The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice (14 page)

Shlain’s most astonishing suggestion is that the content of a spoken message is transformed when it is committed to print. The Gospels that contain the words of Jesus Christ, for instance, overwhelmingly accentuate the values of the right brain. “There is not a single incident where Jesus or His Apostles ever murdered, banished, burned or imprisoned anyone,” Shlain observes. Yet hierarchical and sexist institutions sprang up as soon as those spoken words were written down.

In
The Sandpiper
, Laura Reynolds is all right brain—intuitive, nurturing, visual. She expresses herself in pictures. Edward is all left brain. Although he sermonizes well, he remains very much the product of his culture, which prioritizes writing. We see this when he disciplines a boy who defaced a wall with an obscenity. The punishment: “Learn the equivalent words in German, French, and Latin. Then decline each noun and conjugate each verb in all tenses including the subjunctive.” Alone, Laura and Edward are fractured; together, like the hemispheres of the brain, they become powerful and complete.

When Laura left home to have her out-of-wedlock son, she broke free from left-brain culture. She rejected all its hallmarks: male supremacy, chronic conflict, and verbal one-upmanship. In Taylor’s next film, however, she plays a character who made the opposite choice; who uses words like daggers, who accepts the inferiority of women, and whose right brain seems to have atrophied from disuse.

This next film—
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
—can be viewed as a bookend to
The Sandpiper
, or as the flip side of a coin. After a balmy, enveloping West Coast interlude, this film takes us to the cold and brittle East. Another day, another skirmish—all, in Edward Albee’s words, “blood under the bridge.”

14

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
1966

The adjusted or cured ones who live without conflict or anxiety in the confined world of home have forfeited their own being; the others, the miserable frustrated ones, still have some hope.

—Betty Friedan,
The Feminine Mystique
, 1963

The famous problem of the movie’s frank language turns out to be no problem at all. There is too much genuine excitement present for one even to pay any attention to the four-letter words. I was hardly conscious of their presence.

—Richard Schickel,
Life
, July 22, 1966

I’m loud and I’m vulgar and I wear the pants in this house because somebody has to. But I’m not a monster.

—Elizabeth Taylor as Martha in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

EVERY TIME I watch this movie—and I have viewed it more than a dozen times—I notice something new. Often it’s an insight or a turn of phrase from playwright Edward Albee’s script. And I do mean Albee. During the adaptation process, Mike Nichols, the film’s director, and Ernest Lehman, its producer and screenwriter, made a tough decision: not to subject Albee’s language to the Production Code meat grinder.

More frequently, though, I pick up on a nonverbal detail—a grunt, a gesture, or a tic—evidence that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are not merely reciting Albee’s lines. They are inhabiting his characters: Martha, the fifty-two-year-old daughter of a university president, and George, her husband, six years younger and an associate professor of history at the school of which her father is president.

The film’s opening sequence is striking. Late one autumn night on a quaint New England campus, George and Martha wobble home from a party. The vastness of the grounds—the ancient, sturdy trees—underscore the oppressiveness of their cluttered, dingy house, where most of the action will take place.

Martha’s gait speaks volumes. It is unsteady, but not solely because she is drunk. She hesitates before placing her weight on her foot, then springs forward haltingly, as if she were walking on a hot stove. Most women will recognize the source of her torment: a long night in high heels.

Martha’s laugh fractures the night. It is guttural, booming—deeper than her reedy voice. She is momentarily happy. At the party, she had cracked a successful joke, replacing “big bad wolf” with “Virginia Woolf” in the refrain of a nursery rhyme.

I doubt Albee’s allusion to Woolf was accidental.
Three Guineas
, Woolf’s handy guide to women’s oppression in Edwardian England, talks about the demoralization experienced by “daughters of educated men”—bright women denied formal schooling and forced to express themselves through their husbands’ careers and children. In the best of circumstances, this arrangement is stultifying. In less-than-perfect conditions—when, for example, the husband is a failure and the couple cannot have children—the arrangement can be hell on earth.

Martha is the quintessential educated man’s daughter; her father runs the university. George is the archetypal failure; at midlife, he has not reached the rank of full professor. But the biggest tragedy—the bottomless well from which Martha draws her bitterness—is her inability to bear children. George may have been the partner with the infertility problems. But in the 1960s, this didn’t matter. Women were always to blame. Martha is—to use a cruel, dated adjective that made me flinch when I read it in a review—“barren.”

When the couple arrives back at their house, Martha runs to the refrigerator and shoves a chicken leg into her mouth. This is a reaction to the way women are expected to eat at parties—demurely, so they don’t spill clam dip down their décolletage, and daintily, so they never get enough to satisfy their hunger.

Although it is after midnight, Martha has invited guests for a nightcap: Nick, a cocky new member of the biology department, and Honey, his dowdy heiress wife. As portrayed by George Segal, Nick is a muscular ex-athlete who bursts with ambition—as does his suit, which appears to be a size too small. He expects to rise at the university by, among other things, “plowing pertinent” faculty wives, like, say, Martha.

One nightcap turns into many. George and Martha lead the younger couple though a night of sadomasochistic games. Sandy Dennis, portraying Honey, throws up a lot. And when dawn finally puts an end to their savagery, all four have had their darkest, most humiliating secrets exposed.

I liked this movie when I first saw it in college in the late 1970s. But I don’t think I fully understood it until now. Back then, I believed that feminism had delivered me from all aspects of Martha’s fate. It had pried open the gates of my ivy-covered school, which ten years earlier had been barred against women. Life was a dessert cart of opportunities; the women of my generation would be able to sample them all.

This is, of course, impossible. But one does not realize this until middle age—another subject of Albee’s play. Each opportunity taken represents another that was lost. To have no regrets is to have made no choices.

George has many regrets—possibly more than Martha. And he may have suffered more than she from the tyranny of patriarchy. He has certainly suffered at the hands of Martha’s father, who robbed him of something as precious as a child: his creative expression. The old man forbade him to publish an autobiographical novel whose content may (or may not) have embarrassed the university. His creativity is thwarted—bottled up—stuffed down. It has no outlet besides toxic wordplay.

To me, the film’s feminist message could not have been more explicit. Patriarchy crushes men and women alike. But reviewers at the time did not seem to notice this, and some projected their own paranoia onto the movie.

In the
New Yorker
, Edith Oliver, who admired the film, discerned an important difference between the play and the movie: Lehman excised many of George’s hints that Martha had had an incestuous relationship with her father. To me, such trims buttress the feminist point: Martha is not pathologically attached to her own father, but to the idea of an all-powerful father—the cornerstone of patriarchy. In
Life
magazine, critic Richard Schickel recognized the range in Taylor’s portrayal of Martha—the way she moves from “comic stridency” to “the desperation of the mortally wounded.” He added that Taylor “fully deserves all the praise she will inevitably receive.”

But the reviewer for
Time
—protected by the magazine’s convention of unsigned articles—used his platform for a bizarre misogynistic rant. His word choices suggest a fear and hatred of women. Instead of recognizing Martha’s pathos, he only saw the threat that she posed to men. He dehumanized her through caricature, terming her “an aging maneater” who has “a father fixation and a casual lust for younger chaps.” To the reviewer for
Newsweek
—also protected by anonymity—the movie was a pretext for a deranged, homophobic tantrum. Because Albee is a gay man, the critic reasoned, he could never possibly understand either heterosexuals or love. Albee “has not really written about men and women, with a potential for love and sex,” the reviewer sneered. He has used “his harrowing heterosexual couples as surrogates for homosexual partners having a vicious, narcissistic, delightedly self-indulgent spat.”

I wish Ernest Lehman and Mike Nichols had defeated the Production Code Administration in some huge climactic battle—similar to the clashes in the movie. But by 1966, the Administration was no longer an invincible monolith. It merely needed a push from a feather to make it collapse.

Geoffrey Shurlock, however, the head censor, decided to withhold approval from
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
according to the letter of the law, even though he himself liked the movie. “I think it’s a marvelous film,” he told
Life
. He did this to avoid the embarrassment he had experienced in 1964, when, because of director Billy Wilder’s revered status in the entertainment community, Shurlock had approved Wilder’s
Kiss Me, Stupid
—a tacky sex romp that earned a C rating—the lowest of the low—from the Catholic Legion of Decency.

When Warner Brothers submitted Lehman’s script to Shurlock’s office, it got back a five-page list of words and phrases that needed to be cut. They included “goddam,” “screw you,” “bugger,” “plowing pertinent wives,” “hump the hostess,” and “mount her like a goddam dog.” Most of this language has remained in the finished picture. Warner Brothers appealed Shurlock’s decision to the Motion Picture Association of America Production Code Review Board—the same group that Sam Spiegel had petitioned in 1959 with
Suddenly, Last Summer.
This time, however, the review board didn’t just rubber stamp the film. It concocted a new way of handling “mature” subject matter: refusing theater admission to people under eighteen years of age.

Meanwhile, the Legion of Decency—which by 1966 had rechristened itself the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures—recoiled from imposing an unpopular directive on the Church’s increasingly rebellious flock. Instead, it recruited eighty-one volunteers—college-educated Catholics who liked movies—to determine what it should do about the film. Most thought
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
had redeeming artistic value, though a minority could not get beyond its language. “The only possible favorable comment I can make is that the actors ably depict the varying moods of drunken persons,” a dissenter observed.

Having discerned which way the wind was blowing, the Church signed off on
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Mature adults, it felt, could handle the material—as long as such adults first asked the Church permission to be allowed to handle it.

The verdict came as a relief to Nichols. “Disguising profanity with clean but suggestive phrases is really dirtier,” he told an interviewer. “It reminds me of an old Gary Cooper movie when somebody said, ‘He’s so poor he hasn’t got a pot to put flowers in.’ Everybody in the audience got what was intended: echoes of wild talk, it seems to me, are deliberately titillating.”

Lehman, too, was relieved. His experience adapting
Virginia Woolf
was a far cry from the one he had had with the previous play he brought from Broadway to the screen:
The Sound of Music.

Many people have favorite scenes in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Mine embodies what I like most about the movie—its dark comedy, its zany yet resonant non sequiturs. The scene occurs near the end of the film, after Martha consummated her attraction to Nick. She sits alone on the front porch. George has momentarily vanished. Nick returns from a successful search for his missing wife, Honey. When he last saw her, hours earlier, she had been retching in the bathroom. He wishes his search had failed.

“My wife’s in the can with a liquor bottle and she winks at me,” Nick, stunned, tells Martha. “She’s lying down on the floor on the tiles all curled up. And she starts peeling the label on the liquor bottle, the brandy bottle—”

With a look of genuine concern, Martha cuts him off. Even on a night like this, she has not forgotten how to be a hostess: “Maybe she’d be more comfortable in the tub,” she suggests.

At first I thought this line was the funniest in the film, because Taylor plays it sweetly, rather than for laughs. But it may, in fact, be the saddest—far more wrenching than Martha’s later breakdown, her frank admission of her fears.

Being a good hostess is all that Martha has in her life—all she has ever allowed herself to have. She is the daughter of an educated man. A handmaiden to educated men. A woman who has never questioned the primacy of educated men or their arid left-brain values.