A Conversation With; 110; George Plimpton

A production of the Mississippi Center for Education and Television Series Conversation with Program George Pemerton, lead 28, 30, date 11, 17, 75, director of fears. A conversation with George Pemerton, speaking today with editor, author, actor George Pemerton, is David Berry, poet and writer at the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Rights. He was a former out of questions and in the right way to do it, which was really started with a fist and we ever did, which was with the EM Forster, and you try to find out why

what would give an interesting sort of a framework for this particular interview. And the thing with Forster was fascinating, because he was considered the greatest novelist in the English language, but he had not written a novel since 1924. So the thrust did you do that one? Yeah, well I helped with it, because I was at King's College and that was where he was, distinguished all dawns sitting up there, then in his 80s. And he allowed us to interview him on that particular question. What had happened to him that had kept him from writing a novel since 1924? I forgot what the last one was, Howard's in. Yeah, yeah. And so he suppressed because of the homosexuals? No, no, no, no, no, Howard's in was published, the one that you're thinking of is Maurice, which came out one three, four years after his death. So the general thrust of the questioning had to do with the problems that a writer has.

I mean, what does happen to him that makes him queer or stuff? So that gave the interview a whole framework, as I say. I think it would be very dull if you asked EM Forster questions, which really hadn't, because you'd asked Robert Frost the same question or Hemingway, what time do you get up in the morning? I mean, that's just not much fun. Let me ask George Plumpton some questions. We're talking to, I'm talking to George Plumpton, and let me introduce you, George, graduated from Harvard University and Cambridge University in 1953, founded with two other fellows of the parish review, which is one of the amazing publications, because it's still viable. He's done two pages worth of stuff, but he's such an interesting person. I want to maybe bore you with this. He's taught at Barnard.

He's been an associate editor for Rise and Magazine, a contributor to sports illustrated, and you still are. Yep. I'm going to do that regularly. An associate editor of Harper's Magazine, I start to ask which one of those is the most fun to work for, but I won't ask you that. And then some amazing paragraph of activities here, in 70 and 71, he wrote and starred in a number of television specials, in which he tried his hand as a percussionist for the New York Philharmonic, this man, a stand-up comic at Caesar's Palace, a sports car driver, a last-string quarterback for the Baltimore Colts, a cowboy and a John Wayne movie, an aerialist for Clyde Bady Cole, Brother of Circus. Books include Out of My League, The Story of Pitching or Deal in Yankee Stadium. And I can't wait to ask you about some of this, but just let me go on. Paperline, 1966, a record of training and playing quarterback for the Detroit Lines.

The Bogeyman 68, a report of his stand-up on the professional golf circuit, Mad Ducks and Bears, a roguish account of Alex Carrus and John Gordy's Lies as a professional lineman. And most recently, one for the record, 1974, an account of Hank Evans Chase for Babe Ruth's home run record. And you've just finished our finishing book on Muhammad Ali, finished our finishing. Finishing. Finishing. Where'd you go about? We'll start here and go back. What are you telling about, Muhammad? The race site or the whole career? I was asked to do what they call an instant book. Instant book was the sort of book that I did on Henry Aaron, in which you pre-write it and then when he hits the home run and in this case beat Babe Ruth's record, you spend

a tremendous two weeks or a week working on it. And then it goes into the, in this case, banter and publishing. And then a week after that, out it comes. Usually, as you know, when you write a book, you have to wait for nine months after you hand in the manuscript until finding the book appears, which is an appalling wait, but the publishing industry is so antiquated that that's how long it takes. So I sort of jumped at this, and had a lot of fun doing it, and of course the great pleasure was that you could see your book within weeks of having written the thing. The only thing that you don't get by that process, of course, is a hardcover book. It's not really reviewed as much as a hardcover book would be, but still it's out. And then eventually it came out in hardcover, it sort of reversed the usual progression. And I was asked to do the same thing about the fight in Zaire, in Africa, in which Muhammad Ali retained his, or regained the title from George Foreman, marvelous fight, the very

strange part of the world I have it in. But then I had suddenly, and it was supposed to be an instant book, I was supposed to finish it within two weeks of the fight. But I got bogged down, and I got bogged down because I didn't think it would be a particularly interesting book. I got bogged down because I'd known Muhammad Ali for ten years and sort of followed him all through the vicissitudes of his life. And I got bogged down because I hadn't somehow caught anything that I really wanted to catch about this extraordinary man, or about boxing, which I didn't know very much until I sort of got into it. And it seemed to me that I had a chance to write a longer book that would encompass all these things that I'd learned about boxing, and about him, not only Muhammad Ali, but about Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston and some of the other heavyweights we've had in the past decade. And not only that, but other people began to write books about Muhammad Ali, Wilfred Sheed, great essayist, produced a book, Norman Meiler wrote a book called The Fight, which

was largely about this struggle in Zaire, which I wanted to have as the focus of my book, Ed Shulbeig, cranked out a book on Muhammad Ali, a couple of poets in New York, I'd impressed enough to do books on him, and then Muhammad Ali himself churned out a book on himself, helped by a fellow called Richard Durham, just come out, a very good book. So that I suddenly saw myself a little bit like running myself, running in the Kentucky Derby with 25 other runners. So I put mine aside for a while and decided to change gears and do something little different. And that's why I'm finishing it and it's not, I'm having trouble with it. What do you find, did you find whatever you thought was missing when you didn't want to turn the book in? I don't scared you. Oh yeah, you really have to think, well, why am I doing this book and what gap can I fill? But I think you have to do that as a writer, particularly when you're doing a book about

a subject that a lot of other people are writing about, you have to see if there's not some area where you can bring something that's fresh to it, bring something that's new to it. And I've known him for so long and I've had such a number of adventures, really, that I thought that that was probably the key that I could probably find it in there. And the book starts with my own prize fight. I fought against Archie Moore very briefly as a participatory journalist and got slaughtered. And I've always wanted to have... Did he really punch you? Well, he thought I was somebody else and so he gave me quite a, quite a clip, yeah. And I was, went over a lot of bleeding and a lot of fright on his, but I think he was more scared than I was because he suddenly saw that he was going to have to hold this guy up from falling out of them, falling into the crowd. And I had that marvellous story and also this relationship with Moore. And so I've managed to use that in this book. So I think as you start writing that all sorts of things like building a house, there are all sorts of construction problems and you add a wing here and then you tear it down,

you build a garage out here and finally it works as a sort of a commune, at least you hope it does. Were you an athlete in college? Well, I was sort of a fair, just a average athlete. And I was on the plate number two on the tennis team, where there were maybe three, I used pitch, but I was always doing other things I never really could spend as much time as I knew I would have to or should have played squashings like that. Love sports with a great passion, but I certainly wouldn't be what you'd call a star athlete. That's probably what makes your books attractive about this is a person who isn't and most of us are not star athletes, can have some empathy with one who wasn't yet found a way to get in the Yankee Stadium and pitch and the Baltimore Colt uniform and Detroit Lines uniform.

Well, when you got out of college and helped found the parish review, how soon after that did you publish your first book, which was in 1961, I think, let's see that. Well, I never thought I was going to be a writer, I always thought that writing was very hard and it came very with a very slow and I never thought that I could make a living writing. What were you going to do? Well, I was going to be an editor, I knew that I wanted to deal somewhere in mass communication and preferably mass communication, such as television, I think of that sort. And when I got bogged down in Paris doing this small magazine with a very limited circulation, I just thought that was going to be a sort of an interim period and then I was going to come back and take a course and how to be a television executive or whatever. I used to have these programs at CBS, I remember in New York and I was all set to enroll in that. God help me now if I'd done something like that.

But that was what I thought I'd eventually end up doing. Well I got bogged down in Paris doing this small magazine and of course if you got bogged down in Paris doing something like that, the future seems very, very far away and very easy because you're living in a pulsion and you're 20 years old and you're living in Paris and you're free and all you got to worry about is a little magazine from time to time and you can put a lot of energy into it but you don't really think of your livelihood and what you're going to be doing later on. I always assume vaguely that it was going to have something to do with editing because when you edit, you get someone else's work that comes in and it's plumped down in front of you and you can carve away at it and you can change it and shift it and it's much easier than sitting down and having to produce that clay, that bulk yourself and then I came back and I started to teach a little bit and this was again marking time before the big entrance into the world of communication and then I began to do these pieces for Sports Illustrated really to get a little extra money.

Now how did you go about just, did you go knock on Sports Illustrated door and say hey, had this editorship, the experience and I'd like to write about this game or something, just that. Well there was an editor there who thought that I would probably be the best man around to write a series of articles about a man called Harold Vanderbilt who was a great yachtsman he defended the America's Cup in 1935, defended it successfully three times, he was the inventor of contract bridge and I, and a very shy man who had never been really approached by a magazine before to for someone to do a piece on him and I knew him vaguely and it was thought that perhaps I could do this story and that was a four-part piece for Sports Illustrated and it sort of got me going and when I did that and then somebody got me to do another story and I began and then I came went to Sports Illustrated with this idea of participatory

journalism, that terrible word in which I went to them and said what do you think might become of a series on becoming a baseball player for a, joining the society of a baseball team for a week or a month though the training season or trying to get onto a football team while boxing a great fighter, what would that be like? And of course it's an old thing in journalism, it's been done before, there's a fellow called Paul Terhune used to write about dogs back at the 10th of the century and he had a very tough managing editor on the New York world, he made this poor guy go out and fight, I believe he was set out to fight all the heavyweight contenders as a newspaper man and he come back bruised and he'd write these stories about what he'd been through Paul Gallico used to write for the Daily News, he did this sort of thing, the difference being that they did it to sharpen their perceptions as writers, I mean if you're going to write about a baseball game it's probably a good idea to have seen how devastating a curve ball can be, you get down there and you catch it and Gallico had done that and I'd read all

his pieces and I thought that maybe that maybe they'd be a way of extending this and actually joining the society of these various athletes or maybe the arts, was it works in the arts, any society where there's enormous confrontation where you have to, where there's a great key moment being played out in front of your peers is, would've satisfied what I was trying to do and the editors there thought might be an interesting exercise and that was what started it really and then the first book which was about baseball was a success, it was a sort of a critical success and it was then that I realized that maybe editing wasn't as important as perhaps trying to be a writer but I still, curious, he did this very moment and think of myself not as a writer but as an editor, I can't seem to get it into my mind that I can make a living writing and so I would much rather sit down with someone and continue to sit down with other people's stuff and work on it. These sports you've engaged in, not only sports but with the Philharmonic and with the circus, which one of these experiences was most frightening, at what particular point

in the experience even, were you just, were you terrified, were you saying I can't do this, what am I doing here? Well, the point of terror of course is that one moment that you're training to do which puts you under the pressure, it's running four plays as a quarterback or it's actually winding up and pitching the ball to Willie Mays or it's getting out of the stage of Las Vegas and actually facing the audience, it's the moment of commitment, that's the most terrifying one. And I don't know how you measure terror, I can only say that each one of them was very terrifying because you're an amateur and you're in a fairly unknown world and there's no way that you can train sufficiently for it so that you're comfortable there, it's the unknown, it's very unknown. But you still don't want to be ridiculous, do you? And that's the main fear is that you don't want to embarrass yourself in front of your friends or in front of a vast audience, whatever. I've always said that the ones that I think were the most terrifying were the ones in which ones mental equipment let one down, for example playing the triangle of the New York Philharmonic

which I did. That was just pure terror because if you didn't hit it right, you destroyed a piece of music and also you had to face a man, the conductor saying, what'd you do that for? And what's wrong with you? Now if you drop a pass in football, everybody drops passes, the greatest wide receivers in the world drop passes and so, but the great musicians don't make mistakes, they make a mistake a year or something or if they do make the mistake, they certainly know percussionist makes a mistake, I'll put it that way. I made a lot of mistakes, I used to, I once destroyed an entire symphony in London, Ontario banging away on these things wrong. So what I always used to remember those is the most, if you can measure terror that hours before a performance I would grow, just be ashen with terror and sit in my room and just quiver. Whereas a football game, something like that, somehow you know it's a physical inept too that you're going to be involved in, it's not quite as frightening.

As I say, it's hard to measure, but I would guess that the mental condition was provided more terror than physical. How back then, at Las Vegas, the standard comic did? Well I didn't mind that as much, I don't think it was funny, but I didn't mind that as much because I hadn't written the lines, there were someone else's lines, and I remember saying to these writers that had provided these one lineers, and of course that's a very special art, the art of the stand-up comedian, and these one lineers have been provided by two writers for a laugh-in. And I thought they were very unfunny, and I thought that really what they were trying to do was to have the performance so rotten that there'd be some sort of a, I mean I was going to get lynched or something, and I remember going to them and saying, for the purposes of this television show, see the coming up there, assailed by the audience, I thought that was what they were really pointing towards. And I went up to them and said, I thought that they had not captured my style, and one

of them said, George, he said, Milton Bell is famous for having said to his writers that they had not captured his style, and one of the writers looked at him and said, Mr. Bell, if we could capture your style, we'd put it in a cage and club it to death, and that was what they said to me, and I went up and said I didn't think they'd captured my style. But you know you go out there and you deliver these lines, and the audience laughs at some of them, and it doesn't laugh at others. It doesn't laugh at half an hour, and who was coming on after you? Oh, I can't remember, it was the Paul Anker, I think, big musical thing, so that wasn't really as embarrassing as some of the others. It was embarrassing, I don't mean to suggest that it wasn't, but it wasn't as bad as some of the others. Now your book, either with the baseball team or with Detroit paper line, what did you find out about the world of athletics that surprised you the most? I think the humor, I think you find that, obviously it's there, but here you find these grown

men and they're playing a football, and the training season is boring. I mean you have to do the same thing over and over and over again, and really are doing something, and if you look at it in existential terms, it's pretty lunatic. I was thinking, are you playing the triangle, and you know here's a grown man playing the triangle, and what is this life or something, it's just kind of strange, and as you were saying. Well no, you play a triangle in orchestra, you remember the sense that you're involved in a grown-up behavior because you're playing a very brilliant piece of work, and it's very complicated. All you've got to do is look at a score to realize, or to watch a conductor to realize what amazing brilliance of mental brilliance is going into what you're becoming a part of. In fact, when you leave an orchestra, you walk away with just utter awe about the occupation and how difficult it is to, and how much devotion you have to give to a violin, or for that matter to a triangle, or what the conductor has in that amazing brain of his, to be able

to control all of this. But a football organization or baseball, sure there's a terrific mental genius, goes and I suppose into knowing when to relieve a picture and so forth, but still you're playing a child's game, and a football is not at all the same as an orchestral score. I mean, one is relatively simple, and the other is enormously sophisticated and complicated. What I was going to say was that I think that people that play football or baseball or basketball, and obviously the higher you get in the profession the more complex it is, but still, eventually, during the training season, you're doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over again, and the hedge against that is humor. A lot of practical jokes, a lot of most football pairs seem to be great storytellers, and wonderful witnesses of each other's behavior and each other's performance. It's a very male society like the sort of society you get in the military barracks out

in the middle of nowhere, the way that those men survive is to be able to tell stories and to be able to joke and to be able to remember jokes so that you have this sort of mythology which is repeated, and a lot of it very, very, very funny. Best story tells an overhead we're on the Detroit Lions and on the Baltimore Colts. Then you have the fantasies, people like Alex Carris, who was the mad duck of that book, and ducks and bears, when it could sit around and listen to him for hours, you don't get a sense of it when he's on television because he's not in that society and he has to provide one-liners, or in the case of his acting, which he now is, he has to read other people's lines, but in a football camp, lying on his back, before a gaming, you listen to this extraordinary man go on and on and on. These societies, you asked me what surprised me, and I think that it was that. Really great fun, these people were, and how they'd constructed all of this really is,

as I say, to survive a rather dull occupation. How did they feel toward losing? For athletes? Yeah. Professional, especially. Well, I've never known one that could bear it. Some take it easier than others, but I never saw one that was very comfortable. Did you tell any difference between offensive players and defensive players? Any football? Was there a different psyche to play? Well, they were supposed to, but I remember, I always remember once, that was his name, Hart. It was the great, not Jim Hart. No, he was a defensive, he was an offensive, he used to play for Notre Dame, I can't remember. It was Tara Leon Hart, and he was a great all-American at Notre Dame, and he played both offense and defense. Yeah. And he used to say that he preferred to play offense because offense worked out a very

carefully designed plans, whereas the defense was destructive, it just tried to destroy. But it was fun to work on offense because everything went right, everything went right, it worked. It was like a very complicated watch. He put everything together, and if everything worked correctly, a play would go for a long game. Whereas on the defense, all you did was try to rip into this watch work and dismantle it, destroy it. And he felt that it was a higher calling to be on the offense than it was to be on the defense. And I remember him saying this, it's some party, and I was very impressed with this, I wrote it down, I thought, my goodness, that's really a very sophisticated thing to say. Then about five minutes later, I heard him saying to somebody that the way to get a quarter back was to hit him over the head with a, hit him with a side arm chop like that, and you put him out of the game forever, and that was so that his destructive side had come to the fore there.

So he seemed to have both these compartments in his own ability as a football player. I think what you have to have, and it's a constant with all great athletes, is this great determination and concentration and well concentration, and you said determination. Yeah, which is why you have somebody that is physically, seems to be a, I remember Bill Curry, who used to play with the University of Georgia, a very articulate, bright, interesting fellow. It was a sender for the Baltimore Colts. He had been with the Green Bay Packers, and he was traded, and he was traded after his second year, and it was a terrible blow to him because he'd come to admire this tremendous team in Vince Lombardi, who was the great coach there. And he was traded to the Baltimore Colts, and what struck him, when he walked into the locker room with the Baltimore Colts, was that at Green Bay, all these men that were on that team were these great, ferocious, huge, behomas, I mean, you could look at them and see that they were football players, and physically monstrous team, and then he walked into the

Baltimore Colts locker room, and he were all these sort of misfits. They had a quarter back, was John, you notice, were these fragile little pipe stem legs. Raymond Berry was the end, whose fingers were all broken and gnarled. They had Danny Sullivan, who was the offensive guard, who looked like a rather stout business man from Rowanoke, had, well they were all, they just didn't, they just didn't look like a football team at all, and yet the Baltimore Colts were Wales champions, and Curry was tremendously taken by, he was a coach there, Schuiler, and he was very much taken by this ex-qually, I don't know what you call it, this competitive determination thing, which had made them this championship team. So it wasn't a physical ability, it was something more than that. I was wondering if you had tried to tour with a rock group or a country, I'd rather

see you with a country western group, I believe. I don't think I have quite the style if I may say the country western, but I've always wanted to try to do a rock group, sort of play a tambourine or something in the distance, and there's a fellow that in Chicago wrote a book, and did that, and I think he joined the Alice Cooper group, and he was sort of a Santa Claus, it was called Billion Dollar Baby or something, and he got a sense of it. I read it, sent it out of jealousy because it was something I always wanted to do, and what was, it was a very interesting book, but it was, it didn't have the, it wasn't like a team, it wasn't like the orchestra, there was no humour in there that I could see, even though one would have thought that something frenetic and wild about those people, maybe I couldn't do it, the right sort of justice, because what I look for very hard is humour. What books do you have in mind? Well, I have to write a book about all these adventures, as I was saying at the outset I write clumsily and slowly at the beginning, and I have to write one about the Philharmonic

adventure, and I have to write one about the circus, oh that doesn't happen, yeah, well I've kept notes and I read in sort of short pieces, and I have to write one about playing basketball with a Boston cell. What would you like to be when you grow up? A good writer, a good writer or a bad baseball picture, probably the latter. Well, I still don't think that these books ever quite drive out of my mind. This has been a conversation with editor, author and actor, George Blimpton.