How to Be a Movie Star
“studio in Burbank, Ernest Lehman gripped his steering wheel with one hand and wiped his brow with the other. Normally calm and cool, the urbane producer of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?— and acclaimed screenwriter of North by Northwest, West Side Story, and The Sound of Music—was feeling a bit anxious this morning. The night before, he'd been too excited to sleep, his mind consumed with all the little details that came with the start of a picture. "On a day that I would like to be in top shap...e," he lamented into the tape recorder on the seat next to him, "I'm weary, and the day hasn't even started yet."There was a reason for his weariness. Lehman, who got his start working as a legman for Walter Winchell and then served as a Broadway publicist, had a pretty good idea of what he'd face with the stars of his latest picture. "No one," he said, "is bigger than Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton." That was why, as both producer and screenwriter for Virginia Woolf, he'd been convinced that the only way he could turn Edward Albee's profanity-laden tragicomedy into a box-office smash was to cast the most notorious husband-and-wife team in cinema history.MoreLess
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