I had just graduated from high school in June and was spending a lot of time with friends on Wildwood's beach that summer. We were looking for something to do one night and I pushed for the Elizabeth Taylor movie playing in some rundown boardwalk movie house. For one, I was a big fan of Taylor from my mother's uncensored habits of taking me to see everything, regardless of subject matter (see Suddenly, Last Summer) starring Old Violet Eyes. But there was another motive, as well: I had read several accounts that this movie was even more adult and more shocking; and, thus, in a time of more closely guided morality before the advent of what we actually mean today by "the 60s," it appealed to our fairly traditional Catholic schoolgirls' desire to do something a bit daring. So we went to the 10p feature in a grateful era in which MPAA ratings did not prevent our entry and, by the end of that night, I was irrevocably changed. Even at a tender 17 years old, I knew that I had seen something very different from every film before it, something very imaginative and very edgy. I knew in words that I didn't have for it then that I had experienced an infinite possibility for a new order in movies and literature. And Elizabeth Taylor? She was never the same for me again. She had become Martha forever.
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| Elizabeth Taylor as Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? |
