George Plimpton: The Professional Amateur

By Gerald Clarke

ON the walls of George Plimpton's apartment and office, amid the photographs, posters, paintings, prints, drawings, letters, manuscript pages, animal heads, odd hats and assorted other mementos that take the place of wallpaper, are several cartoons. In one, a patient about to go under the knife looks up at the masked surgeon and plaintively asks: "Wait a minute! How do I know you're not George Plimpton?" In another, set in some imaginary banana republic whose government is about to be overthrown, one mustachioed officer demands of his coconspirators: "Before we proceed with the coup, gentlemen . . . which one of you is George Plimpton?" A third (discreetly exiled to the office bathroom) is set in a whorehouse. "See that new girl looking out the window?" one prostitute whispers to another. "I hear she's really George Plimpton."

The funniest part is that none of these situations, the last one excepted, is totally beyond the limits of the talent or imagination of George Plimpton, the world's consummate amateur. Sometimes, indeed, it is difficult to decide whether Plimpton is an amateur professional or a professional amateur, so intense is his desire to succeed in alien fields. He always loses but, in a larger sense, he always wins, proving that even in an age of constricting specialization a man can do almost anything he sets his mind to, if only for a moment. It is Plimpton's triumph that he has restored the word amateur--which today is so often a synonym for bungler--to its original and true connotation: someone who takes up an art or craft not for gain but for love.

Consider what he has done. He has sparred three bloody rounds (his blood) with Archie Moore, then light heavyweight champion of the world. He has pitched to major league baseball stars in Yankee Stadium; he has shanked and hooked his way over golf links in competition with the world's top moneymakers, and lost to Pancho Gonzales on the tennis court. He has fumbled hand-offs as a training-camp quarterback for the Detroit Lions and missed baskets while working out as a forward for the Boston Celtics.

Three years ago, he toured with the New York Philharmonic as a percussionist--and was severely chastised by Conductor Leonard Bernstein when he set off a rack of sleigh bells out of tempo, ruining the first movement of Mahler's Fourth Symphony. More recently he rode the high trapeze for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus and, as a one-line badman in a yet-to-be-released western (Rio Lobo), he was shot and killed by John Wayne, who never could decide whether the tall (6 ft. 4 in.) bit player's name was Plimpleton, Pembleton, Parfilton or Plankton.

There is no such confusion in Manhattan, where Plimpton's parties and partygoings are assiduously chronicled by the columnists and where he conducts one of America's few literary salons in his East Side apartment. Among other things, he is editor of the Paris Review, a fine literary quarterly. Until his marriage to Freddy Espy 21 years ago, at the age of 41, Plimpton was probably the most sought after bachelor in the U.S.--the escort, at one time or another, of Jacqueline Kennedy, her sister Lee Radziwill, Ava Gardner, Jane Fonda, Jean Seberg and Candice Bergen. He has also been a long and close friend of the Kennedys'--"a kind of choric figure," in the words of one of his friends, to that family's tragic saga. In fact, so familiar is the Plimpton name, so ubiquitous the Plimpton presence, that there is something of a Plimpton backlash. Manhattan is the center of what amounts to a club of Plimpton haters, who simply cannot stand the thought of George gamely attempting some new and improbable feat.

What neither the Plimpton haters nor the Plimptonphiles realize is that he is something else as well. Behind his several masks and costumes lurks an excellent and greatly underrated writer. His primary problem is that almost nobody takes a book on sports seriously. The public, to be sure, has bought his books--Out of My League, Paper Lion and The Bogey Man have sold nearly 2,000,000 copies in both hard-cover and paperback--and the critics have generally been enthusiastic. Yet both readers and reviewers have inferentially relegated Plimpton to the special, segregated subcategory of journalism reserved for the sportswriter. And a sportswriter, even a very good sportswriter, is still, in most people's eyes, only a sportswriter.

Plimpton's books are undeniably about sports. Paper Lion, the product of his month in training camp with the Detroit Lions, tells more null the inner world of pro football than any other book ever written. The Bogey Man, similarly, may be the most complete explanation of that infuriating game called golf. Out of My League is the detailed account of only one afternoon Plimpton spent in Yankee Stadium, but it nonetheless offers a keen insight into the mechanics and mystique of baseball. To say merely that the books are about sports, however, is to tell the plot without describing its climax. They are really about people--and the fantasies, triumphs and humiliations of George Plimpton. sb The Plimpton method began simply enough as a journalistic gimmick, a conscious attempt to release the Walter Mitty in one man and, perhaps, in every man. If an amateur athlete could take the place of a professional and then write about it, he reasoned, every fan in the country would identify with him and want to read his story. A good amateur pitcher, Plimpton persuaded the editors of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED and major league baseball officials to let him pitch to the pros before a post-season all-star exhibition game. What started as a lark quickly turned into nightmare. Under Plimpton's special rules, a batter did not have to swing unless he liked the pitch--and few of them liked his pitches. Ernie Banks, the reigning home run king of the National League at the time, let 22 go by. Exhausted, Plimpton heard an imaginary voice in his inner ear, speaking, for some unknown reason, in a semiliterate Southern accent totally alien to his own exalted New England speech. "My hand drifted up and touched my brow, finding it was as wet and cold as the belly of a trout," he wrote in Out of My League. "It was a disclosure which sent the voice spinning off in a cracker-Cassandra's wail of doom. 'Mah God!' it cried out, 'y'all gonna faint out heah. Lawd Almahty! Y'gonna faint!' "

The formula of Out of My League has been repeated, with varying degrees of success, in every other Plimpton venture into Mittydom. It is always the comic-terror story of the amateur trying his hand at a craft not his own and, without exception, suffering defeat and humiliation when he attempts to master it. "I think he has an idea that there's a kind of mystery one can get to, a really professional mystery of an altogether exciting kind," says Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books and one of Plimpton's closest friends. "But if an amateur enters into this, he will stumble into a nightmare. It's always a story of failure, with some terrible thing happening." Thus, unlike Walter Mitty, who always succeeded in his daydreams, Plimpton always fails in his. If he ever won, the mystery of craft would vanish altogether. Still he must try. "I know that when I do these things," he says, "I hope desperately that I'll succeed at them." In fact, the Plimpton method is somewhat more than a reporter's gimmick. The product of Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard and Cambridge, not to mention three centuries of New England ancestors, he always felt deprived of at least one thing. "I was never able to consider seriously doing what I could do quite well, which was to throw a ball," Plimpton says, somewhat wistfully. "It was the first instrument of superiority I found myself owning." sb Failure is Plimpton's fascination, but for him the line between failure and success is not always distinct --and not always where it seems to be. There is, he thinks, a certain "tragedy in being better. The successful man of any profession I know of somehow rues success." His first novel, which now exists only in notes, is not about the Jet Set or the grand, fun-filled days of the '50s when he and his friends began the Paris Review, but about a 70-year-old photographer, an ostensible failure, who is always in the right place at the right time yet always gets the wrong picture. He is on the Lusitania, but shoots only the horizon and a snip of the bow as the ship goes down; he is present at a political assassination, but records only the assassin's coattails; he was present when the flag was raised at Iwo Jima, but handed his camera to someone else while he helped the Marines put up the colors. "Maybe he is only unsuccessful in terms of the majority report," Plimpton asserts. "He's not a failure in my lights at all, because his view of the world is the extremely sensitive one that may be born out of being a maverick."

If he ever writes his memoirs, George Plimpton will almost certainly have another bestseller: his circle of acquaintances is wide, and his stories about them are inexhaustible. One chapter, for instance, might be titled "The Night Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer Almost Met." Knowing of Mailer's obsession with Hemingway, Plimpton set up their first meeting, the prospect of which drove Mailer, as George recalls, "almost crazy with excitement." Papa was still shaky from his accidents in Africa, however, and the meeting was canceled at the last moment. Perhaps it was just as well. A Hemingway-Mailer encounter might have been historic, but it would not necessarily have been happy, as Plimpton has reason to know. Thumb-wrestling over dinner at the Colony that very night, Hemingway, a fierce and not always fair competitor, drove his fingernail deep into George's palm, so deep that the wound left a scar for several years.

Hemingway liked Plimpton, however--he even wanted to train him in Wyoming for the bout against Archie Moore--and so does everyone else who knows him. Without exception, his friends testify to his extraordinary, almost ingenuous kindness and his nearly perverse refusal ever to be glum. His whole life, in a very broad and somewhat simplified sense, is an attempt to re-create around himself the intimate, boisterous atmosphere of a boys' tree house or a college-humor magazine, where no one is ever envious and no one is ever mean. He draws his friends into his fancies and fantasies "like a group of boys starting out on an adventure at the beginning of a vacation," one notes. Every day he sets off down the Mississippi with Tom, Huck and Jim. In this world the cardinal sin is to betray a friend. About the only time Plimpton displays real dismay is when he talks of a fellow writer who revealed a confidence in print: "I think that's just awful, reprehensible! Don't you?"

Paradoxically, very few of Plimpton's friends claim to know him well. Says Novelist William Styron: "You have an entree into the innards of most people you know for 18 or 20 years. With George you don't. He doesn't set up walls; they just exist." One reason may be that George does not want his innards examined; he frequently hides behind a cloud of vagueness so thick as to defy all but the most pointed questions. Another may be that he moves too fast for anybody to look very closely anyway. "A large part of my makeup," he observes, "is the pleasures of travel, being alone, moving from one place to another, not being bedded down in my own compartment. I think people can't bear the idea of someone not being settled down, either to marriage, or to a job, or to a sort of regimen. It's mostly be, cause they're bothered exactly by that themselves."

One regimen Plimpton was in no hurry to establish was that of marriage. When he finally took the plunge--"a tremendous leap into a swimming pool of cold water," as he describes it--he almost forgot to tell the bride, who "really was," she admits, "among the last to know." Though the license had been acquired days in advance, the actual decision was not made until the morning of the wedding day itself. "He had been agonizing for a long time," explains Freddy, 29, who is blonde, green-eyed and a "knockout," in the dispassionate appraisal of one of George's former girl friends. "It was a question of his waking up one morning and saying it was now or never." Phone calls were made; caterers, florists and guests converged, almost simultaneously, on the Park Avenue apartment of a friend. Some didn't make it at all, and some were late. Jackie called to say she would be delayed--but not to hold up the wedding.

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To Plimpton's delight, the current college generation finds him a particularly sympathetic figure. He is in the Establishment, yet out of it; he has dipped into a dozen different fields, yet is tied to none. He possesses both passionate interest and a kind of cool grace. "He is their ultimate vision of the writer," says Polish-born Novelist Jerzy Kosinski (The Painted Bird), one of George's countless literary friends. "To them he comes closest to the American conception of what a writer ought to be--that he should not just live off the imagination, like Proust, but should re-create an ideal search for experience."

In Plimpton's case, the search is not likely to stop soon. He has a score of Mittyish projects in the works or in the back of his mind, ranging from cooking in an elegant French restaurant to racing in the English Grand National Steeplechase--not to mention a book he is writing with Poet Marianne Moore about events they have attended and people they have met together.

There is, in fact, no end in sight to Plimpton's incursions into foreign territory. John Kennedy once asked him in the White House if he would like to be President for a day. "Sure," Plimpton answered. "What day?" "The 29th of February," Kennedy replied. Richard Nixon had better watch out. Plimpton is not likely to forget that there is such a thing as leap year--and that the 29th of February comes again in 1972. . Gerald Clarke

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