by Arthur Gelb
“I thought it was pretty devastating stuff at the time,” O’Neill reminisced many years later, adding that he doubted the magazine’s editors “were as overwhelmed by its hideous beauty as I was.”
9
In the days following O’Neill’s ostentatious flourish with the clock on the wall of Christine’s restaurant, Agnes could not understand why he was keeping her at a distance, for she sensed he was as much attracted to her as she to him.
What she did not know was that he had made a vow of chastity to the faithless Louise, and he had been in a state of ambivalence about Agnes ever since his drunken declaration on their first meeting that he wanted “to spend every night” of his life with her. Now, as his attraction to Agnes ripened, and Louise’s letters to him held no assurances of love and no date for her return, it dawned on him that his vow of chastity had become a sham.
“I waited until November,” he glowered in a letter to Louise. “Then I gave you a month’s leeway. You didn’t come. Your letters were cold and indefinite. Then I cracked. No one can say I was unfaithful to you before then. But by then . . . my cross had become too heavy to bear.”
It was not until late December that O’Neill struggled out from under his cross and—although still wary—turned to Agnes. While his Greenwich Village friends were certain Louise would easily reclaim him when she returned from Russia, Agnes wanted to believe Louise no longer possessed him. The first night she and O’Neill spent together was not reassuring.
It was a spectacularly cold night in early January 1918 and the circumstances were anything but romantic. In fact, the date was noteworthy chiefly because it was the first time Agnes encountered O’Neill’s drunken, jealous fury. (Like Carlotta years later, she felt impelled to record the shocking details.)
That night, Agnes and O’Neill found themselves in an untidy, cramped two-room apartment whose owner was absent. In the sort of indeterminate social encounter common to the bohemians of the Village, she and O’Neill had agreed to meet there with Hutch Collins, an actor with the Provincetown Players.
Hutch had grown up with O’Neill in New London, Connecticut, where they had been best friends, united by their boyhood rebellion against the stuffy narrow-mindedness of their small town’s leading citizens and their shared passion for such scandalous writers as Shaw, Ibsen, Wilde, and Swinburne. As O’Neill once put it, he and Hutch were “twin disreputables in the village gossip,” which bound them “hilariously together.”
After the three had sat drinking, talking, and shivering in the living room, Hutch went into the bedroom, where he lit a can of Sterno to produce some warmth. Agnes, as she recalled in her memoir, joined Hutch. She had seated herself beside him on the bed when she was suddenly confronted by O’Neill, whom she described as “tall and menacing,” standing in the doorway between the two rooms.
Roughly pulling Agnes to her feet, he shoved her back into the living room and reseated himself. Standing there in a daze, Agnes concluded that O’Neill was smoldering with jealousy over what he evidently construed as a flirtation between his girl and his best friend. According to Agnes, Hutch took no notice of the incident; he soon left the apartment, and O’Neill, without a word, reentered the bedroom and threw himself, fully clothed, onto the unmade bed, apparently settling in for what was left of the night.
It wasn’t long before O’Neill peremptorily ordered Agnes to join him on the bed, which she did, also fully clothed, even to her overcoat. He turned his back to her and she huddled against him for warmth. By now, it was close to dawn.
When Agnes awoke, still pressed against the soundly sleeping O’Neill, it was daylight. She was eager to return to her hotel but she wished to say a word before parting. As she hesitated, O’Neill awoke—and immediately downed a shot of whiskey. He then began to berate her in what she described as “a tirade” that was “couched in language that he had learned at sea and in the dives of the waterfront.” She listened for a while, at first dumbstruck, and then, outraged, left the apartment.
Agnes’s distress was washed away when, later that day, a package was delivered to her at the Brevoort. It was the manuscript of O’Neill’s poetic mood play The Moon of the Caribbees, that completed his cycle of four early one-act sea plays later collectively produced as S.S. Glencairn.
The Moon of the Caribbees was inspired, O’Neill once explained, by an evening he spent on shipboard off Trinidad during his sailing days, when the moon shone and the strange songs of the natives coming over the waters mingled with the sounds aboard ship. It was plotless, as he once noted, but poetic, his “first real break with theatrical tradition.” The Moon of the Caribbees, he later added, was his “favorite short play.”
Instead of shunning O’Neill, as she had planned, Agnes hurried to the Hell Hole to tell him how moved she had been by his script. Evidently, she had passed a crucial test. O’Neill often carried the script with him, allowing friends to read it as a mark of his trust and as proof of their sensitivity. According to Agnes, O’Neill apologized to her somewhat obliquely for his earlier behavior. He confirmed what she had intuited—that when he saw her sitting on the bed, talking to Hutch, he felt a furious surge of jealousy.
Agnes managed to reassure O’Neill that it was him she was in love with. Mollified, he explained that he’d been both beguiled by and suspicious of Agnes from their first meeting. Christine, hoping to encourage his interest in Agnes, had given him a year-old clipping she’d saved from the World featuring an appealing photo of Agnes. The clipping had scarcely had the desired effect.
O’Neill told Agnes the photo made her look like “a washed-out nincompoop!” and went on to mock the story’s wordy headline, “Woman Dairy Farmer Who’s Made a Brave Fight,” with its subhead explaining that there was “No Money in Milk Cows.” Reading from the article and glancing up to glare at Agnes, he quoted, “‘Woman dairy farmer’—Ye gods! ‘Down in New York to help the poor farmers win a milk strike—young widow has supported herself, a baby and a herd of cows by her pen.’”
There ensued a lengthy soliloquy on the state of his soul, which bewildered Agnes and left her speechless. Ranting on, O’Neill at last told her of his recent turbulent love affair with Louise Bryant, bemoaning the terrible wound Louise had inflicted by her departure with Reed.
To Agnes’s reasonable response that Reed did, after all, seem to have first claim on Louise’s love and loyalty, O’Neill replied that Agnes didn’t understand. He rattled off the fiction Louise had fed him about living with Reed as brother and sister because of Reed’s impotence.
Agnes, unwilling to disillusion O’Neill, did not dispute the story, although she instinctively disbelieved it, and, of course, she was right. The truth was that while Reed did suffer from a chronic kidney ailment, sex was not proscribed; in fact, he cheerfully confessed to casual affairs in letters to Louise during his work-driven absences.
And now, although O’Neill professed to care greatly for Agnes, he told her he was not “absolutely sure” whether he was still in love with Louise. (According to O’Neill’s own later account in a letter to Louise, “Agnes knew this feeling of mine and accepted it.”) Ending his tirade, O’Neill declared he had no intention of ever again going through anything like his turmoil with Louise.
Agnes was growing inured to O’Neill’s mood swings, which she attributed to his erratic drinking. And she was flattered by his jealousy even while fearful of it. She listened meekly as O’Neill, with strangled fury, charged her with the follies of her earlier life—particularly her marriage and the child with whom she was now burdened.
Gradually, however, O’Neill allowed Agnes to convince him that she had indefinitely ceded her child to the care of her farm-bound parents and sisters. Indeed, Agnes appeared to have given scant thought to her infant daughter; “my little girl was doing fine and hadn’t even seemed to miss me,” she remarked casually in her memoir, after having received a report from her mother around this time.
Satisfied that Agnes was unfettered, and never mentioning his own earlier marriage and vaporized child, O’Neill expounded to Agnes what it was that he wanted from her: for her to feel deeply at one with him, “not you and me, but us, one being, not two.” That, he insisted, must be their life from now on.
Then, to Agnes’s surprise, he told her he would soon be going back to Provincetown to focus on his writing. He had given up waiting for Louise to return from Russia, he said, and he was eager to develop an idea for a full-length play that was nagging at him, along with several possible one-acters.
O’Neill knew that his theater colleagues, having often heard him complain he couldn’t work amid the distractions of New York, were eagerly waiting for him to leave. They needed a new O’Neill play—better still, two or three. By mid-January, the Provincetown Players were holding their collective breath.
It was then that O’Neill asked Agnes if she would come with him to Provincetown. She said yes.
• • •
O’NEILL IMMEDIATELY SET about obtaining accommodations for himself and Agnes. On January 16, he wrote to John A. Francis, the amiable owner of a general store in Provincetown who also rented studio apartments, asking him to make the arrangements. While waiting to leave, Agnes moved from her cramped hotel room to a two-room apartment on Waverly Place, where O’Neill could show up and make himself comfortable when he chose.
He was postponing his departure until after Louis Holladay returned to the Village. Holladay, who, after Hutch Collins, O’Neill counted as his most intimate friend, had been working on a fruit farm in Oregon. He and Holladay had met at Princeton in 1906 during O’Neill’s freshman (and only) year there. Although Holladay did not attend Princeton, he had several friends among O’Neill’s classmates, whom he often visited.
When one of them had chanced to introduce Holladay to O’Neill, they quickly recognized each other as kindred souls—both social rebels, both avid readers, both content to live like gypsies, and neither able to go for long without a drink. Their bonding continued after O’Neill was dismissed from Princeton by the Committee on Examinations and Standings “for poor scholastic standing.” (Eugene, convinced he could learn more out of college than in, wanted no Ivy-stamped niche in life; like Shaw and O’Casey, he ultimately demonstrated that a college education was not essential to the writing of great plays.)
In New York, Holladay and O’Neill explored the city’s dives together, living off odd jobs and handouts from their families. Holladay was “the most loved man friend Gene ever had,” as he told Carlotta years later.
There is good reason to believe that in 1910, when both were twenty-two, Holladay accompanied O’Neill as a paying apprentice seaman aboard the clipper ship Charles Racine, bound for Buenos Aires. O’Neill, romanticizing his episode at sea in the many interviews he gave when he became famous, never mentioned a companion, probably because it would have made him sound less heroic. But he did tell Nina Moise, soon to direct his play The Rope, and in whom he often confided during his early Greenwich Village days, that Holladay had accompanied him on the Norwegian clipper ship. (Both of their passages had been paid by O’Neill’s father.)
Five years after the trip, O’Neill and Holladay were bumming around together in Greenwich Village, where Holladay’s sister owned a popular restaurant called Polly’s, and where Holladay himself had opened a restaurant called The Sixty.
Holladay had borrowed the money for the restaurant from Louise Norton, who became Holladay’s lover. But Holladay began drinking heavily and forgot to apply for a liquor license and the police closed the restaurant.
His romance with Louise Norton, whom he wanted to marry, was beginning to falter as well; she said she would not marry him unless he demonstrated he could stay sober, and he agreed to go out to the Northwest and establish himself as a fruit farmer while curing himself of his drinking habit.
Now, some months later, he had written to assure his Louise he’d achieved his goal; he’d quit drinking, had grown fit and happy at his labor, and had saved enough money to keep himself and a wife. He asked his friends to stand by for a celebration, and on January 22, O’Neill, Agnes, and a number of others gathered at the Hell Hole.
As Agnes remembered, that night of confusion and fear began joyfully. She, O’Neill, and others in their group greeted Holladay, who was triumphantly cold sober; when Louise Norton arrived, the two sat together at a small table, talking privately. Agnes, watching them, recalled that she felt an unsettling if vague uneasiness. It was now after midnight and she decided to leave; O’Neill accompanied her to her Waverly Place flat and then left, telling her he wanted to return to the Hell Hole to be with Holladay.
Friends later reported differing versions of the night’s events. According to one account, Louise Norton left the party shortly after Agnes, and it soon became evident to those gathered at the Hell Hole that there was something amiss. Almost everyone later agreed, however, that Holladay suddenly began ordering drinks for himself as well as his friends. Eventually he was drunk enough to announce that Louise had told him she’d fallen in love with someone else. Holladay had always been a quiet man and he quietly did what he felt he had to do.
Although no one later wanted to be specific about it, word circulated that while the party was still in full swing, Holladay asked his old friend Terry Carlin to conjure up some heroin, and Carlin obligingly put out a street order. Himself a known user of narcotics, he had no qualms about obtaining drugs for a friend. And it was against Carlin’s personal code of ethics to try to prevent anyone from overdosing—which it soon appeared was what Holladay had in mind.
Carlin, a disillusioned anarchist, had first met Holladay, as he had O’Neill, in a bookstore run by the philosophical anarchist Benjamin Tucker. Unkempt by choice and relying entirely on the Irish charm and eloquence he could summon at will, Carlin always found someone to keep him in liquor and the scant amount of food he required. Even such practiced storytellers as Jack London and Theodore Dreiser had been enraptured by the mythic quality of Carlin’s yarns.
In the years when O’Neill battled despair, when he had cut himself off from his family and was all but penniless—before he was discovered by the Provincetown Players—he had clung to Carlin. Carlin’s career as a perpetually homeless parasite had taught O’Neill innovative survival techniques.
They often stayed up all night, sometimes joined by Holladay, alternately drinking and napping with their heads on a backroom table at the Hell Hole. They subsisted on the saloon’s free lunch and, with handouts from friends, they bought oysters cheaply by the sack at the Fulton Fish Market. From time to time, they jimmied their way into one or another unoccupied Village flat, sleeping on the floor on cast-off mattresses.
• • •
CARLIN AND THE REST of the now-blighted Holladay party moved from the Hell Hole to another favorite Village hangout, Romany Marie’s. On the third floor of a building at Washington Place, the restaurant was reached by climbing one outside staircase and two interior ones.
• • •
MARIE’S SPECIALTY WAS Turkish coffee; she served no liquor and fed her patrons even when they couldn’t afford to pay. A buxom woman with a throaty, heavily accented voice, she came from a family of conservative Romanians. Although respectably married to a businessman named Damon Marchand, she posed as a Gypsy, wrapping herself in floating silky layers embellished with fake jewels.
Shortly after Holladay and his party arrived at her place, according to Romany Marie, he began to look ill, probably having dosed himself at the Hell Hole. Village gossip for weeks afterward held that Holladay had snorted his heroin at Romany Marie’s, but what actually happened is impossible to pin down, since everyone involved was terrified of being implicated in what might become a criminal investigation.
Although Agnes had long since gone home, she later recorded a fuzzy account, partly derived from O’Neill. In her version, w
hen O’Neill learned about the heroin, he’d grown ill with shock; he’d fled the restaurant, hurrying back to Agnes’s flat for solace. Predictably, he then began a weeklong drunk.
Not long after O’Neill left the restaurant (according to Agnes), a member of their group, Dorothy Day—a twenty-year-old reporter for the socialist magazine the Call—arrived at Agnes’s flat with shattering news: Louis Holladay was dead. He had collapsed at a table at Romany Marie’s, Day said. She had tried to revive him, while Romany Marie called for an ambulance. But he had stopped breathing before the ambulance arrived.
When Holladay’s sister Polly was summoned, she informed the ambulance medics that her brother suffered from a weak heart, and they apparently pronounced the death as due to “chronic endocarditis.” The police, arriving a short time later, accepted that finding.
Still according to Agnes, Dorothy Day told her that Holladay had died in her arms. Those who knew—or claimed they knew—about the heroin Carlin had obtained for Holladay were incredulous that no mention of narcotics was entered into the official record. (It’s probable that someone had surreptitiously pocketed the remains of the heroin.)
To many of his friends—O’Neill among them—the senseless death of a young man whose life had seemed full of vitality and hope became an augury of disaster. The Villagers felt suddenly mortal and threatened. The painter Charles Demuth, according to the writer Hutchins Hapgood, “looked like a crazy man” who “literally seemed a being in hell.” Christine Ell wept unstoppably.
It was a milestone as well in the life of Dorothy Day. Self-sufficient and uninhibited, she had come to the Village after attending schools in Oakland and Chicago, choosing to follow her father’s career in journalism. Both she and her lover, Michael Gold, later a leading writer and editor for the Communist Party newspaper the Daily Worker, were close friends of O’Neill, and they often played and drank with the crowd.