Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts
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By 1939, he’d boil these ideas down to a single tragedy to take place over a single day: Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
O’Neill’s infatuation with Monterey slowly began to diminish after months of steady work. He continued writing her, but the letters, as in the past when he’d separated from Boulton, became more matter-of-fact and emotionally distant in tone, and Monterey decided to head to a spa in Baden-Baden, Germany, that June, in part to stamp out (or put to the test) their lingering desire for one another. When Boulton left the island in mid-April to visit her dying father at Shelton, O’Neill’s letter to her betrays a guilt-ridden and desperately needy conscience. After dropping her off at the ship, “I drove right back to Our Home. Our Home!” he said. “The thought of the place is indissolubly intermingled with my love for you, with our nine years of marriage that, after much struggle, have finally won to this haven, this ultimate island where we may rest and live toward our dreams with a sense of permanence and security that here we do belong. ‘And, perhaps, the Hairy Ape at last belongs.’” Boulton wasn’t over his affair, he knew. “I was never in love with her. That was nonsense. … I love you and only you, now and forever.”272
Shane, Agnes, Oona, and Eugene O’Neill in Bermuda, 1926.
(COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)
Lawrence Langner, the managing director of the Theatre Guild, paid a visit to O’Neill at Spithead that March. Aside from Langner, O’Neill never liked the Guild’s board of directors; they were an infamous assortment of difficult personalities but by then the most respected producers of serious drama in the country, having produced such breakout American plays as Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine in 1923, Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted in 1924, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and S. N. Behrman’s The Second Man in 1927.
The acrimony between O’Neill and the Guild had a long history. From the time O’Neill had first submitted Thirst to the Washington Square Players in 1915, before they’d become the Theatre Guild, to the end of the Provincetown Players in 1922, O’Neill and the Guild’s executive committee simply didn’t see eye to eye: “In rejecting my work you have a clear lead [in numbers] over any other management,” he wrote Langner in 1922. “All this without any trace of hard feelings on my part,” he said. “It is merely a question of unprejudiced disagreement, but I am afraid the evidence indicates that your Com. [committee] & I are doomed forever to disagree.”273 Of course, the one play of O’Neill’s the Guild had produced, as the Washington Square Players, was In the Zone, which he thought of as a lesser work.
The Guild had rejected “Anna Christie” in 1921, but Langner pleaded with the committee to reconsider its approach to the playwright. O’Neill had outlined what he believed to be a series of slights against him by the Guild and its management to Langner, who forwarded the letter to his fellow producer Theresa Helburn with a note to be read out loud to the committee: “The trouble with you people is that you don’t understand O’Neill’s temperament. O’Neill is perfectly easy to get along with if you treat him as a friend. If your relations are impersonal, you’ll get nowhere. (Why [don’t we] get up a booze party for him?)”274 By the spring of 1927, O’Neill was willing to swallow his pride and accept the Guild’s (to his mind paltry) option because “it is all going out and nothing coming in with me at present and I direly need all the cash I can grab.” But the Guild must reciprocate his own “eagerness” by committing themselves to an “actual production at the earliest possible date.”275 He was especially concerned that the method of Strange Interlude would be leaked and that someone else might steal the idea and produce a play before his appeared.
Langner read Marco Millions during his stay in Bermuda, and it intrigued him; but Strange Interlude was a revelation. He read the script in one night in his hotel room. A tropical storm had descended on the island, and as the storm grew louder and more menacing, the action of the play grew correspondingly more thrilling. He read until four o’clock in the morning, and by the time he’d reached the sixth act, he said, “I judged it one of the greatest plays of all time.”276 The next day O’Neill celebrated Langner’s eulogies over Strange Interlude with a swim, while Langner filmed him with his cine-Kodak movie camera. “He was built like an athlete,” Langner said, “his deep black eyes set in a sunburnt Irish face, as handsome as one could hope to see anywhere, and the skin of his lean body was the color and texture of mahogany with underlying muscles of whipcord. At no time before or since have I seen him in such good health.”277 (When Langner later informed George Bernard Shaw that O’Neill was done with alcohol, the Irish playwright wryly responded, “He’ll probably never write a good play again.”)278
O’Neill already had made it clear to Langner before he’d arrived that for the Guild to option his plays would require a binding agreement to produce both Marco and Strange Interlude for its next season. Langner agreed and convinced him to return to New York to strategize for the ambitious productions.
On May 15, less than three weeks after Boulton’s return from Connecticut, O’Neill sailed back to New York with Harold de Polo, who’d rented a house near Spithead, and stayed at Lawrence Langner’s apartment in New York. On six out of the eight nights he was there, Langner remembered, O’Neill left his apartment for Monterey’s. “He told me he had fallen in love with her,” Langner recounted of O’Neill’s stay. “He said one reason he got on so well with her was that she was such a good manager; she was able to organize the material side of his life—arranging for railroad tickets, and so forth. Agnes, he said, could seldom plan ahead; she was easygoing and helpless, and needed to be looked after by him.”279
By the time O’Neill returned to Spithead, the property no longer appeared as the “haven” he’d envisioned when Boulton was absent. “Perhaps it is my mood,” he wrote Monterey, “but the weather has seemed intolerably oppressive and I’ve found little zest in anything I used to take pleasure in. Even the sea has failed me. It is such a tepid, lukewarm ocean now, there is no life or sting to it, the only reaction one gets is lassitude. I would never spend another summer down here on a bet. It really is just too boring! … My visit to New York in May was far too short!” He and Boulton had a summer of “nervous bickerings and misunderstandings,” during which time he’d been either sick with the Bermuda flu or working zealously on cutting the action of Strange Interlude to one night, down from the multiple nights its cumbersome original length would require.280
O’Neill traveled back to New York late that August to convince the Theatre Guild to stop delaying, with its convoluted options and paltry advances, and produce Marco Millions and Strange Interlude that season. Boulton also believed that, given the breakdown of their relationship that summer, it would be good for him to be away from the family. This solo trip to New York amounted to a trial separation.
Once aboard the Fort St. George, O’Neill wired Agnes Boulton with a bawdy reference to their last night together. But he longed to see Carlotta Monterey, who’d just returned from a restorative couple of months luxuriating in Baden-Baden. On September 9, they reunited for the first time since May, at which point he reported back to Boulton that he was bored and lonely (“the alcoholic days were much pleasanter!”); he was spending time with Monterey, he told her, but their relationship was platonic.281 He would remain in New York until mid-October.
During this separation, the correspondence between O’Neill and Boulton oscillated between mutual pledges of freedom from their conjugal vows and strident accusations of betrayal. “Please do anything you want to do,” Boulton wrote, “anything that will make you happy, or give you pleasure.” Then, a few days later, “Goodbye. I’m glad Carlotta’s nerves are gone. Do you think she would be interested in taking charge of Spithead? If so, tell her I’ve given up the job. She is certainly more beautiful than I am.” “What sort of game is this you’re playing, Agnes?” he demanded, after accusing her of having an affair. “E
ither I’m crazy or you are! Probably I am, anyway. Or, at any rate, I wish to Christ I could escape from this obscene and snaily creeping tedium of dull days, and empty hours like nervous yawns, into some madness—of love or lust or drink or anything else!”282
“Oh, you’ve gone and done it!” Monterey moaned helplessly to O’Neill before he departed once more for Bermuda. “I love you, damn it!”283
O’Neill arrived at Spithead on October 21, his marriage of over nine years effectively, and mutually, sabotaged. O’Neill had arranged for Macgowan to keep Monterey showered in roses and addressed his love letters to “Shadow Eyes,” his pet name for her. When he returned to New York in mid-November, his letters to Boulton became either guardedly accusatory or all business. Planning for his second divorce, he knew that any correspondence could be used against him in court. He requested that Boulton send him every item of manuscript material that was stored at Spithead, giving the only partially true justification that he planned to sell it to a rare books dealer to avoid financial catastrophe. At Christmastime, after she’d sent him the majority of the material (minus his 1925 diary, his autograph manuscript outlining “The Sea Mother’s Son,” and Exorcism, among other valuable items), he broke up with her permanently. “You don’t love me any more,” he wrote. “We don’t love each other. … I love someone else. Most deeply. … And the someone loves me.”284
Carlotta Monterey. An inscription by Monterey reads, “This was Gene’s favorite photograph of me.”
(PHOTO BY MARCIA STEIN. COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)
The Theatre Guild at long last scheduled Marco Millions and Strange Interlude to open in January 1928, but most of his attention was focused on extracting himself from his marriage and attaching himself more firmly to the future Mrs. Eugene O’Neill. Boulton, however, ignored O’Neill’s entreaties for her to keep away until after the dual openings. Leaving the children behind, she sailed to New York and checked into a room at the Hotel Wentworth, where O’Neill was staying.285 Monterey wasn’t amused. “She calls me every day to get that bitch out of the room,” O’Neill complained to Harold de Polo.286
On January 14, Boulton ordered a sunlamp in her hotel room to battle a cold before heading back to Bermuda. Sprawling naked and miserable under the heat, she heard a knock. Thinking it was her sister, she opened the door en dishabille, and there was O’Neill. They fell into each other’s arms. It was, Boulton later recalled of the spontaneous tryst, “like two ghosts sleeping together.”287 This was the last night they made love and, unless by accident before her return to Bermuda, the last time they would encounter one another for more than a decade.
Then came an unexpected triumph. After several years of fiendishly annoying rewrites, compromises, and disappointments, Marco Millions premiered on January 9 at the Guild Theatre and was a box office hit. O’Neill’s only accomplished satire, Marco tracks the legendary journey of the thirteenth-century Venetian trader Marco Polo. Determined to return home a millionaire, Marco cavalierly spreads materialism across the Far and Middle East. The script demands terrifically complex scene changes and a gigantic cast—thirty-one speaking roles as well as “People of Persia, India, Mongolia, Cathay, courtiers, nobles, ladies, wives, warriors of Kublai Kahn’s court, musicians, dancers, Chorus of mourners” (CP2, 382). Casting this show wasn’t easy, even for the nonspeaking roles. Nearly every scene includes music, poetry, dancing, and chanting, and the dialogue must come across as satiric one minute and transcendent the next.
O’Neill always bore an abiding fascination with the Far East. “Europe somehow means nothing to me,” he said to Boulton when she’d expressed her longing to transplant to Europe. “Either the South Seas or China, say I.” He read Kate Buss’s Studies in the Chinese Drama (1922), which informed his medley of styles; for plot and characterization, he consulted Marco Polo’s Il milione, or “The Million,” the first narrative of Marco’s expedition in 1271–95. This alleged travelogue, actually written by a romance writer named Rusticello da Pisa, remained the only source for the West’s imaginings of the Far East until the seventeenth century, and most of it was based on lies. (Polo’s reports of dog-faced natives, unicorns, and parakeets lifting elephants to the sky are a few indications that the Venetian’s account was to a great extent bogus.) O’Neill’s notes from the scholarly edition of The Book of Ser Marco Polo reveal that O’Neill quoted the editor’s description of Marco Polo verbatim—“a practical man, brave, shrewd, prudent, keen in affairs, and never losing interest in mercantile details, very fond of the chase, sparing of speech,” after which he scrawled, “The American Ideal!” His own dialogue made him “guffaw as I write … and not bitter humor either although it’s all satirical. I actually grow to love my American pillars of society, Polo Brothers & Son.” Yet he still wanted the nation to acknowledge “the true valuation of all our triumphant brass band materialism; [the country] should see the cost—and the result in terms of eternal verities. What a colossal, ironic, one hundred percent American tragedy that would be—what?”288
O’Neill’s comical anachronism (the Venetians in the play speak in 1920s American slang) was a frontal assault on the excesses of American cultural imperialism. Allusions to contemporary American society in the stage directions are pronounced. He likens Marco’s comportment to that of a southern senator who wants a constitutional amendment, referring to Texas’s notorious anti-immigration stance and denial of the theory of evolution, to prohibit “the migration of non-Nordic birds into Texas, or … the practice of the laws of biology within the twelve-mile limit” (CP2, 424). When Marco’s uncle mulls over their prospects in the Middle East, he reads the notes from a previous voyage: “There’s one kingdom called Mosul [now the second-largest city in Iraq] and in it a district of Baku where there’s a great fountain of oil. There’s a growing demand for it. (then speaking) Make a mental note of that” (CP2, 401).
O’Neill was plainly at risk here of betraying his own doctrine that propaganda doesn’t “strike home.” The critics split both ways: liberals, the choir to whom O’Neill preached, applauded Marco Millions for “poking fun at American philistinism, American money-grubbing and money-wallowing,” while conservatives denounced it as scurrilous opinionating. Many parallels were made between O’Neill’s play and Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbitt, a popular satire of the spiritual bankruptcy both authors believed American capitalism had spawned. (Babbitt was published in 1922, the year O’Neill began Marco.) George Jean Nathan referred to his friend’s play as “the sourest and most magnificent poke in the jaw that American big business and the American business man have ever got.” The Wall Street News review, on the other hand, was O’Neill’s worst fear of propaganda realized: “By many sterile devices, O’Neill drives home his sledgehammer points until the play takes on some of the dull witlessness of the Babbittish business man he is so intent on impaling.”289 But for all of Marco Millions’ notoriety, it would be overshadowed by O’Neill’s next production, Strange Interlude, three weeks later.
On January 30, O’Neill avoided the premiere of what he knew would be either his greatest theatrical sensation or, given its unconventional themes and stage techniques, merely an ambitious failure. He strolled aimlessly around the city for the first couple of hours of the play’s opening and bumped into an old crony from his seafaring days. “Gene O’Neill!” he heard the aged sailor call out on the street. “What the hell are you doing these days?” (“At that very minute,” mused a publisher O’Neill told this to years later, “his greatest hit was being played on Broadway!”)290 After this brief encounter, O’Neill went back to the Wentworth to meet Kenneth Macgowan and his wife, Edna, who were attending the play, for dinner during intermission. The curtain rose at five fifteen instead of eight thirty, New York’s usual curtain time. After a ninety-minute dinner break at seven forty, they were to reconvene at nine o’clock, with a final curtain at eleven.291 Macgowan informed
his apprehensive friend that the publicity was so hyped up around the theater district, a Broadway drugstore was selling “Strange Interlude” sandwiches to the theatergoers. “I know what that is,” O’Neill replied. “It’s a four-decker with nothing but ham!”292
Strange Interlude premiered at Broadway’s John Golden Theatre and was largely hailed as O’Neill’s first true tour de force; with its groundbreaking “thought asides” and timely themes, the play signaled its author’s complete maturation as an artist.
O’Neill’s self-described “woman play,” Strange Interlude revolves around the convoluted relationships of Nina Leeds, one of his most deeply wrought female characters. Nina has built a myth of perfection around her deceased fiancé, Gordon Shaw, a World War I aviator shot down two days before the armistice. She surrounds herself with four men who individually cannot satisfy her needs but together comprise her ideal man—lover, provider, father, and son. (The father figure, Charlie Marsden, the combined names of O’Neill friends Charles Demuth and Marsden Hartley, is the only demonstrably bisexual character in his canon.)293 Along with meeting Nina’s essential desires, they also represent the forces shaping the nation: her dead fiancé American “schoolboy ideals,” her lover scientific advancement, her provider venture capitalism, her father figure Puritan morality, and her son Gordon a false sense of national innocence. Since none of these are compatible, the nation (Nina) defaults to the protective and stable, if morally restraining, realm of the puritanical.294
Strange Interlude, O’Neill said, was an “attempt at the new masked psychological drama … without masks—a successful attempt, perhaps, in so far as it concerns only surfaces and their immediate subsurfaces, but not where, occasionally, it tries to probe deeper.”295 Writing from inside O’Neill’s head, George Jean Nathan, in his arch 1929 sketch “Eugene O’Neill as a Character in Fiction,” sets down a prolonged, playfully satiric dialogue in O’Neill’s voice that must have, at least partially, originated in a conversation: “The truth about soliloquies and asides as I employ them is that, while they are cunningly announced by me to represent my characters’ unspoken thoughts—I’m a shrewd hand at concealing the obvious and artfully masking it in a way to make the impressionables gabble—they are actually nothing more than straight dramatic speeches.”296