by Arthur Gelb
Her father, Edward (Teddy) William Boulton, was a gentle, blue-eyed, white-mustached landscape and portrait painter from an upper-crust Philadelphia family. Her mother, Cecil, an early feminist with a mystical bent, believed in free love, nude sunbathing, and smoking in public for women, and she had occasionally posed in the nude for her husband’s painter-colleagues at the Philadelphia Art Students League.
A Catholic convert, she raised her four daughters in the Church, but evidently saw no conflict between her religious beliefs and her feminist views—nor between her feminism and her devotion to domesticity, which included baking for her husband.
Teddy’s fees, although he was praised as an artist, were not always sufficient to support his family, and Agnes helped out with her modest earnings from the romance stories she sold to pulp-fiction magazines. She also sold the milk from her cows, but the dairy business was in a slump. Her current excursion to New York was to find part-time work in a factory, while also meeting with prospective editors in an effort to further her writing career.
Agnes hoped her family would be “happy on the farm,” as she recalled offhandedly in Part of a Long Story, her memoir of the first three years of her involvement with O’Neill, published nearly thirty years after their divorce and five years after O’Neill’s death. “I had to go to New York for their sake and mine, to make more money, and I would return! But I did not return—not until many years later.”
Agnes could clearly recall the night in November 1917 when she first encountered O’Neill. It was a casual meeting, typical of its time and place. Clutching her savings of a hundred dollars (a substantial sum equal to more than $2,000 today), Agnes had checked into the reasonably priced Brevoort Hotel at Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street. A gathering place for young Village artists, it had been recommended by Mary Pyne, a fledgling actress. Pyne and her husband, Harry Kemp (labeled the “hobo poet” by the press), were friends of Agnes’s mother, who had invited them to stay on the Boulton farm the previous summer.
From the Brevoort, Agnes telephoned Christine Ell, with whom she had a slight acquaintance from previous visits to New York. It was Christine who, on one of those visits, mentioned the sought-for factory job and Agnes now hoped for more specific information.
Christine and her husband, Louis Ell, owned the intimate restaurant above the Playwrights’ Theatre at 139 Macdougal Street, run by the Provincetown Players. She invited Agnes to meet her at ten thirty that night (after closing time at her establishment) at a nearby saloon called the Golden Swan.
Christine cautioned that the saloon, on the southeast corner of Sixth Avenue and Fourth Street, in no way lived up to its fancy name and, in fact, was known to its boozing denizens as the “Hell Hole.” Promptly at ten thirty, Agnes, as instructed, entered by the side door that led to the ladies’ section of a typical Irish saloon, separated by swinging doors from the men’s barroom.
Agnes seated herself in the dingy, dimly lit space that smelled of beer and tobacco smoke. Christine had not yet arrived, and Agnes, glancing about uneasily, noticed a dark-haired man wearing a seaman’s sweater under his jacket staring at her from a table in a far corner. When Christine at last arrived, she embraced Agnes and greeted the man in the seaman’s sweater, who silently joined them at their table. Christine introduced him: “This is Gene O’Neill.”
Christine was a strapping woman, with outsized hips and breasts and a tumble of red-gold hair. O’Neill, long since drawn to her earthy warmth, once referred to her as “a female Christ.” Christine was the illegitimate daughter of a Danish army captain and a peasant girl, who brought Christine as a young child to America, where her stepfather raped her when she was fourteen.
After a miserable life as a domestic and a factory worker, and innumerable humiliating short-lived love affairs, Christine was inspired by a speech in which Emma Goldman held forth on society’s wrongful neglect of such people as herself, and she pulled herself together. (Three years later, Christine would serve as a part model for O’Neill’s Swedish-born Anna Christie, and—with far greater poignancy—she would spark the compassionate, self-mocking giantess, Josie Hogan, in O’Neill’s final play, A Moon for the Misbegotten.)
Both Christine and her husband—a sometime carpenter for the Provincetown Players—cooked at her restaurant and, although she claimed to be madly in love, she was routinely unfaithful to him. A generous friend and an enthusiastic matchmaker, she had decided to watch over Agnes in the Village.
Agnes was marginally aware of the existence of the Provincetown Players, who only the year before had established the Playwrights’ Theatre, with O’Neill as resident wunderkind. But having little interest in the theater, she had never heard of the wunderkind himself.
When O’Neill left the table to fetch another drink, Christine told Agnes he was awaiting his brother, Jamie, because he was broke, and Jamie had promised to show up with some money. “Jamie makes love to every woman he meets,” Christine warned Agnes, implying Christine herself was one among them.
Jamie soon arrived. As Agnes remembered, he was wearing a suit of loud black-and-white checks and a bowler hat, a topcoat slung over his arm, a small carnation in his buttonhole. “What ho!” he boomed, in the carrying voice he’d inherited from his actor father. He immediately began flirting with Agnes (and would later quip that he wished he had seen her first).
When the O’Neill brothers repaired to the men’s barroom for a private talk, Christine told Agnes that the factory she’d spoken of the year before had closed. It was clear to Agnes she would have to sell a new pulp romance soon; her hundred dollars would not support her for long. But at the moment she was distracted by the yearning gaze she’d seen in Gene O’Neill’s dark eyes.
She was startled to learn from Christine that Eugene not only did much of his drinking in the Hell Hole, but that also he actually lived in one of the second-floor rooms rented out by the owner, Tom Wallace. Himself an alcoholic, Wallace often drank with O’Neill and other of the Hell Hole’s resident cronies into the early hours of the morning. (Wallace was resurrected by O’Neill years later as part model for the saloon keeper Harry Hope in The Iceman Cometh.)
The Hell Hole was an oasis for shady politicians, gamblers, corrupt cops, touts, pimps, and whores, not to mention a number of O’Neill’s own friends, many of them struggling writers like himself, along with young actors, painters, and newspapermen.
It was in the Hell Hole, in whose dreary depths O’Neill felt at home, that he was adopted by a brutish Irish street gang, the Hudson Dusters; impressed with him as an Irishman and a coming writer, they called him “the kid.”
O’Neill liked to tell a story of how they looked after him, citing a time when he was sleeping off a drunk in the back room. “I woke to find I had been robbed of all my pocket money, ten dollars and a silver watch, which my mother had given me. I told the bartender about it. Next day when I came in he called me aside, handed me the watch and the money and said: ‘Nothin’ happened. See?’” O’Neill saw.
Observing O’Neill’s evident interest in Agnes, Christine murmured, “Well, he’s fallen for you, darling. I can see that.” Bewildered, Agnes asked Christine what O’Neill worked at. He wrote plays, said Christine, to which Agnes replied she didn’t care about the theater. But she was interested to know why, with America ten months into the war, O’Neill hadn’t yet been drafted. Christine told Agnes he’d registered for the draft in June; but he was an outspoken opponent of the war and, luckily for him, he’d been deferred because of his earlier bout with tuberculosis.
The hard-drinking, pacifist playwright had aroused Agnes’s interest and she accepted his offer to accompany her across Washington Square to her hotel.
“Gene said nothing until we reached the steps in front of the Brevoort,” she later recalled, “and I put out my hand to say goodnight.” Then he began to talk drunkenly.
“I wish I could remember what he said, but I can’t,”
wrote Agnes. “I don’t think I quite knew—even then.” She said she “must go upstairs”; but she lingered.
At last, in a low voice, O’Neill declaimed: “I want to spend every night of my life from now on with you. I mean this. Every night of my life.” Agnes was stunned: “I thought him the strangest man I had ever met.”
Unlike some other parts of Agnes’s story, this first meeting, as she later described it, has the ring of truthful recollection. Written in her late sixties when she was in frail health from years of uncontrolled drinking, her story often seemed to be composed in a haze of suppressed resentment and anger as she “remembered”—or alternately took slapdash guesses at—the events she depicted.
Kenneth Macgowan, who knew O’Neill and Agnes more intimately than most of their other contemporaries, appraised Agnes’s memoir, Part of a Long Story, as a contradictory mixture. In a letter to the authors of this biography written shortly after the memoir’s publication, Macgowan wrote, “She gets some things about Gene very clear indeed—fearing to meet people and issues, desire for torture, drive to work, a kind of cumbersome sentimentalism. But she pours on the romance and remembers too much and too little.”
There is, however, enough substance in her memoir to form at least a sketchy landscape of her early life with O’Neill. According to Agnes (and others), within a few days of her first meeting with O’Neill, she learned from Christine that the man who had just declared his wish to spend every night of his life with her—the moody, habitually drunk, and always unpredictable Gene O’Neill—was the beacon around which the Provincetown Players fervently clustered.
Shortly before Agnes’s arrival in the Village, his one-act play The Long Voyage Home had captivated a discerning opening-night audience at the Playwrights’ Theatre. The play depicted a Swedish seaman who is shanghaied as he is about to return to his longed-for life on a farm. Opening on November 2, it had followed the previous year’s one-act triumph, O’Neill’s Bound East for Cardiff, which inaugurated the Players’ first New York season on November 3, 1916. Cardiff, powerfully realistic, stripped bare the sentiments of a dying, rough-hewn sailor reliving—and regretting—his wasted life at sea.
Some days after meeting O’Neill, Agnes, baffled at not having heard from him since he’d made his drunken vow, arrived at a party hosted by Christine at her restaurant. Agnes was hoping O’Neill might be there and suddenly she saw him enter the crowded room. She realized he was deliberately ignoring her and, after watching him gulp from a pocket flask, she walked up to him and said, “Hello! Remember me?” There was a brief exchange of empty pleasantries, and then he was gone. A few moments later, he climbed onto a chair to reach a clock hanging on the wall above a mantelpiece.
He glared at the hushed partygoers and twisted the hands of the clock backward, chanting the lovelorn lyrics of a currently popular Irish ballad: “Turn Back the Universe and Give Me Yesterday.” His performance was greeted with embarrassed laughter.
Agnes, bewildered, feeling out of the know and out of place amid the room’s gossipy (but to her incomprehensible) murmurings, began walking to the door. Glancing back at O’Neill, she saw him staring at her; she felt he was gloating over her discomfort.
At last, Agnes learned from Christine what many of O’Neill’s friends had come to realize: that she bore a pronounced resemblance to Louise Bryant, a Greenwich Village habitué for whom O’Neill was known to be carrying a torch. Louise, just as youthfully appealing as Agnes (although seven years older), had broken O’Neill’s heart when she chose to leave him that August, three months before Agnes’s arrival in the Village. Bryant had gone off with O’Neill’s good friend John Reed, one of the savviest and most courageous political and foreign correspondents of his day, to report on the Russian Revolution.
Christine told Agnes it was Louise’s betrayal that had propelled O’Neill on the protracted drunk in which he was currently doing his best to drown himself. It was sometime later that Agnes learned the full story of the O’Neill-Bryant-Reed triangle that had begun in the summer of 1916.
Reed had fallen in love with Louise on a visit to his native Portland, Oregon, in 1915. The freest of free spirits, she was living in a houseboat on the Willamette River with her husband, a dentist, who was beginning to bore her—as was her job as the society reporter for a local newspaper; ambitious for a career in journalism, she managed to introduce herself to Reed and they were both instantly smitten.
Bryant followed Reed to the Village and moved into his apartment, where she awaited a divorce from her accommodating husband. In the summer of 1916, she shared a cottage with Reed in the old whaling community of Provincetown, Massachusetts. Reed and Bryant participated in the experimental presentations of the Wharf Theatre, founded the year before, and it was Reed, during an evening at the Hell Hole, who had persuaded O’Neill to showcase his early work at the Wharf.
Reed, Bryant, and O’Neill were frequently together during those summer days and evenings of rehearsals and performances. But Reed was often absent on magazine and newspaper assignments and Louise, herself dreaming of journalistic acclaim (although for the moment limiting herself to writing unpublished poetry), grew restless; she amused herself by seducing O’Neill, who fell violently in love with her.
O’Neill was torn between guilt and passion until Louise told him that she and Reed lived together as brother and sister because he suffered from a chronic kidney ailment that precluded sexual activity. O’Neill believed her. He also knew that both Reed and Bryant, along with many of their friends, accepted the notion of free love and open marriage, and Reed seemed unperturbed by Louise’s fling with his good friend.
But O’Neill, fiercely jealous and possessive, wanted Louise to himself—even though there seemed to be no question that she had committed herself, for better or for worse, to Reed. O’Neill, for the next year, stewed in a kind of limbo, making love to Louise during Reed’s absences, waiting for Louise to break with his friend. But Louise had no such intention; she wanted both men, and was content to lie to each for as long as necessary.
In August 1917, learning that Reed planned to go to Russia to cover the Bolshevik upheaval, Bryant wheedled an assignment from the Bell Syndicate, enabling her to accompany him. She believed that with Reed paving her way into one of the greatest stories of the era, she could at last make her reputation. It was then that she abruptly dropped O’Neill.
Just past thirty, Reed—six feet tall and ruggedly handsome—was a fearless, socially conscious journalist, gifted with a flair for stark imagery. At twenty-six, he had transported readers of the New York World and the Metropolitan Magazine to terrifying scenes of Pancho Villa’s bloody revolutionary march across Mexico. His fame matched that of the Tribune’s superstar, Richard Harding Davis.
With the onset of the war in Europe, however, Reed became less a reporter and more an activist. He found both sides cynical and callous, and in his reports from the front he didn’t hesitate to say so. His fiery antiwar stance didn’t sit well with a generally pro-war American public.
By the time he was ready to leave for Russia, he could find no mainstream publication to trust him for the kind of unflinching coverage on which he’d built his reputation. Reed determined to deliver his own impassioned eyewitness account of the revolution in book form. The result would be Ten Days That Shook the World, an instant best seller when it was published in March 1919, and a subsequent classic.
Just before leaving with Reed for Russia, Louise, with her habitual insouciance, assured O’Neill of her constant love; she promised to write often and to return to him soon. But after hearing nothing from her for a month, O’Neill wrote to her on September 19 in care of the American vice-consul in Petrograd. He addressed her as “Sweetheart Mine”:
I am sure hoping to get a bunch of letters from you . . . at least by the first of next month. If I don’t I think I shall tie a large stone around my neck and practice perpetual submerging. It’s so long
, and I’m so worried!
I love you! love you! love you! That isn’t news for you but it’s all in the world that I can find worth writing to you. Come back soon! I am waiting! Please Louise!
Louise did finally write, but her letters were not the loving missives O’Neill expected, nor did she promise a timely return. O’Neill had trusted in her professions of love for him before she left New York; he hadn’t realized the extent of her overarching ambition. Her exhilaration as a foreign correspondent at Reed’s side far outstripped the satisfaction of being O’Neill’s stay-at-home lover.
It’s true she felt sure O’Neill was on the road to success, but Reed was already there, and able to further her career. At least for the time being, Reed seemed the judicious choice. Unwilling to relinquish O’Neill altogether, and confident of his adoration, she felt safe in setting him temporarily aside.
While unaware of O’Neill’s ongoing correspondence with Louise, Agnes could hardly avoid the persistent Village gossip about the love affair. “When Louise touches me with her fingernail, it’s like a prairie fire,” O’Neill confided to an indiscreet friend, who couldn’t resist broadcasting the remark.
Agnes also learned of the love poems exchanged between O’Neill and Louise, and about the stir caused when, during the Provincetowners’ 1916 season, O’Neill cast himself in his one-acter Thirst, solely to play a steamy love scene with Louise. And everyone knew about Louise’s efforts to advance O’Neill’s career by persuading Waldo Frank, co-editor of the literary magazine The Seven Arts, to publish O’Neill’s short story, “Tomorrow.”
The story, inspired by Joseph Conrad, was set in a saloon for down-and-outers called Jimmy the Priest’s near the Battery. Frank read it out of respect for Reed, and after O’Neill (at Frank’s insistence) made some changes, it was published in June 1917. The Seven Arts paid O’Neill fifty dollars, the first respectable money he’d earned for creative writing.