George Kimball/America at Large: 'There are people who would perhaps call me a dilettante, because it looks as though I'm having too much fun. I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun." - George Plimpton, 1927-2003
When I began covering sports in Boston in the early 1970s, a popular trivia question had obtained some currency: "Who is the only man to play for the Red Sox, Celtics, and Bruins?" The answer to the trick question was John Kiley, the Fenway Park organist who also pulled keyboard duty at the old Boston Garden, but those who guessed George Plimpton wouldn't have been far wrong.
George Ames Plimpton, who died a week ago today, trained with the Boston Celtics and played for several minutes of an exhibition game with what was then the foremost basketball dynasty in the world. He also took a shift as an ice-hockey goaltender for the NHL Boston Bruins, and while he never did play with the Boston Red Sox, he did once pitch to Willie Mays at Yankee Stadium. ("I retired him on a pop fly," Plimpton recalled.)
More famously, Plimpton played quarterback for the Detroit Lions, an experience which he chronicled in Paper Lion. He somehow turned four downs (in which his team lost an aggregate 32 yards) into a self-deprecating best-seller which was subsequently made into a film. He also had flings with boxing (he had his nose bloodied by the light-heavyweight champion Archie Moore), the PGA tour (The Bogey Man), the circus (in a trapeze act), and spent a month as a percussionist with the New York Philharmonic.
Having inadvertently founded a school of literature which came to be known as "participatory journalism", Plimpton became trapped by his own schtick. (Publishers flogged his biography of Truman Capote, for instance, with the tag-line "By the author of Paper Lion.") But George Plimpton would have been an important figure in the world of arts and letters had he never ventured near the arena of fun and games.
In 1953 he co-founded the Paris Review, arguably the most influential literary journal of the latter half of the 20th century, and was at least nominally its editor for the next 50 years. In that capacity he interviewed Ernest Hemingway for the magazine's "Writers at Work" series, and was instrumental showcasing writers who would later confirm his judgment: Plimpton was among the first to publish Philip Roth and VS Naipaul, and, his friendship with Capote notwithstanding, gave early exposure to the works of Jack Kerouac.
Plimpton was not, as has been widely reported in the days since his death, the first to publish Kerouac. The Paris Review was founded three years after Kerouac's first novel, The Town and The City, was issued by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1950, but a 1953 issue of the Paris Review did feature "The Mexican Girl" which was excerpted from On The Road, three years before that novel was published.
George was also a world-class party-giver. In 1973 he celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Paris Review with a party which took place on a chartered boat which circled Manhattan. The guests (I was included, since I had been published in the Paris Review 10 years earlier) were serenaded by a jazz quartet fronted by the drummer Elvin Jones, and the piece de resistance came when the vessel stopped near a barge anchored in the East River for a spectacular fireworks show. (Plimpton had managed to have himself appointed to the previously non-existent position of "Fireworks Commissioner" for New York.)
Although I'd been at a few of Plimpton's New York hooleys, I hadn't known him well, but a few months after the cruise I ran into him in the Boston Celtics locker-room following a game. I was struck by the warmth with which his former "team-mates" embraced the Harvard-educated man of letters, whose upper-crust accent and manners would have suggested aloofness. That evening several of them accompanied Plimpton and myself on a pub crawl.
He comfortably moved in circles of society and power (he was a classmate of Robert Kennedy at Harvard, and was not only with Kennedy in Los Angeles the night he was shot, but helped the former NFL lineman Roosevelt Grier subdue the assassin. ("I had my hands around his neck," he recalled of his encounter with Sirhan Sirhan.) He also had bit parts in numerous films, and once wryly noted he had appeared in more movies than he had written books. Noting that his cameo appearances included Lawrence of Arabia, Reds, When We Were Kings, and Good Will Hunting, all of which won Academy Awards, he joked, "It would seem to me that a film director should require my presence if he sees an Oscar in the future."
One afternoon nearly three decades ago Plimpton came to Boston on a book tour promoting Mad Ducks and Bears. He was fretting with some remorse he had just learned that a seemingly inconsequential passage about a lad named Puffer who played on a boy's team coached by the former lineman Alex Karras had resulted in unforeseen consequences. Schoolmates had taken to taunting young Puffer, who had developed bed-wetting habits and was now in therapy. Puffer's parents were threatening to sue Plimpton, who did not seem disturbed by that prospect, but was filled with self-recrimination over any humiliation he might have unwittingly inflicted on the boy.
For all his exploits on the playing fields, Plimpton had an unexpected response when he was asked which sport had been the most daunting: none of them. Rather, it was his stint with the New York Philharmonic, which was at the time coached by Leonard Bernstein.
"All sports are predicated on error, but in music, you cannot make a mistake," Plimpton recalled in a 1999 America Online interview.
"The fear of doing this, particularly since I can't read music, was frightening, to put it mildly. Evening after an evening of pure terror in London, Ontario, playing an instrument called the bells. I destroyed Gustav Mahler's Fourth Symphony by mis-hitting an instrument called the sleigh bells. I dream about that from time to time, and wake up covered with sweat. It's a funny answer, but I think it's true."
