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...ever writes his memoirs, George Plimpton will almost certainly have another bestseller: his circle of acquaintances is wide, and his stories about them are inexhaustible. One chapter, for instance, might be titled "The Night Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer Almost Met." Knowing of Mailer's obsession with Hemingway, Plimpton set up their first meeting, the prospect of which drove Mailer, as George recalls, "almost crazy with excitement." Papa was still shaky from his accidents in Africa, however, and the meeting was canceled at the last moment. Perhaps it was just as well. A Hemingway-Mailer encounter might have been...
Hemingway liked Plimpton, however-he even wanted to train him in Wyoming for the bout against Archie Moore-and so does everyone else who knows him. Without exception, his friends testify to his extraordinary, almost ingenuous kindness and his nearly perverse refusal ever to be glum. His whole life, in a very broad and somewhat simplified sense, is an attempt to re-create around himself the intimate, boisterous atmosphere of a boys' tree house or a college-humor magazine, where no one is ever envious and no one is ever mean. He draws his friends into his fancies...
Paradoxically, very few of Plimpton's friends claim to know him well. Says Novelist William Styron: "You have an entree into the innards of most people you know for 18 or 20 years. With George you don't. He doesn't set up walls; they just exist." One reason may be that George does not want his innards examined; he frequently hides behind a cloud of vagueness so thick as to defy all but the most pointed questions. Another may be that he moves too fast for anybody to look very closely anyway. "A large part...
...regimen Plimpton was in no hurry to establish was that of marriage. When he finally took the plunge-"a tremendous leap into a swimming pool of cold water," as he describes it-he almost forgot to tell the bride, who "really was," she admits, "among the last to know." Though the license had been acquired days in advance, the actual decision was not made until the morning of the wedding day itself. "He had been agonizing for a long time," explains Freddy, 29, who is blonde, green-eyed and a "knockout," in the dispassionate appraisal of one of George...
...Plimpton's delight, the current college generation finds him a particularly sympathetic figure. He is in the Establishment, yet out of it; he has dipped into a dozen different fields, yet is tied to none. He possesses both passionate interest and a kind of cool grace. "He is their ultimate vision of the writer," says Polish-born Novelist Jerzy Kosinski (The Painted Bird), one of George's countless literary friends. "To them he comes closest to the American conception of what a writer ought to be-that he should not just live off the imagination, like Proust...