Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts
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The Hudson Dusters went wild in the balcony, erupting into hoots and whistles and cheers, shocking the respectable uptown audience in the orchestra seats below.25 Along with a propensity for two-fisted drinking, the gangsters shared O’Neill’s Irish pride, and scene 3 in the play has the distinction of being the only one in which, before his encounter with Mildred, Yank allies himself with a group: the Catholics of Belfast. Belfast was the steamship-building capital of the world, where the Titanic was built. To Yank, the officers are Protestant, “Catholic moiderin’ bastards,” and the Dusters may well have received their tickets from the playwright the night before as they celebrated the anniversary of the Easter Rising of April 16, 1916.
On December 6, 1921, the Irish Free State was formed, ending the two-year Irish War of Independence—the very week O’Neill recovered his “creative élan” and had begun composing The Hairy Ape “with a mad rush.” Of course, six of Ireland’s traditional thirty-two counties had remained part of Great Britain, as Northern Ireland, and many irredentist Catholics and Protestants loyal to Great Britain alike ignored the ceasefire and continued fighting through the spring of 1922, the violence mostly concentrated in the north. Given the torrent of dialogue that gushes from Yank’s mouth over the first three scenes, it’s more than likely O’Neill had tipped the Dusters off ahead of time to listen for the line—even more, perhaps, for the satisfaction of disrupting an evening at an uptown theater than the desire to make a political statement.
O’Neill also dedicated a scene to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) or “Wobblies,” as the radical labor union members were then called, and a number of them attended the play as well. O’Neill portrays the Wobblies at their waterfront headquarters at 9 South Street as staid and bureaucratic, juxtaposed against Yank’s imposing ferociousness. In the previous scene, scene 6, Yank had overheard the union men described as a “devil’s brew of rascals, jailbirds, murderers and cutthroats” (CP2, 152). Since the American press had already printed this overblown portrait of the labor organization, O’Neill counters the accepted stereotype by making the IWW scene, paradoxically for middle-class audience members at the time, the only realistic scene in the play. (In fact, the play’s original iteration, the short story “The Hairy Ape,” though rejected by Metropolitan magazine in 1918, had ended with Yank joining the IWW.)26
“[O’Neill] has found a cause and he has become a propagandist,” smirked Heywood Broun, now unrivaled among O’Neill’s most adversarial critics. This time Mike Gold stood up to defend O’Neill against Broun’s attacks. With The Hairy Ape, Gold said, O’Neill had ushered onto the boards “that deep spirit of revolt that burns even in the American working-man, even in the callous-handed citizens of the richest country in the world.”27
The Wobblies, like the Dusters with the reference to Ireland’s troubles, greeted The Hairy Ape with cheers for attempting, they said, to “explode the popular misconception of the I.W.W. as a bomb-throwing organization—an idea especially prevalent among the limousine class of theatergoers, who are now having it dislodged from their minds.” “[O’Neill] understands us,” wrote a port delegate of the Wobblies’ New York division. “Even the spies that the detective agencies sometimes got into the organization,” said another, “know better than to think that the I.W.W. preaches violence.” The delegate wrote a review for the union-run Marine Worker applauding the play’s veracity: “Most books and plays of the sea leave the real seaman with a bad taste in his mouth and much disgust in his heart. Very different is ‘The Hairy Ape,’ written by an old time seaman Eugene O’Neill. … This play, which every seaman should attend, catches the exact spirit of … the forecastle and spreads a flow of language which takes the breath away from the wearers of dress satin and evening gowns. The throb of the engines, the whir of the propeller, the whistle of the wind through the rigging, and the choicest kind of cursing are all there and true to the life of the sea.” “It’s good to hear from someone who knows what he is talking about that my ‘Hairy Ape’ rings true,” O’Neill responded in a letter to the Marine Worker. “I wish there were more of the critics who were familiar enough with the life and background of the play to be able to give it a hearing for what it is, and not what they guess it is.”28
That June 1922, O’Neill and every member of The Hairy Ape cast and crew signed a petition to President Harding urging him to free, without the humiliation required for individual pardons, ninety-six IWW prisoners at Leavenworth Penitentiary who’d been arrested under the Espionage Act for conspiring to obstruct America’s entry into World War I.29 (Harding paroled three of the political prisoners on the condition that he could send them back at his discretion. In August 1923, Harding died suddenly in office, and by Christmas, his successor, Calvin Coolidge, had granted amnesty to them all.) This heated political climate had earlier gotten the Players into the same trouble with Sunday performances as they’d had with The Emperor Jones. “For a performance or two,” said Kenneth Macgowan, “getting by the plain clothes men at the door was harder than getting a passport.”30 It was a female undercover cop, Officer Anna Green, who paid for a membership to attend the show on Sunday evening, March 12.
New York’s prosecuting attorney argued that the idea of the playhouse as a private club was “merely a subterfuge for the sale of tickets in violation” of the penal code forbidding Sunday theatricals. After hearing the testimonies of Fitzie Fitzgerald and O’Neill’s lawyer Harry Weinberger, Magistrate Simpson publicly disagreed. While approvingly reading an article quoting Simpson, O’Neill took out his pencil and underlined what he considered the key points: “The Provincetown Players is an organization that is a credit to the community. It has encouraged native drama and has the support and approval of influential citizens. It would be a calamity to interfere with or hamper the work of this club. It is a boon to those practicing the art of the drama and acting who have no other place to turn to for original experiments.”31
But the New York Police Department wasn’t yet finished with the thirty-three-year-old playwright. A Lieutenant Duffy attended The Hairy Ape at the Plymouth that May, then submitted a report to Chief Magistrate William McAdoo confirming that the drama was “obscene, indecent and impure.” McAdoo then requested a copy of the script from Arthur Hopkins’s office. After giving it a once-over, he sent it back with no comment. McAdoo believed (not unjustifiably) that Hopkins had sent a bogus “concerned citizen” to police headquarters to file a complaint that the play was “immoral and unfit for the eyes and ears of New York theatre-goers” in hopes of boosting sales and publicity. Within the week, O’Neill noted with satisfaction, the bid for suppression had worked against itself: “As for the attempt to suppress ‘The Hairy Ape,’ it simply reacted against the people who started it, as the sale of seats to the play went up with a bang. And, in another way, it has been a very good thing—I feel that it has dealt a decided blow at state censorship.” The next night, in fact, the performance sold out and advance sales skyrocketed. The New York World telegrammed O’Neill in Provincetown for comment: “Such an idiotic attempt at suppression,” he responded with brusque finality, “will bring only ridicule on the poor dolts who started it.”32
New York Herald critic Lawrence Reamer caviled that by scene 4 of The Hairy Ape, “the air is growing pretty thick with blasphemy.” He looked forward to its print publication so he might count precisely how many times O’Neill used the word “Christ” in vain (it’s eight). But the play’s relatively mild language—“Christ,” “tart,” “boob,” “damn,” “tripe,” and so on—was inconsequential, argued David Karsner, a left-wing columnist for the socialist newspaper the New York Call, compared to O’Neill’s blistering critique of the American way of life. Karsner insisted it wasn’t “the choicest kind of cursing” that attracted the censors, as the more priggish critics assumed and the police at first charged. The Hairy Ape hit audiences on a deeper level than that: “It carries a text and a message that is outlawed in this country, and it proclaims an abiding and
everlasting hatred and contempt for the law as it is made and enforced, for the church as it apologizes for the greed of its rich patrons, for the press as it lies and misrepresents, for the state as it censors and suppresses the natural impulses of clean beings, and for all other manifold evidences of hypocrisy and cant with which our people are so sweetly and securely endowed. … And through this medley of derision those in that part of the audience who believe in things as they are are made to feel somewhat insecure in the permanency of their faith.”33 Two years later, on April 22, 1924, when J. Edgar Hoover took over as acting director of the Bureau of Investigation, he heard O’Neill’s subversive dog whistle against the “American way” loud and clear. The Bureau’s memorandum on O’Neill shows that he was now under investigation for treason, and it warned that The Hairy Ape “possesses inferential grounds for radical theories.”34
That May 1922, Columbia University announced that “Anna Christie” had won O’Neill his second Pulitzer Prize. The selection once again met with a churlish response from his detractors in the press, and for the same objection raised two years earlier with Beyond the Horizon: the Pulitzer was meant for the play “best representing the educational value of the stage in raising the standards of good morals, good taste and good manners.” “[Anna Christie] goes over her training period in a brothel,” fumed Billboard critic Patterson James. “She swallows drink after drink and smokes cigaret after cigaret. All in the interest of good morals?”35 O’Neill reveled in this surge of notoriety, one that invariably follows when the world of fine arts and the world of law enforcement reflexively operate in tandem—the former with a mix of applause and outrage, the latter with ham-fisted investigations and threats of obscenity charges. “Yes, I seem to be becoming the Prize Pup of Playwrighting, the Hot Dog of the Drama,” he laughed. “When the Police Dept. isn’t pinning the Obscenity Medal on my Hairy Ape chest, why then it’s Columbia adorning the brazen bosom of Anna with the Cross of Purity.”36
Meanwhile, amid the commotion over O’Neill’s latest triumph, an unyielding wedge had been driven between Cook’s “way of the group” philosophy of theater and the expansive ambitions of other Provincetown Players like O’Neill, Fitzie Fitzgerald, Bobby Jones, Cleon Throckmorton, and Jimmy Light. Cook’s grandiloquence had, quite simply, lost its inspirational appeal on the heels of their uptown success. “Our playwrights outgrew the home nest,” Fitzgerald said, making instant enemies of Kenton and Glaspell, who after this pegged her as a traitor. But Fitzgerald responded to the disbandment of the Players with assurances that their revolutionary mission would carry on to the commercial stage: “Their plays demanded better stages, better productions, than we could give them. Both plays and actors needed the advantages of larger audiences than the faithful old stable could house.”37
Glaspell and Cook departed for Greece in early March, the week before The Hairy Ape’s opening night. The Hairy Ape’s playbill lists Cook as director, apparently as a parting gesture of respect, though he and Glaspell were halfway across the Atlantic before the dress rehearsals had even begun. Consternation had spread over who would direct if not Cook; but by mid-February, O’Neill wrote Saxe Commins that he’d been doing “most of the directing.” Light was listed as the play’s stage manager, and he sat devotedly at O’Neill’s side during rehearsals as well. (Anticipating the move uptown, Arthur Hopkins also offered directorial advice and financing when necessary.)38 Glaspell’s Chains of Dew followed The Hairy Ape on the next bill. This three-act comedy, Kenton admitted, “was not good—none knew it better than [Glaspell]. But we foresaw that The Ape would go uptown, taking with it most of our players. Certainly by now it had become an honor higher to go than to stay.” (Glaspell would go on to win the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for her play Alison’s House.) Cook and O’Neill each thought the other had let them down. “Our richest, like our poorest,” Cook opined, “have desired not to give life but to have it given to them,” while O’Neill wrote Fitzgerald that “primarily, as you undoubtedly will agree, it is all Jig’s fault. As I look back on it now, I can see where he drove all our best talent, that we had developed, away from the theatre for daring to disagree with him—this in a supposed group democracy! Then beat it to Greece leaving a hollow shell as a monument to his egotism.”39 Cook would never return to New York. He succumbed to typhus at Delphi less than two years later and was buried in a tomb respectfully adorned with a stone from the Temple of Apollo.
Over the summer of 1922, Cook mailed off several drunken letters denouncing his former associates for selling out to the “quicksand of commercial New York.” “I do not see how Gene could possibly permit this,” he wrote to Kenton. “Edna, I vomit.”40 Just after Cook cabled to agree to the legal termination of the Players, a personal letter arrived at the theater lamenting what he regarded as a collective defeat: “I am forced to confess that our attempt to build up, by our own life and death, in an alien sea, a coral island of our own, has failed. … What one who loved it wishes for it now is euthanasia—a swift and painless death. We keep our promise; we give this theatre we love good death. The Provincetown Players end their story here.”41
Draining Bitter Cups
Eugene O’Neill Jr., now twelve years old, was scheduled to visit Provincetown in the summer of 1922. “I want to have an opportunity to get to know him,” O’Neill told Kathleen Jenkins, “to convince him that I am his friend as well as his father.” Eugene arrived early that August and stayed for three weeks of sunbathing and picnicking in the dunes, splashing in the surf with his little half brother, Shane, and generally making a fine impression for his newfound family. Even Jim O’Neill, by this time determined to drink himself into oblivion, trekked out to Cape Cod to make the acquaintance of his nephew. O’Neill admired the boy’s precocious intelligence and was secretly pleased that he was a troublemaker at school, just as he himself had been.42 That summer, father and son forged a genuine and lasting bond, a mutual admiration that would carry over into Eugene’s adulthood, and that Shane, much as he longed to, would never achieve.
When Eugene Jr. left to go back to his mother, O’Neill gave himself entirely over to drink. His behavior that summer was outrageous, and he was, by most accounts, a nasty drunk. One night he showed up at a costume party, darkly tanned as usual, wearing nothing but a leopard-skin loincloth and an orange fright wig. A Boston journalist, believing his tan was makeup, wiped a piece of paper against his arm, hoping to take the illustrious smudge back home as a unique souvenir of the playwright. O’Neill glared down at her, then dealt a merciless blow that sent her flying across the room. Bobby Jones, who visited that summer, informed Mabel Dodge that both O’Neill and Boulton had been “rendered entirely will-less by liquor.” Not much of a drinker himself, Jones witnessed some of his colleague’s worst binges yet. One night when Terry Carlin was present, O’Neill urinated into a bottle of whiskey and then drank from it. “I worship the O’Neills,” Jones admitted, despite the crass behavior. “They are the noblest spirits there are … [but] they know nothing about anything except suffering and hell generally.”43
That November O’Neill and Boulton packed up Shane and Fifine Clark, or “Gaga,” as Shane had come to call his stalwart nanny, and relocated the family to a thirty-acre estate known as Brook Farm in Ridgefield, Connecticut. The property consisted of acres of woodland, an old apple orchard, two ponds, and an expansive lawn dotted with elms and maples. Ridgefield was an easier commute to New York than Provincetown, but the manor house that came with the property was ill suited to the O’Neills. Terry Carlin inhabited the attic for a time, and O’Neill felt more at ease up there jawing with the old anarchist than anywhere else in the house.44 Brook Farm’s twelve rooms lacked furniture and other amenities, making its enormity doubly daunting and expensive. More to the point, its stately grandeur reflected the kind of complacent, gentrified existence that, philosophically at least, O’Neill and Boulton abhorred. O’Neill rationalized its expense as a worthy investment, and it spared them from living in hotels, the
demoralizing theatrical lifestyle of his itinerant father and mother. When guests arrived, the O’Neills were determined to make it seem, if only in outward appearance, that they had a real home.45
Eugene O’Neill adorned with seaweed outside Peaked Hill Bar.
(MARGERY BOULTON COLLECTION, COURTESY OF DALLAS CLINE AND THE SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)
Brook Farm in 1922.
(MARGERY BOULTON COLLECTION, COURTESY OF DALLAS CLINE AND THE SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)
Nine original O’Neill plays had appeared on Broadway in just two years, an astonishing run. He also received a gold medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters that winter, and his plays were becoming known in Europe. Macgowan and Jones had gone to Germany the previous summer to drum up producers for O’Neill’s plays, and they’d induced one in Berlin to put on “Anna Christie.” (This was postwar Germany, a defeated nation in financial ruin; for the rights to his play, O’Neill received 7,840,000,000 marks, or $1.39.) By February O’Neill had completed his three-act play Welded, a histrionic account of his tumultuous marriage to Boulton. It was a good time to take stock of their relationship. “You know,” he told Kenneth Macgowan during one of his visits to Brook Farm, “I don’t really like Agnes.” Macgowan winced. “That seemed to me stronger somehow,” he said afterward, “than if he’d said he hated her.”46