Edward Albee: A Singular Journey: A Biography by Mel Gussow

Author:Mel Gussow [Gussow, Mel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2012-11-26T18:30:00+00:00

11

Taylor! Burton! Lehman!

You know who I’d like to see as Martha and George: Bette Davis and James Mason.

THE first formal announcement was in March 1964: The movie rights to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had been purchased by Warner Bros. Albee was paid $500,000, plus 10 percent of the gross after the film earned $6 million. Ernest Lehman was to be the producer and screenwriter. Virginia Woolf was a daring screen venture. At that early point, there was no director, and no actors were named to play the four roles. Those choices were left principally to Lehman, who, for all his success, was the invisible man of Hollywood screenwriting. Although he wrote original screenplays, beginning with North by Northwest, and adapted his own story into the film Sweet Smell of Success, he was best known (in Hollywood, if not to the general public) as the writer of the movie versions of the Broadway musicals West Side Story, The King and I, The Sound of Music, and, later, Hello, Dolly! In other words, his greatest skill was in transferring Broadway shows, in particular, musicals, to the screen, and in retaining whatever it was that made the shows theatrical successes. Mike Nichols, who was later signed to direct Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, said, “The joke is that Ernie wrote one line in the movie of West Side Story, which is ‘I and Graziella will take to the streets.’ ” Albee said that Lehman contributed two lines to the movie of Virginia Woolf: “Let’s go to the roadhouse” and “Let’s come back from the roadhouse.” Both Albee and Nichols insist that all the other lines in the screenplay were Albee’s. To give Lehman his credit, his fidelity to an original play or musical took a certain measure of courage, especially so in the case of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Then and later, Lehman was to be defensive about his contribution as screenwriter. There was a shifting of scenes and some of the dialogue was cut in order to keep the movie at a reasonable length. Creative roles were played by the director, the actors, and the cinematographer—and by Lehman as producer, beginning with his surprising choice of Elizabeth Taylor to play Martha. Albee was a kind of absentee landlord. He had no say over the screenplay and his personal choices for Martha and George, Bette Davis and James Mason, were disregarded. Bette Davis was furious. It was a role “which I really want to kill somebody for. It was to be my part.” She told Albee that if Uta Hagen had gotten the role, she would have been disappointed but not heartbroken. “But to cast Miss Taylor, this beautiful, gorgeous young woman, is sickening for your play.” Albee’s response to Davis: “What I hope they do is take the story up to the point where the play begins and leave us the play.”

Albee had a few conversations with Nichols about specific lines in the play and met briefly with Lehman, but he was not involved in the production and did not visit the movie on location.

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