By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  Learning of O’Neill’s difficult teeth, he saw his chance to grow closer to a member of that community, and offered not only to fix the teeth without payment, but also insisted O’Neill lodge with his sister Stella’s family during the two weeks it would take to do the job.

  O’Neill left Cape Cod for Rochester by train on April 21. After his first session in the dentist’s chair (and apparently forgetting his recent disparagement of married love in his still unproduced The First Man), he moaned to Agnes, whom he once again addressed as “Own little wife”: “I want to lay my head on your breast for comfort, as always when in trouble or pain.”

  Agnes (who remembered all too well how O’Neill had dispatched the wife in The First Man) responded coolly to her husband’s effusion. She said she missed him, but her reply was more a merry amalgam of gossip and playful affection than the pining love letter O’Neill expected. He was upset. In his next letter, after graphically describing the “torture session” of a tooth-pulling, he wrote to her self-pityingly:

  “I hate to make ill wishes about you, but I sure hope you are feeling as unhappily lost without me as I am without you. I have a poignant pain of emptiness inside.”

  Agnes felt sorry for her husband after receiving an extravagant ($5.50) telephone call from him two days later—although the line was bad and she had to shout to make herself heard. “Good night my own dearest thing, I love you so—and miss you so,” she wrote in her next letter.

  • • •

  AFTER O’NEILL’S DENTAL torment ended on May 5, he and Agnes went together to New York to attend rehearsals of Gold (the four-act expansion of Where the Cross Is Made); this time they left one-and-a-half-year-old Shane in Gaga’s care.

  Producer John Williams, perhaps expecting another success like his hastily thrown-together Beyond the Horizon, had agreed to present the play on Broadway after Nathan sent the script to him with his high recommendation. But O’Neill saw from the first rehearsal that Williams was making a mess of it. He got drunk and fled to Provincetown after a week, leaving Agnes behind as his surrogate. Agnes, however, was unable to stand up to Williams, who was himself drinking heavily and seemed indifferent to the shoddiness of his production; it all served only to underline the play’s intrinsic shortcomings.

  Gold opened on June 1, 1921, at the Frazee Theatre. The reviews were blunt, particularly their headlines: “Shows O’Neill Below His Best”; “O’Neill’s Gold Not Glittering”; and “Gold Tells a Weird Tale.” In the Tribune, Broun, who praised the fourth act (which he remembered having seen as Where the Cross Is Made), scolded Williams for a “cheap and tasteless setting.”

  Gold closed after thirteen performances. Some years later, O’Neill told the critic Ward Morehouse that if he “could go back,” he’d “destroy” that play, claiming it had been too hastily written. John Williams would never produce another O’Neill play.

  Agnes and O’Neill, reunited in Peaked Hill Bars, anticipated a hectic summer and fall, as both Anna Christie and The Straw were being readied for November. O’Neill had been unable to persuade George Tyler, to whom both plays were promised, to produce Anna Christie first. Himself more interested in Anna, O’Neill took it instead to the visionary producer Arthur Hopkins, who agreed to mount it on Broadway.

  O’Neill invited Robert Edmond Jones, whom Hopkins engaged to design the sets, to be his guest at Peaked Hill Bars during July. O’Neill knew Jones (“Bobby” to his friends) from his early association with the Provincetown Players in 1916. Since then, Jones had gained a reputation as the most imaginative stage designer in America.

  O’Neill thought Jones might like to absorb atmosphere for Anna Christie, three of whose four acts were set aboard a battered coal barge. It so happened that just such a barge recently had been cast ashore and abandoned a hundred yards from the O’Neill house. Stuck there, its giant hulk imbedded in the sand, it could not be budged.

  No sooner had Jones finished sketching the barge than it mystifyingly burst into flames, and for two days firemen had to drench the O’Neill house to prevent its catching fire. It was an omen for the uneasy weeks to come.

  Like the rest of the country, Provincetown was caught up in the postwar frenzy of jazz, the automobile, and bathtub gin. O’Neill, Agnes, and their friends had become smarter about circumventing the restrictions of Prohibition and they were drinking more than ever—in part, just for the illicit excitement of it. Provincetown’s parties grew wilder.

  The artist Eben Given recalled an evening that began ominously at a pre-party for a costume ball at Town Hall. O’Neill, already half-drunk, grotesquely attired in a sarong and a wild orange wig, arrived separately from Agnes. O’Neill recognized the black lace mantilla she was wearing as a gift to her from his mother, and he tore it from her head. After a boozy reconciliation, they proceeded together to the ball. It was four in the morning when Agnes, Given, and a few others left the ball, but O’Neill had vanished.

  “We walked down the street to my car,” Given said, “when suddenly, from the depths of the car, something with insane blazing eyes, a mad leer, and an orange wig popped up. It was Gene, of course, very drunk.”

  O’Neill and Agnes had rented a room in town for the night, but O’Neill suddenly chose to return to Peaked Hill Bars. Agnes protested. “That was when,” according to Given, “he grabbed her by the hair and tried to drag her off. She yelled, but no one interfered.”

  • • •

  FRIENDS TENDED TO shrug off these public confrontations, which invariably were spurred by O’Neill’s drinking and bolstered by Agnes’s. It was all too manifest that Miss P. and the Nightingale savored their violent battles with as much zest as they embraced their torrid rapprochements.

  And so their marriage lurched along.

  15

  Agnes, in need of a vacation, was unperturbed at parting from her husband in early August 1921. This time she left Shane behind, along with their two dogs and a recently adopted black female cat that had strayed out to Peaked Hill Bars. O’Neill named the cat Anna Christie, regarding her as an omen of hope for his play.

  Agnes’s long-planned solo jaunt of two and a half weeks was intended as half holiday, half business; her primary mission was to find an apartment in New York. She and O’Neill had decided they should be together while he was juggling rehearsals in October for both Anna Christie and The Straw.

  After seeing Agnes off on the evening of August 7, O’Neill at once began to suffer from his predictable “pangs of loneliness.” The house, he wrote to Agnes, seemed empty without her. Regretting their recent hostilities, he gave her carte blanche to choose any apartment that suited her.

  “Your happiness means mine,” he assured her. In a subsequent letter he attempted to portray himself as a caring father, writing of a frolic in the ocean with Shane, who “performed no end of antics and extemporized dances in honor of the sun and sea.”

  After posting three more loving letters and receiving only a postcard in reply, O’Neill tried a provocative ploy, describing a visit to Peaked Hill Bars from “two beautiful young ladies”; one of them, the local bank president’s daughter, he wrote, “popped into the studio by mistake this noon and caught me stark naked.” He said she shrieked and fled.

  “It must have made quite a moment in her 17-year-old life.” Her companion, he said, brought him a box of fudge. “They are nice girls and it’s rather refreshing—the chatter of youth about the place—when one is lonely.”

  O’Neill’s loneliness was mitigated by his work on The Fountain, loosely based on the escapades of Juan Ponce de León, which he’d begun writing in 1921 while still grieving for his father. (O’Neill’s sentimental and romanticized attachment to his deceased father was a striking contrast to his continuing lack of affection for his still-living mother.)

  Eugene evidently saw parallels between James O’Neill’s life and Ponce de León’s. Like the Spanish adventurer who left his country
for a dream of glory and romance in the New World, James had left Ireland as a child and grown up hungering for glory and romance in his New World.

  The Fountain reflects O’Neill’s intense and unending need to resurrect his father; it is O’Neill’s first symbolic portrait of James O’Neill as a valorous but ultimately defeated man. Like James, the play’s protagonist, de León, finds neither glory nor romance (let alone the fountain of youth).

  De León, in the play, dies broken, clinging to the religious belief that “death is no more” and that “all things dissolve, flow on eternally!” Here are poignant reverberations of James O’Neill’s deathbed avowal that he was journeying to “a better sort of life—another sort—somewhere.”

  O’Neill would continue to evoke his father as a self-perceived failure in plays to come, portraying him in numerous disguises: as the failed black lawyer, Jim Harris, in All God’s Chillun Got Wings; the thwarted farmer, Ephraim Cabot, in Desire Under the Elms; the betrayed war hero, Ezra Mannon, in Mourning Becomes Electra; the tragic poseur, Cornelius Melody, in A Touch of the Poet; and—in his thinly veiled final reincarnation—as the actor James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a man coping gamely with what life has dealt him.

  Agnes at last sent her husband a letter apologizing for her failure to write sooner. She told him of her brief visit with Ella and Jamie in New London, and then bemoaned an abscess in her arm that was causing her severe pain.

  “The cricket has left our hearth—honest!” O’Neill responded a day later. “He won’t come back until you do. He knows there is no home without you.”

  “You know,” Agnes wrote back, “that beneath it all, we do deeply, and eternally love one another—so let’s forget and forgive the silly bickering . . . and start again.”

  “Come home and bring my life back!” answered O’Neill. “These days crawl sufferingly like futile purgatories.”

  Agnes, in constant pain from her abscess, told O’Neill she’d finally had to “go and pay $15 to get my arm operated on . . . it nearly killed me—I wept—but I’m glad, as for the first time in two weeks I’ve been without pain.”

  In New York, Agnes found a sublease apartment on West Thirty-fifth Street that she thought they could afford if they shared the space with Bobby Jones. He agreed to occupy a bedroom with a separate entrance, paying rent of seventy dollars a month, while the O’Neills would pay one hundred for their larger quarters. In early October, O’Neill, Agnes, and Shane moved in.

  George Tyler finally had contrived to put The Straw into production for a November 10 opening, and with the premiere of Anna Christie scheduled by Arthur Hopkins for November 2, O’Neill would have two plays opening within eight days of each other. He was not happy about having to hop back and forth from the Vanderbilt Theatre on Forty-eighth Street near Broadway, where Anna Christie was in rehearsal, to the Greenwich Village Theatre between West Fourth and Christopher Streets for rehearsals of The Straw.

  He soon lost interest in The Straw, as was evident to Tyler as well as to Margalo Gillmore, cast as the lovelorn and moribund Eileen Carmody. Gillmore, who had by now replaced the otherwise-engaged Helen Hayes, remembered O’Neill seated in the front row during rehearsals, looking glum. “I don’t think he spoke to any member of the cast,” she said, “but I do recall his dramatic brooding face.”

  O’Neill was far more interested in Pauline Lord, whom Hopkins had engaged to play Anna Christie. She looked nothing like O’Neill’s eponymous twenty-year-old heroine—“tall, blonde . . . handsome after a large, Viking daughter fashion.” Lord was delicate, almost fragile, with a tiny waist, small hands and feet, a pale oval face, and tragic brown eyes. Her technique was once described by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant as “betrayal, rather than portrayal.” She was on the cusp of stardom and O’Neill was delighted with her.

  He also liked Hopkins who, in his own way, was as much of an idealist as O’Neill himself. Unlike Tyler, the old-school pragmatist, Hopkins deplored the Broadway theater’s “ceaseless repetition of a familiar and timeworn formula,” branding it as “a bag of tricks which anyone with skill can play and assure himself a certain amount of success.” There was no longer any excitement in the experience of playgoing, Hopkins asserted. He wanted audiences to leave his productions in heated discussion or even quarreling about the author’s intent. He was to have his wish with Anna Christie. O’Neill’s faith in Hopkins cooled somewhat as opening night approached—much as had been the case with John Williams and Beyond the Horizon. By the final run-through, O’Neill—harboring as always misgivings about his play’s reception—was convinced Hopkins’s staging was off-kilter.

  True to form, O’Neill did not attend the opening on November 2, sending Agnes in his place. He had reluctantly agreed to let her host a post-performance party at their apartment. Apprehensive as he awaited word of the audience’s reaction, O’Neill was disturbed by a telegram from a friend in Provincetown, reporting that his cat, Anna Christie, was dangerously ill. Superstitiously convinced the fate of his play was wedded to the fate of the cat, he beseeched his friend by return wire to seek immediate medical help for the cat. Growing ever more agitated, he began to drink.

  When Agnes showed up with a radiant report of the audience’s reaction, O’Neill, already half-drunk, was unconvinced. He panicked as his guests began arriving, among them Pauline Lord and other members of the cast, as well as friends from the Provincetown Players, including Charles O’Brien Kennedy, a Broadway actor much loved by his colleagues, who had known O’Neill’s father and, the year before, had helped with the staging of Diff’rent.

  Kennedy managed to shepherd O’Neill (and a bottle) into an unused bathroom, where they locked themselves in. They sat on the edge of the bathtub drinking while O’Neill told Kennedy the plot of a new play he was calling The Hairy Ape.

  The next morning’s reviews were uniformly favorable, although several critics quibbled about the “talkiness” of the second act and the “contrived” fourth act. Woollcott, who opined that Anna Christie did not rank among O’Neill’s best, nonetheless labeled it “rich and salty,” calling it “a play written with that abundant imagination, that fresh and venturesome mind and that sure instinct for the theater which set this young author apart . . . from a lot of funny little holiday workers in cardboard and tinsel.”

  On the Tribune, Broun had been succeeded by Percy Hammond, soon to become O’Neill’s pet hate among the critics, and who would be characterized by him as a bigoted egomaniac eaten by ulcers. Hammond began his cumbersome (if favorable) review, “If the gloomy trademark of Eugene O’Neill’s depressing product has kept you hitherto away from his plays, disregard it for an hour or so and go to see Anna Christie.”

  As the play gained popularity, newspapers throughout the country published articles about its controversial ending. The critic John Mason Brown, a consistent O’Neill booster, praised Anna Christie but remarked that “the happy ending” worried him.

  Not even the ever-supportive Kenneth Macgowan, writing in the Globe, got it quite right: “You may call it the happy ending if you like,” wrote Macgowan. “It is the acceptance of suffering and happiness lived out into a new life.”

  Lashing out at the critics, O’Neill growled to friends, “I love every bone in their heads.” He denied his ending was happy; rather, he argued, it was equivocal. Mat Burke would probably keep on shipping out to sea, just like Anna’s father, and Anna would live a life every bit as frustrating and lonely as her mother’s. O’Neill believed he had diluted the happiness of the ending by conveying a sense of foreboding:

  “And the sea outside—life—waits,” he explained to Nathan. “The happy ending is merely the comma at the end of a gaudy introductory clause, with the body of the sentence still unwritten. (In fact, I once thought of calling the play ‘Comma’).”

  O’Neill continued to rebut those who presumed to accuse him of espousing happiness. To a sympathetic old friend
who was interviewing him for an article, he loftily defended his raison d’être. He would write about happiness, he said, if ever he happened “to meet up with that luxury” and found it “sufficiently dramatic and in harmony with any deep rhythm of life.”

  It was ill-judged, he pronounced, “to think of tragedy as unhappy.” The Greeks and Elizabethans, who knew better, “saw their lives ennobled” by tragedy. Then, waxing aphoristic, he explicated his all-consuming dedication to his craft: “A work of art is always happy; all else is unhappy.”

  O’Neill had learned his lesson. Never again would he equivocate; every play he would write from then on—with the exception of his one unambiguous comedy, the nostalgic Ah, Wilderness!—would end in stark, explicit tragedy.

  Despite (or perhaps because of) its disputed ending, Anna Christie ran for 177 performances and won for O’Neill a second Pulitzer Prize. It was made into a silent movie in 1924 with Blanche Sweet, and a talkie in 1929 with Greta Garbo—(Garbo Speaks!)—and while it did not make O’Neill rich, it made his name popularly known—as Beyond the Horizon and even The Emperor Jones had not.

  For a time, O’Neill continued to defend his ending, but eventually he was soured on Anna Christie. In one of the sharp—and unapologetic—reversals of which he was capable, he spoke slightingly of the play he’d once considered among his finest.

  “In telling the story I deliberately employed all the Broadway tricks I had learned in my stage training,” he confessed to the writer Malcolm Cowley. And when the eminent critic Joseph Wood Krutch asked him if he might edit a volume of O’Neill’s “representative plays,” he said he might, with the proviso that Anna Christie not be one of them. (What, one wonders, would O’Neill have made of the continuing fascination with Anna Christie, culminating in the 1993 smash hit New York revival starring Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson?)