Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  O’Neill envisioned Dynamo as the first of a planned trilogy of plays he was alternately calling “Myth Plays for the God-forsaken” or “God Is Dead! Long Live—What?” that combined would “dig at the roots,” O’Neill said, “of the sickness of today as I feel it—the death of an old God and the failure of Science and Materialism to give any satisfying new One for the surviving primitive religious instinct to find a meaning for life in, and to comfort its fears of death with.”34

  Monterey’s fastidiousness in domestic management was perfectly suited to O’Neill’s hermetic lifestyle. She took care of the house, wrote most of their letters, planned engagements, shopped for clothes. She took no interest in socializing or the life of a celebrity. In short, she excelled at the very things that interested Boulton least about her marriage with O’Neill. Monterey’s previous husband, the celebrated caricaturist Ralph Barton, who still pined for her, and Charlie Chaplin, with whom Barton was close friends, intuited that Monterey’s chief aim had always been to attach herself to “a man of genius, to cut him off from everybody and minister to his genius, while she herself shone in reflected glory.”35 Barton knew he’d failed to appreciate this; then O’Neill appeared, and it was too late.

  For Monterey, the play her lover was writing at the Villa Marguerite, Dynamo, would be the first work of O’Neill’s that she could claim as theirs alone, the way Boulton had with Beyond the Horizon (“our play,” Boulton called it). “I—too—am alive with ‘Dynamo,’” Monterey wrote Commins, “but Gene at the stage of wondering if it is rotten or what not! … I understand & soothe—! This Lover of mine is also my child—& living beside him thro’ Fire & Beauty has greatly developed & enriched the inner me.”36 Even with such rapturous support, O’Neill’s mind was besieged by hideous attacks of rage, guilt, and fear—the divorce negotiations with Boulton, his worry over the children, and a “snotty” interview Boulton had given the New York World with the unsettling headline, “O’Neill Divorce Rumors Scouted.”37 Flouting O’Neill’s wish, at the outset, to end the marriage with dignity, Boulton whetted the press’s appetite for a good scandal by denying there was any talk of divorce. Another interview appeared late that June in the New York Daily News with the more egregious title, “Wife Will Grant O’Neill His ‘Illusion’ of Freedom.”

  Once Dynamo had been sent off to the Theatre Guild, O’Neill induced Monterey to join him on an expedition that would further remove them from the public eye and consummate his fascination with the Far East. On October 3, 1928, two days before sailing for Hong Kong, O’Neill sent Boulton one last piece of correspondence. It was a postcard, on the back of which he penned a backhanded well-wish: “This is a marvelous château! You must visit it when you come to France. Kiss Shane & Oona for me. Love. Gene.” The front of the postcard showed a picture of an old tomb with a caption that reads, in part, “Tombeau d’Agnès” (the tomb of Agnes).38

  On their guard against further scandal, O’Neill and Monterey booked separate cabins, and Monterey brought along her masseuse Tuva Drew to serve as nurse, maid, and secretary. O’Neill noticed the wire from New York on the bed in his cabin only after their packet ship André-Lebon had already sailed from Marseille. It was the Theatre Guild’s verdict: a unanimous acceptance of Dynamo and a “Bon Voyage” wish. Monterey wept uncontrollably with relief. “It was such a divine send off,” she wrote Saxe Commins, “& Gene is resting & relaxing & is his dear un-worried self!”39 They spent his fortieth birthday, October 16, 1928, docked in the Yemeni seaport Aden. En route to Singapore they passed through the Red Sea, stopping in Djibouti before continuing on to the Indian Ocean and British Ceylon. Each morning for nearly two weeks, O’Neill worked on “It Cannot Be Mad,” a play about the rise of an automotive billionaire; as with Dynamo, the theme was “the general spiritual futility of the substitute-God search.”40 This time in his planned trilogy the substitute-God would be wealth; but he couldn’t contrive a sustainable dramatic structure, and once they’d sailed east of the Suez Canal, he abandoned writing entirely.

  In Singapore O’Neill caught a dire case of sunstroke after he insisted on taking a swim in the furnacelike noonday heat. He’d also chosen a lake, Monterey fumed in her diary, in which “the CITY SEWER empties right into the place where Gene is swimming!” The next port was Saigon, the capital of French Indochina, where he caught a bad flu, “a nasty combine in sickeningly hot tropic weather,” though he found the city “fascinating in a queer sinister way.” All of the exoticism of Indochina ignited O’Neill’s imagination as much as it revolted Monterey’s. On a tour of Cholon, a Chinese city there, she felt a “strange ‘thing’ in the air as we motored along the swamp highway. Breathless, quiet—the clang of cymbals—all seemed decadent—There was death, decay—to me it was frightening and something I don’t like.” O’Neill again dove headlong into unsanitary waters, in “a literal mudhole,” Monterey wrote, exasperated, “a privy by it!”41

  Firmly resolved that Monterey wouldn’t control him, O’Neill found a “swell gambling joint” where he spent long hours frittering away hundreds, possibly thousands, of dollars at the roulette wheel. Too run down to disembark at Hong Kong, O’Neill stayed aboard until, on November 9, they arrived at British-controlled Shanghai. They checked in to the Palace Hotel and on the first day enlisted the service of hotel physician Dr. Alexander Renner, a Hungarian nerve specialist, who prescribed him daily with “nerve tonic” injections.42

  It was inevitable that O’Neill would be recognized on the streets of Shanghai. “Eugene O’Neill tramping it through the Far East,” noted a stateside newshound, “will have to do it to the accompaniment of the telegraph wires’ drumbeat recording his advance.”43 But luckily the first journalist to spot him was a pal from Greenwich Village, Alfred Batson, who was then reporting for the North China Herald. “Do me a favor,” O’Neill said, “just keep me out of the paper.” In the longed-for company of another man, and with Monterey either off shopping with Dr. Renner’s wife, another Théres, or prostrate from fatigue in her hotel room, O’Neill once again dropped off the wagon. In between drinks, Batson delighted in guiding him through the less frequented sights. “The place that interested Gene most,” Batson remembered, “was the crime museum at police headquarters, a room full of murder weapons, mementoes of outstanding crimes, torture devices, and so forth.” One of these devices was “Death of a Thousand Cuts”: “The bandits would double-track wire all over a person’s body, bunching the flesh, and then slice off the skin—the one thousand cuts.”44 On a separate drunken outing O’Neill found himself helplessly ensnared at another “Wheel palace,” gambling through the night until his credit ran out, then cabling for more money. “I must have that Jim [O’Neill] strain in me after all,” he confessed in a letter to de Polo while denying that alcohol had anything to do with it. “Can you beat it? Me!”45

  On November 21, at about one in the morning, after drinking all night with Afred Batson, “Gene comes into the sitting room,” Monterey wrote, “sees me—& weaves over to me (filthy, Black-Irish drunk) & says ‘What the h—— are you doing here?’ Horrified at the sight of him, Monterey told him she’d just been worried. He stepped back a moment, she wrote in her diary the next morning, then turned on her and shouted, “No —— —— —— is going to keep tables on me! … and he knocked me flat!”46 (Much later she quoted him as saying, evidently leaving out a choice descriptor, “I’m not going to have an old whore telling me what to do!”)47

  By the time O’Neill awoke the next morning, Monterey had disappeared. When Batson showed up at the hotel, O’Neill admitted to hitting her but was remorseless: “I took a poke at Carlotta, and she’s gone. She’s going home, I guess, but I don’t give a damn.” Her absence only made him more defiant, and that night Batson took him on a tour of the city’s late-night scene. After an evening’s bar crawl, they stopped at the St. George Dance Hall to cavort with the Chinese “taxi dancers,” or paid dancing partners. There weren’t many customers in the place, and O’Neill felt sorr
y for the bored dancers lined up against the wall and bought them each a bottle of champagne. In the men’s room, he asked the attendant, “Why do you do this kind of work?” But the man, unable to speak English, didn’t respond. “Good for you!” O’Neill barked. “To hell with the capitalists!” “Take it easy,” Batson said, retrieving what looked like about $1,000 O’Neill had stuffed into the attendant’s hand. Outside the St. George, O’Neill dropped to the curb and started to sob. Across the street several Sikh policemen began laughing at him. “Did I ever tell you,” he asked Batson, his eyes filled with tears, “what a son of a bitch I’ve been to Agnes?”48

  Dr. Renner admitted O’Neill into a hospital the following day and told Monterey, as she reported in her diary, that he’d “drank himself into a coma or somesuch!” Wracked by delirium tremens, O’Neill later described his state of mind as “teetering on the verge of a nervous breakdown and lying awake nights listening to the night-target practice of a Welsh regiment whose garrison was two blocks away, and to the beating of Chinese gongs keeping the devils away from a birth or a bride of a corpse or something devils like. It nearly had me climbing the walls of my room and gibbering a bit.” Renner inveigled Monterey to accompany him to the hospital. With her at his bedside glaring at the repugnant sight of him, O’Neill, Monterey wrote that night, turned on “all the Irish charm & looks terrible!! … He is so full of guile and soft speech—it’s the Irish—I will never feel for him as I have. I do not trust him!”49

  Dispatches were wired back to the United States that Eugene O’Neill was dying. After leaving the hospital, with newsmen on his trail, O’Neill checked into the Astor House, where Monterey was staying; then, on December 12, they both disappeared. Renner booked cabins for O’Neill, Monterey, and Monterey’s nurse Tuva Drew on the S.S. Coblenz, a German liner heading for Manila and points westward, and accompanied O’Neill onboard to get him settled in his cabin. Then he played along with his patient’s ruse to sidetrack the press. “I don’t understand O’Neill,” he told a group of reporters a day or two later, “Apparently he dislikes my services. He had a right to dismiss me, but he shows no appreciation for my kindness, and his actions are most unethical.” (He then also told them that O’Neill had suffered from tonsillitis and a nervous breakdown.) The Astor House’s staff played along, too, claiming O’Neill was still registered there after the Coblenz was well under way.50 O’Neill had written a letter for Renner to share with the press which stated that he’d come to China, “seeking peace and quiet and hoping that here … people would mind their own business and allow me to mind mine. But I have found more snoops and gossips per square inch than there is in any New England town of 1,000 inhabitants. … At any rate, I will find peace and solitude to work in if I have to go to the South Pole.”51

  O’Neill signed on the Coblenz passenger list under the alias James O’Brien and Monterey as “Miss Drew,” passing herself off as Tuva Drew’s daughter. (Newspapers reported that he’d traveled as “the Reverend Mr. William O’Brien”; but after his return, he wrote Eugene that he regretted to say that this was “hilariously amusing” but “untrue.”) The press was still attempting to track him down in Shanghai when O’Neill resurfaced in Manila and amiably came clean after a Filipino newspaperman who’d been carrying his picture confronted him onboard the ship. O’Neill had been up all night from the racket of longshoremen unloading the ship’s cargo and “looked haggard,” according to a reporter. But he laughed when shown a recent dispatch claiming he was still in Shanghai. It was common for Westerners traveling in the Far East to pose as celebrities in order to receive preferential treatment and, suspicious he might be an imposter, the Filipino reporter asked for identification. O’Neill looked at him and smiled, “Why not let me admit my name is O’Brien and not O’Neill? … Since I am endeavoring to travel quietly, it would be gunning my own game if I offered proof I really was O’Neill.” Then he reached into his pocket for his passport, showed letters addressed to him and his bankbook, and opened his jacket to reveal his name printed inside and pointed out the name on his luggage.52

  On Christmas Eve O’Neill and Monterey arrived in Singapore, where he received a frantic cable from Lawrence Langner, who’d read in the papers about the hospitalization of the Guild’s most prized dramatists. “Feel well now,” O’Neill responded. “Much idiotic publicity in Shanghai, Manila. My discovery, disappearance, kidnapped, bandits, death, etc. Merry Christmas to all.”53

  On the voyage west, O’Neill held off his alcohol craving with the psychosis-inducing prescription drugs allonal and bromide. But while docked in Hong Kong he ordered a Scotch at lunch. Then, after Manila, he befriended a newspaperman named Theo Rogers, whose cabin was next door to Monterey’s and whose drunken antics kept her up all night. When the ship’s doctor introduced them to Rogers, Monterey described him as “a vulgar man,” “an obvious shanty Irish type!” “Gene is off again,” she said after a reasonably pleasant Christmas onboard, “and it won’t be pretty this time. … If I had the guts I’d kill myself.” Rogers and O’Neill went on a several-day bender, which included them banging on her wall from Rogers’s cabin. “How this would please A[gnes] and well it might,” Monterey wrote. “She wins! … We are what we are!”54

  On New Year’s Day, 1929, Monterey abandoned ship at Ceylon. She checked into a hotel overlooking the harbor, ordered a pot of tea, and watched from her balcony as the Coblenz slowly disappeared from view. She then booked a return trip to France on the S.S. James Monroe. After two lonely weeks at sea and desperate cables sent back and forth, O’Neill and Monterey arranged to meet in Port Saïd. The second officer of the ship witnessed firsthand the outrageous lovers’ quarrel and then the surprising truce that ensued: “Their reunion on the Monroe was a combination of name-calling, insults, jumping up and down, screeching, hair-pulling, stamping feet, wrestling and finally winding up in a passionate embrace smothering each other with kisses and hugs. From then on they were like a couple of lovebirds.”55

  For O’Neill, the voyage across the Far East, with its maladies, drunkenness, heavy gambling losses, and vicious warfare with Monterey, was, in the end, a great success. “The fact that I was weakened by illness and nerves really helped in a funny way,” he wrote Eugene. “It got me into such a highly sensitized state that every impression hit me with all it had and registered with full force. Everything seemed to be revealing itself for my benefit.”56 “I met all kinds of people of all nationalities,” he said, “and I got the feeling from the East that I was after that made it real and living to me instead of something in a book. I’m full to the brim with all sorts of vivid impressions of sound, color, faces, atmosphere, queer experiences that pursued me.”57 He even came up with a play idea that would take place on the André-Lebon titled “Uncharted Sea.” The play, which he abandoned, would involve a “half-caste” woman and “the American Poet, the drunkard who flies from reality to the negative acceptance of the East.” And it would take to task, like Marco Millions, the arrogance of American cultural imperialism. “The conflict of races on board, the trend of the races of the world struggle today, the essential characteristics, the awakening of the East to the West, the growing dominance of the American idea.”58

  For Monterey, the voyage had been nothing less than a nightmare. Throughout the trip, she’d been exhausted, prostrate with nerves, struck down by flu or a cold, or the prey of her drunken lout of a lover. Just as Agnes Boulton had in the early days of her marriage to O’Neill, Monterey learned over four and a half trying months, in the hardest of ways, what it meant to be initiated into the life of a severe alcoholic who was miserably obsessed with the past. “Why drink,” Monterey wondered, “when you know you are not sane with alcohol in you. Literally not sane! … It’s dangerous.”59

  O’Neill’s eyes had also been opened about Monterey. First off, she was a snob, a fact borne out by the way she treated hotel staff, shop clerks, and ships’ crews. She fancied herself an actress and demanded obsequiousness; any disturbance, no ma
tter how slight, was treated as a personal affront. Onboard the James Monroe the crew referred to her as “Queen Mary,” and she openly treated the gracious, self-abnegating Tuva Drew like a servant. She was also materialistic: after they’d returned to France, Saxe and Dorothy Commins arrived to greet them, and Dorothy was dumbstruck by what she found in Monterey’s brimming boudoir. “Showing me around one day,” she recalled, “[Monterey] opened drawer after drawer of exquisite handmade lingerie, some of it from Shanghai; then a large closet with more than thirty pairs of shoes. Her jewels, her clothes, everything was out of the ordinary. When I complimented her on the fit of her clothes, she said she didn’t have to go to Paris until the final fittings, as Poiret and Mainbocher had made mannequins of her exact figure.” Worst of all, for O’Neill, Monterey was controlling: Theo Rogers later said that aboard the Coblenz Rogers’s cabin had “provided a refuge where Eugene was safe from Carlotta’s nagging. He was one of the gentlest persons I’ve ever met, while she was the domineering sort, possessive, and wanted him all to herself.”60

  O’Neill also importantly learned, however, over his weeks of solitude on the Coblenz, “half mad with utter loneliness,” how dependent on her he’d become. Monterey was precisely the type of person he needed to keep sober and writing. This was her apparent mission in life, even surpassing, at times, his desire to maintain a life of security and hard work. She would listen in rapt attention when he shared his drafts, while Boulton had become less interested in their last years, once even falling asleep while he was reading.61 Before their reunion at Port Saïd, Monterey had already noted in her diary, “I gained (regained) my faith in Gene.” Convinced their relationship was salvageable after their reunion, she gave him a ring symbolizing her dedication. “He is the man I’ve loved—and always will love!”62