It always interested Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane that while left-handed writers represent roughly 11 percent of the population, something like 40 percent of Cato’s staff wrote left-handed. Crane’s conclusion from the statistical oddity was that the left-handed aren’t mirror images of majority. They see the world differently, and seemingly in a libertarian fashion.
More on Cato, when John Stossel would present to the Institute’s donors and explain his libertarianism, he would always say that he viewed homosexuality as something every bit as natural as heterosexuality. Few disagreed with Stossel considering how natural desire is, but after reading Philip Gefter’s spectacular new book, Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, I found myself wanting to ask Crane, Stossel and the great libertarian scholar Charles Murray if, as with the left-handed (I am one), dyslexics, and other “minorities,” there’s perhaps something different about homosexuals; that to limit the difference to sexual preference is to miss something greater?
What brought on the thinking, and the wondering, was the quote that Gefter leads with ahead of Chapter One. It’s by Fran Lebowitz, and it goes like this: “If you removed the homosexuals and the homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture you would be pretty much left with Let’s Make a Deal.” What a remark. What an insight. And a very economically insightful one at that.
It brings to mind a taping of The Bill Walton Show from years ago. Walton was interviewing former Ronald Reagan staffer Ralph Benko and me, and the subject was my not-so-insightful view that much as economic policy matters, people matter much more. Where the talented go is a greater predictor of economic prosperity than growth-oriented policy is, and evidence supporting the previous claim can be found in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. Benko subsequently quipped that one of the best predictors of booming economic growth is where the gays go.
We all laughed, but he was right. There’s a predictive quality to where gays migrate. Which leads to the basic conclusion that the most visible difference among “minorities” is perhaps not what makes them most visible, and this once again includes sexual preferences.
Why all this throat clearing ahead of a review of a book about the making of a film based on a play that, in Gefter’s words, isn’t solely about a marriage, but is “equally, about marriage”? The answer is that much as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? isn’t solely about a marriage, Cocktails with George and Martha isn’t just about the making of a film. While Gefter’s book would be fascinating if only about the film, it’s so much more. It will cause the reader to think about so many things, including marriage. What a spectacular read.
It all begins with Edward Albee (1928-2016), who was the adopted child of a very well-to-do couple who had little to do with the child they adopted. As readers can probably guess from this review’s introduction, Albee was homosexual. That he was arguably explains Gefter leading with the previously mentioned Lebowitz quote. Up to Albee’s play (the critically acclaimed stage version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? lasted 3 ½ hours), Gefter writes that “the movie industry’s preferred image of coupledom tended toward sweet – if insipid – romantic comedies.”
As for television, those familiar with the play or film are aware that George and Martha are nothing like the Ricardos, Nelsons, or Cleavers. How interesting then, that the individual who seemingly wrote the most realistic portrayal of marriage, the one who so ably depicted how “hatred tangles with love” and how “rage follows on the heels of affection,” was a homosexual who, for most of his life, couldn’t get married.
By the time Albee wrote Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, he was already a rising figure in New York’s theater world with successful, well-regarded plays including The Zoo Story and American Dream. Albee’s notoriety is worth mentioning mostly because by the time he’d finished writing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, his reputation was such that the producers could bring the script to the biggest of big names. For instance, Henry Fonda’s agent was given a copy, but Gefter reports the agent “found it too unsavory to forward to his client.” Fonda eventually fired his agent over the error, and later said not playing George was his “single greatest regret.”
Arthur Hill secured the role that Fonda wished he’d gotten. He signed on despite his view that “This thing will never make a dime,” but it “has to be done” just the same. About the mistake made by Fonda’s agent, along with Hill’s low box office expectations, it should be said that if anyone ever wants to see the folly of antitrust law, they should just read books about entertainment. The future of entertainment is so powerfully uncertain, yet antitrust cops feel they must restrain the dominant businesses of the moment so that they don’t remain dominant in the future. Their work is conceited, but also superfluous. Hits of any kind are much more more often than not surprises, and since the hits are so difficult to predict, so are the future giants of business incredibly difficult to predict.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened on October 13, 1962 on Broadway (the symbol, not the street) at the Billy Rose Theatre. Upon completion of the play, the applause was “thunderous.” Only for the reviews to come in. Which on its own is interesting. The play opened on a Saturday night, which meant that producers, cast and the rest were waiting for the October 15 reviews. Except that this was 1962, and well before the internet. Gefter writes that the producers’ “spies were strategically placed at the various newspaper printing plants to deliver word of their fate hot off of the printing press.” What a different world it was. What we can get quickly and cheaply on the supercomputers in our pockets today used to require all sorts of planning, and expense to attain.
Notable about the reviews is that they were mixed. The Mirror’s referred to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as a “sick play about sick people,” while the New York Daily News led with the headline “A PLAY LIES UNDER THE MUCK.” So while Howard Taubman of the New York Times described the play as “a wry and electric evening in the theater,” Gefter writes that Billy Rose himself was already “reading a different set of tea leaves” ahead of Taubman’s praise. He sensed that the negative reviews would in some way titillate the public and bring them out. He offered to buy out the producers who wisely didn’t bite. The play was a huge hit, and a month after release Albee and other “tastemakers” found themselves at the JFK White House.
The buzz and the packed playhouses set Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? up for a film version next. And interest among the boldfaced names in film acting was impressive. No less than Richard Burton observed that “you’ve only to read the first lines and you know this is a great play.” He told his wife in Elizabeth Taylor that she had to play Martha in the film version to ensure that no one else would.
All of which leads to some of the most interesting passages in the book. With Burton, Gefter is clear that he was most certainly something else. He quotes Hume Cronyn as saying that Burton “was truly touched by the finger of God: his appearance, despite the pockmarked face; his quick intelligence, beautiful voice, and above all, a Welsh lyricism of spirit that only money, notoriety, and an overweaning ambition to be a film star could waste.” Taylor herself said about Burton that his voice alone “drowned out the troubles, the sorrows, everything just melted away.” Which, oddly enough, was the problem.
How could someone as powerfully present and appealing to women play George, someone the preternaturally gifted writer in Gefter referred to as a “a beaten-down character whose authority was dimming behind his tattered dignity.” How, by extension, could a 32-year-old, impossibly beautiful Elizabeth Taylor play a run down, twenty pounds overweight, 48-year-old, alcoholic, Martha?
Amazingly, the bigger challenge for the film’s producer (Ernest Lehman) was Burton. Gefter writes that as Lehman suspected, in screen tests “the Shakespearean actor came across with a masculine intensity that was too bold for George.” It brings on a pause. Is there a Burton equivalent today, or in modern times? Someone who combines presence with remarkable intelligence? Burton was of course known to sleep with all his leading ladies, which nowadays is a “cancel-able” offense. In which case are there a few Burtons out there who are just hiding it, or was he sui generis? As interesting as Gefter’s book is, to read it is for the reader wanting to ask the author so much more.
Ultimately Lehman wisely saw beyond Burton seemingly not being a fit for the role of George. As Gefter puts it, “if attaching Burton were the only way to secure Taylor as Martha, Lehman knew it was worth it.” Lehman secured for his film the most famous couple in the world.
Which brings us to Mike Nichols. Oprah Winfrey famously said that Nichols was the one that every woman at every dinner party wanted to be seated next to. In Life Isn’t Everything, Ash Carter and Sam Kashner’s oral history of Nichols (review here), they unearthed a quote from Burton himself that Nichols and Noel Coward were the two people he knew with “the capacity to change the world” anytime they walked into a room. Meaning Burton was a fan, as was Taylor, and they recommended him to Lehman. Though Nichols hadn’t yet directed a feature film, his genius (including as a Broadway director) was already known.
Where it becomes anecdotally and economically interesting is that with Nichols eager about directing the film version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and with Taylor and Burton singing his praises to Lehman, Lehman called Nichols to discuss the project down in Jamaica where the polymath (his houses were filled with the best art, he knew the right Arabian horses to buy, he could sit down on a piano and play the music of the greats with ease) was on a working vacation. Gefter writes that the phone call “cost an astronomical $250 at the time.” Which is a reminder that one can learn exponentially more about economics reading books about Hollywood than one can by reading books by actual economists. Economists near monolithically believe economic growth causes inflation, but as the call between Nichols and Lehman reveals to the mildly sentient, economic growth (meaning productivity) is all about falling prices. In other words, Lehman had called Nichols in 2024 instead of 1964, the cost of the call would not have rated mention.
Nichols is endlessly interesting. In which case Cocktails with George and Martha is at least the third book read by yours truly in which he figures prominently. Carter and Kashner’s previously mentioned book is one of them, Mark Harris’s Mike Nichols: A Life (review here) is another, and it’s worth mentioning because the first two gave the impression that beyond the warts was a super nice guy. Gefter gives the reader a more nuanced look. He paints a picture of Nichols that acknowledges his staggering brilliance, but that includes his manipulative qualities, his social-climbing ways, his arrogance, and an inability “to stop himself from being dick-ish.” Put another way, Nichols was much more likely to transform a room walked into if Burton and those like him were in it, as opposed to any old room.
Harris (Gefter references his biography of Nichols regularly) acknowledged Nichols’s neurotic ways, cited numerous instances of Nichols’s obsession with wealth (and an unrelenting fear that he was running out of it), but you wanted to hang out with Harris’s Nichols. That’s true with Gefter’s too, but his overall description isn’t as laudatory as is Harris’s.
What’s important as applied to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is that Nichols thought the world of Albee’s play, and he would plainly work tirelessly to bring the best version of it to the screen. As Gefter sees it, Nicholas “was doing it all for the sake of the picture.” This included calling the bluff of the legendary Jack Warner of Warner Brothers. Warner felt, as did the film distributors, that the movie version would be more bankable if filmed in color. This was something Nichols would not countenance, and it didn’t matter if Warner was sitting across from him. At one point when Warner demanded a color film, Nichols replied, “Shoot your film in color. I like it at home. I will just go back to New York.”
So who or what is Virginia Woolf? It was not the Bloomsbury set writer. In Albee’s rendering, Virginia Woolf was the examined life. Which is something all too many of us are afraid of, including George and Martha.
Gefter indicates that Albee had many models for George and Martha, including his own parents, but concludes that the characters were most modeled after Willard Maas and Marie Menken, professors at Staten Island’s Wagner College. George is a professor at a college where Martha’s father is president. George hasn’t done well. Gefter quotes John Kenneth Galbraith’s quip about how “I know the man. He’s never been published.” Nichols’s is own take was that George and Martha “are so locked together that each suffers what the other has not become.”
The great writer in Gefter arguably describes George and Martha best: “She has been starved for love; he has been defeated – emasculated – by failed ambition.” What comes out on stage and screen is the “peevish conversation we call marriage” (P.J. O’Rourke) through this couple. Let’s call their hatred tangled with love the hidden side of marriage.
Or, as my RealClear and Parkview Institute colleague Rob Smith explained it in a recent column, “No one knows what goes on inside a marriage; there’s a lot of craziness and dysfunction in the world.” Exactly, and there’s a case to be made that the latter informs some of the unhappiness within marriages. Precisely because most of us see only the public face of other marriages, we ascribe endless happiness to them while wondering about our own.
As Gefter puts it oh-so-well, “Marriages tend to straddle a common paradoxical line. In public, couples by and large conform to a standard social etiquette, where bickering, say, is to be avoided. At home, though, behind closed doors, the private, truer reality of marital coalescence is lived out at the deeper, more intimate, and murkier foundation of emotional attachment.” So very true, yet so very difficult for so many couples to grasp? Comparing their marriages to other marriages, they’re actually doing no such thing. The private is nothing like the public.
Which was seemingly why Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf?, while so often over the top and hard to watch, resonated. Finally the private version of marriage was being portrayed publicly as George and Martha revealed the private version of marriage in front of another couple in Nick and Honey. About Nick and Honey, Gefter concludes that the story ultimately revealed George and Martha’s as the more solid union as compared to Nick and Honey, but what I took from the movie was that Albee was trying to convey the truth behind the public face of marriages. Nick and Honey in public give off the impression of perfection, but cocktails with George and Martha after 2 am unveiled the less attractive side of the marriages that appear so attractive in the public realm.
What’s additionally nice about Gefter’s book is that unlike so many he didn’t spend too much time making a case for how Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? “changed everything.” There are so many books about how various albums, movies, domestic and global events did just that. In Gefter’s case, rather than hitting the reader over the head with commentary on the bigger, world-changing meaning of the film (Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? did $17 million in box office, meaning most Americans didn’t see it), he writes that the timing of the movie “was consistent with the wider cultural forces.” In other words, Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? didn’t change the American outlook on marriage as much as it reflected those changing views.
Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? garnered 13 Oscar nominations, and could claim five wins. Taylor won Best Actress, Dennis Best Supporting Actress, and while Nichols and Burton were respectively nominated for Best Director and Actor, neither took home the statue. Still, what a comment on the acting abilities of both Taylor and Burton to play so far out of character, and by extension what a comment on the skills of Nichols. Quoting Burton again, as a director Nichols “conspires with you, rather than directs you.”
Philip Gefter writes so well, and puts together a great story about the making of a very well-regarded movie. At the same time, and as mentioned early on, he did so much more. He wrote a great meditation on people and marriage, all of it interspersed with interesting anecdotes that are crucial as a way to explain economics and the world around us. He writes toward book’s end that “romance is the halcyon child of marriage before the realities set in.” Yes! Call romance the public face of marriage too? Buy Gefter’s spectacular book to learn about the making of a film but do so confident that you’ll come away with so much more on your mind for a very long time.
