Ernest Hemingway — The George Plimpton Interview
“ After the interview George Plimpton would often visit Ernest in Cuba, and was witness to the lunch meeting between Hemingway and Tennessee Williams in 1959…”
In his day George Plimpton was very much the journalist who got the interviews with movie stars, not least John Wayne who, being interviewed by Plimpton during a filming break, was suddenly called back on set. He told George to follow him, and before the journalist knew what was happening he was in the film — a 1970 western called Rio Lobo — the victim of a shoot-out. It made great copy and gave him an unwritten letter of introduction to many more movie stars and studios, and the world of the celebrity.
Earlier in his career, in 1954, he had interviewed Ernest Hemingway in Cuba which, like his encounter with John Wayne sixteen years later, opened the door to many more famous writers.
A year before the interview with Hemingway, Plimpton had, with Harold L. Hume and Peter Matthiessen, co-founded the then Paris based quarterly magazine, The Paris Review which, after the prestige of the Hemingway interview, managed to attract many well known writers and poets, including William Faulkner…
