The Last Gentleman

On the morning of Friday, Sept. 26, 93-year-old Laurance Rockefeller sat in his New York apartment, waiting to accept an award from the chief minister of the British Virgin Islands. He had invited 11 guests, including his brother Winthrop Rockefeller, ABC News anchor Peter Jennings and author George Plimpton. When Mr. Plimpton had not shown up by 11 a.m., Mr. Rockefeller turned to Mr. Jennings and said, "He's coming, he'll be here. He's coming."

Then someone's cell phone rang: George Plimpton, the last Knickerbocker, had died in his sleep at the age of 76.

Just a few weeks prior, Plimpton had signed a $750,000 deal to write his memoirs, and was preparing to embark on a trip to Cuba for a series of readings of Zelda, Scott and Ernest with Angela Hemingway, the daughter-in-law of one of his greatest idols, Ernest Hemingway. He was in the midst of planning a 50th-anniversary celebration of The Paris Review , where the can-can girls and indoor fireworks would be nothing less than expected of a George Plimpton party. Now the event will not just be a commemoration of a half-century of writing by the likes of John Updike, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound and E.L. Doctorow, but a celebration of the life of the man who devoted all his energy to a publication whose top circulation was 15,000, and in his spare time lived every man's dreams, plural.

Molded in an Old New York household to end all old New York households, polished at St. Bernard's, a private all-boys school, Phillips Exeter, a boarding school, and Harvard's most exclusive finals club, the Porcellian, Plimpton was torn by his great propriety and the lure of the exciting world beyond his own. From boxing with Archie Moore to taking on the role of a psychiatrist in Good Will Hunting to playing football with the Detroit Lions , he acted out fantasies of being someone else without ever changing his demeanor or fundamental outlook, and even held onto one of the last mid-Atlantic accents in New York society.

While his father, Francis T.P. Plimpton, was the Plimpton in the old-line law firm Debevoise and Plimpton and a Puritan in every sense, his son decided instead to be the architect of his own persona.

"He was a through-and-through amateur, and his father was a through-and-through lawyer and a professional citizen," said Nelson Aldrich Jr., one of the original Paris editors of The Paris Review . "George picked up on that and I think chafed under it, though he'd never admit that."

Plimpton's longtime friend, George Butler, author of Pumping Iron , had the same sentiments.

"In effect, what George did was very different to do for someone who grew up in the New York establishment, because you were really expected to join the Porcellian Club and then go into business. George just decided that he would do a riff with jazz musicians, play football with the Detroit Lions. He did what everyone else wanted to do."

Plimpton's adventurousness echoed the rebelliousness of the Lost Generation he so idolized: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos and other young American writers who in the decade following World War I struck a pose of romantic disillusionment. They did so first of all because of the war, which had annihilated several hundred thousand of their contemporaries for no good reason as they saw it, and second of all because they found life in the U.S.A. crippled by a bourgeois dullness that stifled the artist. People understood the art of living in Paris. It was in Paris that the expatriate Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway, "You are all a lost generation." Cummings, Dos Passos and Malcolm Cowley, like Plimpton, were all Harvard graduates. Hemingway and his fellow expats wrote for literary magazines, one of the best known being the Transatlantic Review .

Plimpton's Paris Review harked back to the Transatlantic Review crowd; its creators were the post–World War II generation, young writers who had gone to Groton, Exeter and Harvard, who wrote for the Lampoon and belonged to the Porcellian, who were the serious artists and writers who lived above the herd, which included capitalists, lawyers and businessmen. They followed the creed of E.E. Cummings, who wrote in his introduction to The Enormous Room : "What do you think happens to people who aren't artists? What do you think people who aren't artists become? I feel they don't become; I feel nothing happens to them; I feel negation becomes of them."

Plimpton not only became an artist and a writer, he also became an actor, boxer, baseball player, musician, fireworks expert and bullfighter, to name only a few. Mayors, film directors, inner-city children and world-class athletes all stepped over his threshold at his East 72nd Street townhouse. An aristocrat if ever there was one, Plimpton was the last remnant of a dying breed. As author Gay Talese said of his death, "It's the end of the party."

Rose Styron, poet and wife of William Styron

I met him in 1952 in Paris, with The Paris Review and we've been pals ever since …. A few years ago, we were on a trip to India and Bhutan arranged by Victor Emmanuel and Peter Matthiessen. My husband Bill, who doesn't like to travel, came with us because it sounded so fascinating, and after 10 days he decided to go home, and George replaced him. George arrived with a huge abscess on his elbow and luckily there was a doctor among our group, and he spent a lot of time trying to lance it, and it didn't really get well, and George had it in a sling. But he was very busy buying stuff to take back to his lovely young wife, and he could never carry it, so Inga [Morat, the late photographer and wife of Arthur Miller] and I would end up looking like we were out at Wal-Mart, lugging wonderful things that George was buying for Sarah, like peacock-feathered fans. We would be trailing behind him carrying his things, and he was quite regal about it all …. One day we were out in the fields looking for cranes with Peter, he was writing a book on cranes, and we ended up next to a snake pit. And George-I could see his eyes were gleaming! Then he wrote this very funny piece about how the reason his elbow was swollen was that he'd been bitten by a snake in Bhutan. He had told this story to his mother, and then he had to keep it up for her. And his mother kept telling all his friends, and some snake specialist in Florida wanted to meet George, and I remember George saying, "Shall I confess to him now, or should I let him come up and we'll have lunch and I'll tell him afterwards?" So the guy came up-before, George had gone to the Public Library and looked it all up. And he called the guy a long time afterwards and the guy laughed. So when he was not being an amateur athletic hero, he had to think up some other wonderful fake thing to be ….

For me, he was just a life-enhancing force. There's a big hole in my life. Not as nearly as big a hole as there is in Peter Matthiessen's life. Peter's here with me now. Peter and he had been best friends since they were 8! It was Peter who persuaded him to come start The Paris Review , and my husband was there and did the first interviews, so they were all pals together …. So life, you know, began in Paris, continued in Rome, continued in New York and Connecticut and around the world. It was glorious, and probably next week I will say, "Gosh, I'm just so glad I knew him." Right now I'm just sad.

James Lipton, host, Inside the Actors Studio

He was a great sharer and even inadvertently changed people's lives. He changed mine profoundly. A few days after he and his wife married, they had a reception and everybody showed up, among them Norman Mailer and his wife Norris Church, and they pinned me to the wall and they told me I had to go to the Actors Studio. They persisted and I got involved, and I came up with the idea that the Actors Studio should have a degree-granting school. The school is today the largest drama school in America. Inside the Actors Studio is shown in 70 million American homes and 125 countries. I say this not to boast, but to say if I had not gone to the reception, the Actors Studio Drama School at the New School would not exist. Just by the people that he attracted, by the kind of extraordinary chemistry around him, he made these things happen.

Charles Michener, music writer

About a year ago, George and I went to a Radiohead concert at Madison Square Garden. As he'd put it to me on the phone, a rock group with Oxford degrees was "too good to be true." We were standing in the reserved ticket line, George in summer seersucker, when two young guys came up - multi-colored hair, Radiohead t-shirts, black denim.

"George Plimpton, right?" one of them said.

George nodded.

"Wow!" the other one said. "We really like your stuff!"

"Gosh, that's awfully kind of you," George said.

"I didn't know you were a Radiohead fan," the first guy said.

"Wouldn't have missed them for the world," George said.

"Cool!" they both said.

After they disappeared, George said, "Do you think it's my suit?"

Jonathan Dee, author, former Paris Review senior editor

I don't think I appreciated how easy he made it to work for him, given the fact that he was in his 60's and we were all about 25. I wonder what's going to happen to the magazine now, because without him, there really is a roomful of 25 year old people …. As far as the job interview goes, I put on a suit and reported to this address, I didn't have any idea that I was actually in his home. I thought, boy, this is a nicely appointed office, here's a piano, a pool table. I sat there, very stiff, while they interviewed me and at some point into the room walks George, wearing nothing but his boxers.

John Updike , author

I didn't know George terribly well … but I did know him a long time, beginning with the Harvard Lampoon . He had gone by the time I came on to the Lampoon, yet his ghost lingered …. And I think that the prankishness of George's books, this dressing up in a quarterback's togs, playing golf with Sam Snead and all that, tied in somehow with the prankishness, the game-ness, this willingness to be fantastic which related to George's experiences at the Lampoon. And for the rest of us it was a lesson and an admiration to see him extend himself into the public eye in the ways he did. He was also quite a kind and genial man. He once sat next to my sixteen year old daughter at some event and totally charmed her, and she still remembers it with great fondness and, in view of his death, with sorrow.

John Gordy (former Detroit Lions offensive guard)

He wouldn't just pontificate-he got in there and did it. The great memory of George was his effort-knowing that he couldn't do it, he made an effort with every fiber of his body and his mind, and then when it didn't work, which it didn't, he would laugh about it. When he first got to training camp, he came over and ate at the table where we were. We got together and decided to be very sloppy in our eating habits. We were drinking milk, it was pouring down our shirt-antediluvian, as he would call it-we just wanted to see what kind of guy he was. We thought Harvard and the whole nine yards. Well, George started doing the same thing. He didn't miss a beat. We fell in love with him.

Terry McDonnell, editor, Sports Illustrated

We were walking down a road in New Mexico with my two young sons, it was at dusk and George told us he could show us something interesting. He had a white t-shirt on. He took his t-shirt off and threw it in the air, which attracted a huge number of bats who followed it to the ground. Needless to say my two sons thought it was the greatest thing they had ever seen. He then told us he had hunted bats for the Museum of Natural History's collection.

Lewis Lapham, editor, Harper's

On Leonard Lopate this morning, a caller told the most exemplary anecdote that I've heard about Plimpton. The caller was a member of the graduating class of Bennington in 1975, and someone asked someone for a favor of George, that he produce a fireworks show for commencement. And for however many students there were in the class, he had one made for each of them, all different, and then when the graduating senior came up to receive his or her diploma, George would scream his or her name and a rocket would go off....I recall that 4 or 5 years ago he was invited to one New Year's Eve party in Long Island by Spielberg, one at the White House with Clinton, and one in LA by Hugh Hefner. That's George.

Elaine Kaufman, proprietor, Elaine's

One of the funny ones was recently before Joe DiMaggio died. George came in on his own to have supper, and Joe was there. I said, "You know Joe?" He said, "No." I said, "I'll introduce you. Tell the story of Sidd Finch" - because it's difficult to talk to DiMaggio. You don't know how easy it is to get his ire up. George sat down and told him about the fastest pitcher in the world. Joe had never seen it. Joe DiMaggio is not a literary figure. He just fell down laughing.

Jeffrey Eugenides, author

Back in the days when I had a shaved head and thick Italian glasses I met George at a rather swank party at the New York Public Library and he told me I looked like Swifty Lazar, his old agent. And he took my glasses off my head and pulled up the leg of his pants and put my glasses on his knee cap and that was his impression of Swifty Lazar.

Gay Talese, author

You found people of three generations, those still alive-Mailer, Matthiessen, Styron-and also people who were 40 years younger than yourself, all jammed into that apartment on East 72nd Street, and by the second round of martinis thinking the barges in the river were going the wrong direction. He's a man who not only stayed up late, but made use of the time when others went into an ambient induced sleep. The apartment is really a locale that should have landmark status, every mayor has been there, every prize fighter, and it really has a nostalgic over-layer, too, the over-layer sometimes being marijuana and one gin too many. Now it's really sad because whenever this memorial service will be, it's really a moratorium on all those great and late parties.

George Butler, author and filmmaker

There were situations in which men would go over to his house in Southampton with their dates and I remember a very beautiful woman complaining about the fact that she went over to George's house with a man she was very attached to and he just sort of gravitated to George simply because George was the most interesting person in the room - they kind of drifted off and left their women.

Peter Matthiessen, author

He was my oldest friend and we've been friends since we were 8 years old. He went out to a dinner party [the night before he died] and he was in fine form. My most recent memory of him was we went to the Galapagos this summer, he took his little twin girls and I took my two grandsons. We were little boys together at St. Bernard's School on 98th Street. People think that he did all those sports, that he dabbled all those sports, but he was actually a very good athlete.

Felix Gracie Jr., fireworks mogul

He said, "Butt"-that was my nickname-"I've got an idea. I'm involved with this group called the 3M." I thought it was the 3M tape company. "Mischief Madcap Makers," he said. "It's a group of us that's looking to claim world records in the Guinness Book of World Records . I want you to build the biggest fireworks in the world. The Japanese hold it now, but I think it should be here in America." It was tested here on Long Island, we had this huge tree stump we used-we lowered this tree stump down, Loa and behold, this thing goes off, George looks at us with kind of a dumbfounded look, then he yells, "Run!"

Peter Duchies, band leader

To me, he was kind of an older brother. When I had the barge in Paris, he introduced me to Bob Silvers who came to live on the barge. It was great, Bob edited The Paris Review from there. I was trying to go vaguely to the Sorbing music school but during the day people would come by for interviews and George would occasionally come and stay on the barge, which was a fairly primitive barge but wonderful. He would stay on this army cot, his feet would stick out the bottom because he was about six- four. He'd get up in the morning and do his correspondence from the Plaza Athena, on their stationery, writing home and saying it's very expensive here in Paris, send money.

Thomas Guinzberg, a founding editor of The Paris Review

I can tell you something that we were talking about Thursday night, he and I, the night he died. We were on the phone because we're giving this party to celebrate fifty years of The Paris Review . We've been struggling to create an evening that would be fun and also raise some money for the future of the darn thing. He said, "Have you got any ideas about what we can auction off, if we have this live auction?" And I said, "Well remember, GAP-George Ames Plimpton, I always called him GAP-you got the largest masthead of any journalistic organization in America. Everybody you ever met is on that thing as an advisory or associate or senior editor."

He said, "What's wrong with that, Tombo?"

I said, "There's nothing wrong with that. Why don't we sell those the night of our party? Different amounts of money for how high you'd be on the masthead."

He said, "Yeahhh. How about editor-in-chief ? Could we give that?"

I said, "Absolutely!"

He said, "I'd do it! I'd stand aside. I'd let somebody be editor for an issue."

Robert Silvers, co-editor of th e New York Review of Books

I saw George on the Wednesday night before he died. We were at a party and we went home together and he told me that he was about to go down to Cuba, to put on that reading, "Zelda and Scott and Ernest." And he thought Castro might come to the reading. He hadn't been there since the pre-revolutionary days when he visited Hemingway. And he also had his eye on some manuscripts that had just been found, he had heard, in the basement of the house that Hemingway lived in. And George was going to go down into the basement, where he understood there had been this trunk, this cache of manuscripts, and he thought that in that cache might be the epilogue to For Whom the Bell Tolls.

-Additional reporting by George Gurley and Elon R. Green.