Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  At around 10:30 that night, a twenty-five-year-old beauty named Agnes Ruby Boulton stepped into the Hell Hole’s back room to join Ell for a drink. Boulton, already a well-published fiction writer, had just moved to Greenwich Village from Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut, where she’d been struggling to manage a dairy farm with her parents and two-year-old daughter, Barbara “Cookie” Burton. The ostensible child of Boulton’s first husband, James Burton, who she claimed had died under mysterious circumstances in Europe, Cookie had been left in the care of Boulton’s parents. Boulton was good friends with Harry Kemp and Mary Pyne, who’d visited her farm the previous summer and no doubt gave her the lowdown on recent happenings in the Village.112 Once in New York, she checked into the Brevoort Hotel, hoping to land a factory job to earn some quick money and, perhaps, collect material to write about the inner lives of factory girls.

  The Players gathered at the Hell Hole that night were struck speechless by how eerily Agnes Boulton resembled Louise Bryant. She was a more classic beauty than Bryant, but otherwise a dead ringer. O’Neill was paralyzed, gaping at her from his dark corner. By now his “type” was clear: slim of build (Boulton was five feet four and just over one hundred pounds), long of neck, dark of hair, high of cheekbone. Boulton remembered catching O’Neill staring at her in those first few moments in the back room as if “he had once known me somewhere.”113

  Jim O’Neill swept in soon enough, flamboyantly dressed like a Broadway dandy with his signature black-and-white checked suit, bowler hat, manicured nails—even a carnation was securely inserted into the buttonhole of his jacket. He was drunk, as usual. “What Ho!” he roared into the murk of the Hell Hole’s back room. “Late? Yes! I got lost in the subway, looking for a big blonde with bad breath!” (After a glimpse at Boulton, Jim thought, “High cheek bones—she’ll get him.”)114 The two things that impressed Boulton most about Eugene O’Neill were, in her words, “that he was Irish” and “that he was a revolutionary.” She was also vaguely disturbed by what so many others had felt before her: the man projected an unnerving, contagious vulnerability, “that of being himself—an awareness on the part of others of his being always intensely aware of himself. … This would account for his shyness or whatever it was—which was really an intense self-consciousness.” “I want to spend every night of my life from now on with you,” O’Neill told her after escorting her back to the Brevoort that night. “I mean this. Every night of my life.”115

  O’Neill and Boulton’s next encounter took place soon after at a party at Christine Ell’s Village apartment. For a long time, it wasn’t certain whether O’Neill would show. “Where is he now?” Ell shouted. “At the Hell Hole, drunk. Big guy among the gangsters!” When O’Neill did finally arrive, he refused to acknowledge Boulton. She took this as a challenge rather than a snub, and for a time pretended to be “quiet and uninterested.” After a while, she couldn’t stand it any longer. “Hello!” she said, looking him in the eye, “Remember me?” His response was polite but distant; a few minutes later, he stepped into the next room, took a pint bottle of whiskey from his coat pocket, drained it, and swayed back into the crowd. “With a violent, sardonic, and loud laugh,” Boulton recounted, he dragged a chair up to the mantelpiece where a large clock was ticking, stood upon it as if back in his Princeton days, and chanted,

  Agnes Boulton.

  (PHOTO BY NICKOLAS MURAY, © NICKOLAS MURAY PHOTO ARCHIVES)

  “Turn back the universe,

  And give me yesterday.

  TURN BACK”—

  O’Neill then opened the glass face of the clock and pried the big hand counterclockwise, his eyes fixed on the little hand as it followed along behind. After this strange communion with the clock, he made a beeline for Nina Moise. Those who knew him doubtlessly saw his odd behavior at Ell’s party as a call for Bryant’s return; but he confessed to Boulton afterward that he’d been trying to conceal his overwhelming desire for her. Either way, in the days to follow, O’Neill and Dorothy Day started to double date with de Polo and Boulton. De Polo, who was married, soon dropped out of the picture, and the remaining three, to use Boulton’s term, formed a ménage à trois.116

  “I am more beautiful than Dorothy, even though I can’t keep a tune!” Boulton beseeched O’Neill inwardly. “Please look at me?”117 She accused Day of being envious of O’Neill’s attraction to her, a charge Day later denied. In fact, the reverse was true. For her part, Day thought Boulton was “much better-looking than Louise … but without Louise’s brains and sophistication.” Boulton had nothing to fear from Day, as O’Neill increasingly focused his attention on her; and Day, although she loved him as a friend and admired him as a writer, claims to have been more worried for Boulton than jealous. She believed he’d fallen in love with Bryant because Reed loved her, not for her own sake. “Gene needed a hopeless love,” Day said. “Jack was more in love with Louise than Gene was or could ever be. All Gene’s experiences were ‘copy’ to him. So I watched the Agnes-Gene association and hoped she would not be too hurt.”118

  Day’s fears were justified, as time would bear out, but it was too late. O’Neill convinced Boulton, if not yet himself, that he’d fallen in love with her. Though he felt anguished through the opening weeks of their relationship by the flux of his “painful ardor” for and “bitterness” toward Bryant, he was honest to Boulton about his feelings; but he also told her he was unsure Bryant would still be in love with him after the excitement of her exploits in wartorn Russia.119

  Boulton soon developed misgivings of her own about O’Neill, whose behavior was unaccountably erratic: he had frightening mood swings, made drunken pronouncements of love and hate, and exhibited a paradoxical combination of “contemptuous self-pity” and overweening narcissism. She heard him make “ironic and unkind comments about supposed friends—people to whom he was charming when face to face.” And she realized, as had Beatrice Ashe before her, that he did not like children. “I don’t understand children,” he told her, “they make me uneasy, and I don’t know how to act with them.” Finally, his views on women were problematic, to say the least. Once he remarked to her, “mockingly perhaps,” she admitted, that his ideal woman would be one who performed the composite roles of “mistress, wife, mother, and valet.”120

  What outweighed these concerns for Boulton was his stance as an Irish revolutionary. One night at Sheridan Square, for instance, O’Neill spoke of himself as cut from the same cloth as the great Irish martyrs of the Easter Rising of less than two years before—Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, The O’Rahilly—and he assured her that when the revolution came to America at long last, no matter his belief in nonviolent anarchism, he would take up a machine gun alongside his comrades and mow down the establishment forces. He pointed to one of the square’s triangular structures and made an oath that the building would live through the ages as a memorial of American freedom, just as Dublin’s General Post Office would for the Irish.121

  That January 1918, word spread through the Village that Lou Holladay was returning from his trip to Oregon a sober man. On the day of his arrival, Tuesday, January 22, 1918, festivities were set to take place at Christine Ell’s restaurant. His friends all swore to respect his sobriety and not offer him a drink, so O’Neill spent the day at the Hell Hole to get ahead of the drinking curve before reuniting with Holladay. Boulton came in, followed by the painters Charles Demuth and Edward Fisk, and they all walked down the block to Christine’s, where they met up with Dorothy Day and a few others. When Holladay entered, everyone approvingly remarked upon his physical vigor. “I have never seen anyone so at the peak of his life,” Boulton recalled, “so confident and happy. He had conquered. He had come through—and tonight he was going to see his love again and this coming week they were to be married.”122

  It was late at the Hell Hole when Holladay’s fiancée, Louise Norton, finally joined the group. The revelers watched uneasily as the two had a tense exchange of words. Then Norton abruptly walked out. She had found someone els
e in Holladay’s absence. That he’d gone to Oregon to sober up as a condition of their marriage made the betrayal sting all the more, and he headed for the bar.

  O’Neill escorted Boulton back to her new apartment on Waverly Place, then returned to the Hell Hole to help console his jilted friend. But O’Neill surprised Boulton by returning much earlier than she’d expected. Without saying a word, he curled up beside her in bed fully clothed and grasped her hand like a child. Dorothy Day came over soon after, looking pale and expressionless. “Louis is dead,” she murmured. “I knew he would die.” She pleaded with O’Neill to return with her to Romany Marie’s restaurant at 133 Washington Place, where Holladay’s corpse still occupied a table. The coroner had arrived, Day told them, and the police were questioning people. According to Boulton, Day then removed a bag of white powder from her coat pocket, the evidence of what had caused Holladay’s heart to fail—heroin. All the while, O’Neill was “fumbling at the edge of horror, refusing to be aware of it.”123

  On the way back to the restaurant, O’Neill stopped abruptly at a street corner and said, in a strained tone of defiance, “I’m going back to the Hell Hole. I’ll see you later.” Police officers met Boulton and Day at the entrance to Romany Marie’s but left them alone. There, the two women stared down at Holladay’s propped-up corpse, Boulton remembered, “while a wind from an open window ruffled his hair, and his empty eyes stared into space—those eyes that had been so sure and joyous on his return the afternoon before.”124

  Dawn was just beginning to break, and no one answered Day’s knock on the door at the Hell Hole, so they retreated to a nearby café. They were soon joined by a friend of Holladay’s and O’Neill’s, probably Robert Allerton Parker, who recounted the events of the early morning. After Louise Norton had left, Holladay had begun buying drinks for the house with money he’d saved for his marriage. Later that night he’d somehow got his hands on a vial or two of heroin, though from whom remained unclear. A “shifty character” at the Hell Hole? A restaurant waiter on Prince Street? Terry Carlin?125 Holladay, Parker, and Charles Demuth got high immediately sniffing it off the back of their hands. (O’Neill, no stranger to altered states of consciousness, always refused hard drugs, the result, no doubt, of growing up the son of an addict.) When the Hell Hole closed, this group and O’Neill went to Romany Marie’s restaurant, where they were joined by Day. Once seated at a table, Holladay “half-smiled” at O’Neill and looked over at Day, as if he thought they might understand, then swallowed a huge dose of the drug straight from the vial. Leaning on Day’s shoulder, he quietly died. Aside from Demuth and the proprietor Romany Marie (Marie Marchand), all the others made themselves scarce, O’Neill included.126

  Questions remain whether Holladay intended to commit suicide or whether the overdose was accidental (though in 1944 O’Neill told his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, that he believed it was definitely a suicide).127 Either way, he’d been drinking alcohol on top of heroin, a lethal combination. When the Hell Hole reopened its doors that morning, Boulton and Day found O’Neill at a table too drunk to speak, with a half-finished pint of Old Taylor bourbon in front of him. As the bar began to fill and excited whispers swirled around Holladay’s death, his sister Polly suddenly appeared in the doorway, “sinister and cold,” Boulton remembered, “and stood staring around in search of something that she did not find, and went out again, without a word, and without even looking at Gene,” one of Holladay’s oldest friends and one of the few witnesses to his death.128

  After several days of oblivion with Jim at the Garden Hotel, O’Neill returned to Boulton and beseeched her to marry him. She told him they should wait, but O’Neill, determined to quit drinking and find long-term happiness with Boulton, bought them both tickets for Provincetown. Faced with the impending return of her rival, Louise Bryant, Boulton agreed to go. As the Fall River boat pulled away from the pier, O’Neill produced a hidden pint of Old Taylor. Hands shaking uncontrollably, he gulped down a deep swig.129 Holladay’s probable suicide was the first time he’d witnessed a loved one’s death, but the next one, tragically, wasn’t far off.

  Louise Bryant returned to New York in early March 1918 and fired off a bruising letter to O’Neill in Provincetown accusing Agnes Boulton, from what she’d heard in the Village, of enabling his alcoholism. She also demanded to know if he still loved her. O’Neill responded that Boulton accepted him “at my worst—and [she] didn’t love me for what she thought I ought to be.” “Whether I love her in a deep sense or not,” he went on, “I do not yet know. For the past half-year ‘love’ has seemed like some word in a foreign language of which I do not know the meaning. It dazes me.” Bryant also accused O’Neill of having “affairs” with Nina Moise and Elaine Freeman. He denied both but called her out on her hypocrisy: “For over a year and a half I loved you. During most of that time you lived with another man. That is undeniable. What does it matter if physically you were faithful to me—especially considering the circumstances.”130 O’Neill still regarded his passion for her as straight from Irish legend: “And Ailell said to her: ‘My desire was a desire that was as long as a year; but it was love given to an echo, the spending of grief on a wave, a lonely fight with a shadow, that is what my love and my desire have been to me.’”131 “It is more than probable,” he told Bryant in this final letter to her, “that you have burned yourself so deep into my soul that the wound will never heal and I stand condemned to love you forever—and hate you for what you have done to my life.”132

  John Francis met O’Neill and Boulton at the Provincetown railroad station and settled them into a temporary studio with a writing loft. When the weather warmed and Francis finished some renovations, they would move into the flat O’Neill and Carlin had occupied the previous summer. “That Gene is a wonderful fellow—a real genius,” Francis told Boulton as he showed her around. “I never seen anybody work like he does—when he’s working.”133

  O’Neill took full advantage of their idyllic winter at Francis’s Flats, completing two one-act plays, Shell Shock and The Rope. Shell Shock, alternately titled “Butts,” “A Smoke,” and “At Jesus’s Feet,” was O’Neill’s third attempt to dramatize the horrors of World War I. Whereas his first, The Sniper, takes place in Belgium, with Belgian and Prussian characters, and the second, In the Zone, on a steamship passing through the German U-boat “zone,” Shell Shock is set on the home front, in a student grill at Harvard University. (Unlike the other two plays, Shell Shock was never produced in O’Neill’s lifetime.)

  The Rope is a cynical inversion of the biblical tale of the prodigal or “lost” son (Luke 15:11–32). A young man named “Luke” Bentley claims his inheritance before his father’s death and squanders the money. He’s an unrepentant wastrel who unmistakably resembles Jim O’Neill, with his “good-natured, half-foolish grin, his hearty laugh, his curly dark hair, a certain devil-may-care recklessness and irresponsible youth in voice and gesture” (CP1, 556). (In 1909, Jim had played the title character in the popular play The Prodigal Son.)134 Luke is also a stand-in for O’Neill himself: “You country jays oughter wake up and see what’s goin’ on,” Luke tells his brother-in-law. “Look at me. I was green as grass when I left here, but bummin’ round the world, and bein’ in cities, and meetin’ all kinds, and keepin’ your two eyes open—that’s what’ll learn yuh a cute trick or two” (CP2, 561–62). Though O’Neill had lived a dissolute vagabond’s existence, he’d become even more of a prodigal in the theater world. Indeed, if his father James’s plays were meant to offer uplift with redemption and reconciliation, O’Neill’s spiteful Luke never redeems himself. Far from it. Luke’s experiences abroad do little but confirm his contempt for his family and its small-town parochialism.135

  The Players accepted The Rope for that April, though O’Neill and Nina Moise argued over the script. O’Neill respected Moise’s directing, but she wanted to cut most of the exposition in the first scene, while he insisted that “if the thing is acted naturally all that exposition will
come right out of the characters themselves. Make them act!”136 Moise capitulated, and the play opened to strong reviews, despite her concerns, on April 26 at the Playwrights’ Theatre.

  Toward the end of this same letter to Moise, O’Neill informed her, almost offhandedly, that he’d gotten married two days earlier, April 12, in the “best parlor” of the local parsonage. The clergyman, one Reverend William L. Johnson, was “the most delightful, feeble-minded Godhelpus, mincing Methodist minister that ever prayed through his nose.” “I don’t mean to sneer, really,” he added. “The worthy divine is an utterly lovable old idiot, and the ceremony gained a strange, unique simplicity from his sweet, childlike sincerity. I caught myself wishing I could believe in the same gentle God he seemed so sure of. This seems like sentimentality but it isn’t.”137

  After Boulton had agreed to marry him, they’d decided to delay the nuptials until April. They did so for a couple of reasons: she didn’t trust that O’Neill was over Bryant (their sole witness at the ceremony, Alice Woods Ullman, overheard Boulton berate O’Neill, “You still love Louise as much as ever”), and he worried over the “detail and personal exposure that it would put him through.”138 One rather alarming “detail” has eluded scholars, personal friends, and family members alike about O’Neill’s marriage to Boulton: either their marriage was legally invalid or, at the very least, O’Neill was in contempt of court. The judge who wrote the interlocutory judgment of O’Neill’s divorce from Kathleen Jenkins, had decreed that O’Neill could not remarry “without the express permission” of the White Plains court, which O’Neill did not receive to marry Boulton. The final judgment on default, filed on October 11, 1912, and only open to the public one hundred years and a day later, gave Jenkins the right to marry again “in like manner as if the defendant [O’Neill] were dead.” But as for O’Neill, the second judge assigned the case had ruled unambiguously that “it shall not be lawful for the defendant to marry any person other than the plaintiff in the lifetime of the plaintiff.”139