For instance: Mid-Atlantic English was the dominant dialect among the Northeastern American upper class through the first half of the 20th century. Isnt that what they call it. Several readers wrote in with specimens of Americans who had gone to England and ended up speaking in this mid-Atlantic way. On Sept. 26, George Plimpton died in his sleep, at the age of 76. Of course, I think he enjoyed the odd persona his voice and mannerisms conferred on him. That is, until I saw the documentarythe assassination of his dear friend Bobby Kennedy. The Writer's Chapbook A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice from the Twentieth Century's Preeminent Writers. Over the years, we held a lot of dinner parties for him, and he brought a lot of people inmany, many writers. (He intended to face both line-ups, but tired badly and was relieved by Ralph Houk.) George Plimpton. rejoiced in the name of Euphemia van Renssalaer Wyatt. Shoot! hed hiss, when he was mad. [3] During the summers, he lived in the hamlet of West Hills, Huntington, Suffolk County on Long Island. To me, Mid-Atlantic English is the nom juste for a related but distinct phenomenon (which is also mentioned in Wikipedia). Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2007. George Plimpton and Papa in Cuba - Guernica Thurston Howell III had the Larchmont Lockjaw accent. 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]. [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. Puss, and my father enjoyed nothing more than holding the beast high in the air and making strange, affectionate sounds in that distinguished voice: Yeanngghh, Puss Yeaannngh Puss Puss Puss.) He called my sister Puss, too, sometimes, though mostly I think with her it was Kiddo, which he also called me, though there was a period in which he occasionally called me Ernie, which was the dogs name. That phony-baloney feigned British pronunciation thing. Plimpton! The Great Quarterback Sneak - YouTube George Plimpton (1927-2003) George Plimpton was the editor of The Paris Review from its founding in 1953 until his death in 2003. If you are in the big league, God help us all. During my fight, my nose got badly broken in the second round, but I did last all four scheduled rounds, though I lost. Isnt that what they call it. The fake English announcer voice lingered on sporadically until the end of the Johnson administration in newsreels, which themselves ceased production around the same time, but Rod Serlings decision sounded the death knell for that accent. NYC speech in the sixties, in some ways, flipped prestige markers. Read more. Rose Styron, wife of William Styron and former Paris Review editor:My husband Bill was with George when he started the Paris Review. After returning to New York from Paris, he routinely launched fireworks at his evening parties. A friend of the New England Sedgwick family, Plimpton edited Edie: An American Biography with Jean Stein in 1982. It was as if some old gentlemans code prohibited us from interacting as human beings. Being, And Appreciating, George Plimpton - krvs.org How widespread, numerically and geographically? 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. Well, perhaps it's more accurate to say that the book provided entertaining confirmation to millions of people that they -- like the author . [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. I had made about five thousand egg and tuna sandwiches. But he could easily have said, Alice, I have enough trouble raising money for my magazine.. I thought they were terrific. Along with all the other things he does, George is an editor of the Paris Review, a literary quarterly published by the Aga Khan's uncle, Sadrudin, and his apartment is overstuffed with the comforts and legends of its use as a literary salon. Archie Moore, after all, had broken his nose. 'Plimpton!' documentary looks at George Plimpton's lives 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? He knew we were just as good as he was, but in a different field. I have decided, he said, that I have got to jump from a plane. Old money, would never say the word spanky, and certainly had more money than God could count. George Plimpton writer, publisher, amateur lion tamer died in 2003 after 50 years as the founding editor of The Paris Review. I just heard that George Plimpton has died. He had a small role in the Oscar-winning film Good Will Hunting,[22] playing a psychologist. 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 . When George told the story, DiMaggio laughed so hard I thought he was going to fall on the floor. George Plimpton was a literary man about town who did it all, from co-founding The Paris . [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. Here's a look inside the space, where the Paris Review editor hosted legendary parties. Paris Review - Writers, Quotes, Biography, Interviews, Artists You heard it and it. 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. (What else happened that year??? As such, it was popular in the theatre and other forms of elite culture in that region. Cambridge. But the average person never talked that way. They all sound just like George. [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. 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. The Detroit Lions let a reporter play QB. Can you guess how it went Bill and I met in Rome, several months after the Paris Review was startedwe were, as they say, courtingand he drove me to Paris so George and Peter [Mathiessen] could look me over. expelled from the very expensive, very WASP-y Philips 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. Heres a sampling for today, with more planned in the days ahead. He said, You better stay here, and I did, for a while. "[25] He had a recurring role as the grandfather of Dr. Carter on the NBC series ER. 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. 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). George was the one who read my name out to the commissioner. 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. 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. He was respected by all. Actually, thats not far off from how my mom felt when she first met him. The Wikipedia entry for it is quite detailed. In 1992, Plimpton married Sarah Whitehead Dudley, a graduate of Columbia University and a freelance writer. [33] A later attempt, fired at Cape Canaveral, rose approximately 50 feet (15m) into the air and broke 700 windows in Titusville, Florida. Orson Welles also comes to mind, though I noticed he spoke in this mode more often during his early days, on and off screen. Your transparent jealousy is very unbecoming, Carnac. That made him a great storyteller. 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. Larchmont Lockjaw? George Plimpton is beautifully connected. They were divorced, and had been for a while, but they still talked, and visited every now and then, and they would sit on my moms porch on Long Island and look out over the pond at the birds and tell each other stories and laugh until the tears came to their eyes, but he could not ask her this directlyHow are you, Freddy? He had lost my mom, at least in part because he had been unable to communicate with her, to show his love. Writing Wednesdays: Hemingway on Fiction, Part Two - Steven Pressfield Articles From This Author. I just knew it was going to be something terrible. Think of the accent of Jane Hathaway on the Beverly Hillbillies. Kennedy died the next day at Good Samaritan Hospital. $ 9.19 - $ 32.19. These events were recalled in his best-known book Paper Lion, which was later adapted into the 1968 feature film starring Alan Alda. He was going to put on a reading of his play Zelda, Scott, and Ernest. Yes indeed, George Plimpton is a man for all seasons. George Plimpton Wiki: Salary, Married, Wedding, Spouse, Family . If you say, I parked my car in Harvard Yard, you are being rhotic. Somehow Georgehad gotten it into his head that I was on the verge of becoming a pharmacist before he had called me up a year earlier to tell me the Paris Review was publishing a story I had submittedperhaps because of the pharmacological bent of the subject matter. If you say, I pahked my cah in Hahvahd Yahd, like some vaudeville version of a Boston accent, you are non-rhotic. He is also credited with saving, Learn how and when to remove this template message, Plimpton! He very much approved. That was the last party for a while., I just got back from a road trip from Michigan. Katharine Hepburn spoke this way, on and off screen until she died. Plimpton played Tom Hanks's antagonistic father in Volunteers. 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"). Interesting that the two competitors for his anchor chair were both fully vernacular speakers from the South and West: Mudd and Rather. 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. How George Washington Spoke (Brief Thoughts) | Dialect Blog The Sidd Finch story was accompanied by a series of photos which managed to convince even the eagle-eyed fans . 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. Vault. Family (1) Spouse [2], In 1975, in Bellport, Long Island, Plimpton, with Fireworks by Grucci attempted to break the record for the world's largest firework. . 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. Volume 7, 2003-2005, pages 429-432. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review, as well as his patrician demeanor and accent. 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. But its clear that the diction I call Announcer Voice has been the object of close linguistic study. Okay, then, are you saying that Plimpton has such as accent? That was when Westbrook van Voorhis, the famous March of Time voice, did the intro narration of the pilot episode of The Twilight Zone. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. Plimpton was a writer-raconteur and dilettante in the best sense of the word: He co-founded an important literary magazine, the Paris Review, and tried his hand at everything from quarterbacking for the Detroit Lions (which he wrote about in Paper Lion), boxing with light-heavyweight champ Archie Moore (which became Shadow Box), and becoming New Yorks unofficial official fireworks commissioner. His exploits were such that at one point, The New Yorker ran a cartoon in which a patient eyed a surgeon with misgiving and said, But how do I know youre not George Plimpton?, But perhaps foremost among his accomplishments was his elevation of the interview to a literary form, both in the Paris Review and in his two superb works of oral history, Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career, and Edie, a biography of Edie Sedgwick, which he and Jean Stein compiled. So, pairing the Cagney hint with the Kennedy Inaugural, could we date the changeover to 1961? 08:37 Dinner at Elaine's. by George Plimpton. And so when it was time to say goodbye, we did so simplyno awkwardness, no strangled expressions of affectionand this is why, even though it was the last time we ever spoke, and I would never get the chance again, I do not regret not telling him that I loved him. George Plimpton | The New Yorker Above all, he was a gentleman, one of the lasta figure so archaic, it could be easily mistaken for something else. I didnt know he was from the Larchmont area. This was his habit. 2) The Role of Broadway and Hollywood, and the Shift from Jimmy Cagney to Marlon Brando. They spoke in this manner, and it seemed perfectly natural, evocative of a background spent among the gentry of the northeast.. Greetings From the Vortex of Unpredictability, Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. Its something different, and Ive not encountered that in the mid-Atlantic. I can understand your frustration, but celebrities die every day. It was so violent that it brought a lot of people to the windows. His dish was Spaghetti Bolognese. When Plimpton, the co-founder of The Paris Review, died in 2003 at age 76, The New York Times . George Plimpton Detroit Lions | The Pop History Dig :rolleyes: Ive got news for you, buddy, youre not even second in line! No, my fathers voice was not an act, something chosen or practiced in front of mirrors: he came from a different world, where people talked differently, and about different things; where certain things were discussed, and certain things were notand his voice simply reflected this. At Harvard, Plimpton was a classmate and close personal friend of Robert F. Kennedy. Plimpton was associated with the literary magazine in Paris, Merlin, which folded because the State Department withdrew its support.[why?] My dad and I could not lose each other, but we could never quite find each other, either. His response was "no, just affected.". By strange coincidence, I actually became quite good friends with his (ex-)in-laws here in Manhattan. He had the bearing of Gen. MacArthur, but the soul of Charlie Chaplin. **Those of us whose families are from Larchmont (that would be me) just call it lockjaw. Vault. 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. (Why do I even bother?) Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. He was 76.. Whom is it spoken bymerely the elite, old-money types? I saw him [last] Wednesday night at a party; we rode home together, and he told me that he was planning to go down to Cuba, to revisit the site of his famous interview with Hemingway. 'Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself' review George Plimpton. 3: Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". The journal, which had operated out of his home, moved downtown. OK? 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. The first minute is a cameo by Henry Ford II, who speaks in an utterly flat Midwest rather than Mid-Atlantic accent that no one would call elegant but that would sound perfectly natural in 2015. Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. Friends were almost always happy to see him because you knew he was bound to improve your mood. His father co-founded the law firm Debevoise Plimpton. **. By George Plimpton. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. This brings us back to the why things changed question. All rights reserved. Its a shot from a YouTube video that itself is a fascinating time-capsule portrait of language change. Look out, Wilson! #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. Between 1945 and 1948, Plimpton was a soldier in the United States Army. What will you be mad about ten years after youre gone?). Even the manliest actors, such as Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable sometimes slipped into this voice-coach mode. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 September 25, 2003) was an American writer. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. He loved the ones that made a lot of noise and racket and excitement. George Plimpton was a literary man about town who did it all, from co-founding The Paris Review to boxing (and dribbling and quarterbacking) with the pros. An oral history of George Plimpton. - Slate Magazine Against George Plimpton | Neotenianos Powered by Discourse, best viewed with JavaScript enabled. [citation needed]. In his July 1936 obituary, the New York Times described George Arthur Plimpton (13 July 1855-1 July 1936) as an "internationally known publisher and collector, college trustee and philanthropist." As the materials in the George A. Plimpton Papers testify, those four areas of activity dominated Plimpton's public and private lives. But looking back on it, its funny, too. All contents 2023 The Slate Group LLC. For such admissions to escape my fathers lips, they always had to be a little removed somehow. 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. Losing, he knew, always makes a better story than winning. After running the pilot, Rod Serling realized the narration needed a less pompous sounding and more natural voice himself.