Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  L’Aeschylus du Plessis

  O’Neill and Monterey landed back in Europe at Genoa, Italy, on January 21, 1929. Both weary of travel, they headed straight for the French border. Within a week they settled in Cap-d’Ail, just outside Monte Carlo on the French Riviera, and rented the Villa Les Mimosas, which had a beautiful garden and a spectacular view of the Mediterranean. Monterey wrote Saxe Commins in rapture over their new location, “The sea for my darling Gene & a garden for me!—I have found peace! … Gene is lovelier than ever & an angel to me! … I sit back & admire & adore! What happier lot for a woman?!”63 Their interlude of blissful tranquillity would be short-lived.

  News soon arrived from the Theatre Guild about Dynamo, and it was again unanimous: the play’s February 11, 1929, premiere had been a crushing defeat, and the blague among jealous competitors, sneering critics, and jilted colleagues was heard up and down Broadway. Edna Kenton, still resentful over the Provincetown Players’ unceremonious end, was one of many gleeful observers of O’Neill’s fall from grace. “75 years from now,” Kenton chuckled, “[Dynamo] will be revived in some little Rialto theatre of some then Hoboken as a sample of what ancient Americans believed to be psychology, bitterness, and cynicism!! And how the audience will roar.”64

  Before Dynamo’s opening night, George Jean Nathan had published O’Neill’s letter on his planned trilogy, without asking its author’s permission, revealing that Dynamo was to be its first installment. “Throwing sand” in the critics’ eyes like that, O’Neill complained to Nathan, led them to disregard the psychology of Reuben Light’s tragic fall by focusing too closely on the trilogy’s God-replacement theme.65 Nearly every reviewer based their responses on Nathan’s prerelease tell-all. But Reuben’s conversion was also seen as too drastic, leading audiences to believe he’d gone insane as opposed to destroying himself out of self-contempt, feelings of betrayal, and mother longing. Not one critic, O’Neill protested, “got what I thought my play was about.”66

  O’Neill also blamed Dynamo’s failure on his “domestic brawling” with Boulton during its composition the previous summer, and on the fact that his absence at rehearsals had the unfortunate consequence of actors speaking lines that neither they nor their director, Philip Moeller, wholly understood. Not even George Jean Nathan stepped in to defend him. “His play is a dud,” Nathan wrote in his Judge review, “extremely poor” and “miles below his better work.”67

  Smelling blood in the water, Heywood Broun joined in the frenzy without having seen or read the play. “No living American writer,” Broun wrote, “has so consistently sailed under false colors as Eugene O’Neill. With the aid of curtains, lights and mass psychology it is possible for a man to palm himself off as a creative genius merely by pulling rabbits out of a silk hat. Indeed, O’Neill has been shrewd enough to vary the familiar trick by using vipers and scorpions instead of bunnies.”68 Though Nathan himself had panned it, he was still moved to print a condemnation of the attacks gleefully rolling off the presses: “The stranger from Mars, perusing the New York newspaper reviews of ‘Dynamo,’ would, estimating them from their ferocity, doubtless assume that Eugene O’Neill had not merely written a bad play but had also been guilty of stealing the reviewers’ wives, murdering their children and setting fire to their houses.” Nathan recognized a perverse national pastime exposing itself in the whole ugly affair: “It probably goes back to the characteristic delight of Americans in pulling their heroes off their pedestals. If there is one thing an American likes to do better than putting a man on a pedestal it is booting him off it. … O’Neill is the current goat. He will now have to write at least three plays worthy of Shakespeare at his best to get half-way up the old pedestal again.”69

  However well intentioned such defenses by Nathan and others might seem, O’Neill resented any kind of mollycoddling from his peers: “It is sickening to be treated with such doleful tenderness as if I were the Pope’s toe—me that was born on Times Square and not in Greenwich Village, and that have heard dramatic critics called sons of bitches—and, speaking in general, believed it—ever since I was old enough to recognize the Count of Monte Cristo’s voice! The greatest burden I have to bear after each flop is the well-meant condolence chorus. They never reflect that a kick in the pants—especially when one feels one doesn’t deserve it—is a grand stimulant.”70

  In this case, the “grand stimulant” inspired him on to drastically revise Dynamo for its book version (the script used for the play’s few revivals) throughout that spring and into the summer. “I like it better now—but not enough,” O’Neill wrote the critic Joseph Wood Krutch. “I wish I’d never written it—really—and yet I feel it has its justified place in my work development. A puzzle. What disappoints me in it is that it marks a standing still, if not a backward move.”71

  That spring the debacle over Dynamo was offset for O’Neill by welcome news: Agnes Boulton had agreed to move to Nevada for several months and from there arrange for a “Reno divorce.” She’d also accepted O’Neill’s original offer of $6,000 a year, $10,000 if he made more than $40,000 in a given year. She would also receive $2,400 in child support, with shared custody and unrestricted visitation rights for O’Neill. After his return to France, O’Neill wrote Shane and Oona asking them to relay a message to their mother that, while he’d been convalescing in Shanghai, “all the bitterness got burned out of me and the future years will prove this.”72

  O’Neill’s bitterness reignited, however, when he heard that she’d refused to accept a clause prohibiting her from writing about their marriage during his lifetime. He’d been told that a literary agent had already contacted her about the prospect, and he wrote Weinberger, “I think you should have brought more pressure to bear, what with all the muck we have on her—and as far as the writing clause goes you can tell her for me before Driscoll that if she ever dares write a line about me, either outright or as thinly disguised autobiography, I will write the play—a damned good play it would make, too!—about her past and her family’s that will blast them off the map!”73

  Boulton acquiesced, and on March 11, she took a train to Nevada, leaving Barbara, Shane, and Oona in the care of her new partner, the journalist James Delaney. She took up residence at a ranch outside Reno that catered to would-be divorcées, and that May wrote de Polo a bit of gossip she could be sure would get back to her soon-to-be ex: “I have a violent suitor, Harold—you will die! He is 25, six feet three, wild and handsome, and the crack ‘Bronk rider’ of the west—that is he goes to all the rodeo’s and rides for show money. … He wears high boots with red roses on them, a big black sombrero, blue jeans turned up at the boots—now don’t tell mother!”74

  Whatever Boulton might have written about their marriage, and about Monterey’s seduction of O’Neill, could be spread, less publicly but to him just as harmfully, by word of mouth in New York. Subsequently, O’Neill and Monterey’s truce at Port Saïd all but collapsed by late March at the Villa Les Mimosas. They’d been told that Boulton was circulating, he wrote de Polo, “rough lies” and “foul fairy tales” about him, and Monterey was livid that O’Neill was allowing her name to be dragged through the slush by his “so-called” friends in New York. Bitter accusations flew back and forth with such mounting hostility that Monterey fled temporarily to Paris. O’Neill coaxed her back, pleading with her “to end this present situation in which we are forced by the world into an intolerable impasse. … When peace is measurably within our grasp, are we going to take the side of the world against each other and ourselves work the ruin?”75

  Soon after Monterey’s return, they leased a regal estate, Le Château du Plessis, in the inland province of Touraine, approximately ten miles outside its capital city, Tours. A four-hour train ride from Paris, with thirty-five rooms, two vaulted eighteenth-century turrets, carved wooden furniture, and ancient tapestries draping the walls, the château was owned by three sisters born of provincial French aristocracy—the vicomtesse de Banville, the marquise de Verdun, and Madame
de la Boissiere. The ladies were delighted to have a well-known American writer in residence, if somewhat scandalized by the content of his plays, and he sealed their good opinion by showing them his gold medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.76

  Château du Plessis was preposterously cheap, even by the standards of rural postwar France: it cost just over $100 a month in rent, which O’Neill and Monterey split fifty-fifty. The château was surrounded by over six hundred acres of woods for hunting, a broad stream for fishing, and an expansive farm with cattle, sheep, poultry, wheat, and hay overseen by its proprietor. O’Neill took on the role of the country farmer with gusto, and when he raised a litter of pigs, he affectionately christened them with names like the Duc de Haut Sauterne, Jean Louis Hohenzollern, and Fifi D’Arc. The vicomtesse de Banville opposed modern “improvements” to the estate (as did O’Neill, if less vocally); but Monterey insisted on new electrical and plumbing systems, a roof garden, a gymnasium, and on damming up the stream to install a concrete swimming pool for O’Neill.77

  O’Neill ordered stationery with the letterhead “Le Plessis,” and he made it a point to refer to the château by that name.78 This might well be interpreted as a ruse to shroud the opulence of his new estate; the word “château” means “castle,” of course, a fact O’Neill didn’t want to get back to Boulton or his more radical associates. “Don’t say anything about my gorgeous Renault [car]—make it a small Renault,” O’Neill instructed Commins to pass on to “all and sundry of my friends.”79 O’Neill’s estrangement from his father’s wealth and then his own reveals itself in the souls of most of his money-obsessed characters—Andrew Mayo, Brutus Jones, William Brown, James Tyrone—each of whom is soul-destroyed by the spiritual bankruptcy that it takes to amass riches. The wealthy characters who aren’t affected, Mildred Douglas in The Hairy Ape, Marco Polo in Marco Millions, or Sam Evans in Strange Interlude, have no souls to destroy. (After O’Neill’s death, Boulton observed that there was “a misconception in the mind of the public … an idea that he was hard up, stopped in shoddy hotels, etc, knew nothing about nice living until he married Carlotta, who practically taught him how to use a napkin and to wipe his shoes when he came in.” Her ex-husband’s persistent longing for a “big house, servants, the best of everything that could be had … showed some split in his personality—and that split does show in his work. … It was certainly not the life that an artist would live, was it?”)80

  Carlotta Monterey at the Château du Plessis.

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

  Monterey adopted the same tight-lipped attitude at first, writing to Commins, “Tell no one of our home, unless they insist—& then give them the description of a peasant’s cottage!—”81 But over time she grew more defiant. She was especially enraged by Kenneth Macgowan’s audacity in publishing a “Talk of the Town” vignette in the New Yorker, which he’d charitably written to downplay their extravagant lifestyle but which she considered an “apologia.” Macgowan’s piece ran almost exactly one month before the day, October 29, 1929, that the Wall Street stock market collapsed, taking many of O’Neill’s friends with it. “Flamboyant descriptions of the château [O’Neill] has rented in France have exaggerated its grandeur,” Macgowan wrote. “It is not a show place, simply an old residence on an estate owned by three noble ladies who rented it to the O’Neills furnished, for about half of what a four-room apartment rents in New York.”82

  Two weeks after the crash, Monterey wrote Commins that she’d strongly censured Macgowan in a letter for his presumption, and that she refused to play ball any longer: “I need no apology to the public or Gene’s friends or acquaintance whether I am living in 30 rooms or 3,” she said. “I pay as I go—& it’s nobody’s damn business!”83 In a follow-up letter to Macgowan, still nursing her grudge against him over a year later, Monterey seethed, “But—will you tell me why—in the name of Heaven—Gene & I should apologize to anyone in this world if we have thirty servants or no servants? Will you tell me why you get fussed because a lot of failures, sore heads, drunks, and would-be artists (in one line or another) thro’ envy, disappointment and jealousy criticize a man because he lives in the manner that all middle class people (have they the money!) live? It is too absurd. … And I beg of you,—no matter what they say,—to never apologize for us. We have a huge château,—we have 10 servants,—we have a concrete swimming pool,—we have three cars! … This letter is vulgar—but the superb is vulgar!”84

  Monterey wrote on like this for over eight much-italicized, hyper-punctuated pages: how she’d done her most to give O’Neill, “for the first time in his life, a decent home,” how she’d introduced him to Beethoven and Bach, taken him to the finest tailors, “done everything possible to make him forget the self conscious, uneasy, slovenly atmosphere in which he lived.” He was a dog lover, so she provided him with one; but in contrast to the unruly Finn Mac Cool, she bought a wire-haired fox terrier named Billy (who promptly died of distemper), then a Gordon setter and, most important for the long-term, a high-bred Dalmatian shipped over from England that they named Silverdene Emblem O’Neill, or “Blemie” for short. For her efforts, she fumed at Macgowan, “I was crucified for eighteen months … being called a harlot & other cruel names.” Soon she devised a new time scale for her husband’s life, “B.C.”—“Before Carlotta.”85

  O’Neill’s divorce from Agnes Boulton was finalized, with the charge of desertion, on July 2, 1929. Boulton’s filed complaint was anticlimactic for the press, which had been hoping for a public airing of “many allegations of incompatibility.” The judge let reporters inspect the file before sealing it, but it was pitifully thin and lacked the intimate detail necessary for a juicy society piece, and the trial itself lasted about fifteen minutes.86 O’Neill and Monterey, after signing a prenuptial agreement, got married in Paris on July 22. The ceremony was private, with only a few official witnesses present. O’Neill chose the engraving on his and Monterey’s rings from the script of Lazarus Laughed: “I am your laughter—and you are mine!” (CP2, 586).

  The newlyweds lavished their bounty on a number of guests at the Château du Plessis over the next two years—George Jean Nathan and the silent film actress Lillian Gish, Saxe and Dorothy Commins, the author Carl Van Vechten and his wife, the actress Fania Marinoff, Theresa Helburn and Helen Westley of the Theatre Guild, Walter Huston, Stark Young, and Eugene Jr. all visited. Thérese Renner (who would become his Hungarian translator) even made the trek from Shanghai via the trans-Siberian railroad. Monterey was especially delighted, for the time being, with her new stepson Eugene; after meeting him briefly in Maine when he was a teenager, she was genuinely impressed by the well-mannered, highly intelligent six foot two Yale man who’d just spent the summer studying in Germany. “If my Cynthia is as fine a woman at nineteen—as he is a man,” she wrote Commins the day after Eugene arrived, “I will be a very proud & happy mother.” And she complimented the unpretentious Kathleen Jenkins that her “example and care & love show in his manner—his thoughts—& his viewpoint of life!”87

  Prospective visitors were vetted in terms of their “B.C.” status before any invitations were granted, however. From her writing desk at Plessis, Monterey initiated a ferocious campaign to avenge herself against O’Neill’s “so-called friends”—that is, those she believed had taken sides with Boulton, especially his Provincetown and Greenwich Village associates. “I, personally feel,” she told Commins, whom she had come to regard as an ally and confidant, “that men or women who go about tearing down other people’s reputations—personal or otherwise—should be publicly flogged!—I have no ‘God is Love & all is Divine’ in my nature—. To me ‘an eye for an eye & a tooth for a tooth.’ … If people got what they gave this world would have fewer parasites and weaklings.” Among their female ranks, these included Fitzie Fitzgerald, Mary Blair, and Juliet Throckmorton, all of whom, she said, “were very fluent i
n their conversation concerning me during a certain time—& said things not only stupidly untrue—but ridiculous had they looked into things!”88

  Jimmy and Patti Light were personae non gratae in the O’Neill household as well. Light had won a Guggenheim fellowship that year to study stagecraft in Germany and Russia, and O’Neill told others that he very much wanted to see Light but believed he’d been evading him. According to Patti Light, their rift with Monterey was caused by a misunderstanding: Boulton would tell Patti horrible things about Monterey, she said, then deny it—and then it would get back to Monterey and O’Neill that Patti was the source.89 Patti had tried to explain this to O’Neill during the Lights’ visit to Paris in March 1930, but upon hearing that Patti had “forced herself upon” O’Neill, Monterey had had enough. (Virulently anti-Semitic, Monterey blamed Patti Light’s impudence in large part on the fact that she was Jewish: “That is the Jew of it! The jews in N.Y. … even G.[ene]’s attorney [Harry Weinberger]—I never, in my long & varied experience, have come across such tactless, thick skinned, stupid people.—”)90

  Taken aback by the abrupt severing of connections by Monterey, Light remembered the irony of one night at a performance of The Hairy Ape back in 1922: Monterey and he were then on sociable terms, and they’d played a practical joke on the cast. Horsing around in Monterey’s dressing room, they began crying out, “Oh! Oh! Kiss Me! Kiss Me!” Louis Wolheim and other actors took the bait and peeked in, only to find Monterey casually applying her makeup and Light reading a newspaper with equal nonchalance. Now, when he first addressed her as “Carlotta,” she snapped, “I’d like you to call me Mrs. O’Neill.” To visit O’Neill at Plessis that spring, Light concocted the excuse to Monterey that he needed to talk business with O’Neill. Grudgingly she’d permitted him, without Patti, to stay at the château for one night—but never again. This would be the last time O’Neill and Light would see each other for over two decades.91