HOLLYWOOD GAMBLE PAID OFF
Burton, Taylor and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? helped change the movie industry
Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Philip Gefter Bloomsbury
Before John and Yoko, Charles and Diana, Will and Jada, Taylor and Travis, there were Dick and Liz. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were the ultimate '60s celebrity couple — movie stars who launched a very public adulterous affair while making the cinematic disaster known as Cleopatra. The pair led an extravagant, heedless and alcohol-drenched lifestyle trailed by paparazzi across the globe, and churned out a series of mediocre films.
But they also starred in an exceptionally fine one. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, adapted from Edward Albee's hit Broadway play and directed by Mike Nichols, was a breakthrough movie both cinematically and culturally. Its blistering portrayal of modern marriage as a war of attrition between two lost souls served as a bridge between Hollywood's fading studio system and the New Hollywood decade of more creative and risk-taking adult fare.
Author Philip Gefter recounts the making of the movie, released in 1966, in Cocktails with George and Martha, a lively, well-researched book that displays great affection for the film and the highly gifted and vastly troublesome people who made it. Gefter, whose books include a biography of Richard Avedon, makes a convincing case that Virginia Woolf marked “the dawn of a new age ... the play and the movie, alike — would challenge the hypocrisies of mainstream America, herald the sexual revolution, and register an entirely new psychological dimension to the public discourse.”
As for Burton and Taylor, they were never better on screen, thanks in large part to the deft handling by Nichols, who fed their egos while pushing them past their limitations.
Albee's play depicted a middle-aged married couple at a small private college — George, a history professor drifting into mediocrity and self-hatred, and Martha, his deeply unhappy wife. The couple staggers home at 2 a.m. after a faculty drinks party, followed by Nick, a new assistant professor, and his wife, Honey. George and Martha have invited over the young couple for a nightcap, like spiders welcoming flies to their web. George and Martha proceed to drink too much, make nasty jokes about each other and their guests, and present a breathtaking spectacle of anger and abuse.
Loaded with obscenities and sexual innuendo, the play was dangerous territory for any Hollywood studio. But Warner Bros. head Jack Warner was desperate for a contemporary drama that could attract younger and more sophisticated audiences and help reverse the steep decline in ticket sales due to the rise of television and the growing irrelevance of an industry still focused on stale westerns, biblical epics and Doris Day rom-coms. He turned to Ernest
Lehman, a talented and reliable producer and screenwriter who had already been nominated for an Oscar three times, for co-written screenplays. It was Lehman's idea to offer the role of Martha to Taylor. Burton, who by then had become her fifth husband, helped persuade her to take the part and signed on to play George.
Privately, Lehman harboured doubts about Taylor and Burton's ability to play these two complex people who were so unlike themselves. Still, he couldn't help envisioning “large lines around the block of every city of the world if Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were to star together.”
While most everyone involved in making the film has passed away, Gefter relies on interviews, newspaper and magazine articles from the era, and Lehman's extensive archives at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin to explore in depth the challenges they faced. Nichols, for example, had much to learn and knew it — movies, unlike plays, are primarily visual enterprises, and for Nichols working on a film set with a camera instead of a live audience was like learning a new language.
Early on the couple asserted their power by insisting that Lehman hire their friend Nichols as director. Nichols, then 33, was the toast of Broadway — as the male half of Nichols and May, a brilliant satirical duo with Elaine May, and as director of a string of hit comedies. But he had never directed a movie or taken on a work with the tragic dimensions of Virginia Woolf.
Nichols wisely surrounded himself with talented professionals such as cinematographer Haskell Wexler, whose use of a hand-held camera gave the film an intimate, naturalistic feel, and costume designer Irene Sharaff, who helped mute Taylor's stunning beauty with a frumpy wig and ill-fitting charcoal dress. Nichols and Lehman hired two fine young actors, George Segal and Sandy Dennis, to play Nick and Honey, the young couple upon whom George and Martha prey.
Nichols, whom the book portrays as the charismatic but arrogant creator of his own legend, clashed with almost everyone involved except the Burtons, whom he weaponized whenever the need arose. When
Jack Warner demanded the movie be shot in colour to give it more popular appeal, Nichols insisted that Taylor and Burton would work only in black and white.
The film was a month behind schedule and $2 million over budget, and when Warner first saw the director's cut, he moaned, “We've got a $7.5 million dirty movie on our hands.” But the studio got lucky when the Motion Picture Association hired former White House aide Jack Valenti as its new president with a mandate to modernize Hollywood's public image. When the administrators of the industry's Production Code censorship system demanded major cuts, Valenti overruled them. Two years later he would scrap the code altogether and introduce the ratings system.
The movie, which opened in June 1966, was a critical and box-office success. It received Academy Award nominations in every category there was then — 13 in all. It won five, including best actress for Taylor and best supporting actress for Dennis. No one, it seems, was afraid of Virginia Woolf.