Furious Love

by Sam Kashner

  “You don’t know anything about anything!” Elizabeth teased her husband, with a sharp punch to the shoulder. “You made Ice Palace!” (referring to the rather awful 1960 adaptation of an Edna Ferber novel about the founding of Alaska). Then John Frankenheimer’s name came up. He had been riding high since directing a string of hits: The Manchurian Candidate, The Birdman of Alcatraz, and Seven Days in May. But Lehman said he had already been to see Frankenheimer, and the director insisted that his name appear above the title.

  “Fuck him!” was Elizabeth’s response. Then she asked, “But you know who’s a genius?”

  “Who?” asked Lehman.

  “Mike Nichols.”

  “But he’s never directed a picture,” Lehman said.

  “I’m in awe of him,” Richard admitted. They had been friends since Camelot.

  It was a daring choice. Nichols had been such a good friend to the couple in Rome. At thirty-three, he had gone from a long, popular engagement on Broadway as half of the hip, satirical comedy duo in An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May to directing three wildly successful Broadway plays (Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, and Luv), but he had never directed a film before—and certainly not a searing drama, though the play is laced with black comedy as well. Now he would be getting into the cage with two personalities—unleashed tigers—for a film whose graphic language, psychosexual content, and scalding harangues were far beyond anything American movie audiences were used to. “A movie is like a person,” Nichols would later say. “Either you trust it or you don’t.”

  The Burtons trusted Nichols, and all the principals involved trusted the power of Albee’s play. Burton commented that after John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, the role of George was “the most brilliantly written role” he’d ever undertaken in a film. The work was so challenging and so emotionally raw that Elizabeth requested the soundstage at Warner Bros. Studios be closed to the press.

  Mike Nichols—born Michael Igor Peschkowsky—was very much the man about town, New York’s most eligible bachelor. He was squiring around both Gloria Steinem and Jacqueline Kennedy at the time, and, in fact, Mrs. Kennedy reportedly called on the first day of shooting to wish him well. (It wouldn’t be the first time Jackie’s path would cross the Burtons’, ever since she adopted the charmed metaphor of Camelot to describe her husband’s all-too-brief tenure as president.) One Warner Bros. executive was quoted as saying, “In fact, we later lost an entire day of shooting—twenty-four hours—just so Mike could fly to New York to have lunch with Jackie.”

  Nichols brought cinematographer Haskell Wexler onboard to film in black-and-white, to underscore the dark realities explored in the movie (and to make Elizabeth’s aging makeup look more believable). Burton was not happy about that, fearing the harsh lighting would make his acne scars look like craters on the moon, but Nichols and Wexler prevailed.

  The cast and crew would later film exteriors on the Smith College campus in Northampton, Massachusetts, but most of the movie was shot in Studio 8 at Warner Bros. The set was designed by Richard Syl-bert, who visited eighteen campuses and faculty homes to get just the right look, down to the warped floorboards, old copies of the Kenyon Review, and groaning bookshelves in George and Martha’s slightly down-at-the-heels, two-story house.

  On the first day of rehearsal, the Burtons arrived at the Warner Bros. Studios and inspected their expansive dressing rooms, replete with Lehman’s gifts—bouquets of white roses and lilies of the valley, buckets of Veuve Clicquot, and bottles of scotch. Elizabeth was thrilled with the flowers—“somebody knows what I like,” she said to Lehman, kissing him lightly on the cheek. Then, like the stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, their dressing rooms quickly filled up with agents, valets, and the usual suspects—their publicist John Springer, their agent Hugh French and his son Robin, their dressers, Bob and Sally Wilson, and Elizabeth’s favorite costumer, Irene Sharaff. Meanwhile, Mike Nichols waited on the soundstage to begin rehearsal.

  Nichols, whose entire directing career so far had been on the stage, started by holding lengthy rehearsals as if he were putting on a play. Studio-trained Elizabeth had never worked that way before. She always learned her lines and professionally hit her marks and did what the director asked of her, waiting for him to shout “Action” before she slipped into character and showed any emotion. Now she had to perform in rehearsals, but it helped that Elizabeth trusted her director, though for the first time, actress and director were virtually the same age (Nichols was now thirty-four); however, she far outdistanced him in experience. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would be her thirty-fifth film; it was Nichols’s first—choosing Nichols was certainly a brave and inspired choice.

  What was scheduled to be a two-month shoot became six months, lasting from July through December of 1965. Like Cleopatra, the film went over budget; as in Cleopatra, there were expensive delays caused by Elizabeth’s health issues. This time she suffered an eye injury playing with one of her nephews. (By now, her brother, Howard Taylor, had moved to Hawaii, where he was living in privacy: an oceanographer, married, with five kids.) It was a painstaking, difficult experience for Elizabeth, as the highly emotional role called on her to express bitterness and rage, even at one point spitting into Richard’s/George’s face. Nichols often made her do repeated takes; one day she collapsed, weeping from exhaustion and frustration. Lehman felt that Nichols “was especially tough on her because he wanted the picture to be good and she needed the most help. We were all under a lot of pressure, but Elizabeth was really out on a limb. Everyone said she’d make a fool of herself.” Nichols had wanted Elizabeth to take lessons to lower the register of her voice, but Elizabeth refused, telling her director that she acted by instinct, and vocal drills would only interfere with that. Nevertheless, she was well aware that of the four cast members, only she had no real stage experience, beyond the poetry reading she and Richard had given in New York.

  Somehow, it all worked: Elizabeth would give the greatest performance of her career.

  Taylor, Nichols, and Burton flourished in each other’s company, playing practical jokes and word games, each trying to one-up the other. Burton described it as indulging in “a little harmless hilarity” to break the emotional intensity on the set, often challenging Nichols to identify the author of poems he quoted at length, such as:

  Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,

  Nor the furious winter’s rages;

  Thou thy worldly task hast done,

  Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages;

  Golden lads, and girls all must,

  As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

  “A. E. Houseman?” Nichols asked.

  Burton shot back: “Shakespeare. Cymbeline.”

  Burton described his director, tongue-in-cheek, as “a very disturbing man. You cannot charm him—he sees right through you. He’s among the most intelligent men I’ve ever known and I’ve known most of them. I dislike him intensely—he’s cleverer than I am.” For Taylor, it was a simple case of adoration. Once, when she fell off the bicycle she used to travel from Studio 8 to her dressing room, Nichols rescued her and carried her back to the studio in his arms. “You have to carry me every day,” she teased.

  “I’ll have to get into training,” he answered, registering the extra twenty-five pounds Elizabeth had put on for the role.

  Lehman kept extensive diary entries during the shoot, speaking them into a tape recorder and having them transcribed by a secretary. They reveal some details of the day-to-day life on the Warner set, where rehearsals had begun. Lehman wrote:

  7/6/65…A very exhilarating day. The Burtons and George Segal and Sandy Dennis all arrived at about 10:30 and we went to Stage 2. Bloody Marys, of all things, were served at about noon as we did the reading.

  At one o’clock the whole group went to lunch. At my end of the table I was chatting with Sandy and Elizabeth. A good deal of it was woman talk. Elizabeth and Sandy were comparing their
bellies. Elizabeth claims she’s got a permanent belly from all her cesarean operations. Sandy claims that she has a belly that makes her look like a woman who has been pregnant for 12 months.

  Indeed, Elizabeth was concerned about her weight gain, as Lehman recorded. She reminded the producer that he and Mike Nichols had called her when she was in Paris and instructed her to gain “as much weight as she could for the role of Martha.” That must have been a pleasurable challenge for Elizabeth, who dined with gusto and loved not only beluga caviar and champagne but American fare like cheeseburgers, French fries, and, of course, chili from Chasen’s. She told Lehman that she had been gorging on “a lot of cream and butter and sweets,” but when she arrived in Los Angeles, Nichols took one look at her bursting curves and told her to lose ten pounds.

  “Listen, Ernie,” she said. “You must be sure to tell the press tomorrow that you and Mike have ordered me to get fat for this picture. I don’t want them to get the idea that I’m overweight and sloppy simply because I don’t know any better.”

  Lehman’s diary also reveals that Elizabeth was taking thyroid pills, possibly as a way to lose those ten pounds. Once, when she showed up having accidentally taken two pills instead of one, she was “hopped up,” in Lehman’s phrase, and Burton refused to let her have her Bloody Mary for lunch. Burton knew she was having a hard time. He watched over her, using his own considerable skills to help her modulate her performance. When she seemed “a bit nervous” during rehearsals, Lehman noticed, Burton frequently reassured her, going over to her and “giving her a little kiss.”

  Elizabeth’s confidence would be slightly shaken one day when Marlene Dietrich showed up on the set. She watched quietly from the sidelines while all four actors went through their paces. When the scene was over, Dietrich ran up to Richard Burton and fawned over him, telling him he’d surely win an Academy Award for his performance. She then kissed Elizabeth on the cheek and said, “Darling, everyone is so fantastic! You have a lot of guts to perform with real actors.”

  Elizabeth just smiled. She then said, “Yes, I do. And when I get home, Marlene, Richard and I are going to fuck like bunnies.”

  Curiously—and Ernest Lehman would notice this as well—the constant domestic battles filmed for the movie had a felicitous effect on the Burtons’ own marriage. The role of Martha called for Elizabeth to not only heap contumely on poor George, but to physically pummel him as well. The two actors engaged in frightening violence onscreen—at one point, George slams Martha’s head into the side of their car. “Elizabeth loves to fight,” Lehman observed. “She was constantly hitting and punching Burton,” part of her physicality and her need to have her man stand up to her and fight back. But in real life, heading home in an air-conditioned Cadillac to their rented villa on Carolwood Drive in Bel Air’s Holmby Hills, where they would lounge around two swimming pools with their children in the evenings, the Burtons ceased their quarreling. Because much of it was driven by Elizabeth’s need for drama, to challenge and be constantly challenged, that need was now being met by the physically and emotionally wrenching role she was playing. The experience of becoming George and Martha, locked in a destructive and complicated marriage, ironically drew the Burtons even closer together. “It was very cathartic,” Elizabeth recalled, “because we would get all our shouting and bawling out on the set and go home and cuddle.”

  Nichols knew that this searing film had to be a labor of love, and with the Burtons, he found that to be the case. “I am just constantly surprised at how good Elizabeth and Richard are,” he told the Saturday Evening Post. “…I love them. Their flexibility and talent and cooperativeness and lovingness is overwhelming. I can’t think of one disagreeable thing. I’ve had more trouble with little people you’ve never heard of—temper tantrums, upstaging, girls’ sobbing—than with the so-called legendary Burtons. The Burtons are on time, they know their lines, and if I make suggestions, Elizabeth can keep in her mind fourteen dialogue changes, twelve floor marks, and ten pauses…” Nichols even somehow persuaded Burton to watch the rushes for the first time since he’d appeared in The Last Days of Dolwyn, in 1948. Burton normally could not bear to see himself onscreen, nor did he ever read his reviews, good or bad. He nursed a core of self-hatred that no amount of love, lust, or laurels could completely assuage. “I don’t run out screaming as I used to,” he said after watching himself onscreen as the self-pitying George, whose dreams and hopes have been destroyed by passivity and his all-too-powerful wife.

  Emotionally, it was a difficult role for Burton. Long after the film was completed, Nichols recalled how “Richard had black days. It’s as simple as that. During the production he had perhaps eight or ten of those days, and they took various forms.” In one instance, Richard just walked away, telling Nichols, “I can’t act tonight.” Later, when they were filming on location in Northampton and Burton was called upon to weep while Martha has sex with Nick in an upstairs bedroom, Burton just couldn’t do it. He asked to be excused, claiming he had to leave at four p.m. to spend time with Michael and Christopher, who were about to leave for their schools in Switzerland. He was eventually coaxed into doing the scene—and doing it brilliantly. Nichols recalled, “Looking back now, with my greater knowledge of alcoholic personalities, I think it was somehow connected to the fact that he had either drunk too much, or needed to drink more. He couldn’t pull himself away from it and concentrate.” But it was Burton’s old fear of inadequacy cropping up, his hiraeth, his sense of alienation, his longing to feel at home.

  Nichols observed that sometimes “it took the form of being abusive to Elizabeth, which was horribly upsetting to us. It was infrequent, but what happens is, when such a day occurs, everyone is constantly afraid another is coming. I wasn’t afraid of Richard,” Nichols said, “and I’d just tell him he was being a shmuck. But not that night in Northampton, because I saw it as despair and inability. How can you tell him he’s a shmuck when he’s telling you he’s so untalented and hopeless?”

  If Nichols noticed Richard occasionally being abusive to Elizabeth, Lehman couldn’t help but notice Elizabeth treating Richard as if he truly were George. “She was constantly punching him,” Lehman said. In fact, Nichols saw that all of his actors were becoming obsessed with their roles. When Burton showed up on the set costumed as the ineffectual history professor, he told Lehman, “I am George. George is me.” Burton had long harbored the idea that if he hadn’t become an actor, he would have been content to teach English “to grubby boys” at a small school or college. Later, in Northampton, Burton took Nichols and Lehman aside to read them a book review of a new biography of Dylan Thomas, which he had just written for the New York Herald Tribune. He told his director and producer that he had written the piece “as though I were George.”

  Or perhaps Burton identified with George’s lacerating secret, his source of shame, cruelly betrayed by Martha when she reveals that as a boy George had accidentally shot his mother and later killed his father in an automobile accident. Again, Burton is sublime in a role full of self-contempt, and in his two revelatory monologues, or “arias,” in which he reveals his past, Burton gives perhaps the most affecting performance of his long, extraordinary career. We see a man gripped by both the best and the worst memories of his youth—a day of innocent camaraderie at a roadhouse, when he childishly mispronounces “bergin and soda,” to the delight of his friends, and the tragic day, not long after, when, with his driver’s permit in his pocket, he accidentally kills his father by swerving to avoid a porcupine on the road. This is a shattering revelation, and Burton is mesmerizing in his delivery of those sacred memories. If you see Burton’s repudiation of his father as a kind of metaphorical murder, then Burton is George, in a performance that would surely win him his long-delayed recognition from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  Though Elizabeth still managed to look sexy under her troweled-on makeup, extra pounds, and wig (Nichols had wanted to put putty under her eyes to look like bags, but she re
fused), she completely nailed the role of Martha. She’s terrifying in her diatribes against her husband; screamingly funny in her inventive insults (“I am the Earth Mother and all men are flops!”); touching when she and George cuddle and he rebuffs her attempt to make love to him; and heartbreaking when she’s finally stripped of her illusions and left facing her own loneliness and regret. She has one declaration in which her own personality seems to shine through Albee’s words: “I’m loud,” she yells at George at the height of their battle, in the parking lot of a roadhouse. “And I’m vulgar. And I wear the pants in the family because somebody has to. But I am not a monster.”

  In that scene, the parking lot’s harsh neon light shines pitilessly on the couple, like a prison searchlight examining every hidden corner of their marriage, sparing no one.

  Cast and crew arrived in late August 1965 at Smith College in Northampton (Sylvia Plath’s alma mater, incidentally). The college president, Thomas C. Mendenhall, was at first reluctant to turn his campus over to the movie crew, given the unflattering picture of academic life in Albee’s play (“Musical beds is the faculty sport here”), but Warner Bros.’s offer of $150,000 went a long way to overcome his reluctance. Smith College, however, preferred not to be mentioned in the film’s final credits.

  The studio hired seventy security guards, instead of the usual five, to protect the Burtons and maintain privacy during filming, but it didn’t help. Despite a torrential rainstorm, four hundred people clamoring for autographs flocked to the lakeside house rented for the Burtons, turning the quiet, woodsy town into Via Veneto. It just wouldn’t do—there was no way they could secure their temporary quarters. Elizabeth trotted around to the Victorian homes rented for Lehman and Nichols, and finally decided that Nichols’s splendid quarters would suit them perfectly. Nichols, always the gentleman, packed up, and the Burtons moved in for the four-week duration of the shoot.