This brings us back to the why things changed question. 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]. From what other people had told me, I knew a little bit about itthat my father (and mother) had been right by Bobbys side in California when he was shot, that my father had tackled Sirhan Sirhan to the ground, and wrestled the gun from his handbut not a word of it came from my dad himself. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. **. Future Poet Laureate Donald Hall, who had met Plimpton at Exeter, was Poetry Editor. **Get a life. It was horrifying.. 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. 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. That life couldnt contain him, hed burst its seams like it was an old coat two sizes too small. He was a great addition to the human race. To me, it meant admission to this little exclusive club at the Paris Review. The title of the PBS documentary - "Plimpton! A few days after, I went to a Paris Review party and showed off my damaged nose and two black eyes to George. Plimpton appeared in the 1989 documentary The Tightrope Dancer which featured the life and the work of the artist Vali Myers. That Weirdo Announcer-Voice Accent: Where It Came From and Why It Went How do I know you're not George Plimpton? 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. In that vein, here is an oral biography of George Plimpton. A reader writes: Ive wondered about this myself when I see old Jimmy Cagney moviesand the date of his last starring role might give us a hint towards the date range of the change: "One, Two, Three" in 1961. George Plimpton: what kind of accent? - Straight Dope Message Board 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. 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. Is it in evidence among the Gen X set of Boston, or a passing phenomenon? I feel that his work on this and many other language-related matters should be far more widely known than it is. When George Plimpton Met the Best Bartender in Brooklyn Everything he did was like this, just a bit odd. Read more in this thread (long). We had the book party for my selected poems, Sailing Alone Around the Room, at Georges house on Sept 10, 2001. Revolutionary musket, a stairwell and a housemaster), 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. His response was "no, just affected.". 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. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review. Back in the 1960s and '70s, I would nightly sit alone in front of a TV set in a darkened room in the Midwest munching on potato chips watching late night talk shows out of New York CityJohnny Carson and Dick Cavett in particularand Plimpton was a regular on those shows. 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. Larchmont Lockjaw? [35], Plimpton was known for his distinctive accent which, by Plimpton's own admission, was often mistaken for an English accent. 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. Talking about sports with Georgeor, even better, reading George about sportswas more fun than sports themselves. 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. Plimpton played Tom Hanks's antagonistic father in Volunteers. With a little more practice, you could give us boys in the big leagues a run for our money. Aldas version was always angry or consternated, like a character in a Woody Allen film, while my dad, though he certainly faced hurdles as an amateur in the world of the professional, bore his humiliations with a comic lightness and charmmuch of which emanated from that befuddled, self-deprecating professors voice. Here's a look inside the space, where the Paris Review editor hosted legendary parties. Starring George Plimpton as Himself, "George Plimpton, Urbane and Witty Writer, Dies at 76", "Obituary: Frances T. P. Plimpton, 82, Dies", "Obituary: Pauline A. Plimpton, 93, Author Of Works on Famed Relatives", "Milton at the Midpoint of the Last Century: One Collection of Memories", "How Failing at Exeter made a Success of George Plimpton", "Legendary Humorist, Poonster Dies at 76 | News | The Harvard Crimson", "George Plimpton, Paris Review Founder, Pitches 1980s Video Games for the Mattel Intellivision", "The Simpsons: I'm Spelling As Fast As I Can", "George Plimpton, Author And Editor, Is Dead at 76", "Professor Muhammed Ali Delivers Lecture; Poems and Parables Fill Talk on Friendship | News | The Harvard Crimson", "George Plimpton | Full Film | American Masters | PBS", "George Plimpton, Still Burning His Punk at Both Ends, Finds a Sport in Which He Can Sparkle", "George Plimpton: The Professional Amateur", "Some Really Dangerous Jobs For George Plimpton", "Being, And Appreciating, George Plimpton", "Obituary: Willard Espy, Who Delighted In Wordplay, Is Dead at 88", "George Plimpton, Writer and editor, Is Wed to Sarah W. Dudley, a Writer", "Obituary: James C. Dudley, 77, Investment Adviser", "Naming the Sky: The true story of one man's quest to give George Plimpton a permanent presence in orbit", "DEAD END-DRIVE-IN | Plimpton! [23] He was also notable for his appearance in television commercials during the early 1980s, including a memorable campaign for Mattel's Intellivision. 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]. Ive always heard it referred to as a patrician accent. It was so tiny that if you saw him in it, you couldnt believe hed be able to get himself out of it. 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. If he couldnt be taken quite seriously, that was fine with him (he took himself lightly, and relished being in on the joke). It came from a different era, shouldn't have still existed, but nevertheless, there it wasold New England, old New York, tinged with a hint of King's College King's English. It was always as if one were setting out with him on a special adventure. 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. Never heard of this decidedly imprecise term. 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. Shootout at Rio Lobo", "The Smaller the Ball, the Better the Book: A Game Theory of Literature", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_Plimpton&oldid=1137974740, This page was last edited on 7 February 2023, at 10:19. *Originally posted by j.c. * These are some of the things my father could not say: Shit. Fuck. I love you. His curses were never actually curse-words, though it was perhaps because of this that they held such weight. I didnt know he was from the Larchmont area. Quite sad, as he just had a daughter not many years back. Hows your mom? hed always ask me. Manhattan DVD. Now, in George, Being George, 200 friends, lovers and rivals detail Plimpton's remarkable exploits. The young Paris Review editor and other New York literary figures arrived during a period marked by hope for a democratic Cuba. . He's a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. They spoke in this manner, and it seemed perfectly natural, evocative of a background spent among the gentry of the northeast. He has the same type of patrician upper-class New Yorker accent as Jane Wyatt. He had a small role in the Oscar-winning film Good Will Hunting,[22] playing a psychologist. Mia had the perfect model! Norman Mailer said that George Plimpton was the best-loved man in New York. [2], In 1975, in Bellport, Long Island, Plimpton, with Fireworks by Grucci attempted to break the record for the world's largest firework. Jean Stein became his co-editor. George Plimpton Wiki: Salary, Married, Wedding, Spouse, Family . I just knew it was going to be something terrible. (To read Part One, click here. Mr. Plimpton was born in Manhattan in 1927 and raised in Huntington, L.I. 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. 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. 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. Think of the accent of Jane Hathaway on the Beverly Hillbillies. On one website, I read about a Choate alumn saying one can still hear the LL (see above thread) accent on campus. Paper Lion: Confessions of a Last-String Quarterback **Mid-Atlantic. Read more. 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. Hemingway on Fiction, Part Two. 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. Why couldnt we have a good time, too? The clenched jaw tight-bite bit: the lockjaw dentiloquist. George Plimpton : Movies - CinemaOne My dad and I could not lose each other, but we could never quite find each other, either. George Plimpton's duplex apartment on the Upper East Side hit the market for $5.495 million on April 18. We made $15,000-20,000. Was this sheer affectation? And the answer may explain partly why it has gone out of fashion: Jonathan Harris, the actor who played Dr. Smith on the television show "Lost in Space.". In the 50s Plimpton and staff came to New York, where they kept the Review going for half a century. With 'Paper Lion,' George Plimpton Played Pro Football So We Didn't Have To Norman Mailer said that George Plimpton was the best-loved man in New York. In most situations, he had the remarkable quality of making everyone he talked to feel at ease, at home, welcome, no matter who they were or what they didbut for whatever strange reason there wasnt this effortlessness with me, this warmth. Mid-Atlantic. I can understand your frustration, but celebrities die every day. 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. He knew we were just as good as he was, but in a different field. He plays the 'fancy pants' to our outhouse Americana," Flaherty asserted. As a result, this American version of a posh accent has all but disappeared even among the American upper classes. 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. He thought Castro might come. (Why do I even bother?) He was also an accomplished birdwatcher. Starring George Plimpton as Himself, directed by Tom Bean and Luke Poling, was released. He very much approved. 'Plimpton!' documentary looks at George Plimpton's lives George Plimpton Broke My Arm. The risky pleasures of Plimpton's | by Announcer-Speak: The Video Highlights Reel - The Atlantic George A. Plimpton Papers, 1634-1956 | Rare Book & Manuscript Library When Plimpton, the co-founder of The Paris Review, died in 2003 at age 76, The New York Times . 'Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself' TV review - SFGATE 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.. 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). I think it was an affectation people adopted because they thought it made them sound much more intelligent! Think of the accent of Jane Hathaway on the Beverly Hillbillies. H.V. Lionel on Twitter: "News children today have no concept of the Mid In early 1959, George Plimpton was preparing to watch an execution in Cuba. George Plimpton: what kind of accent? In Praise of Plimpton - Newsweek A lifelong New Yorker, he never tasted a bagel or an olive, and he never chewed a stick of gum. Plimpton's remarkable life is showcased in a documentary that is. George Plimpton, who died last week at his town house, on East Seventy-second Street near the river, was a serious man of serious accomplishments who just happened to have more fun than a van. Among other challenges for Sports Illustrated, he attempted to play top-level bridge, and spent some time as a high-wire circus performer. He could as easily have been my grandfather as father. He wanted to play his own part, but they wouldnt let him. 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. He had the bearing of Gen. MacArthur, but the soul of Charlie Chaplin. That he died in his sleep was impressive. 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. She would not even say goodbye. 'Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself' review I received many notes like this one: The variety of English you are referring to has a name in linguistics: "Mid-Atlantic English". Robert Silvers, editor, the New York Review of Books:I met George on the Ile Saint-Louis in 1953 as I was leaving NATO headquarters. silk-stockinged New Englander - private schools (he was He appeared in the PBS American Masters documentary on Andy Warhol. George Plimpton Dec 1, 2014 In which the venturous author, the rawest rookie pro football has ever known, recounts all the excruciating details of what happened when he called five plays as. The Cuban revolutionaries, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, had just marched on Havana and ousted the US-supported dictator Fulgencio Batista. On Sept. 26, George Plimpton died in his sleep, at the age of 76. Archie Moore, after all, had broken his nose. If you say, I pahked my cah in Hahvahd Yahd, like some vaudeville version of a Boston accent, you are non-rhotic. If you were making a speech in a large hall, or speaking on the radio, you needed to enunciate very clearly and use a lot of emphases to be sure your audience could understand what you were saying. Plimpton was associated with the literary magazine in Paris, Merlin, which folded because the State Department withdrew its support.[why?] Oh now, Im joking, Carnac ( see? George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. Brown & Co. Re-issued George Plimpton Sports Books, 2016. The presentation was called Freedom of the American Road and was made 60 years ago, in 1955, as part of the campaign to build support for the new Interstate Highway system. He also appeared in the 1996 documentary When We Were Kings about the "Rumble in the Jungle" 1974 Ali-Foreman Championship fight opposite Norman Mailer crediting Muhammad Ali as a poet who composed the world's shortest poem: "Me? Plimpton also appeared in a number of feature films as an extra and in cameo appearances. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. George Plimpton, who has died aged 76, became a best-selling author by not only writing about sporting heroes but by participating in those sports as well. George had three siblings: Francis Taylor Pearsons Plimpton Jr., Oakes Ames Plimpton,[15] and Sarah Gay Plimpton. Whom is it spoken bymerely the elite, old-money types? George Plimpton The Movie Database (TMDB) He was 76. Return of the Big Bopper. Listen to Caruso singing or Bix Beiderbecke playing his cornet to hear how muffled was the recording of those sounds. In this campaign, Plimpton touted the superiority regarding the graphics and sounds of Intellivision video games over the Atari 2600.[24]. Hed have that and a scotch on the rocks, his favorite drink. Isnt that what they call it. Vault. Paris Review - Writers, Quotes, Biography, Interviews, Artists On Saturday Night Live, even the great impersonator Dana Carvey couldnt get it quite right. Exeter Academy after an incident involving a Mr . [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. Heres a sampling for today, with more planned in the days ahead. In 1992, Plimpton married Sarah Whitehead Dudley, a graduate of Columbia University and a freelance writer. Shadow Box: An Amateur In The Ring -- George Plimpton On Boxing Family (1) Spouse Starring George Plimpton as Himself, which documents his life, adventures, and work as participatory journalist and editor of the Paris Review, my dad will be playing himself one more time. Anyhow, I asked Terry Gross from Fresh Air and George Plimpton to be auctioneers. I have decided, he said, that I have got to jump from a plane. I'm not an expert, but Bill Labov from UPenn is, and he is quoted thusly: According to William Labov, teaching of this pronunciation declined sharply after the end of World War II. The coach for the Writers team announced that Plimpton would pinch-hit for the first batter of the game, Daily News sports columnist Mike Lupica, and the crowd roared. I think the term Old Money or patrician pretty much says it. I remember getting the news: It was my wife Madeleines birthday, Aug. 7. 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. 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. This speech pattern might be common among US expatriates in the UK, of which Grossman would seem to represent just the most ostentatious example. In that regard, Plimpton is the perfect candidate, and the proof is in "George, Being George," the compulsively readable oral biography edited by his friend Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. The last time I heard my fathers voice, it was over the telephone. What exactly is a Boston Brahmin accent? 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. There was one more matter I never heard my dad discuss. The point of the flipped prestige markers is that generally the fewer the Rs, the fancier the person. If you are in the big league, God help us all. In another cartoon in The New Yorker, a patient looks up at the masked surgeon about to operate on him and asks, "Wait a minute! (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? Next up: some sociological explanations of why someone like George Gershwin might have tried to speak like Westbrook Van Voorhis. Plimpton appeared in the 1989 documentary The Tightrope Dancer which featured the life and the work of the artist Vali Myers. Thats where there was that cross-section you once found in Parisof literary people, of people who were illiterate, of people down on their luck, and people of status. After St. Bernard's School, Plimpton attended Phillips Exeter Academy (from which he was expelled just shy of graduation), and Daytona Beach High School, where he received his high school diploma,[16] before entering Harvard College in July 1944. NYC speech in the sixties, in some ways, flipped prestige markers. You can. 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? There was love thereactually, his inability to express it sometimes made him positively brim with itbut speak the words, his voice could not. And what have we here? My moms initial impression was that he was a little hoity-toityI mean, who did this guy think he was?, But the second time they met, it was, in fact, my fathers voice that won her over. A graduate of Harvard University and King's College, Cambridge, Plimpton was recruited to Paris by Peter Matthiessen in 1952 and signed on to the project shortly thereafter. 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. George was not vainhe didnt care a whit about his image. Others outside the entertainment industry known for speaking Mid-Atlantic English include William F. Buckley, Jr., Gore Vidal, George Plimpton, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Norman Mailer, Diana Vreeland, Maria Callas, Cornelius Vanderbilt IV. Plimpton also appeared in the closing credits of the 2006 film Factory Girl. Shadow Box. Felix Grucci Jr., of Fireworks by Grucci (Plimpton wrote about the Grucci family, widely held to be the first family of fireworks, in Fireworks: A History and Celebration):George had a very big passion for fireworks. Now the interview is perfect!. We were bound to play the roles of father and son, unable to simply be ourselves. Why Did William F. Buckley Jr. Talk Like That? - Slate Magazine
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