by Arthur Gelb
O’Neill then offers Agnes the same advice: “Once they get it from your lips that we’re definitely separated for good,” he says, “they’ll lay off of us for good.” Airmail is new and erratic in 1928, and O’Neill’s letter about abandoning secrecy has not yet reached Agnes—nor, presumably, Weinberger—when, on April 27, the World publishes an “authorized interview” with Agnes, purporting to “clarify her situation.”
Rather than clarifying, Agnes distorts, perhaps stalling for time to gain a better settlement; or perhaps she’s hoping O’Neill will tire of Carlotta and return to her, even though, as she has confided to friends, she herself has begun to find her marriage burdensome.
Agnes informs the World she is not seeking a divorce or separation. Instead, she is planning to join her husband soon in London. She doesn’t know where Miss Monterey is, says Agnes, but she is aware that her husband is traveling in France with friends to escape the noisy repairs in progress at their Bermuda residence.
“Mrs. O’Neill said she hopes her husband is enjoying himself,” according to the interview. “She refused to say that her failure to leave for Europe with him had constituted what other celebrities have referred to as a ‘marital vacation.’ Nevertheless, she believes in an occasional change of air—‘for the man’ she added quickly.”
Based on Agnes’s blithe prevarication, the baffled World reporter theorizes: “If Miss Monterey were one of the friends who had been with [O’Neill] he had never informed her of it. Harry Weinberger, for many years Mr. O’Neill’s lawyer, paid a recent visit to Mrs. O’Neill in Bermuda, strengthening the old reports of marital disagreement. But the wife explained that this was a business visit purely, in connection with a mortgage on a house or something of that kind.”
Agnes, of course, is equivocating. The Weinberger visit to Bermuda was mainly intended to gather and remove O’Neill’s personal documents—an attempt thwarted by Agnes. O’Neill believed that the files containing some early playscripts and other memorabilia that he had left in his Bermuda home when he departed for London in 1928 ultimately “were either destroyed or stolen.” That is what he told officials of the Princeton University Library fifteen years later, when an exhibit of his manuscripts and letters was being planned. (But the contents of those files were, in fact, sold by Agnes after his death, along with O’Neill’s letters to her.)
Carlotta soothes O’Neill’s distress over the published interview. In her diary she congratulates herself for being who she is. “He is like my child! And knows I will take care of him! He has gained, at last, a real mother—combined with mistress!”
“I’m sorry you gave the interview,” O’Neill writes Agnes a few days later, sounding more sympathetic than angry and aware she had not received the letter in which he asked her to be forthright about their reasons for separating. He stresses that a simple divorce announcement would have better served to kill the press’s “hope for a scandal.” As it is, he says, they know Agnes is lying and probably wonder what she is concealing. He urges her once again to accept his terms and to leave for Reno.
“It is funny how soon an aching heart turns into a greedy gut!” O’Neill writes to Macgowan. He grumbles about the influence exerted on Agnes in Bermuda by her “worthy Society drunken neighbor-friends,” who are advising her “to take me for all I’ve got.” He is “too old to start in being a sucker,” he adds.
He has written to Weinberger to tell Agnes that if she won’t take what he has offered, she can “go to hell.” The offer amounts to an income for Agnes—based on O’Neill’s earnings—that might fluctuate annually between $6,000 (roughly equivalent to today’s $80,000) and $10,000 (today’s $130,000) and which, O’Neill has reminded Agnes, is an agreement more generous than Sinclair Lewis’s wife got from him, “considering he must have been making three times my income!”
• • •
ON MAY 1, O’Neill’s mood briefly lightens. Upon receiving word he has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Strange Interlude, he becomes the only playwright at that point to have racked up three (the first for Beyond the Horizon, the second for Anna Christie). He instructs his agent to donate the prize money of $1,000 to the Author’s League Fund for Needy Writers.
Somewhat cheered, O’Neill returns to his routine at the Villa Marguerite. He swims daily in the Bay of Biscay, plays tennis with Carlotta, and takes long walks with her on the beach. From the terrace of their villa, they admire what Carlotta describes as “divine sunsets.” They tour the countryside; Carlotta shops for dresses and shoes and—ever the meticulous housekeeper—for domestic embellishments.
Through it all, Carlotta rarely mentions her daughter, Cynthia, still in the care of her grandmother Nellie in San Francisco. And O’Neill doesn’t speak much to Carlotta about his children. But he does write to Agnes about them.
He misses Shane and Oona “like hell at times,” he says. “Don’t sneer! I love them as much as you do—perhaps more—in my oblique, inexpressive fashion.” Believing his own words, he insists, “they will find out I have been a good father . . . when they are old enough to understand all that has happened and when they really come to know me and about me.”
To Weinberger, in a burst of pathos and self-delusion, he insists he can make it up to the children later for the damage he believes Agnes (never he himself) has done to them. And to Ben De Casseres he writes that—despite his disgust with Agnes and his fear of being “smoked out” by the local press—“inside” he is “deeply at peace and happy and confident of the future,” even though it is “hell on the nerves” and “it’s raining boxing gloves!”
A week later O’Neill expresses his newly felt depth of happiness to Carlotta when he inscribes a copy of Strange Interlude to her: “My life moving in you—your life moving in me—the world is whole and perfect. I am your lover!”
Yet O’Neill’s “perfect” world is ever subject to distressing bulletins about Agnes’s intentions, as well as to concern for Carlotta’s discomfort (in spite of her bravado) with her ambiguous relationship to him.
By mid-May 1928 the tension is too much for O’Neill. Carlotta has her first encounter with his full-blown, black-Irish rage.
5
A man named Kantor wires he’s arriving day after tomorrow!” Carlotta complains to her diary on May 11, 1928. O’Neill tells her he knows the man only slightly. “This,” writes Carlotta, “is a horrible and unkind thing to do.” She is embarrassed, in her role as a married man’s mistress, at having to play hostess to a stranger, and is “dreadfully unhappy!”
The unwelcome visitor to Villa Marguerite is a former reporter for the New York Tribune and a freelance contributor to The New York Times, who writes sometimes under the byline Louis Kantor and sometimes under the pseudonym Louis Kalonyme. As to knowing Kantor “only slightly,” O’Neill has lied to Carlotta. Kantor is actually a hard-drinking crony from O’Neill’s Provincetown and Greenwich Village days.
Carlotta has cautioned O’Neill to shun all his old sidekicks. Not only is she committed to keeping O’Neill abstemious for the sake of his writing, she is eager to bury any lingering notion of him as Agnes’s drunken bohemian husband. Along with restyling his wardrobe, she’s determined to reshape his image as a man who is temperate and aloof—in short, a dedicated artist who is worthy of her as his protector and muse.
She is rightfully suspicious of Kantor, who endeared himself to O’Neill in the early 1920s by writing adulatory articles about the then rising young playwright.
At the time, O’Neill was living with Agnes in Provincetown in a converted Coast Guard station at the edge of the Atlantic; known as Peaked Hill Bars, it had been purchased for him by his father as a wedding present. He had impulsively welcomed Kantor to an intimate friendship and even had a shack constructed close by his own dwelling.
Kantor became an acolyte—sycophant is perhaps more accurate; he would follow O’Neill about, concealing a pint of bootleg booze und
er his shirt, proffering the bottle when requested. He claimed he had begun to drink during the summer of 1920 “to keep up with O’Neill,” and boasted, “Though I started drinking because of Gene, I became a better drinker than he, because I had a stronger stomach.”
One day in Provincetown, some well-meaning friends of O’Neill’s, who wanted to make sure he would sleep off the effects of a drunken binge, locked him in a room at a local hotel. Twelve hours later the proprietor, checking on the prisoner, found him still drunk. Baffled, he searched the room but discovered no liquor.
After feeding O’Neill, he warned him to behave and locked him back in. O’Neill was still drunk the following day, and this time the proprietor caught Kantor, who had climbed up the fire escape, handing O’Neill a bottle through the window.
The day Kantor is expected, May 14, O’Neill is not well. He sends Carlotta, who does not drive, in their chauffeured car to fetch her unwanted guest from the train station. “I don’t know where I am or what to do!” Carlotta scribbles in her diary on her return. “But I do know a dreadful stranger is in our house.”
Kantor finds O’Neill on edge because of recent unwanted attention from the local press, and it isn’t long before the reason for Kantor’s presence at the villa becomes clear; O’Neill and Kantor drive to a nearby village to buy whiskey. Returning to the Villa Marguerite and ignoring Carlotta, the men proceed to drink themselves insensible; a furious Carlotta later discovers them collapsed on beds in one of the villa’s guest rooms.
The following day, she notes, “A terrible night—The good Black Irish comes to the front—hand in hand with sadistic joy in trying to kill everything in me that spells love, loyalty, devotion and decency. I nearly died!”
She watches in alarm a day later as O’Neill secludes himself in his bedroom with Kantor. She hears them rowdily reminiscing late into the night. “Things getting worse!” Carlotta records the next morning, May 17. “He starts to drink with our guest! The alcohol does horrible things to his brain. He mustn’t drink—He should realize this is just what A. wants him to do.”
Fearful that O’Neill’s drinking will lead to “some dreadful scandal,” she writes, “Things seem utterly hopeless! I don’t know what to do . . . I have tried to make a good home . . . give all of myself, & my worldly goods! I am frightened!”
This is O’Neill’s first stumble since he swore off alcohol two years earlier, after his psychoanalyst warned him if he continued drinking, his brain would turn into “the white of an egg” and sabotage his ability to write.
It’s probable, as Kantor later theorized, that O’Neill’s fall from the wagon has been triggered in part by a fresh pang of guilt over the children he has deserted. While he doesn’t mention Kantor’s arrival on May 14 in his Work Diary, O’Neill—with his children on his mind—does note “Oona’s Third Birthday.”
On the fifth day of O’Neill’s bender, with no sign of Kantor’s imminent departure, Carlotta braces herself to leave O’Neill. She makes her impetuous exit from the Villa Marguerite at eight in the morning in a hired car, heading for Bordeaux, where she plans to board a train for Paris. But when she reaches Bordeaux, she’s unable to go on.
“I can’t leave him there to God knows what! I love him!” she writes. She has herself driven back, weeping all the way, not stopping for food, and reaches the villa at nightfall. Staggering into the house, she is appalled to find that O’Neill has thrown black coffee all over the blue satin walls of the salon, staining them so badly she later is obliged to have the walls redone. Once again, she finds O’Neill and Kantor sprawled in a drunken stupor in the guest room. “So, this is genius—this is love! God help us!” she explodes.
The next morning, no one speaks. Carlotta describes O’Neill as looking like a ghost. He finally breaks his silence, morphing into a little boy begging forgiveness from his mother. Kantor echoes his plea and Carlotta, relieved that her ordeal is over, forgives them both—and even sanctions a “loan” to Kantor of $500 when at last, on May 21, he leaves the villa.
Soon after Kantor’s departure, O’Neill falls seriously ill with what Carlotta describes as “a bad nervous breakdown,” and suddenly she is overcome with a need to rationalize her involvement with the volatile genius to whom she has chosen to devote her life.
She records a pathetic mantra that she doubtless longs to throw in O’Neill’s face (if only she dared); it is a tract she periodically trots out in exasperated self-defense, and it is replete with non sequiturs: She wasn’t brought up to live the sort of life O’Neill has foisted on her; her father, “a brilliant Dane, was educated in Denmark, France, Germany & China”; she herself was educated in Europe and given “the strictest sort of up-bringing”; she was “taught to respect others—& to have self respect” and to be “honest, loyal, unselfish & decent”; and finally, irrelevantly, “to remember I was a woman!” With all her rationalizing, she has decided to forgive O’Neill.
• • •
BY THE END OF MAY, O’Neill and Carlotta have recovered their equilibrium. Compared with Carlotta’s scribbled outbursts, O’Neill gives barely a hint of the past month’s disturbances in his Work Diary. As is his wont, he sums up, under the heading “Memoranda,” the number of days during which he did “creative work.” In April, the first month he settled in Guéthery, he had noted twenty-eight work days on Dynamo and two days “blank.” By contrast, in May, he recorded only twelve days of “creative work” and nineteen days “blank.”
His chief concern, however, is not the lost work time, but his fear, replicating Carlotta’s, that his having fallen off the wagon will become a source of gossip, providing Agnes with new ammunition. “Be forever silent,” he cautions Kantor in a letter referring to the drinking episode and apologizing for his “stupidity.” More than two months later, with Agnes still refusing to proceed with the divorce, O’Neill again refers to the drinking episode.
“Remember,” he writes to Kantor, “to forget that incident of May! It had no meaning.” And, he says, in justification, it “was really a damned good thing in its effect on my future, by way of a final K.O. to an old mistake. But how A. & Co. would love to get hold of it!”
After Kantor repeats his own apology in a letter to Carlotta, she cannily turns him into an ally who can be of service to her and O’Neill. During the next several months, she will write Kantor seventeen letters filled with intimate chitchat about the joys of her relationship with O’Neill, which she hopes he will pass on to acquaintances in New York. And she relays various requests from O’Neill for small errands; for example, she encloses postcards O’Neill has written to friends and asks Kantor, who is spending some time in Germany, to mail them from that country—the intention being to mislead those friends as well as the press as to O’Neill’s whereabouts.
Despite Agnes’s relentless recalcitrance, O’Neill and Carlotta have somehow managed to resume a relatively peaceful existence—so much so that by early June Carlotta can frivolously welcome the arrival of a pair of exorbitantly expensive red shoes ordered from Paris, after which she and O’Neill celebrate the delivery of their new Renault.
Although O’Neill will eventually hire a full-time chauffeur, for now he drives himself, and he and Carlotta resume touring the countryside, often motoring into the lower Alps. That month, O’Neill devotes sixteen days of work to Dynamo and two weeks to sightseeing and shopping.
Before leaving on the June motor trip, he writes to Theresa Helburn, a co-producer at the Theatre Guild. Pledging her to secrecy about his whereabouts, he describes his progress on Dynamo, which he expects the Guild to produce—although he will not venture to predict when it will be completed.
The play, inspired by O’Neill’s visit to a hydroelectric plant near the home in Ridgefield, Connecticut, that he once shared with Agnes, tells the story of a teenage boy who revolts against the religious teachings of his childhood and instead embraces “the religion of electricity.”
As a true visionary, he will continue to deplore the world’s current maladies for the rest of his writing life. And what he expresses as the spiritual and moral “sickness of Today” foretells all too aptly the overwhelming materialism of Tomorrow.
To Nathan, O’Neill expresses his conviction that “anyone trying to do big work nowadays must have this big subject behind all the little subjects of his plays or novels, or he is simply scribbling around on the surface of things and has no more real status than a parlor entertainer.”
One evening after dinner, O’Neill reads aloud to Carlotta from the nearly completed script of Dynamo. She has qualms, but she entrusts them only to her diary: the play is “interesting” but, she notes, it needs cuts and revision. “He is too worried to do his best—but so anxious to prove to A. he can work in spite of her & the worry she is causing him! Of course that is all wrong—but I dare not offer any suggestions.”
In early July, O’Neill wrenches himself from Dynamo long enough to launch another vicious attack on Agnes. Answering a letter from Weinberger, who has raised the old question about Agnes’s first marriage, O’Neill says he has never pressed her for details, but she was always vague about her past. He is now convinced she lied about the circumstances of her daughter’s birth. He sneers at her story that while in London, before the war began, she married an English newspaperman named Burton, who was killed in Belgium shortly thereafter.