Jay's QUEEN ELIZABETH TAYLOR Post - The Earth Mother - Cocktails with George and Martha - Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

  My students next semester may not recognize the name Elizabeth Taylor.  We will be reading a sixties novel and writing sixties research papers.  I myself just might write a practice essay on Elizabeth Taylor to serve as a model paper  that I can post on canvas and/or my classroom blog.  Here is Liz's identifer:  in 1964 she was often referred to as the most beautiful woman in the world.  She was a child star turned Hollywood icon.  At age 32, she was making an unheard-of one million dollars per picture.  Maybe that’s because her fans were hypnotized by her violet eyes.  That was their real color.  This was before the invention of contacts.   The color  had something to do with the amount of melanin in the iris of each eye. Liz  had recently starred as Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile.  Paparatzi chased her wherever she went.  Fans lined the streets to see her movies.  She may have been the most famous woman in the world.

This is when she was offered the role of a frumpy, angry, fifty-year-old alcoholic wife in the film version of Who’s Afraiid of Virginia Woolf.  Liz had read the Edward Albee play – it was a major hit on the Broadway stage – but she had never seen it performed.  What she didn’t understand was why would a major studio offer this role to her.  She would have to age twenty years and put on thirty pounds.  Martha, the role she would play, was clearly psychotic, and Elizabeth was known for her reticence and control on the big screen.  She intimates with her eyes, not her mouth. She would have to wear wigs, protheses, and ugly costumes, but screenwriter/producer Ernest Lehman must have known what he was doing.  He has  said, “I had seen a photograph of Elizabeth angrily point her finger at her [then] husband in a manner I immediately saw as Martha-like.”  Her new and current husband, Richard Burton, agreed with Lehman. The role of Martha would present Liz with the chance to show her true screen magic.  It would be transformative.  Her fans would look beyond her beauty and see her talent as a serious actress.   Martha would become her Hamlet.  Richard, in fact, would become her George, her henpecked husband in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

This play/film turns the tormented, middle-aged marriage of a frustrated college professor and an angry housewife - like inside out.  They are at each other's throats from the beginning to the end.  They terrorize a young couple who they have invited to the house after a late-night faculty party.  The drinking is hardcore.  The screaming is off-the-hook.  Liz and Dick not only nail the roles of George and Martha, but they become George and Martha.  Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a veritable horror show.  Moviegoers of the 1960s, clearly unprepared and jolted by the performance, walked out of theaters trembling, while Liz and Dick laughed all the way to the bank. 

I’m not writing a book report here, but I enjoyed reading about the behind-the-scenes story for how this movie was made.  Edward Albee’s play hit Broadway at the heels of 1950s.  This was the "I Love Lucy" era in American entertainment.  Nothing on the stage or on the screen was remotely approaching the complexities of what goes on behind closed doors in a tormented marriage. At least not with this vigor and honesty.   In "Lucy," the networks prohibited their writers to use the word "bathroom" in their scripts.  In Virginia Woolf, characters are puking their guts out on the bathroom floor.  Emotion is laid bare.  Edward Albee grew up as an adopted child by parents he felt didn’t love him.  As a young man, when he recognized he was gay, he broke ties from his adopted family and moved to New York City.   In fact, it was in a Manhattan gay bar, he discovered someone had written in lipstick,  “Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” on a bathroom mirror. This was a transformative moment in his life.  Living an openly gay lifestyle was nothing like it is today.  Until the 1970s, homosexuality was still considered ilegal in many states in this country.   At the time Edward A. may have felt anbandoned, persecuted, angry; in 1961, his play came to him in stages.  The secret lives of George and Martha called out to him to write!

Although Edward A's Virginia Woolf would become a huge success on Broadway, there would be much industry trepidation for it's conversion to a feature film.  In the mid-sixties, these were the run-of-the mill, successful romance films to capture the public imagination: Pillow Talk; Kiss Me, Sutpid; The Parent Trap...  Not a lot of stories about brutal, vulgar hateful arguments between two middle-aged spouses. Most business plans developed by the major movie studios weren't focused on making their audiences uncomfortable or sick.  The language from the original play was not yet to be heard inside a movie theater.  The themes of the play up until then were mostly kept in the dark.  Who would want to see two parents engage in a violent argument over the death of their child?  Rock Hudson and Doris Day, this was not!   Ernest Lehman, the screenwriter, had made a name for himself in adopting Broadway hits for the movies, such as The Sound of Music and West Side Story.  He had recently enhanced his reputation by converting his own novela to the screen, The Sweet Smell of Success.  Not a F-Bomb to be found in any of these. No one could know what to make of first-time film director Mike Nichols.  His success was based on recent Broadway hits with names like Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, and Luv. Something tells me that, despite their proven track records, neither Lehman or Nichols had ever approached the challenge of working with Liz and Dick.

In real life, these two were tour-de-force alcoholics.  Dick, who was born to a Welsh mining family, began his drinking at age eleven.  This was his life.  His father worked in the mines  from 6:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., six days a week, seeing the sun only on Sundays. His father was a boozer.  Dick grew up in a small village where the drinking was constant and cheap.  Fortunately for Dick, once he stepped on the stage in a prep school drama program, the people around him immediately recognized his genius.  They pushed him to pursue a career in the arts at the highest levels.  The failed to recognize, however, his nearly suicidal drinking problems.  By the mid-sixties, Dick boasted  that he could drink a half gallon of cognac or a fifth of whiskey during one night’s stage performance.  At the time of Virgina Woolf, he was drinking 3-4 bottles of hard alcohol per day.  Dick was not only a mentor to Liz in her acting, but he also became an inspiration for her drinking. Liz was proud that she could keep up with her husband, or anyone else for that matter.   

My favorite story in this book features the first meeting between Dick and Liz on the set of Cleopatra. It was in the studio commisary/dining hall.  Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile, meets Marc Anthony, powerful Roman General.  They were both in full costume.  Dick was dressed in his mini-tunic.  Liz's eyes were shaded with thick, stormy blue make-up.  It was clear Dick was suffering from a severe hangover. From where Liz was standing, she could see gin blossoms exploding across Dick's face.  When he tried to raise a cup of coffee to his lips he shook so badly, that his drink spilled right down his costume.   He asked Elizabeth for help. “Hold this, love, will you hold it to my mouth?”  Liz must have fallen for his vulnerabiltity.  She found someone she could care for.  The feeling was mutual. “I fell in love at once,” Richard said later. “She was like a mirage of beauty of the ages, irresistible like the pull of gravity.”  It was the beginning of a beautiful and stormy relationship.

For me, this is the most engaging part about Virginia Woolf:  beyond the clear and present violence in the marriage between George and Martha, you can’t avoid seeing the love and need they have for one another.   It’s COMPLEX. From the beginning of the movie, they are obsessed with hurting each other. In the opening scene,  when Martha askes George for a kiss, he rejects her;  Not because he has any bad feelings for her in the moment, but it’s that’s part of their game.  Their marriage is a painful power struggle between a fat wife and a loser professor.  For two more hours of the movie, their behavior will only get worse."I cannot stand it," George shouts at Martha.  "You can stand it," she shouts back.  "You married me for it!"   Everyone assoicated with Virginia Woolf knew they were they were involved in a huge gamble, for no one could honestly predict the reaction of the audience. George and Martha  were terrifying on screen.  They were relentless. TOTAL WAR!   

Liz and Dick were married for ten years.  They divorced and then remarried.  For this time period, they were the most famous couple in the world.   Maybe for all time. Their fans were desperate to know of both their loving and their fighting.  Considering who they were, and what they drank, their passion overflowed in the public imagination.  There is one scene in the film, where George and Martha are fighting outside a roadhouse in the parking lot.  The scene calls for physical abuse, and George appears to lose all control and slams Martha against his car. Liz's head goes CRACK!  Dick reveals a true expression of fear for what he just did. Liz, the million-dollar superstar, demands to do the scene again, but harder. Director Nichols keeps the scene in the movie.  Liz slumping to the ground like a bag of potatoes. Dick standing there dumfounded, not knowing what just happened. Two artists at the top of their game forever capture the Ugly Truth of their marriage on celluoid.

In the end, Virginia Woolf gave audiences what they wanted.  It was the third highest grossing film of the year.  All four of the main characters were nominated for Oscars.  Liz came home with best actress statue.  Somehow, somewhere, whatever Liz and Dick were saying, what ever they were yelling, they seemed to connect with their viewers in the dark.  So much of the darkness of thier marriage was being  illuminated on the screen.  Of all the people associated with the production of Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf  Liz and Dick knew most what the play was truly about.