. My dad could never say what he feltnot reallyand neither can any of us. They all gathered there. With such a useful explanation, why do I gripe about the name? To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Next up: some sociological explanations of why someone like George Gershwin might have tried to speak like Westbrook Van Voorhis. 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. #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. I think he came down [to the shooting of Paper Lion in] Florida once. In the 50s Plimpton and staff came to New York, where they kept the Review going for half a century. You're going to play for us-making some sort of big comeback." "That's right," Plimpton replied in his patrician accent. He also appeared in a featurette about Edie Sedgwick found on the Ciao! And his apartment, with those windows that looked out onto the East River, became a famous landmark in NYC. 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. The name George Plimpton is synonymous with a kind of all-in participatory journalism. You should be very grateful. Shed wandered out to the balcony of a lonely Manhattan cocktail party, and was standing out there, smoking a cigarette and looking down mournfully at the street far below, when from behind her she heard a voice: I know a better way down.. Plimpton would not boast of his feat, so we did. The opposing team: the Detroit Lions. George also approved, I think, of the fact that I lost. Elaine Kaufman, owner of Elaines restaurant:Over the 40 years I knew him, George came in often, sometimes twice a week, usually on his way back from a cocktail party. For instance: The American-British television presenter Loyd Grossman, who has described his accent as Mid-Atlantic. In 1955 or 56, he went back to New York. In the April 1, 1985 issue of Sports Illustrated, Plimpton pulled off a widely reported April Fools' Day prank. **. I just knew it was going to be something terrible. So it was that my father played himself not just in movies and on TV, but in life, too. Butch, he says, because he always called me Butch. YESTERDAY IS NOT FAR AWAY. His response was "no, just affected.". By George Plimpton. 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. I can understand your frustration, but celebrities die every day. 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. Showdown in the Pits. 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 thoroughly enjoyed listening to these men speak. Several readers wrote in with specimens of Americans who had gone to England and ended up speaking in this mid-Atlantic way. 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. 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. My dad and I could not lose each other, but we could never quite find each other, either. **Those of us whose families are from Larchmont (that would be me) just call it lockjaw. I only wish I could not tell him again, just one more time. He knew we were just as good as he was, but in a different field. Return of the Big Bopper. The primary reason [for the accent] was primitive microphone technology: "natural" voices simply did not get picked up well by the microphones of the time, and people were instructed to and learned to speak in such a way that their words could be best transmitted through the microphone to the radio waves or to recording media. [3] During the summers, he lived in the hamlet of West Hills, Huntington, Suffolk County on Long Island. What was our problem? 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. Ill try to give a representative range, and I am grateful for the care and thought that have gone into these responses. As an old film buff, I am used to this voice, though it figures unevenly in old movies. Youll get another shot at the big time, trust me. In 2013, the documentary Plimpton! 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. History / Biographical Note Biographical Note. 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. That made him a great storyteller. He was going to put on a reading of his play Zelda, Scott, and Ernest. He was a great addition to the human race. She is the product of a line of the original Dutch settlers of New York and grew up in Tuxedo Park and the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan, very exclusive. Was it him? Realizing that I probably didnt know anyone, George took me around the room to introduce me to his guestsWilliam Styron, Norman Mailer, Robert Stone, and Gay Talese among them. But the gentleman amateur - a Harvard. The Writer's Chapbook A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice from the Twentieth Century's Preeminent Writers. Losing, he knew, always makes a better story than winning. After several problems with transporting and preparing the fireworks, Plimpton and Grucci became the first competitors from the United States to win the event. [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. 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. **Oh, I suppose we should all just lavish praise upon Carnac the Magnificent now for bringing this to your attention, is that it? His dish was Spaghetti Bolognese. 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. Ive known him forsix months and I just now learned hes not English!. Are you saying that the denizens of Larchmont sound like Plimpton did? "[27], Plimpton was a member of the cast of the A&E TV series A Nero Wolfe Mystery (200102). Plimpton brought the Left Bank to NYCpeople like Peter Mathiessen, William Styron, Terry Southern. Plimpton entered Harvard as a member of the Class of 1948, but did not graduate until 1950 due to intervening military service. Timothy Seldes, George Plimptons literary agent:Whenever George wanted me to do something for him, he would call me up and say, Hello, Old Tim. One day, I got a call, and heard his voice, and my heart sank. [37] His son, Taylor, described it as a mixture of "old New England, old New York, tinged with a hint of King's College King's English."[14]. He had it, as does/did William Buckley, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Julia Child. You heard it and it could only be him. 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. 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. Look out, Wilson! In 1992, Plimpton married Sarah Whitehead Dudley, a graduate of Columbia University and a freelance writer. (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? [33] A later attempt, fired at Cape Canaveral, rose approximately 50 feet (15m) into the air and broke 700 windows in Titusville, Florida. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. With the evolution of talkies in the late 1920s, voice was first heard in motion pictures. Read more in this thread (long). [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. To me, Mid-Atlantic English is the nom juste for a related but distinct phenomenon (which is also mentioned in Wikipedia). Those of us whose families are from Larchmont (that would be me) just call it lockjaw. [23] He was also notable for his appearance in television commercials during the early 1980s, including a memorable campaign for Mattel's Intellivision. 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?. These interviews are a collaborative effort, and, I believe, a fascinating contribution to literary history. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. The most recent was about how to extend the swing though impact, and the trick, George said, was to station an imaginary dwarf several feet in front of your ball and then (you have to re-create those broad Plimptonian vowels here) smack the dwarf in the ass. I dont know whether it works, because I cant think of it without laughing. Finally I did. The journal, which had operated out of his home, moved downtown. [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]. Plimpton's remarkable life is showcased in a documentary that is. Between 2000 and 2003, Plimpton wrote the libretto to a new opera, Animal Tales, commissioned by Family Opera Initiative, with music by Kitty Brazelton directed by Grethe Barrett Holby. [21] The prank was so successful that many readers believed the story, and the ensuing popularity of the joke resulted in Plimpton's writing an entire book on Finch. He was "George Plimpton"-editor, host . It was as if he was trying out again. George was a little more in-depth than a lot of us, of course, with his education and all. I dont give a rats ass about informing anyone about the death of Plimpton. May a diseased yak squat in your hot tub. 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. $ 9.19 - $ 32.19. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd's deciding about yogaand his future in baseball. 26 Feb 2023 12:18:23 Oh now, Im joking, Carnac ( see? She was the daughter of writers Willard R. Espy[39] and Hilda S. Cole, who had, earlier in her career, been a publicity agent for Kate Smith and Fred Waring. He looked like a very eccentric old Englishman. "[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. He was a Wasp (both of his parents came from old New England families, and had ancestors on the Mayflower). [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. That is, until I saw the documentarythe assassination of his dear friend Bobby Kennedy. [31][32][33] His firework, a Roman candle named "Fat Man",[31][32][33] weighed 720 pounds (330kg)[31] and was expected to rise to 1,000 feet (300m)[33] or more[31] and deliver a wide starburst. 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]. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. Just in time for the Sixties, with all their other pressures towards some kind of anti-Eisenhower authenticity. Read more in this thread (long). *Originally posted by CBCD * He wrote for the Harvard Lampoon, was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club, Pi Eta, the Signet Society, and the Porcellian Club. And he stood there ebullient and charming all night; he bid on many items himself. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. If you didnt know the man, you could, I think, be fooled by the voice. During my fight, my nose got badly broken in the second round, but I did last all four scheduled rounds, though I lost. Too old-fashioned. [citation needed], Outside the literary world, Plimpton was famous for competing in professional sporting events and then recording the experience from the point of view of an amateur. During our time in Paris, he had a famous little car, a dark blue Peugeotit was mine originally; I sold it to himand it had to be seen to be believed. Besides, third is a very respectable showing! 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. So think of Margaret Anderson or Amanda and you can place George. Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. But its clear that the diction I call Announcer Voice has been the object of close linguistic study. Was it me? He liked the fact that I had broken my nose in defeat. The Cuban revolutionaries, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, had just marched on Havana and ousted the US-supported dictator Fulgencio Batista. 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. [17], In 1953, Plimpton joined the influential literary journal The Paris Review, founded by Peter Matthiessen, Thomas H. Guinzburg, and Harold L. "Doc" Humes, becoming its first editor in chief. George Plimpton (1927-2003) was a journalist and the first editor-in-chief of The Paris Review. His friendships testified to what an eclectic man he was. That he died in his sleep was impressive. This was his habit. 2) Truman v. Kaltenborn, 1949. On Sept. 26, George Plimpton died in his sleep, at the age of 76. Update: This post is #2 in the announcer-speak series. A little before my time, but Kennedy certainly didnt, even if his vernacular was more formal than Brandos. Several weeks later at a book party, he spotted two writers who had played in that game. A lordly accent acquired at St. Bernard's and burnished later at Cambridge, in England, enhanced his distinguished aura, as did elevated stature and a silver head of hair which might have encouraged a career in politics but mercifully did not. It was so tiny that if you saw him in it, you couldnt believe hed be able to get himself out of it. . The funny thing about Harris was that he did not start out with that accent - as I suspect George Gershwin did not. I thought they were terrific. I have worked as poetry editor with editors on other magazines; only with George has the experience been entirely agreeable. Description above from the Wikipedia article George Plimpton, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of . Plimpton's The Bogey Man chronicles his attempt to play professional golf on the PGA Tour during the Nicklaus and Palmer era of the 1960s. 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. 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. 1. The Curious Case Of Sidd Finch. *Originally posted by bordelond * When I spoke to him my voice went up an octave and took on his formal tone and became careful and unnatural; his voice became like his fathersstern, authoritative, disciplinarianwhen his father was the last person in the universe he wanted to be. Vault. (The filmmakers assembled his voice-over from recorded speeches and other archival footage.) He had a small role in the Oscar-winning film Good Will Hunting,[22] playing a psychologist. 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. Wed gone to dinner and the maitre d comes over and says, Felix, I got a call for you from Monaco., I pick up the phone, and I hear Georges Bostonian accent. On Saturday Night Live, even the great impersonator Dana Carvey couldnt get it quite right. 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). See below!) BTW, I cant imagine a presidential candidate today getting anywhere close to a nomination with FDRs accent, cigarette holder, and aristocratic bearing. 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. 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. Shadow Box. My fathers voice was like one of those supposedly extinct deep-sea creatures that wash up on the shores of Argentina every now and then. After his discharge, Plimpton returned to Harvard and finished his undergraduate education. Prestigious prep schools and ivy league institutions (though Gore Vidal never went to college). Old money, would never say the word spanky, and certainly had more money than God could count. [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. Big, tall, good-looking guy, easy-going. 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. [28], Plimpton was a demolitions expert in the post-World War II Army. One of the magazine's most notable discoveries was author and screenplay writer Terry Southern, who was living in Paris at the time and formed a lifelong friendship with Plimpton, along with writer Alexander Trocchi and future classical and jazz pioneer David Amram. 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. I didnt know he was from the Larchmont area. He joined us in Monte Carlo when we won the international [fireworks] competition. Congratulations Carnac, for posting about George Plimptons death at 3:44 PM. 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). When I eventually went back to be an editor at Harpers, I arrived at his flat, not having been in New York for eight years. The Scout Is a Lonely Hunter. 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. Famed participatory journalist George Plimpton (1927-2003) was a writer, editor, amateur sportsman, actor, and friend to many. Even the manliest actors, such as Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable sometimes slipped into this voice-coach mode. rejoiced in the name of Euphemia van Renssalaer Wyatt. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 September 25, 2003) was an American writer. Almost twenty years ago, writing quirky sports pieces for the Village Voice, I decided to enter the world of championship arm wrestling.Like many young writers, I was inspired by the sports adventures of the gaunt but game George Plimpton, who had made a literary career out of placing himself in . [26] He also appeared in an episode of the NBC sitcom Wings. Family (1) Spouse 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. George Plimpton was born on March 18, 1927 in New York City, New York, USA. [2], In 1975, in Bellport, Long Island, Plimpton, with Fireworks by Grucci attempted to break the record for the world's largest firework. By George Plimpton. NYC speech in the sixties, in some ways, flipped prestige markers. All rights reserved. Now, in George, Being George, 200 friends, lovers and rivals detail Plimpton's remarkable exploits. Off screen, George Plimpton and Gore Vidal come to mind. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review, as well as his patrician demeanor and accent. One night Joe DiMaggio was here, and they had never met, so I introduced them. Of course, my dad had tried out for the role of himself and not gotten it, though he would go on to have a steady film career playing one version or another of a striking white-haired figure with a distinguished, chivalrous voice in bit roles in some twenty or so movies, including Reds and Good Will Hunting. Fortunately, in the upcoming film Plimpton! Vault. If you are in the big league, God help us all. Call me back.. So it was that George Plimptons accent could not be imitated. The s. expelled from the very expensive, very WASP-y Philips If you listen to Grossman (who is originally from Boston) starting about 15 seconds into the clip below, youll see that he uses a split-the-difference UK/US hybrid that is literally mid-Atlantic, in the sense of combining accents from both countries, but is different from the newsreel announcer voice: You should talk to William Labov [JF: I will try] , pioneering sociolinguist, whose landmark study into New York City speech led him to ask the same question you have. 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. 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. Plimpton himself described it as a "New England cosmopolitan accent"[36] or "Eastern seaboard cosmopolitan" accent. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. There was love thereactually, his inability to express it sometimes made him positively brim with itbut speak the words, his voice could not. Your transparent jealousy is very unbecoming, Carnac. "[25] He had a recurring role as the grandfather of Dr. Carter on the NBC series ER. Get a life. Norman Mailer said that George Plimpton was the best-loved man in New York. LL is typified, I think, but an almost clenching of the teeth while talking, producing a mushy sound, if you will. Would you admit to there being symbolism in your novels? That life couldnt contain him, hed burst its seams like it was an old coat two sizes too small. Labov suspected that WWII had something to do about it. It was as if some old gentlemans code prohibited us from interacting as human beings. 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. Plimpton was a writer-raconteur and dilettante in the best sense of the word: He co-founded an important literary magazine, the . I enjoy doing it. Thats it, George cried out. Middle class? (He intended to face both line-ups, but tired badly and was relieved by Ralph Houk.) I think the term Old Money or patrician pretty much says it. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. He was one of her original supporters and had published an article about her work in The Paris Review. At Harvard, Plimpton was a classmate and close personal friend of Robert F. Kennedy. [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."