By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  • • •

  FOR ITS DAY, Strange Interlude was an audacious and triumphant challenge to the Broadway showplace. O’Neill’s daringly raw scenes of sexual lust—not to mention his reference to the taboo topic of abortion—were years ahead of their time not only for the American stage but also for much of contemporary American fiction.

  “Even the best of modern novels [are] padded with the unimportant and insignificant,” and their authors are “mere timid recorders of life,” O’Neill has complained to the critic Joseph Wood Krutch. Carlotta, herself at home in the theater, knows O’Neill scorns most of his fellow dramatists (in some of whose plays Carlotta has appeared) as scramblers after easy success; they wedge their characters into artificial situations and then melodramatically extricate them—all in the cause of sending their audiences home in a glow of happy endings.

  O’Neill himself has never stooped to crowd-pleasing; none of his previous successes had happy endings—not The Hairy Ape, The Emperor Jones, or Desire Under the Elms; nor the two for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, Beyond the Horizon and Anna Christie (although some of his critics, to O’Neill’s dismay, misread the latter play’s conclusion).

  In all his writing, O’Neill was obsessed with man’s battle against fate, a battle he inevitably loses. It is the bedrock of his creativity and he has never flinched from expressing it.

  “Most modern plays are concerned with the relation between man and man. But that does not interest me at all,” he has declared. “I am interested only in the relation between man and God.”

  In Strange Interlude, O’Neill has chosen to focus on the relationship between woman and God; Nina Leeds is every bit as God-forsaken and afflicted as any of O’Neill’s earlier suffering male protagonists.

  • • •

  THE KNOWLEDGEABLE OPENING-NIGHT audience is quick to realize that Strange Interlude is O’Neill’s most ambitious effort to date, offering a feast of insights into the psyches of his characters—particularly when they voice their sometimes startling inner thoughts in spoken asides. He makes no apology for borrowing this archaic device; he is just as ready to pinch Elizabethan technique, when he thinks it will work, as he is to appropriate stagecraft from the ancient Greeks.

  He is, however, quick to deny that he has been influenced by Freudian gospel, as some of his critics will assert (this being, after all, the dawn of psychoanalytical enlightenment). He has more than once insisted that every creative artist since the beginning of time is an instinctive psychologist and doesn’t require Freud’s assistance.

  • • •

  AS THE CURTAIN RISES (shortly after five fifteen) on part one of Strange Interlude, Carlotta is in a flutter. She and O’Neill have made plans to secretly slip away to Europe in ten days, and if the play is a hit—as she suspects it will be—his freshly garnered notoriety will make it all but impossible for them to maintain their privacy. As she strains to sense the audience’s reaction, she doesn’t know if she’s more terrified or thrilled by what awaits her. Forewarned that the five-hour performance will break for a dinner intermission at a quarter to eight, many playgoers plan to return home to change into the black-tie attire that is de rigueur for a premiere (but gauche at five in the afternoon), before reclaiming their seats for the play’s second half, at nine o’clock. Others, more interested in nourishment than fashion, are already in formal attire and scurry to nearby restaurants.

  The Golden Theatre, somewhat isolated (on Fifty-eighth Street near Central Park) has fewer dining choices than the pulsing midtown theater district, but the nearby Park Central has tailored a “Dinner Interlude” between seven forty-five and nine for the Strange Interlude audience, and the Au Grande Vatel promises (in the Playbill), “You Will Be Repaid by Walking Three Blocks South on 7th Avenue for Your Intermission Dinner,” which (including dessert and coffee) is available “from 75 cents to $1.75.” It will be a shivery walk, though, with the temperature in the low twenties.

  Carlotta is among those who forgo dinner. She is driven to her Upper East Side apartment where, before changing into an evening gown, she telephones a jittery O’Neill at the Wentworth Hotel on Forty-sixth Street near Broadway.

  The audience is savoring the play, she reports, and she pictures her lover’s rare smile of pleasure, the light in his piercing dark brown eyes. His image is seldom out of her mind—his silky brown hair and mustache, the lean muscular body of the habitual swimmer. She thinks of the moments shared with him at the back of the dark, near-empty theater during rehearsals, watching his play evolve, her hand enclosed in his long-fingered grip.

  In looks, he is her perfect male counterpart; they relish posing together for portrait photographers, all of whom are sworn to withhold the photos until after their marriage. While she speaks to O’Neill on the phone, she imagines him pacing his two-room suite, tense about his newest work, wishing it were over, missing her, fighting his anxiety and guilt.

  O’Neill also gets a favorable report from Lawrence Langner, his producer and the principal founder of the Theatre Guild. During intermission, Langner ducks into a nearby drugstore phone booth to give O’Neill “a blow-by-blow account” of how the play is being received.

  Unknown to Carlotta, O’Neill—in a characteristic gesture of nostalgia for his vagabond youth—has chosen to wait out the evening in his suite with Bill Clarke, a former circus daredevil known as “Volo the Volitant,” who once turned loops in the air while riding his bicycle down a precipitous incline at Madison Square Garden. (O’Neill will later partly base the character of Ed Mosher, “one-time circus man” in The Iceman Cometh, on him.) O’Neill has invited Clarke to join him for dinner.

  “Well, everything seems to be going all right,” he remarks to Clarke after receiving his two phone calls. Then, in a voice of profound sadness, he adds, “It would be nice to have Jamie here now.” O’Neill is referring to his older brother, who died of alcoholism five years earlier, at forty-five, and who often used to accompany O’Neill and Clarke on whiskey-soaked sprees from which O’Neill emerged in need of sympathetic tending. “You were good to me in the old days, Clarkie,” O’Neill says. “I’ve never forgotten it.”

  O’Neill hasn’t mentioned Clarke’s presence to Carlotta, knowing she is something of a social snob and would disapprove. She has been trying to nudge O’Neill away from his attachment to his bohemian past, to live up to her own (acquired) standard of upper-class elegance.

  • • •

  STRANGE INTERLUDE STARS Lynn Fontanne, whose husband, Alfred Lunt, happens also to be appearing on Broadway in an O’Neill play, Marco Millions, which opened at the Guild Theater three weeks earlier. (It isn’t the first time that the prolific O’Neill has had two new plays running simultaneously in New York.) Marco Millions is a satirical pageant about Marco Polo, whose adventures as a thirteenth-century Venetian merchant perfectly parallel O’Neill’s concept of the twentieth-century rich American businessman—his symbol of American greed. O’Neill sees Marco as an arid-souled materialist, destructive of the beauty and poetry in life.

  The play, in a clumsy production that disappointed O’Neill, has received only lukewarm reviews (but manages a run of ninety-two performances). Lunt and Fontanne, both established stars in their own right, are poised to emerge as Broadway’s reigning royal couple, and their quips and comments quickly become gossip items.

  Lunt is widely quoted as having ridiculed Strange Interlude as “a six-day bisexual race”—a reference to the six-day bicycle races that are a popular Madison Square Garden draw. Fontanne’s attitude toward the play is no better calculated to endear her to O’Neill. (Eight years earlier she had appeared in the failed out-of-town tryout of his Chris Christophersen, later rewritten as Anna Christie, and although he’d kept his distance from that production, he’d had derogatory reports about Fontanne’s performance both on- and offstage.)

  “There were a good many lines intended by O’Neill to be taken
seriously, that I thought would get belly laughs from the audience,” recalls Fontanne, disparaging the play’s spoken asides. “It would have hurt the play. For instance, I would have to say in an aside something like, ‘Ned [Edmund Darrell] has the bluest eyes I ever saw; I must tell him so.’ Then I would go to Ned and tell him he had the bluest eyes I ever saw.

  “I felt it was unnecessary to say this twice. I told O’Neill it would be better if I looked at Ned’s eyes with admiration the first time, silently, instead of saying the line as an aside. I asked him if I could cut the line. He said, ‘No, you can’t. Play it as I wrote it.’

  “But the play was so long I felt O’Neill wouldn’t realize if I cut a line here and there, so, with fear and trembling, I cut a few of those horse-laugh lines. O’Neill never knew about this sly business of mine.”

  As the son of the actor James O’Neill, a widely celebrated matinee idol of his day, Eugene believed he knew all too much about actors’ wiles. Only recently, he’d complained to an interviewer for the World, “Actors generally get between me and the performance. That is, I catch myself recognizing the technique all the time. I don’t mean that I blame them, but having been brought up among actors I recognize what they are doing when they put over a point. The mechanics of acting stop me from seeing the play.”

  To Lawrence Langner, more bluntly, an exasperated O’Neill grumbles, “If the actors weren’t so dumb, they wouldn’t need asides. They’d be able to express the meaning without them.”

  Shortly before rehearsals began for Marco and Interlude, O’Neill confided his disdain for the stars of his two plays to Agnes (from whom he had not yet formally separated): “I haven’t met either Lunt or Fontanne yet. From what I hear they are both pretty dull in the old bean—but that hardly astonishes me.”

  • • •

  WHEN THE FINAL curtain drops on Strange Interlude shortly after eleven o’clock, Carlotta Monterey, reveling in the animated audience response, joins O’Neill—now alone at the Wentworth—and assures him the play is a hit. The next day’s reviews confirm her judgment. O’Neill—who has long since stated his goal of matching on the stage the achievements of America’s most innovative novelists—especially appreciates the appraisal in the World, which calls Strange Interlude “not only a great American play but the great American novel as well.”

  That assessment is by Dudley Nichols, a twenty-seven-year-old star reporter who—just an hour before curtain time—was asked by the paper’s editor, Herbert Bayard Swope, to replace its established critic, Alexander Woollcott. Woollcott had behaved unethically, said Swope, in writing a condemnation of Strange Interlude for the February issue of a rival publication, Vanity Fair, which came out a week before the play’s opening. (Woollcott had read a script, rumored to have been smuggled to him by Lynn Fontanne, and—convinced the play would be a spectacular flop—had been holding forth at dinner parties, deriding Strange Interlude as “the Abie’s Irish Rose of the pseudo intelligentsia.”)

  An immediate hit, the play is soon the center of controversy—nothing new for O’Neill. The powerful Shubert theater organization complains to the Manhattan district attorney that Strange Interlude is “of a low moral tone” and demands of the play’s producers, “Why does not the Theater Guild . . . come down from the pedestal of art and virtue upon which it has been posing . . . and declare frankly that it is out for every dollar that it can tease into its coffers?”

  The Shuberts plainly are envious of their competitor’s success and the Theatre Guild can afford an enigmatic smile; as the American producers of Saint Joan, George Bernard Shaw’s great succès d’estime, the Guild is secure in its record of “art and virtue.”

  The D.A. responds that he will have the police commissioner investigate the play’s moral tone. But the commissioner reports that his investigator “has been unable to buy tickets for any performance earlier than May 28”—hardly a statement to placate the Shuberts. The investigation comes to nothing. (Some months later, O’Neill runs into Lee Shubert in Spain, and reports to a friend, “We shook hands smilingly as though neither had ever heard of a play called Strange Interlude. It was a funny scene.”)

  • • •

  STRANGE INTERLUDE LOOKS to be O’Neill’s biggest hit to date. For seventeen months, it will play 426 performances to capacity audiences in New York, and generate two road companies. It will earn O’Neill more money—$275,000, a fortune in this era of low taxes—than he has ever made before.

  When published soon after its Broadway opening, the playscript becomes a best-selling book—one hundred thousand copies—and wins O’Neill his third Pulitzer. It’s made into a movie starring Clark Gable and Norma Shearer.

  O’Neill is, of course, gratified. But well beyond its artistic and material rewards, Strange Interlude signals for him the start of a colossal upheaval, both personal and professional. About to make a radical change in the way he lives, he is uneasy about his ever-increasing fame.

  At the moment, he’d very much prefer not having the newspapers delving into his private life.

  2

  The first face-to-face meeting between Carlotta Monterey and Eugene O’Neill hardly signaled their explosive entanglement to come.

  Carlotta had taken over the small but crucial role of Mildred Douglas in The Hairy Ape when it moved to Broadway’s Plymouth Theatre from the Provincetown Playhouse in mid-April 1922. O’Neill, to her chagrin, barely acknowledged her presence in the cast.

  Carlotta ceased to be troubled by O’Neill’s indifference, however, when Ralph Barton, infatuated by her beauty after he saw her onstage, presented himself as her impassioned suitor. Barton at thirty-one is three years younger than Carlotta. He dresses like a dandy, has charming manners, and denies himself little in the way of fine food, wine, and revelry. He is married to his second wife, Anne Minnerly, a model—very pretty, but no match for Carlotta.

  Until she meets Barton, Carlotta—with two failed marriages behind her—has all but despaired of finding her ideal mate. Moreover, in spite of her role in a prestigious O’Neill play, she is disillusioned with her career, complaining to friends that rarely has she been cast as anything but “the bitch or the vamp.”

  Indeed, she is fed up with the theater and, for some time now, has envisioned a different career. As she wandered from one vapid melodrama to another in just the sort of glib, happy-ending trivia O’Neill loved to disparage, she never grew as an actress. What Carlotta now longs for—what she believes is her destiny—is to be muse and ministering angel to a creative genius; in spite of her allure, though, it hasn’t been easy to track and capture that creature of her dreams.

  One night in early May, after a performance of The Hairy Ape, she is introduced to Barton at a party. Barton doesn’t leave her side and she’s quick to recognize him as the trophy she has been hunting. Hunter and prey soon are in bed together. It isn’t long before Minnerly files for divorce (and soon after marries the poet who famously signs himself e.e. cummings).

  Two months go by, and Barton is sketching a magazine caricature of Carlotta. “I cannot visualize your nose satisfactorily,” he tells her in a note, adding he has been forced instead to concentrate on her eyebrows. His note addresses her as “Semiramis; Ninon; Carlotta”—linking her name to two fabled courtesans, one mythological, the other seventeenth-century French. Surely meaning to flatter, Barton is delighted to have spotted the courtesan in Carlotta.

  During their four years together, Carlotta dedicates herself to Barton, swooning over his work, micromanaging his household, assuming secretarial duties, and pleasurably sharing his sybaritic lifestyle. She and Barton are inseparable. Carlotta excels as the hostess of sumptuous all-night parties. The popular portrait photographer Nickolas Muray, for one, is amazed by the bounty of the Barton salon with its inexhaustible flow of food, bootleg liquor, and entertainment. Among the guests—always formally attired—were the handsome, raffish mayor of New York, Jimmy Walker,
and Barton’s closest friend, Charlie Chaplin, who, Muray recalled, would give impromptu performances, sometimes spouting “double-talk in half a dozen languages.”

  The Barton-Monterey relationship is stormy and passionate, according to Ilka Chase. Plagued by insomnia and restlessness, Barton is often irascible and, at moments when he feels suffocated by Carlotta’s relentless nurturing, he turns on her. “Carlotta would arrive at the theater in a seething, emotional turmoil and pour her misfortunes into my willing ears,” recalled Chase. “As she was very beautiful, Ralph was not the first man who had made her unhappy.”

  In spite of their persistent bickering, Carlotta and Barton are in love and, after living together for nearly three years, she elicits from him a promise of monogamy. They marry on March 17, 1925.

  “Carlotta was mad about Barton,” observed Carl Van Vechten, the novelist and photographer. But, like his dear friend Chaplin, Barton is a compulsive philanderer; he is also—although the symptoms apparently are not yet pronounced—a manic depressive. One evening, after dinner with the Bartons, Van Vechten listens to Carlotta and Barton as they debate, for three hours, whether they will “live together any more.”

  They come to no conclusion that night. But Carlotta has begun to doubt Barton’s vow of monogamy and he chafes under her accusations. They have taken to quarreling in front of friends; it’s apparent the marriage is unraveling. Carlotta, at thirty-seven, is not happy at the way her life is turning out.

  • • •

  BORN HAZEL NIELSEN THARSING on December 28, 1888, in Oakland, California, Carlotta has borrowed her stage surname from the California resort city of Monterey. “Carlotta” completes the exotic effect, but no Spanish blood flows through her veins.

  Her father, Christian Nielsen Taasinge, was born in Denmark (slightly altering his surname after arriving in the United States). A seaman in his youth, he eventually settled as a fruit farmer in California’s Yuba County, where he raised apricots and peaches. His daughter liked to describe him rather grandly as a “horticulturist.”