Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the Set of a Classic

“Exhilarating” is how Ernest Lehman described the first day of rehearsal on July 6, 1965. It began with the Burtons’ chauffeur-driven, air-conditioned black Cadillac limousine pulling up to the Warner Brothers lot at ten a.m. Lehman—producer, diplomat, acting studio executive—was waiting there to greet them. Out of the back seat stepped Elizabeth Taylor, long black hair falling over her shoulders, wearing a printed silk dress and a finely woven straw sun hat, and then, Richard Burton in a white cardigan sweater. Elizabeth smiled and planted a polite kiss on Ernie’s cheek; Richard was more effusive and, to Ernie’s surprise, gave him a generous hug. As Lehman escorted them to their dressing rooms, Elizabeth mentioned that Natalie Wood had taken the trouble to call her the night before, thrilled to learn that Elizabeth would be occupying her former dressing room. To Lehman’s relief, the Burtons were “delighted with their diggings.” Elizabeth beamed at Lehman’s gift of white lilies of the valley with white roses and the three bottles of Dom Perignon. “Somebody knows what I like,” she said. After reading Ernie’s card, she “came over and gave me a little kiss,” he recorded in his journal, clearly besotted by the movie star’s attention. The Burtons’ entourage had preceded them and sat waiting in Richard’s dressing room: their agents, Hugh French and his son, Robin French; the press agent, John Springer; their personal dressers, Bob and Sally Wilson; and the costume designer, Irene Sharaff.

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Elizabeth and Richard did not dawdle, as it was already ten thirty a.m. and Mike Nichols was expecting them on Stage Two. On the way over, Burton told Lehman how excited he was about the script. “I like it so much that it frightens me a little,” he confessed. “Before it’s all over,” Lehman later hammed to the Dictaphone, “Richard will get over both his liking it all that much and his fear too.”

Nichols had spent the previous evening doing critical homework— listening to the entire Broadway cast album of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?, attuning himself to the rhythm of the language and the emotional tenor of the stage actors’ voices while parsing out the motivation of the characters scene by scene. Nichols, excited and trepidatious in equal measure, now stood there talking to George Segal, who had arrived from Europe late the night before and looked tired, if continental, in his olive gabardine suit. Sandy Dennis was standing with them, too, “in something pink.” She had been in high spirits when Lehman called her the night before and welcomed her to Los Angeles. She was happy with the house the studio had rented for her and grateful for the flowers and the champagne that Ernie had sent over. Already into her second glass of bubbly when he called, she confessed on the phone that she had taken a tranquilizer for the cross-country flight and given one each to her two dogs and her cat, turning the long trip with her domestic menagerie into a pleasant magic carpet ride. She had been looking at the Virginia Woolf script and declared to Ernie that it was going to be “the picture of the decade.”

There were warm welcomes all around on Stage Two. The close relationship between Nichols and the Burtons was evident immediately. Promptly, Nichols asked everyone to take a seat around the large table. Neatly laid out at every seat was a script, a pad, and pencils. Nichols greeted each actor by name, and then pointed to the two police officers stationed at both entrances, assuring the group that it was a closed set and there would be no interruptions from anyone who was not directly connected with the production—neither the snooping press, nor errant autograph seekers, nor fellow actors like Frank Sinatra or Marlene Dietrich dropping by to say hello.

“I realize we sound like an atom bomb project,” Lehman later told a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post. “But, otherwise, it would be a circus—we’re like the Beatles! This way we don’t embarrass Mike or render anyone nervous.” Burton, who was with Lehman at the time of the interview, chimed in, further explaining the rationale. “Edward Albee is well known, Mike Nichols is well known and wanted absolute protection, and Elizabeth and I are fairly well known—if we belch, they photograph it. So, we’re all for the present policy.”

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Thus began the first read-through, with Taylor speaking Martha’s opening line—“Jesus H Christ.” For weeks, Lehman and Nichols had been fretting about the very phenomenon of Elizabeth Taylor, wondering if the imperatives of her fame would short-circuit her ability to mine the depths of her character. Until then, her talent had resided in her radiant beauty. Her beauty was her currency. Her preparation just to leave the house required the ritual construction of “Elizabeth Taylor” to present to the world—the splendor of her face, the mystique of her image, the myth that was larger than life—whether for the screen or for the public or just going about her daily life. She had become a performance, like Marilyn Monroe. She had come to expect the very aura of her beauty to elevate her above—and insulate her from— everyone else, despite her occasional wish to simply be her natural self among regular human beings. The studio had distributed an official list to all production personnel at Warner Brothers titled “How to Treat the Burtons.” Number ten on the list instructed employees not to address the Burtons unless they initiated a greeting first. “I had never seen people treated like that,” Segal later marveled about the level of reverence afforded them.

Yet all the world-famous glamour fell away that first morning of rehearsal as the four actors sat at the table on Stage Two reading their lines, each of them trying on their roles for the first time, fumbling around to establish their characters’ relationships with each other, while the script supervisor, Meta Rebner, interjected script directions as they went along. Lehman saw a more approachable Taylor seated there, closer to the woman Truman Capote depicted when he wrote about an encounter with her at an intimate luncheon in a socialite’s apartment in New York: “Her legs are too short for the torso, the head too bulky for the figure in toto; but the face, with those lilac eyes, is a prisoner’s dream, a secretary’s self- fantasy: unreal, unattainable, at the same time shy, overly vulnerable, very human, with the flicker of suspicion constantly flaring behind the lilac eyes.”

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At one point, Mike and Ernie caught each other’s eye and nodded in approval—or was it relief—as Elizabeth read her lines with a semblance of her character, Martha, coming through. Later, Taylor would tell Nichols that it was the first time in her movie career she had ever read the lines of a screenplay while seated at a table, all at one sitting. In fact, in twenty years and almost three dozen movies, she had never once been asked to rehearse. She always prepped her lines with the director before each specific scene.

At noon, someone poured Bloody Marys all around, and everyone sipped their drinks as they continued the read-through. It would be an hour before they broke for lunch, when Ernie sat together with Elizabeth and Sandy. The two women embarrassed him by comparing their bellies. Elizabeth claimed that her soft belly was the permanent result of three caesarean births; Sandy disparaged her own belly, which, she declared, made her look like “a woman who’s been pregnant for twelve months.” Elizabeth took the moment to confront Lehman about the edict he and Mike had issued her while still in Europe to gain as much weight as she could for the role of Martha. She had “positively forced” herself to put butter on her morning croissants and to eat elaborate French dishes with cream sauces and to indulge herself with chocolate mousse and crème brûlée. Now she was at least ten pounds too heavy and blamed Lehman with a kind of mock annoyance. “I told her that I think she looks just right for the role of Martha,” Lehman wrote.

During one break, Elizabeth pulled Mike and Ernie aside to question the motivation of George, Burton’s character. While she thought it was an effective “‘gun in the drawer’ for him to say, ‘just don’t start in on the bit’” to Martha—about their imaginary child—she didn’t think it tracked with the ending, when George claims to have killed off their child precisely because Martha broke the rule by “starting in on the bit.” Lehman agreed with Elizabeth and acknowledged his own reservation about it while writing the screenplay. Afterward, Mike took Ernie aside and scolded him, telling him emphatically not to take sides with any member of the cast without talking to him first. Mike felt that the director and the producer had to be completely aligned in front of the actors. “I made what you might call a mistake,” Lehman reported in his journal, conceding that Nichols was probably right. “But it certainly does inhibit any expression I might have.”