What first comes to mind when you think of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
To Philip Gefter, it is not the game-changing play by Edward Albee, but Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the movie, as Gefter makes clear in “Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? “(Bloomsbury, 359 pages), which devotes ten of its thirteen chapters to the making of the movie, and only the first three to the playwright and the play.
Those three chapters are rich enough in detail, and revelation – or at least speculation — to intrigue most theater lovers.
Still, the movie is clearly the author’s primary interest, and frame of reference. It would be hard to argue that isn’t the smartest (which is to say, most commercial) focus: Glamorous movie stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the most famous married couple in the world in 1966 — a headline-grabbing union born in scandal — making a movie together about married couple George and Martha, whose foul-mouthed, abusive behavior scandalizes not just their young married guests Nick and Honey (George Segal and Sandy Dennis) late one night, but rapt movie audiences throughout the nation.
Gefter makes the case for the movie’s impact, influence and importance from the very first words in his book: “What a dump!” He spends the first six pages in a prologue explaining how the phrase became famous not because Bette Davis uttered it in “Beyond the Forest,” a 1949 “noir flop,” but because Elizabeth Taylor repeats it as the character Martha recalling the old movie line, in the opening scene of the 1966 movie. “This was one small testament to the impact of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It could transform even this deliberately misremembered snippet, plucked from the wastebin of American cultural oblivion, into a shibboleth of sophisticated taste.”
The movie, he points out, earned “piles of money and a raft of prizes,” and marked “the death of the Production Code, Hollywood’s midcentury censorship regime.” It also “is my standard against which all movies about marriage are measured, but obviously not because George and Martha’s marriage is ideal” – which he demonstrates with an extensive “epilogue” placing the movie (not the play) in the context of other movies (not theater) about marriage, many of which he argues were influenced by “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” It is inadvertently telling that most of the movies he describes were adaptations of novels and plays.
One yearns for a less ardent perspective on the movie, which one gets, briefly, from an unimpeachable source, Edward Albee: “In spite of everything, it’s not bad. The only trouble with it is that it’s completely humorless.” He also didn’t understand why they shot the movie in black and white. “I wrote the play in color.”
Albee comes off as a colorful character himself in the early chapters, a sensitive turned rebellious child adopted into a rich cold family who escapes as a teenager to Greenwich Village, entranced by the bohemian culture. By age 24 he was living in the Village with a boyfriend and mentor, composer William Flanagan, five years his senior, socializing with playwrights, poets and composers of some renown and hanging out in local cafes and gay bars, where at 26, he saw a piece of graffiti on a mirror that stuck with him: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Albee wrote his first one-act play in 1958, one month shy of his thirtieth birthday. It was “The Zoo Story,” and it launched his career as a playwright. In 1960, he started working on his first full-length play, eventually giving it the title from the graffiti he had seen six years earlier. By then, he had a new boyfriend, Terrence McNally, ten years his junior, who would become a much-respected playwright in his own right.
Gefter is good in explaining the inspirations and connections that led to Albee’s initial playwriting career, much of the information coming from Mel Gussow’s biography of Albee, and in chronicling the complicated story of the development and first production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” Of particular fascination is the origin of that play; Gefter speculates that it was shaped in part by his relationships with Flanagan and McNally, but most directly modeled after a couple he knew through his association with Wagner College in Staten Island. Willard Maas, a poet and experimental filmmaker, taught in the English department; his wife, Marie Menken, was a painter and filmmaker. The couple were evidently so notorious for their weekend binge-drinking and bickering that they were the subject of an early documentary film by Andy Warhol.
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” starring Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill, opened on Broadway on October 13, 1962. If initial reviews were mixed, the audience reaction was thunderous. The play’s director Alan Schneider is quoted as explaining the draw:
“People who wouldn’t come to see Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as a play of ideas about the failure of American marriage, or a philosophical drama dealing with the ambiguous conflict between truth and illusion, came to see us because they thought we were a ‘dirty’ play or because someone told them there were sexy scenes—Uta Hagen touching the inside of George Grizzard’s thigh.”
Gefter himself is more reverent and methodical – downright sociological — in explaining its appeal, seeing it as “an era-defining play,” tapping into the until-then hidden cultural mood of the times: Martha’s discontent, for example, was something that Betty Friedan would soon write about in “The Feminine Mystique.”
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” paid its investors back after only thirty-one performances. It went on to win five Tony Awards, including best play — but not the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; the Pulitzers gave no prize for drama that year, a deliberate snub of Albee’s play, which the drama jurors had selected, but which the board of trustees rejected because, in the words of one naysayer, it was a “filthy play.”
All of this, as I say, is in the first three chapters. The rest of “Cocktails with George and Martha” (such an unfortunate title!) is taken up with the movie, including vivid portraits of all those involved, such as Ernest Lehman, a first-time producer who had been a respected screenwriter (Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, the movie adaptations of West Side Story and The Sound of Music); Mike Nichols, a first-time director who had been a wildly successful performer and Broadway director (as we learned from Mark Harris’s recent biography, from which Gefter judiciously culls), and of course the four cast members. There are some delicious details: Elizabeth Taylor, then thirty two years old and at the height of her beauty and glamor, was eager to stretch by playing an overweight shrew of a middle-aged woman — but not aged 52, which was in the script; she’d only go as far as 48. She stormed out when the director told her to recite the lines exactly as they were in the script, and didn’t come back until very late in the day – all cheerful, because she had had a long lunch with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
Gefter spends an inordinate time re-creating certain scenes moment by moment, relying explicitly on the journal kept by Lehman (and, implicitly, by watching the movie over and over), and in recounting blow by blow the petty bickering between the producer and the director. The author’s effort at analysis, while usually admirable, too often gets lost in airy abstraction: Each time he uses the word “existential,” its meaning becomes less clear. (I also wish he would look up the dictionary definition of “enormity.”)
But there are also many worthwhile glimpses into what it’s like to adapt a play, and this play in particular – and the difference between theatermaking and moviemaking. Although Elizabeth Taylor had made some three dozen movies over the previous twenty years, this was the first time that any director had involved her in two weeks of rehearsals with the rest of the cast, beginning with a table read. Nichols saw his job as reversing all the changes that Lehman’s screenplay had made to Albee’s script, which he managed to do. “My job is not to ‘fix’ what Albee wrote, but to reveal it.”
