the last book I ever read (Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, excerpt twelve)

from Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Philip Gefter:

In 1965, Mike Nichols was more famous than Andy Warhol. Unbeknownst to Nichols, Lehman, or anyone else at Warner Brothers, in the spring of that year, when the production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was just gearing up in Hollywood, Warhol set out to make his own unscripted film version of the Edward Albee play. Warhol personally knew the experimental filmmaker Marie Menken and her poet husband, Willard Maas, who had been Albee’s colleagues at Wagner College—and the likely primary inspiration for his characters George and Martha. Warhol intended to make a film of Willard and Marie fighting. “Menken and Maas were notorious bickerers and heavy drinkers whose weekend salons at their rooftop apartment in Brooklyn Heights were typically marked by the pair’s rambunctious and theatrical sparring,” according to Sheldon Renan, the film historian, who was part of Warhol’s crew that day, along with Factory stalwarts John Hawkins, Gerard Malanga, Edie Sedgwick, Ronald Tavel, and Chuck Wein.

The resulting sixty-seven-minute film, called Bitch, was shot in the Menken-Maas living room in Warhol’s signature home-movie documentary style. Willard and Marie, drunk on a Sunday afternoon, sit amid an eclectic array of Victorian-style furniture trading insults and barbs. “You don’t seem to be able to finish your sentences,” Willard says to Marie, making tongue-in-cheek mockery of her drunkenness. “We usually have a monologue of a hundred thousand hours about anything. You could be one of the great bores of all time.” She nods off for a minute, then picks up the thread. “I happen to be your wife,” and that’s a big job,” Marie says, waving her arm toward him. Willard sips his drink and responds in a kind of taunting singsong. “You are not so easy to live with,” he says. “You think I’m so hard to live with? You are the problem,” Marie ponders this and holds out her glass for another drink. “You don’t know what it’s like to be married,” she says, as if to herself. “He gives me hell all the time.” Before the hour is up, John Hawkins, Gerard Malanga, and Edie Sedwick enter the frame, respectively, sitting down and draping themselves around each other as Willard and Marie each embrace one or the other of “the guests,” who are there to keep the conversation going. Because Willard and Marie were so drunk, Warhol did not get the verité hyperbole he was hoping for on camera. Still, the film remains in the Warhol archive as a notable example of his early filmmaking—and a telling document. You can glean the way Albee absorbed the tenor of Willard and Marie’s controversial style—their unfiltered honesty and barbed affection—to create the characters of George and Martha.