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

In the summer of 1962, Edward Albee wrote to the widower of Virginia Woolf, asking his permission to use her name in the title of his new play, which was “neither about your wife’s work nor her life … Virginia Woolf meaning big bad wolf meaning life.” The playwright meant no disrespect, and Leonard Woolf apparently saw none, as he replied: “I have no objection to your using my wife’s name in the title of your play.”

Did Leonard Woolf read the script that Albee was willing to send to him? Philip Gefter does not say. He calls Albee’s letter to Woolf a “symbolic gesture, a courtesy,” and says Albee was “hoping for a consecration of his new play.” Consecration — this is a curious word to use in connection with such an irreverent play, a searing depiction of a marriage that is an all-out attack on the sentimentalities of the 1950s slopped onto television in shows like “I Love Lucy” and “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.”

People like my mother watched these programs and probably wondered, as she did, “What did Ozzie do for a living?” That was her mild way of questioning an American marriage that seemed unreal. In Albee’s play, and then the movie version, George and Martha fight it out before a young couple unprepared for what seems like a mortal marital struggle. As a bonus, the movie capitalizes on the contentious marriage of the main actors, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.  

If you know the play and movie, Mr. Gefter’s book will satisfy you in a number of ways. You will learn how Elizabeth Taylor’s famous line, “What a dump,” was not merely a parody of Bette Davis in “Beyond the Forest” but also an exaggeration of the way Uta Hagen said the line in the stage production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” You will learn how Burton goaded Taylor into a great performance and how the director, Mike Nichols, still a neophyte in film, found his way to success.

Even so, Mr. Gefter’s book is not very penetrating. Did Albee really want or need Leonard Woolf’s blessing? What did that mean to the playwright or to the play? Why did Albee name his main characters George and Martha with the inescapable allusion to, in Mr. Gefter’s words, “the first couple of American democracy.”

Mr. Gefter busies himself with the history of movie production, the problematics of marriage, the casting of the roles, and so on. All that is said about naming the principal characters is quoted from a published interview with Albee: “I did name the two lead characters George and Martha because there is contained in the play — not its most important point, but certainly contained within the play — an attempt to examine the success or failure of American revolutionary principles.”

Mr. Gefter does not mention that George and Martha Washington conceived no children together or that they made sure their correspondence was burned, so that there could be no George and Martha play about them. Did Albee know as much — that right from the beginning, American biography and history was sanitized like the sitcoms of the 1950s?

What “American revolutionary principles” did Albee have in mind? Mr. Gefter does not speculate. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” come to mind as the unhappy George and Martha contest their own history and what their fraught marriage has come to mean. It is as if Albee was saying to his audience: “Okay, let’s have it out! Right now on the floor!” 

Although James Mason, who had made the effete masculinity of Norman Main so compelling in “A Star in Born,” and the fasten-your-seatbelts Bette Davis of “All About Eve” seemed typecast for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” Burton and Taylor — with their history of romantic wrangling in public — gave the film a keener edge, and Mr. Gefter is very good on that aspect of the marital menagerie. But he gets so caught up in the drama of the entire production that he neglects to stand far enough back from it to ponder what it all means.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Lillian Hellman: Her Life and Legend.”