George, Being George Read online

  GEORGE,

  BEING GEORGE

  CONTENTS

  __

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE: A PLAUSIBLE METAPHOR

  I.

  GEORGE’S STORIED BACKGROUND

  II.

  SIGHTINGS OF GEORGE AT SCHOOL: 1934–1952

  III.

  CREATION MYTHS OF THE PARIS REVIEW: 1952–1955

  IV.

  MOUNTING CELEBRITY: 1955–1963

  V.

  GEORGE AGOG: 1963–1973

  VI.

  PUSS AND MISTER PUSS: 1973–1983

  VII.

  GEORGE IS GEORGE TO THE END: 1983–2003

  EPILOGUE: BLESSED GEORGE, WHO COULD BLESS

  EDITOR’S NOTE: HOW THIS BOOK WAS MADE

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

  BOOKS BY GEORGE PLIMPTON

  COPYRIGHT

  For Dee and Arabella with love

  GEORGE,

  BEING GEORGE

  PROLOGUE:

  A PLAUSIBLE METAPHOR

  ____

  BUDDY BURNISKE I don’t know whether most people have a yearning for ecstatic experience, but George certainly did, and it was no secret. You saw it most sensationally in his love of fireworks. He really did live a life punctuated by fireworks, his fireworks, which produced ecstatic oohs and aahs but then instead of burning out would somehow generate the energy for another explosion. Ecstasy after ecstasy. But again, there was nothing secretive about this great appetite of his. He wanted to share it with as many of his friends as possible. I remember watching him in the Hamptons at a Fourth of July picnic. That’s when George seemed to me most at peace—he was just, “Look at this, golly, this is marvelous!”

  PIEDY LUMET Long ago, when George was in his mid-twenties and in Madrid hunting for Hemingway to do an interview for The Paris Review, he and I went out one evening and happened upon a square where four little ancient medieval streets came together. There were homemade fireworks going off, and big pieces of the shell would drop down in flames from above. I found it quite terrifying, these strange flaming particles with a lot of weight to them, falling onto the crowd, but George was transfixed with joy. I remember his face, his mouth wide open in a smile of pure delight.

  Fortieth Anniversary celebration for The Paris Review,

  East Hampton, 1993. Photograph © Sara Barrett.

  FELIX GRUCCI, JR. Our family came to know George when he used to drive out to the Hamptons during the summers in the early 1960s and stopped off at my dad’s fireworks factory in Bell-port. He struck up a conversation with my father and began a relationship. Eventually it grew to the point where George—this was when he lived in Wainscott—would have us to his Bastille Day party, and we brought a fireworks show, a little one, just a tiny backyard fireworks show. George was supposed to take care of the details of getting the permit. That never happened, but since it was little pops here and there, it never bothered anybody. But over the years it became a mammoth fireworks show in the potato fields behind his house. So much so that the municipality said to George, “You can’t do this anymore.” And George said, “Well, why not? We’ve been doing it now for many years.” And they got into a little bit of fisticuffs because the woman at the municipality said, “If you do this, we’re going to arrest you, we’re going to arrest the Gruccis, we’re going to stop your party, and there’s going to be lights flashing and everything else.” So we get there, we’re setting up, and the next thing you know, as the party is unfolding, wailing fire trucks and police guards come, they hose everything down, all the fireworks, so that you can’t fire them. No one got arrested, but it was the end of the fireworks behind George’s house.

  WILLIAM STYRON It was just a moment which was so perfectly George. He was doing the Bicentennial of the City of New York. There was a huge parade from the Battery up to Washington Square, a monster parade. And George asked Rose and me to sit with him in a horse-drawn carriage with a sign, a very big sign on the side, saying, “Fireworks Commissioner City of New York.” I just recall the absolute delight that he took—the three of us, as a matter of fact, but especially George—in bowing to the crowd, passing people who were saying, “Jesus, I don’t believe it, a fireworks commissioner!” I remember that as an example of George’s joy in being George.

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON George loved parades. He grew up on Fifth Avenue and could see the St. Patrick’s Day parade from his apartment. This was close enough to his birthday, he told me once, so that he thought for a while that the parade was for him. I thought of this many years later when George had to go to MacArthur Airport to do a fireworks show, and asked me to come along. The limo arrived to pick us up with, for some reason, a motorcycle escort. Here we are screaming down Second Avenue with sirens and lights, and into the Midtown Tunnel. George was so pleased with himself. He winked at me and said, “Stick with me, kiddo!”

  RICHARD PRICE The thing that I liked about George was that he was this combination of Long Island lockjaw and “Why can’t I do that?” We were put on this earth to go on safari, and fly on a trapeze, and put on football helmets, and be commissioner of fireworks. I have a hard time having fun, period, and he was the paragon of fun.

  REMAR SUTTON The first time I met George was back in—oh God, in ’71. I knew of him, of course, but we also had a good mutual friend, Bill Curry, the great football player he wrote One More July with. I invited George to fly down to Florida to have some fun. I’ve always liked to do things for fun, and our county, Brevard County, where the Kennedy Space Center is, was in a lot of trouble—the space program was winding down, the place was going to pot, so I decided we had to bring some good publicity to the county. So with George and the Gruccis we set off the biggest firework ever, one ton. This was the famous Fat Man [actually George’s second of that name; his first, on Long Island, had been a dud, “the world’s lowest firework,” according to the Guinness record book; the original, of course, exploded over Nagasaki]. We were going to hide it in the middle of the Indian River. We took the mortar out to a small sandbar, buried it, and on the appointed day we took all the press out there, along with Fat Man. It was supposed to be shot off in about ten to fifteen minutes, when all of a sudden, by mistake, one of the Gruccis accidentally hit the delay starter and he yelled, “My God, it’s going to go!” There were about fourteen of us who had to fit in one boat, which got stuck in the sand for too, too long. But then we gunned it and away we went. As we’re tearing away, the Fat Man explodes and sends a shock wave that cracked the foundations of two houses and broke ten thousand dollars’ worth of windows and set off every alarm within twenty miles. By the time we came to shore, the police were there to arrest George and me. George leaned over to me and said one word: “Marvelous.”

  KURT ANDERSEN My family called me “Explodo.” I was mostly into big explosions, and that’s what George planned for a Lampoon festivity in 1976. We made the largest explosive fireworks ever [Fat Man III]—over Boston, anyway. It was a folly, as much of the Lampoon is a folly, in the best sense. George’s interest in pursuing beautiful, purposeless ventures of various kinds was what I admired most about him.

  ROSE STYRON The first thing I remember of George’s love of fireworks was when he brought a display to John Marquand’s place on Martha’s Vineyard. He carried the fireworks in his bag across three borders, illegally—by plane, train, and ferry. When he got to Martha’s Vineyard, we went out to Marquand’s beach. It was the day before the Fourth of July, and we set it up on the beach, and it all went off and was tremendous fun. George was breathing a sigh of relief that nobody had arrested him. And all of a sudden, all these Army planes flew over. It was the same year they had the movie The Russians Are Coming, and somebody had al
erted Otis Air Force Base that they’d seen fires, rockets, bombs, explosions of all sorts—but not fireworks. And they sent the whole Air Force over to see what was happening. And George thought, “Oh, my God,” and packed everything up and fled the island, leaving John Marquand to face the music with the cops.

  Fat Man III, Indian River, Florida. Photograph © Bill Kilborn (1977).

  FREDDY ESPY PLIMPTON One year, George decided to do a Bastille Day fireworks because Ted Kennedy was coming to stay. We were renting on Gardiners Bay at that time, and George wanted to do a party for Ted, a dinner and fireworks. Well, the long and short of it is that the cops and fire department came, of course, and, after noting that Ted Kennedy was there, they arrested George, who hadn’t, of course, got a permit. It wasn’t a major show, but it was major enough that neighbors saw it and complained. There was a lot of talk that they hated Kennedy out there. Perhaps Chappaquiddick was still on people’s minds. Anyway, George got dragged off in handcuffs and slammed into the back of a police car. We were flabbergasted. We were saying things like “You can’t do that! You can’t—that’s George Plimpton!” The cops were really mean. Teddy got him out, because, needless to say, he had a lawyer with him. When Ted’s lawyer brought George back, he was very pale and very much in shock. He said, “I don’t understand, I don’t understand why they had to do that. If they do that to me, imagine what they do to poor people.” He was going to make sure to get a permit from then on. Soon afterward, though, he turned it into a lighthearted story.

  PATRICIA STORACE His attachment to fireworks—I mean, I can understand that; I love them, too. But look at how extraordinary they are, and how ephemeral. They’re beautiful, beautiful, but sometimes you can think there’s nothing sadder than fireworks. They’re beautiful feats, but there is no more mortal art.

  I.

  GEORGE’S STORIED BACKGROUND

  ____

  George talked about his family background endlessly. The whole family, his mother especially, had an extraordinary knowledge of the glories of their past generations. As his wife, I heard all the stories many times. One story George loved was “Pull up your bowels, sir!” which is what General Adelbert Ames, “the Boy General,” used to say when reviewing the men of the 20th Maine, maybe at Gettysburg when they drove back Pickett’s Charge. It was George’s way of saying, “Get a grip!”

  —SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON

  ANCESTORS

  SARAH GAY PLIMPTON Our mother may have looked down on Daddy a bit. It wasn’t his fault, of course, but Daddy wasn’t an Ames.

  TIMOTHY DICKINSON It is something to be an Ames in New England. The Ameses have been around, making themselves felt, for a substantial time in that part of the world. But the fact that the two prominent Ames families in George’s family tree were called the “Maine Ameses,” for their non-Boston origins, and the “shovel Ameses,” for the homely origins of their wealth . . . well, that tells you something about their position in the New England hierarchy. It’s not like being a Winthrop, a Cabot, a Forbes, a Lowell, a Saltonstall, or a Lawrence—to be one of the families whom one is never surprised, no matter how questionable their manners, to see in the Somerset Club. I guess George embraced that New England identity, with the Ameses carrying the Plimptons—socially, so to speak. But it was, as I say, not that final New England eminence, which features no more than a dozen families.

  PHOEBE LEGERE I don’t know how George and I got into a discussion about genealogy—at Elaine’s!—but we were talking about how both of our mothers are in the Mayflower Society. At Society meetings, you know, they read off the names of the Mayflower passengers, and when the name of your ancestor comes up, you stand. So I asked George, “From whom are you descended?” He said, “I don’t know, but my mother stands up five or six times.” I just loved that.

  OAKES PLIMPTON Adelbert Ames, our great-grandfather, was the hero in our family tree. He was the youngest general in the Civil War, a Medal of Honor winner, and the officer who trained and commanded the 20th Maine at Gettysburg, in fact throughout the war. Afterwards, under Reconstruction, in the South, he became governor, then senator, then governor again of Mississippi. He married Blanche Butler during this time, a daughter of another famous general, Benjamin Butler, who was a Radical Republican congressman from Lowell, Massachusetts. Adelbert and Blanche Ames had a daughter—also named Blanche—and she married a shovel Ames, Oakes Ames. Grandfather was a serious Harvard professor of botany who was the son and nephew of Oliver and Oakes Ames of the Crédit Mobilier scandal. Grandma and Grandpa Ames lived in Boston and in North Easton, Massachusetts, where they built this big stone house on the shovel Ames family estate, near the factory. They had four children, one of them our mother, Pauline, who married our father, Francis T. P. Plimpton, and they had four children: George, “T.P.,” me, and Sarah, in that order.

  JOAN AMES I never knew our great-grandmother Blanche Butler, Adelbert’s wife, but she must have been a remarkable woman. She and Adelbert wrote hundreds of wonderful letters to each other. Before their wedding, she warned him, “I have not the least intention of making that promise,” meaning the vow of obedience. In another letter to Adelbert, who’s in Mississippi now, she recounts her adventure of going swimming “boy fashion” with her sister Kate one night at the Butler summer place on Cape Ann. It’s beautifully written, seductive really, and Adelbert writes back that he took a night swim in the Gulf of Mexico a few weeks later, so as to share in her experience.

  Benjamin F. Butler.

  Adelbert Ames.

  Blanche Butler Ames.

  All courtesy of the National Archives.

  OAKES PLIMPTON Adelbert Ames came from Rockland, Maine, from a family that wasn’t so fancy as the shovel Ameses or so rich as the Butlers. As a great champion of black civil rights in the South he failed, for sure, but only when the establishment Republicans up in Washington, many of them hot abolitionists before the war, deserted the cause in the 1870s. That’s when the North began turning against Radical Republicans like Adelbert and Butler, picking up the South’s curse word for them, “carpetbaggers.” You can find the same sneer, directed at Adelbert, in Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, published in the late 1950s. In the South, Adelbert was so hated that Jesse James and his gang of bank robbers, all ex-Confederates, rode all the way up to Northfield, Minnesota, where they heard he was visiting, in hopes of killing him. They didn’t get him, of course. He lived to be ninety-seven—the oldest surviving Union officer—and George actually met him. He was only six, but he always liked to say, “I’ve looked into the eyes of the man who repulsed Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg.”

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON George told me they’d met in the garden. George was terrified of him, he was so very old and so severe. His great-grandfather leaned over and picked up a stick and fiercely snapped it in two and said, “Life ends like that, boy.”

  WILLIAM BECKER I remember one time in the early 1960s when George and I visited his grandmother Blanche in North Easton. She was an extraordinary woman. According to George, she became incensed at JFK’s characterization of her father, General Ames, as a carpetbagger and wrote letter after letter to the president, demanding that he rectify the calumny in subsequent editions. Finally she asked George to intercede with Kennedy, who he knew, of course. As George told the story, JFK approached him at a White House party begging him to persuade his grandmother to stop writing these scolding letters. George said he told the president that it might be easier to remove the slander. JFK said he would but in fact did not. Whereupon, at age eighty or so, Blanche Ames commenced writing a massive biography of her father. I have it, and it’s quite good.

  OAKES PLIMPTON Grandmother Ames was a lot of fun and figured out all these projects. She thought of this whole idea of a composting toilet and actually got patents for it. She prospected for oil on the Butler ranch in New Mexico; the company was called the Praying Mantis because that’s what the oil rigs reminded her of. Unfortunately, they never struck oil. She was a suffragist and wa
s also one of the people who started the Birth Control League in the 1930s; I think she even invented a contraceptive device. When some people began talking about eugenics, she quit. She was also an artist. She painted these incredible, lovely paintings of her husband’s orchid collection; and she did landscapes and portraits. One drawing that this curator woman found was of a woman on the cross. Her feminism was one of those generational things. My mother was not a feminist.

  JOAN AMES Some part of George’s income (and mine, for that matter) surely came from trust funds established by our great-great-grandfather Butler. Some came from the shovel Ameses, too, but Butler made lots of money as a lawyer after the Civil War. He was a social and political upstart in Massachusetts—most definitely not a Brahmin—and his wealth didn’t stop him from winning the governorship of Massachusetts on the slogan “A friend of the working man.” Which I believe he was: As governor, he appointed the first Irishman and the first African American to judgeships. There is a strong streak of unconventionality in the Butler line of our family.

  ROWAN GAITHER Butler is most famous, I suppose, for that infamous order which he promulgated as military governor of New Orleans. George kept a framed copy of it on his kitchen wall. It said that any woman who disrespected a Union soldier would be assumed to be a lady of the evening and treated as such. George also loved the story that Butler had been asked by Lincoln to be his vice president and that Butler had said, “I will agree to do so only if you promise to die.” So the job went to someone else.