Harris trained himself as a young man to lose his native Bronx accent - to the point that he was asked if he were British. Everything he did was like this, just a bit odd. And I felt such love for my sweet old excited dad at that moment that I thought I would do him the favor of not telling him so, of leaving it unsaid. They spoke in this manner, and it seemed perfectly natural, evocative of a background spent among the gentry of the northeast. 3: Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Her mother, a writer and critic for Commonweal and Catholic World. 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.. ), this isnt some kind of morbid contest to see who can be the first to inform the board of some celebritys death. Ive known him forsix months and I just now learned hes not English!. He was one of her original supporters and had published an article about her work in The Paris Review. If you are in the big league, God help us all. Several weeks later at a book party, he spotted two writers who had played in that game. If you say, I pahked my cah in Hahvahd Yahd, like some vaudeville version of a Boston accent, you are non-rhotic. [citation needed] Some of these events, such as his stint with the Colts, and an attempt at stand-up comedy, were presented on the ABC television network as a series of specials. The journal, which had operated out of his home, moved downtown. BTW, I cant imagine a presidential candidate today getting anywhere close to a nomination with FDRs accent, cigarette holder, and aristocratic bearing. ), this isnt some kind of morbid contest to see who can be the first to inform the board of some celebritys death. Plimpton was an optimist, a teller of amusing and amazing stories. (The filmmakers assembled his voice-over from recorded speeches and other archival footage.) In the April 1, 1985 issue of Sports Illustrated, Plimpton pulled off a widely reported April Fools' Day prank. Congratulations Carnac, for posting about George Plimptons death at 3:44 PM. The coach for the Writers team announced that Plimpton would pinch-hit for the first batter of the game, Daily News sports columnist Mike Lupica, and the crowd roared. In all my years, Ive never heard this accent in person. 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. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd's deciding about yogaand his future in baseball. The Writers won the game with a home run in extra innings, but the highlight was Plimptons hit. Researcher and writer Samuel Arbesman filed with NASA to name an asteroid after Plimpton; NASA issued the certificate 7932 Plimpton in 2009. The book offers memories of Plimpton from among other writers, such as Norman Mailer, William Styron, Gay Talese and Gore Vidal, and was written with the cooperation of both his ex-wife and his widow. It was horrifying.. George Plimpton. Oh now, Im joking, Carnac ( see? Now, in George, Being George, 200 friends, lovers and rivals detail Plimpton's remarkable exploits. He looked like a very eccentric old Englishman. [Then] this August he showed up, pulled the shirt over his head, and said he was ready to bat. Here's how Geroge Plimpton and his team created a prodigious pitcher out of thin air. 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. He was an actor and writer, known for Good Will Hunting (1997), Nixon (1995) and Just Cause (1995). Get a life. Please educate me. He also appeared in a featurette about Edie Sedgwick found on the Ciao! 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. 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. Just in time for the Sixties, with all their other pressures towards some kind of anti-Eisenhower authenticity. *Originally posted by Phlosphr * Except at parties. 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. Ive rarely heard this accent in real life but its often used by actors doing a stereotype character based on other actors impersonations! Plimpton was .the public face of the New York intellectual: tweedy, eclectic and with a plummy accent he himself described as "Eastern seaboard cosmopolitan." . Think of the accent of Jane Hathaway on the Beverly Hillbillies. Id like to offer a speculation, for what its worth. As an old film buff, I am used to this voice, though it figures unevenly in old movies. Plimpton didnt die. Angelo Dundee, trainer for Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard:George was such a great guy. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. What exactly is a Boston Brahmin accent? Others outside the entertainment industry known for speaking Mid-Atlantic English include William F. Buckley, Jr., Gore Vidal, George Plimpton, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Norman Mailer, Diana Vreeland, Maria Callas, Cornelius Vanderbilt IV. It was a hot, sweltering day. [citation needed], Plimpton's studies at Harvard were interrupted by military service from 1945 to 1948, during which time he served in Italy as an Army tank driver. May a diseased yak squat in your hot tub. Description above from the Wikipedia article George Plimpton, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of . 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. Cambridge. December 17, 2022 Rafael Garca. Brown & Co. Re-issued George Plimpton Sports Books, 2016. We were going to go looking for strange birds. [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. 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. Besides, third is a very respectable showing! [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]. 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! [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. That life couldnt contain him, hed burst its seams like it was an old coat two sizes too small. On one website, I read about a Choate alumn saying one can still hear the LL (see above thread) accent on campus. When I spoke to him my voice went up an octave and took on his formal tone and became careful and unnatural; his voice became like his fathersstern, authoritative, disciplinarianwhen his father was the last person in the universe he wanted to be. 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. You can. Of the Murrow Boys, Eric Sevareid held on to the newsreel style the longest; relying on memory, Im betting that we could actually watch the transition away from that to a more vernacular style in the long career of Walter Cronkite. Ad Choices. Orson Welles also comes to mind, though I noticed he spoke in this mode more often during his early days, on and off screen. 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. He did these jobs, and many others, as an amateur.. Ever. Back to Plimpton I dont remember the LL affect at all. Hemingway on Fiction, Part Two. Thats a common name for such an accent. A few days after, I went to a Paris Review party and showed off my damaged nose and two black eyes to George. The first minute is a cameo by Henry Ford II, who speaks in an utterly flat Midwest rather than Mid-Atlantic accent that no one would call elegant but that would sound perfectly natural in 2015. The funny thing about Harris was that he did not start out with that accent - as I suspect George Gershwin did not. Call me back.. I only wish I could not tell him again, just one more time. Charles McGrath, editor of the New York Times Book Review:I dont think George had played golf in years, but he used to save up oddball tips for me and others. $ 3.99 - $ 27.44. Whats the matter?, Well, he said. Several readers wrote in with specimens of Americans who had gone to England and ended up speaking in this mid-Atlantic way. He had, for instance, a series of antiquated phrases and terms of affection. (A variation is the Locust Valley Lockjaw.). The limited frequency response of the recording technology of the late 19th and early 20th centuries has left us with only a pale, and sometimes caricatural image of the original sound. "[27], Plimpton was a member of the cast of the A&E TV series A Nero Wolfe Mystery (200102). 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. He was a Wasp (both of his parents came from old New England families, and had ancestors on the Mayflower). Plimpton was an omnipresence for much of American cultural lifeboth high and lowin the last third of the 20th century. 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. When he was on the scene, everything was a big happeningan event. He had a small role in the Oscar-winning film Good Will Hunting,[22] playing a psychologist. Powered by Discourse, best viewed with JavaScript enabled. For such admissions to escape my fathers lips, they always had to be a little removed somehow. Plimpton sparred for three rounds with boxing greats Archie Moore and Sugar Ray Robinson while on assignment for Sports Illustrated. He also served as editor of the Harvard Lampoon. After his discharge, Plimpton returned to Harvard and finished his undergraduate education. 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. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review, as well as his patrician demeanor and accent. 2023 Cond Nast. Katharine Hepburn spoke this way, on and off screen until she died. Did he have the celebrated Boston Brahmin accent, or was it a psuedo-Brit affectation? 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. Dan Rather certainly marks the definitive end of the newsreel style and the ascendance of the folksy vernacular: those rustic analogies! 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. Articles From This Author. In 1955 or 56, he went back to New York. I never thought that George slept. Spoke in a mid-Atlantic accent, reflecting a privileged Upper East Side (in New York City) upbringing. And I, of course, was looking them over, too. tweedy demeanor and Oxford accent. 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! Now the interview is perfect!. [3], He was the son of Francis T. P. Plimpton[4] and the grandson of Frances Taylor Pearsons and George Arthur Plimpton. 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. I want you to go [to the shop] pull out the biggest firework you have and go out and light it up, because you just won the firework contest in Monaco!, I was so stunned, all I could think to say was, I dont think I can get a permit that fast!, Alice Quinn, director of the Poetry Society of America, poetry editor, The New Yorker:When I was an adviser at Columbia Magazine [a journal run out of Columbia University], we were scraping barrel, with no money in the bank, and I said to the students we should have a benefit auction. He could as easily have been my grandfather as father. 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. But for now, just one more category: 3) Changing technology, changing voices. One of the magazine's most notable discoveries was author and screenplay writer Terry Southern, who was living in Paris at the time and formed a lifelong friendship with Plimpton, along with writer Alexander Trocchi and future classical and jazz pioneer David Amram. [29], With Felix Grucci, Plimpton competed in the 16th International Fireworks Festival in 1979 in Monte Carlo. That is, until I saw the documentarythe assassination of his dear friend Bobby Kennedy. 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 appeared in commercials for Oldsmobile and Intellivision, and appeared. I just knew it was going to be something terrible. It was always as if one were setting out with him on a special adventure. Vault. Typical of George to laugh about something others saw as a defining traithe never took himself all that seriously. silk-stockinged New Englander - private schools (he was All rights reserved. [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].
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