Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
By Philip Gefter
(Bloomsbury Publishing, 368 pages, $32)

If you’ve never seen the 1966 movie Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, directed by Mike Nichols and based on the play by Edward Albee, don’t waste your time reading this; go find the picture, one way or another (it’s free online, if you know where to look), and watch it already. If you have seen the movie, chances are that you liked it — it has a 96 percent “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes — and that you’ll probably get a kick out of Philip Gefter’s richly detailed new book Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. If, like me, you’ve seen the picture more times than you can count — and look forward to the next — you’ll want to order Gefter’s tome prontissimo. 

Gefter, who has previously written biographies of the photographer Richard Avedon and the curator Sam Wagstaff, opens this one with Albee’s childhood. Born in 1928, the adopted but unloved son of a Westchester County couple so rich that they had a private railway car, Albee left home at 18 for Greenwich Village, where, living off of a hefty inheritance from his grandmother, he found a circle of artsy friends and struggled to become a writer. As it turned out, he didn’t complete his first play, the one-acter The Zoo Story, until he was 30; its success made him a cultural figure to be reckoned with, and his first full-length play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which premiered on Broadway in 1962, propelled him instantly into the front ranks of American dramatists. It also made him the subject of intense media controversy, because Virginia Woolf presented what was, for the time, an unusually graphic portrait of a bibulous, foul-mouthed married couple who, for just under three hours, are constantly at each other’s throats. 

Of course, the film rights were snapped up. The purchaser was Warner Bros., which, as it happens, was name-checked in the first moments of the play, when the female lead, Martha, walks into her modest, cluttered home with her husband, George, looks around, declares “What a dump!” and then asks George which “Bette Davis picture,” which “Warner Brothers epic,” the line is from. (The answer, never given in the play, is the 1949 noir Beyond the Forest.) But how to make a profitable movie, suitable for family viewing, out of a play so dark, so full of rage, and so crammed with obscene language? 

Ernest Lehman, a buttoned-down Tinseltown stalwart who’d written the original scripts for movies like Executive Suite (1954) and North by Northwest (1959) and adapted plays like West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965) for the screen, was hired to produce the film and to adapt Albee’s playscript, which he felt needed to undergo major changes in order to satisfy his bosses at Warners (not to mention the middle-American moviegoing public). 

On this score, Lehman was challenged mightily by the man chosen to direct the picture, Mike Nichols, who — after three years as half of the edgy, sophisticated comedy team Nichols and May — had directed Neil Simon’s Broadway hit Barefoot in the Park (1963) and, having become the toast of New York, was now out to conquer the Coast as well. Nichols, a great fan of Albee’s play, wanted to stick to the original text as much as possible, which involved “chipping away” bit by bit at Lehman’s screenplay, the early drafts of which departed rather alarmingly from the source material. 

It was Nichols, too, who insisted on making the movie in black and white, an issue on which he fought repeatedly with studio chief Jack Warner. (On this shoot, there was at least as much arguing — and, for that matter, boozing — offscreen as on.) Nichols’ tenacity on these points was admirable. Less admirable was the fact that he was a notoriously obnoxious egomaniac who played mind games with Lehman (and everyone else), bragged about his famous friends (among them Jacqueline Kennedy and Stephen Sondheim), exhibited (unashamedly) a petty competitiveness and garish acquisitiveness, and lusted nakedly after ever greater wealth, fame, and social status. According to Gefter, Nichols once told the playwright David Hare that during a period when he’d thought he was going broke, he “did this incredible thing”: He flew coach, which he found “disgusting.” (This from a man who would go on to be one of Hollywood’s most celebrated liberals.) To his surprise, Hare replied that he flew coach “all the time,” as did “[m]ost of the human race.”

One thing about which Nichols and Lehman didn’t quarrel terribly much was casting. On stage, Martha and George had been played by the respected actors Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill. But Hollywood called for much bigger star power. Jack Warner had promised Albee to cast Bette Davis and James Mason — which would have required a change in the opening scene, in which Martha, as noted, actually refers to Davis. (As it happens, Davis, who’d just had a hit with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, was desperate to play the role.) But Lehman and Nichols didn’t close out other possibilities. Lehman made lists of possible choices for the leads, including Ingrid Bergman, Deborah Kerr, and Anne Bancroft for Martha and Peter O’Toole, Kirk Douglas, and Marlon Brando for George. 

But quickly enough they trained their focus on Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who while making Cleopatra (1963) in Rome had fallen in love, divorced their spouses, gotten married — and immediately become the most famous couple in the world. Sent a copy of Albee’s play, Taylor read it on the Super Chief from New York to Los Angeles (both Burtons hated to fly), then handed it to her new husband, a brilliant Shakespearean actor whose judgment in such matters, she knew, eclipsed her own. He would later say that it was clear from the very first lines that it was “a great play.” What he told his new wife was this: “I think you’re too young.… I don’t think you’re enough of a harridan. Maybe you don’t have the power, but you’ve got to play it to stop everybody else from playing it.” 

And so they were cast. But Nichols wasn’t sure about Taylor. Burton, he confided in Lehman during the first week of rehearsals, could simply play himself and be believable enough as his character, a college history professor; the same went for the actors George Segal and Sandy Dennis, who’d been selected to play the young couple, Nick and Honey, whom Martha invites over for a nightcap after a faculty party and who find themselves wrapped up in an apocalyptic, liquor-fueled domestic battle. (Robert Redford, the first choice for Nick, had turned it down because, as he later explained, he “was never a fan of the play.”) But although both Burtons could argue — and throw it back — as impressively as George and Martha, Nichols didn’t think the 33-year-old Taylor, known more for her beauty than for the depth of her performances, could pull off the bitter, blowsy, middle-aged Martha. Soon enough, however, Nichols changed his mind — kind of. After a few days of repeated table reads — something that Taylor, who’d appeared in 34 movies, starting at age 10, had never experienced before — her inner Martha began to emerge, thanks in no small part to constant, painstaking direction by both Nichols and Burton (whose harsh criticism of her line readings sometimes drove her to tears). 

Despise the frequent abuse he took from Nichols, Lehman, a class act (by Hollywood standards, anyway), was generous in praising his director. During the early weeks of filming, when demonstrating to the actors how he wanted them to move or gesture or read their lines, Nichols played the roles, said Lehman, better than they did. Nichols even stocked the refrigerator in George and Martha’s kitchen with an eye to giving Taylor a sense of the kind of woman she was playing — it contained a chewed-up ear of corn, some leftover spaghetti on a plate, and an open can of beans “with the lid folded back.” Over time, Taylor, who’d never played such a complex and challenging role, grew more and more into the part. Dining with Burton and friends, she snapped at him in an uncharacteristic fashion and realized that it hadn’t been her — it had been Martha. 

Still, Nichols wasn’t entirely convinced. “I just don’t think Elizabeth is going to make it,” he grumbled to Lehman at one point. Some, indeed, didn’t make it. Several crew members quit because they found Nichols unbearable. Others just stopped talking to him. His attitude problem cost the movie its first cinematographer, the veteran Harry Stradling (A Streetcar Named Desire; Guys and Dolls), and briefly also lost it the accomplished composer Alex North (Streetcar; Spartacus). Eventually Jack Warner got so fed up with Nichols’ discourtesy and imperiousness that, after the completion of principal photography, Nichols himself got fired — only to be hired back when he promised Warner, who was worried about the film getting banned by the Catholic League of Decency, to take Jackie Kennedy, the world’s most famous Catholic widow, as his guest to the screening for the monsignor who would make the fateful decision. 

Nichols did take Jackie, who, at the end of the screening, in a move she’d arranged beforehand with him, gushed so that the monsignor could hear, “Jack would have loved this film.” Partly because of the former first lady’s endorsement, and partly because the theater had been full of young Catholic cineastes who responded enthusiastically to the movie — “There is something being said here,” one of them wrote in his report to the monsignor, “which is quite valid and, in its own terms, very moral” — the Catholic League categorized Virginia Woolf, despite its salty language and depiction of adultery, as “unobjectionable for adults, with reservations.” 

The film’s other hurdle was the Production Code Administration, which could doom the film’s chances by withholding a seal of approval on moral grounds. After viewing Virginia Woolf, Geoffrey Shurlock, the head of that office, did indeed withhold his approval. But then Warner screened the movie for Shurlock’s new boss, Motion Picture Association of America President Jack Valenti, who promptly overruled Shurlock’s decision, declaring “approvingly” that its sometimes-coarse dialogue would “hit the American public like an angry fist.” This episode spelled the beginning of the end of the old Production Code, which in 1968 would be replaced by a system whereby films weren’t approved or banned but simply rated G, M, R, or X.

Of course, Virginia Woolf was a hit. It was the year’s third highest-grossing film (after The Bible and Hawaii) and won acting Oscars for Taylor — whose emotionally shattering performance in the closing scenes surprised everybody, including her — and for Dennis, plus awards for Haskell Wexler’s cinematography, Richard Sylbert’s production design, and Irene Sharaff’s costumes. Albee was happy with it, too, though he was as sarcastic as Nichols was about Lehman’s screenwriting credit: In his view, Lehman had added “about twenty-five words” to his own text, and he claimed to find all of them “absolutely terrible.” 

Virginia Woolf provided a career boost for everybody involved. Lehman went on to produce Hello, Dolly! and other pictures; Nichols, denied an Academy Award for Virginia Woolf, won one the next year for The Graduate and kept directing movies, many of them praiseworthy (Postcards from the Edge; Primary Colors), for another four decades, during which — as I can testify from personal experience — he never stopped being a prick. Taylor, previously renowned mostly for her beauty and, well, for her renown, gained new respect as a serious actress. And the movie, even more than Albee’s play, played a not insignificant role in the massive sociocultural shift that took place in America in the mid-to-late 1960s. 

And Gefter’s book? It’s a fun read. Much of the fun lies in his scene-by-scene accounts of acting and directing challenges, lighting and sound problems, and the like. It’s fun to watch Nichols learning on the job about everything from lenses to camera angles to film stock. (Not until the production wrapped did he realize that he could’ve shot all the exteriors on the Warners backlot instead of moving the production for a month to the campus of Smith College in Massachusetts.) It’s also interesting to be reminded that in the 1960s the colossal alcohol intake of people like George and Martha wasn’t really all that far from the norm: Jack Warner’s welcome gift to the Burtons when they arrived on his lot included six bottles of champagne, a case of Scotch, and a case of gin. 

As for Liz Taylor, Gefter gives both sides of the woman their due. On the one hand, we see her being obscenely pampered and giving way to puerile emotional displays. (Even while collecting a million-dollar salary – the first actor ever to command such a big paycheck — she expected producers to shower her with expensive jewelry.) On the other hand, as Wexler testified, Liz was “a real trouper,” a “very, very fine woman” who was “considerate of everybody down to the supposedly least important member of the crew”; during the shoot, she invited everybody working on the picture to a barbecue at which she happily flipped burgers. 

As his subtitle suggests, Gefter is particularly preoccupied with the role of Virginia Woolf as a key text in the cinematic examination of marriage. This preoccupation results in some skippable passages toward the beginning of the book as well as to a long, anticlimactic, and entirely superfluous afterword (it reads, in fact, like a proposal for another book) in which he sums up the plots of a dozen or so other movies — among them Adam’s Rib, Diary of a Mad Housewife, Shoot the Moon, and Husbands and Wives — about married couples. Like Sam Wasson’s 2021 book Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman (why, by the way, are books about the making of 1960s movies suddenly a thing?), Gefter’s latest offering is a frothy dose of fluff — a guilty pleasure with a subtitle that seeks to sell it as perhaps a little bit more profound than it really is.