Elizabeth Taylor, In Memoriam: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966)

1 year ago

Elizabeth Taylor, In Memoriam: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966)

by Sarah Malone

You may have known couples like George (Richard Burton) and Martha (Elizabeth Taylor). You may have gotten similar invitations, unwisely offered, imprudently accepted—a few drinks after the party. Come over; we’d love to have you. It’s no imposition. We’re happy to have guests. You only met the couple tonight. You’re new in town; you seize the invitation like it’s a life preserver. And one of you, you or your partner, wouldn’t mind getting to know one-half of the other couple better.

For a while the couple seem to trust and confide in you more than in each other. In fact, it takes you a few drinks to stop feeling like their awkward, unwitting audience—a few drinks, a few jokes, mutually appreciated barbs.

The second act of the evening. The couples split up; the halves pair off. You’re trading stories with a near stranger—painful, intimate stories, the inadequacies you spend your sober daylight hours pretending not to be affected by and secretly nourishing and being sustained by, and that, somehow, now, you want to release into the still darkness under the thick trees of the town’s fading summer. In the wee small whiskey-warmed hours, insults, secrets and rants seem honest, and your newfound bond with this insulting, difficult stranger seems more real and profound for its instantaneousness.

And you feel superior the entire time. These middle-aged sad sacks clearly see themselves and each other as failures. That won’t befall you.

You even become…. intimate.

Then one of them—George or Martha—turns his or her fire on you, betraying your confidence, and you begin to realize your naiveté. George and Martha have years of history. If they haven’t split up yet, are they really going to split up for you? They don’t need you or your partner as soul mates. They need you for a game that long precedes you. They know how to play you. You thought you’d happened into a play about an alcoholic marriage, a couple that hates each other. You thought you might find some kind of escape with one of them. But George and Martha move expertly between hate and love, from one line to the next. Both hate and love bring pain, both bring solace; both are only aspects of their terrible intimacy. They have muddled out a way to survive or at least to continue. Would you—will you—do as well?

* * *

Elizabeth Taylor gets top billing in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, ahead of Richard Burton. With its release only a few years after their affair on the set of Cleopatra, it may have been difficult from the first not to regard it as being about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton; as a stormy through-the-looking-glass portrayal of the tabloid versions of them, demonstrating some mismatch of proper, middle-class America and the willfulness, cocktail party wit, indulgence, and failure expected of Hollywood stars (George and Martha, the farthest things from stars, argue about a picture they have trouble remembering).

Forty-five years may have dulled Who’s Afraid’s salacious luster, but knowing about the notoriety, along with its acclaim, that the stage production had already achieved for its language and sexual frankness, plus the salaries Taylor and Burton commanded and the negotiations required for the film to be released with a Motion Picture Association recommendation, one might approach it expecting something perhaps cripplingly serious about being a Big Thing—until the film rolls and we follow Taylor and Burton, walking home into the small town night (the exterior scenes were filmed at and around Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts) in the way that couples walk when drunk and either of the pair might at any moment need to be the support or supported.

Re-watching the film, I’m astonished by the line-by-line shifts in power from Taylor to Burton and back, condemnations that turn into flirtation, the obsessions shading every comment, at times mordantly, at times elusively.

Taylor gained thirty pounds for a role envisioned for an actress twenty years her senior. Her voice is brassy, smoke-brittled, alternately angry, whiny, and derisive, her full mouth rarely at rest and often in close-up, sneering, smoking, yelling, laughing, crying.

Her celebrity would endure undiminished, but Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is Taylor at the peak of her box office draw.

* * *

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? won five Oscars, with eight further Oscar nominations and numerous other awards, but, watching it, it’s the playwright’s toolkit I’m aware of, the tonal shifts of extended real-time scenes. Just when you think George or Martha really want to hurt each other, one of them laughs, appreciating the other’s wit—briefly, before insults fly again. No one is safe. She is the obviously dangerous one, but I kept waiting for him to be really scary. He is too accommodating for too long; and, sure enough, he harbors potentially killing rage.

“Violence!” cheers the young professor’s wife, drunkenly clapping.

The film doesn’t unfold in strict real-time—it begins before last call at the bar they detour to about an hour in, and the last scene is at first light, after only two hours of screen-time—but it feels close to real-time, much more so than most scripts originally written for the screen. Watching it, I never had the sense of losing myself in movie-time, jumping through months and years, only touching ground as needed. Instead, George and Martha broke out of the screen and demanded, persuaded, cajoled, and mesmerized me into watching them unravel, and we arrived at first light together.

Screenwriting instructors advise getting into scenes as late as possible, only when something crucial is about to happen or be said. In fiction, characters entering and exiting cars and rooms quickly leads to a sense that the writer has no more idea where things are headed than we do, or doesn’t trust us to follow. In Who’s Afraid, George and Martha enter and leave rooms so distinctively (usually drink in hand), that it’s vital we stay with them. While their agony is driven by overarching facts—inability to have children, George’s (relative) career failure—they live it with a creeping ugliness moment-by-moment, and moment-by-moment is how we appreciate it.

We get fifteen minutes of them before the younger couple enters, enough time to learn everything and nothing: nothing about career failure and infertility, but all we need to understand about their pattern of tearing each other down and smiling at the last minute. I’m reminded of an anecdote about Stalin saying that if you plucked a chicken of all its feathers, it would cower at your feet instead of running away. George and Martha each play at dictator.

I wonder at their symbiosis: is it really only their misfortunes that make them snipe? Can you picture them content? Lives are of a piece. If their way of being in the world is not what defeated them, it is at least an adaptation to defeat.

We leave them at dawn. They’re tender, at rest. He touches her shoulder hesitatingly. Is it a new point in their contest, or one that they’ve arrived at before, and will again? The script doesn’t tell us, nor, I think, does it support one conclusion over the other. George and Martha seem simultaneously sure and unable to help themselves.

Sarah Malone writes fiction, and tumbls here.