Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  Stanley Ridges (left) as Loving and Earle Larimore as John in the final scene of Days Without End at Henry Miller’s Theatre, New York, 1934.

  (COURTESY OF THE YALE COLLECTION OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, NEW HAVEN)

  To O’Neill’s great consternation, because of the play’s evident religiosity, the Catholic community largely venerated Days Without End; it fared so well in Catholic-dominated Boston, in fact, that at its first showing on December 27, 1933, it received fifteen curtain calls.174 The Nobel Prize–winning poet William Butler Yeats also produced the play successfully on April 16, 1934, at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre to celebrate the anniversary of the Easter Rising. (Days Without End was banned, unsurprisingly, in the atheist-run Soviet Union.)175 “Eugene O’Neill,” wrote one pious admirer, “former Catholic, cynic of cynics … delver into the dark and oppressive secrets of sex-crazed New Englanders … has written the great Catholic play of the age.” Another called O’Neill’s jeering critics “the minions of the Anti-Christ … pseudo-intellectuals who hide their ignorance under the misapprehension that faith is outmoded.” Few were more pleasantly surprised by the playwright’s apparent return to God than Gerard B. Donnelly, S.J., of America magazine. Father Donnelly decreed that Days had a “profound significance” for “all who glory in the Christian name.”176

  Saxe Commins, when he first read the script, uttered evasively that he appreciated O’Neill’s innovative use of the mask; but Monterey was certain he was holding something back. When Commins then admitted that the religious aspect of the final scene seemed overwrought, she rebuked him with contempt: “Gene and I nearly had a fit when we saw you had taken the end of the play quite from the wrong angle. It has nothing to do with Christianity or prayer that brings Elsa back—it is her great & all consuming love for her husband! Thro’ her love she senses that her husband is in danger & that love gives her the strength to come back & live for him—We suppose no one will understand that tho’—that you didn’t!”177 “I think Gene has forgotten,” she wrote in her diary, cutting both ways, “that Saxe is very Jewish + very radical + a play about the Christian faith being important for the happiness of a man—would seem to him both childish + a bore!” That summer, 1933, when George Jean Nathan read the script, she noted again in her diary, “Geo. Jean won’t like ‘D.W.E.’ because he can’t tolerate any play with religion playing an important part!”178 She was correct, of course, and Commins and Nathan were in the majority.

  Benjamin De Casseres went so far as to pen a razor-sharp lampoon titled “Denial Without End,” in which a winged demon whisks the playwright away to confront an assortment of his characters: Lazarus, Marco Polo, Yank, Brutus Jones, Nina Leeds, Sam Evans, Charlie Marsden, Ponce de León, Chris Christopherson, Abbie Putnam, and Lavinia Mannon each mock him in turn for offering his soul back to the Church and reprimand him for selling out. O’Neill’s stand-in, named John Loving in De Casseres’s satire, responds fatuously (and here it genuinely gets cruel), “It was all right while I was poor, neurotic and had no château in France, no swanky Park Avenue apartment. It was first-rate stuff—and you were a great pal!—before I made my pile, found my Isolde-Juliet-Brunnhilde [Monterey] and changed Friend Swig for Friend Swank. But now, I tell you, I’m a gentleman! To hell with your spittle-spattle about artistic creation and its spiritual jim-jams. I’m saved!” Thinking it was all in good fun, De Casseres sent a copy to O’Neill. He didn’t hear back, and they never spoke again.179

  In the fall of 1933, the Catholic Writers Guild hounded Cerf to change Elsa from a divorcée to a widow for the book version—if, that is, he wanted it to appear on their White List (plays that a committee of laymen decides are appropriate for children).180 O’Neill told Cerf, who welcomed any helpful publicity, that even if the play was “about a Catholic … it is also a psychological study,” whatever the religious overtone. If Cerf ignored his wishes on this, he threatened, he’d be forced “to oil up the family automatic and surge forth and eliminate you from our midst! … It is not Catholic propaganda! If, after it comes out, the Church wants to set the seal of its approval on it, well that’s up to them. But I don’t give a damn whether they do or not—and I certainly will not make the slightest move to win that approval in advance.”181

  Despite his atheism, O’Neill had always been enticed by the promise of an afterlife, of moral and spiritual certainty, and of Catholicism’s alleviation of guilt through confession. In a letter to Sophus Keith Winther, a scholar from the University of Washington who was hurrying to include Days Without End in his 1934 book-length study of the playwright, O’Neill clarified this as best he could: “But the end [of the play] hardly means that I have gone back to Catholicism. I haven’t. But I would be a liar if I didn’t admit that, for the sake of my soul’s peace, I have often wished I could. And by Catholicism I don’t mean the Catholic church as a politically-meddling, social-reactionary force. That repels me. I mean the mystic faith of Catholicism whose symbols seem to me to approach closer than any other symbols to the apprehension of a hidden spiritual significance in human life.”182

  Brooks Atkinson, in an attempt to come to grips with the play, quoted Henry David Thoreau, who, when asked if he’d made peace with God, replied, “We have never quarreled.” In contrast, Atkinson said, O’Neill’s quarrel with the Almighty had finally conquered his atheism, since nothing replaces God in the play but God himself. Similarly, Dorothy Day observed decades later in “Told in Context” that “Gene’s relations with his God was a warfare in itself. He fought with God to the end of his days. He rebelled against man’s fate. [crossed out:] He shook his fist at God.” Other friends were convinced that Monterey’s embrace of Catholicism had invidiously taken hold in her husband. Monterey’s ecumenical prodding may have made his turn to religion more explicit in the case of Days Without End; but O’Neill had already envisaged his inner life as Catholic prior to her arrival—in spiritual sensibility if not in actual faith—such as with the maskless Dion Anthony (St. Anthony) in The Great God Brown. But another explanation might be found in the most important female figure of his life who, along with Monterey, had returned to the Church for its “mystic faith” that provided “soul’s peace”—Ella O’Neill.183

  Ella had been devastated by her son Eugene’s resolve to snub the Church at fourteen, the age he learned of her drug addiction, and Catholicism in Days Without End saves through forgiveness and love, strongly suggesting his mother’s experience in recovery. Ella had overcome her addiction by returning to a spiritual state of mind, one that only the Church could afford her. Starting in June 1914, she’d ended her over twenty-five-year habit by cloistering herself at a Brooklyn convent and attending Mass each Sunday. Even when faced with the pain and disfigurement of her mastectomy in 1918, she’d never returned to the drug for good. (For O’Neill, an end to the churning nightmare at the heart of Long Day’s Journey Into Night must have seemed the true stuff of his earlier play’s subtitle, “A Modern Miracle.”) Ella, of course, is one letter off from Elsa, John Loving’s wife. Hence, O’Neill was paying off an “old debt” to the Church, as he told Lawrence Langner, for saving his mother; at the same time he asserted that “any life-giving formula,” no matter how archaic and restrictive, should be regarded “as fit a subject for drama as any other.”184

  O’Neill also clarified John Loving’s saving grace through Catholicism in a revealing 1935 letter to his Argentine translator Leon Mirlas: “I chose Catholicism because it is the only Western religion which has the stature of a real Faith, because it is the religion of the old miracle plays and the Faustian legend which were the sources of my theme—and last and most simply because it happens to be the religion of my [Irish … background, tradition, and] early training and therefore the one I know most about.”185 But when pressed elsewhere as to whether he’d in point of fact rediscovered his Catholic faith, O’Neill responded bluntly, “Unfortunately, no.”186

  “What am I doing now?” O’Neill, recovering f
rom defeat back at Casa Genotta, replied to a letter from Kenneth Macgowan in February of 1934. “Loafing determinedly. I feel as stale as a mousetrap cheese on the theatre. I won’t start anything new for a long while. I’m fed up.” O’Neill’s doctors had ordered six months of “compulsory rest,” but then another crisis came to a head.187 Two years earlier, on March 18, 1932, the O’Neills were in a car accident that returned to torment them that April 1934: Herbert Freeman had been driving O’Neill and Monterey down the Hutchinson River Parkway in Westchester County when they collided into the car of a Bronx elevator operator named Louis Gans and his daughter Isabelle. The Ganses were suing for $28,000. Her husband conspicuously absent, Monterey appeared in front of a jury in a Bronx court on April 12, 1934; she testified that O’Neill was “unfit to work,” “very nervous,” and physically and mentally incapable of leaving his hotel room. (During the trial, her nerves gave out, and she was escorted by an attorney to a vacant courtroom. O’Neill’s attorney, A. J. D’Auria, further explained, in a statement that appeared in the New York Times, that his client wasn’t able to attend the trial himself because he was, at the time, in the throes of a nervous breakdown. The presiding judge ordered that the Ganses receive $3,200 in damages.)188

  That April O’Neill declined an invitation to meet the novelist Sherwood Anderson, he apologized to Anderson, because “I’ve been teetering on the verge of a nervous crack-up recently—too long a stretch of work without any real period of rest, is the doctor’s dope—and I’m to be under a strict regime of rest cure here at home for an indefinite period until I can ‘come back.’ The medicos put it to me cold and claim that either I take time out voluntarily now or go on a complete bust and be laid out for years.”189

  O’Neill’s self-removal from the public gaze, at first meant as a six-month hiatus, extended into a near-absolute silence that would last for more than twelve years.

  Safely back at her Sea Island redoubt, Monterey labored diligently, in every imaginable capacity, to protect and serve her husband. “I am wife, mistress, housekeeper, secretary, friend & nurse,” she wrote Macgowan. “Am everything but his tailor!”190

  In his first weeks of sequestration, O’Neill mailed off a succession of letters, lashing out at anyone requesting money or work related to the theater. When his agent Richard Madden informed him that several items of their correspondence had been stolen and then turned up in a book dealer’s catalogue, O’Neill gave him no quarter: “The more I hear of this dishonorable affair, the sorer I’m getting—and I tell you frankly that the person I am principally sore at is you.” When Shane requested a $400 outboard motor as a gift, he angrily responded, “I think you have a lot of nerve to ask for such an expensive present. … In short, you have got to prove to me in these coming years that you are not lazily expecting something for nothing but are willing to work for it. Otherwise, you will get nothing. Is that clear? And, believe me, you will find out I mean it!” “No I won’t cut a single damned line,” he wrote Lee Simonson of the Guild, who was hoping for cuts in its ongoing production of Ah, Wilderness! “That’s final.” “I take my theatre too personally, I guess—,” he added, “so personally that before long I think I shall permanently resign from all production and confine my future work to plays in books for readers only. The game isn’t worth the candle.”191

  On April 16, 1935, after their initial rebuff, Sherwood Anderson and his wife, Eleanor, were invited to lunch at Casa Genotta. Anderson, in his subsequent thank-you note, told O’Neill what a delight it had been to make the acquaintance of “a man I have looked up to as one of the few great figures of the time.” He shared a more dismal tale to a friend, however: Monterey was “cold, calculating. Certainly she is not one of the women who make a house warm.” Though he’d told O’Neill he was “delighted to find you at work again and in good spirits,” the other letter was more frank on this subject as well: “Gene is a sick man. … He is a very very sweet fine man but I did feel death in his big expensive house. He has drawn himself away, lives in that solitary place, seeing practically no one. He needs his fellow men. I felt him clinging to me rather pitifully.”192

  Eugene O’Neill and Carlotta Monterey at Casa Genotta in 1933.

  (PHOTO BY CARL VAN VECHTEN. COURTESY OF THE CARL VAN VECHTEN ESTATE AND THE MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK)

  As O’Neill worked hard to remove himself from “the game,” he’d become a trademark of American 1930s pop culture. “If I were Eugene O’Neill I could tell you what I really think of you two,” Groucho Marx informs two society ladies competing for his attention in the Marx Brothers’ 1930 hit film Animal Crackers. “You know,” he remarks to the jockeying pair, “you’re really fortunate the Theatre Guild isn’t putting this on,” then adds, “and so is the Guild.” Marx excuses himself for a “strange interlude” and somberly faces the camera. The society ladies freeze while he intones, thespian-like, “How happy I could be with either of these two if both of them just went away.”193

  O’Neill’s handlers thought such antics were played at his expense, but the playwright was delighted with them. When comedian Jack Benny requested permission to parody Ah, Wilderness! in January 1935, O’Neill dismissed Weinberger’s opposition: “GIVE BENNY MY CONSENT TO GO AHEAD WITHOUT CHARGE STOP DON’T AGREE WITH YOU THINK BENNY VERY AMUSING GUY AND BELIEVE KIDDING MY STUFF EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE HAS VERY HEALTHY EFFECT AND HELPS KEEP ME OUT OF DEAD SOLEMN ILLUSTRIOUS STUFFED SHIRT ACADEMICIAN CLASS = GENE”194 When Al Jolson, the vaudevillian known for his (later notorious) black-faced minstrel routines, asked to produce a live radio version of The Emperor Jones in 1934, O’Neill wrote Madden good-naturedly, “I hope Brutus Jones won’t burst into ‘Mammy!’”195

  At the same time, O’Neill’s avidity for the “talkies” after viewing Broadway Melody had mostly subsided, and he took no part in the film adaptations of his plays. He did nudge Robert Sisk, who was attempting to sell The Hairy Ape to Hollywood, to adopt a film treatment he’d written in 1926: “Of course, my idea in the screen story, was to build up the attraction-repulsion, hate-lust thing between Yank and Mildred, to make her even more of a bitch.”196 He still hadn’t viewed Greta Garbo’s famous MGM “Garbo Talks!” version of “Anna Christie” in 1930. In her first scene, Garbo slumps down wearily at a table in the back room of Johnny the Priest’s and orders a drink from the barman. Moviegoers then heard the starlet’s voice for the very first time: “Gimme a whiskey—ginger ale on the side. And don’t be stingy, baby.” “Well, should I serve it in a pail?” the bartender wisecracks. “Ah,” she replies wearily, “that suits me down to the ground.”197

  “I couldn’t sit though it without getting the heebie-jeebies and wondering why the hell I ever wrote it,” O’Neill said, “even if Joan of Arc came back to play ‘Anna.’” But when Grace Rippin informed him that the film had been a hit in New London, he responded, “Yes, it sure would have done me proud” to glimpse his name up in lights on Bank Street. “But I imagine that the talky of ‘Anna Christie’ is all to the Garbo and very little of the O’Neill left in it.” He did see MGM’s 1932 adaptation of Strange Interlude but regarded it as a “dreadful hash of attempted condensation and idiotic censorship.” He had no desire to go to MGM’s Ah, Wilderness! of 1935, nor had he seen Paul Robeson play Brutus Jones on the silver screen. O’Neill respected DuBose Heyward, who wrote the screenplay for The Emperor Jones, and Dudley Murphy, who directed the film for MGM; but he heard they’d “opened up” the story to include Jones’s early years as a Pullman porter and spooned out some “Harlem hooey” for their slumming audiences. He told Macgowan that he’d been told that “in the last stages of the making, rumour has it that everybody concerned started stepping on everyone else—and the result a shoddy compromise.” The slave auction and the Middle Passage had been dropped and replaced with, outrageously, an African American Baptist church service—thus brusquely removing the culpability of white America for Jones’s betrayal of his race. “However,” O’Neill said, “I wail not, I got my mone
y.” “They can buy ’em for Movies,” he often quipped, “but they can’t make me go & see them!”198 (The great exception would arrive with John Ford’s 1940 film The Long Voyage Home, based on the Glencairn plays, which O’Neill considered the finest picture adapted from his work.)

  In 1933, the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed, ending America’s fourteen-year prohibition on the sale and purchase of alcohol. And contrary to the perception of O’Neill as abstaining from booze after his calamitous trip to the Far East, Jack London’s “White Logic” caught up with him at Sea Island. Even before the repeal, the open secret among locals was that O’Neill and the real estate agent George Boll had installed a distillery for corn whiskey in Herbert Freeman’s apartment above the garage.199 And he would find an ideal drinking companion in the form of a gift from Monterey.

  For O’Neill’s forty-fifth birthday, October 16, 1933, Monterey ordered a player piano from a defunct New Orleans brothel. Painted over in red roses and nude women, the piano was the finest present O’Neill could imagine, and he affectionately dubbed it Rosie. Rosie came with a box of old music rolls that included “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “That Mysterious Rag,” “All Alone,” and “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee.”200 In December 1935, Monterey scolded George Jean Nathan after his Christmas present had arrived. It was a keg of the Brooklyn lager Edelbrau: “What you and Frau Edelbrau have done to our household is shocking,” she said. “Casa Genotta is completely demoralized.” After tapping Nathan’s keg, O’Neill began drinking beer at lunch, beer at teatime, beer at dinner, and beer as a nightcap. “Rosie plays and the Edelbrau flows!” Monterey told Nathan. That week, O’Neill and Boll gathered round Rosie, swilled the lager, and sang along with uproarious abandon. “Gene had a great sense of humor and did his share of talking,” Boll recalled of these times with the playwright. “I found him a very human and normal person, which is contrary, I know, to what many thought.”201