by M. G. Lord
Laura’s problem, however, is that she doesn’t believe in Man. There are no people in the sketches she presents to Edward. She identifies entirely with Nature—pagan, lush, innocent. But “man is essential to any concept of the universe,” Edward sputters. For him, “the awe and terror of the infinite universe” is meaningless without a person battling not to fear it. In that moment, I could not help but think of the film’s opening panorama, its love note to the immensity of nature. When Laura shows her sketches to Hewitt, she has almost become the landscape. And Edward is the Tinkertoy bridge attempting to contain it.
Well, of course, they have an affair—but it is an affair with conceptual underpinnings. Accused by some critics of having written a shallow sex romp, Dalton Trumbo exploded in a letter to producer Martin Ransohoff: Had Laura “been dull and devoid of ideas, no amount of beauty could have aroused that interest in her as a person which, for a man of Edward’s quality, is the only basis from which love can develop. His interest in her as a person—his interest in her ideas and values and way of life—becomes the bait without which he could never have been trapped into a love affair.”
Taylor and Burton brought in Trumbo and Michael Wilson, who wrote A Place in the Sun, to rethink the script, after Ransohoff, who had come up with the story, showed them a crude early treatment that resembled, Burton said, “a lady’s magazine melodrama.” Trumbo met with the Burtons in London and received his marching orders. The couple would bring their luster to the project if it portrayed the complexity of betrayal. Edward should not flee a troubled marriage; he must love his wife but fall in love with Laura. For her mind.
This assignment might have daunted a lesser screenwriter, but not Trumbo. From 1950 to 1960, he survived blacklisting and a prison term for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. When he was again permitted to work, his acclaimed script for Spartacus allowed Kirk Douglas, a muscle-bound scenery chewer, to portray with plausibility the dynamic leader of a Roman slave rebellion. To get inside Laura’s head, Trumbo pondered the problems of extreme beauty. He grasped what lustful men and envious women often miss: beauty isolates its possessor and can cause real pain.
In a letter to Ransohoff, he described Laura’s retreat to Big Sur: “There came a time when she realized that she must escape from the pressures of that constantly encroaching sea of masculinity, or be drowned in it. Out of this experience came a feeling that she had become no more than a sexual object which attracted the desires and passions of all kinds and classes and ages of men; that no man had ever loved her in the sense that other women are loved, and never would or could; that men, confronted with her, were not capable of loving the woman—only of possessing the object of beauty she represented to them.”
Trumbo’s meditation made me think of Edith Wharton and her characterization of Lily Bart, the comely, troubled heroine in The House of Mirth. “Beauty,” Wharton wrote, “needs more tact than the possessor of an average set of features.” She will have to manage the desire of men and the envy of other women.
Paganism does not triumph in The Sandpiper, but neither does Christianity—which itself is a victory, given the zeal with which monotheists throughout history have struggled to extirpate the Goddess. Edward senses the dryness of his faith; he is a “sloganeer” and fund-raiser. But he is not yet prepared to abandon either Church or wife. So he strikes out alone (as we all are at birth and in death) to find himself. Laura, too, has been awakened by the affair—to the possibility of male tenderness. Still skeptical, but with less reluctance, she lets her son stay in boarding school, hopeful that he can learn the ways of men without becoming a brute.
I am not proud of this, but I loved watching Claire, Edward’s wife, disintegrate. As her upscale, patriarchal universe imploded, I felt happy and alive. As she lurched, ashen, from the family station wagon—shattered by Edward’s betrayal—I sensed a weight lift off my heart. I couldn’t help it. In the majority of post–World War II Hollywood movies, the Claires of the world—conformist, antiseptic helpmates—always win. They get the man, the money, the prize. In contrast, the Lauras—brazen, sexual freethinkers—get their comeuppance: either commitment to an insane asylum or, if they’re lucky, death.
In fairness, Edward’s wife, portrayed by Eva Marie Saint, is not as bad as most Claires. She’s stunted, of course, from all those years of chirpy servitude, and she wears her pastel knits as if the hangers were still inside them. But she isn’t vengeful or frigid. Trumbo gave the Burtons what they had requested: Edward isn’t escaping a gorgon; he’s running toward Laura.
My exhilaration at Claire’s defeat, I suspect, had less to do with Saint in The Sandpiper, and more to do with other, smugger Claires that she portrayed. One of the worst was in Raintree County, the ghastly movie that Taylor made after her fantastic turn as Leslie Benedict in Giant. Saint’s character, named Nell, is in love with Montgomery Clift’s character, John, an abolitionist. As you can imagine, Taylor’s character, a bombshell named Susanna, quickly steals John away from Nell. But Susanna doesn’t get to keep him. She’s bad and must therefore suffer a Hollywood reprimand. Like clockwork, Susanna first goes eye-rolling, gibberish-spouting nuts. Then, realizing her chronic Mrs. Rochester impersonation might impede her husband’s political career, she does what any noble wife would do: she drowns herself in a swamp. Nell, who has been circling, vulture-like, since the opening credits, can now take her “rightful” place beside John.
The Sandpiper, with all its flaws, seemed a feminist Citizen Kane. Not everyone, however, felt this way. Men who liked seeing strong women punished were annoyed. The film “uses the formidable Miss Taylor to rationalize values and views that are immature, specious, meretricious and often ridiculous,” Bosley Crowther huffed in the New York Times.
Mad magazine, the cultural barometer I myself favored as a kid, mocked the movie’s gaps in logic. If Laura is a starving artist, how can she afford to live on some of the most expensive beachfront property in California? Mad suggests that perhaps because Laura models nude and favors scanty beachwear, she has saved a lot of money on clothes.
I expected this fixation on Taylor’s looks from Mad, but not from my friend Jeffrey, a scholar of mathematics, computer science, and religion, whose opinion I frequently seek on all manner of subjects. After urging him to watch the movie, I asked whether he thought Laura had weakened Edward’s faith. No question, he said, then described a scene where she poses naked for a sculptor: “When I saw her, I forgot about God.”
Even Pauline Kael fixed on the nudity—likely threatened by Taylor’s beauty: “Taylor demurely cups her breasts with her hands, though they seem inadequate to the task.” In fairness, the scene really was a little strange. The Production Code Administration forbade Taylor to conceal her breasts with her bare hands; instead she covered them with what look like black cocktail napkins.
With decades of distance from the real-life Burtons and their infamy as a couple, it’s easier to see Laura and Edward as fictive characters. Viewed in this way, the film dramatizes a phenomenon that Leonard Shlain would detail three decades later in his groundbreaking book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image.
Shlain drew on brain anatomy, anthropology, and history to make a startling suggestion: that literacy may have a dark side. The very act of reading, Shlain says, prioritizes the left hemisphere of the brain, which processes linear, abstract, and masculine thought. It deemphasizes the right side, which is visual, holistic, and feminine. Over time, the ascendancy of the left brain has led to many bad things: the denigration of women, the banning of imagery from churches, and patriarchal domination.
As Shlain tells it, the values that typify the right brain are “empathy with the plight of one’s companions, generosity toward strangers, tolerance of dissent, love of nature, nurturance of children, laughter, playfulness, mysticism, forgiveness of enemies, and nonviolence.” In contrast, the left brain valorizes “work, goals, focus, power, and money.” Thes
e are of course good things; the left brain is not evil. But it does tend to frown on obstacles to its ambitions. Hence its other attributes: “cruelty, argument, a disregard for nature, and a lack of concern for the lame and the halt”—all the things that make one “a successful hunter/killer.”
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 portraya
l 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.