He just did it because Columbia was another literary magazine. While I don't normally think of Lithgow as speaking with a Mid-Atlantic accent, he does a great job affecting one for the role. Macklem . I think the term Old Money or patrician pretty much says it. Anyhow, I asked Terry Gross from Fresh Air and George Plimpton to be auctioneers. He had it, as does/did William Buckley, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Julia Child. In the "I'm Spelling as Fast as I Can" episode of The Simpsons, he hosts the "Spellympics" and attempts to bribe Lisa Simpson to lose with the offer of a scholarship at a Seven Sisters College and a hot plate; "it's perfect for soup! We all just had our own regional accentor non accent, like the flat midwest speak. At one point, there was a tremendous Wagnerian thunder and lighting storm. You're going to play for us-making some sort of big comeback." "That's right," Plimpton replied in his patrician accent. 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 If you didnt know the man, you could, I think, be fooled by the voice. How do I know you're not George Plimpton? By George Plimpton. Revolutionary musket, a stairwell and a housemaster), All rights reserved. Oh now, Im joking, Carnac ( see? 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. At Harvard, Plimpton was a classmate and close personal friend of Robert F. Kennedy. Timothy Seldes, George Plimptons literary agent:Whenever George wanted me to do something for him, he would call me up and say, Hello, Old Tim. One day, I got a call, and heard his voice, and my heart sank. After his discharge, Plimpton returned to Harvard and finished his undergraduate education. Tom Nowatzke, fullback, Detroit Lions (In the 1960s, Plimpton briefly played with the Detroit Lions asresearch for the best-selling book Paper Lion, which was later made into a film):I was the No.
'Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself' review 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. After returning to New York from Paris, he routinely launched fireworks at his evening parties. But looking back on it, its funny, too. Powered by Discourse, best viewed with JavaScript enabled.
Do, Write George Plimpton Has Made A Career Throwing Himself Into Norman Mailer said that George Plimpton was the best-loved man in New York. "[25] He had a recurring role as the grandfather of Dr. Carter on the NBC series ER. It includes clear pronunciation of each and every consonant cluster. 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. So it went in late 1960 at one of George Plimpton's legendary soirees at 541 E. 72nd St., New York. Several readers wrote in with specimens of Americans who had gone to England and ended up speaking in this mid-Atlantic way. And later I woke upat 6 a.m. Later I called up George, I said, What happened?, I thought it over, he said, and I took mercy on you. We were both excitedId just come back from a weekend in Las Vegas, and hed just come back from celebrating the fortieth anniversary reunion of his Detroit Lions team at Ford Field, where the fans had given him a standing ovation, and he had raised his hatand for a moment we were no longer father and son, but just two big excited boys, each comparing adventures, and I could hear the pride in his voice, the happiness. Bill, who was from the South, kept saying to me, Can you believe Georges not English? From looking at Labovs study, I know today, as I didnt know yesterday, that linguists use the term rhotic to describe whether a person pronounces, or doesnt, the R sound before a consonant or at the end of a word. 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. Friends were almost always happy to see him because you knew he was bound to improve your mood. Lewis Lapham, editor, Harpers Magazine:Georges immense enthusiasm was his primary characteristic. 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. He had a small role in the Oscar-winning film Good Will Hunting,[22] playing a psychologist.
George Plimpton Biography - life, family, children, wife, school, son But he came right down to our level. Vault. He also appeared in a featurette about Edie Sedgwick found on the Ciao! It was as if some old gentlemans code prohibited us from interacting as human beings. He wrote, "I suppose in a mild way there is a lesson to be learned for the young, or the young at heart the gumption to get out and try one's wings". Think of the accent of Jane Hathaway on the Beverly Hillbillies. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. Mid-Atlantic. Its something different, and Ive not encountered that in the mid-Atlantic. Did he have the celebrated Boston Brahmin accent, or was it a psuedo-Brit affectation? 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. In the 50s Plimpton and staff came to New York, where they kept the Review going for half a century. So we got together and, after some preliminaries, he popped the question that he was really there to ask. The clenched jaw tight-bite bit: the lockjaw dentiloquist. Share; Copied! What exactly is a Boston Brahmin accent? I have decided, he said, that I have got to jump from a plane. There was one more matter I never heard my dad discuss. The point of the flipped prestige markers is that generally the fewer the Rs, the fancier the person. 2023 Cond Nast. 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. 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. A friend of the New England Sedgwick family, Plimpton edited Edie: An American Biography with Jean Stein in 1982. **, In this case, Mid-Atlantic refers to speech in which the attributes of British English and American English meet halfway. It's a Scottish accent that's been modified somewhat for a mainstream audience that tends to associate them with Groundskeeper Willie. Think of the accent of Jane Hathaway on the Beverly Hillbillies. Why couldnt we have a good time, too?
George Plimpton and Papa in Cuba - Guernica 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. I didnt know he was from the Larchmont area. In 1992, Plimpton married Sarah Whitehead Dudley, a graduate of Columbia University and a freelance writer. But the gentleman amateur - a Harvard. I mean, if George Plimpton wasnt my father and Id never met him, and I heard that voice emerge from his lips and matched it with his severe Roman features and his usual blue blazer, oxford shirt, and tie, I might have assumed that he was a little pompous or snooty or affected.
'Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself' TV review - SFGATE Call me back.. I remember getting the news: It was my wife Madeleines birthday, Aug. 7. Plimpton entered Harvard as a member of the Class of 1948, but did not graduate until 1950 due to intervening military service. Speaking of which, didnt the young Jackie Kennedy have something of this, along with a kinda dreamy, airy, Monroe-esque (though many degrees less contrived) essence to it? Plimpton sparred for three rounds with boxing greats Archie Moore and Sugar Ray Robinson while on assignment for Sports Illustrated. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to these men speak. 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.
When George Plimpton Met the Best Bartender in Brooklyn He was a Wasp (both of his parents came from old New England families, and had ancestors on the Mayflower). I just knew it was going to be something terrible. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. He's a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. George Plimpton boxed with Archie Moore, played quarterback for the Detroit Lions, and played percussion for the New York Philharmonic. 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. Return of the Big Bopper. $ 9.19 - $ 32.19. George Plimpton was a literary man about town who did it all, from co-founding The Paris . But he would do this in the most charming and agreeable way. [31][32][33] His firework, a Roman candle named "Fat Man",[31][32][33] weighed 720 pounds (330kg)[31] and was expected to rise to 1,000 feet (300m)[33] or more[31] and deliver a wide starburst. 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. And his apartment, with those windows that looked out onto the East River, became a famous landmark in NYC. I feel that his work on this and many other language-related matters should be far more widely known than it is. It was always as if one were setting out with him on a special adventure. For instance: Mid-Atlantic English was the dominant dialect among the Northeastern American upper class through the first half of the 20th century. (Did Eisenhower speak the newsreel style? If you are in the big league, God help us all. A similar phenomenon can be noted in the use, well into the 1980s, of the recorded sound of teletype machines in the background of newscasts, a sound still faintly evoked by the bip-bip-bip patterns of music that often introduces news broadcasts, even though teletype machines are long gone The subconscious association of this pattern of sound with news is fading fast with the passing of the years and will undoubtedly disappear entirely in the coming decade as surely as the over-enunciated style of radio speech of the 30s disappeared within a generation of its no longer being needed. We were bound to play the roles of father and son, unable to simply be ourselves. * George had three siblings: Francis Taylor Pearsons Plimpton Jr., Oakes Ames Plimpton,[15] and Sarah Gay Plimpton. Vault. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. 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. 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. This periodical has carried great weight in the literary world, but has never been financially strong; for its first half-century, it was allegedly largely financed by its publishers and by Plimpton. In another cartoon in The New Yorker, a patient looks up at the masked surgeon about to operate on him and asks, "Wait a minute! (Newsreels ran in movie theaters, of course: what better critique of the high newsreel style than the new movies that jarred against it?). 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. In the April 1, 1985 issue of Sports Illustrated, Plimpton pulled off a widely reported April Fools' Day prank. [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. **Your transparent jealousy is very unbecoming, Carnac. By strange coincidence, I actually became quite good friends with his (ex-)in-laws here in Manhattan. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review. They all sound just like George. [41] She is the daughter of James Chittenden Dudley,[42] a managing partner of Manhattan-based investment firm Dudley and Company, and geologist Elisabeth Claypool. With a little more practice, you could give us boys in the big leagues a run for our money. Plimpton brought the Left Bank to NYCpeople like Peter Mathiessen, William Styron, Terry Southern. If you say, I pahked my cah in Hahvahd Yahd, like some vaudeville version of a Boston accent, you are non-rhotic. His friendships testified to what an eclectic man he was. 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. 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. [19] Another sports book, Open Net, saw him train as an ice hockey goalie with the Boston Bruins, even playing part of a National Hockey League preseason game. By George Plimpton. Prestigious prep schools and ivy league institutions (though Gore Vidal never went to college). It includes clear pronunciation of each and every consonant cluster. People two or three deep stood looking out at the East River. He majored in English. Plimpton also appeared in a number of feature films as an extra and in cameo appearances. Family (1) Spouse He came from a family where such endearments were not expressed, and phone conversations were curt.
Mid-Atlantic accent - Wikipedia *Originally posted by cuauhtemoc * **Get a life. Too old-fashioned. . So, pairing the Cagney hint with the Kennedy Inaugural, could we date the changeover to 1961? And so fuck was definitely out of the question, but what about I love you? Katharine Hepburn spoke this way, on and off screen until she died.
George Plimpton | About the Film | American Masters | PBS Sidd Finch: A pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. - Sports Illustrated He could as easily have been my grandfather as father. In the offices of the Paris Review, he displayed far more discerning tastes. Back to Plimpton I dont remember the LL affect at all. He smiled broadly, signaled for the coach to send Lupica in to run for him, and trotted back to the sidelines. Wed gone to dinner and the maitre d comes over and says, Felix, I got a call for you from Monaco., I pick up the phone, and I hear Georges Bostonian accent. With the evolution of talkies in the late 1920s, voice was first heard in motion pictures. A few days after, I went to a Paris Review party and showed off my damaged nose and two black eyes to George. I dont give a rats ass about informing anyone about the death of Plimpton. Here's how Geroge Plimpton and his team created a prodigious pitcher out of thin air. (What else happened that year??? [13], Plimpton's son described him as a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant and wrote that both of Plimpton's parents were descended from Mayflower passengers.[14]. The Curious Case Of Sidd Finch. 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. You heard it and it. "I've decided to stay over here in .
Oh, I suppose we should all just lavish praise upon Carnac the Magnificent now for bringing this to your attention, is that it? George Plimpton: what kind of accent?
George Plimpton Detroit Lions | The Pop History Dig But the average person never talked that way. And here for the full interview). The clipped, non-rhotic English accents of George Plimpton and William F. Buckley Jr. were vestigial examples. All the good guys have got to go. Few could give a toast or tell a story with equal humor. Yes he is gone.
George Plimpton : Movies - CinemaOne The guys here in Detroit treated him like one of us. I received many notes like this one: The variety of English you are referring to has a name in linguistics: "Mid-Atlantic English". His response was "no, just affected.". 2) The Role of Broadway and Hollywood, and the Shift from Jimmy Cagney to Marlon Brando. 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 little before my time, but Kennedy certainly didnt, even if his vernacular was more formal than Brandos. **.
George, Being George: George Plimpton's Life as Told, Admired, Deplored So it was that George Plimptons accent could not be imitated. And the answer may explain partly why it has gone out of fashion: Jonathan Harris, the actor who played Dr. Smith on the television show "Lost in Space.".
See Inside George Plimpton's Upper East Side Duplex 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 . Cambridge. By George Plimpton. The conservative thinker may have shared an accent with some other men of the same age and social class, but his mannerisms and gestures made him entirely uniqueand occasionally prone to. . He was one of her original supporters and had published an article about her work in The Paris Review. If you listen to Grossman (who is originally from Boston) starting about 15 seconds into the clip below, youll see that he uses a split-the-difference UK/US hybrid that is literally mid-Atlantic, in the sense of combining accents from both countries, but is different from the newsreel announcer voice: You should talk to William Labov [JF: I will try] , pioneering sociolinguist, whose landmark study into New York City speech led him to ask the same question you have. Jay McInerney, author:Arriving in Manhattan as a young writer, nothing was more thrilling or daunting than attending my first Paris Review party at Georges townhouse on East 72nd in the fall of 1984. Manhattan DVD. If you say, I parked my car in Harvard Yard, you are being rhotic. Spoke in a mid-Atlantic accent, reflecting a privileged Upper East Side (in New York City) upbringing. **Those of us whose families are from Larchmont (that would be me) just call it lockjaw. I always thought it sounded similar to the accent of William F. Buckley, Jr., who I believe was not reared in Boston. These interviews are a collaborative effort, and, I believe, a fascinating contribution to literary history. Youd be on the phone with him and get to the end of the conversation, and youd say I love you, Dad, and at most, hed reply, without subject or object, Love, like he was signing a letter. History / Biographical Note Biographical Note. 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. Well, perhaps it's more accurate to say that the book provided entertaining confirmation to millions of people that they -- like the author . If you found him at a fancy restaurant, he was there as a guest: For his own meals he preferred cheap Chinese or bangers and mash at a local Irish pub. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. He wrote for the Harvard Lampoon, was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club, Pi Eta, the Signet Society, and the Porcellian Club. And so it seemed only fitting to commemorate his death with the form he made his own.Meghan ORourke. He was going to put on a reading of his play Zelda, Scott, and Ernest.
Being, And Appreciating, George Plimpton - krvs.org 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. He was 76. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 September 25, 2003) was an American writer. 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. He did not appear last year, or the year before, and we feared he was done with us. [29], His enthusiasm for fireworks grew, and he was appointed Fireworks Commissioner of New York by Mayor John Lindsay,[29][30] an unofficial post he held until his death. He was also known for "participatory journalism," including accounts of his active involvement in professional sporting events, acting in a Western, performing a comedy act at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and playing with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra[1] and then recording the experience from the point of view of an amateur. And they founded this thing called the Paris Review and published poetry and short story writers and did interviews. See below!) To me, Mid-Atlantic English is the nom juste for a related but distinct phenomenon (which is also mentioned in Wikipedia). 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. One thinks of the glorious character actress, Kathleen Freeman, as the voice coach Phoebe Dinsmore in Singing in the Rain: Round tones, Miss Lamont. In Woody Allens Radio Days, Mia Farrow has an impossibly thick Brooklyn accent until she takes voice lessons and becomes a successful radio purveyor of celebrity gossip. . 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. (Why do I even bother?) By George Plimpton.
A Final Party at George Plimpton's Storied Apartment This brings us back to the why things changed question. The name George Plimpton is synonymous with a kind of all-in participatory journalism. . Researcher and writer Samuel Arbesman filed with NASA to name an asteroid after Plimpton; NASA issued the certificate 7932 Plimpton in 2009. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Best-selling author George Plimpton shares his experience as a "Storyteller For Life" with Dean Nelson of Point Loma Nazarene University as part of PLNU's 5th Annual Writer's Symposium By The. One reader writes: I've wondered whether that "announcer English" was at least partly caused by poor loudspeakers and microphones. He was an actor and writer, known for Good Will Hunting (1997), Nixon (1995) and Just Cause (1995). Everything he did was like this, just a bit odd. It is the kind of study . Ive lived in Boston for 30 years and have never heard a George Plimpton accent; so I guess it must be a Larchmont accent, *Originally posted by Carnac the Magnificent! It was so tiny that if you saw him in it, you couldnt believe hed be able to get himself out of it. George Plimpton. He was a great addition to the human race. (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. 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. How widespread, numerically and geographically? Off screen, George Plimpton and Gore Vidal come to mind. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. [23] He was also notable for his appearance in television commercials during the early 1980s, including a memorable campaign for Mattel's Intellivision. Isnt that what they call it. [3] During the summers, he lived in the hamlet of West Hills, Huntington, Suffolk County on Long Island.
Paris Review - Writers, Quotes, Biography, Interviews, Artists With a little more practice, you could give us boys in the big leagues a run for our money. Vault. To me, it meant admission to this little exclusive club at the Paris Review. Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career.
George Ames Plimpton (1927 - 2003) - Genealogy - geni family tree [2], A November 6, 1971, cartoon in The New Yorker by Whitney Darrow Jr. shows a cleaning lady on her hands and knees scrubbing an office floor while saying to another one: "I'd like to see George Plimpton do this sometime." 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. Is it in evidence among the Gen X set of Boston, or a passing phenomenon? Showdown in the Pits. "[44], In 2006, the musician Jonathan Coulton wrote the song entitled "A Talk with George", a part of his 'Thing a Week' series, in tribute to Plimpton's many adventures and approach to life. [37] His son, Taylor, described it as a mixture of "old New England, old New York, tinged with a hint of King's College King's English."[14]. He appeared in commercials for Oldsmobile and Intellivision, and appeared. You heard it and it could only be him. For such admissions to escape my fathers lips, they always had to be a little removed somehow. Update: This post is #2 in the announcer-speak series. It sounds like Somerset Maugham, was a favorite putdown. Plimpton was .the public face of the New York intellectual: tweedy, eclectic and with a plummy accent he himself described as "Eastern seaboard cosmopolitan." . Well have a lot more to say about Buckley and Vidal for now the leaders in the race for Last American to Talk This Way (with George Plimpton in third)in the next installment. He once said that, in writing Paper Lion, he wanted to reveal the "humor and grace" of football. George Plimpton.
George Plimpton - Wikipedia His final interview appeared in The New York Sports Express of October 2, 2003 by journalist Dave Hollander. Its strange to think, but he would have been eighty-five this year: fourteen years older than my mom, fifty years older than me. He loved the ones that made a lot of noise and racket and excitement. Hed ask what was new in fireworks business and doodle around the facility with my dad, and he would always leave with a package of fireworks, to put on his own show.
George Plimpton: what kind of accent? - Straight Dope Message Board No matter where he was, or who he wasquarterback, trapeze artist, Philharmonic triangle-playerhis voice never changed, proving that you can be whomever you want to be without ever abandoning yourself. 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.
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