Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

by Philip Gefter

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Few plays have left as immense a cultural impact as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and you won't get a more comprehensive look at this play, from stage to screen to behind the scenes, than this.

"Smart and entertaining . . . Gefter shows why Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? hit the '60s like a torpedo." -NPR, Fresh Air

"Delicious." -New York Times Book Review

The behind-the-scenes story of a provocative play, the groundbreaking film it became, and how two iconic stars changed the image of marriage forever.

From its debut in 1962, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was a wild success and a cultural lightning rod. It scandalized critics but magnetized audiences. Across 644 sold-out Broadway performances, the drama demolished the wall between what could and couldn't be said on the American stage and marked a definitive end to the I Love Lucy 1950s.

Then, Hollywood took a colossal gamble on Albee's sophisticated play-and won. Costarring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the sensational 1966 film minted first-time director Mike Nichols as industry royalty and won five Oscars. How this scorching play became a movie classic-surviving censorship attempts, its director's inexperience, and its stars' own tumultuous marriage-is one of the most riveting stories in all of cinema.

Marfield Prizewinner Philip Gefter tells that deliciously entertaining story in full for the first time, tracing Woolf from its hushed origins in Greenwich Village's bohemian enclave, through its tormented production process, to its explosion onto screens and its permanent place in the canon of American cinema. This deliciously entertaining book explores how two couples-one fictional, one all too real-forced a nation to confront its most deeply held myths about relationships, sex, family, and, against all odds, love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639736676
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	09/02/2025
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Philip Gefter is the author of What Becomes a Legend Most: The Biography of Richard Avedon; Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe, which received the Marfield Prize for arts writing; and an essay collection, Photography After Frank. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker's Photobooth, Aperture, and the New York Times, where he was an editor and photography critic for over fifteen years. Gefter produced the award-winning documentary, Bill Cunningham: New York. He lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

A lively, well-researched book that displays great affection for the film and the highly gifted and vastly troublesome people who made it.” —Glenn Frankel, Washington Post

“Good, harrowing fun.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Gefter deftly blends social history, textual analysis, and Hollywood gossip.” —The New Yorker

“Terrific! With a dynamically deft touch, Gefter chronicles how a uniquely volatile mix of timing, talent, pressure, and passion turned a landscape-altering play into a cinematic detonation.” —Steven Soderbergh, Academy Award-winning filmmaker

From the Publisher

2023-10-31
A cinematic history of an explosive portrayal of marriage.

When he was 15, biographer and photography critic Gefter saw Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and was fascinated. The film, he recalls, “put its finger on the rumbling beneath the polite surface” of suburban marriages—like his parents’—and laid bare “tensions that I felt but that were left unacknowledged.” Deeming the movie “my standard against which all movies about marriage are measured,” he takes a deep dive into the genesis, making, and reception of the movie, from its 1962 beginnings on Broadway (the first three-acter for playwright Edward Albee) to its transformation into the acclaimed movie starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. The play, with Uta Hagen as Martha and Arthur Hill as George, was a hit, burnishing Albee’s reputation and garnering several Tony awards. Warner Brothers paid generously for the film rights, handing the 3.5-hour play to screenwriter Ernest Lehman to be condensed into two hours. Mike Nichols, a well-regarded Broadway director, agreed to take on his first movie. Taylor and Burton, recently married after a notorious affair on the set of Cleopatra, were signed as the stars. Gefter chronicles a spate of conflicts, shifting alliances, and emotional outbursts that erupted on the set. Nichols argued with Warner over whether to film in black and white, as Nichols insisted, or color; actors and staff balked at Nichols’ impatience and arrogance; Burton goaded Taylor. The result, nevertheless, was a critical and financial success, praised by the New York Times as “a magnificent triumph of determined audacity.” Gefter offers a close reading of the movie to support his assessment of it as “era-defining.” Revealing the emotional struggles and challenges at the core of any marriage, the movie was “both a product of the 1960s and a catalytic influence that came to define that decade.”

A penetrating examination of a bold film.

Kirkus Reviews