Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  Return to Monte Cristo

  On January 20, 1912, O’Neill was served his divorce summons from Jenkins’s attorney. Then he hopped a train for the Deep South. At the station in New Orleans, he stumbled onto the platform, in his words, “broke on the tail end of a bust which terminated in that city.”126 O’Neill claimed he’d won some money at faro cards, went on a bender with a few pals from Jimmy the Priest’s, blacked out, and awoke, startled, to find himself on a train heading south. Actors in his father’s company remember a different story: James had wired money to Eugene in New York, they felt sure, in response to a telegram that read, “To eat or not to eat, that is the question.”127 Whatever the case, O’Neill’s first stop in New Orleans was the city docks to drum up a berth back to New York. He had the papers on him to prove he was a qualified able-bodied seaman, but no ship sailing for New York had an opening. Only then did he contact his family.128

  James, Ella, and Jim were in New Orleans on a tour that had started the previous fall. Tormented by the prospect of financial insolvency in his elder years, James held his nose and cobbled together a tabloid version of Monte Cristo with a stage time of forty-one minutes (whittled down from its usual three hours). The touring company’s bill included, among others, a perky ragtime songster named Rae Samuels, a.k.a. “the Blue Streak of Ragtime,” a trampoline stunt team, and “the Juggling Burkes,” a two-man act that juggled “Indian clubs.” But James O’Neill as the Count of Monte Cristo was, of course, the main attraction. Jim was billed as “one of the foremost of the younger generation of leading men,” a short-lived reputation based chiefly on his ephemeral 1909 success in The Travelling Salesman. Eugene later described Jim’s choice of acting for a living as a “line of least resistance.” Jim had performed onstage throughout the previous decade, including several tours with his father, and in this vaudeville tour of Monte Cristo, he played a number of roles, one of which, in an inescapable irony, was that of Edmund Dantès’s financial benefactor Abbé Faria.129

  The tour had arrived in Memphis, Tennessee, when James was first informed of Eugene’s attempt on his life. At that time, it was “whispered around” among the actors that the elder O’Neill’s son had “suffered some kind of misfortune.” James refused Eugene the money for a return ticket from New Orleans but offered him a job for $25 a week. “It was a case of act or walk home,” O’Neill remembered, “so I acted for the rest of the tour over the Orpheum Circuit.” O’Neill was cast as a jailer and a gendarme; while playing the gendarme, he wore a mustache wired to his nostrils to distinguish one character from the other. “That cut-down version was wonderful,” O’Neill joked to a reporter years later. “Characters came on that didn’t seem to belong there and did things that made no sense and said things that sounded insane. The Old Man had been playing Cristo so long he’d almost forgotten it, so he ad-libbed and improvised and never gave anybody a cue. You knew when your turn came when he stopped talking.”130

  “The tabloid presentation of ‘Monte Cristo,’” a Salt Lake City drama critic neatly summed up its reception, “is rather pitiful, all things considered, when one remembers past performances.” (Rae Samuels stole each evening with hoots of laughter and applause. In October 1920, Agnes Boulton would see Samuels perform the musical comedy The Tooting Tooties in order to glimpse, as she wrote O’Neill, “the eyes that smiled on your mad youth!”)131

  From New Orleans, the company rode the Overland Limited rail line up to Ogden, Utah, and points north and west—Salt Lake City, Denver, and St. Paul, Minnesota (not coincidentally, the state to which Ned Malloy will head at the end of Exorcism).132 The O’Neills kept relations with the company cordial but aloof, sequestering themselves between towns in their own train car. When they arrived at a destination, Jim would drink heartily with the other actors but assume a haughty reserve if they got too chummy. An actor in the production, Charlie Webster, remembered Jim’s intoxicated face as “an alcoholic mask, reddish, glazed expression, or rather no expression.” And Jim wasn’t holding up his end onstage. “Imagine an actor who can’t fence!” James groused during rehearsals. On their afternoons off, he tried to coach his son in swordsmanship but finally gave up, simplifying the finale so that Jim merely had to strike James’s raised weapon once.133

  One grainy image of this production still exists. Taken at the Orpheum Theatre in Ogden, the photograph (too obscured by age to reproduce here) appeared in the Salt Lake City Evening Tribune. It was taken Friday night, February 2, the first time Eugene O’Neill had ever acted on the professional stage.134 The photo shows James glaring down at the corrupt police chief Villefort—who, with the same aquiline nose and jutting chin, must be Jim—dead on the floor of the inn Pont du Gard. Eugene can just be made out upstage right, with his fake pointy mustache, hiding behind more expressive gendarmes. (Eleven people were advertised as having roles in the production, and ten are onstage; the missing cast member is whoever was playing the scoundrel Danglars.) Webster’s sketchy description matches James in the photo to a fault: “He was very graceful, used his hands eloquently. As Monte Cristo, wore black satin knee breeches, a white wig. His body had thickened but was still graceful. … Production had good costumes, came from his regular production.”135

  Despite the vaudeville circuit’s lowbrow reputation, its standards of behavior were notoriously strict. You couldn’t swear in public (signs forbade you even to say “damn”), and drunkenness and unruly behavior were forbidden. Jim respected this and played it relatively safe while still trying his father’s patience with crude practical jokes. Charlie Webster, playing Edmund Dantès’s son Albert, had a line challenging a villain to a duel, pronouncing it his “duty to repress calumny.” One night before the show, Jim cautioned Webster not to slip up and say “calomel” (a laxative). Sure enough, he uttered “calomel” instead of “calumny,” and James, playing opposite Webster, grunted, “Hmph,” as he generally did after such gaffes, but the audience didn’t appear to notice. On another night after the performance, Jim exited the theater out the stage door and into the alleyway singing at the top of his lungs, his baritone voice echoing off the building walls; but he was cut short when a bucket of water was dropped on his head.136

  Webster described the elder James’s magnetism among the troupe in nothing but admiring terms: he was like “a priest, quiet; he never raised his voice; he had a spiritual quality.” Frustrated as James was with his boys, he occasionally revealed a deep paternal affection for them. Once, when a group of reporters was interviewing James and the other players, Eugene walked in the front entrance and hopped up onstage to join them. “He’s a handsome chap,” one reporter said. “Takes after his father.” James waved off the compliment. “I was never as good looking as he is.” He expressed less parental satisfaction in private, once taking Eugene aside and reproaching him with cool reserve. “I am not satisfied with your performance, sir,” he said. “I am not satisfied with your play, sir,” Eugene retorted.137

  William Lee, an electrician at the Olympic Theatre in St. Louis, where the company played in late February, remembered Eugene as a conspicuously dreadful addition to what he considered an otherwise “grand” production. “I can’t understand,” scoffed Pat Short, a stagehand at the Olympic, “how a fine actor and a smart man like James O’Neill can have a son so dumb.” Lee remembered overhearing James and Eugene in a testy backstage exchange: “You never could act,” James fumed. “You can’t act. And you never will.” “What of it?” his son shrugged.138

  Eugene rarely greeted the doorman with so much as a hello when he arrived at the theater, nor did he chat with the other actors while waiting for his cue. “He never had a word to say to anybody,” Lee recalled.139 He also suffered terribly from stage fright (an affliction he would never overcome), and like so many of O’Neill’s future companions and theatrical associates, Webster found his anxiety infectious. Once during the Château d’If scene, for instance, just before the set change for James’s climactic proclamation that the world is his, a tre
mbling O’Neill, playing a jailer, looked down at the body of Abbé Faria and spluttered out a line he’d rehearsed at least a dozen times: “What has happened here?” Webster, affected by O’Neill’s halting delivery, responded with a clipped, “Yes, he is dead.”140 The audience howled with laughter. O’Neill and Webster heard James from the wings thundering, “What happened? What did they do? Why are they laughing? … Where are they? I’ll kill those boys.” They made a hasty exit and clambered up into the fly lofts.141 Even so, James rarely raised his renowned cello-toned voice in anger, even when enraged by his children’s drunken behavior; instead, he’d slip into an Irish brogue.142

  “I had a small part,” O’Neill remarked in hindsight, “but I couldn’t have been worse if I’d been playing Hamlet.” He later boasted that throughout the tour neither he nor Jim had drawn “a sober breath.” Full-blown alcoholics by this time, the two made a habit of downing several whiskeys before each performance. “The least said about those acting days the better,” O’Neill said. “The alcoholic content was as high as the acting was low. They graduated me from the Orpheum Circuit with degree of Lousy Cum Laude. If the tour lasted a month longer I would also have won my D.T. [delirium tremens]. The one remorseful thought … is that I didn’t warn audiences in advance about my performance so they could all get drunk, too. It must have been a terrible thing to witness sober.” Nonetheless, O’Neill recalled his brief time on the circuit fondly: “My brother and I had one grand time of it,” he said, “and I look back on it as one of the merriest periods of my life.”143 But the experience as a whole spoiled his enjoyment of attending the theater, as he couldn’t keep his mind off the actors: “I can’t help seeing with the relentless eye of heredity, upbringing, and personal experience, every little trick they pull.”144

  James O’Neill, in fairness, had reason to grumble over these few months on tour with his family: Eugene had just attempted suicide; Jim was weak willed, a lush, and failing as an actor, the one profession that might have allowed him to survive on his own steam; and James’s reputation as a has-been among the press corps had expanded to intolerable levels. Even his hometown paper had admitted a few years earlier that, proud as everyone was that James was a Cincinnati boy, “‘Monte Cristo,’ one might say, ruined James O’Neill … his success was such that he has never been able to entirely break away from the part or persuade the public to abate its demands for its continuance.” Adding financial insult to domestic and professional injury, James also lost nearly $40,000 when two firms he’d invested in went belly-up.145

  Then there was Ella O’Neill—lost to “the poison” again. Ella was rarely glimpsed by the rest of the company, except when she slipped in and out of her husband’s dressing room. Webster’s impression, though he observed her only from a distance, closely resembles that of Ella’s counterpart in Long Day’s Journey Into Night: “Someone remote. … Frail, unsteady … very sensitive, quiet, someone who had been well born, floating, wore clothes very feminine. … On train always hidden, like a wraith.” The O’Neill men treated her with the utmost care and deference, like some kind of purified essence that might be “contaminated,” he said, by a stranger’s touch. Ella had also begun behaving erratically after Eugene joined the tour. In one disquieting incident, she edged her way toward the stage while James roared his line, “Revenge is mine, Fernand—I hold thy heart in my hand!” Glancing over and seeing her approach from the wings, he nearly signaled for the curtain when a stagehand stopped her before she could reveal herself to the audience. Ella attempted this several more times, prompting James to check the wings each time he performed the scene.146 No one but the three O’Neill men could have known that Ella was on morphine, that her otherworldly demeanor was a result of the drug’s effect rather than her ordinary temperament.

  Long Day’s Journey, the play that allowed O’Neill to come to terms with his mother’s drug addiction, is set that following summer. But O’Neill only hints that it might have been his suicide attempt and presence on the tour afterward that instigated Ella’s relapse, rather than the more blameless diagnosis of tuberculosis that the work implies.

  The O’Neills returned to New York by early March 1912, and though Eugene’s subsequent movements remain a mystery, there was one place he undeniably wasn’t: his divorce proceedings. Not legally obliged to attend the June 10 trial in White Plains, O’Neill was spared the depositions about his night with the prostitute as well as exchanges between the presiding judge, Joseph Morschauser, and Kathleen like this one: “Have you voluntarily cohabitated with [the defendant] since he committed these adulteries?” the judge asked. “No.” “Have you forgiven him?” “No.”147 Kathleen was granted “exclusive care, custody and control” of Eugene Jr., and O’Neill was absolved, presumably to ensure an unmitigated dissociation from her and Eugene, of child support and alimony. The interlocutory judgment was filed July 8 and, since O’Neill made no attempt to challenge it, the final judgment on default was handed down on October 11. It’s unknown whether O’Neill ever read this second document, but the judge who wrote it, Isaac N. Mills, made it clear that he believed O’Neill unfit for marriage: “It shall not be lawful,” he ruled, “for the defendant to marry any person other than the plaintiff in the lifetime of the plaintiff.”148

  Back in New London that summer, O’Neill spent long, lazy days drifting nude in a rowboat on the Thames River and enjoying frequent swims off the Scott family dock across the road. He also swam a mile across the Thames, and the Day newspaper reported that he made “good time.” At night he visited the Bradley Street brothels and drank with his friends Art McGinley, Ed Keefe, Hutch Collins, and “Ice” Casey. “Gene O’Neill and I tried to drink America dry,” McGinley liked to say, “and nearly succeeded.” Many evenings they played cards and read poetry at Dr. Joseph “Doc” Ganey’s “Second Story Club,” where a cohort of like-minded intellectuals congregated at the physician’s apartment on Main Street (now Eugene O’Neill Drive).149

  When his father’s harangues about working for a living could no longer be ignored, O’Neill took a job for $10 a week at the New London Telegraph, a liberal-minded newspaper then struggling to stay afloat. Upon receiving one of O’Neill’s first filings from the police court, city editor Malcolm “Mal” Mollan called him into his office. “The smell of the rooms is made convincing,” Mollan began, with barely concealed sarcasm, “The amount of blood on the floor is precisely measured; you have drawn a nice picture of the squalor and stupidity and degradation of that household.” Then the editor lowered the boom: “But would you mind finding out the name of the gentleman who carved the lady and whether the dame is his wife or daughter or who? And phone the hospital for a hint as to whether she is dead or discharged or what? Then put the facts into a hundred and fifty words—and send this literary batik to the picture framers.” On another assignment, the Harvard/Yale rowing regatta, O’Neill’s prose dripped with pretentious alliteration—“bronze and brawny backs bent against the oars” and so on. The editors, having read a few sentences into the piece, demanded to know at what point the reporter might deign to inform his readers which crew team had won the race. O’Neill regularly showed up drunk at the news desk, and after he’d done so once too often, Mollan warned him he’d be dismissed; but the business manager, Charles Thompson, took the editor aside. “Hell,” he said. “You can’t do that. His father is paying his salary.”150

  The Telegraph’s editor in chief, Frederick P. Latimer, a former judge and friend of James’s, allowed O’Neill some latitude by publishing his poetry in the newspaper’s “Laconics” column, even though Latimer believed that given O’Neill’s stylistic flourishes in his prose reporting, he would “eventually abandon the poetic medium and become a novelist.” (As late as the mid-1920s, Latimer maintained his belief that O’Neill should have been a novelist, and so did O’Neill.)151

  O’Neill’s talents proved better suited to writing poetry than reporting, in fact, but not by much. He wrote sophomoric, propagandizing verse c
onsisting mainly of barbs at Standard Oil and other business interests and backhanded brickbats at politicians such as presidential rivals Teddy Roosevelt and Howard Taft:

  Our Teddy opens wide his mouth,

  N’runs around n’yells all day,

  N’calls some people naughty names,

  N’says things that he shouldn’t say.

  N’when he’s nothing else to do

  He swells up like he’d like to bust,

  N’pounds on something with his fist

  N’tells us ’bout some wicked trust.

  I always wondered why that was—

  I guess it’s ’cause

  Taft never does.152

  Most of O’Neill’s poems at the Telegraph consisted of stylistic send-ups of popular rhymesters like Kipling, Robert Burns, and Robert W. Service with topics alluding to local events, political figures, and wealthy citizens. O’Neill’s verse, Latimer wrote, would “make us choke with wrath at the queer wildness of his ideas, so different from those of other folks and hard to comprehend.” Frustrating as their debates were while rowing together on the Thames or smoking in a back room at the paper, the editor nonetheless retained a “dim, small notion” that this upstart had a touch of the poet in him. O’Neill’s estimation of these propagandistic verses once he’d matured as a writer is plain enough: by 1923, he admitted that although they marked the true start of his writing career, the work was “junk of a low order.” “I was trying to write popular humorous journalistic verse for a small town paper,” he said in 1929, “and the stuff should be judged—nearly all of it—by that intent.” Later still, in 1936, he scolded a publisher interested in reprinting this early poetry as a collection: “Frankly … I’m all against it. It would be a shame to waste good type on such nonsense. If those small-town jingles of my well-misspent youth were amusingly bad, I would have no objection, for their republication might hand someone a laugh, at least. But they’re not. They are merely very dull stuff indeed—and so my decision must be to let them lie suitably defunct.” Even so, O’Neill’s consistent refrain in the offices of the Telegraph must have sounded laughably conceited at the time—that one day James O’Neill would be remembered chiefly for being Eugene O’Neill’s father.153