Plimpton's Crazy Co-Conspirator

John Shick/ITVS As a fascinating new documentary reveals, Doc Humes was the true mad genius behind The Paris Review.

George Plimpton is having a posthumous moment. George, Being George, Nelson Aldrich's oral history/biography of Plimpton, was expansively praised by Graydon Carter last month on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. And Philip Roth, equally unencumbered by irony, mourned Plimpton effusively in his novel Exit Ghost. Beneath the warm words for Plimpton, a hugely witty journalist, one senses nostalgia for a time when writers with literary ambitions stood somewhere near the center of American cultural life.

There is something merely cosmetic at work here, too, as embodied by the famous Cornell Capa photo of a 1963 party at Plimpton's apartment that accompanied the Times’ review. The black-and-white image captures an all-star get together that included Plimpton, Truman Capote, Mario Puzo, and Ralph Ellison, among others, all looking very young and stylish in their narrow-lapel suits and skinny ties. The photo tempts the viewer to long for the good old days when writers were mostly white men who dressed properly, and there was plenty of booze around, as well as what Plimpton called "pretty girls.” This is a highbrow version of nostalgia for the Rat Pack.

Norman Mailer once described Humes as “one of the few people I have ever met who was essentially, at bottom, more vain, more intellectually arrogant, than I was."

Among the ghosts in that alluring photo is Harold L. “Doc” Humes, dapper in suit, vest, and bow tie. Humes, a co-founder of The Paris Review (along with Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen), is the subject of Doc, a documentary directed by his daughter Immy Humes. An hour-long version of the jazz-filled, visually arresting film airs December 9 on PBS. It rather unsentimentally chronicles the little-known life of a literary figure whom Norman Mailer once described as “brilliant…one of the few people I have ever met who was essentially, at bottom, more vain, more intellectually arrogant, than I was."

These striking words attest to Humes’ stature among his contemporaries. His life was as rich in incident as a Dickens novel, and the film is rich in interviews with the likes of Plimpton, Matthiessen, William Styron, Timothy Leary, and Mailer himself. But none of this would matter much if the filmmaker, an Oscar nominee in 1992, had not artfully avoided several traps awaiting any daughter taking on the life of a brilliant, difficult, deeply paranoid, and profoundly ill father.