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

“A dynamite cultural history account that focuses laser-like on the fraught translation of Edward Albee’s 1962 searing stage play about marriage . . . to the big Hollywood screen.”

This is a dynamite book by Philip Gefter, an acclaimed biographer of cultural history that focuses with laser-like inquiry on the fraught translation of Edward Albee’s 1962 searing stage play about marriage, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, to the big Hollywood screen.

The 1966 film starred the tumultuous real-life couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and first-time director Mike Nichols who had until then made a name for himself in stage improvisation with Elaine May.

Taylor was forced to gain 20 pounds for the role and still had to be fitted with prostheses to make her look like the middle-aged professor’s wife of the story. Nichols’ film went on to win five Oscars.

The interweaving drama in these pages between two couples—one fictional, the other all too real and deeply flawed, and who enjoyed cavorting shamelessly in the press—is simply too delicious. It fuels the ongoing frisson in these pages and also makes for a most rewarding read. It is hardly an understatement to note that the two iconic stars—married, divorced, and then married again as if they couldn’t make up their mind—forever changed the zeitgeist’s understanding of what the ideal marriage was supposed to be.

Gefter traces the play’s evolution from its unassuming origins in Bohemian Greenwich Village to its fraught stage production, and finally its explosion onto screens across America where it ultimately took its place in the canon of unforgettable cinematic marriages.

In cultural terms Edward Albee was widely celebrated as the century’s most distinguished, if not the most provocative, playwright. The film adaptation differs in several important respects from the stage play as many purists complain, but Albee nonetheless gave his blessing to the screen version.

The three-and-a-half-hour drama of both versions transpires over a long drawn-out boozy night, and lays bare the lies, compromises, and ultimately the incandescent love that sustains a middle-aged couple through decades of their marriage.

At its premiere the play may have scandalized critics but it invigorated American audiences whose understanding of it demolished the wall between what could and couldn’t be said on the American stage and screen. Husband and wife keep peeling away the layers of the illusions by mercilessly telling each other the truth, until the final layer is peeled away.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? marked a decisive break from the treacly domestic happiness of 1950s fare such as I Love Lucy and Leave it to Beaver. Mike Nichols, a quintessential New Yorker who knew everyone who mattered, presented not a treacly Ozzie and Harriet story but a realistic reflection of actual human relationships.

Albee, himself an adopted orphan, grew up in “baronial opulence and was educated in suave surroundings.” He partied regularly with Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copeland, Virgil Thompson, and similar notables of the period. Yet despite his rarified upbringing he gave America one of the most honest and raw portrayals of human relationships.