George was the one who read my name out to the commissioner. [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. 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. If he couldnt be taken quite seriously, that was fine with him (he took himself lightly, and relished being in on the joke). He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review. Yes indeed, George Plimpton is a man for all seasons. [28], Plimpton was a demolitions expert in the post-World War II Army. 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. He was smooth. To me, Mid-Atlantic English is the nom juste for a related but distinct phenomenon (which is also mentioned in Wikipedia). 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. Kaltenborn was a famous mid . He came from a family where such endearments were not expressed, and phone conversations were curt. So think of Margaret Anderson or Amanda and you can place George. Starring George Plimpton as Himself" - is meant as a wink-wink to Plimpton's career as a "participatory journalist." As a writer for Sports . 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. Thats a common name for such an accent. Off screen, George Plimpton and Gore Vidal come to mind. I dont give a rats ass about informing anyone about the death of Plimpton. *Originally posted by bordelond * [35], Plimpton was known for his distinctive accent which, by Plimpton's own admission, was often mistaken for an English accent. I think that perhaps Harris' portrayal of Dr. Smith made the accent so identified with cowardly buffoonery that no one in the baby boom generation and later would want to use the accent as anything other than a joke. 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. Paul McCartney and his then-girlfriend Heather showed up. [5][6][7][8][9][10] His father was a successful corporate lawyer and partner of the law firm Debevoise and Plimpton; he was appointed by President John F. Kennedy as U.S. deputy ambassador to the United Nations, serving from 1961 to 1965. At Harvard, Plimpton was a classmate and close personal friend of Robert F. Kennedy. 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. That he died in his sleep was impressive. 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. Plimpton was .the public face of the New York intellectual: tweedy, eclectic and with a plummy accent he himself described as "Eastern seaboard cosmopolitan." . He did these jobs, and many others, as an amateur.. 08:37 Dinner at Elaine's. by George Plimpton. After running the pilot, Rod Serling realized the narration needed a less pompous sounding and more natural voice himself. (Newsreels ran in movie theaters, of course: what better critique of the high newsreel style than the new movies that jarred against it?). [47][48] He had, for instance, a series of antiquated phrases and terms of affection. Buckley clearly flaunts it, probably to set himself apart from the hoi polloi of his contemporaries. How do I know you're not George Plimpton? But the average person never talked that way. **Oh, I suppose we should all just lavish praise upon Carnac the Magnificent now for bringing this to your attention, is that it? Ive known him forsix months and I just now learned hes not English!. It was a great partyraucous and long. Read more in this thread (long). During a career that spanned the second half of the 20th century, Plimpton was a quarterback for the Detroit Lions, pitched at Yankee Stadium, sparred with Archie Moore, played the triangle with. George was a little more in-depth than a lot of us, of course, with his education and all. Quite sad, as he just had a daughter not many years back. BTW, I cant imagine a presidential candidate today getting anywhere close to a nomination with FDRs accent, cigarette holder, and aristocratic bearing. 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. Plimpton sparred for three rounds with boxing greats Archie Moore and Sugar Ray Robinson while on assignment for Sports Illustrated. Think of the accent of Jane Hathaway on the Beverly Hillbillies. **. Plimpton's remarkable life is showcased in a documentary that is. He looked for ways in which he could make himself a ridiculous figure, and not only on the football field, but in all walks of life. [32] When lit, the firework remained on the ground and exploded, blasting a crater 35 feet (11m) wide and 10 feet (3.0m) deep. This was his habit. [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. The young Paris Review editor and other New York literary figures arrived during a period marked by hope for a democratic Cuba. That was the last party for a while., I just got back from a road trip from Michigan. So we got together and, after some preliminaries, he popped the question that he was really there to ask. Hemingway on Fiction, Part Two. 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. The point of the flipped prestige markers is that generally the fewer the Rs, the fancier the person. The clearest example of the Mid-Atlantic accent is the accent of the Frasier & Niles Crane characters on the TV show Frasier. Cambridge. ), this isnt some kind of morbid contest to see who can be the first to inform the board of some celebritys death. 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. Yes he is gone. But its clear that the diction I call Announcer Voice has been the object of close linguistic study. He saw athletes as heroes he. 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. *Originally posted by cuauhtemoc * Of course, I think he enjoyed the odd persona his voice and mannerisms conferred on him. 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. With such a useful explanation, why do I gripe about the name? The wife is also old money, as Phlosphr mentions, and she talks exactly the same way. 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. Plimpton and Dudley were the parents of twin daughters Laura Dudley Plimpton and Olivia Hartley Plimpton. Powered by Discourse, best viewed with JavaScript enabled. Its our anniversary. 3: Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Old money, would never say the word spanky, and certainly had more money than God could count. From looking at Labovs study, I know today, as I didnt know yesterday, that linguists use the term rhotic to describe whether a person pronounces, or doesnt, the R sound before a consonant or at the end of a word. When George told the story, DiMaggio laughed so hard I thought he was going to fall on the floor. Alan Alda, portraying my dad in the movie version of Paper Lion (his book on playing quarterback for the Detroit Lions), didnt bother with his voice at all. Mia had the perfect model! Plimpton entered Harvard as a member of the Class of 1948, but did not graduate until 1950 due to intervening military service. 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?. Revolutionary musket, a stairwell and a housemaster), 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. 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. George Plimpton writer, publisher, amateur lion tamer died in 2003 after 50 years as the founding editor of The Paris Review. For instance: Mid-Atlantic English was the dominant dialect among the Northeastern American upper class through the first half of the 20th century. This periodical has carried great weight in the literary world, but has never been financially strong; for its first half-century, it was allegedly largely financed by its publishers and by Plimpton. 1 draft choice of the Lions in 1965. He has the same type of patrician upper-class New Yorker accent as Jane Wyatt. Typical of George to laugh about something others saw as a defining traithe never took himself all that seriously. Butch, he says, because he always called me Butch. No matter where he was, or who he wasquarterback, trapeze artist, Philharmonic triangle-playerhis voice never changed, proving that you can be whomever you want to be without ever abandoning yourself. 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. I enjoy doing it. Thats it, George cried out. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Shoot! hed hiss, when he was mad. George Plimpton. George Plimpton, Out of My League: The Classic Account of an Amateur's Ordeal in Professional Baseball, 2016, Little His experience was captured in the book Out of My League. Indeed, the police deposition the filmmakers managed to uncover may be the only time my dad ever spoke about the tragedy, publicly or privately. I hope not. "I've decided to stay over here in . O ne afternoon this summer, I sat in George Plimpton's study waiting for the gentleman editor, participatory journalist, and beloved gadfly of American letters to arrive. Mr . George Plimpton. 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." Now you know! 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. 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. Mr. Plimpton was born in Manhattan in 1927 and raised in Huntington, L.I. **Those of us whose families are from Larchmont (that would be me) just call it lockjaw. Except at parties. When he was on the scene, everything was a big happeningan event. These interviews are a collaborative effort, and, I believe, a fascinating contribution to literary history. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review, as well as his patrician demeanor and accent. Among other challenges for Sports Illustrated, he attempted to play top-level bridge, and spent some time as a high-wire circus performer. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. And here for the full interview). I thoroughly enjoyed listening to these men speak. Havent heard that term in years. Orson Welles also comes to mind, though I noticed he spoke in this mode more often during his early days, on and off screen. Plimpton was a writer-raconteur and dilettante in the best sense of the word: He co-founded an important literary magazine, the . 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. Congratulations Carnac, for posting about George Plimptons death at 3:44 PM. Starring George Plimpton as Himself, the writer James Salter said of Plimpton that "he was writing in a genre that really doesn't permit greatness. (What else happened that year??? We worked at the Paris Review on the Rue Garanere for several years together. 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. George Plimpton was a literary man about town who did it all, from co-founding The Paris . He had the bearing of Gen. MacArthur, but the soul of Charlie Chaplin. *Originally posted by Phlosphr * Off screen, George Plimpton and Gore Vidal come to mind. That life couldnt contain him, hed burst its seams like it was an old coat two sizes too small. Update: This post is #2 in the announcer-speak series. (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? 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.
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