George Plimpton

We worked together several times. George needed the money to keep THE PARIS REVIEW in business. Stacy Wall wrote a Nike campaign based on PAPER LION, the book Plimpton wrote about his brief visit to the Detroit Lions football camp. The stuff was brilliant, witty, improvisational, and it never ran. Someone at Nike thought that Plimpton wasn’t relevant. This was the same Nike that had used William S. Burroughs in a campaign a few years earlier. I guess junkies are more relevant than writers.  Plimpton continually admonished Stacy about syntax. I thought Stacy’s eyes would roll over and out of his head. I had been involved in a project with Gore Vidal years earlier and until I met George, Gore was my intellectual hero. I thought Plimpton was far far wittier and more relevant, underrated.