Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  Soon after the play’s release in 1956, George Jean Nathan offered a partial explanation for O’Neill’s mysterious decree to withhold the script: “O’Neill had confided to me, personally, that regard for his family’s feelings—chiefly his brother’s and mother’s—had influenced him to insist upon the play’s delay.”14 Saxe Commins added that O’Neill told him that the play “should be kept from the public until everyone involved, particularly members of his family, was dead or old enough not to be hurt or even disturbed by it.”15 “To the outer world we maintained an indomitably united front and lied and lied for each other,” O’Neill had told Eugene about his family. “A typical pure Irish family. The same loyalty occurs, of course, in all kinds of families, but there is, I think, among Irish still close to, or born in Ireland, a strange mixture of fight and hate and forgive, a clannish pride before the world, that is particularly our own.”16 Although it’s typically Irish to bury family problems, O’Neill had effectively hung his brother’s legacy out to dry with A Moon for the Misbegotten; and since he’d shown Long Day’s Journey to Eugene, it’s highly unlikely he would have been more concerned about Oona and Shane’s reactions. If anything, the play might have explained a great deal to them about their father’s behavior.

  More important, O’Neill had informed the press that there was a character in Long Day’s Journey who remained among the living, and it was out of respect for that person that he withheld the play. When asked whether it was himself he meant, he said nothing, though he was, in fact, the only one still alive.17 But he never specified whether this character, a member of his family, as Commins indicated, was onstage or off, or even directly mentioned. (There is one other onstage character in Long Day’s Journey, the Tyrone’s Irish maid Cathleen; but she can be ruled out given his specifications about being a member of the family.) One possibility is that he meant Kathleen Jenkins, for whom he had abiding loyalty and respect—she was “the woman,” as he’d told Monterey, “I gave the most trouble to” but who gave him “the least.”18 (And in fact he’d already attempted to destroy Exorcism in large part, apparently, to respect Jenkins’s privacy.) In fact, both Agnes Boulton and Jenkins remarked how strange it was that O’Neill neglected to mention Jenkins and Eugene Jr. in Long Day’s Journey. “It was just that Gene was like that,” Boulton remarked. “Who, after having seen Long Day’s Journey Into Night, would ever realize that Edmund, the younger son, had been married and divorced and was the father of a child nearly three years old on that August evening in 1912?”19

  Indeed Boulton, who’d retained and ensured the continued existence of the surviving copy of Exorcism, after countless interviews with journalists and biographers and even a memoir about her early years with O’Neill (which discusses his suicide attempt but makes no mention of Exorcism), respected O’Neill’s privacy to her death in 1968. Nowhere did she ever betray the fact that the much-coveted script still existed. Jenkins, for her part, told the New York Post that she was “very glad” she and her son went unmentioned. “It was so absolutely outside anything that was between us,” Jenkins said. “A great deal happened to both of us since then. It seems way back in the dark ages.”20

  But when O’Neill’s remark about his “family’s feelings” is taken into account, a more likely possibility exists, one that might explain his refusal to share the play: his cousin Agnes Brennan, the “only relative he ever saw,” Monterey said, and one of the few of his family apprised of Ella’s addiction. On May 29, 1954, at the very time that Monterey had made up her mind to contact Random House about publishing the script, Brennan came to visit. “I try to explain ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ to her,” Monterey’s diary reads, “which leads to her telling me all about Gene’s babyhood, childhood, and boyhood—Unwanted, no love or tenderness, no care, no discipline, no protection! … If I had only known this fully—not in bits and pieces!” The following morning, a Sunday, Brennan attended Mass, then read Long Day’s Journey: “It upsets her no end. But, when she has settled down—she tells me the play is under statement—spends hours weeping + telling me of the O’Neill family. … A sad, unnecessary mess! What a heritage!”21 Brennan isn’t mentioned in the play, but she’s implicit in Mary Tyrone’s disgust with the town of New London and all of its inhabitants. O’Neill’s earliest work notes for Long Day’s Journey describe his mother’s character, “M,” thinking of the Brennans as “obstacles to her socially, [making living in New London] impossible,”22 and in the completed version, Mary declares venomously, “I’ve always hated this town and everyone in it” (CP3, 738).

  The Brennan sisters had been “infuriated” before by what they considered O’Neill’s unsavory autobiographical impulse. They believed that the Irish biddy Maggie Brennan in The Straw was an unfair treatment of their mother, Josephine. Josephine herself had no use for O’Neill. After reading Thirst in 1913, she tossed it into her furnace and proclaimed, “Someone ought to tell Eugene to get out of the gutter!”23 Agnes Brennan and her sister Lillian’s barely implicit message after The Straw was heard loud and clear: “Go to it, but leave the family out of it.” O’Neill had mixed feelings about the “lace curtain” Brennans, but he stayed in touch. Prior to his return from France in 1931, O’Neill had written Agnes Brennan to wish her mother well on her ninety-first birthday. “I always remember with deep gratitude how kind she used to be to me when I was a boy and how I used to look forward to her visits on Pequot Avenue. … How I wish my Mother could have lived! It has been lonely with my Father, Mother and Jamie all gone.”24 A couple of years later, at Casa Genotta, he admitted to the director Philip Moeller that his ultimately disastrous decision to end Days Without End with John Loving praying at the cross and embracing God’s love was “undoubtedly a wish fulfillment on his part,” according to Moeller, to achieve the Brennan family’s Catholic-influenced “simple trusting happiness” that his marriage to Monterey hadn’t fulfilled.25 And finally, in his penultimate will, O’Neill had bequeathed money to three people besides his wife: his stepdaughter, Cynthia, his New London friend Ice Casey, and Agnes Brennan. Agnes died in 1956, the year of Long Day’s Journey’s release, and perhaps she was mercifully spared the worldwide news of O’Neill’s shocking portrayal of her family. “Such cracks,” O’Neill believed of publishing hurtful information he’d written about actual people, “are remembered, passed on, and finally appear in theatrical gossip columns and someone’s feelings are hurt, even though it dates back twenty years or more.”26

  But what to make of the playwright’s complete embargo on productions in any medium? This too was nothing new for him. “My interest in the productions steadily decreases,” O’Neill lamented after Dynamo’s failure in 1929, “as my interest in plays as written increases. They always—with exceptions you know—fall so far below my intent that I’m a bit weary and disillusioned with scenery and actors and the whole uninspired works of the Show Shop. … As it is I think I will wind up writing plays to be published with ‘No Productions Allowed’ in red letters on the first page. … The ideas for the plays I am writing and going to write are too dear to me, too much travail of blood and spirit will go into their writing, for me to expose them to what I know is an unfair test. I would rather place them directly from my imagination to the imagination of the reader.”27

  Of course he would see five more productions onto the boards after writing this; but his preference for the reader over the live audience only hardened with time. Soon after the humiliating Days Without End fiasco, he’d reiterated the idea to the Guild’s set designer Lee Simonson: “I take my theatre too personally, I guess—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.”28 By 1940, before Monterey had even typed up a draft of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, O’Neill had lost faith in American drama entirely: “Now I feel out of the theatre,” he told Kenneth Macgowan. “I dread the idea of production because I know it will be done by people who have really only one
standard left, that of Broadway success.”29 How might a director from the future, he must have wondered, desecrate his most sacred, most personal work?

  The reasons behind Monterey’s premature release of Long Day’s Journey have since remained unclear. Many believe she did it for the money. But Monterey never spent whatever profits she made on the play’s international productions on a lavish lifestyle, and she’d even donated the royalties of the Swedish premiere to the Royal Dramatic Theatre’s cast.30 Others imagine she did it for attention, though she loathed (her word) publicity of any kind, and rarely agreed to be interviewed or to respond to inquiries about her husband. Perhaps she released it for O’Neill’s legacy; but that was assured in any event by the play’s eventual publication.

  We may never know precisely why Monterey did this. But while O’Neill tormented himself over a Cycle of plays about “possessors self-dispossessed,” she had dedicated her life to one purpose: the possession of her husband’s legacy. “Thank God I did for him what I did do!” she concluded in her (revised for public consumption) diary of May of 1954 after making the decision to take Long Day’s Journey to press; nearly a year later, while arranging the publication of the book with Yale University Press, she wrote, “No one could do all I’ve done but me—nor would any one but me!”31 O’Neill showered Monterey with loving inscriptions; but far and away his greatest gift to her was his last will and testament from 1948. Once it was probated in a Boston court less than a month after O’Neill’s death, she at last possessed his legacy, with the full backing of the law. Monterey then insisted that Yale University Press include in the publication of Long Day’s Journey an inscription, signed on July 22, 1941, with no further introduction:

  For Carlotta, on our 12th Wedding Anniversary

  Dearest: I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood. A sadly inappropriate gift, it would seem, for a day celebrating happiness. But you will understand. I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play—write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.

  These twelve years, Beloved One, have been a Journey into Light—into love. You know my gratitude. And my love! (CP3, 714)

  A previously unknown incident is also revealing for understanding her motives: O’Neill’s nurse from California, Kathryne Albertoni, had come to New York with her husband, Albert, to attend a first-run performance of Long Day’s Journey. (O’Neill, after all, had written much of the play while Albertoni inhabited the bedroom adjacent to his office.) Monterey gave them complimentary tickets and invited them to dine at her suite in the Carlton House on Madison Avenue. Albertoni’s husband, a friend of O’Neill’s back in Danville who looked and sounded like Humphrey Bogart, demanded to know why Monterey had released the play early. “Why did you do that, what you did?” he growled angrily across the dinner table. “That was not Mr. O’Neill’s will.” Monterey replied bluntly: because “every whore would claim she slept with him while he was writing [it].” The Albertonis took this literally, assuming she meant that some prostitutes O’Neill had caroused with as a young man might still be alive and come out of the woodwork to blackmail Monterey. “That’s why she [re]wrote the will,” Albertoni said as late as 2010, three years before her death. “She didn’t like the way it was written. I don’t blame her.”32

  But there’s another way to read Monterey’s response. She and O’Neill used the epithet whore with disturbing frequency, and he repeatedly applied it against her after she’d abandoned him at Marblehead Neck. (“‘Whore’ has echoed about my ears continually,” she protested that April.)33 Monterey had several “whores” in mind after her husband’s death, including Jane Caldwell. But the woman Monterey most frequently referred to as a whore was Agnes Boulton. “Where is her pride, her self-respect?” Monterey had fumed over Boulton’s alimony payments. “Whores are paid for their bodies—not wives!”34 If Boulton was preparing to make any claims on the profits of Long Day’s Journey, Monterey would be ready. For over two decades, she’d voiced outrage over Boulton’s financial lien on O’Neill. Additionally, Boulton was in fact present when he’d sketched out his preliminary treatment of Long Day’s Journey back in the spring of 1927—and Boulton had that manuscript, found among her belongings after her death, to prove it if necessary. By releasing the play early, Monterey was undoubtedly forestalling Boulton’s potential claims to biographers, the press, and the courts—for monetary reasons in part, perhaps, but more important to Monterey, for custodianship of the work. The glory of serving as midwife for O’Neill’s most cherished child would be, and has been, hers alone.

  O’Neill and Monterey’s friend Carl Van Vechten responded with grave doubts to his publisher Alfred A. Knopf’s query about the prospect of an O’Neill biography after Long Day’s Journey had drummed up interest: “I think it would be impossible for any one, save in some secret way, to set down his share of the story, to write a frank O’Neill story. Undoubtedly Carlotta will have her version prepared and she has already rewritten her diary. … Moreover, I think she will be able to protect his reputation even after she is dead, for a generation or two.” (In fact, Monterey had diligently transcribed most of her diaries before she presumably destroyed the originals, then submitted the revised transcriptions in volume form to Yale’s Beinecke Library.) Van Vechten suggested collecting affidavits from those who knew O’Neill personally, with the idea being to “organize and publish these in some far distant future, without risk of getting sued.”35

  Two years later, 1958, Boulton did publish a “frank O’Neill story,” a memoir about her early years with him, Part of a Long Story: Eugene O’Neill as a Young Man in Love. She’d planned to write two sequels before she passed away on November 25, 1968 (having signed into the hospital, in spite of her remarriage, as “Mrs. Eugene O’Neill”); but her severe alcoholism prevented their completion.36 Over the following decade, her daughter, Oona, also began drinking heavily while nursing Chaplin until his death in 1977; later she surrendered to alcoholism and died of pancreatic cancer in 1991 at age sixty-six. Carlotta Monterey suffered a complete nervous breakdown the same month that Boulton died and was subsequently institutionalized at St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan. She never fully recovered. Monterey had thought it likely she’d be dead herself twenty-five years after her husband’s death, and she was right. She died on November 18, 1970, eight years before O’Neill’s intended release date for Long Day’s Journey.

  On February 10, 1956, Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre welcomed King Gustaf Adolf VI and his wife, Queen Louisa, along with a lavish, formally attired procession of Sweden’s aristocrats, socialites, artists, and diplomats, to view the world premiere of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. When the final curtain fell, the audience rose to its feet and roared applause for up to half an hour, and the cast was beckoned back for more than a dozen curtain calls.37 The Swedish critics deemed O’Neill “the world’s last dramatist of the stature of Aeschylus and Shakespeare,” and the performance was hailed as the greatest theatrical event of the twentieth century.38 Monterey, who didn’t attend, next summoned José Quintero, who had directed the Greenwich Village revival of The Iceman Cometh at the Circle in the Square—a production that ran for 565 performances, a record for O’Neill, and prompted critics to rank Iceman as a masterwork. She offered Quintero and his team, including Leigh Connell and Theodore Mann, the rights to produce Long Day’s Journey on Broadway. The Iceman production had starred Jason Robards Jr., whose performance as Hickey Hickman, then as Jamie Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey, “Erie” Smith in Hughie in 1964, and Jim Tyrone in the legendary production of A Moon for the Misbegotten with Colleen Dewhurst as Josie Hogan, indelibly marked his position as O’Neill’s master interpreter for the stage.

  Once the final curtain had dropped on November 7, 1956, at New York’s Helen Hayes Theatre, after well-received tryouts in Boston and New Haven, ther
e was a hush of astonishment that lasted more than a minute. Then the audience rose to its feet, and the trickle of isolated clapping surged into a wave of deafening, rapturous applause; after innumerable curtain calls, a mass of theatergoers pushed forward to praise the exhausted actors onstage. Those in the audience were awed by the play’s craftsmanship but also shocked by the autobiographical revelations it contained. Who could have known that the mother of America’s only Nobel Prize–winning playwright had been a morphine addict for over twenty years? That O’Neill’s older brother had exerted such a Mephistophelian influence on him? That his celebrated father had lived in such a painful state of regret and Irish-born terror of poverty that only alcohol and a manic acquisition of real estate could ease his suffering? Certainly no one who didn’t know O’Neill intimately, and even many who did. The ghost of the playwright was a tangible presence behind the proscenium arch that night. In this drama, the dead playwright was the protagonist.

  From left at back, Bradford Dillman as Edmund Tyrone, Jason Robards Jr. as Jamie Tyrone, Frederic March as James Tyrone, and at front, Florence Eldridge as Mary Tyrone in José Quintero’s production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night at the Helen Hayes Theatre, 1956.