Scott Sublett
Philip Gefter’s “Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (Bloomsbury Publishing, 368 pages), while mostly about the 1966 film version, spends quite a few of its most interesting pages on the birth of the 1962 stage play. Edward Albee had made his name with absurdist one-acts in Europe and off-Broadway, but his first full length play was on-the-rocks realism, marinated in the womb of an inebriated marriage. Albee and William Flanagan, his lover, intellectual mentor, and more or less husband, were both what even in those more liquid days would be called alkies. Flanagan was a serious composer, well connected in the arts, and introduced his artistically floundering partner to Thorton Wilder, who advised him to abandon poetry and try playwriting.
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” would crash into American culture in a way that a stage play probably cannot do anymore. “The New York Daily Mirror” called it a “sick play about sick people,” but critic Walter Kerr in “The New York Herald Tribune” found it interesting: “a horror play written by a humorist.” Then “The New York Times” weighed in with a money review and the production made back its investment in 31 performances. Formally, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” was conventional. Broadway has seldom been a hotbed of formal experimentation, but content could always be relied upon for shock value and “content” usually meant sex, and of course this play had it. But while sex is controversial, marriage is sacred—literally a sacrament—and that’s the edge of Albee’s play that really cut. Truths about marriage were relatively rare on Broadway. Tennessee Williams’s 1947 “A Streetcar named Desire” was notorious for Stanley’s drunken rape of Blanche, but more deeply unsettling was his wife’s reaction to it: she’d rather see her sister in an insane asylum than surrender her illusions about her husband. In Williams’s 1955 “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” the issue was once again marriage plus booze plus illusions, Maggie the Cat’s problem being that her husband is conflicted by his homosexuality, and therefore alcoholic. Other Broadway plays, such as “Come Back Little Sheba,” “Long Day’s Journey into Night” and “A View from the Bridge,” also explored damaged marriages in which liquor played a prominent role, but none of them shocked the public like Edward Albee’s 1966 “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” As the first Broadway play to depict marriage as open warfare, it was a threat to the institution of marriage itself.
CUT TO: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, whose adulterous shenanigans had been condemned by the Vatican and in the United States Congress, and who by the mid-1960s were the most famous married couple in the world. Like the play, the Burtons were seen as a threat to the institution of marriage. And like the couple in the play, they were heroic boozers.
The Burtons were not Albee’s idea. In fact, when Warner Brothers bought the movie rights, Jack Warner promised the playwright that George and Martha would be Bette Davis and James Mason, which would have been pretty great casting. But first-time producer Ernest Lehman (the noted screenwriter of “North by Northwest”) had a brainstorm: to woo Elizabeth Taylor, who at 33 was decades too young for the part but was huge box office. Also on Lehman’s list were Ingrid Bergman, Uta Hagen (who had played it on Broadway), Nancy Kelley, Anne Bancroft, Patricia Neal, Shelley Winters, Bette Davis, Deborah Kerr, Geraldine Page and Viveca Lindfors, which makes one wish the movie could have been shot ten times with ten different leading ladies. Taylor was always Lehman’s first choice. “People know how good Uta Hagen played her,” Gefter quotes Lehman as saying. “They certainly know how Bette Davis would do it. But they would wonder how Elizabeth Taylor would do it.” Lehman also had a list of Georges that included Peter O’Toole, Jason Robards, Arthur Hill, Kirk Douglas, Peter Finch, Maximilian Schell, Christopher Plummer, Marlon Brando, Gregory Peck, Paul Scofield, Peter Ustinov, Richard Widmark, William Holden, Burt Lancaster, Peter Sellers and James Mason. He had been turned down by Jack Lemmon and Glenn Ford. Imagine the permutations: Brando with Shelley Winters? Jason Robards and Patricia Neal? Lehman thought Burton was too manly, intense, and Shakespearian for George, but if he wanted Taylor, Burton was part of the deal.
First-time film director Mike Nichols, known for directing Neil Simon comedies on Broadway and, before that, for his cabaret act with Elaine May, came aboard mostly because he was pals with the Burtons. They considered him a genius. Albee scoffed, “My play is not a farce.” Nichols was a supreme networker, and his connections came in handy when he used his friend Jackie Kennedy to save the finished film from being condemned by the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, which was the new name for the Legion of Decency.
The bulk of Gefter’s book covers the actual production of the film, with the worldwide fame of the Burtons a backdrop to both their genius and their reckless privilege. People often underrated Taylor, a mercurial and intuitive actress who understood more about film acting technique than any of them: being real while hitting your mark, finding your light, and calibrating your relationship with the camera. Stage-trained Burton would watch Taylor on the set and think she was doing nothing, then see the rushes and be gobsmacked.
Liquor was an insistent leitmotif. The luxurious dressing rooms were stocked with Rémy Martin and Johnny Walker Red Label for him, and Dom Perignon and bourbon for her. And who could be expected to face a camera at the ungodly hour of 10:00 A.M. without a bloody? And more at lunchtime. A theme that emerges from Gefter’s dishy and witty book is how alcohol makes marriage supportable while simultaneously sinking it. “Cocktails with George and Martha” is often high-toned gossip, but also about how a masterpiece about drinking and love gets made—amid a cultural moment that won’t—can’t—come again. * * *
Completists wanting to spelunk through the diamonds and arcana of Taylor’s vast career—all 56 theatrically-released feature films—might enjoy “On Elizabeth Taylor: An Opinionated Guide” by Matthew Kennedy (264 pages), part of Oxford University Press’s series of “opinionated guides” to actors’ oeuvres. It concentrates on her performances but also, around the edges, the marriages and drinking. The book makes one appreciate afresh her extraordinary, intuitive, yet utterly professional talent, and the usefulness of her freakish beauty (the cinematographer on her second film, “Lassie Come Home,” discovered that she had a double row of eyelashes). From the innocent, little-girl feminism of “National Velvet” to the high art of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” to the splendor of “Cleopatra” and ultimately, the campy misfires of the decline-and-fall years in pictures like “Boom!” (“Bloody marys were served every morning, and much of the production was shot while cast and crew were hammered,” Kennedy reports), the book makes an excellent case for Taylor’s career as one of the most interesting in the history of film acting.
