The Writers won the game with a home run in extra innings, but the highlight was Plimptons hit. Share; Copied! And he told everyone that night, and for many years after, that hed diverted me from a career of filling prescriptions. [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]. At least, not to me, nor even to my sister, a fact she mentions in the movie. George was not vainhe didnt care a whit about his image. In most situations, he had the remarkable quality of making everyone he talked to feel at ease, at home, welcome, no matter who they were or what they didbut for whatever strange reason there wasnt this effortlessness with me, this warmth. They spoke in this manner, and it seemed perfectly natural, evocative of a background spent among the gentry of the northeast. The s. 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. He once said that, in writing Paper Lion, he wanted to reveal the "humor and grace" of football. 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." These events were recalled in his best-known book Paper Lion, which was later adapted into the 1968 feature film starring Alan Alda. He appeared in commercials for Oldsmobile and Intellivision, and appeared. Oh now, Im joking, Carnac ( see? Losing, he knew, always makes a better story than winning. 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. 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). So it was that my father played himself not just in movies and on TV, but in life, too. The Mid-Atlantic accent, or Transatlantic accent, is a . (To read Part One, click here. "[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. By strange coincidence, I actually became quite good friends with his (ex-)in-laws here in Manhattan. (Did Eisenhower speak the newsreel style? For such admissions to escape my fathers lips, they always had to be a little removed somehow. (And, OK, Im not a linguist, but Im married to one!) The clipped, non-rhotic English accents of George Plimpton and William F. Buckley Jr. were vestigial examples.
Paris Review - Writers, Quotes, Biography, Interviews, Artists 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. And so when it was time to say goodbye, we did so simplyno awkwardness, no strangled expressions of affectionand this is why, even though it was the last time we ever spoke, and I would never get the chance again, I do not regret not telling him that I loved him. There was love thereactually, his inability to express it sometimes made him positively brim with itbut speak the words, his voice could not. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review, as well as his patrician demeanor and accent. [28], Plimpton was a demolitions expert in the post-World War II Army. And so it seemed only fitting to commemorate his death with the form he made his own.Meghan ORourke. [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. I never thought that George slept. Shoot! hed hiss, when he was mad. 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. A heuristic approximation! Its our anniversary. [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. Now, in George, Being George, 200 friends, lovers and rivals detail Plimpton's remarkable exploits.
George Plimpton - American Academy of Arts and Letters [32] When lit, the firework remained on the ground and exploded, blasting a crater 35 feet (11m) wide and 10 feet (3.0m) deep. Next up: some sociological explanations of why someone like George Gershwin might have tried to speak like Westbrook Van Voorhis. He said, You better stay here, and I did, for a while. Havent heard that term in years. Plimpton appeared in the 1989 documentary The Tightrope Dancer which featured the life and the work of the artist Vali Myers. Indeed, the police deposition the filmmakers managed to uncover may be the only time my dad ever spoke about the tragedy, publicly or privately. So think of Margaret Anderson or Amanda and you can place George. It was always as if one were setting out with him on a special adventure. We were both excitedId just come back from a weekend in Las Vegas, and hed just come back from celebrating the fortieth anniversary reunion of his Detroit Lions team at Ford Field, where the fans had given him a standing ovation, and he had raised his hatand for a moment we were no longer father and son, but just two big excited boys, each comparing adventures, and I could hear the pride in his voice, the happiness. 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. [26] He also appeared in an episode of the NBC sitcom Wings. The Wikipedia entry is indeed delightful. 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. He saw athletes as heroes he.
That Weirdo Announcer-Voice Accent: Where It Came From and Why It Went My dad and I could not lose each other, but we could never quite find each other, either. But for now, just one more category: 3) Changing technology, changing voices. He was so open to life and all its new and unexpected situations. The film used archival audio and video of Plimpton lecturing and reading to create a posthumous narration. As such, it was popular in the theatre and other forms of elite culture in that region. He very much approved. These interviews are a collaborative effort, and, I believe, a fascinating contribution to literary history. expelled from the very expensive, very WASP-y Philips That life couldnt contain him, hed burst its seams like it was an old coat two sizes too small. Plimpton played Tom Hanks's antagonistic father in Volunteers.
George Plimpton | Military Wiki | Fandom And the many candidates for the crown of Last American to Speak This Way. Of course, I think he enjoyed the odd persona his voice and mannerisms conferred on him. "He speaks with an oddly mannered accent, sounding as though on the verge of a stammer, polite, genteel, perhaps just a little Woosterish. Plimpton's most memorable writings involved him inserting himself into a daunting situation about which he knew . That was when Westbrook van Voorhis, the famous March of Time voice, did the intro narration of the pilot episode of The Twilight Zone. Another entertainment-related explanation for the shift, right about the time of the Eisenhower-Kennedy transition: The plumby announcer voice that hovers over the Atlantic midway between the Eastern Seaboard and England was mortally wounded in 1959. He had it, as does/did William Buckley, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Julia Child. It was a great partyraucous and long. 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. [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." Plimpton brought the Left Bank to NYCpeople like Peter Mathiessen, William Styron, Terry Southern. Read more in this thread (long). Larchmont Lockjaw? He just did it because Columbia was another literary magazine. . He had it all going! The responses fall into interesting categories: linguistic descriptions of this accent; sociological and ethnic explanations for its rise and fall; possible technological factors in its prominence and disappearance; explanations rooted in the movie industry; nominees for who might have been the last American to talk this way; and suggestions that a few rare specimens still exist. Call me back.. Plimpton also appeared in the closing credits of the 2006 film Factory Girl. Description above from the Wikipedia article George Plimpton, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of . 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. He knew we were just as good as he was, but in a different field. 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. He would have a beer with you. Here are five things you may not have known about him. With a little more practice, you could give us boys in the big leagues a run for our money. 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. 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. The flipped prestige markers point here is fascinating.
'Plimpton!' documentary looks at George Plimpton's lives Did he have the celebrated "Boston Brahmin" accent, or was it a psuedo-Brit affectation? 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. Your transparent jealousy is very unbecoming, Carnac. Get a life. [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.
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. **. In early 1959, George Plimpton was preparing to watch an execution in Cuba. Louis Begley, novelist:Jim Atlas interviewed me for an Art of Fiction piece in the Paris Review, a feature of the magazine that George invented and brought to perfection. 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. On Saturday Night Live, even the great impersonator Dana Carvey couldnt get it quite right.
George, Being George: George Plimpton's Life as Told, Admired, Deplored Vault. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. Norman Mailer, author:George had a rare gift. 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.
George A. Plimpton Papers, 1634-1956 | Rare Book & Manuscript Library But he has never employed that voice professionally, and certainly does not speak that way in real life.
George Plimpton Detroit Lions | The Pop History Dig [33] A later attempt, fired at Cape Canaveral, rose approximately 50 feet (15m) into the air and broke 700 windows in Titusville, Florida. [citation needed], In the movie Plimpton! See below!) Archie Moore, after all, had broken his nose. 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. The clenched jaw tight-bite bit: the lockjaw dentiloquist. 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. [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. It includes clear pronunciation of each and every consonant cluster. Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. He wanted to play his own part, but they wouldnt let him. Shadow Box. George Plimpton. Off screen, George Plimpton and Gore Vidal come to mind. It was so tiny that if you saw him in it, you couldnt believe hed be able to get himself out of it. George Plimpton boxed with Archie Moore, played quarterback for the Detroit Lions, and played percussion for the New York Philharmonic. 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. ), this isnt some kind of morbid contest to see who can be the first to inform the board of some celebritys death. 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. Typical of George to laugh about something others saw as a defining traithe never took himself all that seriously. 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. He had, for instance, a series of antiquated phrases and terms of affection. Jay McInerney, author:Arriving in Manhattan as a young writer, nothing was more thrilling or daunting than attending my first Paris Review party at Georges townhouse on East 72nd in the fall of 1984. (A variation is the Locust Valley Lockjaw.). Hed have that and a scotch on the rocks, his favorite drink. So we got together and, after some preliminaries, he popped the question that he was really there to ask. Paul McCartney and his then-girlfriend Heather showed up. Queen Elizabeth doesnt say car, and neither did Franklin D. Roosevelt, nor did the newsreel announcers or movie actors of his day. The name George Plimpton is synonymous with a kind of all-in participatory journalism. Even the most basic conversation was often a struggle. [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. What stood in our way? The Scout Is a Lonely Hunter. 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. Articles From This Author.
In Praise of Plimpton - Newsweek [45], Plimpton is the protagonist of the semi-fictional George Plimpton's Video Falconry, a 1983 ColecoVision game postulated by humorist John Hodgman and recreated by video game auteur Tom Fulp.[46]. Jean Stein became his co-editor. In this campaign, Plimpton touted the superiority regarding the graphics and sounds of Intellivision video games over the Atari 2600.[24]. They all sound just like George. After running the pilot, Rod Serling realized the narration needed a less pompous sounding and more natural voice himself. The Sidd Finch story was accompanied by a series of photos which managed to convince even the eagle-eyed fans . He's a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. He Was Shot by John Wayne. In finally hearing the great storyteller tell the one story he would not tell, I could hear, too, his long, reverent silence on the subjectand it reveals his integrity as a journalist, and as a man. I'm not an expert, but Bill Labov from UPenn is, and he is quoted thusly: According to William Labov, teaching of this pronunciation declined sharply after the end of World War II. Friends were almost always happy to see him because you knew he was bound to improve your mood. 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 After returning to New York from Paris, he routinely launched fireworks at his evening parties. A lifelong New Yorker, he never tasted a bagel or an olive, and he never chewed a stick of gum. The risky pleasures of Plimpton's classic of participatory sportswriting, Paper Lion.