Partying with George Plimpton

Excerpts from George, Being George: George Plimpton’s Life as Told, Admired, Deplored, and Envied by 200 Friends, Relatives, Lovers, Acquaintances, Rivals—and a Few Unappreciative Observers

PIEDY LUMET One time, he came to a birthday party in East Hampton that I gave for Sidney [Lumet], and it was all Sidney’s friends, most of them Jewish, except for the waiters. Everybody made toasts, and George said, “I look around this room and there’s Gene Saks, and Saul Steinberg, and Peter Stone, and I see that I’m in a minority. I’m not really used to that, and I don’t really like it. So could all those people who are not Jewish please wave to me?” So the waiters all waved, and I waved, and Keren Saks, who is half Jewish, gave a half wave, and George said, “Thank you.” It was terribly funny, because they were all friends of his.

ELIZABETH GAFFNEY When it came time to select summer interns—or editors, for that matter—George certainly did not want ugly ones. One time, when we had a really brilliant, dykey, purple-haired summer intern who was terrific—she was so smart, so well-read—numerous times over that summer, I heard him say,“Why don’t we just fire her and get some charming young girl from Harvard. She’s no good. She’s no use to us.” He couldn’t have been more wrong. He just couldn’t see her, because she was overtly lesbian and had purple hair.

ELIZA GRISWOLD Was he classist? You’re not going to get a WASP to talk about class, but I’ll give it a try. First of all, anybody who’s going to work at the Review probably had some alternative source of income, because you got paid nothing. The idea was, you were getting paid in experience. So the staff came to him self-selected, in terms of their parents’ ability to pay their rent, but also in terms of class. I would have hated to come into that office as an outsider—at the age we were working there it was pretty cliquish, who knew who, who’d had what experiences, a cultural shorthand I wouldn’t have recognized then as class, but that’s what it is.

MONA SIMPSON I think I was the first relatively middle-class person to work there. I worked there during graduate school, and afterwards when I started working there more, I asked for health insurance. This was preposterous idea to George. He said, “Well, if you get sick, just give me the bill and I’ll pay it.”

WILLIAM BECKER I don’t think George had affairs of the heart, as they say. What he did do, as I did, was to go to orgies. They were called “scenes” and were presided over by a big, bearded fellow by the name of Jim Moran, one of the great characters of our time. George was much taken by Moran, and not just because of the orgies. The man was pure mischief, a lord of misrule who managed to make money at it. He was a publicist, specializing in doing crazy stunts that would get lots of news coverage for his clients. For example, when David Merrick produced Look Back in Anger, Moran planted a woman in the first row and had her climb up onstage and attack Jimmy Porter. It made all the papers, and the show ran forever. His orgies were informed by the same careful planning and imagination as his stunts. They happened about once a month, usually on weekends, starting at eight o’clock sharp, after which no one would be allowed up the elevator. He invited the men, whom he knew personally or were vouched for by someone he knew personally. Each of them had to bring a woman and he planned for a week or so to be sure that she wasn’t loony or a hooker, that she was a real person. Which in fact they all were—the sort of women you might meet at Elaine’s or at one of George’s parties. His apartment was huge—ten rooms or more, more than enough for the ten to twenty people he invited. One of them was entirely filled with costumes—what would an orgy be without costumes? Group sex, I suppose. My costume was a monk’s robe with a big cross in front, George’s was that of a French country priest, with a little hat. Moran insisted on dressing all the girls himself. Drinks were available, but I don’t recall anyone doing any serious drinking. No food. The rules of engagement, so to speak, were clear. You were allowed to approach anybody you wanted, but if she wanted to go off with someone else, you were not allowed to pursue her. I went to some other parties where there were people who were just dreadfully aggressive; they would push you off some girl and jump on. One fellow who did that later became a well-known American diplomat. At Moran’s, things were more civilized. I remember one time when he himself was in a bedroom, down on his knees giving oral sex to a girl, when some noisy people came down the hall, and he called out to them in a booming voice, “If you want to laugh and joke and whatever, the place to do that is the library, but this room is my church, and I am at worship.” And back he went to his prayers.