By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  • • •

  ONCE SETTLED in Peaked Hill Bars awaiting the birth of his child in early October, O’Neill regimented himself to a schedule: breakfast at eight, work until one, and then a brief nap. Always intent on keeping physically fit, he swam, took long solitary walks, or exercised with a punching bag. Often, he paddled his kayak far out into the dangerous waters.

  He generally spent some time in the afternoon going over his morning’s writing. After dinner, he and Agnes read until their bedtime at nearly midnight. They ventured into town once a week or so to hear the latest gossip, and occasionally friends visited. But because their home was hard to reach, O’Neill for the most part led a peaceful, productive life with few interruptions.

  Agnes, who did all the cooking and housekeeping, shared that life contentedly. Absent from her account of that first summer at Peaked Hill Bars is any mention that she and O’Neill shared their thoughts about what their life would be like after their child was born—another indication that O’Neill was not looking forward to the disruption of his married life.

  He was, however, relieved when his mother-in-law, Cecil Boulton, arrived in August accompanied by Agnes’s nineteen-year-old sister, Margery, to spend several weeks helping Agnes shop for baby clothes and equipment, and prepare Happy Home, a small cottage in the town’s Commercial Street; the house on Peaked Hill Bars was not only unheated, but also too isolated for Agnes’s lying-in. (Even with her mother’s supervision, Agnes forgot to buy a crib.)

  O’Neill had a nagging concern that superseded his distress about the child to come: October 16 was not far off, and he feared he would turn thirty-one with no sign of a Broadway production for his long-since-completed Beyond the Horizon, to say nothing of The Straw and Chris Christophersen.

  • • •

  OBSESSED AS HE was with his Irish heritage, O’Neill named his newborn son Shane Rudraighe, after “Shane the Proud,” the sixteenth-century chief of the O’Neill clan of Ulster. (Among his other achievements, Shane the Proud murdered his half brother.)

  Shane Rudraighe arrived late, almost a month later than expected, in the early morning of October 30, 1919, just two weeks after O’Neill’s thirty-first birthday. It was nearly ten years since the birth of his first son, who had long since been airbrushed out of O’Neill’s life.

  James O’Neill had determined to acknowledge neither his first grandson nor his then twenty-year-old son Eugene’s irresponsible forced marriage to Kathleen Jenkins. Casting about for a subterfuge that would get Eugene out of the country, he had asked a friend of his, an engineer, to take Eugene along on an impending gold-prospecting expedition to a mine in Honduras in which he’d invested; James hoped that with Eugene’s absence the unwelcome birth could somehow be ignored.

  Kathleen’s mother, Kate, was furious with the O’Neills. Herself divorced from George Jenkins, her alcoholic husband, Kate had encouraged her daughter to accept young Eugene as a suitor. Kathleen was dazzled by his good looks and what she perceived as his aura of “strange romance,” and not a little impressed that he was the son of a famous actor.

  Kathleen and Eugene took long walks together in Riverside Park, a half block from her home on 113th Street near Columbia University. He wooed her by quoting Wilde, Ibsen, Swinburne—authors unfamiliar to her; he recited tender love poetry of his own. Kathleen fell dizzily in love, believing, as did her mother, that O’Neill wanted to marry her.

  O’Neill was in no position to do so. At a loss for a career after being expelled from Princeton toward the end of his freshman year, he’d quit, or refused, the clerical jobs his father found for him. His future was a blank and he knew his father would never consent to support him in a marriage—nor did he himself want to be tied down. Nonetheless, when Kathleen told him she was pregnant, he submitted to her pleas and they were secretly married in Hoboken Trinity Church in New Jersey.

  Seeing no other way of extricating himself from the entanglement, he confessed to his father he’d gotten a girl pregnant, and James O’Neill promptly sent him off to Honduras.

  When Eugene returned five months later, Kathleen’s baby had been born (on September 5, 1910). Kathleen, resigned to having been rejected by Eugene and his family, requested a divorce, asking no alimony. “We could never have made a go of it,” she subsequently conceded.

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  Agnes, when writing of her labor during Shane’s birth, made no reference to the birth of her daughter, Barbara, nearly four years earlier; in truth, she seemed, like O’Neill, to have all but forgotten the existence of her firstborn.

  The doctor who attended Agnes in the small heated cottage rented for the Provincetown winter, was Daniel Hiebert, whose family O’Neill had boarded with five years earlier when Hiebert was a medical student at Boston University and O’Neill was enrolled in his playwriting course at Harvard. Dr. Hiebert remembered handing Shane to O’Neill, who, according to Agnes, regarded the infant with “delighted admiration” before placing him on the bed beside her.

  O’Neill grasped her hand and gazed tenderly at his newborn, saying, according to Agnes, “A sort of Holy Trinity, eh Shane?” (Shane’s birth marked the end of Agnes’s memoir, which was to have been the first in a series of three volumes, never completed. Years later, during a hiatus in the acerbic divorce proceedings, O’Neill wrote to Agnes that he wanted to forget about “the poison and hate” of their marriage, and to preserve memories he never wanted “to shake off”; he said he’d had “a sudden clear vision of the day at the Happy Home when Shane was born, of my holding your hand, remember?”)

  • • •

  ELLA O’NEILL RESPONDED with motherly solicitude to O’Neill’s telegram announcing Shane’s birth: “I am one of the happiest old ladies in New York tonight to know I have such a wonderful grandson—but no more wonderful than you were when you were born and weighed eleven pounds and no nerves at that time!”

  Enclosing a photograph of O’Neill at three months old, Ella said she hoped Shane would be equally good-looking; she cautioned her son not to let Agnes “want for anything, for she is a darling girl.” With teasing affection, she ended her letter: “Oceans of love to Agnes, baby, and the biggest baby of the three You.”

  Although O’Neill seemed ready at this time to welcome his mother’s affection, his childhood resentment of her addictive behavior still festered; it would emerge most realistically some twenty years later in his autobiographical Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

  In that play, his mother’s stand-in, Mary Tyrone, does not lovingly tell her younger son that he was a nerveless wonder; rather, she reproves him for having been “born afraid” because she “was so afraid to bring [him] into the world.” She did not “have a single gray hair” until after his birth, when her beautiful long reddish-brown hair “began to turn white,” as she ruefully reminds her husband.

  Apparently, no amount of motherly love and attention during the final eight years of Ella’s life as a drug-free solicitous wife and mother could ever, in O’Neill’s mind, compensate for the terror evoked by her morphine-induced tantrums, accusations, and moody retreats as he was growing up.

  Nor could he forget the burden of helping his father and older brother to conceal his mother’s shameful addiction.

  “Dope fiend,” Jamie Tyrone calls his mother in Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

  O’Neill, even at fifty-three, simply could not let go of his resentment. The retrospective fury he felt toward his mother is reflected in an early scenario for the play; in a surprisingly vicious note, he described his mother (as Mary Tyrone), when under the influence of morphine, as changing from “happy chattering girlishness” to the hard, bitter cynicism of an aging woman, “who can taunt with a biting cruelty, as if suddenly poisoned by an alien demon.”

  But in October 1919, Eugene seemed proud of his fatherhood when he wrote to George Tyler, who had produced several of James O’Neill’s triumphant road tours and had
become a lifelong family friend. “The Event transpired yesterday, and most successfully,” said O’Neill. “A ten-and-a-half-pound boy who looks able to play football right now. His voice already carries further than the Old Man’s.”

  O’Neill’s jocular tone was forced; he was actually annoyed with Tyler. The producer had recently optioned Chris Christophersen, but was demanding numerous changes. And although Tyler had said he liked The Straw, he would not commit to producing it. Meanwhile, John Williams was still being evasive about an opening date for Beyond the Horizon.

  Added to these concerns was the impending production by the Provincetown Players of O’Neill’s recently completed one-act play, Exorcism (subtitled “A Play of Anti-Climax”), about which O’Neill had very mixed feelings.

  He’d written Exorcism in 1919 while in the grip of one of those deeply despondent moods that invariably drew his thoughts back to his attempted suicide seven years earlier. He believed he had temporarily purged himself and he put Exorcism aside. But it wasn’t long before Jimmy Light, who was operating the Provincetown Players in Jig Cook’s absence during the 1919–1920 season, begged O’Neill for a play, citing the dearth of worthwhile new work by American playwrights.

  O’Neill felt obligated to Light, who had always been his loyal champion; and so, hesitant as he was about the staging of a play so openly based on his 1912 suicide attempt, O’Neill handed over Exorcism for production on March 26, 1920.

  By setting the play in “the middle of March some years ago,” it’s fair to assume O’Neill was thinking of the spring of 1912, the same year as the setting for the two great autobiographical plays, Long Day’s Journey Into Night and The Iceman Cometh—the year he was twenty-three, a down-and-out drunk living in an upstairs cubicle at a Fulton Street saloon, Jimmy the Priest’s.

  The actual chain of events that led to O’Neill’s attempt at self-annihilation had its beginning on December 29, 1911, the day on which he’d agreed to provide Kathleen Jenkins with grounds for the divorce she’d requested. Since adultery was the only grounds for divorce in New York State at that time, O’Neill had to endure a sordid charade of being caught and photographed in bed with a prostitute.

  Disgusted with himself, he returned to Jimmy the Priest’s, where he’d been subsisting on his daily plate of free soup and his father’s weekly dole of seven dollars—enough to keep him in whiskey. A month later, on January 20, he was served with the divorce papers.

  Still consumed with self-loathing, and all but insensible with drink, he sought to escape from his tormenting thoughts by a digression uptown to Times Square. On his way, he stumbled on a five-dollar bill on the sidewalk, which prompted him to try his luck at Canfield’s, the renowned gambling casino on Forty-fourth Street. Fueled by free champagne, he found himself $200 ahead, but he grew so boisterous he was bounced, albeit with his winnings.

  He continued his drinking at a Broadway saloon, and the next thing he knew (as he later liked to tell friends), he was awaking in a train’s upper berth as it pulled into the station in New Orleans. To his surprise (so he claimed), he was greeted by a poster announcing the presence of his father in a condensed touring version of The Count of Monte Cristo. The production had opened in New Orleans on January 22.

  Eugene asked his father for the fare back to New York, but James told his prodigal son he’d have to earn it, and put him to work in a bit part in the bowdlerized melodrama, in which Jamie had a minor role as well. The production was “a horrible hash-up of the play, its general frightfulness reaching a high spot in the formidable lousiness of my acting,” O’Neill told a writer researching his father’s career many years later.

  In fact, during Eugene’s two months on the road, he and his brother did their utmost to sabotage the production, staggering onstage drunk during successive performances, goading each other to trip up their fellow actors, humiliating their father, and ultimately wrecking the tour. Hating himself, Eugene slunk back to Jimmy the Priest’s. And now, added to his disgust with himself over his shameful role in his divorce from Kathleen, he suffered over his atrocious behavior toward his father. He was, in his own words, “sick in body, brain and soul.”

  In mid-March, O’Neill determined to put an end to his unbearable burden of guilt. He went from pharmacy to pharmacy collecting veronal tablets, returned to Jimmy’s to swallow them, and fell asleep.

  His attempted suicide was thwarted when several of his drunken co-derelicts shook him awake and hustled him to Bellevue Hospital. At the admitting office, O’Neill was pronounced fit and dismissed while his rescuers were detained for alcoholic detoxification. O’Neill’s own later jocularity in recalling this episode suggests he was making a macabre gesture rather than a sincere attempt to kill himself. When he was in his fifties, he told the psychiatrist Dr. Louis Bisch, his neighbor and friend in Bermuda, that he had changed his mind about wanting to die after swallowing the veronal. One thing seems clear; the attempt was a gesture aimed largely at his father.

  Once again, the stalwart James O’Neill came to his son’s rescue. Forgiving him for having wrecked his vaudeville tour, he persuaded Eugene to return to New London that summer, where he arranged a job for him as a cub reporter on the New London Telegraph.

  The suicidal protagonist of Exorcism, who has the Irish surname Malloy, has the given name Ned, which is short for Edmund—the name O’Neill gave the character based on himself in Long Day’s Journey (switching names with his brother Edmund, who died of measles before Eugene was born).

  The Ned of Exorcism looks like Eugene. He is “a tall slender young fellow” of twenty-four, the same age and build as Eugene in 1912. While his eyes are blue rather than deep brown like O’Neill’s, they hold O’Neill’s “peculiar possessed expression of the inveterate dreamer” and his face gives the appearance of “conflict” and “inner disharmony.”

  Ned, like Eugene, swallows an overdose of sleeping pills and is rescued by the seedy fellow boarders who live in the “squalid rooming house” above a “saloon of the lowest type of grog shop.” When Ned awakens the following day, they tell him how they sought out his estranged father, who gave them fifty dollars to pay a doctor to come and pump his stomach. His father then visits and father and son are reconciled.

  Declaring himself “reborn,” his “sins forgiven,” Ned drinks with his rescuers, and is raucously singing the opening lyrics of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” as the curtain falls.

  O’Neill regretted the play’s production—at least in part because he didn’t want to hurt his ailing father’s Catholic sensibility; but he must also have rued its glib and patently false ending—and despite an enthusiastic review by Alexander Woollcott in the Times, he called in all the scripts of the twenty-three-page one-acter and destroyed them. Or so he thought.

  For almost sixty years after O’Neill’s death, scholars had to base their analysis of Exorcism on the scattered recollections of its cast members and on Woollcott’s considerably detailed review.

  Then, in the early spring of 2011, an intact script magically surfaced. It had been withheld by Agnes—along with other scripts and letters—when O’Neill sent his lawyer to collect the papers he’d left behind in Bermuda in 1928 while planning to leave her for Carlotta.

  Many years later, Agnes casually gave the script as a Christmas gift to a friend, the playwright and screenwriter Philip Yordan, whose widow discovered it among his papers after his death and sold it to Yale University’s Beinecke Library in May 2011.

  • • •

  BY THE END of November 1919, with three completed full-length plays still lacking producers, O’Neill’s nerves were screaming; he found himself helplessly bickering with Agnes, who was almost equally distraught, and she encouraged him to take a break. She suggested he visit his parents in New York and take the time to refurbish his meager wardrobe for his hoped-for future meetings with producers. She was breast-feeding Shane and would not accompany him, but they agr
eed he would return to Provincetown within a week.

  The plan suited O’Neill. Part of his tension was due to Prohibition’s anticipated effect on Provincetown. The Volstead Act was expected to take effect in January, only a few weeks away. Liquor stores and legitimate saloons were already shutting down. O’Neill was certain that if anyone had access to good bootleg whiskey, it would be his father, and he believed that once in New York he could look forward to a week of hearty drinking.

  He wrote to Agnes the moment he boarded the train carrying him to the Fall River steamship, which would land him in New York on the following day. He begged her to ignore his “bad moods” and “irresponsible tongue,” blaming them on his “leopard’s spots.”

  In that letter (and in the dozens he wrote to her on every subsequent separation), he spoke of his anguished dependence on her, deluging her with his pangs of “great emptiness,” his loneliness, his insatiable need for her love and companionship, his pledge that she was his heart and soul. Often, he ended with a ritual “Kiss Shane for me”; in this first letter, he insisted, “I do love him—‘in my fashion’” (a cynical reference to the Ernest Dowson poem “Cynara,” which O’Neill and his brother were fond of quoting).

  Impassioned as were these outpourings, they scarcely differed from those showered on previous lovers or, later, on Carlotta. By contrast, Agnes, in her somewhat less feverish replies, emerges as a more substantial and sympathetic woman than the self-portrait she inadvertently draws in her memoir. Replying to O’Neill’s affirmations of love, Agnes replied, “I’m glad you do need me—still. The feeling of emptiness you speak of nearly drove me crazy this afternoon—before I got your letter.”

  O’Neill snuggled into the domestic nest of his parents’ suite in the Prince George Hotel on December 3. James and Ella welcomed him with warmth and gentle humor and he gratefully submitted to their nurturing, content to banter with his father, and almost childishly acceptant of his mother’s fussing over him.