Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  O’Neill conspicuously co-opted his protagonists’ first names, Jim and Ella, from his recently departed parents. And the parallels between the actual couple and the fictional couple don’t end there. Jim’s desire to “pass” the bar exam is analogous in the play to “passing,” if only psychologically, as white, a dual goal that he ultimately fails to achieve as a result of his racist wife’s mental sabotage. (In a noteworthy coincidence, Paul Robeson was forced to put off his own bar exam in order to devote himself to the rehearsals of the play.)99 Jim fails to achieve his dream of success, just as James O’Neill had failed to attain real stature as a Shakespearean actor. Both Jim and James are also thwarted by the needs of their troubled wives—in the final scenes, Ella Harris is driven back to angelic childhood by her own racism and Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night to her Catholic schoolgirl days through the power of morphine. Still, along with his parents’ names, the characters also share the two best-known slave names in all of American fiction: the slave Jim from Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Eliza Harris from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).

  O’Neill completed All God’s Chillun in October of 1923, and the play appeared in George Jean Nathan’s American Mercury that February 1924, at which time the Provincetown Playhouse announced they would put it on that spring.100 To print such a tale in a literary journal read by a handful of downtown literati was one thing; but to show a white actress kissing the hand of a black man live on a public stage was quite another. Simply put, O’Neill was accused of promoting miscegenation. It was then reported that Helen MacKellar, who’d starred as Ruth Atkins in Beyond the Horizon, turned down the role with “outraged hauteur” after hearing that the leading man wasn’t to be played by a white man in blackface. O’Neill denied this and made a public statement that he’d meant the part for Mary Blair from the beginning. The press then circulated a follow-up story with a picture of Blair captioned, “The play requires that the white girl kiss the negro’s hand on stage,”101 which circulated in papers across the country.

  At the end of a day-long interview at Brook Farm with the New York Times, O’Neill admitted to the incendiary nature of the material while at the same time maintaining his rejection of open propagandizing: “Of course, the struggle between [Jim and Ella] is primarily the result of the difference in their racial heritage, but it is their characters, the gap between them and their struggle to bridge it which interests me as a dramatist, nothing else. I didn’t create the gap, this cleavage—it exists. And members of both races do struggle to bridge it with love. Whether they should or not isn’t in my play.” Thematically, he said, the plot would still hold true if Jim had been Japanese and Ella white, “or if Harris had been a German, and the play produced in France. Or an Armenian in Turkey. Or a Jew and a Gentile.”102 But they weren’t. He was black and she was white, in America, and that seemed to matter a great deal to a lot of people.

  If O’Neill’s hoped-for effect was for race relations to come across as “incidental” in All God’s Chillun, he couldn’t have failed more disastrously. But he remained obstinate. “I know I am right,” he said. “I know that all the irresponsible gabble of the sensation-mongers and notoriety hounds is wrong. They are the ones who are trying to rouse ill feeling [between the races] and they should be held responsible. … All we ask is a square deal.”103 “Prejudice born of an entire ignorance of the subject,” he said in a follow-up press release, “is the last word in injustice and absurdity. The Provincetown Playhouse has ignored all criticism not founded on a knowledge of the play and will continue to ignore it.”104 In the weeks leading up to the production, however, some criticism would prove impossible to ignore.

  “Gentlemen!” roared Professor George Odell of Columbia University, thumping his fist on a table, “Eugene O’Neill is responsible for the profanity and insanity on the American stage today!”105 Countless voices rose up to join Odell’s cry: the Society for the Prevention of Vice and Crime, Hearst’s New York American newspaper, the Ku Klux Klan, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Authors’ League of America, the Salvation Army, the New York Board of Education, and New York City Hall all united against the production on Macdougal Street.

  When asked in the spirit of compromise to take out the hand-kissing scene, O’Neill flatly refused: “The play will stand as it is. That would weaken the entire last scene. It is the climax on which the entire play is built.”106 This only exacerbated matters, of course. The Provincetown Playhouse was next harassed with poison-pen letters, bomb threats, and warnings of race riots. The Long Island chapter of the Ku Klux Klan threatened to blow up the theater on opening night. “If you open this play,” it warned, “the theater will be bombed, and you will be responsible for all the people killed.” In retrospect, Paul Robeson considered the whole affair pretty laughable, but the situation was worse than he ever knew. O’Neill and Jimmy Light purposefully hid the vilest letters from their actors. “A great many,” Light recalled later, “were obscene or threatening or both, but Mary and Paul didn’t see the largest part because we began holding them back. I remember one in particular to Mary, really filthy, pathological.”107

  The worst was addressed to O’Neill from the Georgia Klan’s Grand Kleagle. The letter began reasonably, more of a form letter than a threat, but then got to the point: “You have a son [Shane]. If your play goes on, don’t expect to see him again.” Without hesitation, Light said, O’Neill scrawled across it in bold letters, “Go fuck yourself!” signed it “Gene Tyrone O’Neill,” and fired it back to the Klansman by return mail.108 (O’Neill’s actual middle name was Gladstone, named for the nineteenth-century British prime minister who favored home rule for Ireland. Tyrone is the county from which the O’Neill tribe originated and the name O’Neill would give the family in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. It’s probable that by signing his letter this way, he was defiantly identifying himself as Irish Catholic, another group hated by the Klan.)

  George Jean Nathan noted in American Mercury that Colonel Billy Mayfield “of the Protective Order of the Ku Klux Klan, Texas Lodge” wrote an editorial in the Klan’s newsletter The Fiery Cross demanding “the immediate dispatch of [O’Neill] on the ground that he is a Catholic and hence doubtless trying to stir up the Negroes to arm, march on Washington, and burn down the Nordic White House.” The Fiery Cross responded with an equally sarcastic item of its own: “Art is fast approaching its highest pinnacle in America. We are to be congratulated. … It will be interesting to watch the success of the production. … Its uplift will be tremendous and do much toward bringing about ‘universal brotherhood,’ of which we now hear so much.”109

  This wasn’t the criminalized white supremacist outfit of later years. The Klan by the mid-1920s had a national membership of around 5 million. Thus O’Neill wasn’t facing just the condemnation of racists and the press but a reigning moral stance of the times. Miscegenation, after all, was illegal in thirty of the forty-eight United States. (This number would remain steady until 1948 and wouldn’t arrive at zero until 1967.) Augustus Thomas, one of the most highly respected American playwrights of the time, publicly stated that he thought O’Neill was treading on thin societal ice. “In the first place,” Thomas wrote, “I should never have written the play, and in the second place, if I had I should be willing to do what is usually done in such cases, to permit a white man to play the part of the negro. The present arrangement, I think, has a tendency to break down social barriers which are better left untouched.” The choice to cast Robeson instead of a white actor, Thomas said, appealing to the literary angle, was an “unnecessary concession to realism.” (When Thomas was a guest lecturer at Baker’s English 47 seminar during O’Neill’s time there, he’d encouraged the students to write their plays as vehicles for actors; O’Neill refused to attend.)110

  Several prominent literary figures, on the other hand, black and white, rallied to support O’Neill. On the latter side, these included two rising men of le
tters, Edmund Wilson and the poet T. S. Eliot. Eliot wrote that in his estimation, the dramatist “not only understands one aspect of the ‘negro problem,’ but he succeeds in giving this problem universality, in implying wider application.” Wilson, in his New Republic review, hailed the play as “one of the best things yet written about the race problem and among the best of O’Neill’s plays.”111

  New York’s black audiences were just as divided over the play as whites. Alain Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois, two of the era’s most respected black intellectuals, defended it. Locke dubbed it, along with The Emperor Jones, a work of “fine craftsmanship” by a “clairvoyant genius,” while Du Bois wrote an impassioned program note for the Experimental Theatre’s playbill: “Any mention of Negro blood or Negro life in America for a century has been occasion for an ugly picture, a dirty allusion, a nasty comment or a pessimistic forecast. The result is that the Negro today fears any attempt of the artist to paint Negroes. He is not satisfied unless everything is perfect and proper and beautiful and joyful and hopeful. He is afraid to be painted as he is, lest his human foibles and shortcomings be seized by his enemies for the purposes of the ancient and hateful propaganda. … Eugene O’Neill is bursting through. He has my sympathy, for his soul must be lame with the blows rained upon him. But it is work that must be done.”112

  Others responded with open hostility. O’Neill had made one of the country’s most feared taboos, mixed-race marriage, even more inflammatory by choosing to unite an upright African American man with an ignorant Irish American woman. It was demeaning, they contended, that Ella was intellectually and morally beneath Jim. In the Nation review, proving their point, a white critic wrote, “Why mate a first-rate Negro with a third-rate white woman? Because those are the facts. … Only this woman would have married a Negro in America today.”113

  William H. Lewis, the son of Virginia slaves and the first African American to hold many essential government posts, including U.S. attorney general, had become a political leader in Boston and declared that O’Neill’s play would be banned not only in Boston but across New England—and justifiably so: “Every negro in New England,” he said, “will engage in this battle against this insidious effort at propaganda that insults the intelligence and self-respect of every negro in this country.” Religious leaders from the black community also joined in the protest. Macgowan related in a satiric New York Times article that the controversy had “stirred up the racial feelings of the Rev. Dr. Squiddlebottom”—that is, Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and father of the future political leader of the same name. Powell asserted that All God’s Chillun would place racial equality in jeopardy because the play “intimates that we [black men] are desirous of marrying white women. … The kissing of a white woman by a big, strapping negro is bound to cause bad feelings. … For myself and my congregation, the largest colored Baptist Church in the city, I want to go on record as being opposed to Mr. O’Neill’s play.” Rev. J. W. Brown, pastor of Mother Africa Methodist Episcopal Zion Church agreed: “This play is most unfortunate as it portrays the negro in the wrong light. No thinking colored man desired to marry outside of his own race.”114

  Paul Robeson, soon one of the most revered African American performers in history, was twenty-six when he published his essay on the matter entitled “Reflections on O’Neill’s Plays.” This moving reminiscence of his experience working with O’Neill and Jimmy Light was published, six months after the run, in the Urban League’s journal Opportunity—one of the most influential organs of the Harlem Renaissance. “The reactions to [Jones and All God’s Chillun] among Negroes,” he wrote, “but point out one of the most serious drawbacks to the development of a true Negro dramatic literature. We are too self-conscious, too afraid of showing all phases of our life—especially those phases which are of greatest dramatic value. The great mass of our group discourage any member who has the courage to fight these petty prejudices.” “If there ever was a broad, liberal-minded man,” Robeson said of O’Neill, “he is one. He has had Negro friends and appreciated them for their true worth. He would be the last to cast any slur on the colored people.” He admits to having been a neophyte to the stage less than a year earlier but states that his opportunity to act in “two of the finest plays of America’s most distinguished playwright” had transformed him permanently into a dedicated man of the theater.115

  Nearly a decade later, in 1933, when Robeson’s film version of The Emperor Jones was released, the reaction in Harlem was divided once again: “I can’t see how a man in Mr. Robeson’s standing would be a parrot just to make a few bucks,” an audience member wrote to Harlem’s Amsterdam News. “I am a man that loves my race and am willing to stand up and fight to the end any day for it.” The article goes on to describe a standing-room-only screening at Harlem’s Roosevelt Theatre: in spite of protests over the word “nigger,” “which aroused more heated discussion, and in some quarters more indignation, than any other incident in the last decade … the audience—or the major part of it—fairly worshipped [Jones].”116 Still, as the audience gathered on the street out front, a man was overheard remarking, “I got my opinion of a nigger who would stoop that low and use that word on the screen for the white folks.”117

  Jimmy Light directed All God’s Chillun Got Wings, and he’d initially hoped to get out in front of the escalating hullabaloo and release the production as early as possible; but then he delayed it for the season’s final bill. In part, this was because when the American Mercury first commissioned the play, O’Neill’s contract stipulated that it not go on until at least three weeks after publication. On top of this, when rehearsals began, Mary Blair came down with pleurisy and was hospitalized for nearly a month. Macgowan conceded that to blame a leading lady’s illness for a delay, given the theater world’s unbending “the show must go on” tradition, was the “lamest excuse in the world.” Buoyed by an approval rate of about 85 percent from their subscribers, the Provincetown Playhouse moved ahead with rehearsals.118

  Given these setbacks, Light and the Triumvirate concocted a shrewd tactical move that would draw the press away from the All God’s Chillun scandal, which they saw only exacerbated with time: they would revive The Emperor Jones, with Robeson playing that role as well, ten days before the scheduled opening of All God’s Chillun on May 15, 1924. This decision had the favorable effect of taking the spotlight off the escalating scandal and onto the comparative talents of the Provincetown’s newest African American star against Gilpin’s by then legendary performance.119 Although Robeson had at first rejected the role of Brutus Jones as at best unseemly and at worst racist, he then he heard about Gilpin. “I remember vividly picking up the paper one morning at breakfast, and reading the printed eulogies,” Robeson said. “I could not help wondering if I too should have been so acclaimed if, when my chance came, I had accepted it.”120

  The Emperor Jones’s revival allowed cast and crew to blow off steam beforehand as well, in the calm eye of this unrelenting storm of public hysteria. One night after a performance, Jimmy Light discovered O’Neill pounding the tom-tom drum onstage. He never stopped drumming, even as he and Light climbed the stairs to attend the party in Cleon Throckmorton’s apartment. At one point, Light, Robeson, and Throckmorton removed their shirts to compare physiques. Boulton, with connubial pride, induced O’Neill to show off his. He did so, revealing his own well-muscled torso, then continued on with his drumming. Boom—boom—boom—the noise reverberated up and down Macdougal Street, attracting the attention of a cop on the beat. The officer also happened to be one of their bootleggers, and he agreed to let the party relocate to O’Neill’s old roommate Barney Gallant’s basement-level speakeasy, Club Gallant, at 40 Washington Square South. There O’Neill continued his shirtless communion with the tom-tom late into the night.121

  Heywood Broun arrived at the theater on All God’s Chillun’s opening with a holstered Colt .45. Hart Crane stepped into the building armed, in his words, with a �
��cane for cudgeling the unruly.”122 James “Slim” Martin, a steelworker associated with Terry Carlin, had rounded up a gang of roughnecks to protect the actors and the theater. Two of these were assigned to Robeson as bodyguards—staring six inches upward at the former football all-star, they snorted at the ludicrous prospect that he needed protecting and strode off to look after weaker targets. (O’Neill was, naturally, back at Brook Farm on opening night, pleading an unspecified illness.)123

  Manhattan district attorney Joab H. Banton, a Texan, had sworn he’d “get” O’Neill, and he had one last possibility do so: he would refuse to allow children to perform in the play. Black and white children are featured in the opening scene, before they lose their angels’ wings and age into racist adults. The theater knew the law requiring a permit to employ child actors; but that was largely a formality of the Gerry Society, which had already granted them permission. Then, late in the night before the opening, the playhouse received a call from Mayor John F. Hylan’s “Chief Magistrate,” reported the Herald Tribune, that “revoked the Gerry Society’s permission for children to appear in the performance. … It is evidently believed by the officials that the small actors of both races would be hurt by contact with one another in the theater, though not in the public schools and elsewhere.” (One white father did send a telegram from Georgia refusing to allow his preteen son to perform onstage with black children.)124