He had been in the war, if briefly (stationed in Italy towards the end of it, he’d missed action, but met the Pope, an early sign of the “great good fortune”-one of his favorite phrases-that marked his life). He could as easily have been my grandfather as father. It’s strange to think, but he would have been eighty-five this year: fourteen years older than my mom, fifty years older than me. She’d 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.” Clarke’s 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! …And what have we here?” My mom’s initial impression was that he was a little hoity-toity-“I mean, who did this guy think he was?”īut the second time they met, it was, in fact, my father’s voice that won her over. I mean, if George Plimpton wasn’t my father and I’d never met him, and I heard that voice emerge from his lips and matched it with his severe Roman features and his usual blue blazer, oxford shirt, and tie, I might have assumed that he was a little pompous or snooty or affected.Īctually, that’s not far off from how my mom felt when she first met him. If you didn’t know the man, you could, I think, be fooled by the voice. (The filmmakers assembled his voice-over from recorded speeches and other archival footage.) 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.” Premièring on June 21st at the SilverDocs festival, in Washington, D.C., and directed by Tom Bean and Luke Poling, the film contains interviews with notable friends and peers like Hugh Hefner, Peter Matthiessen, and James Lipton, though the majority of this remarkable account is narrated by none other than George Plimpton. Of course, my dad had tried out for the role of himself and not gotten it, though he would go on to have a steady film career playing one version or another of a striking white-haired figure with a distinguished, chivalrous voice in bit roles in some twenty or so movies, including “Reds” and “Good Will Hunting.” Fortunately, in the upcoming film “Plimpton! 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. Alda’s 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 charm-much of which emanated from that befuddled, self-deprecating professor’s voice. He got the personality totally wrong, too. Alan Alda, portraying my dad in the movie version of “Paper Lion” (his book on playing quarterback for the Detroit Lions), didn’t bother with his voice at all. On “Saturday Night Live,” even the great impersonator Dana Carvey couldn’t get it quite right. So it was that George Plimpton’s accent could not be imitated. It came from a different era, shouldn’t have still existed, but nevertheless, there it was-old New England, old New York, tinged with a hint of King’s College King’s English. My father’s voice was like one of those supposedly extinct deep-sea creatures that wash up on the shores of Argentina every now and then.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |