A leading man, always offstage

George Plimpton remains shadowy amid recollections

George Plimpton (center, seated), the writer, raconteur, editor, and friend of the famous, at a fashion shoot at Elaine's restaurant, New York City, 1999. (Larry Fink/Jersey City Museum)

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
Edited by Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. Random House, 423 pp., illustrated, $30

The 200 voices recalling George Plimpton - lifelong editor of The Paris Review, silken writer about his bumbling amateur sorties into professional sports, and the Beau Brummel of New York social hilarities - produce the buzzy uproar of one of his tumultuous and hotly sought-after parties. A party, though, from which he is absent.

"Last night I saw upon the stair / A little man who wasn't there," the song goes. Plimpton was 6 feet 4 and gracefully awkward, but among all the vivid recollections and lively anecdote in "George, Being George," he too seems not to be there.

That is not a weakness in the dazzling bits of mosaic collected and put together with well-conceived looseness by Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. It is their point.

A double-page spread of photographs shows Plimpton variously chasing a basketball with the Boston Celtics, playing football with the Detroit Lions, acting a minor villain in "Rio Bravo," and chiming a triangle with the New York Philharmonic. It is not participation, it is not parody (or self-parody, quite), and it is not role-playing. It is not even presence, or rather it is presence the way the movie character Zelig is present alongside the world's famous. "He himself was not one of the things he paid close attention to, except as this comic figure, this persona that he created for his books," Oliver Broudy, who was a Paris Review intern, recalls. "I don't know that he knew who he was. He just sort of was, like an idiot savant."

The savant, though, like Aristarchus' hedgehog, knows one thing well. The Paris Review, whose editor Plimpton became when it was founded in 1953, and continued to be until his death in 2003, was his needed anchor in all his needed drift. "The armature for everything he did," says Peter Matthiessen, a Review cofounder. It fed his New York social celebrity, but also it made him something more than one more celebrity.

He found a series of wealthy publishers to support the magazine (one was Sadruddin Khan, a friend and rival for the favors of one of Plimpton's many lovers). He put in money himself (his Sports Illustrated impersonations and a series of TV commercials supplemented his family funds). Though his hours were erratic and he relied on his staff, he took a firm if not always steady hand in the editing.

The most consistently interesting voices in this collection tell of the birth and life of the review. It has been a home to generations of young writers: Michael Cunningham, Jeffrey Eugenides, Michael Chabon, and others.

Its most distinctive feature has been the literary interviews, conducted at a length and with an astuteness (Hemingway, Borges, Faulkner, to name a few) that give us roots and trunk as well as foliage. Plimpton took a principal role in devising and supervising them; the review archives show the imagination he used in their editing.

"He was very good at getting people to talk about themselves," one of his assistants recalls. "Writers like to talk about themselves anyway, but I think George was really interested in what they had to say, even in the boring bits. He stayed optimistic that something interesting was bound to turn up and, sooner or later, it usually did."

Some of the voices have a "you had to be there" quality. There is more about school, college, university (Cambridge), and Plimpton's New York social life than anyone not engaged in remembering them could care about. On the other hand, the portrait of his distinguished but formidable parents is fascinating. They were puritanically exigent, sometimes walked about naked, and did not spare the rod (conceivably spoiling the child into his mix of ecstatic arrivings and elusive flights).

Quite a few voices speak of Plimpton's sex life, including those of women with whom he had casual affairs. There were a great many, characterized by lots of energy and charm and little intimacy. He took part in a high-class orgy or two; one of his friends speculates that he engaged in them much as he dabbled with his sports ventures - as impersonations, that is.

It's not entirely a pretty picture. Nor is the odd story of his two marriages. Both followed long and amiable affairs; the amiability vanished as soon as the new status made demands on him. The portrait of his first one, to Freddy Espy, is comically gothic. Bobby Kennedy had insisted that he regularize the relationship; the wedding photograph shows two appalled faces at the guillotine. The next day Plimpton insisted that Freddy accompany him on a plane trip, where he shakily clutched her hand. "I realize that he's asked me to come along so I could commiserate with him over the fact that he'd married me," she remembers.

Aldrich imposes no theme on the voices, but he is clearly aware of one. In the prologue he groups those who recall Plimpton's passion for fireworks. Fireworks are spectacular and celebratory, and then there is nothing.

"George, Being George" speaks of exuberance, warmth, and generosity that elude closeness; of someone whose feelings were real enough, only he did not quite possess them. He was their impresario.

Richard Eder reviews books for several publications.