And the many candidates for the crown of Last American to Speak This Way. When he was on the scene, everything was a big happeningan event. 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. You can. For instance: Mid-Atlantic English was the dominant dialect among the Northeastern American upper class through the first half of the 20th century. Besides, third is a very respectable showing! One reader writes: I've wondered whether that "announcer English" was at least partly caused by poor loudspeakers and microphones. Are you saying that the denizens of Larchmont sound like Plimpton did? 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. They all gathered there. It's a Scottish accent that's been modified somewhat for a mainstream audience that tends to associate them with Groundskeeper Willie. George Plimpton was an upper-class guy with a patrician accent who partied his way through life . Plimpton! The Great Quarterback Sneak - YouTube Against George Plimpton | Neotenianos Hes just trying it out and will come back and write a book about his experiences. He could as easily have been my grandfather as father. So we got together and, after some preliminaries, he popped the question that he was really there to ask. Starring George Plimpton as Himself, which documents his life, adventures, and work as participatory journalist and editor of the Paris Review, my dad will be playing himself one more time. My dad and I could not lose each other, but we could never quite find each other, either. I think it was an affectation people adopted because they thought it made them sound much more intelligent! 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.. A Final Party at George Plimpton's Storied Apartment Plimpton, George 1927-2003 | Encyclopedia.com After his discharge, Plimpton returned to Harvard and finished his undergraduate education. And what have we here? My moms initial impression was that he was a little hoity-toityI mean, who did this guy think he was?, But the second time they met, it was, in fact, my fathers voice that won her over. I hope not. He appeared in the PBS American Masters documentary on Andy Warhol. George Plimpton, Author And Editor, Is Dead at 76 Here's a look inside the space, where the Paris Review editor hosted legendary parties. He was 76. 2) The Role of Broadway and Hollywood, and the Shift from Jimmy Cagney to Marlon Brando. Thanks for the scores of replies that have arrived in the past day, in response to my post asking why the stentorian, phony-British Announcer Voice that dominated newsreel narration, stage and movie acting, and public discourse in the United States during the first half of the 20th century had completely disappeared. In that vein, here is an oral biography of George Plimpton. He called his computer the machine. At dinner, when offered seconds, he would often decline by saying, Thank you, no, Ive had a gracious plenty. He called my mom Puss (this was also the name of our fat, raccoon-striped cat, though he was Mr. Eerily enough, one of the messages on my answering machine was from George, with that distinctive accent of his: Hallo, its George Plimpton. But the average person never talked that way. Vault. 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. 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. Firstly, then-managing director of SI, Mark Mulvoy, gave Plimpton the liberty to create a hoax.Secondly, SI photographer Lane Stewart recruited his friend, Joe Berton to play the part of Sidd Finch. 'Plimpton!' documentary looks at George Plimpton's lives He knew we were just as good as he was, but in a different field. What was our problem? [Then] this August he showed up, pulled the shirt over his head, and said he was ready to bat. The wife is also old money, as Phlosphr mentions, and she talks exactly the same way. George Plimpton: what kind of accent? - Straight Dope Message Board 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. Vault. He smiled broadly, signaled for the coach to send Lupica in to run for him, and trotted back to the sidelines. Butch, he says, because he always called me Butch. And so it seemed only fitting to commemorate his death with the form he made his own.Meghan ORourke. Share; Copied! 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. Too old-fashioned. Heres a sampling for today, with more planned in the days ahead. The Mid-Atlantic accent, or Transatlantic accent, is a . The Wikipedia entry for it is quite detailed. He has the same type of patrician upper-class New Yorker accent as Jane Wyatt. 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. As such, it was popular in the theatre and other forms of elite culture in that region. 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. 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. George Plimpton - Biography - IMDb When George told the story, DiMaggio laughed so hard I thought he was going to fall on the floor. You heard it and it. 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. We all just had our own regional accentor non accent, like the flat midwest speak. He watched the first pitch sail high for a ball, and then hit a rope into left field. To me, it meant admission to this little exclusive club at the Paris Review. 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. his prose, and his down east, cultivated accent, although perhaps a bit pretentious, will remain with me as I reread one of my favorite books. And being good at losing was one of Georges many gifts. H.V. 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. 3: Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". And so fuck was definitely out of the question, but what about I love you? Plimpton's remarkable life is showcased in a documentary that is. 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. I remember the Lowell Thomas documentary films of the 50s where Mr. Thomas' mellifluous tones and distinct radio-style pronunciation gave him a respectability that a similar huckster could hardly hope to replicate today by the mere application of such an artifice. 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. If he couldnt be taken quite seriously, that was fine with him (he took himself lightly, and relished being in on the joke). And the role of Katharine Hepburn, whose Locust Valley Lockjaw accent was a cousin of announcer-speak: I was just discussing this not a week ago with a friend who has done voice work in film and television, and can adopt this accent in an instant to evoke that period, much to my amusement. Kim Noble, one of the announcers on the NPR affiliate in Kansas City, KCUR, speaks with a very affected Connecticut Lockjaw accent. Yes indeed, George Plimpton is a man for all seasons. A few days after, I went to a Paris Review party and showed off my damaged nose and two black eyes to George. Writing Wednesdays: Hemingway on Fiction, Part Two - Steven Pressfield 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 he have the celebrated Boston Brahmin accent, or was it a psuedo-Brit affectation? [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. She would not even say goodbye. Billy Collins, poet:Im one of these people who went from crashing Georges parties in the 70s to being invited in the 80s. We had the book party for my selected poems, Sailing Alone Around the Room, at Georges house on Sept 10, 2001. **. Few could give a toast or tell a story with equal humor. He died on September 26, 2003 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA. That made him a great storyteller. 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. How George Washington Spoke (Brief Thoughts) | Dialect Blog Thats where there was that cross-section you once found in Parisof literary people, of people who were illiterate, of people down on their luck, and people of status. (This is not to belittle Lowell Thomas, but to recognize the artifice that served him so well in his career). At the time, he was getting ready to pitch for the Yankees,and we would throw pitches across 72nd Street in preparation. That was when Westbrook van Voorhis, the famous March of Time voice, did the intro narration of the pilot episode of The Twilight Zone. Quite sad, as he just had a daughter not many years back. In his July 1936 obituary, the New York Times described George Arthur Plimpton (13 July 1855-1 July 1936) as an "internationally known publisher and collector, college trustee and philanthropist." As the materials in the George A. Plimpton Papers testify, those four areas of activity dominated Plimpton's public and private lives. Talking about sports with Georgeor, even better, reading George about sportswas more fun than sports themselves. Volume 7, 2003-2005, pages 429-432. They spoke in this manner, and it seemed perfectly natural, evocative of a background spent among the gentry of the northeast. tweedy demeanor and Oxford accent. If you didnt know the man, you could, I think, be fooled by the voice. Powered by Discourse, best viewed with JavaScript enabled. George Plimpton Broke My Arm. The risky pleasures of Plimpton's | by 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. *Originally posted by Phlosphr * [32] When lit, the firework remained on the ground and exploded, blasting a crater 35 feet (11m) wide and 10 feet (3.0m) deep. To me, Mid-Atlantic English is the nom juste for a related but distinct phenomenon (which is also mentioned in Wikipedia). I had made about five thousand egg and tuna sandwiches. An Evening With George Plimpton - 2000 - YouTube No, my fathers voice was not an act, something chosen or practiced in front of mirrors: he came from a different world, where people talked differently, and about different things; where certain things were discussed, and certain things were notand his voice simply reflected this. Jean Stein became his co-editor. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd's deciding about yogaand his future in baseball. What accent does Logan have in the show? : r/SuccessionTV Been there, done that | Books | The Guardian Among other challenges for Sports Illustrated, he attempted to play top-level bridge, and spent some time as a high-wire circus performer. After the technology improved the need to speak so histrionically went away, and so did "announcer English.". The point of the flipped prestige markers is that generally the fewer the Rs, the fancier the person. 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. Harris trained himself as a young man to lose his native Bronx accent - to the point that he was asked if he were British. And here for the full interview). A lifelong New Yorker, he never tasted a bagel or an olive, and he never chewed a stick of gum. After several problems with transporting and preparing the fireworks, Plimpton and Grucci became the first competitors from the United States to win the event. There was one more matter I never heard my dad discuss. Shadow Box: An Amateur In The Ring -- George Plimpton On Boxing What stood in our way? Were taking off from Teterburo, N.J., at 4 a.m. tomorrow. The Dudleys established the 36-acre (15ha) Highstead Arboretum in Redding, Connecticut. 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). George Plimpton The Movie Database (TMDB) That Weirdo Announcer-Voice Accent: Where It Came From and Why It Went 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. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. It was so violent that it brought a lot of people to the windows. The Left Bank really became East 72nd Street. He liked the fact that I had broken my nose in defeat. Do, Write George Plimpton Has Made A Career Throwing Himself Into 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. I always thought it sounded similar to the accent of William F. Buckley, Jr., who I believe was not reared in Boston. BTW, I cant imagine a presidential candidate today getting anywhere close to a nomination with FDRs accent, cigarette holder, and aristocratic bearing. 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. So, pairing the Cagney hint with the Kennedy Inaugural, could we date the changeover to 1961? 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. This kept his magazine fresh for 50 years. By George Plimpton. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. He was a Wasp (both of his parents came from old New England families, and had ancestors on the Mayflower). He Was Shot by John Wayne. The Curious Case Of Sidd Finch. Interesting that the two competitors for his anchor chair were both fully vernacular speakers from the South and West: Mudd and Rather. All rights reserved. Prestigious prep schools and ivy league institutions (though Gore Vidal never went to college). George Plimpton's duplex apartment on the Upper East Side hit the market for $5.495 million on April 18. He once said that, in writing Paper Lion, he wanted to reveal the "humor and grace" of football. Family (1) Spouse George Plimpton, the New York aristocrat and literary journalist whose career was a happy lifelong competition between scholarly pursuits and madcap attempts -- chronicled in self-deprecating. His response was "no, just affected.". He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review, as well as his patrician demeanor and accent. [47][48] 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 speaks with an oddly mannered accent, sounding as though on the verge of a stammer, polite, genteel, perhaps just a little Woosterish. A graduate of Harvard University and King's College, Cambridge, Plimpton was recruited to Paris by Peter Matthiessen in 1952 and signed on to the project shortly thereafter. In 1992, Plimpton married Sarah Whitehead Dudley, a graduate of Columbia University and a freelance writer. I received many notes like this one: The variety of English you are referring to has a name in linguistics: "Mid-Atlantic English". Isnt that what they call it. Description above from the Wikipedia article George Plimpton, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of . 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. Is it in evidence among the Gen X set of Boston, or a passing phenomenon? 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. Now you know! 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. Even in the UK we sometimes subtitle various Scots dialects on the news and TV and whatnot, so it makes sense that he wouldn't go full Dundee for the show. An Oral History of George Plimpton: The Man Does Everything - Observer Plimpton was associated with the literary magazine in Paris, Merlin, which folded because the State Department withdrew its support.[why?] It was a great partyraucous and long. 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). Thats a common name for such an accent. 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. When Muhammad Ali was fighting, George Plimpton was always there. With a little more practice, you could give us boys in the big leagues a run for our money. 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. His experience was captured in the book Out of My League. There was love thereactually, his inability to express it sometimes made him positively brim with itbut speak the words, his voice could not. (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? George Plimpton was a literary man about town who did it all, from co-founding The Paris . (To read Part One, click here. My fathers voice was like one of those supposedly extinct deep-sea creatures that wash up on the shores of Argentina every now and then. I dont give a rats ass about informing anyone about the death of Plimpton. He was previously married to Sara Whitehead Dudley and Freddy Medora Espy. Dan Rather certainly marks the definitive end of the newsreel style and the ascendance of the folksy vernacular: those rustic analogies! We were going to go looking for strange birds. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. George Plimpton and Papa in Cuba - Guernica Would you like Mike to run for you, George? the coach asked. [23] He was also notable for his appearance in television commercials during the early 1980s, including a memorable campaign for Mattel's Intellivision. Plimpton revisited pro football in 1971,[18] this time joining the defending Super Bowl champion Baltimore Colts and seeing action in an exhibition game against his previous team, the Lions. 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. 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. ), this isnt some kind of morbid contest to see who can be the first to inform the board of some celebritys death. Sidd Finch: A pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. - Sports Illustrated . He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review, as well as his patrician demeanor and accent. 1. 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. History / Biographical Note Biographical Note. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2007. 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. 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. It was as if some old gentlemans code prohibited us from interacting as human beings. Spoke in a mid-Atlantic accent, reflecting a privileged Upper East Side (in New York City) upbringing. 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 Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. They spoke in this manner, and it seemed perfectly natural, evocative of a background spent among the gentry of the northeast.. Your transparent jealousy is very unbecoming, Carnac. George Plimpton (1927-2003) was a journalist and the first editor-in-chief of The Paris Review. [33] A later attempt, fired at Cape Canaveral, rose approximately 50 feet (15m) into the air and broke 700 windows in Titusville, Florida. Starring George Plimpton as Himself, directed by Tom Bean and Luke Poling, was released. During our time in Paris, he had a famous little car, a dark blue Peugeotit was mine originally; I sold it to himand it had to be seen to be believed. And you are going to come with me. In 1966, George Plimpton's book Paper Lion, recounting his attempt to play football with the Detroit Lions, allowed millions of Americans to vicariously live out their childhood dream of playing in the NFL. Think of the accent of Jane Hathaway on the Beverly Hillbillies. George A. Plimpton Papers, 1634-1956 | Rare Book & Manuscript Library At least, not to me, nor even to my sister, a fact she mentions in the movie. 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. Is your language rhotic? Its something different, and Ive not encountered that in the mid-Atlantic. Articles From This Author. 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. 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.
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