In His League: Being George Plimpton (Page 5)

Some of the most illuminating sections of George, Being George concern the ongoing tension in Plimpton's life between his journalistic output, his stewardship of The Paris Review and his myriad social and financial obligations. Plimpton's literary career began auspiciously enough. In 1956 he launched a fruitful collaboration with Sports Illustrated; his first piece was about the "many-sided character" of Harold Vanderbilt and his success in the America's Cup. It was in the pages of SI that Plimpton launched his forays into professional baseball and football, which in turn led to Out of My League and Paper Lion. The former is sprightly but somewhat weightless; the latter, by contrast, demonstrated what Plimpton, at his most resolute, could accomplish at the typewriter. Paper Lion has vivid details, exuberant humor, a powerful narrative arc and a polished, sophisticated diction, all of which suggested a young craftsman pushing himself to the limit. His early books on sports were wildly popular: in 1970 Time reported combined sales of nearly 2 million copies.

But success on that scale was difficult to repeat in the 1970s and '80s. There were some fine books to come--Shadow Box: An Amateur in the Ring, which contains an uproarious account of his bout with Archie Moore, appeared in 1977--but Plimpton eventually found himself marginalized at Sports Illustrated, as the magazine became less accommodating to his idiosyncratic brand of personalized reporting. "His interests had changed, too," says former SI editor Myra Gelband in George, Being George. "He wasn't gonna go suit up and play football for us, and we weren't gonna run those kinds of stories."

His financial position (strained by marriage, children, club memberships, weekend homes and the barely solvent Paris Review) was not improving, and by the '80s much of Plimpton's income was derived from television commercials (for Carlsberg beer, Saab and Dry Dock Savings Bank, among others) and speechmaking, an endeavor in which he saw his fee sink from $20,000 per appearance at his apex in the '70s to less than $5,000 by the '90s. And the literary projects he undertook to pay the bills didn't always suit his talents: D.V., his 1984 collaboration with Diana Vreeland, borders on hackwork. In a nation more enamored of stars than scribes, Plimpton the writer and editor was eventually transformed, in the public mind, into Plimpton the celebrity. Says Jonathan Dee, who worked at The Paris Review in the late '80s:

The irony is that his whole "participatory" method was devised as a way to get a better picture of the subject--it wasn't supposed to be about George. But over time, and more or less against his will, his celebrity became such that it overshadowed whatever else he might have wanted you to get out of the story. His persona was his livelihood, and it was also a kind of trap for him. But then that happens to a lot of successful public figures. If you want to say he was complicit in it, I suppose it was only by reason of the extraordinarily hard time he had saying no.

As lucrative writing opportunities began to recede, Plimpton took refuge in "the love of his life." According to Marion Capron, who worked at The Paris Review in the 1950s, the journal became a crutch for Plimpton: "He didn't want nine to five. He didn't want a regular life, but he needed a calling card; he needed a peg to hang himself on." Matthiessen told Aldrich, with a sliver of derision, "He needed the magazine. The Paris Review was the armature for everything he did." A more equitable interpretation is offered by Plimpton's friend and editor Terry McDonell: "Deep in his heart the Review was the place he felt most comfortable, his spiritual hideout."

Plimpton was on a ship in the Galápagos with Matthiessen and Jean Kennedy Smith in 2003 when a call came from New York: a publishing house had offered to pay $750,000 for Plimpton's memoirs. His friends were ecstatic: "He could have written a wonderful book on the manners and morals of his time and place and class," says Gerald Clarke. "George knew his world as Evelyn Waugh knew his." But Plimpton was chilled by the idea, telling his wife Sarah, "I don't want to do this. I've already written the stories of my life, what more is there to say? It's like putting the nails in the coffin." For Plimpton, it seemed that the adrenaline that enabled him to write Paper Lion and Shadow Box had dissipated with the years. At a private gathering in 1992, after the funeral of Doc Humes, Maggie Paley heard him utter, "I could have been a contender." Paley says: "Clearly to me he was saying 'If I hadn't done The Paris Review, I could have been a major writer.'" Norman Mailer had a different view: with his customary frankness, he told Aldrich that the gods denied Plimpton "a huge literary talent."

But maybe the gods weren't to blame. A subtheme winding its way through George, Being George is that underneath Plimpton's deeply amiable exterior was a person who sometimes came across as a Man Without Qualities. Says Oliver Broudy, a former colleague at The Paris Review: "I don't know that he knew who he was." For Plimpton to write a great book, says the literary agent Lynn Nesbit,

He would have needed to tell it; he needed an audience. To write, to do great writing, you have to be alone, to have privacy, a private life. He was the most thoroughly social creature I've ever known. I think George experienced private life as a terrible deprivation; I think he would have preferred not to have one.

Or perhaps his writerly inclinations at that point were better suited to a more modest undertaking, a book on the order of Lost Property: Memoirs & Confessions of a Bad Boy (1991), Ben Sonnenberg's graceful account of his life as a hedonist and literary editor, or a collection of private jottings akin to his friend Kenneth Tynan's dark and enthralling Diaries. In 1993 Plimpton produced "Death in the Family," a learned essay about ornithology, for The New York Review of Books. Writing with melancholy and rage about the decimation of bird populations, he effortlessly chronicled the travails of the ivory-billed woodpecker, the whooping crane, the Micronesian kingfisher and Kirtland's warbler. Birds were a subject about which he felt strongly, and on which he might have written, if he so desired, a fine and valuable book.

The accumulated residue of years of high living--he had a fondness for alcohol, and he subsisted on a diet that his doctor described as "quite poor"--began to take a heavy toll on Plimpton in the '90s. "He went to the doctor a lot," his assistant says in George, Being George. "He seemed preoccupied with checkups." In 2003, while drinking at the bar of the Brook Club, Plimpton's blood pressure fell, and he collapsed on the floor. The paramedics recognized him and, while slapping his face, yelled, "Hey, George! Wake up!"--at which point the maitre d' turned to them and declared, "At the Brook Club, sir, we refer to him as Mr. Plimpton."

He had been ruminating about death for a long time. In 1977 The New York Review of Books published "The Last Laugh," in which Plimpton surveyed his writer friends about how they wished to die. Nowhere in Plimpton's oeuvre are the high-spirited and melancholy elements of his personality held in more perfect equipoise. "The Last Laugh" was inspired by a conversation he had with Norman Mailer in Kinshasa in 1974, when both men were covering the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman heavyweight title fight. Mailer affirmed that he would be content if a biographical note in the back of a high school anthology read: "Norman Mailer had been killed by an African lion near the banks of the Zaire in his fifty-first year." (Mailer's second choice: "Taken by a whale off Cape Cod in his fifty-first year.") Gore Vidal declared: "When I go, everyone goes with me. You are all figments of my waking dreams." And Plimpton's preference? "I usually saw myself 'shuffling off'...in Yankee Stadium...sometimes as a batter beaned by a villainous man with a beard, occasionally as an outfielder running into the monuments that once stood in deep center field...a slight crumpled figure against the grass."

It didn't exactly turn out that way, but Plimpton's good fortune sustained him to the end. On his last day, September 25, 2003, he taped a spot for Conan O'Brien, met with a fundraiser from Harvard, rehearsed for a play and embarked on his customary nocturnal rounds. Later that evening, after he had turned in, he shuffled off painlessly. "He died in his sleep from a catecholamine surge, resulting in sudden cardiac arrest," Dr. Denton Cox told Nelson Aldrich Jr. "For George it was an ideal way to go."

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