By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  “It’s the liquor talking,” says Con Melody, the self-pitying protagonist of A Touch of the Poet, defending his indefensible malice toward his wife and daughter.

  As for The Iceman Cometh, it is the American theater’s definitive and devastating portrait of drunken delusion—O’Neill’s gigantic gasp of gratitude for the fate he finally, miraculously circumvented.

  7

  What a joy to be away from a boat—and in Europe again,” writes Carlotta on January 21, 1929, the day she and O’Neill disembark at Genoa and begin to make their way, by hired car, back to France. Within a week, they have rented the Villa Les Mimosas on the Riviera’s Cap d’Ail.

  In his Work Diary, O’Neill glumly records that he spent zero “creative work days” in January. He resolves that this will not be the case in February, telling himself his attempt at a Far East voyage, despite its tragicomic snags, has been worthwhile; “a million impressions” have been jammed into his brain, he writes to a few close friends.

  To nine-year-old Shane and his three-year-old sister, Oona, O’Neill composes the carefully worded letter he knows Agnes will read: “I think of you both a lot and sometimes I want to see you so much that I feel like taking the first boat to America—but I have such important business to attend to over here that I have to stay for a while longer.”

  Responding to Harry Weinberger’s news that Agnes had been ill, O’Neill asks Shane and Oona to tell their mother he is “damned sincerely sorry”; he goes on to claim that when he himself was sick in the hospital in Shanghai, “all the bitterness got burned out of” him and “the future years will prove this.”

  He tells his two young children that he loves them both very dearly and, as always, he asks them not to forget their “Daddy.” And to almost-nineteen-year-old Eugene Jr., the son from his first marriage, he confides that “the whole trip, in spite of sickness and the lousy publicity I ran into, was a wonderful, stimulating experience that I wouldn’t have missed for a million.”

  Dreading the Broadway opening of Dynamo, O’Neill rereads his script and regrets there isn’t sufficient time to rewrite the entire play. To an old theater colleague he later explains that Dynamo was written at a time when he “shouldn’t have written anything” because he was in “a continual inward state of bitter fury and resentment” and his “brains were woolly with hatred” for Agnes.

  What he’s embarrassed to admit is that his brains had been woolly not only with hatred for Agnes, but from his reckless return to alcohol—a lapse that nearly cost him Carlotta.

  When Dynamo opens on February 11 at the Martin Beck Theatre, the Times’s Brooks Atkinson charitably discerns in the play “a lashing, poetic fury.” Most of the other critics dislike it.

  What bothers O’Neill the most is the disapproval of George Jean Nathan, who tells him that Dynamo is “far, far below you.” Since Nathan has always been an ardent booster of his work, O’Neill is rattled. Nathan’s enthusiasm dates from 1917, when he and H. L. Mencken were editing The Smart Set—which they modestly styled “a magazine of cleverness.” They had the vision then to publish three of O’Neill’s early one-act sea plays—The Long Voyage Home, ’Ile, and The Moon of the Caribbees. O’Neill couldn’t believe his good luck; seventy-five dollars per play, at a time when he was barely able to support himself. His first serious recognition, it marked the start of his long-lasting friendship with Nathan.

  The jabs at Dynamo keep coming. “A womb with a view,” Noël Coward calls it. And The New Yorker, to accompany Robert Benchley’s negative critique, publishes a ditty: “Eeny, Meeny, Mynamo / I have been to Dynamo. / All except the girl in red / It was worse’n what you said!” The girl in red is a young Claudette Colbert—in the role of the seductive flapper Ada—whose legs attract considerable attention and help launch her on a robust movie career.

  O’Neill’s sense of humor eventually comes to his aid. “Henceforth,” he tells Nathan, “I cast not only actresses but legs.” More serious, O’Neill writes to De Casseres that the play would have greatly profited from his presence during rehearsals: “I had no right to let it go on without being there. . . . No one knows what I see in my stuff during rehearsals, or the changes I suggest or veto.”

  To take O’Neill’s mind off Dynamo, Carlotta coaxes him into spending an evening dancing to records on their new Victrola. O’Neill sings along. He is thoughtful and tender and, as she remarks in her diary, “all self-consciousness is gone!”

  Eager to know how long it will be before he and Carlotta can marry, O’Neill, succumbing once again to superstition, writes to De Casseres, requesting the help of his clairvoyant wife, Bio. O’Neill’s request is off-the-wall. He proposes to telephone Bio at eleven thirty on the night of April 1 (which he may or may not realize is April Fool’s Day); at that time he wants her to concentrate on his hand. He will hold it out and imagine her looking at it, and she will tell him when that promised peace is coming.

  “Believe me,” he vows, “I can do with it!” (A day after sending the letter, O’Neill and Carlotta read in the Paris Herald that Agnes has gone to Reno, but it will turn out the news is premature; Agnes has yet again delayed her departure.)

  On April 1, at the specified hour, O’Neill makes his phone call and trustfully holds out his hand. Bio, obediently concentrating, tells him July is the month when he will find peace; she advises him to curb his impatience. He writes to her on May 10 that her “benign prophecy was most welcome.” Agnes, he has learned, left for Reno earlier that month to begin her required six-week residency.

  O’Neill also tells Bio she has “just about hit the facts on the head as to time and the relief and peace that will then be mine”; and he reminds her that on his last night in New York she predicted he was destined to turn forty-one before his “new era” began. Now five months from his birthday, he’s convinced it will be then that his “inner self” will be “freed from the dead” and he will be “liberated and reborn.”

  • • •

  ALTHOUGH DREADING AGNES might yet change her mind, Carlotta and O’Neill make tentative plans for a wedding in July. Since April, they have been house-hunting in Touraine, in the Loire Valley—the home, as O’Neill is happy to acknowledge, of Rabelais and Balzac.

  A real estate agent guides them from one château to another—some, in Carlotta’s view, “too grand,” others “too run down for decent housekeeping.” Ever since their journey to the Far East, Carlotta has longed for permanent domestic tranquillity. By that she means that her home—castle or not—must have a clean kitchen and a warm, comfortable environment where O’Neill will feel “loved—so he can work.”

  When they finally approach a château that looks suitable to Carlotta, O’Neill refuses to inspect it. “O.K., you look at it,” he says. “I’ll sit in the car.” She coaxes him into accompanying her.

  “We see ‘Plessis’—just right!” Carlotta trumpets in her diary. But the château will require considerable fixing up before it suits her. Although it has “lovely stone walks and romantic tourelles,” it has no electricity, is heated only by fireplaces, and has but one toilet for its forty-five rooms; moreover, as Carlotta notes, there are “no baths (as Americans know them).”

  O’Neill asks Carlotta, “Didn’t they take baths?” Amused, she calls his attention to the bidet. “I loved this place!” she enthuses, relieved that “strangely enough, so did Gene!”

  They decide on April 19 to sign a three-year lease for the formally named Le Plessis, which through the centuries has been owned by the family of the Marquis du Plessis. Carlotta asks the owners’ permission to create a proper bathroom from one of the forty-five rooms; she also asks if she may install a swimming pool, having found a suitable site on the grounds. Since the château has no electricity, they will make do with oil lamps and candles; for heating they will rely on the many fireplaces.

  Because Le Plessis has never been rented and is all but buried in dust, mold, and d
ead moths, the annual rent of $1,200 is ridiculously low. Carlotta is flush enough to place orders for engraved silver flatware from Cartier, together with an individually designed china service, as well as monogrammed linens—all part of what it pleases her to call her “dot” (dowry). Carlotta informs James Speyer, with whom she has been in constant correspondence, of their plans, and he asks if she needs an advance on her income. She thanks him, but says no.

  When reminiscing years later about her life at Le Plessis, Carlotta liked to stress that “Gene had never lived in a chateau,” loftily implying that she, unlike the deprived O’Neill, was quite accustomed to the palatial life, having inhabited the grand Scottish estate that was her home during her marriage to John Moffat.

  “Gene thought the idea of living in a chateau [was] very chichi and putting on airs. But I said, No, I will show you how simple chateaux are. And Gene saw that you could really be polite and live in a charming place and you didn’t have to be ridiculous. I made him very comfortable.”

  What O’Neill thought of his château he conveyed to Kenneth Macgowan with much the same enthusiasm he’d expressed, respectively, for his homes in Provincetown, Connecticut, and Bermuda. The property encompassed seven hundred acres with “wonderful old woods attached,” and, he said, “I feel soundly at home here.” It was the sort of house, he told Macgowan, he’d always dreamed of, but could never have afforded in the United States.

  He went on to brag about his “corking study” in one of the château’s tourelles, pointing out that the price “of all this grandeur” was only a little more than one thousand dollars a month, which he and Carlotta were splitting. The estate, he added, required numerous servants, but wages were low in the French countryside and taxes were minimal. “Altogether the grandest bargain—this Le Plessis—that I’ve ever heard of!”

  Carlotta has managed to convince herself that O’Neill, during his marriage to Agnes, lived in one hovel after another, even though she is well aware of their baronial sea-front house in Bermuda and the thirty-acre, fifteen-room estate they had owned in Ridgefield, Connecticut. But to acknowledge that he had ever lived in comfort would diminish her own achievement.

  Carlotta’s vision of the aristocratic lifestyle, adopted during her marriage to her blue-blooded Scotsman, calls for separate bedrooms for herself and her mate. There are frequent references in her diary to O’Neill slipping from his bedroom to hers, seeking solace during the night.

  On April 4, however, while still living in Villa Les Mimosas, Carlotta notes she and O’Neill have decided to try sleeping overnight in the same bed: “We are less nervous and rest better!” She does not specify sex but, according to the former curator of the O’Neill archives at Yale, Carlotta (after O’Neill’s death) removed from her diaries “an occasional comment on their love-making sessions.” About the closest she gets to describing sensual pleasure (at this juncture) is her frequent mention of shampooing O’Neill’s hair and giving him what she calls “oil rubs.”

  While awaiting the completion of repairs to Le Plessis (scheduled for the first week in June), she and O’Neill continue to live at Villa Les Mimosas. They go sightseeing and indulge in lunches and afternoon teas on the terraces of various scenic inns; and they shop. Carlotta is being fitted at Molyneux for additions to her wardrobe; the high-fashion couturier who dresses Garbo and Gertrude Lawrence—along with the social elite of two continents—has recently opened a fashion house in Monte Carlo, within walking distance of Villa Les Mimosas.

  Nor does O’Neill stint himself. A tailor comes to the villa to measure him for suits and he trades his Renault for a Mercedes. A month later, he decides he doesn’t want the Mercedes after all and buys a red Bugatti. Carlotta surely can congratulate herself on having transformed her “tough mick,” as she sometimes mocks him, into a proper aristocrat.

  Despite his days of sightseeing and shopping, O’Neill, during April and May, devotes twenty-six “creative work days” to making notes for the visionary project he first conceived in 1926 and that eventually will compensate for the dismal failure of Dynamo. Variously referring to it as his “Greek tragedy plot idea,” his “Life of Aeschylus idea,” and his “Electra idea,” it has come increasingly to preoccupy him. In bed with Carlotta on May 11, he spreads his concept before her like a sacred offering. After providing her with his blueprint, he announces, “This will be your play.” She is so moved, she can’t speak.

  • • •

  NO MATTER HOW HARD O’Neill tries to isolate himself for his writing, he seems unable to avoid intrusions. When he isn’t the focus of marital scandal, he’s incurring the wrath of censors and periodically getting himself banned in Boston. Now, in late May, amid his sybaritic and painstakingly acquired seclusion in France, he finds himself the victim of a widely publicized lawsuit in the United States.

  Already worn down from legal battles over his divorce, he is driven to defend himself against a charge of plagiarism. While Strange Interlude is in the second year of its Broadway run, and with touring companies successfully launched, a woman using the pen name Georges Lewys sues O’Neill in New York’s Federal Court, demanding $1.25 million in damages and an injunction against the play as both acted and published. She alleges that O’Neill stole Strange Interlude from her 1924 novel, The Temple of Pallas-Athenae.

  “Woman is fool or crook or both!” an exasperated O’Neill writes in his Work Diary on May 28. Carlotta, reading about the lawsuit in the Paris Herald, is outraged. “What is all this?” she moans. “Are we cursed?”

  O’Neill’s lawyers send him the list of Georges Lewys’s purported instances of plagiarism, which are blatantly absurd, and he is furious about the time and money it will cost to defend himself from the bogus charges.

  “Some blackmail! Some Gal!” he fumes to his publisher. “She’s crazy, but—she’s crazy like a fox! A million dollars’ worth of publicity for nothing! I lose no matter how I win! It’s a grand law that permits such stunts to get by!” (The lawsuit will drag on until April 1931, and ends with O’Neill being awarded $7,500 in costs, which he’s unable to collect from the bankrupt Lewys.)

  In anticipation of his marriage in July, O’Neill tries to shrug off his irritation with the lawsuit. He doesn’t want to dim Carlotta’s happiness.

  While it’s true Carlotta is aglow, she has not forgotten her anger at those of O’Neill’s friends she deems false, and is plotting to cut them off once she is Mrs. Eugene O’Neill. She turns for help to Saxe Commins, who by now has been added to her list of best friends. Carlotta regards Commins as absolutely loyal, even though she is aware he once participated with O’Neill in the bohemian lifestyle she detests. Commins, a would-be writer and devotee of the arts, and recently married to Dorothy Berliner, a concert pianist, is soon (in 1933) to become the editor of O’Neill’s published plays at Random House.

  Carlotta asks the Comminses’ help in weeding out those false friends. If either of them have heard any recent slanders of O’Neill or herself, would they share them with her, for it would help—as she phrases it—in their “elimination.” This, says Carlotta, would give her and O’Neill “more time for those we love—& who really love us!”

  Writing trustfully to Commins, Carlotta warns him not to disclose O’Neill’s French address to anyone. And if anyone says she is “ruining” O’Neill and “spending all his money—say ‘yes’—and that I’m planning to eat his children & my own!”

  In Carlotta’s mind, it is actually Agnes who is spending O’Neill’s money and ruining her own children. Although the divorce seems assured, Carlotta regards Agnes as spiteful and treacherous enough to do an about-face, even now.

  As she tells Commins, Agnes “has never been known to keep her word in anything,” and she “cannot distinguish a lie from the truth.”

  PART II

  ABOUT AGNES

  8

  Agnes Boulton checked into a dude ranch outside Reno in early May 1929. Away
from her children, isolated from her friends, she had time enough to ponder her failed marriage.

  She knew O’Neill had come to loathe her, as only a man can who was once possessed by love. And, in truth, she herself had come to feel little but contempt for O’Neill. Yet his leaving rankled. Aware she could have been the heroine of one of her own pulp-fiction romances, she marveled that her once-ardent, utterly dependent Gene could have wiped from his mind the nearly ten years of their partnership, those exciting (if sometimes trying) years when he was striving for recognition.

  She had been his lover, his bedrock, his shield; together they had celebrated his triumphs, commiserated over his failures. She had shared his grief during his father’s agonizing final illness, his shock at his mother’s sudden death, the torment of his brother’s ultimate alcoholic disintegration.

  It seemed incredible that her Gene could erase from memory all the hours she had devoted to nursing, reassuring, and mothering him during his own frequent illnesses, both physical and emotional. How could he have stonily turned his back on her and their children? Was it true, as he’d hinted, that she could have held him if she’d put up a fight? But did she, after all, really regret that the marriage was over?

  Her writer’s instinct surely told her this was a story any number of magazines would pay for generously—but O’Neill and his lawyers had anticipated that possibility and, under the terms of the divorce agreement now before the Reno court, Agnes has been prohibited from profiting in any such way.

  • • •

  AGNES WAS TWENTY-FOUR, five years younger than O’Neill, when they first met in Greenwich Village in 1917. A young woman with a sure sense of her own allure, she had large blue-gray eyes and high cheekbones and she wore her smooth brown hair in a bun, sometimes concealing it under a becoming cloche. She had come to New York on one of her excursions from the Connecticut dairy farm she shared with her family, which included three younger sisters who, like her, inherited their bohemian outlook from their parents.