From the Introduction
“What a dump.”
Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? begins with these three words. They are a proclamation and a provocation. Albee might as well be Beethoven taking the podium to commence a performance of his own Fifth Symphony. A flick of the baton. A breath:
Da da da DUM.
What a dump.
The first four indelible notes of Beethoven’s “Symphony of Fate” (as the Fifth is sometimes known) form the essential DNA of that piece. The assertive theme unfurls in a trail of echoes and iterations, galloping through various instruments and multiple harmonies, building to crescendos, returning again and again to that unquenchable motif. So, too, we may see “What a dump” as a strand of DNA that will replicate and mutate and evolve throughout a nocturnal odyssey of taunts and dares, with its own thunderous crescendos and touching adagios.
The 1966 film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, directed by Mike Nichols, opens with George and Martha, a married couple, arriving home after a late-night party. Martha, played by Elizabeth Taylor, turns on a light, surveys their living room, takes a long drag on her cigarette, and levels a sorry appraisal. “What a dump,” she utters, with casual disdain. Then, suddenly, a glimmer of amusement animating her face, she swings around to George, played by Richard Burton. “Hey, what’s that from?” she blurts out, repeating the phrase—“WhaT a DumP”—with exacting elocution. She looks at him expectantly. “How would I know?” George says, turning away with an air of impatience and leaving the room.
Martha thinks she’s imitating Bette Davis’s performance in “some goddamn Warner Brothers epic.” She’s mistaken. Beyond the Forest, directed by King Vidor, is the 1949 film in which Davis says “What a dump,” but it’s a throwaway line, uttered in passing, without the Hollywood diva’s usual precise diction. In the original 1962 stage version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the actress Uta Hagen, starring as Martha, hyperarticulated the line, out-Bette-Davis-ing Davis herself. Taylor’s performance, in turn, is an homage to Hagen’s, which Taylor heard on the cast recording of the Broadway production as she prepared the role.
At least Martha gets the name of the studio right: It was, indeed, Warner Brothers that was left holding the bag for Beyond the Forest, a film noir flop, universally panned. “If Bette Davis had deliberately set out to wreck her career, she could not have picked a more appropriate vehicle,” the columnist Hedda Hopper wrote at the time. In her later years, Davis, appearing on television talk shows, was asked repeatedly about the line “What a dump.” She endured the question with forced levity. By then, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was an artistic monument, and an infinitely greater number of people knew the line in Taylor’s exaggerated form than had ever heard Davis’s original. “WhaT a DumP” had taken hold, traded back and forth between dinner party guests and hosts. Whether grudgingly or genuinely, Davis would say she gave all credit to Taylor.
This was one small testament to the impact of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It could transform even this deliberately misremembered snippet, plucked from the wastebin of American cultural oblivion, into a shibboleth of sophisticated taste. How deliciously ironic. How camp.
In the 1980s, Davis starred in a one-woman show on Broadway. As the performance opened, she would walk onstage, survey the theater, and let fly: “WhaT a DumP.” Laughter. Applause.
REVIEWS
“Tracing the life of the play from its first draft through the film version, adapted by Mike Nichols in 1966, Gefter deftly blends social history, textual analysis, and Hollywood gossip to probe the story’s appeal. At the heart of his inquiry are three real-life relationships—between Albee and his longtime boyfriend, William Flanagan; between Nichols and Ernest Lehman, the film’s producer; and between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the film’s stars—that illustrate the universality of Albee’s themes.”
―The New Yorker
“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
“Delicious . . . unapologetically obsessive . . . [Gefter gets] to the marrow: of male ego, rushing into new projects with hubris and jostling for posterity.”
―Alexandra Jacobs, New York Times Book Review (cover)
“Good, harrowing fun . . . Just as the extreme nature of George and Martha’s all-night brawl helps us to understand all marriages, the antics of Liz and Dick and Mike and Ernie reveal the love-hate dynamic that’s common to all artistic collaborations.”
―The Wall Street Journal
“Very smart and entertaining . . . dishy-yet-earnest . . . Gefter shows why Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? hit the ’60s like a torpedo.”
―NPR, Fresh Air
“Charming . . . filled with enjoyable anecdotes and recollections of how Hollywood accidentally makes great movies from time to time.”
―The New Republic
“In this well researched and deliciously dishy new book, Philip Gefter explores the world that shaped Albee and how he used it to develop his great work, and follows the ups and downs involved in creating the film-Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were just the beginning!-to paint an incredible picture of the creative process among some of the brightest minds of their time.”
―Town & Country
“Raucous, unpredictable, wild, and affecting.”
―Entertainment Weekly
“Multilayered and eminently revisitable (like the play and the film), Gefter’s wonderful book helps readers reevaluate vis-a`-vis values prevalent half a century later.”
―Library Journal (starred review)
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
With a critical acumen as keen as his eye for a juicy anecdote, Philip Gefter goes spelunking into the deep history of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a work that would scandalize audiences and transform two artistic mediums during a pivotal four-year stretch of the mid-twentieth century. No one who’s interested in the history of theater, film, media censorship or good old-fashioned celebrity gossip should miss the chance to read this book.
―Dana Stevens, film critic at Slate and author of Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema and the Invention of the Twentieth Century
“A finely detailed, step-by-step, sometimes day-by-day, account of Who’s Afraid?–from the play to the movie and beyond. I thought I knew this story already, but Philip Gefter’s book is full of surprising twists, startling quotes, and striking insights. Many marriages are examined, not just George and Martha, of course, and Liz and Dick, but the intimate, radioactive partnership of a hungry writer/producer and a rising young director. This is a wonderfully readable work of cultural history, sexual politics, and social comedy.”
―Christopher Bram, author of Eminent Outlaws
“The high-stakes film adaptation of Edward Albee’s famous play was turbocharged by the real-life chemistry between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. They were the perfect couple to play the shockingly honest George and Martha. This book vividly captures the realities of marriage, onscreen and off, taking the reader into the fraught fictional world of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as well as its stars’ famously passionate and volatile relationship.”
―Kate Andersen Brower, #1 New York Times bestselling writer and author of Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon