In the 1960s, The Paris Review&rsquo;s founding editor owned a duplex that was considered party central for New York society. With the legendary apartment back on the market, one writer dives into its storied past.

My two favorite forms of escapism are as follows. One: Looking at listings for real estate I can&rsquo;t afford. And two: Reading about the life of the writer George Plimpton.
These twin hobbies are not as disparate as they first appear. They both offer a gorgeously painful glimpse into a world I feel I just missed; a generation I was very nearly born into; a raucous party I seem to have arrived to just as the dawn light is creeping through the blinds, the vinyl is spinning silently on the player, and the martini shaker is curdling on the counter. (But listen, we&rsquo;ll get to the parties later.) That golden second half of the great American century, when a humble writer might own a duplex on the Upper East Side of Manhattan on his freelance income alone, and when life might be a picaresque hop from adventure to assignment, princess to president, party to party, wonder to delight.
Or maybe just the life of George Plimpton, come to think of it. Plimpton is now most often described as the inventor of &ldquo;participatory journalism:&rdquo; that practice of diving head-first, as a jolly amateur, into an esoteric or grueling specialism. Quarterback for the Detroit Lions one month. Boxing a round with a heavyweight champion the next. Perhaps a percussionist&rsquo;s role in the New York symphony orchestra after that, under the terrifying glare of maestro Leonard Bernstein.

George Plimpton hosting a 1976 party for politician Jim Symington at his apartment. Getty Images.

Plimpton&mdash;or simply George, as his closest two thousand or so friends called him&mdash;combined rarefied journalistic access with sunbeam charm (&ldquo;a gift of the gods,&rdquo; according to his friend Robert Becker). He had an almost childlike sense of wonder and a genuinely gung-ho spirit. His interview subjects&mdash;whether Ernest Hemingway or President George H. W. Bush&mdash;were as intrigued by him as he was by them. &ldquo;When George walked up, [Muhammad] Ali&rsquo;s eyes would sort of light up with this mischievous little glint,&rdquo; the sportswriter Bud Shrake remembered. (I take this and all other reminiscences from the exquisite oral history of Plimpton from 2008: George, Being George, edited by Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr.)
Plimpton was also the editor and co-founder of the Paris Review, that handsome literary journal that began life in 1953 in the caf&eacute; society of postwar <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/travel-living/what-to-do-in-paris-trip-inspiration-travel" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Paris</a> and is still beloved (and galloping on) today. The fact that it has survived for more than three-quarters of a century is down, mostly, to Plimpton. He would not let it die, financially or reputationally. (Indeed, keeping it afloat is possibly what prevented him from enjoying the proper wealth that one might have expected from his East Coast&ndash;aristocratic upbringing.) The publication was fused to his being, like the shell of a tortoise, and in many ways protected him from the various barbs that he was simply a dilettante writer, a buffoon-for-hire.
The Review&rsquo;s offices, for most of the second half of the twentieth century, were situated just below Plimpton&rsquo;s duplex apartment, at 541 East 72nd Street, overlooking the East River. Which is where my second obsession comes in. A couple of months ago I was browsing multimillion-dollar apartments in esoteric corners of Manhattan (it was that or northern Umbria again) and I saw a listing that made me sit up in my chair. &ldquo;Rarely does an opportunity steeped in such a storied history present itself,&rdquo; read the opening copy on the Douglas Elliman website. &ldquo;The former residence of renowned journalist, writer, and longtime editor, George Plimpton, is now primed for its next chapter after nearly 60 years in the Plimpton family.&rdquo; The price? $5,250,000. For that, you get five bedrooms, six bathrooms, 4,700 square feet&mdash;and a lifetime of telling your friends &ldquo;This is where Jackie O spilled her daiquiri!&rdquo;

The exterior of George Plimpton's former apartment as seen in 2025. Photos by Ellen Silverman Photography for Douglas Elliman.

The pool room in George Plimpton's former apartment as seen in 2025. Photos by Ellen Silverman Photography for Douglas Elliman.

The living room in George Plimpton's former apartment as seen in 2025. Photos by Ellen Silverman Photography for Douglas Elliman.

The apartment was, for a long time, the center of gravity for <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/pop-culture/history-of-new-york-high-society-socialites-astor-vanderbilt" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upper Manhattan&rsquo;s swirling cosmos</a>. Plimpton&rsquo;s parties were legendary. &ldquo;I always thought of the people at those parties as divided between the herbivores and the carnivores,&rdquo; said Review staffer Fayette Hickox. The herbivores were made up of stately, ruminating authors (William Styron, say) and Brahmin types from George&rsquo;s days in the Porcellian Club at Harvard. The carnivores were the more socially alert media types and various gimlet-eyed tycoons. But also in the menagerie would be pals from Plimpton&rsquo;s boxing life, like light heavyweight champion Jos&eacute; Torres. Plus eminent politicians, Wall Street types, poets, gangsters, bewildered young society heiresses. It did sometimes resemble a zoo. Review editor Molly McKaughan remembers a function at Plimpton&rsquo;s apartment with writers Gay Talese and Norman Mailer and baseball star Bill Plummer. McKaughan stepped out of the room for a little while, and when she came back Mailer was viciously wrestling another guest on the coffee table, with Plimpton on all fours as an impromptu referee.

George Plimpton with Jim Symington and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis during the 1976 event. Getty Images.

Perhaps that was characteristic of Plimpton&rsquo;s ebullience as a host&mdash;a version of his ability to put everyone at ease with a playful charm that seemed to place its subject, momentarily at least, at the center of the universe. &ldquo;There was this great tall guy who, when we were introduced, acted as if I was the greatest thing that ever happened to him,&rdquo; recalls investment banker Geoffrey Gates of his first encounter with Plimpton at the apartment. &ldquo;For five seconds, I was in heaven.&rdquo; When he greeted friends, Plimpton would grip their shoulders and throw his head back in astonished joy, mouth wide and eyes sparkling, as if bumping into them by chance at the ends of the earth and not, in fact, at 8 p.m. on some pre-arranged September Friday. Nervous guests would be met with a dramatic Thank god you&rsquo;re here!, as if they alone could save the party. Terry McDonell, the Sports Illustrated editor, remembers Plimpton once greeting a pizza delivery boy like he might be a Nobel Prize winner, crying out, &ldquo;There&rsquo;s the great man!&rdquo;
By the mid-1960s, Plimpton was hosting a party at his apartment almost every Friday night. He had become, his friend Donald Hall remembers, &ldquo;the Elsa Maxwell of his time&rdquo;&mdash;a reference to the great society hostess (and gossip-wrangler) of the &lsquo;30s and &lsquo;40s. &ldquo;He had [this] capacity to embrace, or at least give the appearance of embracing, this eclectic gathering of strays and straights and very social people,&rdquo; Talese recalls. &ldquo;Once, sitting in his little office with him, I saw that he was putting in a new address under X in his address book,&rdquo; remembers author and Review editor Maggie Paley. &ldquo;He said it was his first &lsquo;X&rsquo;: Malcolm X.&rdquo; Dutch aristocrat and banking heir Teddy van Zuylen recalls meeting a hearty mafioso by the name of &ldquo;Bugsy&rdquo; at a Plimpton party, who was thrilled to learn van Zuylen was &ldquo;from Europe.&rdquo; &ldquo;Big Ted,&rdquo; Bugsy said. &ldquo;How would your bank like to get a couple of million dollars coming in, a couple of million smackers? You know, if I bring them over like this, just to have?&rdquo; An arrangement was very happily reached.

George Plimpton with actor and writer Wyatt Cooper during a 1976 art exhibition. Getty Images.

&ldquo;And yet, in reality, he had a discerning eye,&rdquo; says Talese, whose 1963 Esquire story slingshotted Plimpton, much to his supposed indignation, into something like a celebrity. Talese&rsquo;s sprawling story opens at one of Plimpton&rsquo;s legendary gatherings. At one point during the evening, <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/history-behind-jackie-kennedy-pink-suit-chanel-jfk" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Jackie Kennedy</a>&mdash;then the First Lady&mdash;strolled into the throng. Talese spotted Plimpton standing on a set of three steps that led from one living area in the apartment to another, and surveying the sea of heads. &ldquo;Who am I going to take Jackie over to meet?&rdquo; Talese saw him thinking. &ldquo;He stood on that kind of stage, at the top of those steps, and with all his life&mdash;his nighttime life, his private life, his side street life, his main street life, all the people that his personality and curiosity had drawn to him at different times&mdash;all of this spread out before him.&rdquo; One can still see the steps in the real estate listing today, and one can almost see Plimpton atop them.
Other Plimpton-era features that are retained include those broad, high windows overlooking the East River; the dark hardwood floors which must have borne many a Belgian <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/zegna-moccasin-loafer-summer-2025" target="_blank" rel="noopener">loafer</a> in their time; the long, open living space that Plimpton utilized to practice his football throws; the archways that broke up that same living room into several more clubby and conspiratorial areas; and the famous pool table, which served as a makeshift bar/buffet at many of the evening parties and a dumping ground for half-edited manuscripts and Paris Review back-issues in the daytime.

George Plimpton with journalist Hunter S. Thompson at a 1998 film premiere. Getty Images.

George Plimpton with fashion editor Diana Vreeland during a 1984 interview. Getty Images.

George Plimpton with actor Catherine Deneuve at a 1992 luncheon. Getty Images.

A lasting image of the space was taken by photographer Cornell Capa in 1963. A black-and-white shot with the swoony quality of a &lsquo;30s film still and an almost Renaissance composition, the scene centers on Truman Capote, tiny in black tie on a sofa. In a gentle haze of cigarette smoke, the writers Mario Puzo, William Styron, Peter Matthiesen, Gore Vidal, Ralph Ellison, and many more are arranged about him, with Plimpton sitting in the foreground, smiling widely across the room. It captures just a small amount of the delight that Plimpton was said to take from these eclectic gatherings&mdash;and, in fact, from everything else.
&ldquo;To me, the most Georgish of expressions that you&rsquo;d see on his face was when he was looking agog,&rdquo; says Hickox. Meaning: excited, delighted, awestruck, enthralled. &ldquo;A display of skill, an eccentric character, a great deed, a fine folly, a beautiful woman, a splendid paragraph&mdash;all left him agog, and he loved them for it.&rdquo; This, according to David Michaelis, was a fine model not simply of how to host, but also of how to live. &ldquo;George was willing to be surprised and delighted by whatever life presented him with from one moment to the next,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;Life came at him in little packets of wondrousness. How many times in George&rsquo;s day did he exclaim, Marvelous! and mean it? Certainly more than anyone I knew.&rdquo; Marvelous might well sum up George Plimpton&rsquo;s historic apartment, or at least the Sunday evening fantasy of one day owning it. These walls do not talk&mdash;they beam and cajole, and flicker with lovely ghosts. Ah! There&rsquo;s the great man!

Plimpton (seated far left) hosting a 1963 literary cocktail party at his apartment. Photography by Cornell Capa © International Center of Photography / Magnum Photos

The Rich History of George Plimpton’s Upper East Side Party Pad

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