My Fathers Voice

My father’s voice was like one of those supposedly extinct deep-sea creatures that wash up on the shores of Argentina every now and then. It came from a different era, shouldn’t have still existed, but nevertheless, there it was—old New England, old New York, tinged with a hint of King’s College King’s English. You heard it and it could only be him.

So it was that George Plimpton’s accent could not be imitated. On “Saturday Night Live,” even the great impersonator Dana Carvey couldn’t get it quite right. Alan Alda, portraying my dad in the movie version of “Paper Lion” (his book on playing quarterback for the Detroit Lions), didn’t bother with his voice at all. He got the personality totally wrong, too. Alda’s version was always angry or consternated, like a character in a Woody Allen film, while my dad, though he certainly faced hurdles as an amateur in the world of the professional, bore his humiliations with a comic lightness and charm—much of which emanated from that befuddled, self-deprecating professor’s voice.

Of course, my dad had tried out for the role of himself and not gotten it, though he would go on to have a steady film career playing one version or another of a striking white-haired figure with a distinguished, chivalrous voice in bit roles in some twenty or so movies, including “Reds” and “Good Will Hunting.” Fortunately, in the upcoming film “Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself,” which documents his life, adventures, and work as participatory journalist and editor of the Paris Review, my dad will be playing himself one more time. Premièring on June 21st at the SilverDocs festival, in Washington, D.C., and directed by Tom Bean and Luke Poling, the film contains interviews with notable friends and peers like Hugh Hefner, Peter Matthiessen, and James Lipton, though the majority of this remarkable account is narrated by none other than George Plimpton. (The filmmakers assembled his voice-over from recorded speeches and other archival footage.) As Poling puts it, “George was known as an unrivaled raconteur and, in making a film of his life story, it only seemed natural to allow him to tell it.”

* * *

If you didn’t know the man, you could, I think, be fooled by the voice. I mean, if George Plimpton wasn’t my father and I’d never met him, and I heard that voice emerge from his lips and matched it with his severe Roman features and his usual blue blazer, oxford shirt, and tie, I might have assumed that he was a little pompous or snooty or affected.

Actually, that’s not far off from how my mom felt when she first met him. She was having lunch at P. J. Clarke’s with the publisher Bennet Cerf and his son Chris, and my dad swooped over to the table (he was wearing a cape) and introduced himself in that ridiculously gallant voice: “Bennet, Chris, what a pleasant surprise! …And what have we here?” My mom’s initial impression was that he was a little hoity-toity—“I mean, who did this guy think he was?”

But the second time they met, it was, in fact, my father’s voice that won her over. She’d wandered out to the balcony of a lonely Manhattan cocktail party, and was standing out there, smoking a cigarette and looking down mournfully at the street far below, when from behind her she heard a voice: “I know a better way down.”

* * *

It’s strange to think, but he would have been eighty-five this year: fourteen years older than my mom, fifty years older than me. He could as easily have been my grandfather as father. He had been in the war, if briefly (stationed in Italy towards the end of it, he’d missed action, but met the Pope, an early sign of the “great good fortune”—one of his favorite phrases—that marked his life). He was a Wasp (both of his parents came from old New England families, and had ancestors on the Mayflower). Above all, he was a gentleman, one of the last—a figure so archaic, it could be easily mistaken for something else. No, my father’s voice was not an act, something chosen or practiced in front of mirrors: he came from a different world, where people talked differently, and about different things; where certain things were discussed, and certain things were not—and his voice simply reflected this.

But it didn’t define him, much the way he refused to be defined by the stiff, upper-crust world from which he’d come. That life couldn’t contain him, he’d burst its seams like it was an old coat two sizes too small. He’d go on to move freely through so many worlds and circles, without ever not speaking in that singular accent—though it probably would have made life easier for him if he’d adopted a new way of talking (after all, as a journalist in the locker rooms, where slang and cursing were art-forms, my dad’s stiff, formal tongue made him stick out like an egret among ducks). No matter where he was, or who he was—quarterback, trapeze artist, Philharmonic triangle-player—his voice never changed, proving that you can be whomever you want to be without ever abandoning yourself.

* * *

Of course, I think he enjoyed the odd persona his voice and mannerisms conferred on him. If he couldn’t be taken quite seriously, that was fine with him (he took himself lightly, and relished being in on the joke). Consider his duties as host of “Mousterpiece Theatre” (my first intro to my father as celebrity), a children’s TV show in which he debated the adventures and psyches of Donald Duck and Goofy in that marvelously serious voice: “Is Donald Duck really a strident existentialist and a hero?” How wonderful—what fun!—to have a constant reminder emerging from your lips that life was absurd, and identity, too; all of it a great game to be played at, enjoyed. So it was that my father played himself not just in movies and on TV, but in life, too.

My Fathers Voice

He had, for instance, a series of antiquated phrases and terms of affection. He called his computer “the machine.” At dinner, when offered seconds, he would often decline by saying, “Thank you, no, I’ve had a gracious plenty….” He called my mom “Puss” (this was also the name of our fat, raccoon-striped cat, though he was “Mr. Puss,” and my father enjoyed nothing more than holding the beast high in the air and making strange, affectionate sounds in that distinguished voice: “Yeanngghh, Puss… Yeaannngh Puss Puss Puss.”) He called my sister “Puss,” too, sometimes, though mostly I think with her it was “Kiddo,” which he also called me, though there was a period in which he occasionally called me “Ernie,” which was the dog’s name. (Every now and then he also called me “Sweet Prince,” as in “Goodnight, Sweet Prince.”)

Of course, my father’s voice was odd not just in what it said, but in what it couldn’t. These are some of the things my father could not say: “Shit.” “Fuck.” “I love you.” His curses were never actually curse-words, though it was perhaps because of this that they held such weight. “Shoot!” he’d hiss, when he was mad. It was scary, because he was never mad, and to see this normally benevolent, white-haired figure of civility fill with pink steam, to hear this gentle man, who loved nothing more than to tell lighthearted stories and laugh, suddenly shout-whisper “Dammit” at some injustice on the other end of the telephone was unsettling. But looking back on it, it’s funny, too. Hearing the words “Dammit, I’m mad as a hornet!” uttered in George Plimpton’s voice made anger sound totally ridiculous, which is exactly what it most often is. (My dad’s been dead nearly ten years: not that he held many in his life, but what grudges could he possibly be holding on to now? What will you be mad about ten years after you’re gone?)

And so “fuck” was definitely out of the question, but what about “I love you”? There was love there—actually, his inability to express it sometimes made him positively brim with it—but speak the words, his voice could not. At least, not to me, nor even to my sister, a fact she mentions in the movie. You’d be on the phone with him and get to the end of the conversation, and you’d say “I love you, Dad,” and at most, he’d reply, without subject or object, “Love,” like he was signing a letter.

He came from a family where such endearments were not expressed, and phone conversations were curt. In fact, my dad’s farewells seemed loquacious in comparison to his mother’s. She would not even say goodbye. There you’d be, talking with her on the phone, and she’d say, “Well, tell him I called,” and you’d say, “O.K., Grandma, good to talk to you, I… Grandma?”

* * *

There was one more matter I never heard my dad discuss. That is, until I saw the documentary—the assassination of his dear friend Bobby Kennedy. From what other people had told me, I knew a little bit about it—that my father (and mother) had been right by Bobby’s side in California when he was shot, that my father had tackled Sirhan Sirhan to the ground, and wrestled the gun from his hand—but not a word of it came from my dad himself. Indeed, the police deposition the filmmakers managed to uncover may be the only time my dad ever spoke about the tragedy, publicly or privately. In finally hearing the great storyteller tell the one story he would not tell, I could hear, too, his long, reverent silence on the subject—and it reveals his integrity as a journalist, and as a man.

Nevertheless, it’s a strange thing that one of the great voices of modern storytelling had limitations, restrictions, words, and phrases it was incapable of uttering, matters it could not express: death, love, tragedy. That tension between what was in his heart and what his voice allowed him to express is the basic tension of language we all face, only heightened. My dad could never say what he felt—not really—and neither can any of us. For such admissions to escape my father’s lips, they always had to be a little removed somehow.

“How’s your mom?” he’d always ask me. They were divorced, and had been for a while, but they still talked, and visited every now and then, and they would sit on my mom’s porch on Long Island and look out over the pond at the birds and tell each other stories and laugh until the tears came to their eyes, but he could not ask her this directly—“How are you, Freddy?” He had lost my mom, at least in part because he had been unable to communicate with her, to show his love.

My dad and I could not lose each other, but we could never quite find each other, either. Even the most basic conversation was often a struggle. When I spoke to him my voice went up an octave and took on his formal tone and became careful and unnatural; his voice became like his father’s—stern, authoritative, disciplinarian—when his father was the last person in the universe he wanted to be. In most situations, he had the remarkable quality of making everyone he talked to feel at ease, at home, welcome, no matter who they were or what they did—but for whatever strange reason there wasn’t this effortlessness with me, this warmth. It was as if some old gentleman’s code prohibited us from interacting as human beings. We were bound to play the roles of father and son, unable to simply be ourselves. Why couldn’t we have a good time, too? What stood in our way? What was our problem? Was it him? Was it me?

* * *

The last time I heard my father’s voice, it was over the telephone. We were both excited—I’d just come back from a weekend in Las Vegas, and he’d just come back from celebrating the fortieth anniversary reunion of his Detroit Lions team at Ford Field, where the fans had given him a standing ovation, and he had raised his hat—and for a moment we were no longer father and son, but just two big excited boys, each comparing adventures, and I could hear the pride in his voice, the happiness. And I felt such love for my sweet old excited dad at that moment that I thought I would do him the favor of not telling him so, of leaving it unsaid. And so when it was time to say goodbye, we did so simply—no awkwardness, no strangled expressions of affection—and this is why, even though it was the last time we ever spoke, and I would never get the chance again, I do not regret not telling him that I loved him. I only wish I could not tell him again, just one more time.

Photographs courtesy Taylor Plimpton.