By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  His visit began with a shopping spree when his mother took him to her favorite Fifth Avenue store, Lord & Taylor, where their purchases included a tweed suit, an overcoat, and some shirts and collars; a few days later “under Mama’s guidance,” as he reported to Agnes, he bought a hat and shoes.

  Less successful than shopping with his mother was O’Neill’s first evening at home with his father; it was then he learned that the Volstead Act was taking its toll in New York as well as in Provincetown. His father had only “one-quarter of one bottle left of the treasure when I arrived,” he complained to Agnes, “and that is now gone, need I add?” He’d had only three drinks and he feared that was all he was likely to get during the rest of his stay, for James O’Neill was “at a loss where to get more!”

  There was nothing for him in a dry New York, he declared—although it did make him “happy to see Paw ’n’ Maw again” and he planned to spend the rest of his time in the city “right under their wing.”

  O’Neill’s drinking was becoming increasingly a cause of the friction between him and Agnes. She did not object to his occasional imbibing, but tried to rein him in when she thought it interfered with his writing. Although resentful, O’Neill would try to taper off. But during most of his marriage to Agnes, he found it impossible to control his binge drinking. And yet, during his stay in New York, he assured her he was being “a good, good boy.” He had no choice. “Believe me, Prohibition is very much of a fact.”

  Almost as adept as O’Neill at confessional pillow talk, Agnes now wrote to apologize for previously having misjudged him. In her “meanness,” said Agnes, she had charged O’Neill with petty misdeeds that she actually “knew were not true,” and asked his forgiveness.

  On his third night in New York, O’Neill paid a sentimental visit to the Hell Hole, where he tried but failed to get drunk on sherry with the rest of the barflies; at twenty cents a shot, it was the only alcohol available. “There was just enough kick in the wine to make everyone feel jovial and that’s all,” he reported to Agnes.

  Back in Provincetown by mid-December, O’Neill gingerly reacquainted himself with Shane, and then tried to settle down to writing. Gratified as he was that Tyler, in New York, had told him he was going ahead with Chris Christophersen (although proffering no date for its opening), what he really wanted was a production date for Beyond the Horizon; over and again, he cursed John Williams for dragging his feet.

  Williams’s most recent excuse was the acute shortage of Broadway theaters. As O’Neill was petulantly aware, it was Williams himself who was partly responsible for the shortage; once again bypassing Beyond the Horizon, Williams had launched a new play the week before Christmas called For the Defense, by the rising playwright Elmer Rice.

  But in one of those whimsical manifestations of theater magic, it was Rice’s overwrought courtroom drama that enabled Beyond the Horizon at last to reach Broadway.

  The popular star of For the Defense, Richard Bennett, was the angel who interceded on O’Neill’s behalf. Bennett (the father of Constance and Joan, who both grew up to be movie stars) had chanced to pull a dusty script of Beyond the Horizon from a cubbyhole during a visit to John Williams’s office and found himself surprisingly moved by the play. Growing bored at forty-seven with repetitive matinee-idol roles like the one he was currently playing, Bennett asked Williams to let him star as the tragic twenty-seven-year-old younger brother, Robert Mayo.

  When Williams explained his misgivings about presenting Beyond on Broadway, Bennett offered the producer a solution both for the current theater shortage and for the financial risk of staging a contemporary American tragedy.

  He suggested the play be presented as a series of “special matinees” at the Morosco Theatre, where For the Defense was now established; and that Williams recruit cast members from For the Defense (along with Bennett himself) to take on roles in Beyond. Williams genuinely did wish to give O’Neill’s play a hearing and since Bennett’s plan called for little financial risk—no more than an investment in some sketchy scenery—he agreed.

  Bennett’s own enthusiasm was contagious. He persuaded three members of For the Defense to appear with him in the O’Neill play, along with Edward Arnold and Helen MacKellar from another Broadway hit, The Storm. Arnold, not yet a movie star, agreed to portray the older brother, Andrew Mayo, and MacKellar, an upcoming ingenue, accepted the role of Ruth Atkins, the girl both brothers fancy. For these actors it was a commitment of faith and love. They had to rehearse their new roles in addition to performing nightly in their established vehicles, and give twelve performances a week rather than the usual eight.

  Williams notified O’Neill that Beyond would open in early February, and by now George Tyler had abruptly named a date in early March for the opening of Chris Christophersen—with the proviso that O’Neill remain in New York after the premiere of Beyond to prepare for the production of Chris. Meanwhile, Tyler had finally committed to The Straw, although an opening date for that play was still uncertain.

  O’Neill headed back to New York on January 11, anticipating the beginning of a new life. Since he would be away from Agnes for much longer this time, he wanted to leave her as comfortable as possible and, although he could barely afford it, he engaged a housekeeper-nursemaid. Fifine D’Orsay Clarke, the French-born widow of a Provincetown ship’s captain, was to evolve as a fixture in the O’Neill household as nanny, cook, and general manager.

  Emotionally connected as she was to the fate of Beyond the Horizon, Agnes was not happy at being left behind, unable to share in the play’s progress from script to stage. She and O’Neill would write to each other daily, aware their letters would sometimes cross. Telephoning long-distance was too expensive, but they would telegraph if either grew anxious.

  O’Neill again stayed with his parents at the Prince George Hotel while waiting to move into the single room of his own they’d reserved for him three floors below. After all his months of uncertainty, he was both exhilarated and dazed at finding himself caught up in three major productions of his long-orphaned plays.

  While O’Neill felt all three plays were being hastily slapped together, he was determined at least to be adequately recompensed. For a start, backed by his new agent, Richard Madden, he confronted John Williams and received a more favorable percentage of the expected profits from Beyond the Horizon than initially proffered. Reporting his small triumph to Agnes, he also informed her that the opening date for Beyond was set for February 3, following a single trial performance somewhere away from Broadway (which turned out to be Yonkers).

  The plan called for four introductory matinees, after which there would be several evening performances. The makeshift production, which had no formal director, had already begun rehearsals a week before O’Neill’s arrival, under the supervision of Williams and Richard Bennett. At the same time, Tyler was casting Chris Christophersen and had offered the eponymous leading role to the eminent British actor Godfrey Tearle; Tyler was also thinking of casting the promising nineteen-year-old Helen Hayes as the doomed heroine in The Straw.

  Agnes, having long since overcome her indifference to the theater, was now as much caught up in O’Neill’s creative life as Carlotta would be eight years later. She thrived on her husband’s gossipy letters; Beyond, she wrote him, “is nearer to me, somehow, than anything you have done.” Wistfully, she told him, “I get a great deal of pleasure and excitement myself out of imagining you at all your interviews and appointments.”

  O’Neill’s own exuberance was diminished by the precarious physical condition in which he found his father, who was still weak and in pain from the shock of the recent car accident. His family doctor, John Aspell, also thought he’d suffered a slight stroke. Ella told her son she’d been so worried she’d thought of summoning a priest, but Dr. Aspell had managed to pull him through.

  While concerned about his father, O’Neill took advantage of Dr. Aspell’s presence to consu
lt him about symptoms of his own. As was invariable during times of stress, he was suffering from “nerves” due to the demands of readying two plays for production at the same time with a third in the offing. The doctor pronounced him “keyed up tight as a string” and warned him he would “snap” if he didn’t slow down; he advised O’Neill to forget his work and to rest.

  “Good advice, maybe,” wailed O’Neill to Agnes, “but how the hell can I keep it at this stage of the game?” Citing the long hours he was devoting to Beyond and Chris, he reverted to tongue-in-cheek brogue: “It’s a hectic life, divil a lie, and how I’m to keep both the plays separate in my mind and think clearly about each of them is a problem.” Immediately contradicting himself, he added, “However, I feel so keyed up I could work 24 hours a day without eating, I think.”

  He could not, however, go for long without drinking. His father, meanwhile, had found a source of bootleg whiskey, and O’Neill soon grew accustomed to joining him for drinks in the evening—never enough to get drunk, as he assured Agnes.

  And now he was about to luck out. He’d made an appointment with Richard Bennett to go over the script of Beyond, and after the curtain rang down on For the Defense at 11:30 p.m. on January 16, Bennett carried O’Neill off to his elegant town house in Greenwich Village. Before beginning their work, Bennett asked O’Neill if he liked absinthe; he just happened to have fifty cases of Pernod on hand.

  “Jack Barrymore and I are the only people in the country who have any,” he bragged, reminding O’Neill—unnecessarily—that Pernod, the most popular brand of absinthe, had been banned from the United States in 1915 because it was believed to have toxic effects.

  O’Neill suggested he bring it on. “I knew I was going to like you from the first moment we met,” he told Bennett.

  Pouring the Pernod over ice in tall glasses, Bennett proceeded to read the script aloud, line by line, as he and O’Neill sipped a glass for each of the play’s three acts. “If we hadn’t had it we couldn’t have kept awake,” O’Neill confided to Agnes. “Do you know what time the work was finished? 7:30 a.m.! We were both dead.” When he returned to his hotel, his brain “was full of subtle fireworks from the queer poison of absinthe,” but, relieved that the Beyond script was now in satisfactory shape, he went to bed and slept all day.

  Drink was again on his mind when he awakened. He was looking forward to what he called a “John Barleycorn party” to be held at the Playwrights’ Theatre later that night. O’Neill assured Agnes he was not planning to participate in “any orgy” at the party, and said not to worry about his making a fool of himself. “I’m a wise guy—when I know it’s necessary. But it would be silly for me not to drink. Everyone I’m associated with does—Tyler, Williams, Bennett . . . and they’d simply think me a prig if I didn’t.”

  Well, the wise guy, finding himself ill at ease at the party, got drunk, first at the theater, and even drunker later when he went to the Hell Hole. He got so drunk that he ended up sleeping in one of the saloon’s unheated upstairs rooms, on a bare mattress, and inadequately covered by his recently purchased expensive overcoat.

  O’Neill confessed all this in his next letter to Agnes, along with the news that rehearsals for Chris Christophersen were to begin on the following Monday (January 26), for an opening in Atlantic City the first week in March.

  Agnes lectured him severely about “the shape you get into after much drinking!” She conceded that a few drinks a day might help him to keep going, “But once you’d had a lot, and your brain is lit up with alcohol, you’ve got to keep on having a lot, or feel wretched—unless you’ve changed.” She felt “surprised and hurt and depressed” that he should deliberately put himself “in the way of this happening.”

  O’Neill’s response was swift and angry. “No more lecture letters, please! You never used to be a moralist, and I’ve never in my life stood for that stuff, even from my Mother.” His “ethics of life,” he said, forbade “even Christ or Buddha” from telling “the lowest slave what he should do,” because that slave “has something actuating him that they can never understand.”

  Although Agnes apologized three days later, O’Neill continued to stew. “Your letter was gall when I prayed for wine,” he wrote her. “You always have kicked me when I was down—do you realize that?—you did not mean to, of course, but you always have.”

  • • •

  BY JANUARY 22, O’Neill had a severe cold and had been warned by Dr. Aspell not to go outdoors. The influenza epidemic, intermittently raging since the beginning of 1918, was resurgent. (By the end of 1920, it would have killed somewhere between fifty and one hundred million people globally.) As neither Tyler nor Bennett was ready to work with him, O’Neill was content to stay put at the Prince George. But with too much time to brood, pessimism overwhelmed him.

  He was sick of Beyond the Horizon, he told Agnes, and was certain it would fail. He wished he didn’t have to attend any rehearsals, and he would certainly not attend a performance, for he doubted that any actor could ever fulfill his ideal of the character he’d created. But five days later O’Neill attended his first rehearsal of what he now labeled “the massacre.” While the cast all had “the possibilities of being very good,” he glumly wrote Agnes, “they all just miss it.” The characters didn’t “seem to hang together.”

  “They all appealed to me to dope out for them the real meaning of what they were trying to do. I tried my best, and I’m no director, God knows, and whether my talking will result in any improvement I don’t know.”

  O’Neill’s second day of rehearsals restored him to optimism. His report to Agnes, in fact, was buoyant: “For two days now I have occupied that position so unattainable to most playwrights—the only man in the auditorium, director of my own play! And I don’t think I’ve made such a fizzle of it either! They all showed a noticeable improvement today, and also a marked improvement in their respect for me.”

  At the end of each scene, he went on, “Bennett calls ‘Suggestions!’ and every member of the cast who has been in that scene lines up at the foot lights while I—a lone figure in a vast auditorium—go from one to one, praising or panning, and not excepting Bennett himself.”

  Agnes responded with delight, but then grew thoughtful about their future. “Sometimes,” she wrote, “I have a dreadful feeling that when the inevitable success does come there will be something to spoil it all for us.”

  By the time Beyond had its tryout in Yonkers on February 2, O’Neill was again disgusted with the production—as well as with the play itself. “It all seemed false and rotten and I wondered why the devil I’d ever written it,” he told Agnes. “The sets for the outdoor scenes especially get my goat. To my eye they are the last word in everything they shouldn’t be.”

  O’Neill’s parents arrived early at the Morosco for the 2:15 matinee opening—James supporting himself with the cane he’d needed since his automobile accident—and were seated in the box their son had reserved. O’Neill himself was a reluctant member of the audience; Williams had insisted he sit beside him in the orchestra.

  The curtain rose on the badly painted, murkily lighted set meant to represent O’Neill’s lyrically described section of a country highway, “the horizon hills . . . rimmed by a faint line of flame, and the sky above them glows with the crimson flush of the sunset.”

  While the grim tale of the two brothers unfolded, O’Neill covertly watched as his father, in his box, “wept his eyes out.” However, the rest of the audience—which included a large number of Provincetown Players—seemed to O’Neill unmoved. He squirmed throughout the play’s three acts, embarrassed by the long waits between scenes. It was “hell,” he reported to Agnes the following day.

  When the performance ended a few minutes before six, he was greeted by his departing father, who beamed at him through teary eyes.

  “It’s all right, if that’s what you want to do,” said James O’Neill, “but
people come to the theater to forget their troubles, not to be reminded of them. What are you trying to do—send them home to commit suicide?”

  Recalling the episode years later, O’Neill said he was not surprised by his father’s reaction, as Beyond was not “the sort of thing he could like. . . . All the same, I think he was pleased.” O’Neill himself slouched from the Morosco, convinced that his play was “a flivver” artistically and “every other way.”

  Most of New York’s first-string critics attended the opening despite the early curtain and the fact that they would shortly be reviewing an evening performance of a Georges Feydeau farce, Breakfast in Bed. That season, they’d already scribbled their opinions of thirty musicals and revues, sixty comedies and melodramas, and six farces. They had seen little to stir them: some Shakespeare in repertory, a couple of adapted European tragedies, a fantasy or two.

  Certainly they had not been challenged to appraise “An American Tragedy,” which was how John Williams had decided to bill Beyond the Horizon. But several of the more intellectually curious critics, including The New York Times’s Alexander Woollcott and the New York Tribune’s Heywood Broun, knew O’Neill’s work from regularly attending the Provincetown Players’ productions, and they expected something out of the ordinary.

  To O’Neill’s astonishment, all the critics praised his play. “I felt sure when I saw the woebegone faces on opening day that it was a rank failure,” he said in an interview two and a half weeks later. “No one was more surprised than was I when I saw the morning papers and came to the conclusion that the sad expressions on the playgoers’ faces were caused by their feeling the tragedy I had written.”

  A number of critics recognized that an event of magnitude had occurred in the American theater. Alexander Woollcott (who, twenty years later, would scorn Strange Interlude) described Beyond the Horizon as “an absorbing, significant and memorable tragedy, so full of meat that it makes most of the remaining fare seem like the merest meringue.”