I have decided, he said, that I have got to jump from a plane. The 16th at Cypress Point is one of the famous golf holes of the world, certainly one of the most difficult and demanding par 3's. What exactly is a Boston Brahmin accent? I dont give a rats ass about informing anyone about the death of Plimpton. Isnt that what they call it. Even Orson Welles on occasion. She was also the great-granddaughter on her father's side of Oakes Ames (18041873), an industrialist and congressman who was implicated in the Crdit Mobilier railroad scandal of 1872; and Governor-General of New Orleans Benjamin Franklin Butler, an American lawyer and politician who represented Massachusetts in the United States House of Representatives and later served as the 33rd Governor of Massachusetts. 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. Congratulations Carnac, for posting about George Plimptons death at 3:44 PM. What exactly is a Boston Brahmin accent? . George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 September 25, 2003) was an American writer. Charles McGrath, editor of the New York Times Book Review:I dont think George had played golf in years, but he used to save up oddball tips for me and others. As a result, this American version of a posh accent has all but disappeared even among the American upper classes. 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. 1 draft choice of the Lions in 1965. 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. Big, tall, good-looking guy, easy-going. Just when Jim and I thought we had finished, and we had been working a long time, George, who loved the result of our efforts, decided he wanted to talk to me as well. That was how it was in New York in those days, George just dragged it out a bit longer." Dudley Plimpton suspects the excess contributed to Plimpton's death in his sleep in 2003, at the age of 76. Shoot! hed hiss, when he was mad. Paper Lion: Confessions of a Last-String Quarterback: Plimpton, George The Wikipedia entry for it is quite detailed. Writing Wednesdays: Hemingway on Fiction, Part Two - Steven Pressfield 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. George Plimpton - Biography - IMDb But the average person never talked that way. That tension between what was in his heart and what his voice allowed him to express is the basic tension of language we all face, only heightened. (The filmmakers assembled his voice-over from recorded speeches and other archival footage.) And being good at losing was one of Georges many gifts. There was intellectual heft in the Plimpton genes too: one Ames was a Professor of Botany, another was Governor of Massachusetts, another relation was a publisher, and yet another a writer-philanthropist fascinated with the subject of how the great figures of the past were educated Young Georges educational path was precisely that of a How to find out, and whether you should care. George Plimpton (1927-2003) George Plimpton was the editor of The Paris Review from its founding in 1953 until his death in 2003. Announcer-Speak: The Video Highlights Reel - The Atlantic And similarly on the role of ridicule in speeding the move away from this accent: This is only partly facetious, but I think I know who was the American to speak "Announcer." I think it was an affectation people adopted because they thought it made them sound much more intelligent! [Then] this August he showed up, pulled the shirt over his head, and said he was ready to bat. Actually, thats not far off from how my mom felt when she first met him. On one website, I read about a Choate alumn saying one can still hear the LL (see above thread) accent on campus. That was when Westbrook van Voorhis, the famous March of Time voice, did the intro narration of the pilot episode of The Twilight Zone. [23] He was also notable for his appearance in television commercials during the early 1980s, including a memorable campaign for Mattel's Intellivision. Sidd Finch was a fictional character George had created for a Sports Illustrated story, supposedly the greatest and fastest pitcher in the world. We were bound to play the roles of father and son, unable to simply be ourselves. & FDR, George Plimpton, William F. Buckley, etc. Its a shot from a YouTube video that itself is a fascinating time-capsule portrait of language change. **. . But he came right down to our level. Paper Lion: Confessions of a Last-String Quarterback He majored in English. (To read Part One, click here. So we got together and, after some preliminaries, he popped the question that he was really there to ask. 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. George, Being George: George Plimpton's Life as Told, Admired, Deplored When he found a story to be short of the mark, he rejected it no matter who the author wasan old friend, a Pulitzer winner, an unknown. He modestly shrugged off the compliment, but his bright smile betrayed his pleasureand ours. He was immensely generous in every waygenerous about sharing the work and about giving one a chance to edit things. 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. The Detroit Lions let a reporter play QB. Can you guess how it went NYC speech in the sixties, in some ways, flipped prestige markers. We worked at the Paris Review on the Rue Garanere for several years together. Please educate me. Was this sheer affectation? After it was published, all of the baseball people were trying to get in touch with Sidd, but he didnt existit was an April Fools joke! He was going to put on a reading of his play Zelda, Scott, and Ernest. He very much approved. 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. (Every now and then he also called me Sweet Prince, as in Goodnight, Sweet Prince.), Of course, my fathers voice was odd not just in what it said, but in what it couldnt. George Plimpton The Movie Database (TMDB) As Poling puts it, George was known as an unrivaled raconteur and, in making a film of his life story, it only seemed natural to allow him to tell it.. **. The Wikipedia entry is indeed delightful. In this campaign, Plimpton touted the superiority regarding the graphics and sounds of Intellivision video games over the Atari 2600.[24]. That is, until I saw the documentarythe assassination of his dear friend Bobby Kennedy. 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. Talking about sports with Georgeor, even better, reading George about sportswas more fun than sports themselves. Plimpton played Tom Hanks's antagonistic father in Volunteers. :rolleyes: Ive got news for you, buddy, youre not even second in line! 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! 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. Plimpton appeared in the 1989 documentary The Tightrope Dancer which featured the life and the work of the artist Vali Myers. 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? 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. There was love thereactually, his inability to express it sometimes made him positively brim with itbut speak the words, his voice could not. George was not vainhe didnt care a whit about his image. I only wish I could not tell him again, just one more time. And he told everyone that night, and for many years after, that hed diverted me from a career of filling prescriptions. Typical of George to laugh about something others saw as a defining traithe never took himself all that seriously. Suddenly, a New York cop remembered a long-ago murder. Butch, he says, because he always called me Butch. Larchmont Lockjaw? Now you know! He Was Shot by John Wayne. The Very Good Life Of George Plimpton - The Washington Post 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. (Newsreels ran in movie theaters, of course: what better critique of the high newsreel style than the new movies that jarred against it?). George Plimpton: Writer, Quarterback, Pitcher, Boxer, Triangle Player 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). You heard it and it could only be him. List of books by author George Plimpton - ThriftBooks I believe the accent was at one time known as Larchmont Lockjaw. Book excerpt - George Plimpton on why Hole 16 at Cypress Point is one The Cuban revolutionaries, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, had just marched on Havana and ousted the US-supported dictator Fulgencio Batista. It was always a surprise. He wrote for the Harvard Lampoon, was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club, Pi Eta, the Signet Society, and the Porcellian Club. In 2013, the documentary Plimpton! **Those of us whose families are from Larchmont (that would be me) just call it lockjaw. After running the pilot, Rod Serling realized the narration needed a less pompous sounding and more natural voice himself. Hed done it in Amsterdam, Moscow, and London; hed done it at a PEN benefit; and now he and Norman were going to do it in Cuba. For more than five decades, author and journalist George Plimpton delved deeply into an array of high-profile and often physically grueling experiences, including professional baseball, boxing . So think of Margaret Anderson or Amanda and you can place George. Is it in evidence among the Gen X set of Boston, or a passing phenomenon? [citation needed] In 1958, prior to a post-season exhibition game at Yankee Stadium between teams managed by Willie Mays (National League) and Mickey Mantle (American League), Plimpton pitched against the National League. 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. 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. **Oh, I suppose we should all just lavish praise upon Carnac the Magnificent now for bringing this to your attention, is that it? He was respected by all. He once said that, in writing Paper Lion, he wanted to reveal the "humor and grace" of football. **. 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. I think the term Old Money or patrician pretty much says it. He was smooth. So it was that my father played himself not just in movies and on TV, but in life, too. I always thought it sounded similar to the accent of William F. Buckley, Jr., who I believe was not reared in Boston. This book is the party that was George's life-and it's a big one-attended by scores of famous people, as well as. 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. This brings us back to the why things changed question. Peter even came with us on our honeymoon in Ravello, though George didnt. It was scary, because he was never mad, and to see this normally benevolent, white-haired figure of civility fill with pink steam, to hear this gentle man, who loved nothing more than to tell lighthearted stories and laugh, suddenly shout-whisper Dammit at some injustice on the other end of the telephone was unsettling. I had made about five thousand egg and tuna sandwiches. *Originally posted by bordelond * He had a way of putting it all together, of understanding fighters in the ring; he was a good analyst of boxing. 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. 08:37 Dinner at Elaine's. by George Plimpton. (This is not to belittle Lowell Thomas, but to recognize the artifice that served him so well in his career). George Plimpton was a literary man about town who did it all, from co-founding The Paris . But he has never employed that voice professionally, and certainly does not speak that way in real life. his prose, and his down east, cultivated accent, although perhaps a bit pretentious, will remain with me as I reread one of my favorite books. He appeared in commercials for Oldsmobile and Intellivision, and appeared. News children today have no concept of the Mid-Atlantic accent. Jean Stein became his co-editor. "[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. Kim Noble, one of the announcers on the NPR affiliate in Kansas City, KCUR, speaks with a very affected Connecticut Lockjaw accent. People two or three deep stood looking out at the East River. This kept his magazine fresh for 50 years. "Hut-Two-Three . . Ugh" A writer proves to be a Paper Lion at QB George Plimpton Detroit Lions | The Pop History Dig After her transformation, I noted that Mia sounds precisely like her mother, Maureen OSullivan, who had that patrician manner of speaking on and off screen. They all gathered there. Archie Moore, after all, had broken his nose. Macklem . Interesting that the two competitors for his anchor chair were both fully vernacular speakers from the South and West: Mudd and Rather. Orson Welles notably spoke in a mid-Atlantic accent in the 1941 film Citizen Kane, as did many of his co-stars, such as Joseph Cotten. At one point, there was a tremendous Wagnerian thunder and lighting storm. The Left Bank really became East 72nd Street. The Moth | The Art and Craft of Storytelling George Plimpton Biography - life, family, children, wife, school, son Look out, Wilson! But dying in sleep: It was as if he was doing what he did when he tried out for all those other things as an amateurballooning, acting, boxing, performing at amateur night. How George Washington Spoke (Brief Thoughts) | Dialect Blog In 1955 or 56, he went back to New York. Documentary Shows George Plimpton's Best Story Was His Own : NPR - NPR.org 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. Jean Harlow, one of my favorites, is all over the map with this, sometimes sounding like a tough streetwalker, other times like a society matron, and, oddly, slipping in and out of both dialects in the same role, or even in one sentence. To me, Mid-Atlantic English is the nom juste for a related but distinct phenomenon (which is also mentioned in Wikipedia). Its a joke to say 500 of my closest friends, but that would have been true with George1,000 of his closest friends, actually. What was our problem? He rounded first as if he were about to go for a double, then glided back to the base, with fans waving and cheering. 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. (A variation is the Locust Valley Lockjaw.). 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. After his discharge, Plimpton returned to Harvard and finished his undergraduate education. I had George tell him the story of Sidd Finch. * 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. The funny thing about Harris was that he did not start out with that accent - as I suspect George Gershwin did not. Kennedy died the next day at Good Samaritan Hospital. Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. The title of the PBS documentary - "Plimpton! The Paris Review was a testimony to his literary taste and his sense of glamour. His high Boston accent might have been heard as an influential transitional hybrid, and its interesting how prominent parodies of the speech of Brando, Dean, and Kennedy were at the time: seems a sign that we were noticing a marked change. NEW YORK -- George Plimpton, the self-deprecating author of "Paper Lion" and other sporting adventures and a patron to Philip Roth, Jack Kerouac and countless other writers, has died. 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. Just in time for the Sixties, with all their other pressures towards some kind of anti-Eisenhower authenticity. A friend of the New England Sedgwick family, Plimpton edited Edie: An American Biography with Jean Stein in 1982. 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. Youll get another shot at the big time, trust me. I just knew it was going to be something terrible. The film used archival audio and video of Plimpton lecturing and reading to create a posthumous narration. Vault. [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.
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