george plimpton accent

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. I havent heard that he is dead, but if so RIP George. Aldas version was always angry or consternated, like a character in a Woody Allen film, while my dad, though he certainly faced hurdles as an amateur in the world of the professional, bore his humiliations with a comic lightness and charmmuch of which emanated from that befuddled, self-deprecating professors voice. expelled from the very expensive, very WASP-y Philips He was a great addition to the human race. And his apartment, with those windows that looked out onto the East River, became a famous landmark in NYC. These interviews are a collaborative effort, and, I believe, a fascinating contribution to literary history. Listen to Caruso singing or Bix Beiderbecke playing his cornet to hear how muffled was the recording of those sounds. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. (Newsreels ran in movie theaters, of course: what better critique of the high newsreel style than the new movies that jarred against it?). He had it, as does/did William Buckley, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Julia Child. Why couldnt we have a good time, too? Actors Nathan Lane (from Jersey City, NJ) and Robin Williams (grew up in SF Bay area) often adopt this accent. Plimpton would not boast of his feat, so we did. Hed have that and a scotch on the rocks, his favorite drink. It was horrifying.. See Inside George Plimpton's Upper East Side Duplex From what other people had told me, I knew a little bit about itthat my father (and mother) had been right by Bobbys side in California when he was shot, that my father had tackled Sirhan Sirhan to the ground, and wrestled the gun from his handbut not a word of it came from my dad himself. By strange coincidence, I actually became quite good friends with his (ex-)in-laws here in Manhattan. He was a Wasp (both of his parents came from old New England families, and had ancestors on the Mayflower). 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. With a little more practice, you could give us boys in the big leagues a run for our money. [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. 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. He is also credited with saving, Learn how and when to remove this template message, Plimpton! I always thought it sounded similar to the accent of William F. Buckley, Jr., who I believe was not reared in Boston. Big, tall, good-looking guy, easy-going. *Originally posted by bordelond * **. George Plimpton, Author And Editor, Is Dead at 76 We worked at the Paris Review on the Rue Garanere for several years together. Ive known him forsix months and I just now learned hes not English!. That was the last party for a while., I just got back from a road trip from Michigan. **, In this case, Mid-Atlantic refers to speech in which the attributes of British English and American English meet halfway. We were bound to play the roles of father and son, unable to simply be ourselves. They all gathered there. Revolutionary musket, a stairwell and a housemaster), 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.. (The filmmakers assembled his voice-over from recorded speeches and other archival footage.) A Final Party at George Plimpton's Storied Apartment In the offices of the Paris Review, he displayed far more discerning tastes. George was not vainhe didnt care a whit about his image. [citation needed], In 1963, Plimpton attended preseason training with the Detroit Lions of the National Football League as a backup quarterback, and he ran a few plays in an intrasquad scrimmage. I have worked as poetry editor with editors on other magazines; only with George has the experience been entirely agreeable. 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. 3: Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". 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. And so fuck was definitely out of the question, but what about I love you? 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. [32] When lit, the firework remained on the ground and exploded, blasting a crater 35 feet (11m) wide and 10 feet (3.0m) deep. The point of the flipped prestige markers is that generally the fewer the Rs, the fancier the person. Did he have the celebrated "Boston Brahmin" accent, or was it a psuedo-Brit affectation? 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. The risky pleasures of Plimpton's classic of participatory sportswriting, Paper Lion. 1 draft choice of the Lions in 1965. As an old film buff, I am used to this voice, though it figures unevenly in old movies. Description above from the Wikipedia article George Plimpton, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of . (What else happened that year??? And the many candidates for the crown of Last American to Speak This Way. [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." Cambridge. Plimpton was an omnipresence for much of American cultural lifeboth high and lowin the last third of the 20th century. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review, as well as his patrician demeanor and accent. 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. Quite sad, as he just had a daughter not many years back. And bolstering this last point, a reader who grew up in Depression-era Chicago writes: All I can think of is that people were imitating FDR. Hear Stories By George Plimpton. 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. **Your transparent jealousy is very unbecoming, Carnac. Plimpton was a writer-raconteur and dilettante in the best sense of the word: He co-founded an important literary magazine, the Paris Review, and tried his hand at everything from quarterbacking for the Detroit Lions (which he wrote about in Paper Lion), boxing with light-heavyweight champ Archie Moore (which became Shadow Box), and becoming New Yorks unofficial official fireworks commissioner. His exploits were such that at one point, The New Yorker ran a cartoon in which a patient eyed a surgeon with misgiving and said, But how do I know youre not George Plimpton?, But perhaps foremost among his accomplishments was his elevation of the interview to a literary form, both in the Paris Review and in his two superb works of oral history, Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career, and Edie, a biography of Edie Sedgwick, which he and Jean Stein compiled. And so it seemed only fitting to commemorate his death with the form he made his own.Meghan ORourke. Here's a look inside the space, where the Paris Review editor hosted legendary parties. 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. After St. Bernard's School, Plimpton attended Phillips Exeter Academy (from which he was expelled just shy of graduation), and Daytona Beach High School, where he received his high school diploma,[16] before entering Harvard College in July 1944. 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. Macklem . And George had written it straight. George Plimpton, who died last week at his town house, on East Seventy-second Street near the river, was a serious man of serious accomplishments who just happened to have more fun than a van. Youll get another shot at the big time, trust me. He's a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Just in time for the Sixties, with all their other pressures towards some kind of anti-Eisenhower authenticity. For instance: The American-British television presenter Loyd Grossman, who has described his accent as Mid-Atlantic. I didnt know he was from the Larchmont area. I dont give a rats ass about informing anyone about the death of Plimpton. Sidd Finch was a fictional character George had created for a Sports Illustrated story, supposedly the greatest and fastest pitcher in the world. I had George tell him the story of Sidd Finch. 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. If he couldnt be taken quite seriously, that was fine with him (he took himself lightly, and relished being in on the joke). In fact, my dads farewells seemed loquacious in comparison to his mothers. He loved the ones that made a lot of noise and racket and excitement. Kennedy died the next day at Good Samaritan Hospital. When George Plimpton Met the Best Bartender in Brooklyn Two New York Legends Collide By Tim Sultan February 26, 2016 The only other person that I had known who possessed a similar charisma to Sunny Balzano's was my first employer in New York: George Plimpton. It was so violent that it brought a lot of people to the windows. Discussing the accent he used for Washington in an interview with The Onion AV Club, he explained: The accent back then was probably nothing like what we think of as a Southern accent now or a New England accent now, so we tried to find the root of the accents.