1966 – Scenes from a marriage?
No, this isn’t about Ingmar Bergman’s film, Scenes from a Marriage: that is seven years in the future. Bergman’s television series was about the disintegration of a relationship, slowly revealing the events leading up to Marianne and Johan divorcing, and the messy, slightly unresolved aftermath. That was to prove a potent source for so many subsequent films and drama series about love and disintegrating relationships. I’m quite certain Woody Allen was one, among many, who learnt from Bergman’s approach.
No, this is about a film released in 1966, and based on a play from four years earlier: Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor made many other films, a few together, and many by themselves. However, the film of this play was to demonstrate their talents in a way no other movie did. I am not talking about awards, although it was one of the only two films ever to have been nominated for an Oscar in all the eleven categories, winning four, (with Elizabeth Taylor and Sandy Dennis winning for best actress and best supporting actress. Richard Burton lost out to Paul Scofield in A Man for All Season, but joined Elizabeth Taylor and Mike Nicholls in winning at the UK’s British Academy Film Awards. Rather than being concerned about awards, this was a film in which all the four main actors were brilliant, in my opinion, (George Segal was the other lead). It was also one in which we were spectators to the dissection of a relationship, not its disintegration.
Do you remember the basic plot? It takes place late at night at the home of George and Martha. George is an undistinguished professor of history at a small New England liberal arts college, and Martha, his wife, is the daughter of the university’s President. Drunk, after a college party, they return home with Nick, a recently arrived biology professor, and his wife Honey. Alcohol fuels indiscretions, George and Martha let fly at each other. Bewildered and increasingly drunk, Nick and Honey are drawn into a web of stories and confidences, all the while as tensions keep mounting. When Nick and Honey decide to leave, George takes them home (on the grounds they were drunk), and they end up at a roadhouse, as Honey suggests they might dance for a while. Nick moves on Martha, having told George he was willing to ‘sleep his way to the top’, and that Martha was where he might start.
The dancing comes to an end when George unplugs the jukebox, and, after a blazing row in the car park, Martha, Nick and Honey drive back to the house, leaving George to walk back. He arrives to see the car crashed to the side of the drive, Honey asleep in the back, and looks up to see Nick and Martha in the bedroom. He goes inside, and Honey follows. Could this get any worse? Of course it could. As Martha and Nick return downstairs, she accuses him of being a sexual flop, and, moments later, the conversation wanders on to George and Martha’s son. Suddenly George announces he has received a telegram, their son has been killed in a road accident. In fact, they don’t have a son; unable to do so they have created an imaginary child. By declaring their son dead, George has ‘killed’ him. Their one mutually-agreed-upon rule was to never mention the existence of their son to anyone else, and he had killed him because Martha had broken that rule by talking about him to Honey. Nick and Honey leave the emotional wreckage behind them, and George and Martha are left alone as the day begins to break outside.
Where does ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?’ come in to this? It was first sung to the tune of ‘The Big Bad Wolf’ early in the play by Martha, a reprise of her singing it at the faculty party, and then by George as he is whirling a seriously drunk (and pregnant) Honey around the house. As the play ends, Nick and Honey have left, and George starts singing the song again. Martha responds, “I am, George, I am”, while the two hold hands. It’s a coruscating play, all the more so because of the unexpected casting of Taylor and Burton.
Did I say all four actors were brilliant? That’s true, but watching the film today you see things differently. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton dominated the story, in two exceptional performances. They are younger than I recalled, and while Elizabeth Taylor dressed down and put on weight to look the part, she is still young and can’t hide her classic features. It was easier for Richard Burton, who made a convincing middle aged minor academic. Before its release, who could have imagined they would appear like this?
Elizabeth Taylor was born in London to American parents, her father an art dealer, and her mother a retired actress. In 1939, when she was seven, the family returned to the USA, concerned about the impending war. Her mother had encouraged her to take screen tests to get into films, and was successful in getting parts from the age of 10, albeit minor roles to begin with. However, in 1944, then 12 years old, she became a star with her role in National Velvet. From there she never looked back, starting to appear in adult roles from the age of 18.
She could act, and she was conventionally beautiful, which propelled her into dramas where she was the sex symbol, the other woman, . Some of the films were dreadful run-of-the-mill efforts, produced by MGM to sell into an established market. She was an ideal poster girl for stories that actually had little merit, but for which there was an audience. However, every so often she did get a part in a film that demonstrated her talent, especially two Tennessee Williams plays made into films, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Suddenly Last Summer. Several were well received, including her last film to complete her MGM contract, Butterfield 8. Many she claimed were far from what she preferred, even though were commercially successful. Her first film for 20th Century Fox was Cleopatra, and it was on that film set she was to meet Richard Burton.
Richard Burton had a somewhat different career, much of which was influenced by the handicap of his rich, mellifluous Welsh voice. It was an asset, but it was a handicap. It made him attractive as an actor in major stage plays, especially Shakespearean classics. A voice like his led to many opportunities to record stories and poems, especially the works of Dylan Thomas. At the same time it allowed him to overplay roles in films, treating the dialogue as a starting point for an oration, perched on the battlements of a castle or down in the trenches urging soldiers to stand up and fight, reminding them of past glories and even greater fame to come.
If Elizabeth Taylor’s life had been a life working in the film industry, Richard Burton had a far more complicated career. His father was a Welsh coal miner, a heavy drinker, his mother a barmaid who died when Burton was 2 years old, after the birth of their thirteenth child. By the age of 18, in 1943 had started to get roles in plays for various theatre groups, as well as reading Welsh and English Poetry. In 1944 he joined the Royal Air Force, but poor eyesight ensured he only had a land based role. Three years later, his career took off, first in plays, and by 1952 in Hollywood. For a while he divided his time between the Old Vic and Shakespeare and 20th Century Fox and cinema. He took on many roles, driven, most commentators believe, by a desire to make himself rich, even if many roles and films were second rate. If, like Elizabeth Taylor, Burton made several rather poor films, he also starred some excellent ones, especially Look Back in Anger, Becket, and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.
In 1963, Taylor and Burton met on the set of Cleopatra. In terms of popular films, the lumbering epic Cleopatra is the most well-known for huge costs, constant delays, a change of locale which further increased expenditure, changes in personnel, and, of course, the scandal-ridden affair between Taylor and Burton, both of whom were married at the time. [i] If nothing else, adultery ensured a huge viewing audience for this monstrously expensive epic. It cost $31m to make and a further $13m in marketing costs. In the end it was financially successful, with nearly $58m in North American box office receipts in 1963, but it nearly pushed 20th Century Fox into bankruptcy. It was a spectacle, scenes frequently absurdly lavish, and the emphasis on grandeur must have diminished what the two actors might have achieved. For me, unfortunately, they come across as clothes horses rather than real people. Neither won an award, while it was Rex Harrison as Julius Caesar who scooped up a Golden Globe and an Oscar. Elizabeth Taylor did manage to achieve a Guinness World Record, however, for the most costume changes in a film, 65 in all, a record to be surpassed by Julie Andrews three years later: sic transit gloria mundi!
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor became what we call today a Hollywood power couple, as much because the gossip their very public affair created. They could command high fees for acting, and were sought after. They took a short break from their careers, when they both divorced their former partners, and married in 1964. Despite this break, they continued to star in films, sometimes together, sometimes not.
Three years after Cleopatra, they were George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, surely the most powerful film they made. It’s easy to forget in the middle of the rapier dialogue, sharp retorts, verbal games and sneaky hidden attacks how sad this film is. Both George and Martha are failures, condemned to live at her father’s second-rate college, George a disillusioned professor and Martha a disillusioned woman unable to have children. Watching it again recently, the surface brilliance of this black comedy floats over a much deeper truth. George and Martha an inextricably linked. Alcohol fuelled verbal abuse can’t hide their mutual interdependence, the reality of their failed lives, and the comfort they find but want to deny in each other. Edward Albee’s play, on which the film is based (with Ernest Lehman as screenwriter determined to keep the original language which had shocked theatre goers two years earlier) is a remorseless depiction of a couple who almost hate each other, but can’t live without each other.
The dialogue is vivid, flashing half-complete thoughts and fragmented sentences past the audience, almost too quickly to be understood. Here’s Martha talking to Nick after a less than successful, unseen episode in the bedroom:
“You’re all flops. I am the Earth Mother, and you’re all flops. (more or less to herself) I disgust me. I pass my life in crummy, totally pointless infidelities … (laughs ruefully) would-be infidelities. Hump the hostess? That’s a laugh. A bunch of boozed-up … impotent lunk-heads. Martha makes goo-goo eyes, the lunk-heads grin, and roll their beautiful eyes back, and grin some more, and Martha licks her chops, and the lunk-heads slap over to the bar to pick up a little courage, and they pick up a little courage, and they bounce back over to old Martha, who does a little dance for them, which heats them all up … mentally … and so they slap over to the bar again, and pick up a little more courage, and their wives and sweethearts stick their noses up in the air … right through the ceiling, sometimes … which sends the lunk-heads back to the soda fountain again where they fuel up some more, while Martha-poo sits there with her dress over her head … suffocating – you don’t know how stuffy it is with your dress over your head – suffocating! Waiting for the lunk-heads; so, finally, they get their courage up … but that’s all, baby! Oh my, there is sometimes some very nice potential, but, oh my! My, my, my. (Brightly) But that’s how it is in a civilized society. (To herself again) All the gorgeous lunk-heads. Poor babies. (To Nick now, earnestly) There is only one man in my life who has ever … made me happy. Do you know that? One.” [ii]
And we know that one man is George, even if Nick is too stupid or drunk to realise. And we’re compelled to keep on watching, fascinated, laughing and horrified, all at the same time. This is a mess of a marriage laid bare, no covering up, and nowhere to hide. Poor Nick and Honey!
To watch the film nearly sixty years later is both as compelling as it ever was, and yet in some ways different. Shot in black and white film stock, on the basis this would make attempts to have Taylor look much older, now she shines through for much of the film as a younger woman. In scenes with the others she does look middle-aged, but in close up, she’s at least a decade younger. She was 32. The same is true for Burton, though less obviously so: he was just shy of 40, and generally well able to look like an unsuccessful middle-aged academic, but even he, especially in close ups with Taylor, looked closer to her real age. Curiously enough, ages didn’t matter. This was a film about love, twisted and complicated as it was. When they screamed, shouted and abused each other, you began to understand they were in an unbreakable connection, and they would emerge from another round of fighting still needing each other. In the very last scene you saw, all too clearly, they clung on each other because that was all they had.
Was the film part of the myth of their relationship? He was a well-known drinker and smoker, that beautiful voice almost teetering on the edge of failing. He wasn’t matinee idol handsome, but embodied a kind of tough charisma, worn around the edges, but desirable. For Elizabeth Taylor, it seemed her private life was the same as her screen life, glamorous, sexy, moving on from one man to another. It wasn’t a hard step to imagine they were George and Martha, he the he the older, manipulative and philosophical game player, and she more responsive to the moment, volatile, but just as good at psychological games.
Over the years, separately and together, Burton and Taylor made many films, some good, some less so. However, in 1966 it appears they came together at just the right moment to extract outstanding performances from themselves and each other. Paul Mavis put it well: “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? exists now as one of the seminal dramas of the modern screen. And its existence counterbalances every gauche public display the Burtons perpetrated, every ream of wasted newsprint devoted to their sometimes silly, outsized lives, and every mediocre film they made before and after its production. It is the peak of their collective and individual careers. And they would never recover from it.” [iii] It is hard not to imagine the film is a composite of scenes from their marriage; not the story line, obviously, but the extraordinary and often tempestuous relationship they had. Perhaps, or was it two actors at the peak of their careers?
[i] As usual, Wikipedia has a nice overview of the film – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra_(1963_film)
[ii] Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, 1970, New York: Atheneum, page 189, stage production
[iii] Quoted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who%27s_Afraid_of_Virginia_Woolf%3F_(film)
