The cowardly groom

Kyle Smith:

In 1968, Freddy Espy was a photographer's assistant who was herself being photographed for New York magazine. The phone rang. It was a friend who had been invited to her wedding saying that she should meet them at four. This was a surprise, because Freddy didn't realize she was getting married. Her boyfriend of five years, George Plimpton, hadn't bothered inviting her.

Says Freddy: "George had forgotten to call me and ask me to marry him. He was so terrified, he just neglected to tell me anything about it." She didn't even have time to invite her mother or her sisters. "And forget a real wedding party. We went to Elaine's. That was it."

George had met his friend Robert Silvers at Tiffany's to pick out rings. "George," recalls Silvers, "seemed knotted up. He just said, 'The poor girl, the poor girl.' " In the wedding photo, she and Plimpton are looking at each other like Cold War chess opponents.

Plimpton was flying to Indiana the next day to campaign for Bobby Kennedy. He called Freddy. "I feel awful, just awful," he said. "I need your help. I can't go alone." It dawned on Freddy that "he's asked me to come along so I could commiserate with him over the fact that he's married me."

Freddy is among the wits who spoke to Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. for his highly entertaining oral biography of Plimpton, "George, Being George: George Plimptons's Life as Told, Admired, Deplored, and Envied by 200 Friends, Relatives, Lovers, Acquaintances, Rivals - and a Few Unappreciative Observers." Every reminiscence is polished, sometimes to a dagger's point.

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"If you went to Harvard, Amherst, Yale, you were obviously good. If you went to some college he didn't know about, it was already a strike against you," recalls his sister Sarah Gay Plimpton. "I remember bringing home a boyfriend who had gone to Union College, and this just wasn't possible."

His parties were famous, but what kind of host calls up lesser invitees and disinvites them when RSVPs from the muckety-mucks come in?

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Plimpton was a classic Ivy League snob. He did not want to be around anyone else who was not. The description of his parties reminds me of Obama's new cabinet. It is "the best and the brightest" revisited with everyone thinking they are the smartest people in the room and they are looking down their noses at the rest of us.