102. William Johnston, “To-Day’s the Time,” Pleiades Club Year Book (New York: Pleiades Club, 1912), 58.
103. Madison Cawein, “Beside the Road,” Pleiades Club Year Book, 129.
104. See Robert M. Dowling, “Jimmy Tomorrow Revisited: New Sources for The Iceman Cometh,” Eugene O’Neill Review 34, no. 3 (2013): 94–106.
105. O’Neill, Exorcism, 2.
106. Gelb and Gelb, Life with Monte Cristo, 295.
107. Kathleen O’Neill v. Eugene G. O’Neill, County Clerk’s Index #1673, Supreme Court, Westchester County, Westchester County Clerk’s Office, White Plains, N.Y., 1912.
108. Washington Times, April 11, 1912, 11; Variety, n.d., 1913, 10.
109. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 128n2; Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, “J. M. Synge and the Abbey Theatre’s Leftist Influence on O’Neill,” in Herrmann and Dowling, Eugene O’Neill and His Early Contemporaries, 79.
110. “Staid Columbia University Shelters Radicals,” New York Times, January 15, 1911.
111. “Sees Artist’s Hope in Anarchic Ideas,” New York Times, March 18, 1912, 8.
112. Interview with Moritz Jagendorf, February 23, 1978, in Avrich, Anarchist Voices, 221, 220; Komroff, “Manuel Komroff,” 202; Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Metropolitan, 2000), 133.
113. Robert M. Dowling, ed. “Kathleen O’Neill v. Eugene O’Neill: Proceedings of the New York Supreme Court at White Plains, June 10, 1912,” Eugene O’Neill Review 34, no. 1 (2013): 24. O’Neill’s second wife, Agnes Boulton, implies in her memoir that he did not have sex with the prostitute, that they only talked and chain-smoked, and that eventually he felt “as sorry for her as for himself” (Part of a Long Story, 168). But we should remember that he was describing this event to his new wife.
114. See Robert M. Dowling, “Eugene O’Neill’s Exorcism: The Lost Prequel to Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” Eugene O’Neill Review 34, no. 1 (2013): 1–12.
115. O’Neill, Exorcism, 3, 29.
116. Ibid., 31–32.
117. Ibid., 32, 34, 55. Bearing in mind O’Neill’s lifelong compulsion to project onto the stage emotions impossible for him to express otherwise, I agree with Louis Sheaffer that the script of Exorcism must be considered “the most reliable index of Eugene’s frame of mind after his suicide attempt” (Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 214).
118. O’Neill, Exorcism, 32.
119. My characterization here refers to when O’Neill describes Stephen Murray, his autobiographical protagonist in The Straw, as someone who “gives off the impression of being somehow dissatisfied with himself but not yet embittered enough by it to take it out on others” (CP1, 732).
120. Gelb and Gelb, Life with Monte Cristo, 330; Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 168.
121. Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 169.
122. Ibid.
123. Quoted in Gelb and Gelb, Life with Monte Cristo, 337.
124. O’Neill, Exorcism, 26–29, 47.
125. See Dowling, “Exorcism: The Lost Prequel.”
126. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 378.
127. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 215. In the 1920s, O’Neill denied that he wrote the telegram, but then said it was printable because it was such a good yarn (Charles Webster, interview by Louis Sheaffer, December 18, 1962, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection).
128. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 378.
129. “The New Bills,” Goodwin’s Weekly [Salt Lake City, Utah], February 3, 1912, 13; “Plays and Players at Salt Lake Theaters,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 2 and 4, 1912, magazine section, 6; Karsner, “Eugene O’Neill at Close Range in Maine.”
130. Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 215; Webster, interview by Sheaffer, December 18, 1962; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 378; Basso, “Tragic Sense—I,” 37; Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 216.
131. “Orpheum,” Goodwin’s Weekly, February 10, 1912, 12; William Davies King, ed., “A Wind Is Rising”: The Correspondence of Agnes Boulton and Eugene O’Neill (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), 159.
132. “Mr. James O’Neill Reaches This City After a Long Trip from New Orleans,” Ogden (Utah) Evening Standard, February 2, 1912, 5.
133. Webster, interviews by Sheaffer, May 8, 1962, and December 18, 1962.
134. “Plays and Players at Salt Lake Theaters,” 6. To view this photograph, see the Library of Congress’s Web site Chronicling America (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045396/1912–02–04/ed-1/seq-38/). The O’Neills also played matinee and evening performances the following Saturday, February 3, but that would not have given the Salt Lake Tribune enough time to publish the photograph for the Sunday paper (“No Vaudeville Thursday Night,” Ogden (Utah) Evening Standard, January 31, 1912, 5; see also “News, Notes and Queries,” Eugene O’Neill Newsletter 8, no. 2 [Summer–Fall, 1984], http://www.eoneill.com/library/newsletter/viii_2/viii-2n.htm).
135. Webster, interview by Sheaffer, October 28, 1960.
136. Fechter, Monte Cristo, 68; Webster, interviews by Sheaffer, May 8, 1962, and December 18, 1962.
137. Webster, interview by Sheaffer, December 18, 1962; Gelb and Gelb, Life with Monte Cristo, 322. This is an anecdote O’Neill himself liked to tell often.
138. “O’Neill Failed His Dad,” New York World, October 19, 1929, 14 (reprinted from St. Louis Dispatch, 1929).
139. Ibid.
140. Fechter, Monte Cristo, 39.
141. Webster, interview by Sheaffer, May 8, 1962. In the interview, Webster says O’Neill uttered the line “Is he …?” which doesn’t appear in the full script. It is possible they shortened the line for the vaudeville version.
142. James Light, interview by Louis Sheaffer, November 5, 1961, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection.
143. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 498; quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 215. The Gelbs and Sheaffer disagree about O’Neill’s level of drunkenness, the former believing O’Neill that, as he said, he never drew “a sober breath,” and the latter believing Webster that he didn’t drink more than a few drinks a day. I agree with the Gelbs. O’Neill could hide his drunkenness well, and I don’t believe that he would wish to embarrass his parents or that Webster would be privy to the insular O’Neills’ actual drinking habits.
144. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 498.
145. “People of the Stage,” Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, March 8, 1908, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection; Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 216. One of these was the Henry L. Brittain Company, where Eugene had once been employed.
146. Webster, interviews by Sheaffer, May 8, 1962, and December 18, 1962; Fechter, Monte Cristo, 65; Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 220.
147. Dowling, “Kathleen O’Neill v. Eugene O’Neill,” 16.
148. Kathleen O’Neill v. Eugene G. O’Neill, Westchester County Clerk’s Office.
149. Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 224; Gelb and Gelb, Life with Monte Cristo, 349; Morgan McGinley, “An Actor’s Visit Stirs Memories of O’Neill’s Day,” (New London) Day, March 1, 1998, D1.
150. Basso, “Tragic Sense—I,” 37; McGinley, “An Actor’s Visit,” D1; Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 227.
151. Quoted in Clark, Eugene O’Neill, 19; James Light, “The Parade of Masks,” T-Mss 2001-050, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library, New York.
152. O’Neill, [untitled poem] (1912), in Poems, 9.
153. Frederick P. Latimer, “Eugene Is beyond Us,” New London Evening Day, February 15, 1928, 6; J. F. O’Neill, “What a Sanatorium Did for Eugene O’Neill,” Journal of the Outdoor Life 20, no. 6 (1923): 192; Donald Gallup, introduction to O’Neill, Poems, vi; Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 225.
154. Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 233.
155. Ibid., 289. Maibelle Scott’s grandfather, Captain T. A. Scott, would also appear as Captain Dick Scott in Beyond the Horizon.
156. Ibid., 233, 234.
157. Ibid., 235.
158. Bowen, “Black Irishman,
” 65.
159. This line was written into Maibelle’s friend Mildred Culver’s autograph book. Quoted in Gelb and Gelb, Life with Monte Cristo, 434.
160. See Madeline C. Smith, “Harkness, Edward Stephen, and Hammond, Edward Crowninshield,” in Dowling, Critical Companion to Eugene O’Neill, 2:616–17.
161. See Richard Eaton, “Dolan, John ‘Dirty,’” in Dowling, Critical Companion to Eugene O’Neill, 2:573–75. The ice pond was actually located on Hammond’s land, though O’Neill unfairly conflates him with Harkness with the Standard Oil reference.
162. Dr. Heyer appears as Dr. Hardy in Long Day’s Journey, though Heyer was not the quack O’Neill made him out to be (Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 242).
163. Ibid., 236–37.
164. Ibid, 237.
165. Ibid., 238, 240, 241.
166. Ibid., 240.
167. Ibid., 224.
168. J. F. O’Neill, “What a Sanatorium Did for Eugene O’Neill,” 192.
169. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 25.
170. J. F. O’Neill, “What a Sanatorium Did for Eugene O’Neill,” 192.
171. Gelb and Gelb, Life with Monte Cristo, 387; for a complete breakdown of O’Neill’s reading at Gaylord, see Jean Chothia, Forging a Language: A Study of the Plays of Eugene O’Neill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 199.
172. Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 257.
173. O’Neill, “Ye Disconsolate Poet to His ‘Kitten’ Anent Ye Better Farm Where Love Reigneth: Ballade” (1914), in Poems, 42.
174. J. F. O’Neill, “What a Sanatorium Did for Eugene O’Neill,” 192.
175. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 533.
176. William Saroyan, The Time of Your Life (1939) (London: Methuen Drama, 2008), 43.
177. “Human Defects,” Lockport (N.Y.) Union-Sun and Journal, March 18, 1940, 6.
178. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 155.
179. Notes on James F. Byth, “The Search for Jimmy Tomorrow,” Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection. Sheaffer reports that the New York Health Department Bureau of Records listed Byth’s death as a suicide.
180. Quoted in Charles F. Sweeney, “Back to the Source of Plays Written by Eugene O’Neill,” New York World, November 9, 1924, cited in Doris Alexander, Eugene O’Neill’s Last Plays: Separating Art from Autobiography (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 23.
181. Clayton Meeker Hamilton, Seen on the Stage (New York: Holt, 1920), 187; Clayton [Meeker] Hamilton, “Eugene G. O’Neill,” Ninth Lecture at Columbia University, April 7, 1924, in Conversations on Contemporary Drama (New York: Macmillan, 1925), 203, Hamilton, Seen, 187.
182. Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 222.
183. Hamilton, Seen, 187–88.
184. Richter, O’Neill and Dat Ole Davil Sea, 138, 142.
185. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 22.
186. Bowen, Curse of the Misbegotten, 114.
187. O’Neill, “Speaking, to the Shade of Dante, of Beatrices” (1915), in Poems, 65.
188. Beatrice Ashe, interview by Louis Sheaffer, September 1962, Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 30.
189. Ashe, interview by Sheaffer, September 1962. (Ashe’s letters from O’Neill are housed at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.)
190. Clayton [Meeker] Hamilton, “O’Neill’s First Book: A Review of ‘Thirst,’ and Other One-Act Plays” (1915), in Cargill, Fagin, and Fisher, O’Neill and His Plays, 229; Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 291.
191. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 125.
192. Ibid.
193. Gladys Hamilton, “Untold Tales of Eugene O’Neill,” Theatre Arts 40, no. 8 (1956): 88.
194. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 125.
195. Tyler, Whatever Goes Up, 91.
196. Gladys Hamilton, “Untold Tales,” 88. Bread and Butter wouldn’t see a performance until 1998. O’Neill claimed later that he destroyed Servitude, but since he copyrighted it at the Library of Congress, it was produced in 1960 at New York International Airport (now JFK). (Given Servitude’s wooden dialogue and sexist views on love and marriage, some might feel it would have been better left to rot in Tyler’s filing cabinet.)
197. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 125; Gladys Hamilton, “Untold Tales,” 88.
198. Hamilton, Seen, 188; Hamilton, “Eugene G. O’Neill.” As well as O’Neill, the graduates of George Pierce Baker’s legendary seminar included playwrights Philip Barry, Sidney Howard, and Edward Sheldon; novelists John Dos Passos and Thomas Wolfe; renowned journalists and critics Robert Benchley, Heywood Broun, and Van Wyck Brooks; O’Neill’s future producers Theresa Helburn and Kenneth Macgowan; and set designers Robert Edmond Jones and Lee Simonson, among many other literary lights (Madeline Smith, “George Pierce Baker,” in Dowling, Critical Companion to Eugene O’Neill, 2:529).
199. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 26.
200. Ibid.
201. The Ebel family’s house was located at 1105 Massachusetts Avenue.
202. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 28, 33.
203. Ibid., 52.
204. Paul D. Voelker, “Eugene O’Neill and George Pierce Baker: A Reconsideration,” American Literature 49, no. 2 (1977): 214; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 36; Pfister, Staging Depth, 107.
205. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 60–61.
206. Ibid., 60.
207. Ibid., 68, 402.
208. John V. A. Weaver, “I Knew Him When—,” New York Sunday World, February 26, 1926.
209. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 28, 54, 47.
210. Ibid., 42; Weaver, “I Knew Him When—.”
211. Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 297.
212. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 51.
213. Gelb and Gelb, Life with Monte Cristo, 482; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 51; Voelker, “Eugene O’Neill and George Pierce Baker,” 218.
214. Webster, interview by Sheaffer, May 8, 1962; Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 309–10.
215. Clark, Eugene O’Neill, 28; Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 317.
216. This address has never been reported, but when the Canton Silk Mill took on the lease of the building in December 1919, the New York Herald reported, “M. & L. Hess and Holten & Leverich have sold the lease on the Garden Hotel, at 63 Madison Avenue, at the northeast corner of Twenty-seventh Street, for Welibrock & Thomforde to the Canton Silk Mill” (December 17, 1919, 23).
217. Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 109.
218. “A Eugene O’Neill Miscellany,” New York Sun, January 12, 1928, 31.
219. “‘Sixty’ Is Dead; Long Live Polly’s! Greenwich Villagers Preparing to Give New Year Hot Welcome Dance,” New York Tribune, December 30, 1915, 3.
220. Djuna Barnes, “The Days of Jig Cook: Recollections of Ancient Theatre History But Ten Years Old,” Theatre Guild Magazine, January 1929, 32.
221. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 59, 65.
222. Mary Heaton Vorse, “Eugene O’Neill’s Pet Saloon Is Gone,” New York World, May 4, 1930, M7; Luther S. Harris, Around Washington Square: An Illustrated History of Greenwich Village (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 194.
223. Vorse, “Eugene O’Neill’s Pet Saloon,” M7.
224. Mary Heaton Vorse, Time and the Town: A Provincetown Chronicle (1942), ed. Adele Heller (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 122; verse, “Eugene O’Neill’s Pet Saloon,” M7; Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 115; “Solemn Sightseers Stroll in Waldorf,” New York Times, March 30, 1929.
225. “Sight of Revolver, Held by Policeman, Halts Gang Killing,” New York Evening World, June 15, 1915, 5; “Gangster Outwitted by Two Detectives,” New York Evening World, January 15, 1915, 4; Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 217.
226. Harry Golden, “Only in America,” Amsterdam Recorder, June 13, 1969, 4; Vorse, “Eugene O’Neill’s Pet Saloon.”
227. Gelb and Gelb, Life with Monte Cristo, 523–24; O’Neill, Selected Letters, 547.
228. Quoted in Sheaffer, Son and Playwright, 214; Hutchi
ns Hapgood, “Memories of a Determined Drinker; or, Forty Years of Drink” (1932), MS, Hapgood Family Papers, Beinecke Library; Boulton, Part of a Long Story, 254.
229. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 73.
230. Hutchins Hapgood, “The Case of Terry,” Revolt, February 19, 1916, 6.
231. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 100.
232. Hapgood, “The Case of Terry,” 6.
233. Oliver M. Sayler, “From Play at Provincetown to Work in New York and All for Native Drama Past, Present, and Future of a Brave and Fruitful Adventure” (1921), in Edna Kenton, The Provincetown Players and the Playwrights’ Theatre, 1915–1922, ed. Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004), 192.
ACT II: “To Be an Artist or Nothing”
Notes to pp. 123–24: “Now that I look back” (Louis Sheaffer, Son and Playwright [Boston: Little, Brown, 1968], 204); “the closed-shop, star-system, amusement racket” (Eugene O’Neill, “An Open Letter on the Death of George Pierce Baker” (January 7, 1935), in The Unknown O’Neill: Unpublished and Unfamiliar Writings of Eugene O’Neill, ed. Travis Bogard [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988], 420); “aimed at and almost succeeded … their henchmen” (quoted in Candace Barrington, American Chaucers [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007], 47); “to establish a stage where” (Edna Kenton, The Provincetown Players and the Playwrights’ Theatre, 1915–1922, ed. Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer [Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004], 72).
1. Leona Rust Egan, Provincetown as a Stage (Orleans, Mass.: Parnassus, 1994), 151.
2. Wainwright J. Wainwright, Provincetown in Picture and Story (Cotiut, Mass.: Picture Book, 1953), 4; Mary Heaton Vorse, Time and the Town: A Provincetown Chronicle (1942), ed. Adele Heller (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 147, opp. p. 126.
3. The fact that O’Neill and Carlin occupied a sailmaker’s loft next to Francis’s Flats is mentioned with confidence in a letter from actress Kyra Markham to Louis Sheaffer, September 6, 1962 (photocopy), private collection of Jackson R. Bryer. The link between O’Neill and Boyesen with Provincetown has been given no attention to date, possibly because he was a political figure rather than a theatrical or literary one.
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 57