Which famed magazine editor practiced taxidermy as a young man?
George Plimpton, editor of the erudite Paris Review and wielder of a classic patrician accent hardly seems like the type of guy who might be slinging small animal skins around his bedroom. But the interest of 14 year-old George in home taxidermy -- well, technically, boarding-school taxidermy -- is just one of the surprises in the new biography, "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."
Plimpton, who died in 2003, attended New Hampshire boarding school Phillips Exeter Academy from 1940 through 1944; despite the athletic fields being named for his family, he was kicked out three months before graduation. The trouble started his first year, his classmate Buzz Merritt remembers:
The first big thing, which occurred when we were freshmen, was when George became interested in taxidermy. That summer, he had gone on a trip with the Cleveland Museum to California, where they were collecting rodents, which they skinned and stuffed. When they got back to New York, there were a lot of extra skins, so George said he'd take them, and he brought them back to his room at Exeter. He had them scattered all over the place and was practicing taxidermy on them from a book. I remember a whole lot of rodents with cotton sticking out of their mouths. We had maids in those days who came in and made our beds and cleaned our rooms, and one of them opened the door to George's room and screamed and ran down to the dorm master, who went to investigate and encountered all of George's rodents with cotton sticking out of their mouths.
Nelson Aldrich Jr. edited "George, Being George"; the book contains more than 200 interviews. He recently spoke at a launch party for the book in New York, as chronicled by the New Yorker's Book Bench:
"An account of a man’s life that allows the reader to make their own judgments, of George but also of the speakers — can you trust them?" [Aldrich said] Considering that one reveler admitted, in the elevator, to having given his interview drunk, perhaps not.
Plimpton's own books, in which he often figured as a central character, include "Out of My League" and "Paper Lion." But he also had a lovely, droll way of observing others, as you can hear in his 2003 reading of the story "Paul Tavilla." It was at New York's Summerstage, and he introduced the story saying, "I don't think anybody I know believes this, but this is a true story -- it's not, as Mark Twain used to call it, a stretcher -- but absolutely true."
-- Carolyn Kellogg
