Buckley, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Julia Child. May a diseased yak squat in your hot tub. Again with thanks to Jonathan Fields, here's the continuation of George Plimpton's famous interview of Ernest Hemingway from the Paris Review, Summer 1958. 1 draft choice of the Lions in 1965. (This is not to belittle Lowell Thomas, but to recognize the artifice that served him so well in his career). One night Joe DiMaggio was here, and they had never met, so I introduced them. My dad and I could not lose each other, but we could never quite find each other, either. 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. Congratulations Carnac, for posting about George Plimptons death at 3:44 PM. Please educate me. Sometimes, we used to have quarrels, because he thought I took too many poems: Are you turning this magazine into a poetry magazine? he would say. Plimpton appeared in the 1989 documentary The Tightrope Dancer which featured the life and the work of the artist Vali Myers.
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