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George Plimpton, Author And Editor, Is Dead at 76    By RICHARD SEVERO ( Obituary (Obit); Biography ) 1850  words   
The Five-Decade Book Party and Its Tireless  Host    November 19, 2003   
George Plimpton Recalled as Writer, Editor and Man of  Charm   .

September 27, 2003, Saturday

THE ARTS/CULTURAL DESK

George Plimpton, Author And Editor, Is Dead at 76

By RICHARD SEVERO ( Obituary (Obit); Biography ) 1850 words

The cause of death was not immediately known, but Mr. Plimpton's agent, Timothy Seldes, said it was most likely a heart attack.

Mr. Plimpton, a lanky, urbane man possessed of boundless energy and perpetual bonhomie, became, in 1953, the first (and principal) editor of The Paris Review. A cultural force and ubiquitous presence at book parties and other gala social events, he was tireless in his commitment to the serious contemporary fiction the magazine publishes.

Easily identifiable in later years by his thatch of silver hair and always by his cheery, lockjaw delivery, Mr. Plimpton was a familiar figure, ranging above other guests at the restaurants, saloons and weekend destinations where blue-blood New York overlapped with the New York of the famous and the creative.

All of this contributed to the charm of reading about Mr. Plimpton's career as dilettante par excellence -- ''professional'' athlete, stand-up comedian, movie bad guy, circus performer and many other trades -- which he described elegantly in nearly three dozen books.

As a boxer, he had his nose bloodied by Archie Moore at Stillman's Gym in 1959. As a major league pitcher, he became utterly exhausted and couldn't finish the inning at an exhibition game between National and American League all-stars in 1959 (though he managed to get Willie Mays to pop up). And as a ''professional'' third-string quarterback with the Detroit Lions, he lost roughly 30 yards during a scrimmage in 1963. On Sunday Mr. Plimpton was in Detroit for a 40th-anniversary reunion with the players who once lined up with ''a 36-year-old free-agent quarterback from Harvard.''

He also tried his hand at tennis (Pancho Gonzalez beat him easily), bridge (Oswald Jacoby outmaneuvered him) and golf. With his handicap of 18, he lost badly to Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus.

In a brief stint as a goal tender for the Boston Bruins, he made the mistake of using his gloved hand to catch a flying puck, which caused a nasty gash in his pinky. He failed as an aerialist when he tried out for the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus. As a symphonist, he wangled a temporary percussionist's job with the New York Philharmonic. He was assigned to play sleigh bells, triangle, bass drum and gong; he struck the last so hard during a Tchaikovsky chestnut that Leonard Bernstein, who was trying to conduct the piece, burst into applause.

That was Mr. Plimpton, the popular commercial writer. His alter ego was as the unpaid editor of The Paris Review, an enduring, chronically impoverished quarterly, founded in 1952 by Peter Mathiessen and Harold L. Humes, who asked him to edit it. He did so from 1953, when publication began, until the end of his life.

Over the years, the magazine gained a loyal following for its dedication to new fiction. Among the many authors it published were Terry Southern, Philip Roth, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Mona Simpson, George Steiner and V. S. Naipaul. It also introduced works by Donald Barthelme, Italo Calvino, Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace.

The Paris Review was a must-read as well for its interviews with established writers: Archibald MacLeish, Pablo Neruda, Gore Vidal, Joan Didion, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Ernest Hemingway and scores more. Mr. Plimpton interviewed some, including Hemingway, personally.

Some years ago, Gay Talese, a longtime friend of Mr. Plimpton's, wrote about The Paris Review in an essay called ''Looking for Hemingway.'' Describing the review's earliest days in Paris, Mr. Talese wrote that the editors, chiefly Mr. Plimpton, turned out a successful magazine because ''they avoided using such typical little-magazine words as 'zeitgeist' and 'dichotomous,' and published no crusty critiques about Melville or Kafka, but instead printed the poetry and fiction of gifted young writers not yet popular.''

Later, after Mr. Plimpton and his friends had moved to New York and become known variously as ''the Quality Lit Set,'' ''the East Side Gang'' and ''the Paris Review Crowd,'' they gathered regularly at the Plimpton apartment, Mr. Talese wrote, ''for the liveliest literary salon in the city.''

As a ''participatory journalist,'' Mr. Plimpton believed that it was not enough for writers of nonfiction simply to observe; they needed to immerse themselves in whatever they were covering. For example, football huddles and conversations on the bench constituted a ''secret world,'' he said, ''and if you're a voyeur, you want to be down there, getting it firsthand.''

And he didn't always fall on his face. One night in 1997 (too old by then to engage in strenuous contact sports), he showed up at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, which was then having its amateur night. He announced that he was an amateur, and when asked what he was going to play, replied, ''the piano.'' He knew only ''Tea for Two'' and a few other tunes, but played his own composition, a rambling improvisation he called ''Opus No. 1.'' The audience adored him, and the charmed judges gave him second prize.

In 1983 he scored another success when he volunteered to help the members of the Grucci family plan and execute a fireworks display to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge. They accepted his kind offer, and he did his job without destroying himself or any of the Gruccis. For a time, he was regarded as New York City's fireworks commissioner, the bearer of a highly unofficial title with no connection to the city government. In 1984 he wrote a book on his love of the rockets' red glare, called ''Fireworks: A History and Celebration.''

He was given to practical jokes. While he was a writer for Sports Illustrated, he invented a fictitious pitcher, Sidd Finch, whom he described as a Buddhist with a 168-mile-an-hour fastball. This unlikely soul became the centerpiece of his 1987 novel, ''The Curious Case of Sidd Finch.''

Mr. Plimpton was first married in 1968 to Freddy Medora Espy, a photographer's assistant. They had two children, Medora and Taylor, who survive him. The marriage ended in 1988. In 1991 he married Sarah Whitehead Dudley, 26 years his junior, who also survives him, along with their twins, Laura and Olivia.

George Ames Plimpton was born on March 18, 1927, in New York, the son of Francis T. P. Plimpton, a corporate lawyer (he was one of the early partners in the firm that is now Debevoise & Plimpton) who became a United Nations ambassador. His mother was the former Pauline Ames. His grandfather, George A. Plimpton, had been a publisher. The family traced its roots in this country to the arrival of the Mayflower.

Mr. Plimpton was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard and Cambridge. His career at Harvard, where he studied literature, was interrupted in 1945. He spent two years in the Army, then returned to college and received his bachelor's degree in 1950, although he always regarded himself as a member of the class of 1948. He earned a second baccalaureate degree at Cambridge, where he also earned a master's.

Mr. Plimpton's career included teaching at Barnard College from 1956 to 1958 and editing and writing at Horizon magazine (1959 to 1961) and at Harper's magazine (1972 to 1981). He also contributed material to Food and Wine magazine in the late 1970's. In the late 60's, he was seen frequently as a host or a guest on several television shows, and still later, he made some commercials for De Beers diamonds.

He had been inspired as a youth by Paul Gallico, an author and sports writer for The Daily News. Mr. Gallico believed so much in participatory journalism that he once had a brief encounter with the heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey.

''What Gallico did was to climb down out of the press box,'' Mr. Plimpton said, creating ''a wonderful description of what it feels like to be knocked about by a champion.'' The only problem with Mr. Plimpton's similar match with Archie Moore, set up by Sports Illustrated, was that Mr. Plimpton wept after Mr. Moore bloodied his nose. He called it a ''sympathetic response.''

Many of Mr. Plimpton's books dealt with his adventures, most notably ''Out of My League'' (1961), on baseball; ''Paper Lion'' (1966), on football; and ''The Bogey Man'' (1968), on golf. Ernest Hemingway read ''Out of My League'' and declared that it was ''beautifully observed and incredibly conceived, his account of a self-imposed ordeal that has the chilling quality of a true nightmare. It is the dark side of the moon of Walter Mitty.''

The Walter Mitty reference was picked up by several critics, but Mr. Plimpton's exploits were not really like those of Mitty, James Thurber's fictitious daydreamer. For while Mitty only imagined that he was doing heroic things, Mr. Plimpton wasn't imagining anything.

Not all of Mr. Plimpton's writings dealt with his guises. In 1955 he wrote a children's book, ''The Rabbit's Umbrella.'' He also edited ''American Journey: The Times of Robert F. Kennedy'' (1970). He was a friend of the Kennedy family and was with Robert Kennedy the day he was shot to death by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles. Mr. Plimpton said Mr. Sirhan ''seemed composed and peaceful'' after Kennedy died.

In 1997 he also wrote an unconventional biography of Truman Capote, in which he meshed the techniques of oral history and traditional biography. And in 2002, joined by Terry Quinn, he created ''Zelda, Scott and Ernest,'' a dramatization of the correspondence between F. Scott Fitzgerald; his wife, Zelda; and Hemingway. It was produced in Paris.

Mr. Plimpton made it into movies and television, too. He was an extra -- a Bedouin -- in ''Lawrence of Arabia'' in 1962, and in ''Rio Lobo'' (1970) he played a crook who is shot dead by a heroic John Wayne. When the movie of ''Paper Lion'' was made in 1968, Alan Alda played Mr. Plimpton, who had a minor part himself. For a time, Mr. Plimpton also had a recurring role as Dr. John Carter's wealthy grandfather on ''E.R.'' He used to say he had been pegged as ''the Prince of Cameos.''

Last year Mr. Plimpton was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Perhaps his career was best summarized by a New Yorker cartoon in which a patient looks at the surgeon preparing to operate on him and demands, ''How do I know you're not George Plimpton?''

CAPTIONS: Photos: George Plimpton in 1963 as a third-string quarterback with the Detroit Lions, an experience he chronicled in ''Paper Lion,'' and in the ring in 1959 with the champion Archie Moore, who gave him a bloody nose. (Photo by Walter Iooss Jr.); (Photo by H. Scharfman)

The Five-Decade Book Party and Its Tireless Host

By WARREN ST. JOHN

N a spring afternoon in 1992, Rowan Gaither, then a 25-year-old editor at The Paris Review and George Plimpton's personal assistant, was at his usual spot — the desk beneath a claw-marked lion tamer's chair Mr. Plimpton had hung from the ceiling as a conversation piece. The night before, Mr. Plimpton had gone to see the Grateful Dead, and backstage after the show, he had invited the band over for drinks at his apartment. Only, the invitation had slipped his mind and the band was due imminently. That's when he rang Mr. Gaither from his office upstairs.

"Oh Rowan," Mr. Plimpton said with incongruous ease. "By the way, the Dead are coming by for a drink. Make sure we have something for them. Oh yes, and tell the staff."

This was social planning, Plimpton style: a last-minute carnival where the interns were included with the luminaries and where a drop-in by the Grateful Dead was only barely notable. When Mr. Plimpton died in his sleep on Sept. 26, at 76, he left behind a considerable legacy — The Paris Review, which plans to continue publishing; dozens of published books; and appearances in numerous films. But to the deep chagrin of the New York literary world and not a few lost, late-night stragglers, Mr. Plimpton took one grand New York institution with him: the effervescent swirl of young and old, of hard-drinking literary lions, starry-eyed editorial assistants and totally random passers-by that was a Plimpton party.

"George saw his home as a place for everybody," said Sarah Plimpton, Mr. Plimpton's widow. "He loved the lights blazing, piano playing, glasses clattering, and the more oddballs the better. He loved people so much that he felt something was missing if this house wasn't full."

Few in Manhattan have ever entertained as aggressively and with as much zeal as Mr. Plimpton did, and in literary and artistic circles, the competition isn't even close. For more than 45 years, he was host to hundreds of parties for thousands of guests, sometimes at a rate of one a week.

The typical party had a few key ingredients: an easygoing but suspenseful vibe, given that no one knew who might show up; an open door — Mr. Plimpton despised guest lists; a minimalist selection of hors d'oeuvres laid out on the pool table; and an anachronistic offering of liquor that served as a kind of call-to-arms to revelry.

"He would always order 38 bottles of Scotch, one bottle of white wine and a bottle of Dubonnet," said Jonathan Dee, a novelist who served as Mr. Plimpton's assistant in the 1980's. "And it was always a struggle to get him to order food."

In the early days of Mr. Plimpton's parties, guests included friends like Truman Capote, William Styron, Ralph Ellison, Lewis Lapham and Gore Vidal. He insisted on giving book parties for anyone who had been published in his magazine, which over time included Rick Bass, Mona Simpson and Jay McInerney, among others. Eventually, Manhattan publishing houses simply relied on Mr. Plimpton to give parties for their authors; the publishers would supply the drinks and food, and Mr. Plimpton the venue and the excitement. Crashing these parties was a rite of passage for generations of young aspiring writers and editors, who saw them as an opportunity to rub elbows with literary giants like Norman Mailer and Gay Talese.

"I think when people went, they thought, 'This is why I came to New York,' " said Helen Schulman, who went to her first Plimpton party while an M.F.A. student at Columbia and who has published three novels. (Ms. Schulman spent a decent portion of her own book party at Mr. Plimpton's locked in the bathroom; her desperate banging on the door could not be heard over the din of the party just outside.)

As often as not, invitations to Mr. Plimpton's came the day of, by telephone, and the calls served as welcome interruptions for the literary crowd. "Come 8 or 9, most writers have had enough of being alone," Mr. Talese said. "George just called you and said, 'Hey, we're doing this or that.' And he was always a person who thought there was room to squeeze you in."

Preparations for a Plimpton party followed a familiar script. Mr. Plimpton would tidy up his office, cover the pool table — a regulation model from the Blatt Bowling & Billiard company — with a tablecloth, for the hors d'oeuvres he had been talked into. With help from his staff, he would use his lanky frame to cantilever furniture out of the way.

Guests would arrive at the Plimpton apartment to find the door at street level slightly ajar. They would walk up a flight of stairs, past the manuscript-laden Paris Review office, and up another flight into the main floor of the apartment, the walls of which were covered with posters by famous artists — Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Larry Rivers — produced as part of a fund-raising series for the magazine. (For his contribution, Andy Warhol enlarged and signed a bill from Regency Wine & Liquor made out to The Paris Review for two bottles of Blair House Scotch and one of vodka.) Outside the window, ships and barges ghosted silently by, seemingly just out of reach, while the party bubbled inside.

Mr. Plimpton made a point of welcoming guests and kept an eye on the social flow. James Lipton, dean of Actors Studio Drama School, said, "Whatever happened he was ready."

That was the case at a party in the 1960's, when Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis arrived, only to nearly bump into Norman Mailer, who had recently written an unflattering article about her in Esquire. Mr. Talese recalled that Mr. Plimpton took Mrs. Onassis by the arm and, using his 6-foot-4-inch frame to peer over the crowd and keep an eye on Mr. Mailer, steered her away from a potential confrontation.

"That was the 'Social Register' George," Mr. Talese said.

If musicians were at the party, at some point they would play. Bruce Levingston, the pianist and a longtime friend of Mr. Plimpton's, was once playing a stormy Schumann piece when the pedals came off the piano. Far from being annoyed, Mr. Plimpton was delighted.

"He got down beneath the piano and propped the pedals up with old issues of The Paris Review," Mr. Levingston said. "He thought it was high drama."

On such evenings it was customary for guests to urge Mr. Plimpton to play one of only a few pieces of music he knew, a waltz he wrote called "Opus No. 1."

"He'd say, 'Oh, no, no, no; oh, O.K., I'll play a few bars,' " Mr. Levingston said. "It's a tipsy waltz anyway, so after a few Scotches, he'd have it just right."

When the hors d'oeuvres had been finished or simply abandoned, the cover came off the pool table. The literary lions ambled out, and the younger crowd took over.

Mrs. Plimpton said her husband stayed up with them. "There he would be at 1 a.m., playing pool with a bunch of college students," she said. "He didn't want the party to stop."

Of all the hard-drinking writers who passed through Mr. Plimpton's home, perhaps none was as zealous in his partying as Terry Southern. William Becker, a film distributor and a friend of Mr. Plimpton's from Harvard, said he remembers showing up at the apartment one morning in the 1960's to find Southern and a young woman passed out on the sofa in the early stages of undress, each holding a glass of Champagne. Mr. Becker was editing some home movies at the time, and for 45 minutes scenes flickered on the wall above Southern and his date, who never stirred.

"It was as if he'd just got the zipper down and then passed out cold," Mr. Becker recalled. "I left and there they still were, with this unspilled Champagne."

Mr. Plimpton's apartment building was originally a tenement that was converted to respectable Upper East Side flats by the Harper's Bazaar editor Carmel Snow in the 1930's, as cheap housing for friends who had hit hard luck during the Depression. Mr. Plimpton moved into a rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment there in the late 50's, after returning from Paris, where he had founded his magazine with Peter Matthiessen and Harold L. Humes. The building went co-op in the early 70's, and Mr. Plimpton acquired and joined four other apartments, one of which he used as the offices of The Paris Review. As the apartment grew, so did the parties.

All the parties took their toll on Mr. Plimpton's home. During one in the late 80's, the plaster ceiling of his downstairs neighbor collapsed, and the neighbor's cat narrowly avoided injury. (Mr. Plimpton had long since co-opted his neighbors by giving them standing invites to all his soirees.) In the early 90's, Mr. Gaither said, Mr. Plimpton became so worried about his house that he made the uncharacteristic decision to limit the guest list to 100; after much effort, it was eventually winnowed to 125, but Mr. Plimpton found the exercise distasteful, and never tried it again.

Veterans of Plimpton parties say that over the years, the affairs began to blend together into a seamless if blurry memory. But Mr. Lipton said one party in particular stands out: Mr. Plimpton's 50th-birthday party, where friends arranged for a young woman in a gorilla suit to pop out of a birthday cake. The woman then performed a striptease, and leapt naked into Mr. Plimpton's arms, to the horror of his socially austere mother.

Before he died, Mr. Plimpton was planning another party, which he hoped would be a blowout, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Paris Review. That party will go ahead without him, on Tuesday Oct. 14, at Cipriani on 42nd Street.

If there's a mystery to Mr. Plimpton's life, it is how he managed to be a relentless host and maintain such a prolific output.

Thomas Moffett, Mr. Plimpton's most recent assistant, said that when the staff would arrive bleary-eyed at around 10 a.m. the morning after a party, Mr. Plimpton, often still in his socks, would already be hunched over dozens of strips of paper on his pool table, which in the daytime served as an editorial storyboard. If someone had made an impressive pool shot the night before, he would already have it diagrammed for discussion. And if anyone asked him how he got up so early, Mr. Plimpton was quick to dispense some practical advice. "He would shrug his shoulders and tell you to drink lots of water before you go to bed," Mr. Moffett said.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company — Home — — Back to Top

November 19, 2003

he fraternity of writers in which George Plimpton held a lifelong membership remembered him yesterday at a gathering in Manhattan not as just as the writer, editor and skilled raconteur that he was but also as the life of the party.

Norman Mailer set the convivial tone at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, saying of Mr. Plimpton's social gifts, the mark of a gentleman is to inspire love in people who hardly know him.

His words echoed in the cavernous nave, which was nearly filled with writers, editors, and journalists as well as the curious.

Mr. Plimpton, who died on Sept. 26 at 76, was recalled fondly in remarks by Terry McDonell, Peter Matthiessen and Robert B. Silvers, as well as by family members, including his sister, Sarah; his daughter Medora; and his son, Taylor.

Elizabeth Gaffney, an editor at The Paris Review, the journal that Mr. Plimpton edited since its founding in 1953, mentioned his 1958 interview with Ernest Hemingway, in which the author of For Whom the Bell Tolls confessed to having made 39 attempts to write an ending for that novel.

Mr. Matthiessen, a founder of The Paris Review, and Mr. Silvers, one of the editors of The New York Review of Books, praised the vividness and self¯deprecating humor in his writing about his experiences as an occasional participant in sports and other public activities.

John Le Carr´, in a letter read by Ms. Gaffney, got closer to the point of Mr. Plimpton's misadventures in sports by saying that he was physically handsome and graceful yet never afraid to dress himself as a clown.

Sarah Plimpton and Victor Emanuel, a Texas bird expert, remembered Mr. Plimpton's wide and lesser¯known interests in birds and natural history.

But one anecdote about Mr. Plimpton's boundless popularity proved so irresistible that it was told twice, by Mr. Matthiessen and Mr. Silvers.

Mr. Plimpton was at Camp David playing tennis with an unnamed president when a courtside phone rang and was answered by a steely Secret Service agent prepared for the next international crisis.

I'm sorry, Mr. President, said the Secret Service man. It's for George.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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