By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  And, despite his unwaveringly tragic outlook, O’Neill sometimes startled and delighted Arthur and me with his outbursts of sardonic humor, in both his plays and his personal life. We’ve sprinkled examples of that humor throughout our text, including our all-time favorite—his response to the dismissive comments made by various critics about some of his plays: “I love every bone in their heads.”

  • • •

  IN BY WOMEN POSSESSED we have expanded the story of O’Neill’s final wrenching years. They were years of increasing ill health and wrathful battles with Carlotta, who, herself, was not well, either physically or emotionally.

  During Arthur’s and my numerous interviews with Carlotta for our 1962 O’Neill, she had elided details of the harrowing confrontations of those years. We had, nonetheless, contrived to stitch together the facts (and factoids) from various sources: the doctors and nurses who tended to both O’Neills; hospital, police, and court records; lawyers; close friends; and the observations of domestic help.

  The version we ended up with made Carlotta look like a monster. It was a version whispered abroad, with relish, by Carlotta’s disparagers—that is to say, those of O’Neill’s friends she had cut off, who believed she had kept O’Neill a virtual prisoner during his later years. She had once acknowledged to Arthur that she knew all about these whispers but didn’t know how or where to begin defending herself, and preferred to remain silent.

  But—at almost the last moment before our 1962 book was scheduled to go to press—Arthur finally convinced Carlotta that our biography offered her the best chance to tell her side of the scandalous story and that she owed it to herself and to posterity. She agreed to sit for a recorded interview in the hotel suite that was her home.

  “Can you come over at once?” she demanded.

  My ever-resourceful Arthur immediately flung himself into a cab, lugging the thirty-pound reel-to-reel recording machine that was the tool of choice in those ancient times.

  In her living room at the Carlton House, Carlotta drew the heavy drapes. She allowed Arthur only a small table lamp by which to manipulate the clumsy tape recorder. In the darkened room he switched it on and began softly asking questions.

  Carlotta appeared to fall into a trance. After leading her into the subject of her retreat with her husband to Marblehead in the fall of 1948, Arthur—gently but firmly—got her talking about the climactic night of February 5, 1951. In her theatrically inflected voice, now low and halting, Carlotta recounted her hazy memories of that night when O’Neill rushed from their isolated home on Point O’Rocks Lane and when—by all accounts—she let O’Neill lie in the frozen snow of his front yard, moaning in pain with a broken leg.

  Her recorded version differs in its details from the one we had assembled. It differs as well from a version Carlotta herself left behind in one of her diaries. These diaries, for many years locked away, presumably at Carlotta’s own request, are now available to scholars and made use of in By Women Possessed.

  • • •

  LOOKING BACK—a very long way back—Arthur and I reflected on the striking contrast between his tape-recorded session on November 28, 1961 (which turned out to be his final meeting with Carlotta) and our very first meeting with her, five years earlier. It had been arranged by Brooks Atkinson, who briefed us in advance. He cautioned us not to be put off by Carlotta’s theatrical posturing; we should bear in mind that she was a former actress and that she was always onstage. And as O’Neill’s wife and widow, she was accustomed to the role of grande dame and expected deference.

  Atkinson also suggested we not take notes in front of Carlotta. He told us he had hinted to her that we might, at some point, like to write about O’Neill. But he believed Carlotta would be more relaxed and forthcoming if she could regard this first meeting as a social occasion: We were two ardent admirers of O’Neill’s heroic artistry who wished to pay their respects to his widow, over an informal lunch—a lunch to which she had invited us at Atkinson’s suggestion.

  Carlotta certainly lived up to Atkinson’s description.

  It turned out to be a quite elaborate lunch. We met at Quo Vadis, the restaurant adjoining the Lowell Hotel, where Carlotta was then staying. She quickly invited us to join her in what she said was her “usual” drink, pointing out, with a throaty laugh, that it was listed on the menu as a “Monterey Cocktail”—a mix of gin and Cointreau.

  Carlotta Monterey O’Neill was then sixty-eight. She had given up dieting and was no longer the slender beauty of her photographs. But she still had the bearing of a queen, and she throbbed with vitality.

  She was exquisitely groomed and dressed all in black, down to her onyx jewelry. Her hair was a smooth steel gray, cut short, and swept back from her face, which was pearly white and almost unlined.

  She wore tinted glasses because (as she hastened to tell us) she had ruined her eyes over the years, deciphering O’Neill’s minuscule handwriting while she typed his playscripts.

  We both suspected, from what Atkinson and others had already told us, that Carlotta tended to blend history and histrionics and was given to bursts of self-serving hyperbole. She did, most certainly, see herself as the final, tragic O’Neill heroine. Nevertheless, Arthur and I found her not only informative but often funny.

  It was hard to resist taking a note or two, but we both (at that time) had excellent memories, and the minute we got into a taxi after leaving the restaurant, we each scribbled down every word we remembered of Carlotta’s conversation. And, I must confess, that is what we did at the end of all our other interviews—except for that final one Arthur recorded. Atkinson had been right. Carlotta soon began to trust and confide in us—at least up to a point.

  It wasn’t long before she was giving us her melancholy version of O’Neill’s final years as a sick and forgotten man, and of the isolated life she had lived with him, nursing him in the suite of a Boston hotel.

  O’Neill hated hotels, she told us, because he had been born in one and had spent the first seven years of his life traveling from hotel to hotel while his father toured the country with his acting company, reluctantly accompanied by his morphine-addicted wife. Carlotta repeated what she claimed were O’Neill’s last words, uttered on November 21, 1953, three days before his death.

  O’Neill, she said, “clenched his fists, raised himself slightly in his bed, and gasped, ‘Born in a hotel room—and God damn it—died in a hotel room!’”

  Of course, we reported that verbatim in our 1962 O’Neill.

  But at the time of her telling, Carlotta had evidently forgotten an entirely different version in the diary she’d kept during the year of O’Neill’s death. In that 1953 diary, which was among those eventually made available to researchers, there is no entry for November 21. Indeed, there are no entries at all from September 29 through November 24. And her entry on the twenty-fifth noted that O’Neill, after trying but failing to speak to her, mumbled something incoherent, then fell back onto his pillow and never spoke again.

  To do Carlotta justice, it’s more than likely that O’Neill—at some point during his final days, if not on his actual deathbed—did utter those “last” stricken words about dying in a hotel room. They certainly make for a splendid curtain line, and one can hardly blame Carlotta for juxtaposing them. We felt obliged to correct this quirky, if minor, inaccuracy that has so often appeared in print.

  • • •

  IN FEBRUARY 2014, as we approached the end of our final draft, Arthur turned ninety. Although we’d been telling ourselves since embarking on our eighties that henceforth we were living on borrowed time, neither of us had ever really felt our age.

  But it was not a good time to be writing our last chapter, which goes into fairly graphic detail about O’Neill’s ever-worsening health. Arthur (inevitably, I guess) began overempathizing with O’Neill’s medical issues.

  It didn’t help when he, himself, suffered a sligh
t stroke that, eerily, left him with some of the same symptoms suffered by the debilitated sixty-four-year-old O’Neill: severe tremors of the hand, difficulty walking, an episode or two of anxiety and depression.

  Arthur’s mind was as sharp as ever, and he was determined to finish polishing those last few pages of that final chapter. But he was rapidly losing ground, and soon he had to give in to his increasing physical frailty. He told me that, much as he wanted to be around to celebrate the publication of By Women Possessed, he knew he wasn’t going to make it.

  Surely O’Neill was awaiting him. Arthur chuckled weakly as he recalled the Black Irishman’s mocking suggestion for his epitaph:

  There’s something to be said

  For being dead.

  Arthur keenly felt the irony of his situation. “O’Neill is having the last laugh,” he said.

  PART I

  UPHEAVAL

  1

  Although it is only five o’clock on the winter-dark afternoon of January 30, 1928—three and a half hours earlier than the customary eight-thirty Broadway premiere—first-nighters are spilling from limousines and taxis in front of the new John Golden Theatre. As they step onto the roped-off sidewalk, they are surrounded by a crush of celebrity-oglers who are being pressed back by a cadre of mounted police. The celebrities themselves blithely jostle their way to their seats, undaunted by the prospect of sitting through a performance that is double the length of a conventional play.

  They are here for the season’s most trumpeted theatrical event, Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude.

  The author, globally heralded as the pioneer of American stage tragedy and the recipient (so far) of two Pulitzer Prizes, will not be present. Chronically nervous and wary of crowds, he usually sends his wife, Agnes Boulton, as his emissary on opening nights.

  Boulton, however, has her own good reasons for staying in Spithead, the Bermuda home where O’Neill, craving isolation, has settled near the sea that has called to him since childhood. Tonight O’Neill has designated as his emissary Carlotta Monterey, a former actress who is better known for her sultry beauty than for her talent. During the past year and a half, O’Neill has been twisting in the tempest of his on-and-off love affair with her.

  At thirty-nine, O’Neill is as handsome as Apollo, as haunted as Oedipus, and as conflicted as Hamlet. Although long a religious apostate, he was born and raised a Catholic, and his adultery torments him.

  “It’s this and that, the this-that desire—more than desire, need!—that slow-poisons the soul with complicated contradictions,” he lamented in a letter to his closest confidant, Kenneth Macgowan, the theater critic and author. “And do not mistake my nebulous cries for whinings. Beauty, either here or there, is worth whatever price one has to pay for it, here or there . . . Oh very much so!”

  Carlotta Monterey, who has recently ended an unhappy marriage, is O’Neill’s age but, like Shakespeare’s queen, age cannot wither her; a jazz-era Cleopatra, she glides down the aisle to her seat, warmly greeted by friends and stared at by strangers.

  She is escorted by James Speyer, a sixty-seven-year-old widower and powerful international banker and philanthropist. Carlotta’s senior by twenty-seven years, Speyer is an elegant, sophisticated, undemanding man with whom she has had an intermittent love affair both before her marriage and following her divorce. Monterey, who affectionately calls Speyer “Papa,” has led O’Neill to believe he is merely a fatherly friend. Speyer is so fond of her that he has long since secretly settled a sizeable annual income on her—with no strings attached. To O’Neill she attributes the money to a bequest from a childless aunt who raised her.

  Monterey’s bearing is haughty, but her nose-in-the-air carriage stems from severe nearsightedness. Pointed and slightly overlong, her nose, together with a chiseled chin and a complexion both pearly and flawless, completes the veneer of aloof entitlement. Tonight she wears her hair—thick, lustrous, and black—drawn into a smooth coil at the nape of her long, slender neck; she is sometimes referred to in print as “The Swan.” But it is her dark, deep-set eyes, feathered with long lashes, that are her most striking feature; “Shadow Eyes,” O’Neill calls her, quoting Baudelaire.

  Her close friend, the actress Ilka Chase, describes her as “kind and funny”—even, on occasion, “ribald”—although Monterey herself insists she is “innately shy.” Chase admires her immaculate grooming and cites her predilection for couture suits and dresses. Her accessories, Chase notes, are “of the finest material, her shoes made to order of special leathers at great cost” and sometimes sewn with jewels.

  Monterey’s recent divorce from her third husband, Ralph Barton, has been much gossiped about. He is a prestigious artist and a bon vivant—jaunty, openhanded—with unlimited entrée; his caricatures appear prominently in The New Yorker and his renderings of Carlotta and his fellow Brahmins are also vied for by the editors of Vanity Fair, Life, Judge, and Harper’s Bazaar, all of whom pay him exorbitant fees. He has been acclaimed for his witty illustrations for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Anita Loos’s best seller parodying the social and sexual excess of what is now the tail end of the Roaring Twenties. Barton adored Carlotta and she adored him. But she could not forgive his compulsive philandering.

  • • •

  OPENING-NIGHTERS WHO HAVE BEEN following the chitchat about Strange Interlude in the newspapers anticipate an uninhibited probing of Modern Woman’s psychic and sexual yearnings. Contemporary American novelists have explored this territory, but American playwrights have tended to sidestep any intense delving into the messy subject of sex. Not O’Neill.

  Strange Interlude is O’Neill’s nineteenth attempt in twelve years to soar beyond the limits of traditional theatrical creativity. He has confided to Carlotta, who has read the script, that the play is embedded in his own life: “Of course, there’s almost everything in it that makes people mad with rapture or tortured beyond belief. . . . This whole play is I, my experience, you might say.”

  Carlotta has asked O’Neill if she has correctly recognized aspects of herself in Nina Leeds, the play’s protagonist, and he has allowed that “there is a lot of you in the woman, I think . . . and yet, wholly unlike you.” He hesitates to admit just how deeply he has blended her into the multifaceted Nina Leeds, but in truth his agonizing fixation on Carlotta was seldom out of his mind during the long months he labored over the play.

  As for O’Neill’s own essence in Interlude, it is expressed in the character of the virile psychologist, Dr. Darrell, whose first name, significantly, is Edmund (the name O’Neill will later use to represent himself in his openly autobiographical Long Day’s Journey Into Night). Darrell, like O’Neill, is “handsome and intelligent,” his “dark eyes are analytical,” and there is “a quality about him, provoking and disturbing to women, of intense passion.” Illicitly in love with Nina, Darrell struggles against this passion.

  “Sometimes I almost hate her!” Darrell says in an aside, adding that if not for her, he’d have kept his “peace of mind”; he berates himself for being “no good for anything lately.” And then O’Neill, surely thinking of his own early effort to evade Carlotta’s conquest, causes Darrell to muse: “. . . got me where she wants me! . . . I’m caught . . . she touches my hand, her eyes get in mine, I lose my will.” He vows to go away and “forget her in work!” But in the end, Darrell succumbs to Nina (foreshadowing O’Neill’s own surrender to Carlotta).

  Nina Leeds is O’Neill’s Everywoman. She is the emotional and psychological aggregate of all the tragic heroines of his previous plays. She embodies for O’Neill both the darkest and most seductive characteristics of her sex—qualities that O’Neill attributes not only to the cluster of women with whom he’s had unhappy love affairs, but also to the unstable, withholding mother who had wished him unborn.

  • • •

  THE OPENING-NIGHT AUDIENCE sits entranced by the play’s convoluted and ever-more-lurid plot. It
seems that Nina, the pampered, middle-class daughter of a widowed college professor, had sanctimoniously refused to sleep with her lover, Gordon Shaw, before he went off to war. Now, he has been killed in action, and Nina, crazed by guilt, hurls herself into a nursing career and sleeps with every wounded soldier who desires her. To save Nina from her self-destructive behavior, Dr. Darrell advises her to marry the dead Gordon’s best friend, Sam Evans, who worships her. Although she does not love Sam, she agrees, believing she will thereby atone for having allowed Gordon to die unfulfilled.

  Dutifully pregnant with Sam’s child, Nina abruptly learns that (unknown to Sam) there is insanity in his family and secretly undergoes an illegal abortion; unwilling to hurt Sam, she pretends she has had a miscarriage. Sam sinks into a deep depression, and Nina—intent on providing him with his longed-for child—persuades Darrell to impregnate her. A son is born, Nina presents him to her unsuspecting husband as his own, and Sam comes joyously back to life.

  Nina, meanwhile, has fallen in love with Darrell (who is equally smitten) and won’t give him up. But Darrell finds it harder and harder to live with the guilt of betraying Sam and struggles to end his affair (as O’Neill is struggling to give up Carlotta).

  Time goes by. Lots of time. This, after all, is a five-hour, nine-act drama that unfolds over twenty-five years and has all the elements of a novel.

  Nina’s affair with Darrell eventually cools; she loses the son she adores to a daughter-in-law she loathes; Sam’s prosperous, happy life is cut short by a heart attack; and Nina allows herself to sink into a comfortable, asexual relationship with an old family friend, an elderly, timid mama’s boy, who has always secretly loved her. At play’s end, the widowed Nina longs for nothing more than to “rot away in peace.”