by Arthur Gelb
4
Still relying on assumed names, O’Neill and Carlotta check into separate rooms at the Berkeley Hotel in London on February 18. It has been less than a month since O’Neill embraced the dream he’d once thought hopeless and he can barely wait to share his jubilation with his confidant Kenneth Macgowan.
Macgowan, having suffered through many of the battles between O’Neill and Agnes, had come to view her as a negative influence on her husband’s work. He was the first person in whom O’Neill had confided his love for Carlotta.
“I’m simply transformed and transfigured,” O’Neill now writes to Macgowan. Aflame with boyish rapture, O’Neill pummels his friend with the wonderment of his new love: “I wander about foolish and goggle-eyed with joy in a honeymoon that is a thousand times more poignant and sweet and ecstatic because it comes at an age when one’s past—particularly a past such as mine—gives one the power to appreciate what happiness means and how rare it is and how humbly grateful one should be for it.”
He has been rendered putty in Carlotta’s hands and is unable to restrain his ardor. “We ‘belong’ to each other!” he warbles. “We fulfill each other!”
The two men have been friends since 1920, when Macgowan, then a critic for the New York Globe, reviewing Beyond the Horizon, extolled its author as a genius who “seems incorruptible”; four years later they started working together to rescue the theater in Greenwich Village that had given O’Neill his start in 1916—the by-then-faltering Provincetown Playhouse.
As for Carlotta, she writes like a lovesick and barely articulate schoolgirl to Elizabeth Sergeant four days after their arrival:
“I am so happy I could die! . . . this extraordinary exaltation—this divine spiritual thing with its understanding, gentleness and warmth . . . being loved and loving is almost too much for me! Gene is an angel—despite his need of solitude, sunshine & exercise he is smiling & laughing! He is letting go.” To this effusion, O’Neill adds a postscript: “I will go Carlotta one better and say that I am so happy I can live!”
Part of Carlotta’s pleasure lay in having enticed O’Neill into visiting the smart tailor and boot maker she remembers from shopping jaunts with her first husband, John Moffat, as well as with Ralph Barton. She is still intent on molding O’Neill into a model of sartorial panache and O’Neill, of two minds about her attempted makeover, is trying to comply.
She began several months ago in New York, when she presented him with a mink-lined overcoat similar to one she had bought for Ralph Barton, and O’Neill began wearing it somewhat abashedly. Like a newly anointed princeling not quite certain of his bona fides, O’Neill has singled out several friends to view Carlotta’s resplendent gift, as though seeking reassurance that he deserves it. Among them is Jo Mielziner, who has designed the sets for Strange Interlude.
“O’Neill was always interested in the technical problems of design and lighting and often made perceptive comments about them,” recalls Mielziner. “But this time he had an ulterior motive. He phoned very early in the morning and said he’d be over right away. Would I lean out of my window—I was living on the top floor of a brownstone in the East Sixties—and watch for him as he got out of the taxi?”
Puzzled but accommodating, Mielziner did as requested and beheld O’Neill and his coat as they emerged from the taxi. O’Neill entered Mielziner’s apartment with the coat flung open to reveal the lining. “He was beaming,” recalled Mielziner. After showing off the coat, he dropped it on the floor in a mock repudiation of its grandeur.
A few days later, O’Neill attempted a similar gesture but was unable to carry it through. He asked Norman Winston to accompany him on a visit to Joe Smith, one of his black friends in the Village. O’Neill was wearing his mink-lined coat.
Smith lived on a small pension from a company that had once employed him as a night watchman—a pension supplemented, it was rumored, with a pair of loaded dice. Smith, like the circus performer Bill Clarke, dated to O’Neill’s derelict days, when he often drank himself insensible; in those days Smith would take him home to his sister, who nursed him back to (temporary) sobriety.
Smith is among several old drinking cronies to whom O’Neill now gives handouts. (Like Clarke, Smith will loan part of his persona to yet another character in The Iceman Cometh, Joe Mott, the operator of a gambling house.)
“At the last minute Gene didn’t have the nerve to appear before Joe in The Coat,” Winston remembers. “He was truly too embarrassed to display it. He stopped in the dark passageway leading to Joe’s upstairs flat and found a hook near the basement door; he hung his coat there before knocking on Joe’s door.”
Carlotta—to give her her due—is as much concerned with O’Neill’s comfort as with his facade. As she notes in her diary, “He wore shoes that didn’t fit properly and caused his toes to curl up.” Persuading him to buy new shoes, she congratulates herself: “I never knew a human being to fight so against well made clothes! But, as his wardrobe grew & he could pick & choose—he was like a happy child—all smiles and pleasure.”
• • •
FULFILLED IN LOVE and fashionably dressed though he might be, O’Neill soon finds his blissful honeymoon soured by a letter from an irate Agnes, prodding him about the domestic muddle he has left behind.
The letter, which doesn’t reach O’Neill until early March—when he and Carlotta have already left England for France—was written shortly after he’d sailed from New York; Agnes, unaware of O’Neill’s whereabouts, has sent it in care of his attorney, Harry Weinberger, who has forwarded it. It’s a response to the accusatory letter O’Neill wrote her before his departure, and it’s no less acerbic than his own.
Accusing O’Neill of having left New York with everything unsettled, Agnes goes on to warn him to cease his jibes about her drinking. “Lots of other men—though few who were such drunkards as you, I admit—have cut out drinking without selfishly insisting that their wives, to whom it did no harm, cut it out absolutely too.”
Rather than answer Agnes, O’Neill spends hours complaining about her to Weinberger. He doesn’t think his attorney is pushing her hard enough to accept the financial arrangement they discussed before he left for Europe. He wants Weinberger to hasten Agnes’s departure to Reno for the divorce.
At the Hotel du Rhin in Paris, Carlotta attends to O’Neill’s personal needs with the same fervor she once bestowed on Ralph Barton. More efficient even than a Parisian concierge, she arranges train, car, and hotel accommodations for the next phase of their prenuptial voyage.
“Gene, at times, like a child, so astonished at being done for, & not asked for anything in return,” she bubbles in her diary. Overcome by her own “polite” and “unselfish” treatment of him, she expresses the hope that he will learn to respond in kind.
So far, so good.
Although neither O’Neill nor Carlotta can quite shake off a sense that their rapturous new life is fated soon to hit some rocky terrain, they begin their hunt for an idyllic (if temporary) retreat. They explore the Basque countryside along the Bay of Biscay, seeking both serenity and seclusion for O’Neill’s long-interrupted writing. In mid-March, they find what they’ve been seeking: the Villa Marguerite in the village of Guéthery, five miles south of Biarritz near the Spanish border; they sign a six-month lease.
Their combined income has sizeable stretch in France in the late 1920s, and Carlotta staffs the villa, which has a tennis court and a private beach, with a cook, two housemaids, and a handyman—all these in addition to her personal maid, Tuwe Drew, who has traveled with her since leaving New York.
“A new life, a really new one!” Carlotta writes to an old friend. “And to say that at my age means something. I have with me, in all this, a lovely soul—a keen brain & a beautiful person. And altho’ our address must not be told now—when all this mess is over I will be proud & happy to scream it from the housetops.”
In Guéthe
ry, O’Neill, at least for the moment, feels emotionally stable enough to resume work on Dynamo, a play he began writing a year earlier. But his work frequently is interrupted by letters from Agnes (forwarded by Weinberger), as well as by letters from Weinberger himself.
While O’Neill continues to withhold his address from Agnes, his letters to her vacillate between placatory/amiable and accusatory/hateful. On March 10 he tells her he will pay her expenses for the next six months, including her trip to Reno, where it has been agreed she will establish the necessary residence to qualify for a divorce. And he assures her he won’t sell Spithead as long as she wants to live there. But he suggests she could live more cheaply in Europe—ignoring the fact that she would be entirely friendless abroad. He cautions her to be economical because his current unprecedented success with Strange Interlude might well be followed by leaner years.
It’s evident he’s baffled about how best to prod Agnes into getting on with the divorce. In one breath, he goads her, writing that he is “happy and quite sure of the lasting fundamental value” of what he is doing; in the next breath, he hypocritically signs his letter, “All deepest friendship always, dear!”
Later that month, after receiving another two letters from Agnes contesting his terms, O’Neill grows outright hostile and berates her for being greedy and thoughtless. “Don’t think you can frighten me by threatening to sue,” he blusters in a four-page manifesto. “Outside of the fact that I should hate you for dragging such a nasty mess of notoriety around our children’s ears, when, if you weren’t so eager to get all you can, everything could be arranged quietly on a decent human basis.”
Admonishing her for spending lavishly on renovations at Spithead that he never agreed to, he threatens to cable the Bermuda papers to say he won’t be responsible for such debts. “If you’re determined to act like an enemy, you can’t expect me to take it lying down.”
He issues a warning that must sound hollow even to his own ears: if Agnes continues to harass him with exorbitant financial demands, he will be too distraught to write and earn money for her to “throw away.” He then stoops to repeating malicious gossip he’s heard by mail about her “drinking and promiscuity.” Although conceding he has “no right” to tell her “not to have lovers, or not to drink—except in our children’s names,” he says that nonetheless such reports upset him.
Placatingly, he then asserts that he still loves and respects her “as my partner of ten long years in which we both managed to remain fairly clean.” But after apologizing for sounding bitter, he renews his self-justifying tirade:
He resents Agnes’s implication that it is she who is “doing all the suffering.” Doesn’t she think he suffers, too? “If you don’t, Agnes, you’re a damn fool! Sometimes—and often!—when I think of Shane and Oona I suffer like hell from a sense of guilt toward them, and a deep sense of guilt because I’ve made you suffer.”
O’Neill clinches his argument by laying the blame for his leaving on her, maintaining he gave her “every chance a man of honor could give” to save the marriage. He reminds Agnes that he reached for her “understanding, sympathy and help” during his early involvement with Carlotta. He chides her for having been “deaf and blind and dumb” to his need until it was too late to disentangle from Carlotta. He is in effect telling Agnes that if she had fought to keep him she could have saved the marriage. Possibly he believes this.
• • •
BY NOW O’NEILL, despite wrapping himself in his work, has sunk into what Carlotta calls “a deep depression”; he tells her that Agnes’s dalliance over the divorce is poisoning his life. Carlotta silently wonders how O’Neill could have failed, early on, to recognize Agnes’s defects; she spitefully sputters in her diary that “Even a breeder of horses, dogs, pigs, etc.—is most careful.
“So, it goes—the artist hasn’t time for such ‘middle-class’ thoughts—but it really isn’t ‘middle-class!’” Promising herself she will “stick” and do her best to help O’Neill, she can’t suppress a whimper: “I will be the one to take the beating for all this!!”
Carlotta is as outraged as O’Neill to learn of Agnes’s most recent ploy; she claims to be pregnant with O’Neill’s child. O’Neill thinks the pregnancy might be a bluff but, in any case, he knows the child cannot be his—and he explodes to Harry Weinberger: “I’m a mild man but there is a limit and being blamed for other men’s children is that limit. I don’t give a damn how many lovers she may have. That’s her privilege, naturally. But I don’t want them bringing O’Neills into being. I have my little Puritan prejudices!”
That is only the beginning of a nine-page letter in which he declares all-out war on Agnes. Until now he has continued to hope she would agree to free him in a timely fashion. It dawns on him at last that he has miscalculated and he fulminates to Weinberger that Agnes is sabotaging him with her greed and dishonesty.
Sounding almost unhinged, he rants about what he calls “the plain facts” of the case, hurling a litany of venomous accusations against Agnes. (Perhaps it doesn’t occur to him that Agnes might someday sell this letter to a university, for all the world to scrutinize; but even if it does occur to him, he simply can’t control the self-justifying temper that compels him to spew his rage in this and subsequent letters to Agnes.)
O’Neill goes on to deride Agnes as a woman whom he accepted when she was “a shabby hanger-on” in Greenwich Village, “an unsuccessful cheap fiction writer, with no status of any kind.” And he dredges up a long-ago episode of Agnes’s past: it was not long after they’d met in the winter of 1917, writes O’Neill, that he first learned Agnes had a nearly four-year-old daughter who was being raised away from New York by her grandparents. At the time, Agnes had given O’Neill a vague account of a wartime marriage in England in early 1915, where she was then living with her parents, followed almost at once by pregnancy and widowhood.
O’Neill had not pressed her for details at the time. Now, however, digging for grounds to counter Agnes’s demands during divorce proceedings, he unfurls his long-suppressed suspicion and wrath.
Agnes, he writes, had averred her child was “born in wedlock (but no shred of proof of her having ever been married before was ever brought forward).” Moreover, he says, before she married him, she had readily agreed that he “would never have to support that child”; nevertheless, he “always had partly supported her.”
He then takes Agnes to task for “violating in both letter and spirit” their quixotic agreement that “if ever either came to the other and said they were in love with someone else that automatically a divorce would be given and no alimony asked.” And he dismisses as “a grotesque fiction” Agnes’s claim that she helped him in his work, insisting she was actually envious of his work “as compared to what she could do,” and even, at times, “did her best to hamper it.”
Agnes, he contends, allowed his father to support her early in their marriage; and she accepted from his mother “the only decent furs and clothes she had ever had up to then.” What’s more, he contends, she is a woman who was slackly raised in near poverty, to whom he gave “three fine houses” (their summer home on the Provincetown dunes, an estate in Connecticut, and Spithead, their recently purchased beachfront house in Bermuda).
Continuing to tally Agnes’s treacheries, he sounds as paranoid as Othello. In conclusion, he snarls, Agnes, after squandering his money, dares to blackmail him while she entertains a lover at his expense. “Oh no! It’s a bit too thick! I am bitter and I am mad. . . . I’ll gladly blow up the works no matter who it crushes so long as it crushes her.”
O’Neill is so furious that Agnes has not responded rationally and agreeably to his own irrational and disagreeable behavior that he abruptly shifts into reverse, informing Weinberger that he and Carlotta have decided to adopt an entirely new strategy.
They no longer care whether Agnes obtains the divorce. If it’s a case of his being blackmailed for more than
he can afford, he says, he and Carlotta will forgo marriage and “come out in the open and tell the world we’re living together because my wife is charging too high for a divorce.”
He instructs Weinberger to inform Agnes that he and Carlotta have sufficient money to live comfortably in Europe for the rest of their lives; he will have his future plays produced abroad and limit his income in America to royalties from already published work; he can no longer write, and will not try to, until his problems are settled. Agnes, he winds up in a frenzy of frustration, is “a skunk!”
It took O’Neill a day to cool down. Acknowledging to Weinberger that his previous letter about Agnes was “a bit hectic,” he says he has grown “calmer about the hatred stuff,” although he’s still opposed to Agnes’s conditions for granting a divorce.
What he now wants from Weinberger is a statement to the press that will put a stop to the rumors and speculation about his whereabouts and—most important—will protect Carlotta’s reputation. He says he can’t work with the specter of a tabloid scandal hanging over his head “like an unexploded bomb.”
He suggests that they follow Sinclair Lewis’s example and stop shrouding their divorce in secrecy. Lewis’s recent divorce, he points out, attracted no salacious public attention, even though he was living with a woman not his wife, because all the facts were out in the open. It was simply announced in the papers that Lewis and his wife had separated and that she was divorcing him on the grounds of desertion; nothing more was announced until the divorce was granted.
Forgetting that it was he himself who chose to cloak his departure from his home and family in secrecy, O’Neill now demands to know why his own divorce cannot be managed like Lewis’s. The “secrecy business,” he says, “will eventually result in my being sought out over here and involved in a terrible mess.”
O’Neill wants Weinberger to tell the press that he and Agnes have separated simply because they have grown incompatible. And he stresses there is no reason why there needs to be any mention of a third party. He instructs Weinberger to ask Agnes to corroborate the statement; she should say she is going to Reno and that “there is no question of any correspondent, that we simply cannot hit it off together anymore, etc.”