george plimpton accent george plimpton accent

2023 Cond Nast. Angelo Dundee, trainer for Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard:George was such a great guy. Plimpton was a writer-raconteur and dilettante in the best sense of the word: He co-founded an important literary magazine, the . Family (1) Spouse Orson Welles notably spoke in a mid-Atlantic accent in the 1941 film Citizen Kane, as did many of his co-stars, such as Joseph Cotten. Are you saying that the denizens of Larchmont sound like Plimpton did? What exactly is a Boston Brahmin accent? Few could give a toast or tell a story with equal humor. He got the personality totally wrong, too. Middle class? :rolleyes: Ive got news for you, buddy, youre not even second in line! The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. He was "George Plimpton"-editor, host . This kept his magazine fresh for 50 years. Been there, done that | Books | The Guardian 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! 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! 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. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to these men speak. Bill Buckley, Gore Vidal, George Plimpton. (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? 26 Feb 2023 12:18:23 Im having a harder time coming up with clear examples from the other side of the Atlantic, but Ive heard Alfred Molina (Londoner), and Catherine Zeta-Jones (Welsh) put on a Mid-Atlantic accent from time to time.. George Plimpton - Wikipedia Revolutionary musket, a stairwell and a housemaster), NYC speech in the sixties, in some ways, flipped prestige markers. He just did it because Columbia was another literary magazine. In fact, my dads farewells seemed loquacious in comparison to his mothers. LL is typified, I think, but an almost clenching of the teeth while talking, producing a mushy sound, if you will. Was this sheer affectation? If you say, I parked my car in Harvard Yard, you are being rhotic. In the April 1, 1985 issue of Sports Illustrated, Plimpton pulled off a widely reported April Fools' Day prank. 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. He loved the ones that made a lot of noise and racket and excitement. **. He had the bearing of Gen. MacArthur, but the soul of Charlie Chaplin. 'Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself' TV review - SFGATE George Plimpton writer, publisher, amateur lion tamer died in 2003 after 50 years as the founding editor of The Paris Review. Think of the accent of Jane Hathaway on the Beverly Hillbillies. 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. George Plimpton Net Worth The list of authors interviewed is extraordinary, and stretches from Hemingway years ago to Amy Hempel (in the 50th anniversary issue that has just been published). 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. Next up: some sociological explanations of why someone like George Gershwin might have tried to speak like Westbrook Van Voorhis. My dad could never say what he feltnot reallyand neither can any of us. Shed wandered out to the balcony of a lonely Manhattan cocktail party, and was standing out there, smoking a cigarette and looking down mournfully at the street far below, when from behind her she heard a voice: I know a better way down.. George was the one who read my name out to the commissioner. He knew we were just as good as he was, but in a different field. But the average person never talked that way. In most situations, he had the remarkable quality of making everyone he talked to feel at ease, at home, welcome, no matter who they were or what they didbut for whatever strange reason there wasnt this effortlessness with me, this warmth. Congratulations Carnac, for posting about George Plimptons death at 3:44 PM. Her mother, a writer and critic for Commonweal and Catholic World. She is the product of a line of the original Dutch settlers of New York and grew up in Tuxedo Park and the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan, very exclusive. Its something different, and Ive not encountered that in the mid-Atlantic. Plimpton didnt die. It was so violent that it brought a lot of people to the windows. 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. George Plimpton - Biography - IMDb These events were recalled in his best-known book Paper Lion, which was later adapted into the 1968 feature film starring Alan Alda. When George Plimpton Met the Best Bartender in Brooklyn Here are five things you may not have known about him. Jean Stein became his co-editor. (Newsreels ran in movie theaters, of course: what better critique of the high newsreel style than the new movies that jarred against it?). Read more in this thread (long). Almost twenty years ago, writing quirky sports pieces for the Village Voice, I decided to enter the world of championship arm wrestling.Like many young writers, I was inspired by the sports adventures of the gaunt but game George Plimpton, who had made a literary career out of placing himself in . 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. 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. 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. I just knew it was going to be something terrible. And here for the full interview). See Inside George Plimpton's Upper East Side Duplex He majored in English. I think it was an affectation people adopted because they thought it made them sound much more intelligent! . The flipped prestige markers point here is fascinating. And similarly on the role of ridicule in speeding the move away from this accent: This is only partly facetious, but I think I know who was the American to speak "Announcer." So it was that George Plimptons accent could not be imitated. I just heard that George Plimpton has died. The young Paris Review editor and other New York literary figures arrived during a period marked by hope for a democratic Cuba. I didnt know he was from the Larchmont area. Plimpton's remarkable life is showcased in a documentary that is. Mr. Plimpton was born in Manhattan in 1927 and raised in Huntington, L.I. George Plimpton : Movies - CinemaOne Being, And Appreciating, George Plimpton - krvs.org He saw athletes as heroes he. Plimpton appeared in the 1989 documentary The Tightrope Dancer which featured the life and the work of the artist Vali Myers. [29], With Felix Grucci, Plimpton competed in the 16th International Fireworks Festival in 1979 in Monte Carlo. His friendships testified to what an eclectic man he was. Starring George Plimpton as Himself" - is meant as a wink-wink to Plimpton's career as a "participatory journalist." As a writer for Sports . Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. The funny thing about Harris was that he did not start out with that accent - as I suspect George Gershwin did not. Kennedy died the next day at Good Samaritan Hospital. That is the tendency of Americans trying to sound more British, or Brits trying to sound more Yank, to split the difference and speak in an accent whose home ground is no real country but somewhere in the middle of the sea. "I've decided to stay over here in . The film used archival audio and video of Plimpton lecturing and reading to create a posthumous narration. The Moth | The Art and Craft of Storytelling The point of the flipped prestige markers is that generally the fewer the Rs, the fancier the person. What exactly is a Boston Brahmin accent? He was one of her original supporters and had published an article about her work in The Paris Review. How George Plimpton's Sports Books Presaged the First-Person Media Age He was 76.. My Father's Voice | The New Yorker It is the kind of study . It was a great partyraucous and long. Vault. It sounds like Somerset Maugham, was a favorite putdown. I thought Id died and gone to Olympus. This book is the party that was George's life-and it's a big one-attended by scores of famous people, as well as. And you are going to come with me. Whats the matter?, Well, he said. George Plimpton was an upper-class guy with a patrician accent who partied his way through life . Self-help author and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson has a unique accent that, . It includes clear pronunciation of each and every consonant cluster. [30] Plimpton later wrote the book Fireworks, and hosted an A&E Home Video with the same name featuring his many fireworks adventures with the Gruccis of New York in Monte Carlo and for the 1983 Brooklyn Bridge Centennial. 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. An Evening With George Plimpton - 2000 - YouTube :rolleyes: Ive got news for you, buddy, youre not even second in line! It came from a different era, shouldnt have still existed, but nevertheless, there it wasold New England, old New York, tinged with a hint of Kings College Kings English. Just listen to very early recordings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, back even before microphones, when singers had to yell directly into a large cone and over-enunciate so that their voices would be recorded into something intelligible on a spinning wax cylinder or disk. Plimpton embedded with the Detroit Lions for their three week training camp, an adventure which culminated with him playing quarterback in their annual intra-team preseason scrimmage. The fake English announcer voice lingered on sporadically until the end of the Johnson administration in newsreels, which themselves ceased production around the same time, but Rod Serlings decision sounded the death knell for that accent. *Originally posted by cuauhtemoc * During a career that spanned the second half of the 20th century, Plimpton was a quarterback for the Detroit Lions, pitched at Yankee Stadium, sparred with Archie Moore, played the triangle with. 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! 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]. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review, as well as his patrician demeanor and accent. She was the daughter of writers Willard R. Espy[39] and Hilda S. Cole, who had, earlier in her career, been a publicity agent for Kate Smith and Fred Waring. 3: Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Its strange to think, but he would have been eighty-five this year: fourteen years older than my mom, fifty years older than me. Spoke in a mid-Atlantic accent, reflecting a privileged Upper East Side (in New York City) upbringing. By George Plimpton. He came from a family where such endearments were not expressed, and phone conversations were curt. In all my years, Ive never heard this accent in person. (The filmmakers assembled his voice-over from recorded speeches and other archival footage.) 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. The Mid-Atlantic accent, or Transatlantic accent, is a . George also approved, I think, of the fact that I lost. 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 . O ne afternoon this summer, I sat in George Plimpton's study waiting for the gentleman editor, participatory journalist, and beloved gadfly of American letters to arrive. You should be very grateful. George Plimpton's duplex apartment on the Upper East Side hit the market for $5.495 million on April 18. I havent heard that he is dead, but if so RIP George. He is also credited with saving, Learn how and when to remove this template message, Plimpton! Hearing the words Dammit, Im mad as a hornet! uttered in George Plimptons voice made anger sound totally ridiculous, which is exactly what it most often is. George Plimpton. After the technology improved the need to speak so histrionically went away, and so did "announcer English.". One reader writes: I've wondered whether that "announcer English" was at least partly caused by poor loudspeakers and microphones. He was a Wasp (both of his parents came from old New England families, and had ancestors on the Mayflower). 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 Sometimes, we used to have quarrels, because he thought I took too many poems: Are you turning this magazine into a poetry magazine? he would say. Larchmont Lockjaw? 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! Except at parties. Along with all the other things he does, George is an editor of the Paris Review, a literary quarterly published by the Aga Khan's uncle, Sadrudin, and his apartment is overstuffed with the comforts and legends of its use as a literary salon. They were born to Plimpton and his second wife, Sarah Dudley, 26 years younger than he, who is chairwoman of the East Harlem Tutorial Program, for which he was a trustee. George, Being George: George Plimpton's Life as Told, Admired, Deplored [citation needed], Outside the literary world, Plimpton was famous for competing in professional sporting events and then recording the experience from the point of view of an amateur. The guys here in Detroit treated him like one of us. *Originally posted by cuauhtemoc * Again with thanks to Jonathan Fields, here's the continuation of George Plimpton's famous interview of Ernest Hemingway from the Paris Review, Summer 1958. Hed go on to move freely through so many worlds and circles, without ever not speaking in that singular accentthough it probably would have made life easier for him if hed adopted a new way of talking (after all, as a journalist in the locker rooms, where slang and cursing were art-forms, my dads stiff, formal tongue made him stick out like an egret among ducks). George Plimpton was born on March 18, 1927 in New York City, New York, USA. But its clear that the diction I call Announcer Voice has been the object of close linguistic study. 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. So we got together and, after some preliminaries, he popped the question that he was really there to ask. **, In this case, Mid-Atlantic refers to speech in which the attributes of British English and American English meet halfway. Ken Auletta, author:Sometime after age 70, when his reflexes dulled, George took to the sidelines in the Artists and Writers softball game in Easthampton, N.Y. Each year his name was announced, and each year he was hailed by the crowd, who paid more attention to him than to the game. (This is not to belittle Lowell Thomas, but to recognize the artifice that served him so well in his career). He said, You better stay here, and I did, for a while. 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. 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. In finally hearing the great storyteller tell the one story he would not tell, I could hear, too, his long, reverent silence on the subjectand it reveals his integrity as a journalist, and as a man. [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. Somehow Georgehad gotten it into his head that I was on the verge of becoming a pharmacist before he had called me up a year earlier to tell me the Paris Review was publishing a story I had submittedperhaps because of the pharmacological bent of the subject matter. Even if it had nothing else going for itsomething very far from the truth Shadow Box by George Plimpton will forever remain a bastion of boxing literature because of the image it contains of the "Near Room," a place of dreadful foreboding which Muhammad Ali once described to the famed . **Get a life. George Plimpton was a literary man about town who did it all, from co-founding The Paris . George Plimpton. Back in the 1960s and '70s, I would nightly sit alone in front of a TV set in a darkened room in the Midwest munching on potato chips watching late night talk shows out of New York CityJohnny Carson and Dick Cavett in particularand Plimpton was a regular on those shows. 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. A lordly accent acquired at St. Bernard's and burnished later at Cambridge, in England, enhanced his distinguished aura, as did elevated stature and a silver head of hair which might have encouraged a career in politics but mercifully did not. After his discharge, Plimpton returned to Harvard and finished his undergraduate education. His final interview appeared in The New York Sports Express of October 2, 2003 by journalist Dave Hollander. Isnt that what they call it. It includes clear pronunciation of each and every consonant cluster. He once said that, in writing Paper Lion, he wanted to reveal the "humor and grace" of football. The clipped English of George Plimpton and William F. Buckley, Jr. were vestigial examples.. Peter Matthiessen took the magazine over from Humes and ousted him as editor, replacing him with Plimpton, using it as his cover for Matthiessen's CIA activities. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. Harvard (where he edited the Lampoon), Kings College, Do, Write George Plimpton Has Made A Career Throwing Himself Into [40] They had two children: Medora Ames Plimpton and Taylor Ames Plimpton, who has published a memoir entitled Notes from the Night: A Life After Dark. Plimpton would not boast of his feat, so we did. The Detroit Lions let a reporter play QB. Can you guess how it went 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. I never thought that George slept. 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. He very much approved. At the time, he was getting ready to pitch for the Yankees,and we would throw pitches across 72nd Street in preparation. 5 Things You Didn't Know About George Plimpton | Mental Floss By George Plimpton. Plimpton[2] was born in New York City on March 18, 1927, and spent his childhood there, attending St. Bernard's School and growing up in an apartment duplex on Manhattan's Upper East Side located at 1165 Fifth Avenue. And his apartment, with those windows that looked out onto the East River, became a famous landmark in NYC. Volume 7, 2003-2005, pages 429-432. I dont give a rats ass about informing anyone about the death of Plimpton. Description above from the Wikipedia article George Plimpton, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of . George Plimpton Wiki: Salary, Married, Wedding, Spouse, Family . He was also an accomplished birdwatcher. 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. For his grandfather, the publisher and philanthropist, see, Calvin Gay Plimpton and Priscilla G. Lewis were the parents of, He was widely reviled for years after the war by Southern whites, who gave him the nickname "Beast Butler." [citation needed], In the movie Plimpton! 08:37 Dinner at Elaine's. by George Plimpton. 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. Kaltenborn was a famous mid . George . 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. Return of the Big Bopper. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. Articles From This Author. It was always a surprise. 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. Quite sad, as he just had a daughter not many years back. Labov suspected that WWII had something to do about it. 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.