Cocktails With George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

by Philip Gefter (Bloomsbury, $32)

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—both the 1962 Broadway play and the hit 1966 movie adaptation— wasn’t just a night’s entertainment to the many Americans who saw it, said Scott Bradfield in The New Republic. “It barged into their lives and made a home of them. It acted as both shock and revelation.” As the married central couple, George and Martha, battered one another with insults and obscenities across a long night of drinking witnessed by two younger guests, Woolf buried decades of dishonest screen depictions of domestic bliss and made the ugliest parts of viewers’ own home lives feel visible. As Philip Gefter’s “charming” new book makes clear, the making of the movie produced a memorable tempest of its own.

Adapting Edward Albee’s play was “dangerous territory for any Hollywood studio,” said Glenn Frankel in The Washington

Post. But Warner Bros. head Jack Warner was eager to erase the industry’s staid image, and upped the ante by entrusting the project to a first-time film director and a first-time producer, who quickly signed up the world’s two biggest stars. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor turned out to be nightmares to work with, forcing long breaks into short days during which Taylor was often reduced to tears by her husband’s “coaching.” Director Mike Nichols, 33 and a theater hotshot, proved so difficult that he was eventually banned from the studio lot. Somehow it all worked: The film was a critical and commercial success. And Burton and Taylor “were never better on screen.”

Thanks in part to his use of the diaries of producer-screenwriter Ernest Lehman, “Gefter’s account is good, harrowing fun,” said Jeremy McCarter in The Wall Street Journal. “His summing up,” by contrast, is “less persuasive.” He overexplains rather than simply trusting that he’s written a story of universal interest. “Just as the extreme nature of George and Martha’s all-night brawl helps us to understand all marriages, the antics of Liz and Dick and Mike and Ernie reveal the love-hate dynamic that’s common to all artistic collaborations.”