Its something different, and Ive not encountered that in the mid-Atlantic. Articles From This Author. Researcher and writer Samuel Arbesman filed with NASA to name an asteroid after Plimpton; NASA issued the certificate 7932 Plimpton in 2009.
The Blacklisted Journalist,George Plimpton, 76 Death Claims Another of 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. Alan Alda, portraying my dad in the movie version of Paper Lion (his book on playing quarterback for the Detroit Lions), didnt bother with his voice at all. Louis Begley, novelist:Jim Atlas interviewed me for an Art of Fiction piece in the Paris Review, a feature of the magazine that George invented and brought to perfection. (Did Eisenhower speak the newsreel style? They all sound just like George. The Cuban revolutionaries, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, had just marched on Havana and ousted the US-supported dictator Fulgencio Batista. 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. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. Plimpton, along with former decathlete Rafer Johnson and American football star Rosey Grier, was credited with helping wrestle Sirhan Sirhan to the floor when Kennedy was assassinated following his victory in the 1968 California Democratic primary at the former Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California.
See Inside George Plimpton's Upper East Side Duplex The guys here in Detroit treated him like one of us. 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. George Plimpton boxed with Archie Moore, played quarterback for the Detroit Lions, and played percussion for the New York Philharmonic. My suspicion is that the shift might have begun in the switch away from the two paired styles in American movies, the classical acting of the British School and the rapid patter of popular American actors (Marx Brothers, Cagney, Powell and Loy, etc), and over to the Method Acting style of the Strasberg/Brando/Dean school. George Plimpton, journalist extraordinaire, trains with and then performs as Quarterback for the Baltimore Colts.
George Plimpton, Author And Editor, Is Dead at 76 One reader writes: I've wondered whether that "announcer English" was at least partly caused by poor loudspeakers and microphones. Thurston Howell III had the Larchmont Lockjaw accent. Greetings From the Vortex of Unpredictability, Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. 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. Think of the accent of Jane Hathaway on the Beverly Hillbillies. NYC speech in the sixties, in some ways, flipped prestige markers. They spoke in this manner, and it seemed perfectly natural, evocative of a background spent among the gentry of the northeast. We were bound to play the roles of father and son, unable to simply be ourselves. "[25] He had a recurring role as the grandfather of Dr. Carter on the NBC series ER. And being good at losing was one of Georges many gifts. That was when Westbrook van Voorhis, the famous March of Time voice, did the intro narration of the pilot episode of The Twilight Zone.
'Plimpton!' documentary looks at George Plimpton's lives 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. Plimpton's The Bogey Man chronicles his attempt to play professional golf on the PGA Tour during the Nicklaus and Palmer era of the 1960s. In this campaign, Plimpton touted the superiority regarding the graphics and sounds of Intellivision video games over the Atari 2600.[24]. But its clear that the diction I call Announcer Voice has been the object of close linguistic study. Richard Howard, poetry editor, the Paris Review:I worked with George for 10 years on the magazine.
In Praise of Plimpton - Newsweek The primary reason [for the accent] was primitive microphone technology: "natural" voices simply did not get picked up well by the microphones of the time, and people were instructed to and learned to speak in such a way that their words could be best transmitted through the microphone to the radio waves or to recording media. 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. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. George Plimpton was a literary man about town who did it all, from co-founding The Paris . 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. **Mid-Atlantic. We were going to go looking for strange birds. By George Plimpton. Isnt that what they call it. "I've decided to stay over here in . I can understand your frustration, but celebrities die every day. He could as easily have been my grandfather as father.
George Plimpton - American Academy of Arts and Letters [17], In 1953, Plimpton joined the influential literary journal The Paris Review, founded by Peter Matthiessen, Thomas H. Guinzburg, and Harold L. "Doc" Humes, becoming its first editor in chief. May a diseased yak squat in your hot tub. We had the book party for my selected poems, Sailing Alone Around the Room, at Georges house on Sept 10, 2001. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 September 25, 2003) was an American writer. He Was Shot by John Wayne. He rounded first as if he were about to go for a double, then glided back to the base, with fans waving and cheering. Family (1) Spouse That made him a great storyteller. Between 1945 and 1948, Plimpton was a soldier in the United States Army.
An Oral History of George Plimpton: The Man Does Everything - Observer Book excerpt - George Plimpton on why Hole 16 at Cypress Point is one Please educate me. The clipped, non-rhotic English accents of George Plimpton and William F. Buckley Jr. were vestigial examples. Hed have that and a scotch on the rocks, his favorite drink. [35], Plimpton was known for his distinctive accent which, by Plimpton's own admission, was often mistaken for an English accent. News children today have no concept of the Mid-Atlantic accent. 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. But he has never employed that voice professionally, and certainly does not speak that way in real life. Plimpton was associated with the literary magazine in Paris, Merlin, which folded because the State Department withdrew its support.[why?] Even the manliest actors, such as Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable sometimes slipped into this voice-coach mode.
By strange coincidence, I actually became quite good friends with his (ex-)in-laws here in Manhattan. I live in Connecticut which is both the richest and poorest state in the union - I think we still are - and we have our fair share of extremely rich folk who sit around all day in their large victorians wearing rockport loafers, no sox, khaki pants and a polo-shirt with the collar up. And so when it was time to say goodbye, we did so simplyno awkwardness, no strangled expressions of affectionand this is why, even though it was the last time we ever spoke, and I would never get the chance again, I do not regret not telling him that I loved him. Actually, thats not far off from how my mom felt when she first met him.
Articles by George Plimpton - Sports Illustrated Vault | SI.com Vault. I can understand your frustration, but celebrities die every day. They spoke in this manner, and it seemed perfectly natural, evocative of a background spent among the gentry of the northeast.. I believe the accent was at one time known as Larchmont Lockjaw. Consider his duties as host of Mousterpiece Theatre (my first intro to my father as celebrity), a childrens TV show in which he debated the adventures and psyches of Donald Duck and Goofy in that marvelously serious voice: Is Donald Duck really a strident existentialist and a hero? How wonderfulwhat fun!to have a constant reminder emerging from your lips that life was absurd, and identity, too; all of it a great game to be played at, enjoyed. Ive known him forsix months and I just now learned hes not English!. He wrote for the Harvard Lampoon, was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club, Pi Eta, the Signet Society, and the Porcellian Club. 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. . rejoiced in the name of Euphemia van Renssalaer Wyatt. (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? 1. 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. **, In this case, Mid-Atlantic refers to speech in which the attributes of British English and American English meet halfway. [47][48]
April Fool's Day: Throwback to the time George Plimpton fooled the After the technology improved the need to speak so histrionically went away, and so did "announcer English.". [2] His first wife, whom he married in 1968[38] and divorced in 1988, was Freddy Medora Espy, a photographer's assistant. 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.
George Plimpton | The New Yorker His experience was captured in the book Out of My League. Here's a look inside the space, where the Paris Review editor hosted legendary parties. How widespread, numerically and geographically?
Paper Lion: Confessions of a Last-String Quarterback: Plimpton, George He's a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. 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! Harris trained himself as a young man to lose his native Bronx accent - to the point that he was asked if he were British. On Sept. 26, George Plimpton died in his sleep, at the age of 76. Plimpton was .the public face of the New York intellectual: tweedy, eclectic and with a plummy accent he himself described as "Eastern seaboard cosmopolitan." . I dont give a rats ass about informing anyone about the death of Plimpton. YESTERDAY IS NOT FAR AWAY. 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. Of course, my dad had tried out for the role of himself and not gotten it, though he would go on to have a steady film career playing one version or another of a striking white-haired figure with a distinguished, chivalrous voice in bit roles in some twenty or so movies, including Reds and Good Will Hunting. Fortunately, in the upcoming film Plimpton!
Do, Write George Plimpton Has Made A Career Throwing Himself Into (A variation is the Locust Valley Lockjaw.). But he would do this in the most charming and agreeable way. For more than fifty years, his friends made a circle whose circumference was vast and whose center was a fashionable tenement on New York's East Seventy-second street. *Originally posted by j.c. * He wanted to play his own part, but they wouldnt let him. Indeed, the police deposition the filmmakers managed to uncover may be the only time my dad ever spoke about the tragedy, publicly or privately. 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. You can. But it didnt define him, much the way he refused to be defined by the stiff, upper-crust world from which hed come. [45], Plimpton is the protagonist of the semi-fictional George Plimpton's Video Falconry, a 1983 ColecoVision game postulated by humorist John Hodgman and recreated by video game auteur Tom Fulp.[46].
George Plimpton Broke My Arm. The risky pleasures of Plimpton's | by In it Van Voorhis has the formal delivery that would have seemed familiar to many mid-century listeners but which in retrospect we know was on the way out. Nevertheless, its a strange thing that one of the great voices of modern storytelling had limitations, restrictions, words, and phrases it was incapable of uttering, matters it could not express: death, love, tragedy. Isnt that what they call it. Think of the accent of Jane Hathaway on the Beverly Hillbillies. After returning to New York from Paris, he routinely launched fireworks at his evening parties. I do believe his accent was decidedly Swamp Yankee. By George Plimpton. Plimpton scowled, and said he was perfectly capable of running for himself. George Plimpton (1927-2003) was a journalist and the first editor-in-chief of The Paris Review. His final interview appeared in The New York Sports Express of October 2, 2003 by journalist Dave Hollander. George Plimpton was a literary man about town who did it all, from co-founding The Paris Review to boxing (and dribbling and quarterbacking) with the pros. 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].