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. (My dads been dead nearly ten years: not that he held many in his life, but what grudges could he possibly be holding on to now? We worked at the Paris Review on the Rue Garanere for several years together. We all just had our own regional accentor non accent, like the flat midwest speak. 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. George was a little more in-depth than a lot of us, of course, with his education and all. George Plimpton. 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. Did he have the celebrated Boston Brahmin accent, or was it a psuedo-Brit affectation? In early 1959, George Plimpton was preparing to watch an execution in Cuba. George was the one who read my name out to the commissioner. Plimpton revisited pro football in 1971,[18] this time joining the defending Super Bowl champion Baltimore Colts and seeing action in an exhibition game against his previous team, the Lions. Now the interview is perfect!. At Harvard, Plimpton was a classmate and close personal friend of Robert F. Kennedy. It was so tiny that if you saw him in it, you couldnt believe hed be able to get himself out of it. But it didnt define him, much the way he refused to be defined by the stiff, upper-crust world from which hed come. Youll get another shot at the big time, trust me. Hed have that and a scotch on the rocks, his favorite drink. He once said that, in writing Paper Lion, he wanted to reveal the "humor and grace" of football. Orson Welles also comes to mind, though I noticed he spoke in this mode more often during his early days, on and off screen. Self-help author and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson has a unique accent that, . This kept his magazine fresh for 50 years. He wrote, "I suppose in a mild way there is a lesson to be learned for the young, or the young at heart the gumption to get out and try one's wings". But the average person never talked that way. The 16th at Cypress Point is one of the famous golf holes of the world, certainly one of the most difficult and demanding par 3's. For instance: Mid-Atlantic English was the dominant dialect among the Northeastern American upper class through the first half of the 20th century. Lewis Lapham, editor, Harpers Magazine:Georges immense enthusiasm was his primary characteristic. So it was that my father played himself not just in movies and on TV, but in life, too. When he was on the scene, everything was a big happeningan event. He watched the first pitch sail high for a ball, and then hit a rope into left field. Except at parties. (Newsreels ran in movie theaters, of course: what better critique of the high newsreel style than the new movies that jarred against it?). He could as easily have been my grandfather as father. [33] A later attempt, fired at Cape Canaveral, rose approximately 50 feet (15m) into the air and broke 700 windows in Titusville, Florida. He Was Shot by John Wayne. He has the same type of patrician upper-class New Yorker accent as Jane Wyatt. I remember getting the news: It was my wife Madeleines birthday, Aug. 7. Plimpton was associated with the literary magazine in Paris, Merlin, which folded because the State Department withdrew its support.[why?] I can understand your frustration, but celebrities die every day. George Plimpton writer, publisher, amateur lion tamer died in 2003 after 50 years as the founding editor of The Paris Review. So, pairing the Cagney hint with the Kennedy Inaugural, could we date the changeover to 1961? Above all, he was a gentleman, one of the lasta figure so archaic, it could be easily mistaken for something else. Bill Buckley, Gore Vidal, George Plimpton. With the evolution of talkies in the late 1920s, voice was first heard in motion pictures. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. You can. 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. In 1994, Plimpton appeared several times in the Ken Burns series Baseball, in which he shared some personal baseball experiences as well as other memorable events throughout the history of baseball.[20]. Vault. *Originally posted by j.c. * All contents 2023 The Slate Group LLC. A little before my time, but Kennedy certainly didnt, even if his vernacular was more formal than Brandos. 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. A friend of the New England Sedgwick family, Plimpton edited Edie: An American Biography with Jean Stein in 1982. He thought Castro might come. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. **. Read more. Too old-fashioned. "[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. **Get a life. Felix Grucci Jr., of Fireworks by Grucci (Plimpton wrote about the Grucci family, widely held to be the first family of fireworks, in Fireworks: A History and Celebration):George had a very big passion for fireworks. By George Plimpton. See below!) That he died in his sleep was impressive. So it went in late 1960 at one of George Plimpton's legendary soirees at 541 E. 72nd St., New York. You heard it and it could only be him. 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). Hed go on to move freely through so many worlds and circles, without ever not speaking in that singular accentthough it probably would have made life easier for him if hed adopted a new way of talking (after all, as a journalist in the locker rooms, where slang and cursing were art-forms, my dads stiff, formal tongue made him stick out like an egret among ducks). December 17, 2022 Rafael Garca. And bolstering this last point, a reader who grew up in Depression-era Chicago writes: All I can think of is that people were imitating FDR. He had a way of putting it all together, of understanding fighters in the ring; he was a good analyst of boxing. 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 presentation was called Freedom of the American Road and was made 60 years ago, in 1955, as part of the campaign to build support for the new Interstate Highway system. 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. 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. He smiled broadly, signaled for the coach to send Lupica in to run for him, and trotted back to the sidelines. [29], With Felix Grucci, Plimpton competed in the 16th International Fireworks Festival in 1979 in Monte Carlo. There was one more matter I never heard my dad discuss. One reader writes: I've wondered whether that "announcer English" was at least partly caused by poor loudspeakers and microphones. Prestigious prep schools and ivy league institutions (though Gore Vidal never went to college). 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. Hed ask what was new in fireworks business and doodle around the facility with my dad, and he would always leave with a package of fireworks, to put on his own show. In the "I'm Spelling as Fast as I Can" episode of The Simpsons, he hosts the "Spellympics" and attempts to bribe Lisa Simpson to lose with the offer of a scholarship at a Seven Sisters College and a hot plate; "it's perfect for soup! There youd be, talking with her on the phone, and shed say, Well, tell him I called, and youd say, O.K., Grandma, good to talk to you, I Grandma?. You're going to play for us-making some sort of big comeback." "That's right," Plimpton replied in his patrician accent. They all sound just like George. Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. He said, You better stay here, and I did, for a while. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to these men speak. [47][48] Kennedy died the next day at Good Samaritan Hospital. George Plimpton: what kind of accent? While I don't normally think of Lithgow as speaking with a Mid-Atlantic accent, he does a great job affecting one for the role. That is the tendency of Americans trying to sound more British, or Brits trying to sound more Yank, to split the difference and speak in an accent whose home ground is no real country but somewhere in the middle of the sea. This speech pattern might be common among US expatriates in the UK, of which Grossman would seem to represent just the most ostentatious example. Whee!! The Writers won the game with a home run in extra innings, but the highlight was Plimptons hit. As Poling puts it, George was known as an unrivaled raconteur and, in making a film of his life story, it only seemed natural to allow him to tell it.. He is also credited with saving, Learn how and when to remove this template message, Plimpton! 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. 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. Plimpton played Tom Hanks's antagonistic father in Volunteers. 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." 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. [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. Mia had the perfect model! I just heard that George Plimpton has died. So think of Margaret Anderson or Amanda and you can place George. The Left Bank really became East 72nd Street. He wrote for the Harvard Lampoon, was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club, Pi Eta, the Signet Society, and the Porcellian Club. #1 was Who Was the Last American to Speak This Way, #3 is Class-War Edition, and #4 is The Origin Story., Who Was the Last American to Speak This Way. George . One night Joe DiMaggio was here, and they had never met, so I introduced them. And here for the full interview). That life couldnt contain him, hed burst its seams like it was an old coat two sizes too small. He rounded first as if he were about to go for a double, then glided back to the base, with fans waving and cheering. 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. Big, tall, good-looking guy, easy-going. In 1992, Plimpton married Sarah Whitehead Dudley, a graduate of Columbia University and a freelance writer. Dan Rather certainly marks the definitive end of the newsreel style and the ascendance of the folksy vernacular: those rustic analogies! Youll get another shot at the big time, trust me. Could it be fairly said that Plimptom had it? The Cuban revolutionaries, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, had just marched on Havana and ousted the US-supported dictator Fulgencio Batista. Queen Elizabeth doesnt say car, and neither did Franklin D. Roosevelt, nor did the newsreel announcers or movie actors of his day. (The filmmakers assembled his voice-over from recorded speeches and other archival footage.) Ill try to give a representative range, and I am grateful for the care and thought that have gone into these responses. Labov suspected that WWII had something to do about it. 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. After his discharge, Plimpton returned to Harvard and finished his undergraduate education. Among other challenges for Sports Illustrated, he attempted to play top-level bridge, and spent some time as a high-wire circus performer. We made $15,000-20,000. [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. Her mother, a writer and critic for Commonweal and Catholic World. Between 1945 and 1948, Plimpton was a soldier in the United States Army. That made him a great storyteller. He would have a beer with you. He was smooth. By strange coincidence, I actually became quite good friends with his (ex-)in-laws here in Manhattan. George Plimpton Wiki: Salary, Married, Wedding, Spouse, Family . At the time, he was getting ready to pitch for the Yankees,and we would throw pitches across 72nd Street in preparation. 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]. I have decided, he said, that I have got to jump from a plane. He looked like a very eccentric old Englishman. He appeared in the PBS American Masters documentary on Andy Warhol. I never thought that George slept. Richard Howard, poetry editor, the Paris Review:I worked with George for 10 years on the magazine. George had three siblings: Francis Taylor Pearsons Plimpton Jr., Oakes Ames Plimpton,[15] and Sarah Gay Plimpton. 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. I had George tell him the story of Sidd Finch. Just listen to very early recordings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, back even before microphones, when singers had to yell directly into a large cone and over-enunciate so that their voices would be recorded into something intelligible on a spinning wax cylinder or disk. He had the bearing of Gen. MacArthur, but the soul of Charlie Chaplin. 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. After the technology improved the need to speak so histrionically went away, and so did "announcer English.". But for now, just one more category: 3) Changing technology, changing voices. But the gentleman amateur - a Harvard. 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. "[25] He had a recurring role as the grandfather of Dr. Carter on the NBC series ER. Robert Silvers, editor, the New York Review of Books:I met George on the Ile Saint-Louis in 1953 as I was leaving NATO headquarters. Return of the Big Bopper. He's a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. But its clear that the diction I call Announcer Voice has been the object of close linguistic study. Mr . He saw athletes as heroes he. The Sidd Finch story was accompanied by a series of photos which managed to convince even the eagle-eyed fans . But he came right down to our level. If you were making a speech in a large hall, or speaking on the radio, you needed to enunciate very clearly and use a lot of emphases to be sure your audience could understand what you were saying. He also served as editor of the Harvard Lampoon. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. His father co-founded the law firm Debevoise Plimpton. The Wikipedia entry for it is quite detailed. [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. Plimpton's most memorable writings involved him inserting himself into a daunting situation about which he knew . Plimpton, George 1927-2003(George Ames Plimpton) Source for information on Plimpton, George 1927-2003: Concise Major 21st Century Writers dictionary. Friends were almost always happy to see him because you knew he was bound to improve your mood. 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. 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. 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? NYC speech in the sixties, in some ways, flipped prestige markers. He was very understanding of what we did and how we did it. 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. Ill pick you up., I had a hard time sleeping that night, as you might imagine. $ 9.19 - $ 32.19. Rose Styron, wife of William Styron and former Paris Review editor:My husband Bill was with George when he started the Paris Review. **. [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. Talking about sports with Georgeor, even better, reading George about sportswas more fun than sports themselves. The film used archival audio and video of Plimpton lecturing and reading to create a posthumous narration. I didnt know he was from the Larchmont area. Plimpton appeared in the 1989 documentary The Tightrope Dancer which featured the life and the work of the artist Vali Myers. And so it seemed only fitting to commemorate his death with the form he made his own.Meghan ORourke. I have worked as poetry editor with editors on other magazines; only with George has the experience been entirely agreeable. After finishing at Harvard in 1950, he attended King's College, Cambridge, from 1950 to 1952, and graduated with third class honors in English. Plimpton was an omnipresence for much of American cultural lifeboth high and lowin the last third of the 20th century. (This is not to belittle Lowell Thomas, but to recognize the artifice that served him so well in his career). He was respected by all. And I, of course, was looking them over, too. Okay, then, are you saying that Plimpton has such as accent? :rolleyes: Ive got news for you, buddy, youre not even second in line! With such a useful explanation, why do I gripe about the name? The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. Yes he is gone. Congratulations Carnac, for posting about George Plimptons death at 3:44 PM. Articles From This Author. 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. In no way do I recall Plimpton talking in a way that is typically associated with LLa style which, as I understand it, is associated with unclear pronunciation of most consonant cluster. Plimpton had a quasi-Brit patrician accent, which in no way corresponds with the official descriptions of LL that Ive read on the Net. In fact, my dads farewells seemed loquacious in comparison to his mothers. Starring George Plimpton as Himself" - is meant as a wink-wink to Plimpton's career as a "participatory journalist." As a writer for Sports . These experiences served as the basis of another football book, Mad Ducks and Bears, although much of the book dealt with the off-field escapades and observations of football friends Alex Karras ("Mad Duck") and John Gordy ("Bear"). 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. Of the Murrow Boys, Eric Sevareid held on to the newsreel style the longest; relying on memory, Im betting that we could actually watch the transition away from that to a more vernacular style in the long career of Walter Cronkite. George Plimpton, the New York aristocrat and literary journalist whose career was a happy lifelong competition between scholarly pursuits and madcap attempts -- chronicled in self-deprecating. He was stationed primarily in Italy, where he worked as a tank driver. In the early 60s, when I was working at the firework plant with my dad [Felix Grucci], George would pull up in shiny red sports car on his way to the Hamptons. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review. He hosted Disney Channel's Mouseterpiece Theater (a Masterpiece Theatre spoof which featured Disney cartoon shorts). 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. It was horrifying.. Now, in George, Being George, 200 friends, lovers and rivals detail Plimpton's remarkable exploits. 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. 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. People two or three deep stood looking out at the East River. 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. [11], His mother was Pauline Ames,[12] the daughter of botanist Oakes Ames (1874-1950) and artist Blanche Ames. Hearing the words Dammit, Im mad as a hornet! uttered in George Plimptons voice made anger sound totally ridiculous, which is exactly what it most often is. A lifelong New Yorker, he never tasted a bagel or an olive, and he never chewed a stick of gum. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2007. Think of the accent of Jane Hathaway on the Beverly Hillbillies. Even the most basic conversation was often a struggle. 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. Besides, third is a very respectable showing! So it was that George Plimptons accent could not be imitated. Plimpton brought the Left Bank to NYCpeople like Peter Mathiessen, William Styron, Terry Southern. Plimpton died on September 25, 2003, in his New York City apartment from a heart attack later determined to have been caused by a catecholamine surge. Premiring on June 21st at the SilverDocs festival, in Washington, D.C., and directed by Tom Bean and Luke Poling, the film contains interviews with notable friends and peers like Hugh Hefner, Peter Matthiessen, and James Lipton, though the majority of this remarkable account is narrated by none other than George Plimpton. What exactly is a Boston Brahmin accent? 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. Hed done it in Amsterdam, Moscow, and London; hed done it at a PEN benefit; and now he and Norman were going to do it in Cuba. 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.