A quarterly column, steady as ever
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“What do twenty-first-century people have an appetite for? I’m leaving myself out of this. I’m a twentieth-century person, I suspect.”
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Books read:
- Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and Goddesses—Peter Wolf
- Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”—Philip Gefter
- Loved and Missed—Susie Boyt
- Deep Cuts—Holly Brickley
Books bought:
- Bitch: On the Female of the Species—Lucy Cooke
- Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”—Philip Gefter
- Family Happiness—Laurie Colwin
- Becoming a Composer—Errollyn Wallen
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Do you remember Steve Morrow, the Arsenal player who fell off his captain’s shoulders during a celebration after the 1993 League Cup final and broke his collarbone? I don’t think you do. I don’t think you’ve ever heard of him. Well, true story. He once came to one of my book signings with his son. If I were to write a book in the style of Peter Wolf’s memoir, Waiting on the Moon, that true story would be in there. That’s why I shouldn’t write it.
Wolf, once a DJ and then the lead singer of the J. Geils Band, is pop culture’s Zelig. Woody Allen’s character, you may remember, managed to appear alongside Babe Ruth and Al Capone, Charles Lindbergh and Hitler, Hearst, Chaplin, and scores of others. Wolf—who, it’s important to stress, is not a fictional character—was put in charge of the mic that Eleanor Roosevelt was to speak into at his high school. He messed it up. When he was a young boy, Marilyn Monroe fell asleep on his shoulder in a movie theatre. Bob Dylan harangued him on the subject of truth outside a restaurant in the Village. He met with Hitchcock to try and get his band on the soundtrack of the great director’s last movie, Family Plot. Muddy Waters stayed in his apartment. David Lynch was a roommate, and changed the locks when Wolf couldn’t pay the rent. Charlie Watts punched him during an argument about who was the greatest drummer of all time. (Wolf, unforgivably, thought Watts was making a case for Jo Jones, Basie’s drummer, when actually and predictably he was talking about Philly Joe Jones, who played for Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Bill Evans.)
And Faye Dunaway… Well, Faye Dunaway married him, which is kind of a cheat in the Zelig game. You can’t go around marrying one of the people who represent the zeitgeist and expect to get a point. You’re just supposed to be in a room in the right place at the right time—Dunaway disallowed. Through Dunaway, he met the fashion photographer Terry O’Neill, although that was an example of being in the wrong place at the wrong time: O’Neill was in Dunaway’s bedroom at the time, and the meeting ended with Wolf smashing several of O’Neill’s lenses. Maybe that one doesn’t count either.
He sat next to Tennessee Williams in the theater; they were watching a production of one of Williams’s plays, and the playwright annoyed the audience by laughing too hard at his own lines. He went to dinner at Julia Child’s house, where Child served coleslaw and Pepperidge Farm snacks. George Cukor. Warhol. Peter Wolf went drinking with Pelé and he didn’t recognize him. And of course there are the musicians—Aretha, John Lee Hooker, the Stones, Van Morrison. After a while, you start to laugh at the sheer relentlessness of it. But Wolf is laughing with you. What makes Waiting on the Moon such a joy is that Wolf isn’t dropping names. He’s saying, What the fuck? He can’t believe it either. The book is organized around these people (the subtitle is Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and Goddesses) rather than around his own career—it’s about a wide-eyed fan who can’t believe his luck. There’s hardly any mention of the J. Geils Band, who meant a great deal to me: the first four or five J. Geils albums, the ones they made before their big 1980s pop hits, were fierce, funny R&B albums that unearthed a whole ton of obscure 1960s singles for me, and their live shows were ferocious. But you don’t have to be a devotee of the band to enjoy Waiting on the Moon. You just have to be a devotee of something.
The star power in Cocktails with George and Martha, Philip Gefter’s deeply entertaining book about Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the play and the movie, could power a rocket to Mars and back. Nobody, however, is standing around gaping: just about everyone concerned knows—or feels—that he or she is a star. That’s too many stars in one place, and one of the possible outcomes of a stellar collision is a black hole. Another is the creation of a brighter star, and nobody involved in the movie version of Albee’s play had their light dimmed by the experience. It was one of only two films in history that was nominated for every single eligible category in the Oscars, and it won five. Irene Sharaff, incidentally, was the very last winner of the Best Costume Design in Black and White award, in 1967.
But it all began with a piece of graffiti: the words of the title, spotted by Edward Albee in a bar in Greenwich Village. Those words went into him, hung around for a few years, and then became a play, which opened on October 13, 1962. Chances are you have already spent some time in that week this year: Bob Dylan played at the Gaslight Café on October 15, a day after the Cuban Missile Crisis began. A Complete Unknown, the Oscar-nominated Bob Dylan movie, shows the panic and the ominousness of those few days. Albee’s play didn’t cause the Cuban Missile Crisis—historians, feel free to quote me—and Albee might not have heard of Bob Dylan, and vice versa. But the three events combined must have created some kind of murky and foreboding atmosphere in New York City that autumn: the end of marriage in the theater, prophesies of doom in the folk clubs, the end of the world live on TV. The Yankees won the World Series that week. It’s not often you can rely on your sports team to lift the gloom. The play caused a sensation, despite, or because of, the reviews in some of the New York newspapers: “Three and a half hours long, four characters wide and a cesspool deep,” said the New York Daily News. “A sick play about sick people,” said The Mirror. I’d have run all the way to the box office, and a lot of people did. The New York Daily News then decided it wanted to shift a few more tickets by running a follow-up piece a few days later in the weekend section, with the headline for dirty-minded females only. In 1963 the Billy Rose Theatre could probably have sold the last remaining tickets to dirty-minded females alone. But there must have been a lot of young men thinking to themselves, Well, Tinder hasn’t been invented yet…
There was an inevitability about the movie adaptation that was peculiar to its time. As you probably know, the play really is only four characters deep, and it is set in one room, over one night, and it’s airless and savage, and it’s very hard to imagine twenty-first-century people finding the appetite for it. (What do twenty-first-century people have an appetite for? I’m leaving myself out of this. I’m a twentieth-century person, I suspect. Or at least, I came of age in a time when we did all huddle around a book, or a movie or a TV show we all watched at the same time, like losers.) And of course, plays happen in only one big city per country, initially, at least. One thing that’s changed is that people who do not live in that big city no longer give much of a shit about what happens there. The phrase metropolitan elite became politicized, mostly by bad people, but let’s face it, it was ripe for politicization. Telling newspaper readers in Manchester or Atlanta all about a play they can see in only one theater in London or New York… Well, I suspect those days are nearly gone, not least because those newspaper readers have all stopped reading newspapers, or died. WAoVW?—if I may—opened at a different time, when a local metropolitan event could grab national attention, and therefore the interest of a film studio could be guaranteed. Warner Bros. paid Albee half a million dollars for the film rights.
There are so many fascinating, gossipy tidbits studded throughout Cocktails with George and Martha that you want someone to ask you what you’re reading just so you can spew some of it back out. Henry Fonda’s agent turned down the role of George on his client’s behalf without letting him know; when Fonda found out, he fired the agent. Elizabeth Taylor liked to be given very expensive jewelry by… Well, by just about everyone who crossed her path, professionally or personally. If such a gift were not forthcoming, she was likely to turn a bit sulky. (Ernest Lehman, the producer and screenwriter, refused to cough up, on the not-unreasonable grounds that he was paying her enough already.) The movie—surely one of the least complicated ever made—was delivered two months behind schedule and two million dollars over budget. The total cost was seven and a half million—seventy million in today’s money. Ernest Lehman received an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, despite having written only a couple of transitional lines—everything else came from the play. And when the movie desperately needed the approval of the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, a big deal back then, Mike Nichols arranged for Jackie Kennedy to sit behind two important representatives of the Church and say loudly, “Jack would have loved this film” as the credits came up at the end.
But this is a smart book, too, a proper piece of cultural history, placing the play and the film in their time, a time that produced Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, as well as WAoVW?, all within months of one another. In 1963, only eight states gave stay-at-home wives any claim on their husband’s earnings, and rape was defined as “forcible sexual intercourse with a woman other than one’s wife.” No wonder Martha was angry; no wonder that anger was recognized and then amplified.
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