Mary Ellen “Ella” Quinlan O’Neill.
(COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)
Worse still, perhaps, a hotel doctor prescribed Ella O’Neill morphine for the intolerable pain of giving birth to Eugene, an eleven-pound baby, thus precipitating a drug addiction that would last for well over two decades and haunt Ella and the O’Neill men to all of their deaths. This was the guilt-ridden, blame-laden family substructure that O’Neill would lay bare in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a play, he wrote, “of old sorrow, written in tears and blood … with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones” (CP3, 714).
O’Neill toured with his parents around the American theater circuit for the first seven years of his life. “Usually a child has a regular, fixed home,” he said decades later, “but you might say I started in as a trouper. I knew only actors and the stage. My mother nursed me in the wings and in dressing rooms.”18 But like any average American lad, one of his earliest memories involved … what else? Cowboys and Indians. Most small boys from the Northeast became enraptured by the romantic lure of the Wild West by reading dime novels and magazines. O’Neill’s father brought him right to the source.
James O’Neill’s advance man, George C. Tyler, marveled at the storybook figures his boss fraternized with across the West. On any given night, Tyler said, he would find James in a saloon chatting with “the biggest poker player in the United States, or Buffalo Bill Cody or somebody like that—the biggest guns in any walk of life were a natural part of his background.”19 Indian-related violence in the Montana Territory had abated after the Great Sioux War (1876–77), and James, the prosperous showman and Civil War veteran Nate Salsbury, and Colonel William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody together held lucrative shares in a Montana ranch called the Milner Cattle Company. So the three men communed together at barrooms whenever they chanced to find themselves performing in the same Western town.
In his adult years, O’Neill calculated that he’d been around two years old and near death from typhoid in a Chicago hotel room when Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and other Sioux “hostiles” from the Dakota Territory gathered around his sickbed. He remembered feather headdresses and blankets draped across imposing, longhaired heads and “big brown” bodies. One of James O’Neill’s associates had indeed assembled a troupe of Sioux performers from William Cody’s Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show to offer the child some respite from the stomach cramps, headaches, and soaring temperatures with which typhoid assails its victims. O’Neill couldn’t recollect the words spoken, though he remembered the visits took place over the course of a month. Whatever was said, this memory—maybe his earliest—“left him with the low-down on Custer,” he told a friend in 1946, “and an acute sympathy for the redman.”20
This makes for a great story. But Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse weren’t there at O’Neill’s sickbed in Chicago. Sitting Bull had performed only one season for William Cody, and that was four years before O’Neill was born. It’s unlikely that Crazy Horse would have submitted to the demeaning behavior expected of Cody’s performers; but in any case, he couldn’t have. Crazy Horse was killed by a prison guard in 1877 after his pyrrhic victory at Little Big Horn. And by the time the O’Neills arrived in Chicago in the late spring of 1891, when Eugene was two and a half, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was on tour in Europe. Cody wouldn’t play Chicago again until 1893 at the famed World’s Columbian Exposition, better known as the great Chicago World’s Fair, commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the New World.21 With these facts in mind, the only plausible story is nearly as good as the one O’Neill recalled.
The Chicago run of James’s romantic drama Fontanelle, a welcome thirty-week break from Monte Cristo, opened on March 12, 1893, after which the O’Neill family spent the last week of March “resting” in the Second City before traveling eastward on Easter Sunday, April 2, 1893.22 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, whose performers had been in town throughout March preparing for their six-month engagement, opened the following day, April 3. (Cody’s act was deemed too mawkish a billing for the official grounds, so the show was performed just outside the gates on the Midway Plaisance leading up to the fair. In the end Cody exacted the perfect revenge for this slight: the Columbian Exposition went bankrupt, while his show took in more than $1 million.) Eugene was four and a half then, which explains his vivid memory of the Indians far better than if he were two or three. Thus O’Neill preceded Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Frederick Douglass, Jack London, Thomas Edison, and countless other illustrious visitors to the Chicago World’s Fair. Of course, they all witnessed the spectacle; O’Neill missed it by a day.
The Indians at O’Neill’s bedside, then, must have been Sioux warriors known as Ghost Dancers, a cohort of holdouts who called for war after the Wounded Knee Massacre left over 150 tribal members—men, women, and children—dead on December 29, 1890. Just three months after Wounded Knee, William Cody made a deal with Secretary of the Interior John W. Noble for the release of a hundred of these Ghost Dancers imprisoned at nearby Fort Sheridan in order to enlist authentic Indians for another European tour. “The Indians at Fort Sheridan are a nuisance,” the press reported, “and it is understood that Secretary Noble was only too glad of an opportunity to get rid of them. … The Indians were, of course, glad to do anything to get out of prison.”23 Among those captured were the Lakota Sioux medicine man Kicking Bear, a veteran of the battle of Little Big Horn, and another Lakota named Short Bull—both leaders of the Ghost Dance resistance. Each of them took Cody up on his offer, and each, it’s safe to say, would have left young Eugene with “the low-down on Custer.”
Nearly two dozen Sioux braves were coerced into playing “savages” for William Cody’s show, and the grotesquery involved was never lost on O’Neill. In a scene in his 1920 play Diff’rent, a spiteful ne’er-do-well mocks a woman for having “dolled” up with “enough paint on her mush for a Buffalo Bill Indian” (CP2, 36). Other than that, O’Neill only once addressed the plight of the American Indian in his plays. The Fountain (1922), his first historical drama and a failure at the box office, follows the adventures of the sixteenth-century explorer Juan Ponce de León, who joined Columbus on his second voyage to the New World. Juan is nearly killed in Florida by Seminoles. O’Neill depicts the Native tribesmen, like the novelist James Fenimore Cooper a century before him, as a proud and defiant but ultimately doomed people.
O’Neill related his memory of the Sioux visits over fifty years later in a New York penthouse amid frenzied preparations for the premiere of The Iceman Cometh, testifying to the impact of the experience on both his creative imagination and his politics. He passionately spoke out against the injustices visited upon Native tribes by the government, and he would shock an unsuspecting reporter at the time by delighting over the conclusion of Custer’s Last Stand: “The great battle in American history was the Battle of Little Big Horn. The Indians wiped out the whitemen, scalped them. That was a victory in American history. It should be featured in all our school books as the greatest victory in American history.”24
O’Neill’s friend the journalist Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant wrote about the tale’s evocation of the playwright’s cynicism that the American Dream was an insidious myth. “In so far as O’Neill has written of American life,” Sergeant’s unpublished notes on the subject read, “he has written its un-success story, discussed the places where the American dream has broken down into something rather raw and unacceptable.”25 Another interviewer took note of two paintings on the walls of his penthouse, one of a clipper ship and one of Broadway at theater hour. “There’s the whole story of the decline of America,” O’Neill told him. “From the most beautiful thing America has ever made, the clipper ship, to the most tawdry street in the world.”26
No single American more than William F. Cody trumpeted the virtues of Euro-American expansion across
North America, and his legend only grew, long after his death in 1917, with the heightened mood of triumphalism that followed World War II. And no single writer could have done more to dispel the myth of those very same virtues than Eugene O’Neill, the wide-eyed child gazing up at those “big brown” figures looming over his sickbed in a Chicago hotel room.
School Days of an Apostate
Ella and James O’Neill settled on New London, Connecticut, as their permanent town of residence in 1885. Conveniently located halfway between the theatrical centers of New York and Boston, the whaling city turned summer resort was a sensible choice. Ella’s cousins on her mother’s side, the Sheridans and the Brennans, had lived in New London for some time, and James had theater friends who owned summer homes there as well. Second in importance only to New Bedford, Massachusetts, in the heyday of the whale oil trade, New London is situated at the mouth of the Thames River, a tidal estuary that connects points inland to Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean. During the Revolutionary War, Benedict Arnold, then a British officer, personally orchestrated the town’s desolation by fire in one of the infamous traitor’s most vicious acts of betrayal against the revolutionary forces. But the townspeople rebuilt and soon after transformed the waterfront into a patchwork of multitiered clapboard, red brick, and granite shops and dwellings, bestowing on the port city one of the more picturesque skylines in New England.
New London’s economy foundered after the Civil War, by which time whale oil had been replaced by petroleum and natural gas; ever since, the citizenry of the “large small-town,” as O’Neill refers to it in Ah, Wilderness! (CP3, 5), has taken the fantasy of an imminent “renaissance” for granted. Real estate in New London was thus considered a strong bet in the late nineteenth century, and James O’Neill, with his Irishman’s faith in the surety of land to ward off poverty, was game to try his luck. After buying and inhabiting several rental properties, by the summer of 1900, when Eugene was eleven, the family occupied a Victorian-style residence at 325 Pequot Avenue. Horse-drawn carriages clopped back and forth along the west bank of the Thames from the majestic Pequot House resort hotel and the Pequot Summer Colony, the bailiwick of the town’s most elite families, to the downtown “Parade” a couple of miles north. For a few thousand dollars, James had Monte Cristo Cottage, as the house was soon called, renovated and enlarged using the abandoned structures of a schoolhouse and a general store. The O’Neills would spend their summers there, from June to September, for the next two decades. Monte Cristo Cottage was as close as the family would ever come to a true home.
When O’Neill was in his late thirties, he sketched out a diagrammatic account of his childhood development using what the founder of American psychiatry Adolf Meyer called a “life chart.”27 (Today a similar tool is referred to as a genogram.) O’Neill’s psychiatrist Dr. Gilbert V. Hamilton believed the exercise might help his patient at long last understand the painful and abiding resentments he’d clung to since childhood; in that way, perhaps, he might be released from over two decades of bondage to alcohol, which had by that time become untenable. O’Neill revealed in his chart that as a toddler, it was his English nurse Sarah Sandy, not his aloof mother Ella, who’d provided him with “mother love.” Sandy also brought him to novelty museums that displayed “mal-formed wax dummies” and enjoyed watching as the boy recoiled in horror. The nurse also, perversely, instilled in him an acute fear of darkness as a result of the ghoulish “murder stories” she delighted in telling before turning out his lights at bedtime, after which she coddled him with motherly love as he howled in fear. “Father would give child whiskey + water to soothe child’s nightmares caused by terror of dark,” O’Neill recalled in his chart. “This whiskey is connected with protection of mother—drink of hero father.”28
Eugene O’Neill in New London. Photo signed to “Carlotta Monterey O’Neill.”
(COURTESY OF THE YALE COLLECTION OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, NEW HAVEN)
Sarah Sandy was relieved of duty in the fall of 1895, not because of her unorthodox ideas of child rearing but rather because Eugene, not yet seven years old, was sent to St. Aloysius Academy in the Bronx, where he was instructed for four years by the Sisters of Charity. This point on O’Neill’s life chart reads, “Resentment + hatred of father as cause of school (break with mother). … Reality found + fled from in fear—life of fantasy + religion in school—inability to belong to reality.”29 O’Neill looked back on his exile as a cruel act of abandonment on the part of his parents, though his brother Jim had fared much better: he too was sent away before he turned seven, to Notre Dame’s preparatory school in South Bend, Indiana, but while there he blossomed socially and academically. It was a period of success for Jim that would constitute a painful reminder of his wasted intellectual potential once he reached adulthood.
Eugene O’Neill with James O’Neill Jr. and James O’Neill, left to right, in 1900 on the porch of Monte Cristo Cottage.
(COURTESY OF THE YALE COLLECTION OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, NEW HAVEN)
In 1900, O’Neill entered Manhattan’s De La Salle Institute on Central Park South and boarded with his family close by at a rented apartment on West Sixty-Eighth Street. One afternoon, arriving back from school early, he walked in on his mother holding a hypodermic needle. Indignant over the disruption, Ella accused him of spying; with little explanation, he was sent back to De La Salle the following fall as a boarder rather than a day student.30 A year later, O’Neill transferred to Betts Academy, a prep school in Stamford, Connecticut.
One summer night in 1903 after his freshman year of high school, the fourteen-year-old Eugene, his brother Jim, and his father all looked on, horror-stricken, as Ella made a desperate attempt on her life. Having run out of morphine, she ran headlong, wearing only a nightgown and shrieking like a madwoman, toward the Thames River across Pequot Avenue. The men rushed after her and stopped her before she could leap from the dock. James and Jim had been aware of Ella’s “problem” for years; but they had, right up to that moment, kept the truth from Eugene. “Jamie told me,” Edmund recounts bitterly of the incident in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. “I called him a liar! I tried to punch him in the nose. But I knew he wasn’t lying. (His voice trembling, his eyes begin to fill with tears.) God, it made everything in life seem rotten!” (CP3, 787).
O’Neill’s life chart makes it clear that this traumatic revelation triggered an instantaneous “discovery of mother’s inadequacy,” and here the “mother love” line on the chart drops off. The shock of Ella’s drug addiction, which in O’Neill’s mind was reserved for prostitutes and derelicts (though morphine use was endemic among well-heeled women at the time), along with the possibility that she might be insane, activated an addiction of the young man’s own: alcoholism,which began when he was fifteen and was eagerly reinforced by his ne’er-do-well brother Jim.31 (Only his parents and close family relations referred to him as “Jamie”; after O’Neill’s adolescence, he unvaryingly calls him “Jim.”) Jim also arranged for his younger brother’s loss of virginity to a prostitute in a two-bit Manhattan brothel. “Gene learned sin more easily than other people,” he boasted years after this event, which was severely traumatizing for his teenage brother. “I made it easy for him.”32 “The girls were such terrible creatures they forced whiskey down his throat,” O’Neill’s third wife, Carlotta Monterey, related of the incident decades later: “with Jamie helping them,” according to Monterey, “they tore off his clothes—he was fighting them. He wasn’t ready for that. He was reading a lot of poetry in those days. But later on he made himself at home in them, in the whorehouses.”33
Alcohol, often combined with sex, became a psychic painkiller for O’Neill, and over the years, drunkenness and even hangovers occupied his imagination as more reliable companions than the people who ostensibly loved him. For over two decades, O’Neill would drink himself into a stupor from morning to night, then dry out for weeks at a t
ime in a state of utter loneliness and despair.
O’Neill also openly renounced his parents’ Catholicism after his mother’s breakdown—all religions, in fact—and became a confirmed atheist. “He rejected God,” O’Neill’s onetime girlfriend the Catholic Worker activist Dorothy Day wrote soon after his death. “He turned from Him.” That first Sunday morning after his mother’s attempt on her life, O’Neill refused to join his parents for Mass. A fight erupted between Eugene and James on the staircase in the front hall until the full-bodied James, who could have handily drubbed his son, abruptly stopped, straightened his cuffs, and said, “Very well. The subject is closed.”34 Though Ella would eventually conquer her morphine habit for good in 1917, thanks in part to the Sisters of Charity, her son never looked back.
O’Neill’s loss of faith was truly a loss—a profound emptiness, a breach in spirit. In Long Day’s Journey Into Night, O’Neill dramatizes a period when his mother had given up Mass as well. Her character, Mary Tyrone, longs to return to her convent schooldays when she embraced Catholicism. “If I could only find the faith I lost,” she laments, “so I could pray again!” (CP3, 779). In the final scene, locked in a morphine-induced dream state, Mary searches helplessly through the living room for something she’s misplaced, “something I need terribly. I remember when I had it I was never lonely nor afraid. I can’t have lost it forever, I would die if I thought that. Because then there would be no hope” (CP3, 826). O’Neill himself experienced this desperate search for hope and spirit. Had he been able to regain his Catholic faith, and his mother’s affection, or find a meaningful substitute, he would have felt safer and less alienated through life—but it’s more than likely he would never have achieved his stature as an artist.
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 5