george plimpton accent

In 1992, Plimpton married Sarah Whitehead Dudley, a graduate of Columbia University and a freelance writer. So, pairing the Cagney hint with the Kennedy Inaugural, could we date the changeover to 1961? Think of the accent of Jane Hathaway on the Beverly Hillbillies. For more than fifty years, his friends made a circle whose circumference was vast and whose center was a fashionable tenement on New York's East Seventy-second street. I remember getting the news: It was my wife Madeleines birthday, Aug. 7. Just when Jim and I thought we had finished, and we had been working a long time, George, who loved the result of our efforts, decided he wanted to talk to me as well. I havent heard that he is dead, but if so RIP George. And so it seemed only fitting to commemorate his death with the form he made his own.Meghan ORourke. And being good at losing was one of Georges many gifts. Even the most basic conversation was often a struggle. 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." The Wikipedia entry is indeed delightful. After finishing at Harvard in 1950, he attended King's College, Cambridge, from 1950 to 1952, and graduated with third class honors in English. She would not even say goodbye. If you were making a speech in a large hall, or speaking on the radio, you needed to enunciate very clearly and use a lot of emphases to be sure your audience could understand what you were saying. Now you know! She was having lunch at P. J. Clarkes with the publisher Bennet Cerf and his son Chris, and my dad swooped over to the table (he was wearing a cape) and introduced himself in that ridiculously gallant voice: Bennet, Chris, what a pleasant surprise! After returning to New York from Paris, he routinely launched fireworks at his evening parties. He also served as editor of the Harvard Lampoon. Havent heard that term in years. But the gentleman amateur - a Harvard. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review, as well as his patrician demeanor and accent. Plimpton also appeared in a number of feature films as an extra and in cameo appearances. With the evolution of talkies in the late 1920s, voice was first heard in motion pictures. In the offices of the Paris Review, he displayed far more discerning tastes. "[34] A feature in Mad titled "Some Really Dangerous Jobs for George Plimpton" spotlighted him trying to swim across Lake Erie, strolling through New York's Times Square in the middle of the night, and spending a week with Jerry Lewis. He would have a beer with you. Here's how Geroge Plimpton and his team created a prodigious pitcher out of thin air. I think the term Old Money or patrician pretty much says it. We worked at the Paris Review on the Rue Garanere for several years together. It was so violent that it brought a lot of people to the windows. Starring George Plimpton as Himself, directed by Tom Bean and Luke Poling, was released. rejoiced in the name of Euphemia van Renssalaer Wyatt. George Plimpton was born on March 18, 1927 in New York City, New York, USA. Plimpton played Tom Hanks's antagonistic father in Volunteers. After several problems with transporting and preparing the fireworks, Plimpton and Grucci became the first competitors from the United States to win the event. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. George was the one who read my name out to the commissioner. Plimpton sparred for three rounds with boxing greats Archie Moore and Sugar Ray Robinson while on assignment for Sports Illustrated. Where are you?, Im at dinner with my wife, I said. Ill try to give a representative range, and I am grateful for the care and thought that have gone into these responses. I have worked as poetry editor with editors on other magazines; only with George has the experience been entirely agreeable. Except at parties. 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. 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. ), this isnt some kind of morbid contest to see who can be the first to inform the board of some celebritys death. [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. Daniel Kunitz, managing editor of the Paris Review from1995-2000: I once heard George joking with William F. Buckley on the phone about how they had the last affected accents in New York. 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. Back to Plimpton I dont remember the LL affect at all. Another entertainment-related explanation for the shift, right about the time of the Eisenhower-Kennedy transition: The plumby announcer voice that hovers over the Atlantic midway between the Eastern Seaboard and England was mortally wounded in 1959. 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." Think of the accent of Jane Hathaway on the Beverly Hillbillies. Larchmont Lockjaw? As Poling puts it, George was known as an unrivaled raconteur and, in making a film of his life story, it only seemed natural to allow him to tell it.. The young Paris Review editor and other New York literary figures arrived during a period marked by hope for a democratic Cuba. 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. He also appeared in the 1996 documentary When We Were Kings about the "Rumble in the Jungle" 1974 Ali-Foreman Championship fight opposite Norman Mailer crediting Muhammad Ali as a poet who composed the world's shortest poem: "Me? Several weeks later at a book party, he spotted two writers who had played in that game. Lewis Lapham, editor, Harpers Magazine:Georges immense enthusiasm was his primary characteristic. Best-selling author George Plimpton shares his experience as a "Storyteller For Life" with Dean Nelson of Point Loma Nazarene University as part of PLNU's 5th Annual Writer's Symposium By The. Jean Stein became his co-editor. He knew we were just as good as he was, but in a different field. George Plimpton. "I've decided to stay over here in . There was one more matter I never heard my dad discuss. But for now, just one more category: 3) Changing technology, changing voices. They all gathered there. So it went in late 1960 at one of George Plimpton's legendary soirees at 541 E. 72nd St., New York. (Did Eisenhower speak the newsreel style? But it didnt define him, much the way he refused to be defined by the stiff, upper-crust world from which hed come. It includes clear pronunciation of each and every consonant cluster. Self-help author and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson has a unique accent that, . In that vein, here is an oral biography of George Plimpton. [13], Plimpton's son described him as a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant and wrote that both of Plimpton's parents were descended from Mayflower passengers.[14]. He was going to put on a reading of his play Zelda, Scott, and Ernest. But dying in sleep: It was as if he was doing what he did when he tried out for all those other things as an amateurballooning, acting, boxing, performing at amateur night. 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. What stood in our way? 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. [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]. 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. 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 . Ill pick you up., I had a hard time sleeping that night, as you might imagine. 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. **Mid-Atlantic. Final Twist of the Drama. 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. On Saturday Night Live, even the great impersonator Dana Carvey couldnt get it quite right. Vault. And you are going to come with me. Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. Oh now, Im joking, Carnac ( see? The clearest example of the Mid-Atlantic accent is the accent of the Frasier & Niles Crane characters on the TV show Frasier. Thats a common name for such an accent. As an old film buff, I am used to this voice, though it figures unevenly in old movies. Richard Howard, poetry editor, the Paris Review:I worked with George for 10 years on the magazine. **Your transparent jealousy is very unbecoming, Carnac. And they founded this thing called the Paris Review and published poetry and short story writers and did interviews. Never heard of this decidedly imprecise term. George was a little more in-depth than a lot of us, of course, with his education and all. He has the same type of patrician upper-class New Yorker accent as Jane Wyatt. Brown & Co. Re-issued George Plimpton Sports Books, 2016. Norman Mailer, author:George had a rare gift. Update: This post is #2 in the announcer-speak series. I always thought it sounded similar to the accent of William F. Buckley, Jr., who I believe was not reared in Boston. Is your language rhotic? [citation needed]. He joined us in Monte Carlo when we won the international [fireworks] competition. These events were recalled in his best-known book Paper Lion, which was later adapted into the 1968 feature film starring Alan Alda. Here are five things you may not have known about him. 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. Jay McInerney, author:Arriving in Manhattan as a young writer, nothing was more thrilling or daunting than attending my first Paris Review party at Georges townhouse on East 72nd in the fall of 1984. He Was Shot by John Wayne. Suddenly, a New York cop remembered a long-ago murder. Typical of George to laugh about something others saw as a defining traithe never took himself all that seriously. 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. The Wikipedia entry for it is quite detailed. Spoke in a mid-Atlantic accent, reflecting a privileged Upper East Side (in New York City) upbringing. Above all, he was a gentleman, one of the lasta figure so archaic, it could be easily mistaken for something else. Ad Choices. Bill, who was from the South, kept saying to me, Can you believe Georges not English? I think it was an affectation people adopted because they thought it made them sound much more intelligent! He wrote, "I suppose in a mild way there is a lesson to be learned for the young, or the young at heart the gumption to get out and try one's wings". Eerily enough, one of the messages on my answering machine was from George, with that distinctive accent of his: Hallo, its George Plimpton. [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]. (Why do I even bother?) Bill and I met in Rome, several months after the Paris Review was startedwe were, as they say, courtingand he drove me to Paris so George and Peter [Mathiessen] could look me over. He was so open to life and all its new and unexpected situations. I think he came down [to the shooting of Paper Lion in] Florida once. 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. . The clenched jaw tight-bite bit: the lockjaw dentiloquist. 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. A little before my time, but Kennedy certainly didnt, even if his vernacular was more formal than Brandos. Old money, would never say the word spanky, and certainly had more money than God could count. 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. 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. With the help of the New York Mets organization and several Mets players, Plimpton wrote a convincing account of a new unknown pitcher in the Mets spring training camp named Siddhartha Finch, who threw a baseball over 160mph, wore a heavy boot on one foot, and was a practicing Buddhist with a largely unknown background. [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. 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. silk-stockinged New Englander - private schools (he was One night Joe DiMaggio was here, and they had never met, so I introduced them. 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! Hes just trying it out and will come back and write a book about his experiences. Its a shot from a YouTube video that itself is a fascinating time-capsule portrait of language change. May a diseased yak squat in your hot tub. It was a hot, sweltering day. This speech pattern might be common among US expatriates in the UK, of which Grossman would seem to represent just the most ostentatious example. What exactly is a Boston Brahmin accent? Whee!! George Plimpton. I always thought it sounded similar to the accent of William F. Buckley, Jr., who I believe was not reared in Boston. So it was that George Plimptons accent could not be imitated. I dont give a rats ass about informing anyone about the death of Plimpton. In fact, my dads farewells seemed loquacious in comparison to his mothers. With such a useful explanation, why do I gripe about the name? **Get a life. 2) The Role of Broadway and Hollywood, and the Shift from Jimmy Cagney to Marlon Brando. Showdown in the Pits. George Plimpton. 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. George Plimpton. Mid-Atlantic. Shootout at Rio Lobo", "The Smaller the Ball, the Better the Book: A Game Theory of Literature", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_Plimpton&oldid=1137974740, This page was last edited on 7 February 2023, at 10:19. Everything he did was like this, just a bit odd. Read more in this thread (long). But its clear that the diction I call Announcer Voice has been the object of close linguistic study. Yes indeed, George Plimpton is a man for all seasons. He also appeared in a featurette about Edie Sedgwick found on the Ciao! That life couldnt contain him, hed burst its seams like it was an old coat two sizes too small. George Plimpton (1927-2003) George Plimpton was the editor of The Paris Review from its founding in 1953 until his death in 2003. Exeter Academy after an incident involving a But he has never employed that voice professionally, and certainly does not speak that way in real life. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Isnt that what they call it. Yes he is gone. 2023 Cond Nast. Look out, Wilson! 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. Dan Rather certainly marks the definitive end of the newsreel style and the ascendance of the folksy vernacular: those rustic analogies! 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. Plimpton appeared in the 1989 documentary The Tightrope Dancer which featured the life and the work of the artist Vali Myers. Family (1) Spouse On Sept. 26, George Plimpton died in his sleep, at the age of 76. He is connected by blood to Benjamin "Beast" Butler, a rakish pol who told Abraham Lincoln he would be his running mate "only if you die within three. George Plimpton gives an auction winner a star-studded walk through the legendary NYC eatery Elaine's. There was love thereactually, his inability to express it sometimes made him positively brim with itbut speak the words, his voice could not.

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