by Arthur Gelb
O’Neill appreciates that Rockmore and Winston take his celebrity in stride; he trusts them as down-to-earth, both sensible and candid and, truth be told, he needs to escape now and again (as did Barton) from Carlotta’s smothering presence.
Winston recalls several occasions on which O’Neill drifted back to his youthful tribulations: “Sometimes he would tell me a little about his family. But he seemed incapable of finishing his thoughts. He would say, ‘Our family . . . there was a great deal of tragedy . . . we drifted apart . . . my mother . . .’ He seemed to be bearing a cross, quietly. But he did say, several times, that one day he would write the tragic story of himself and his family.”
Toward the end of November, O’Neill made an overnight visit to Winston’s Long Island home; strolling with his host to the edge of the Sound that evening and watching the moon’s reflection on the water, he confided a fantasy:
“If I were thinking of suicide, I’d swim along that reflection until I was exhausted and couldn’t swim anymore.” Is he thinking of suicide? Winston asks, and O’Neill says no, but if he ever decides to do it, that would be a good way.
He does not mention his actual suicide attempt (with sleeping pills) sixteen years earlier, nor does he tell Winston that the idea of swimming to his death derives from his literary hero, August Strindberg; in The Dance of Death, a young woman thwarted in love speaks of killing herself by swimming with her lover out into the sea until they drown. “There would be style in that,” she says.
• • •
AFTER HIS OVERNIGHT VISIT with Winston, O’Neill is happy to rejoin Carlotta in New York and to have her at his side during rehearsals of Strange Interlude. He tries to forget his domestic troubles in the swirl of production problems. He introduces Carlotta to Philip Moeller, the play’s director, and Carlotta, aware of O’Neill’s respect for Moeller’s artistic dedication, tries her winsome best to make a friend of him. In his late forties, Moeller has recently raised the role of director to artistic prominence in the American theater with his staging of Shaw’s Saint Joan, Molnár’s The Guardsman, and Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted.
Moeller finds it difficult to draw close to O’Neill. “He seemed so lonely, always looking for happiness,” Moeller recalls. “He was an outsider; everything was bitter and wrong for him. But there was no small meanness about Gene. He had tremendous integrity, was one of the most honest human beings I’ve ever known. And of all the people I’ve known, he possessed the most intense dramatic sense.”
O’Neill submits to most of his director’s cuts. He even volunteers cuts of his own that exceed Moeller’s concept and dismay him. Co-producer Lawrence Langner is amazed that “Time after time, Gene insisted on cutting out comedy lines or ‘laughs’ when, in his opinion, they interfered with the emotional build of a scene.”
Moeller adores the comedy and, by Langner’s account, every time O’Neill solemnly cuts an amusing line, Moeller pleads for its return. “I hope he doesn’t realize that line is funny,” Moeller once remarked to Langner, “for if he does, out it’ll go.”
George Jean Nathan, the critic who has been O’Neill’s major booster and solicitous guide since his earliest writings, attends a rehearsal during which Moeller asks O’Neill to insert a line of comedy. Nathan later quotes O’Neill’s exasperated response:
“I’ll tell you what to do. Just turn slowly around after the character has spoken, drop your pants, and disclose to the audience your backside painted an Alice blue. That should do it.”
Shortly before the opening of Strange Interlude, O’Neill reveals to the magazine essayist Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant that his marriage to Agnes has collapsed. He and Sergeant have been friends since the summer of 1926, when she first interviewed him.
Earlier, when first reading Sergeant in The New Republic, O’Neill had been struck by her probity and acuity. Stylistically ahead of most of her peers, Sergeant was intent on interpreting essences and conveying nuanced literary impressions rather than recording bald facts. Her “personality studies,” as she called them—of such figures as Willa Cather, H. L. Mencken, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Robert Frost—had won her O’Neill’s admiration and confidence, and led to the 1926 interview.
Sergeant’s resultant profile, published in The New Republic, was called “The Man with a Mask.”
“You cannot be near O’Neill without recognizing in him a unique temperament with a unique power of concentration,” wrote Sergeant, adding that there is “nothing crystallized about him,” and going on to describe him as “a man in a state of growth, a man in a state of progression.” There are, she writes, no limits to the “range of his imagination,” and “he gives the impression of being still at the very beginning of a career which is incalculable, except that it will be precipitate, fertile, concentrated, and solitary.” O’Neill loved every word of it.
He now trusts Sergeant enough to confide in her about his resentment of Agnes for having violated their vow to have a childless marriage and to devote themselves entirely to their work and to each other. And, after speaking of his hesitancy, despite all his grievances, to make a decisive break with Agnes, he confesses his affair with Carlotta.
Certainly aware he’s not the first man ever confronted with a choice between wife and mistress, O’Neill nonetheless persuades himself the dilemma is uniquely and tragically his own. Sergeant listens sympathetically. Of course, she will keep his confidence—at least while he is alive—but she keeps private notes of their conversations.
Later, when introduced by O’Neill to Carlotta, Sergeant concludes that she is “more in love with the Great Dramatist than she is with Gene”; she finds Carlotta “charming and enormously poised, a woman of the world, at home anywhere, completely in command.”
Sergeant believes that Carlotta’s private income (the secret income from Speyer disguised as a legacy from her aunt) is what gives her “standing in Gene’s eyes.” But there is more to it than that. Carlotta has offered O’Neill the possibility of an alternative life centered on his writing, free of domestic disturbances, served by a selflessly devoted partner—a life that his creative genius deserves; in short, a life that Agnes is unwilling to indulge. Carlotta slyly encourages O’Neill to exaggerate his list of grievances against Agnes—among them her refusal to give up all drinking.
Agnes has pointed out that, unlike O’Neill, who is an alcoholic, she can control her intake (which at this point she still can). Carlotta gently reminds O’Neill that she herself, on the other hand, is prepared to join him in total abstinence if it will help him in his ongoing struggle to stay sober.
Carlotta’s annual love-gift from Speyer of $14,000 (the equivalent today of roughly $125,000) will enable her to share their living expenses; to O’Neill, always worried about money, this is no small consideration. When Carlotta informs Speyer that she wants to marry O’Neill because he needs her, Speyer, in his role as protective father, gives her his blessing; it is then that he assures her he will continue providing her with financial guidance, along with a lifetime income.
Reassured, Carlotta feels safe in disingenuously introducing “Papa” Speyer to O’Neill as her surrogate father and financial adviser, and telling him Speyer understands and supports her love affair with O’Neill. O’Neill accepts Carlotta’s story.
• • •
WHILE CARLOTTA IS congratulating herself on Speyer’s approval of her challenging liaison with America’s foremost dramatist, O’Neill encounters an amateur clairvoyant from whom he receives a startling prophecy about that liaison.
One evening in mid-December 1927, he visits Benjamin De Casseres, a poet, philosopher, and essayist with whom he has begun a friendship. De Casseres introduces O’Neill to his wife, Bio, who listens intently while the two men talk theater and art. Known to have an affinity for the occult, Bio is referred to affectionately by her husband as an “Effulgent Spirit of Affirmation.” She takes herself seriously a
s an amateur practitioner of palmistry.
Bio has not met O’Neill before. But she knows his plays, has read about him in newspapers and magazines, and her husband has sketched a picture for her of his uneasy life with Agnes in Bermuda—from all of which Bio has intuited possibilities she thinks might interest O’Neill.
On impulse, during a lull in the conversation, Bio turns to O’Neill. “I would like to look at your palm. May I?” With a wan smile, he extends his hand. She has sized him up correctly. O’Neill, the lapsed Catholic, is manifestly superstitious and receptive to mystical prognostication.
Bio is seized with an unfathomable source of “inner illumination,” as she later describes it. “You are never going back to Bermuda,” she predicts, as she begins to read his palm. “You will live in Europe and San Francisco. You have a long journey before you. You are leaving your wife. Another woman is in your life now. You met her five years ago. There will be a great deal of publicity and you will have a struggle for a divorce before you are able to marry her. Your plays will be successful. You will live for twenty-five years.” (Except for being off by one year as to the date of O’Neill’s death—he died in 1953—Bio was spot on.)
Early the next day, O’Neill invites De Casseres to lunch to tell him he is stunned by his wife’s predictions. Only a few close friends, he says, know he and Carlotta are planning to go abroad together; he has not yet disclosed his decision even to Agnes.
After informing Elizabeth Sergeant that he and Carlotta have chosen February 10 for their elopement, O’Neill lets Norman Winston in on the secret and asks what he thinks of the plan. Although Winston has his doubts, he endorses the idea. “If it doesn’t work out,” he says, “you can break up for good.” O’Neill then asks Winston how he and Carlotta can slip away without attracting attention. Winston helps them book separate cabins under false names on the ocean liner they have selected.
Three days before sailing, O’Neill writes to Agnes in Bermuda. Although she has by now halfheartedly agreed to divorce him, he feels compelled to tell her that he doesn’t trust her good faith. During recent weeks, he writes, “so many ugly rumors” have reached him “about what you said to this one and that about how you were going to ‘wait me out’ . . . that I have felt anything but secure.”
Harshly, he scolds, “It isn’t that I don’t trust you to keep your word—when you’re yourself, the fine, honorable woman you are at bottom.” But, he adds, he has heard she has begun to drink excessively, and when she drinks, she is “neither fine nor honorable.”
Conceding he was equally to blame for their discord, he rationalizes, “It is what life does to love—unless you watch and care for it. This time I am going to watch and care. And when you fall in love—as I am sure you soon will—you better bear that in mind, too.”
Still, O’Neill is suddenly suffering squalls of guilt toward the two children he has fathered with Agnes—eight-year-old Shane and two-year-old Oona—whom he is abandoning. Always ambivalent about his fatherhood, he now attempts to justify his desertion with a letter to his son that is, in effect, a protracted moan of self-pity; meant for Agnes’s eyes, it includes misleading information about his destination.
He “explains” to Shane that he must travel to California for the production of a new play and goes on to say it probably will be a long time before he sees him and Oona again and he will miss them “very much.”
“I often lie in bed before I go to sleep—or when I can’t go to sleep—and I picture to myself all about Spithead and what you both have been doing all day and I wonder how you are—and then I feel very sad and life seems to me a silly, stupid thing even at best when one lives it according to the truth that is in one . . . always remember that I love you and Oona an awful lot—and please don’t ever forget your Daddy.”
• • •
CARLOTTA IS BUSY with last-minute packing and, since she and her lover plan to arrive separately at the pier, O’Neill elects to spend February 9, his final evening in New York, with Winston and Rockmore. “This is the worst struggle I’ve ever had against taking a drink,” he tells them, “but if I have one, I’m off.” He didn’t have one.
The following morning O’Neill, bolstered by reports of a box-office surge for Strange Interlude, boards the S.S. Berengeria, followed soon after by Carlotta, for their seven-day voyage to London. They will not return to the United States for three years.
James Speyer sees them off, bringing flowers for Carlotta. Seated in her spacious double cabin, attended by her personal maid, Carlotta makes a diary note just as the ocean liner pulls away:
“Am nervous, afraid (of what I don’t know) and feel terribly alone! Gene arrives looking as I feel! He looks out the porthole at the part of New York he used to know so well in his youth. Is emotionally disturbed as I am—, finally, takes me in his arms, holds me very close—says ‘I love you—’ kisses me on the forehead and leaves!”
O’Neill’s own terse comment, noted in his Work Diary: “N.Y. Exit—S.S. ‘Berengeria’!”
Traveling incognito in separate cabins, both O’Neill and Carlotta are tense and apprehensive about the days ahead. “The ship is rolling—cold & damp—to me everything has an unreal quality,” Carlotta writes. And in a moment of what is either panic or clairvoyance, she calls upon the deity: “God help us both!”
Carlotta is sanguine about at least one aspect of their risky undertaking; she is a self-assured traveler in Europe. O’Neill is not. The one time he was in Europe—as a seaman, with his ship in dry dock at Southampton to undergo nearly three weeks of repairs—he spent his shore leaves hanging around the waterfronts of Southampton and Liverpool with his brother sailors, not venturing farther afield.
That was a year after he’d shipped out to Buenos Aires as an apprentice seaman (his fare paid by his father) on the Charles Racine, a Norwegian bark, one of the last of the clipper ships to compete with steamers at the end of the nineteenth century. For O’Neill, at twenty-one, climbing the rigging amid a churning sea was the apotheosis of Romance. (In a naively derivative poem entitled “Free,” written on the ship’s deck in 1910, he attempted to convey his sense of oneness with the sea:
Then it’s ho! for the plunging deck of a bark, the hoarse song of the crew
With never a thought of those we left or what we are going to do
Nor heed the old ship’s burning, but break the shackles of care
And at last be free, on the open sea, with the trade wind in our hair.
It was being at sea and living the life of a sailor that mattered. He often spoke of that period as the most exalting of his life. Shipping out at that time was an attempt to free himself from circumstances that were suffocating him—as it is on this present voyage of escape from a strangling marriage.
Maintaining a low profile, Carlotta and O’Neill take their meals in Carlotta’s cabin, only occasionally venturing on deck for a walk. O’Neill chain-smokes and Carlotta is gratified to see him using the cigarette case she bought him in New York. (“I asked him if he had ever wanted something that was quite unnecessary,” she once noted. “He looked at me & smiled that charming smile of his,” and replied, ‘I always envied a man who could reach into his pocket & nonchalantly pull forth a long, thin, plain, solid gold cigarette case!’” O’Neill laughed and almost blushed, according to Carlotta. “I got him the case—& he was flabbergasted!”)
• • •
CARLOTTA IS KEENLY conscious that from this time on, O’Neill’s writing and his life will be in her care; and O’Neill is thankful he has at last found his ultimate earth mother, the woman who will give him the unconditional love and nurturing that his unstable mother could not provide.
Once it had been Agnes who satisfied O’Neill’s voracious need for mothering. “You are wife of all of me but mother of the best of me,” he wrote to her when they were briefly apart soon after the birth of their first child. And a month later, when t
hey were again apart: “In a few days I’ll be back in your arms, My Own, and be your other—and firstborn!—baby again!”
O’Neill’s craving for maternal nurturing was of long standing. While staying with his parents in their vacation home in New London, Connecticut, in the summer of 1914, he’d fallen in love with the nineteen-year-old Beatrice Ashe, a spirited brunette who played at being a free spirit. That fall, as a twenty-six-year-old student at a playwriting workshop at Harvard, O’Neill wrote an infatuated letter to Beatrice begging for her mothering:
“I feel the impulse of the tired child who runs to his mother’s arms and lays his head upon her breast, and sobs for no reason at all. Be my Mother!”
O’Neill frequently left Cambridge for visits to New London, where he attempted, unsuccessfully, to bed the provocative Beatrice; but she, the daughter of the respectable superintendent of New London’s trolley-car system, was actually as conventional-minded as her father, and the affair was never consummated.
Now, it is Carlotta to whom O’Neill clings. And she is more than merely maternal. To O’Neill, she is the ultimate fulfillment of a concept that has bedeviled his life—a fusion of mother/mistress/wife. In his eyes, she is almost too perfect. There is, of course, her great beauty. Worldly and resourceful, she is a sophisticated traveler, willing to take on all the responsibility involved in planning a complicated journey; her substantial private income enables her not only to dress exquisitely but also to pay for whatever service or luxury she requires, including a personal maid. She is well-read (if sometimes appallingly misguided, narrow-minded, and self-righteous). And O’Neill is convinced she is prepared to protect his privacy to write while lavishing on him her dedicated and unconditional love.
As mistress and wife-to-be of America’s icon of theatrical tragedy and, despite the goblins she will have to sweep from her stage, Carlotta finds herself, at last, in a role that suits—a role she will play to the hilt.