Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  The Provincetown Playhouse at 133 Macdougal Street, New York City.

  (PHOTO BY BERENICE ABBOT. © BERENICE ABBOTT/COMMERCE GRAPHICS)

  “The Town Is Yours”

  The Players celebrated O’Neill’s return to New York with a homecoming party and embraced Boulton as one of their own. After that, O’Neill and Boulton went to a restaurant with actor Teddy Ballantine and his wife, Stella, O’Neill’s friend Saxe Commins’s sister. O’Neill’s thirst for liquor was particularly overpowering. His mother had just been diagnosed with breast cancer that fall, which resulted in a successful, if terrifying, mastectomy procedure (and a brief relapse of her drug addiction). O’Neill knew that if he wanted not to get too “tight,” he should drink whiskey with a lot of water. He did so and tolerated the teasing good-humoredly; but a whiskey bottle was inevitably passed around, and O’Neill helped himself to a straight drink. Spotting this, Boulton whispered that maybe they should leave. He pushed her backward and then, “his mouth distorted with an ironic grin,” slapped her hard across the face with the back of his hand. Boulton, in a state of shock, was hastily led out by Stella Ballantine. “It means nothing, my dear, nothing!” Stella tried to reassure her. “Genius is like that, my dear! Genius must have its outlet!” Late that night, Boulton said, O’Neill pitifully returned to his wife, “a sick man.”167

  Jimmy Light, who was cast as the captain’s son in the upcoming production of Where the Cross Is Made, showed up at O’Neill’s hotel a few days later. O’Neill had avoided Macdougal Street after his loutish behavior, but his presence was required at the dress rehearsal. Among the actors, according to Edna Kenton, the play had given rise to “one prolonged argument, to give it no more brutal name.”168 Hutch Collins, playing the psychotic captain, and Ida Rauh, who both directed and played the female lead, tried to convince O’Neill that a group of ghosts he called for in the final scene should be imagined rather than played by actors. Ghosts, they argued, do not tread their feet on floorboards, and the audience might find such an incongruity more hilarious than terrifying. The Players were reluctant to take such a gamble, particularly on the opening night of the season.

  What was left unspoken was their mutual fear of a new adversary—the critic. Although they retained their policy of making critics pay for their own tickets, opening night at the new theater was sure to attract a fair number of scoop mongers willing to pay out of pocket. “We begged Gene, as if it were a favor to the dying, to cut the ghosts,” Kenton recalled.169 “No,” he said after watching the scene rehearsed. “They’re rotten, but they won’t be so bad tomorrow night, beyond the first twenty rows anyway. This play presumes that everybody is mad but the girl, that everybody sees the ghosts but the girl. Everybody but the girl means everybody in this house but the girl. I want to see whether it’s possible to make an audience go mad too.”170

  O’Neill was right: when the houselights went green and the ghosts appeared, Heywood Broun, writing for the New York Tribune and one of the few willing to pay the ticket price, had been seated too close to appreciate the “visual illusion,” he said, “but the sweep of the story and the exceptional skill with which the scene of the delusion is written made us distinctly fearful of the silent dead men who walked across the stage.”171 In spite of the play’s relative success, O’Neill had never taken it seriously. “It was great fun to write,” he said, “theatrically very thrilling, an amusing experiment in treating the audience as insane—that is all it means or ever meant to me.”172

  Conversely, on December 20, the Players staged for their second bill a play O’Neill took very seriously indeed: The Moon of the Caribbees. Set on the forward deck of the fictional Glencairn at anchor off Port of Spain, Trinidad, The Moon of the Caribbees features a mélange of over twenty seamen drinking rum, brawling, and whoring; the men cavort with West Indian “bumboat” women as Old Tom, the “Donkeyman” (or engineer), looks on in tolerant amusement and listens patiently as Smitty, based on O’Neill’s actual Buenos Aires acquaintance, recounts memories of his lost love back home. The West Indian dirge ethereally drifting over the gunnels from the island was performed by poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, her two sisters, and their mother.173 “It was a mood play, and the Millay family provided the background music, which set the mood,” Jimmy Light’s wife, Susan Jenkins Brown, remembered. “It was all swooping vocal harmonies—they weren’t seen, and … well, it was unearthly.”174

  O’Neill avowed that The Moon of the Caribbees signaled his most conscious revolt against the “conventional construction of the theatre as it is.” Indeed, one of the two mystified critics in attendance considered the “mood play” “just an interlude of a drama, with prelude and afterlude left to the imagination of the spectators.” O’Neill ignored such gainsayers and in hindsight contended with immense satisfaction that The Moon “was my first real break with theatrical traditions. Once I had taken this initial step the other plays followed logically.”175

  On the night before Where the Cross Is Made had opened, O’Neill and Boulton fled to her ancestral home, the Old House, in West Point Pleasant, New Jersey. Life there proved as rustic and uneventful as O’Neill could have hoped for; and he remained mostly sober, aside from the occasional drunken excursion to monitor the Players’ progress with The Moon of the Caribbees. He and Boulton were amused to discover that a rumor had spread around town that O’Neill was a drug addict. “Doesn’t your husband take drugs?” a wary local woman asked. “Those walks—those long walks! It ain’t natural, a man walking like that. … I’ve passed him looking so quiet, you could tell he wasn’t drinking, so I calculated he must have been taking drugs.”176

  Boulton’s family had moved back to West Point Pleasant from Connecticut, but O’Neill and Boulton had the place to themselves. Prior to their arrival, Boulton’s father Teddy, an accomplished artist himself, had amiably agreed to remove the family so his son-in-law could work in peace. Over the bitterly cold winter months at the Old House, O’Neill completed two plays he’d sketched out in Provincetown the summer before: The Straw, about his convalescence at Gaylord Farm, and Chris Christophersen, about his friend of that name from Jimmy the Priest’s. He checked the mail obsessively, but still no word arrived from John Williams about a production schedule for Beyond the Horizon, and Williams’s frustrating reticence spurred O’Neill to hire his first (and lifelong) agent, Richard J. Madden of the American Play Company.

  Boulton visited her daughter at her family’s provisional house nearby, but “only for a few minutes,” she recalled. “Cookie,” as Barbara was nicknamed, “appeared astonished and detached” when she received a hug, but was “mildly pleased” by her present of a glass angel figure adorned with a bouquet of flowers.177 Boulton didn’t tell O’Neill about the visit, or even that her family was in the vicinity; but he found out from neighbors. “What’s the idea of not telling me your family was here?” he demanded.178 But she knew her husband well enough—the first time her sisters Margery and Barbara visited the Old House, he hid in a closet. Eventually, though, he found the Boultons enjoyable company, particularly her free-thinking grandmother and Teddy, who’d been friends with Algernon Swinburne, one of O’Neill’s favorite poets.179 The sentiment proved mutual, which was fortunate, given that Boulton would discover that winter that she was pregnant.

  Back in Provincetown in May 1919, rather than moving back into Francis’s Flats as usual, O’Neill and Boulton moved into a home of their own—Peaked Hill Bar, the renovated life-saving station nestled among the dunes on the uninhabited, weather-exposed northern shore. Ella O’Neill, though she’d frowned upon her son’s marriage to “the Irish servant girl,” had persuaded James to purchase them this spectacular, if belated, wedding present on Provincetown’s “outside.”180

  “Peaked Hill Bar.” The name alone brought to mind the sea in all its romance, danger and, for O’Neill, solace. “The Atlantic for a front lawn, miles of sand dunes for a back yard,” he rhapsodized. “No need to wear clothes—no vestige of the unr
efined refinements of civilization.” The wooden rafters were strung with wire to prevent high winds from blowing the roof into the sea, and Mabel Dodge had modernized the kitchen with state-of-the-art appliances; enlisting expert aid from the artist Maurice Sterne and set designer Robert Edmond Jones, she’d also “fitted it up inside” with coat upon coat of white and blue paint, giving the light-drenched interior a celestial ambiance. Stepping into the house from the beach, the effect was that one hadn’t left the outside, but rather that the rooms had been merged with the sand and sky and ocean.181

  O’Neill had a knack for outlining his sets for designers in his stage directions and often sketched out his own designs; in a 1921 interview, he described the interior of his breathtaking new estate as if composing a new play: “The interiors of the buildings … still preserve their old sea flavor. The stairs are like companionways of a ship. There are lockers everywhere. An immense open fireplace. The big boat room, now our living room, still has the steel fixtures in the ceiling from which one of the boats was slung. The lookout station on the roof is the same as when the coast guards spent their eternal two-hour vigils there. The exteriors of the buildings are as weather-beaten as the bulwarks of a derelict. The glass in the windows is ground frosty by the flying sands of the winter storms. … The place has come to mean a tremendous lot to me. I feel a true kinship and harmony with life out there.”182

  O’Neill’s writing studio was set up on the second floor, where the sand-scraped windows overlooked the North Atlantic. The room was fitted with a captain’s chair and a desk constructed from driftwood; and he adorned his walls, like his room at Princeton (if without the women’s undergarments and used condoms), with fishing nets and old floats. When O’Neill was struggling over a difficult bit of dialogue, he’d step onto the look-out platform and, in blissful solitude, take in his private view of the open sea. Other than the odd fishing or life-saving boat, no sign of civilization disrupted the panoramic coastal scenery for miles in any direction.

  Most of his first summer there was spent revising Chris Christophersen while awaiting the birth of his and Boulton’s first child. The actual Christopherson from Jimmy the Priest’s, like his fictional counterpart, inveighed repeatedly against “dat ole davil, sea.”183 “When I knew him,” O’Neill told a reporter, “he was on the beach, a real down-and-outer. He wouldn’t ship out, although it was the only work he knew, and he spent his time getting drunk and cursing the sea. ‘Dat ole davil,’ he called it. Finally he got a job as captain of a coal barge.” O’Neill reported that in 1917, Christopherson “got terribly drunk down at Jimmy’s … and reeled off at about two o’clock in the morning for his barge. On Christmas morning he was found in the river, frozen to death.”184 In fact, the old barge skipper had accidentally fallen into New York Harbor on October 15, 1917, and his remains were found a week later floating off Liberty Island.185

  Peaked Hill Bar in Provincetown.

  (COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)

  O’Neill wrote each morning after breakfast and ended his workday around one o’clock with a sandwich and a nap. In the afternoons he took long swims, sunbathed nude among the dunes, or strolled along the coastline with Boulton. Together they broke up flocks of sandpipers that gathered at the water’s edge and analyzed horseshoe crabs; for exercise, especially if it rained, O’Neill pounded away at a punching bag he’d installed in the back room. Most evenings he read in his white Morris chair until eleven or so, then went to bed at midnight. “Gene was beautiful that summer,” Boulton recalled, “tall and brown and tender and smiling, working all morning, lying for hours in the sun, absorbing life and courage and hope from the sea.”186

  Over time, however, Peaked Hill Bar’s remoteness proved as much a curse as a blessing. O’Neill and Boulton’s volatile personalities had steadily begun to chafe against each other. Any trip to town required an onerous slog across dunes and pine forests, and socializing was reserved for summer guests who braved the three-mile tramp out. No road led to the site, and their mail and supplies had to be delivered by horse-drawn carts. They rarely went into town more than once a week, where they would visit with Susan Glaspell and Jig Cook, Mary Vorse, Hutch Hapgood and Neith Boyce, and Teddy and Stella Ballantine, among others on the East End.

  That September, they rented a small cottage called Happy Home behind Cook and Glaspell’s house on Commercial Street so Boulton would be closer to their doctor and supplies for the baby, who was due in October. Boulton’s mother and nineteen-year-old sister Margery came to stay with her as the birth approached. On September 10, Boulton and her family bunked with the Ballantines while Happy Home was prepped and sterilized. O’Neill worked at Peaked Hill Bar but made frequent trips to town. He was surprised to discover, given his lifelong aversion to children, that he looked forward to the child’s arrival. As the due date loomed closer, he rented another cottage across from Happy Home. It was there that he wrote his one-act Exorcism, the narrative of his suicide attempt that ends on an exultant note of rebirth, while the actual birth of his son was about to take place a stone’s throw away.187 He gave the corrected typescript to Boulton, either for her to type up a clean script for the Players or as a present—probably both. (O’Neill’s motivation for treating his first wife, Kathleen Jenkins, so shabbily in the play might be in part explained by Boulton’s ardent jealousy.) “[God] evidently wants to retain my services here below,” Ned/O’Neill says after surviving the attempt on his life, “for what I don’t know yet but I’m going to find out—and I feel of use already!”188

  O’Neill stood at Boulton’s bedside as Shane Rudraighe O’Neill was born on October 30. He was named for the sixteenth-century Irish chieftain Séan an Díomais Ó Néill, known to the ages as “Shane the Proud.” “Shane the Loud!” O’Neill chuckled, gazing down at the howling newborn. “It’ll be us still from now on,” he said. “Us—alone—but the three of us. … A sort of Holy Trinity, eh, Shane?” Ella O’Neill, the elated new grandmother, wrote a warm (if backhandedly malicious) congratulatory note to her son: “I am one of the happiest old ladies in New York tonight to know I have such a wonderful grandson but no more wonderful than you were when you were born and weighed eleven pounds and no nerves at that time. I am enclosing a picture of you taken at three months. Hope your boy will be as good looking.”189

  The Dreamy Kid premiered at Macdougal Street the day after Shane’s birth. Jig Cook had taken a leave of absence to write his full-length play The Spring in Provincetown, and Jimmy Light took the helm of the Provincetown Playhouse. Under his directorship, the Players doubled down on their revolutionary methods by flouting the long-standing tradition of white companies using white actors in blackface and instead hired an all-black cast. O’Neill’s future associate and close friend Kenneth Macgowan, though he was a stranger at the time, raved that The Dreamy Kid was “short, sharp, and incisive. Its people live. Its story moves. It is full of ‘punch.’”190

  During his last month in Provincetown, before returning to New York, O’Neill preoccupied himself, along with fathering his newborn, with trying to sell The Straw either to the Washington Square Players, who’d recently renamed themselves the Theatre Guild, or to George C. Tyler, once his father’s advance man from the old days of Monte Cristo but now a major Broadway producer. O’Neill admitted to Tyler, who did eventually buy it, that he was “in the devil of a hurry … because it is my pet play and I am anxious to hug to my heart the certainty that it is going to be done.”191

  For $6 a week, the O’Neills hired the French-born widow of a Provincetown sea captain named Fifine Clark (soon nicknamed “Gaga”) as a nanny for Shane and general “dame of all work.”192 Once Boulton was settled, with Terry Carlin left behind to sponge from her in the name of domestic assistance, O’Neill hopped the train to New York with Jig Cook and Hutch Hapgood. The tasks at hand were threefold: he would find a producer for The Straw, get straight answers from
George Tyler about Chris Christophersen, and ascertain at long last John Williams’s plans for Beyond the Horizon.

  O’Neill resolved to steer clear of the Macdougal Street crowd while in New York and took a room down the hall from his parents at the Prince George Hotel. But the reunion was less than cheerful: his father had been diagnosed with intestinal cancer, he reported back, “so serious that Mama was going to summon the priest and wire for Jim and me at one time.”193 Instead of a priest, they summoned Dr. John Aspell, the oncologist who’d performed Ella’s mastectomy in 1918. Dr. Aspell stabilized him for the time being, but the prognosis was not good.

  O’Neill got down to business nevertheless; now armed with an agent, Richard Madden, he felt that he’d reached a level of professionalism requiring a semblance of decorum. So he went shopping with his mother at Lord & Taylor’s for more reputable attire for his meetings with Tyler and Williams. The meetings went well. Tyler bought Chris Christophersen, shortened to Chris, and Williams assured O’Neill that Beyond the Horizon was slotted for February. He’d also made another important connection the previous spring, one that would result in one of his closest friendships and gain him a powerful defender for the remainder of his career—Smart Set editor and drama critic George Jean Nathan. O’Neill and Nathan were a perfect fit, both professionally and personally, and at the time of their second meeting, at the Royalton Hotel, Nathan was “gratified” to find O’Neill “as proficient at drinking cocktails as at concocting dramas.”194