Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? By Philip Gefter. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024. $42.00
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I love “making of” books, and there are some fine ones out there. The sausage-making behind Giant (1956), Imitation of Life (1959), and Midnight Cowboy (1969) have all been excellently researched and dramatized in recent years. I’m happy to proclaim Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Philip Gefter as another worthy entry to this film studies subgenre.
In Cocktails with George and Martha, Gefter, whose other books include bios of Richard Avedon and Mapplethorpe-associated curator Sam Wagstaff as well as a study of photography post-Robert Frank, has effectively combined the making of the seminal 1966 film and its stage origin in one book. He includes playwright Edward Albee’s early years as a brooding child adopted into a privileged but loveless home. Then on to his apprenticeship as a playwright, his homosexuality and significant love affairs, the development of Virginia Woolf, and its triumph on Broadway in 1962.
The story gets richer when veteran mogul Jack Warner buys the movie rights. (Gefter insists on spelling out Brothers, when the studio name has long been Warner Bros.) Warner was an unlikely buyer, as his tastes were then decidedly old-fashioned just as he was aging out of the movie business. He was nervous about the play’s liberal sprinkling of obscenities and how they would translate on-screen.
To Gefter, the film’s primary creative relationship was between first-time director Mike Nichols and producer-screenwriter Ernest Lehman. Nichols had been a brilliant but depressed comedian-writer-stage director obsessed with perceptions of his place in the show business hierarchy. Lunching with Jean Renoir, Billy Wilder, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz gave him the bragging rights he coveted.
Lehman, in contrast, had written screenplays as disparate as Sweet Smell of Success, North by Northwest, and The Sound of Music. The two of them engaged in power plays through the production and beyond. Nichols demonstrated tremendous nerve as a neophyte to films. In making script rewrites, he sneakily tried to return the screenplay back to the stage version, so the film would become all Albee and no Lehman.
Gefter pays somewhat less attention to Virginia Woolf’s fabled married stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. As a tweedy underachieving history professor and his embittered castrating wife, they were both miscast. At 33, Taylor was too young by nearly two decades. But by some sort of cinematic miracle, they both gave never-better performances. The dynamics of their young marriage (his second, her fifth) often flared on set, as when an insecure Burton diminishes Taylor’s acting skills in front of cast and crew. But in another breath, he speaks of her uncanny intuition and understanding of the moving camera and what it captures. Both drank voluminously while enduring a level of celebrity achieved by only a handful of people in the twentieth century.
Gefter saves room for other critically important contributors to Virginia Woolf’s lofty success: supporting players George Segal and Sandy Dennis, cinematographer Haskell Wexler, editor Sam O’Steen, costume designer Irene Sharaff, and composer Alex North. The various creative connections and disconnections, between Nichols and Wexler, or Albee and North, are artfully woven into the text.
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Gefter is a fine writer, though he’s not above the occasional clunky under-edited sentence of questionable content (“The production was also shadowed by the apparent suicide of the thirty-six-year-old Marilyn Monroe two months prior – the iconic power of her international stardom cutting deep into the American psyche, as the entire culture mourned the loss of the postwar symbol of sexualized optimism she personified.”) And while he charts the genesis and gestation of Who’s Afraid of Viriginia Woolf? with finesse, he’s somewhat less successful in summarizing its legacy. He claims a share of Virginia Woolf’s greatness comes with its place in the stream of films about marriage. The corrosive effects of unmet dreams in a long-term coupling was simply not present on the screen as persuasively or powerfully before Virginia Woolf (tell that to Burt Lancaster and Shirley Booth in 1952’s Come Back, Little Sheba). It paved the way for Revolutionary Road, Scenes from a Marriage, The Lion in Winter, and others as recent as Marriage Story, Gefter asserts. It’s an uneasy claim. Virginia Woolf is a great movie, but how wide was its influence? Whether it can claim large credit for later studies of marriage on film is dubious.
Gefter’s book has some delicious eyebrow-raising tidbits, such as Ingmar Bergman directing a stage version in Stockholm. Or Nichols renting Cole Porter’s house during production. The opening credits of Virginia Woolf, it could be said, are brought to you by Gloria Steinem. Nichols had an affair with the young journalist, who suggested the exteriors of the film be shot at Smith College. Virginia Woolf’s infamously salty language (“hump the hostess,” “plowing pertinent wives”) was instrumental in toppling the antiquated and censorious Production Code and paving the way for the ratings system still in use today. The film was a box-office triumph and received a whopping 13 Oscar nominations, one in each of its eligible categories. It won five, including Best Actress for Taylor and Supporting Actress for a divinely eccentric Sandy Dennis. Stand-alone masterpiece or game changer in the history of movies on marriage, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is one for the ages, and Gefter serves it well.
