A Swinging Walter Mitty

A bestselling book. Clever articles in many magazines. Lunch with Marianne Moore. Tennis with Novelist Irwin Shaw. Cocktails with Actress Jane Fonda and a few fetching models. Dinner with Jackie Kennedy. A postprandial beer with Detroit Lions Guard John Gordy or Dallas Cowboys Quarterback Don Meredith. A TV appearance on the David Susskind show in which his enthusiastic host calls him an "attractive, interesting, glamorous bachelor" and "really quite civilized."

It sounds like the dream of an Out desperate to be In. But it is no dream; it is the everyday life of George Plimpton, 40, who lives in more worlds than most journalists are even privileged to see. Perfectly poised, leanly good-looking, Plimpton not only edits one of the most esteemed of the little magazines, the Paris Review; he is also an eloquent, self-deprecating sportswriter and a genuine humorist. He presides over the closest existing thing to a salon in the U.S.: almost everybody who fancies himself anybody in the arts, sports or society beats a path to one of the frequent parties in his comfortably cluttered apartment overlooking Manhattan's East River.

Perfumed Sweat. "If George ever concentrated on one thing," says Bud Shrake, associate editor of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, "God knows what he could do." George chooses not to concentrate. He exhibits the genuine journalist's compulsive curiosity about everything that comes to his attention. Nor is he content to be a mere observer; he participates. When he and a few other Paris-based friends started the Paris Review in 1953, they banned the typical cryptic criticism that fills most literary magazines; instead, George personally sought out authors for extensive interviews about their working habits with the creative process. Even Ernest Hemingway, who claimed that it would hurt his creativity to talk too much about it, submitted to George's probing queries.

After a bout of mock bullfighting in 1954 with Hemingway, Plimpton started plunging into a variety of sports to give readers a feeling of what it's like to play with the pros. Back in New York, where he continued to edit the Paris Review from his apartment, he challenged Light Heavyweight Boxing Champion Archie Moore to a few rounds. Hundreds of his friends showed up. "The gym became a branch of El Morocco," recalls Tom Guinzburg, president of Viking Press. "The smell of sweat was replaced by perfume." George was game for three rounds; then Archie bloodied his nose. Next, he took on Pancho Gonzales at tennis, losing 6-0. He played bridge with Oswald Jacoby, sending Jacoby into a towering rage. In the late '50s, he did some pregame pitching to the National League All-Stars at Yankee Stadium. The batters cannily waited for the pitch they wanted; George almost collapsed from exhaustion on the mound. He described his ordeals in an article for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED and a book, Out of My League. To Hemingway, it had the "chilling quality of a true nightmare, the dark side of the moon of Walter Mitty."

At 36, Plimpton joined the Detroit Lions for a look at pro football. Subject to the same spartan training as his teammates, Plimpton demanded to be treated like any other rookie quarterback and was regularly smeared in scrimmage. He told it all in the bestselling book, Paper Lion, in which he conveys the atmosphere of the violent, self-contained world of pro football. The players, characterized with a novelist's skill, are alternately boisterous and withdrawn, bellicose and desperate. "There's been a lot of almanac-type sportswriting," says Plimpton, "with emphasis on records, score cards, statistics. Sportswriters have never given the reader a sense of what it's like to be part of a team, of the mystique, ritual, frights and fears of the game."

Impeccably Upper Crust. Plimpton is a successful Walter Mitty because his lack of self-consciousness allows him to suffer humiliations that would gall a less secure person. He was brought up in impeccably upper-crust surroundings. His father, Francis T. P. Plimpton, is a wealthy corporation lawyer who has served as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Jackie Kennedy has been a close friend since college days, and he is regularly included in Kennedy gatherings. Beyond that, he has what SPORTS ILLUSTRATED Assistant Managing Editor Jack Tibby calls an "enormously prepossessing personality." He likes people and likes to have them around--so much so that he has handed out keys to his apartment to assorted friends. "It's not that I have a literary salon," he says. "It's simply that people come and won't leave." Once he was awakened by the phone when he was staying at a hotel in Los Angeles. Over the sound of laughter and clinking glasses, a friend informed him that he was missing a swinging party in his own apartment.

Plimpton shows no signs of slowing down. Next September he plans to play goalie with the Detroit Red Wings. Later he hopes to play chess with Bobby Fischer and then take a fling at a role at the Metropolitan Opera. He is collaborating with Marianne Moore on a sports book, with Film Maker Ricky Leacock on a documentary series for educational TV. He hopes to put together a single film from the best parts of Andy Warhol underground movies. Yet even George Plimpton has his limits. He recently turned down an offer from David Susskind to host a person-to-person kind of program on TV (Criminal Lawyer F. Lee Bailey will do it instead). It is probably just as well. When Plimpton appeared on the earlier Susskind show, he was in such a hurry to get on to his next activity that he accidentally started to walk off camera before the interview was over--looking, nevertheless, "quite civilized."

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