by Arthur Gelb
“If, as you write, it is dangerous for us to see each other,” he said, “then we must still be lying to ourselves . . . I would dearly love to see you—no matter how it hurt—for I am convinced that neither your efforts nor mine will ever sever our souls, and that Our Dream of Yesterday is not dead but only stunned into unconsciousness.”
Once again, he raises the issue of their triangular relationship, warning that, this time, Agnes must also be considered. “I would not hurt her for the world, she is much too fine for that.” If all doubts were definitely cleared up, “the pity of it” would be that “some one or two of us would have to suffer an added pain in order that the other two or one might be free. And there you are!” He ended on a pleading note: “Write me what you think of this matter. Please! The approaching night is long, and—I am afraid!”
Although Louise’s reply is not extant as far as is known, her answer may be gleaned from a further, angrier letter in which O’Neill accused her of being blind to the fact that she had “done more to ruin my life than any other person in the world, not even excepting myself.” She presented herself as “blameless,” he stormed, but it was she who had betrayed their love.
For over a year and a half, he wrote, while he loved her and was faithful, she had lived with “another man”; even though she insisted there was no sexual relationship because of Reed’s illness, Louise had been “spiritually untrue” not only to himself but to herself and to Reed “every moment of that time.”
Unable to suppress his venom, he taunted: “Does it cause you pain to know I have been living with another woman? Then you know now how I suffered . . . my love for you kept me in Hell. I lived only in that love, in the hope of those fleeting bits of Paradise you tossed me once in a while—only to turn back to the other man the next moment.” In his agony, he said, nothing mattered, “my own life least of all.” He drank and drank in order to drug himself into “an indifferent apathy.”
It was Agnes, wrote O’Neill, who “pulled me together until I realized what I was wasting of myself and felt a longing to be clean and do clean work again.” He also praised Agnes for having accepted and understood him, even at his worst; but even though he owed her a lot, he was unsure whether he loved her “in a deep sense.”
It was “more than probable,” he added, that Louise had “burned” herself too deeply into his soul for the wound ever to heal; “I stand condemned to love you forever—and hate you for what you have done to my life.”
O’Neill finally came to a decision. He told Agnes he would meet with Louise in New York. While Agnes did not believe he would actually desert her for Louise, she did fear that once amid the distractions of the city, he would be tempted into a drinking binge. She was bemused as well by his willingness to disrupt his work on Beyond the Horizon. Not least, she was loath to give Louise the satisfaction of being able to summarily bring O’Neill to heel.
Quite possibly O’Neill himself recognized the pitfalls inherent in his proposed journey and—whether consciously or not—he might have been testing Agnes’s mettle, challenging her to their first major Strindbergian duel.
While he wavered, Agnes accepted the challenge. With uncharacteristic resolve, she took command, proposing a compromise she believed to be fair to him, to herself, and to Louise: O’Neill should meet Louise halfway between New York and Provincetown—in Fall River, Massachusetts. Surprisingly, O’Neill acceded to the plan. But Louise, according to Agnes, haughtily declined his proposal as being beneath her notice.
Letters continued to spin between Louise and O’Neill until March 10. In spite of the “peevish tone” of her last letter, wrote O’Neill, he said he agreed with her verdict of not meeting again. “Your assertion that you belong to no one is quite right: not even to yourself, at any time I have known you.” He would always retain his feeling for the Louise “who was and whom I loved so greatly.”
In a final scolding, O’Neill sounded more than ever like a suffering Booth Tarkington adolescent: “But you—you who write such letters—I do not know you or care to. You are alien to me in every respect. And so at the crossroads I salute you as we pass: ‘Adios, Stranger!’”
There is no evidence that O’Neill and Louise ever met again—although traces of the triangle lingered not only in the plot of Beyond the Horizon, but also in other plays to come.
• • •
BETWEEN O’NEILL’S PLAYWRITING and letter-writing, and Agnes’s hand-wringing over Louise’s epistolary intrusions, they found time to befriend a year-round Provincetown resident, Alice Woods Ullman. She was a writer, the recently divorced wife of the Impressionist painter Eugene Ullman, and the mother of two schoolboys whom she’d raised in France, where her circle included Matisse and Gertrude Stein. She had dropped her former husband’s name, preferring to be known as Alice Woods. She liked Agnes, but believed her to be “out of place.”
“I thought it was shocking for a woman to live under those conditions,” she recalled, referring to the ramshackle studios Agnes and O’Neill occupied. In an oblique reference to O’Neill’s recent romance with Louise Bryant, Woods concluded that Agnes “wasn’t subtle enough to play the game that Gene seemed to be playing.”
As an example of Agnes’s naïveté, Woods cited an episode that occurred one day in March, when Agnes and O’Neill had been invited to tea. Agnes was in tears when they arrived and told Woods that O’Neill wanted to marry her, but she would not agree.
“Why not?”
Because, said Agnes, O’Neill was still in love with “that girl.”
O’Neill looked haggard. Staring out the window at the melting snow in a bare, brown orchard, he made no comment. The younger of Alice Woods’s two sons, Allen Ullman, in later years a painter like his father, was eleven that spring. He dreamily recalled Agnes’s beauty and the soulful looks she exchanged with O’Neill. Allen worried about the couple’s episodic jealous tiffs and about O’Neill’s violent drinking bouts. He thought them the most tempestuously romantic couple outside the pages of a book.
• • •
DESPITE EMOTIONAL MISGIVINGS on both sides, Agnes and O’Neill rejoiced in a windfall when his one-acter In the Zone proved to be a commercial success on the Orpheum vaudeville circuit; it had been touring the circuit since early in the year, earning him thirty-five dollars a week in royalties. Now, at last, he was freed from his near-total dependence on the dollar-a-day dole his father had been supplying, on and off, for most of his adult life.
As a member of the Provincetown Players, O’Neill—along with the group’s other writers and actors—earned little more than appreciation, since the expense of operating the Playwrights’ Theatre was barely covered by ticket sales.
The Orpheum income, however, though hardly munificent, was enough to support him and Agnes in their modest lifestyle. For the first time in his writing career, O’Neill was on the cusp of financial independence, and this fact was a spur to their marrying. In the event, Alice Woods recalled that by mid-March, she herself was well into plans for the wedding between the saturnine O’Neill and his jittery beloved.
Woods had arranged for a “Mr. Darrell,” owner of the town’s most prestigious drugstore, to visit O’Neill’s studio to help with obtaining the marriage license. She instructed him to arrive after two in the afternoon, when O’Neill customarily stopped writing. But she forgot to alert either O’Neill or Agnes to the visit.
It was an unusually warm spring day and O’Neill was in a particularly affectionate mood. After lunch, he stripped down to his skin. Like the Celtic forebears he often invoked—who preferred to fight naked—he was totally unself-conscious about walking around in the nude. He grabbed Agnes, prepared to make love and then nap.
An hour or so later, Agnes was awakened by a knock on the unlocked door, but was too comfortable and lazy to open it. Darrell, aware that O’Neill worked in a loft above the main room, and thinking O’Neill hadn’t heard his repea
ted knocking, pushed the door open, stepped inside, and loudly announced, “I’ve come to see about you getting that marriage license, Mr. O’Neill.”
O’Neill, naked, sprang to his feet, as Agnes cowered on the bed. She watched as the two men, frozen, stared at each other.
“Ah!” said Darrell, recovering his poise, “I’m afraid I’ve come too early.” Backing toward the door, he explained that Mrs. Woods had told him O’Neill would be finished working by two, and blandly offered to return at half past four. (Years later, O’Neill bestowed the drugstore owner’s name on the character of the psychiatrist who was Nina Leeds’s lover in Strange Interlude.)
If Agnes had her own doubts about the marriage, O’Neill was having second thoughts as well.
“One part of me is the author of my life—tearing his hair in a piteous frenzy as he watches his ‘worser’ half playing the lead . . .” he confessed to his close friend Nina Moise, just three days before the date set for his marriage.
Moise, soon to direct The Rope, his one-act play (scheduled to open at the end of the month at the Playwrights’ Theatre), had frequently been the sympathetic recipient of O’Neill’s ruminations about how he wanted to live his life. She knew he felt himself condemned to be forever at war with his bemused alter ego; but he was insightful enough to ridicule himself as a “Jekyll and Hyde.”
“Believe me,” he wrote to Moise, “from line to line, the poor wretch can never tell whether the play is farce or tragedy—so perverse a spirit is his star.” O’Neill knew Moise would understand that Louise Bryant was the reason for his dithering on the verge of commitment to Agnes. But whatever his misgivings, he suddenly made up his mind that Agnes really was the woman with whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life. And Agnes resolved not to let the threat of Louise hinder her happiness.
The marriage took place on April 12, 1918. Agnes and O’Neill would have preferred to be married by a justice of the peace but couldn’t find one. Instead, they took their vows, in O’Neill’s words, before “the most delightful . . . Godhelpus, mincing Methodist minister that ever prayed through his nose.” The minister, wrote O’Neill, conducted the ceremony as though it were “the wedding of two serious children.”
“The worthy divine is an utterly loveable old idiot and the ceremony gained a strange, unique simplicity from his sweet, childlike sincerity,” continued O’Neill. “I caught myself wishing I could believe in the same gentle God he seemed so sure of.”
11
When O’Neill completed Beyond the Horizon at the end of April 1918, he sent the script to George Jean Nathan for his appraisal. O’Neill and Nathan had not yet met, but the influential theater critic had recognized the young dramatist’s potential ever since publishing several of his one-act sea plays in the iconoclastic magazine The Smart Set.
Nathan, much taken with the play, brought it to John D. Williams, one of the rare producers of the day challenging the tawdriness of Broadway. Nathan believed Williams had the courage and imagination to take on Beyond the Horizon, even though it was a departure far more radical than anything Broadway had yet dared.
O’Neill could barely contain his glee when Williams sent a check for $500 to option the script for six months. But when the option was about to expire with no word of a Broadway production, a frustrated O’Neill switched his attention back to two one-act plays, Where the Cross Is Made and The Moon of the Caribbees—the first announced to open on November 22, the second a month later, both under the aegis of the Provincetown Players.
To be on hand for the productions, O’Neill and Agnes had moved in mid-November from Provincetown back to New York City, into the Lafayette Hotel, near the Playwrights’ Theatre. The Armistice with Germany had been signed on November 11, and the Village, like the rest of the country, was in a celebratory mood. O’Neill and Agnes were looking forward to the cocktail party arranged by their friends to welcome them back to the Village, and O’Neill gave Agnes his word he’d stay sober.
For once, Agnes let her hair fall alluringly loose and was rewarded with O’Neill’s flattering approval. At the party, following the advice of Harold de Polo, a hard-drinking writer, O’Neill diluted his whiskey with plenty of water.
He was in a serene mood at party’s end and to Agnes he seemed sober. Joining friends at a nearby restaurant for dinner, they seated themselves casually at a long table, Agnes beside Teddy Ballantine, an actor with the Provincetown Players.
O’Neill sat farther down the table and Agnes noticed him glaring at her, as he seemed to be straining to hear her animated conversation with Ballantine. When she saw O’Neill pour himself a large glass of straight whiskey, she grew concerned. Rising from her seat, she squeezed into a space beside him and whispered that perhaps it was time for them to go back to the Lafayette. Too late, Agnes recognized the signs of his uncontrollable, drunken jealous rage. O’Neill erupted.
“He got to his feet,” recalled Agnes, “gave me a push that sent me backward, leaned toward me, swinging as hard as possible with the back of his hand, and hit me across the face. Then he laughed, his mouth distorted with an ironic grin.”
Just as Carlotta some years later would feel compelled to record for posterity the day in Shanghai when a drunken O’Neill “knocked” her “flat,” Agnes in her memoir described her first encounter with O’Neill’s drunken abuse: “I can remember my horrible astonishment and despair at this performance, along with a crazy dazed feeling that it just couldn’t be true—it couldn’t have happened.”
“Get out of here, all of you,” O’Neill snarled at the assembled diners, few of whom appeared unduly shocked by his behavior.
Ballantine’s wife, Stella, took Agnes firmly by the arm and steered her out of the restaurant. “It means nothing, my dear, nothing,” Stella soothed. “Genius must have its outlet!” She sheltered the distraught Agnes in her own nearby apartment, advising her to give O’Neill time to cool down.
But a few hours later, Agnes returned to the hotel, where she fretted. O’Neill turned up at dawn, haggard and ill; sitting heavily on the edge of the bed, “he reached out and put his arm around me,” Agnes recalled, “holding me tightly and quivering.” After downing a few restorative swigs of whiskey ordered from the bellboy, O’Neill ceased to shake. But he was in no shape to keep his scheduled business appointments, nor could he keep his promise to introduce Agnes to his parents, who were expecting a midday visit from their new daughter-in-law.
Agnes telephoned O’Neill’s mother: Eugene was ill from having eaten bad oysters, she lied, but was recovering. Might they postpone their visit until after dinner?
O’Neill sipped a bowl of soup and soon was almost himself. Lying in bed, with his head in Agnes’s lap, he whispered his penitence: “The dream—it’s back. I almost shattered it. . . . You and I always. Us always!”
Did Agnes forgive him? Yes, and (as would Carlotta) not for the last time.
That evening, James and Ella O’Neill embraced Agnes. James, who had turned seventy-three a month earlier, had recently retired from the stage. Ella, at sixty-one, had been drug-free for the past four years. In 1914, succored by “out-sisters” from an order of Carmelite nuns in Brooklyn, she’d undergone an epiphany, re-embracing her lapsed Catholic faith and concurrently conquering her morphine habit.
Ella and James now lived a tranquil life, spending winters in New York and summers in their New London cottage. They occupied a comfortable two-room suite on the eighth floor of the Prince George Hotel on Twenty-eighth Street, east of Fifth Avenue. Jamie, whose own tenuous acting career had long since evaporated, lived at the nearby Garden Hotel on his father’s dole and was his mother’s daily visitor.
The elder O’Neills were bleakly resigned to Jamie’s entrenched alcoholism and his inability, at the age of forty, to earn a living. But their disappointment in their older son was ameliorated by the emergence of their scapegrace younger son as a recognized playwright and a dutiful husba
nd.
The old antagonism between Eugene and his father, along with his mistrust of his mother, seemed—at least on the surface—to have been swept away.
Both parents, eager to show their pleasure with Eugene, asked him what he would like as a wedding gift. O’Neill mentioned that the former Coast Guard station on the edge of a rugged stretch of Atlantic beach in Provincetown had recently been put up for sale. It would be the ideal dwelling for him and Agnes, a home where, from early spring until late fall, they could write and swim and walk in the isolation they sought, and yet be within occasional visiting distance of fellow writers and artists.
The renovated structure was owned by the financier Sam Lewisohn, who had shared it as a vacation home with Maurice Sterne, a painter, and his wife, Mabel Dodge, a patron of the arts (and once John Reed’s lover); it was she who had transformed the abandoned station into an inviting summer residence.
James, prodded by his wife, agreed to buy it for his son and daughter-in-law. But to raise the purchase price of a thousand dollars he would need to close a real estate deal in New London—and a trip there would have to wait until he was mobile. He’d recently been knocked down by a car as he was crossing Fifth Avenue and one leg was still in a cast; it would be several weeks before he could travel.
He told his son he could commit to the transaction and agreed it should be handled by O’Neill’s locally well-connected Provincetown landlord, John Francis. That settled, O’Neill was ready to face rehearsals, in late November 1918, of Where the Cross Is Made, while simultaneously fidgeting about his prospects for Beyond the Horizon.
John Williams, at the last minute, renewed the play’s option, dangling the far-fetched notion of casting John and Lionel Barrymore as the Mayo brothers. Again, O’Neill’s hopes soared. But it turned out the Barrymores had other plans. Williams’s continuing vagueness drove O’Neill at last to engage both an agent and a lawyer.