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

A Review of
Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
By Philip Gefter
Bloomsbury
Hardcover; 368 pages

Tale of classic American play’s journey from stage to screen is as electric, vivid as its stars

By Jay Wiener

FCC Chair Newton Minow’s address to the National Association of Broadcasters on May 9, 1961, allowed that “[w]hen television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse….”

Books are analogous: as with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s little girl with a little curl in the middle of her forehead, masterpieces are very good indeed; pulp fiction is horrid. The best books that I have devoured this decade are Kai Bird’s “The Outlier” and Nina Siegal’s “The Diary Keepers,” but both lack the ne plus ultra: altering one’s view of the world.

Insufficient wordcount exists to completely commend “Cocktails with George and Martha,” recounting the cinematic adaption of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” which opened onstage on Saturday October 13, 1962.

The “New York Times” theatre review revealed that “[a]t its core is a bitter, keening lament over man’s incapacity to arrange his environment or private life so as to inhibit his self-destructive compulsions.”

Thornton Wilder urged Albee to abandon poetry and pursue theatre. Albee’s associates were astonished by his stagecraft’s musicality, commenting that Albee wrote like a composer.

Albee so masterfully mined the modern condition that, when the movie was filmed in 1965, three Albee plays, “The Sandbox, The Zoo Story, and The American Dream were each presented in more productions that year than any individual Shakespeare play.”

One cannot see theatre through the same eyes after exploring Philip Gefter’s excellent exegesis. One will also fathom film more faithfully, better perceiving the recreation of books cinematically, alongside costuming, filming and set design. Hollywood finances and politics are integral.

Discussion dissects the dynamic duo dominating the four actors, the reigning royalty of cinema who happened to be the most famous couple in the world: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. The two departed the set for lunch one day and returned with the former Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson—the Duke and Duchess of Windsor—there being no question which couple was preeminent.

The choice of Elizabeth Taylor to play Martha was panned: Taylor was known for radiant beauty, not for character interpretation. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress, her second, demonstrating that she enjoyed emotional perception and stage presence equally. Familiarity with filming processes provided compelling comportment as cameras rolled.

Robert Redford refused the role of Nick, a decision which Redford subsequently regretted. George Segal played Nick perfectly. Sandy Dennis proved the others’ peer as Nick’s wife Honey.

Taylor and Burton’s performances soared—a symbiosis of acting and actuality, private passion and pathos surfacing on set.

The movie was a watershed. A champion of awarding the Pulitzer Prize for Drama to the play—none was given, although no other received nomination—wrote, “I see no insuperable objection to the work on the grounds of immorality, lubricity, or scatology once one reflects that we cannot expect the vital plays of our period, whether we like this period or not, to abide by Victorian standards.”

Similar issues surfaced following the film’s completion. The widow from the most famous couple in the world, previously, attended one screening: Jacqueline Kennedy sat immediately behind Monsignor Thomas Little, who oversaw the Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, and, “When the film ended, Mrs. Kennedy turned to [its director Mike] Nichols and, as rehearsed, said in direct earshot of the monsignor: ‘Jack would have loved this film’… Eighty-one churchgoing volunteers—all college-educated film enthusiasts—attended that screening, too, and each one wrote a lengthy report, [one commenting] ‘I feel very strongly that at this time an arbitrary blanket pronouncement regarding language by the Church would do nothing but assure its critics of a general lack of perception on the Church’s part of the values of the film. There is something being said here which is quite valid and, in its own terms, very moral.’”

A halcyon past can no more be resurrected than the Mighty Mississippi might flow upstream to its Bemidji headwaters: “Cocktails with George and Martha” reminds readers that the future is best bent to one’s advantage rather than resisted.

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Jay Wiener is a Jackson attorney.