This is an amazing and highly enjoyable look at the making of the film "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." We learn about the life of Edward Albee, the playwright, and the hurdles he faced both in his childhood and in getting the play staged. The criticism at the time was about how a gay man cannot write about a heterosexual marriage so it must be coded in some way to reflect a gay relationship and laden with homophobic references in the review. Gefter does a brilliant job of discussing the concept and reality of marriage and relationships and how in all relationships, as much as we want to bring out our better self, we can still play games and test, prod and push limits. One of my favorite parts of the book is the letter Albee writes in response to this nasty review -worth a read!.

The other things I learned in this book - the theory is Albee based the characters on two faculty members where he taught and who Andy Warhol made a film about and Kenneth Anger roomed with this couple so witnessed first-hand their cruelty to each other. But also there are themes from his own childhood of being "invisible" to his parents. I also learned that they filmed at Smith College (based on the suggestion of Gloria Steinem (an alumna) and girlfriend of Mike Nichols (the director) at the time). When Albee sold the filming rights to Jack Warner, Albee insisted on having Bette Davis and James Mason as the stars. That would have been a really interesting and different film! I would have loved to see Bette Davis deliver her own line "What a dump!" in this film.

We learn a lot about the trials and tribulations of making a film - from pressure from the studios, to the newer director Mike Nichols who was still battling insecurities yet wanted complete control, to the long suffering producer Ernest Lehman (who represented old Hollywood) who kept copious journals of the making of the film, and of course the up and down new romance of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton.

This is just an incredible read and the author does a fantastic job weaving all of the themes together in a compelling and entertaining way.

I highly recommend this book.

Thank you to Netgalley and Bloomsbury USA, for an ARC and I voluntarily left this review.

Really enjoyed the larger-than-life personalities, egos, and minute details of this behind-the-scenes. So much so that I wrote about it for the Books section of Zoomer, Canada’s national culture magazine. (see article at link)

What first comes to mind when you think of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

To Philip Gefter, it is not the game-changing play by Edward Albee, but Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the movie, as Gefter makes clear in “Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? “(Bloomsbury, 359 pages), which devotes ten of its thirteen chapters to the making of the movie, and only the first three to the playwright and the play.

Those three chapters are rich enough in detail, and revelation – or at least speculation — to intrigue most theater lovers.

Still, the movie is clearly the author’s primary interest, and frame of reference. It would be hard to argue that isn’t the smartest (which is to say, most commercial) focus: Glamorous movie stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the most famous married couple in the world in 1966 — a headline-grabbing union born in scandal — making a movie together about married couple George and Martha, whose foul-mouthed, abusive behavior scandalizes not just their young married guests Nick and Honey (George Segal and Sandy Dennis) late one night, but rapt movie audiences throughout the nation.

Gefter makes the case for the movie’s impact, influence and importance from the very first words in his book: “What a dump!” He spends the first six pages in a prologue explaining how the phrase became famous not because Bette Davis uttered it in “Beyond the Forest,” a 1949 “noir flop,” but because Elizabeth Taylor repeats it as the character Martha recalling the old movie line, in the opening scene of the 1966 movie. “This was one small testament to the impact of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It could transform even this deliberately misremembered snippet, plucked from the wastebin of American cultural oblivion, into a shibboleth of sophisticated taste.”

The movie, he points out, earned “piles of money and a raft of prizes,” and marked “the death of the Production Code, Hollywood’s midcentury censorship regime.” It also “is my standard against which all movies about marriage are measured, but obviously not because George and Martha’s marriage is ideal” – which he demonstrates with an extensive “epilogue” placing the movie (not the play) in the context of other movies (not theater) about marriage, many of which he argues were influenced by “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” It is inadvertently telling that most of the movies he describes were adaptations of novels and plays.

One yearns for a less ardent perspective on the movie, which one gets, briefly, from an unimpeachable source, Edward Albee: “In spite of everything, it’s not bad. The only trouble with it is that it’s completely humorless.” He also didn’t understand why they shot the movie in black and white. “I wrote the play in color.”

Albee comes off as a colorful character himself in the early chapters, a sensitive turned rebellious child adopted into a rich cold family who escapes as a teenager to Greenwich Village, entranced by the bohemian culture. By age 24 he was living in the Village with a boyfriend and mentor, composer William Flanagan, five years his senior, socializing with playwrights, poets and composers of some renown and hanging out in local cafes and gay bars, where at 26, he saw a piece of graffiti on a mirror that stuck with him: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Albee wrote his first one-act play in 1958, one month shy of his thirtieth birthday. It was “The Zoo Story,” and it launched his career as a playwright. In 1960, he started working on his first full-length play, eventually giving it the title from the graffiti he had seen six years earlier. By then, he had a new boyfriend, Terrence McNally, ten years his junior, who would become a much-respected playwright in his own right.

Gefter is good in explaining the inspirations and connections that led to Albee’s initial playwriting career, much of the information coming from Mel Gussow’s biography of Albee, and in chronicling the complicated story of the development and first production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” Of particular fascination is the origin of that play; Gefter speculates that it was shaped in part by his relationships with Flanagan and McNally, but most directly modeled after a couple he knew through his association with Wagner College in Staten Island. Willard Maas, a poet and experimental filmmaker, taught in the English department; his wife, Marie Menken, was a painter and filmmaker. The couple were evidently so notorious for their weekend binge-drinking and bickering that they were the subject of an early documentary film by Andy Warhol.

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” starring Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill, opened on Broadway on October 13, 1962. If initial reviews were mixed, the audience reaction was thunderous. The play’s director Alan Schneider is quoted as explaining the draw:

“People who wouldn’t come to see Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as a play of ideas about the failure of American marriage, or a philosophical drama dealing with the ambiguous conflict between truth and illusion, came to see us because they thought we were a ‘dirty’ play or because someone told them there were sexy scenes—Uta Hagen touching the inside of George Grizzard’s thigh.”

Gefter himself is more reverent and methodical – downright sociological — in explaining its appeal, seeing it as “an era-defining play,” tapping into the until-then hidden cultural mood of the times: Martha’s discontent, for example, was something that Betty Friedan would soon write about in “The Feminine Mystique.”

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” paid its investors back after only thirty-one performances. It went on to win five Tony Awards, including best play — but not the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; the Pulitzers gave no prize for drama that year, a deliberate snub of Albee’s play, which the drama jurors had selected, but which the board of trustees rejected because, in the words of one naysayer, it was a “filthy play.”

All of this, as I say, is in the first three chapters. The rest of “Cocktails with George and Martha” (such an unfortunate title!) is taken up with the movie, including vivid portraits of all those involved, such as Ernest Lehman, a first-time producer who had been a respected screenwriter (Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, the movie adaptations of West Side Story and The Sound of Music); Mike Nichols, a first-time director who had been a wildly successful performer and Broadway director (as we learned from Mark Harris’s recent biography, from which Gefter judiciously culls), and of course the four cast members. There are some delicious details: Elizabeth Taylor, then thirty two years old and at the height of her beauty and glamor, was eager to stretch by playing an overweight shrew of a middle-aged woman — but not aged 52, which was in the script; she’d only go as far as 48. She stormed out when the director told her to recite the lines exactly as they were in the script, and didn’t come back until very late in the day – all cheerful, because she had had a long lunch with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Gefter spends an inordinate time re-creating certain scenes moment by moment, relying explicitly on the journal kept by Lehman (and, implicitly, by watching the movie over and over), and in recounting blow by blow the petty bickering between the producer and the director. The author’s effort at analysis, while usually admirable, too often gets lost in airy abstraction: Each time he uses the word “existential,” its meaning becomes less clear. (I also wish he would look up the dictionary definition of “enormity.”)

But there are also many worthwhile glimpses into what it’s like to adapt a play, and this play in particular – and the difference between theatermaking and moviemaking. Although Elizabeth Taylor had made some three dozen movies over the previous twenty years, this was the first time that any director had involved her in two weeks of rehearsals with the rest of the cast, beginning with a table read. Nichols saw his job as reversing all the changes that Lehman’s screenplay had made to Albee’s script, which he managed to do. “My job is not to ‘fix’ what Albee wrote, but to reveal it.”

This is such a fun book about one of my favorite movies, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf! I love reading about Edward Albee, the play, and then the production of the movie. I feel like I have a much better understanding of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and the drama involved in their personal lives, and how that drama was exhibited in their characters, Martha and George. I also was intrigued with how Gefter related the story in the movie to all marriages, as well as all the other contemporary marriage themed movies.
Had I not seen this movie about a hundred times, I probably would not appreciate this book at all. I did get a tad bogged down with some of the production details.

Thanks to NetGalley for allowing me to read and review Cocktails with George and Martha.

A detailed look at Albee, the play and film adaption of the great Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, this is a great read for any film or theatre fan. Well-researched and a compelling read, I really enjoyed getting more of the context and history that surrounded this controversial piece of art.

Philip Gefter considers WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? in all its forms: Edward Albee's play, the film adaptation directed by Mike Nichols in his feature debut, and a story not about a marriage but marriage in general. The material is understandably weighted toward the movie, owing to its storied and complicated production. Gefter does ably sketch out Albee's life and the rich cultural ferment in New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s. If COCKTAILS can be said to have a hero, it's Ernest Lehman, the veteran screenwriter who decided to act as producer for the first time. He serves as a compelling bridge figure between the new sensibility of Nichols and many of his collaborators and the old guard represented by studio boss Jack Warner - and, to an extent, Lehman himself. Gefter also plumbs how the tumultuous union between the film's stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton mirrors and in some ways augments the themes of Albee's play. (There's also fantastic information to be gleaned about the arcane art of Hollywood gift-giving.) The closing chapter considers the many works that mine the territory first mapped by Albee's groundbreaking work, from Ingmar Bergman's SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE (tellingly, Bergman directed the play's European premiere) to Noah Baumbach's Academy Award winning MARRIAGE STORY. An engaging work of cultural history.

When I first saw Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf on the big screen at the 2011 TCM Festival (with cinematographer Haskell Wexler introducing), the greatness of this previously viewed movie was finally revealed to me. The performances, writing, cinematography and direction came through in a way they never had on a small screen. So, by all means see this movie if you haven't. Once you have, you won't go wrong picking up this book, which although imperfect (more later), provides tons of insight into the background behind, the making of, and the influential power of this landmark film. All great movies seem inevitable, but this story shows just how contingent the process was on both wise and lucky decisions on the part of director Mike Nichols and producer/writer Ernest Lehman, who clashed continuously.

My favorite part of the book is the first several chapters which describe the New York intellectual milieu in which the original Edward Albee play was created and received. The bulk of the book then deals with the production history of the film. The dominant figure is definitely the flamboyant Mike Nichols (I now need to read the Mark Harris biography) who even outshines Liz and Dick (at the height of their popularity/notoriety). But the dominant viewpoint is that of Ernest Lehman, largely because he kept comprehensive notes and dictaphone recordings throughout the process. There's a nice balance between discussing the dishy interpersonal relations between giant egos, and the difficult artistic decisions (e.g. filming in black and white, using Smith College as a location). One area that needed a little more amplification was exactly how the 3.5 hour play was transformed into a 130 minute movie. We're told about the cutting, but nothing about what was cut. Another odd choice was extended visual descriptions of several scenes in the movie, with no real explanation of why that scene was chosen, and no use of these descriptions to make a point (without those, why not just watch the movie).

The final pre-epilogue chapter is a short discussion of the movie's reception and its skillful navigation of the censorship regime. I was particularly amused by the way Jacqueline Kennedy was used to soften the Catholic Legion of Decency. But the way that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf helped demolish the production code and give rise to the MPAA rating system was given short shrift. Finally, there's an adequate but perhaps unnecessary epilogue discussing the movie's place in the history (both pre- and post- Virginia Woolf) movies about marriage.

All in all, this is recommended for movie buffs and fans of either the play or the movie. It's not as much of a knockout as Glenn Frankel's Shooting Midnight Cowboy, a book that I would even recommend to readers that may think they are uninterested in the topic. But it's certainly a worthy addition to this particular genre of book (which I'm partial to), the biography of a movie.

Thanks to netgalley for providing an early copy of this title for review.

A delicious behind the scenes look at this iconic play & movie.Reading about Liz Taylor and Richard Burtons relationship and behavior on the set so much fun really enjoyed.#netgalley #bloomsbury

A smart and delicious behind-the-scenes tale of both the play and the movie. Thoughtful, rich in context and overflowing with gossip and history.

I have received an ARC via NetGalley. This has not affected my voluntary review.

As a matter of whether or not this book lives up to its title, I have to admit it only really looks at two-thirds of the subtitle, and marriage tends to be left out in the cold. Considering how the author and Albee appear to feel about it, can you blame them?

Albee was a gay man with contentious, cold parents. No wonder he had a low opinion of marriage. However, it doesn't follow that all of American couples were hypocritical if they looked happy, which seems to be the argument of the author. I'll agree the 1950s happy-clappy propaganda was overly optimistic about everybody's mental state, but I hardly think that the average American heterosexual couple was cruel, alcoholic and promiscuous; or even deeply unhappy.

That being said, the movie-making descriptions and behind-the-scenes drama have more-than fulfilled the promise of cocktails with George and Martha, or Dick and Liz. I didn't particularly care for the play, or the movie, but reading this book made me want to check them both out again. I think that means the author did a fairly fine job.

I, personally, loved this book, and have already recommended it to a friend who's been involved with theater since I met her in the '80's, However, I doubt that it's a title that my local, very rural and conservative community library would be interested in having on their shelves.
That aside, I thought it was a very insightful study of what is involved with the production of a film, and the players , personalities, and talents that have to mesh in order to make it a success. Of course I had to watch the movie while I was reading the galley, which made it even more fun.
Really well done.

Really enjoyed this book. It begins with several chapters about Edward Albee's life in Greenwich Village. I wasn't expecting so much detail, but it was very interesting reading about the homosexual scene in the Village in the late 50s and early 60s. The book, in my opinion, really took off once it came to the film adaption. Between Mike Nichols, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, you haver three iconic figures and Gefter does a tremendous job giving you an inside seat over the power dynamics between the three. you really get a look behind the curtain. Also fascinating is the role played by screenwriter/producer Ernest Lehman who is caught between the three trying to navigate the three huge egos involved.

Gefter ends with a look at where the film stands in comparison to other movies made about marriage. All in all, a very thorough look at a classic film.

Netgalley provided me with a free e-galley of the book in return for an honest review.

At first I thought this would be interesting, but the material is familiar, nothing new to report for those of us who have clear memories of the events as they unfolded and were reported in the press and in other biographies.

I’m very into Pop Culture so as soon as I saw this was a book about one of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s most famous films, I knew I wanted to read it. For me the book started off a little slow, reading more like a report than a story. As I continued reading the writing started flowing and the story took off. We learn intimate details about Edward Albee’s life, mentions of Tennessee Williams and other famous playwrights, and the struggle to get his play on the big screen in the way he wanted it. It is a very detailed look from thought to finish describing the making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and how important it was to pop culture and theatre. Very well researched.

Terrific in-depth analysis and history of the controversial and influential play and subsequent movie that is essential reading for any fan.