by Arthur Gelb
Immediately following the play’s premiere Broadway production at the Vanderbilt Theatre, O’Neill left for Provincetown with Agnes and Shane, not waiting for The Straw to open. He read from afar the respectful, if unenthusiastic reviews, and did not regret its closing after only twenty performances. But he did feel remorse for his cavalier treatment of George Tyler.
With distance, he saw that Tyler’s efforts on behalf of both The Straw and the earlier Chris Christophersen—however misguided—were largely motivated by the elderly producer’s sentimental friendship with James O’Neill. Eugene, recalling the times he’d been irritable with Tyler, had the grace to apologize for his behavior. Even so, Tyler, like Williams, never produced another O’Neill play.
• • •
DURING THE Christmas holidays of 1921, O’Neill briefly put aside his writing on The Hairy Ape to devote himself to his mother and brother, who were soon to leave for a six-month stay in California. Ella hoped to liquidate her husband’s West Coast real estate holdings, but she also was counting on the moderate California climate to alleviate the recent recurrence of her severe headaches. Optimistic about her health, she saw no reason to connect her headaches to the breast cancer from which she had suffered two and a half years earlier; at that time (March 28, 1919), she had undergone a mastectomy, after which her doctor told James, “We shall live in hopes that it may not recur.”
Still vigorous, Ella not only continued to dress in fashionable mourning black, but also had begun to wear more jewelry, including the large diamond brooch James had given her for an anniversary and that she’d previously considered too gaudy. She and Jamie had dutifully attended the premieres of O’Neill’s recent plays and she told Eugene she was sorry she would miss the opening of The Hairy Ape. She hoped the play would still be running when she returned; if she waited for a time when Eugene did not have a play opening, she quipped, she’d never be able to leave. It was on this playful note that she parted from her younger son. Neither had a glimmering—why would they?—that it was for the last time.
• • •
IN EARLY JANUARY, O’Neill wrote to Nathan with boyish enthusiasm about The Hairy Ape: “I believe you are going to be very much interested in this play, whatever your verdict may be.” Nathan was amused, aware that while O’Neill was always eager for his opinion, he never paid the least attention to it—unless it was favorable.
As it happened, Nathan did not like the play. O’Neill later mocked him to Richard Madden for having disliked both The Hairy Ape and the subsequent Desire Under the Elms; those two plays, said O’Neill, were “certainly two of my finest, while [Nathan] did like Gold and The Fountain (two of my worst).”
The final manuscript of The Hairy Ape was ready by the third week in January 1922. O’Neill had started it “with a mad rush,” as he’d written earlier to the critic Oliver Sayler. “Think I have got the swing of what I want to catch and, if I have, I ought to tear through it like a dose of salts.” It had taken O’Neill only a little more than six weeks to write it.
Even more daring than The Emperor Jones, the play was based on O’Neill’s experience in 1911 as an able-bodied seaman aboard the luxury liner S.S. Philadelphia. A coal stoker known to his shipmates only by his last name, Driscoll had earlier befriended O’Neill at the Manhattan sailors’ saloon, Jimmy the Priest’s. At O’Neill’s request, Driscoll permitted him a rare look into the fearsome life of the coal stoker.
Driscoll, as O’Neill later told an interviewer for the Times, “thought a whole lot of himself, was a determined individualist. He was very proud of his strength, his capacity for grueling work. It seemed to give him mental poise to be able to dominate the stokehole, do more work than any of his mates.”
O’Neill lost touch with Driscoll but, in 1915, while still living a derelict life at Jimmy the Priest’s, he heard of the coal stoker’s death at sea. Driscoll had committed suicide, as O’Neill learned, “by jumping off a liner in mid-ocean to the bewilderment of everyone who knew him, for there never lived a more self-assured, self-contented guy, seemingly.”
In an introduction to the play’s published version, O’Neill wondered “why Driscoll, proud of his animal superiority and in complete harmony with his limited conception of the universe, should kill himself.” That, wrote O’Neill, “provided the germ idea” for The Hairy Ape. Continuing to brood about the why of the suicide, O’Neill concluded it was Driscoll’s sense of “belonging” (to the human race) that had been shattered; that became the focus of the play: Yank Smith suddenly loses faith in his image of himself as all-powerful and integral to the ship’s momentum.
When interviewed by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, O’Neill told her the play was “unconscious autobiography,” explaining it was his own veiled attack on the hypocrisy of the social system. “He chose to write about the hairy stoker, victim of modern industry, a man far removed from [O’Neill] himself in actual circumstance,” reported Sergeant, “in order to voice through Yank that social rebellion and sense of buffeted frustration which was his philosophic message at the time.”
What destroys Yank’s animal superiority is an encounter with a snobbish first-class passenger, Mildred Douglas, who is taken by a ship’s officer on a slumming tour of the stokehold. Mildred is horrified by the appearance of the outsized, sweating, and coal-blackened Yank (a “giant of a man and absurdly strong,” as O’Neill described him). Calling him “a filthy beast” (translated by Yank’s jeering shipmates as a “hairy ape”), Mildred faints.
The play follows Yank, after his ship docks in New York, in a series of scenes expressing the coal stoker’s distorted sense of reality—scenes that track his unraveling as he makes a futile attempt to prove that he “belongs,” that he is as good as, if not better than, Mildred Douglas and her kind.
Blindsided by the indifference he encounters, he acts out disruptively and is arrested. Released from jail, he tries to regain his sense of himself by joining the International Workers of the World, but they, too, reject him. Finally forced to accept that he belongs nowhere, he commits suicide—not, like Driscoll, by leaping over the side of an ocean liner, but crushed in the arms of a gorilla in the zoo, whom he greets as “brother.” “Even him didn’t tink I belonged,” says the dying Yank in the gorilla’s cage. “Where do I fit in?”
“He slips in a heap on the floor and dies,” reads O’Neill’s stage direction. “The monkeys [in the adjoining cages] set up a chattering, whimpering wail. And, perhaps, The Hairy Ape at last belongs.”
The play, like The Emperor Jones, was consigned to the Provincetown Players because of its highly experimental nature, but O’Neill was counting on its eventual move to Broadway.
As was the case the year before, when The Straw and Anna Christie opened within a week of each other, O’Neill, as he wrote to Kenneth Macgowan, was again “about to have the ghastly joy of attending two sets of rehearsals at the same time.” The opening night curtains of The First Man and The Hairy Ape were scheduled to rise within five days of each other.
The First Man had found a producer-cum-leading-man in Augustin Duncan, brother of the storied Isadora, and he was to open the play at the Neighborhood Playhouse on March 4, while Ape was set for March 9 at the rechristened Playwrights’ Theatre, now the Provincetown Playhouse.
Once again, O’Neill decided to give his full attention to the stronger play. His instinct proved sound. The First Man closed after only twenty-seven performances.
The founders of the Provincetown Players, in their sixth year of operation, had lost much of their fervor by the time The Hairy Ape was ready to begin rehearsals in early February. Impatient with their amateurism, and bypassing Jig Cook, O’Neill asked Arthur Hopkins (the producer of Anna Christie) to help with the staging. Hopkins brought in Bobby Jones to design the sets.
For the crucial role of Yank, O’Neill wanted the Broadway actor Louis Wolheim, a burly ex–college football star whom O’Neill had spot
ted in a supporting role in the Barrymore brothers’ Broadway hit The Jest. But O’Neill didn’t have the nerve to approach Wolheim, fearing he would be insulted at being asked to play the ugly brute described in Ape. Instead, he asked Charles O’Brien Kennedy, who had also appeared in The Jest, to feel out Wolheim about the role, and Kennedy complied.
“Wollie,” said Kennedy, “would you play the homeliest so-and-so in the world if Gene O’Neill wrote him?” Wolheim, according to Kennedy, “roared his profane affirmative.” A triumphant O’Neill felt sure, as he wrote to Nathan, that the production “could be relied on to achieve results,” unlike the sort of “amateur affair” that marked too many of his earlier efforts.
Jig Cook was deeply offended. He couldn’t believe O’Neill’s assertion that he’d outgrown the Provincetown Players, or that he had decided to bypass those who had loyally supported him from the beginning.
Cook did not wait to see The Hairy Ape. Leaving the Provincetown Players to reorganize themselves as best they could under a temporary new leader, Jig departed with his wife, Susan, for what was to be a year’s sojourn in Greece.
16
Jamie O’Neill had grown ever dearer to his mother since his father’s death in the late summer of 1920. True to his vow, he had given up drink, and his mother had come to depend on him for all her small comforts.
Living together, traveling together, confiding daily in each other, the mother and son intimacy mimicked a married life; certainly this was the closest Jamie would ever be to having a wife. Perhaps for the first time in his adult life, Jamie was at peace with himself and the world; his younger brother was both grateful and proud. “He hasn’t had a drink in almost a year and a half now!” O’Neill bragged to a friend. “Fact, I swear to you! My mother got him to go on the wagon and stick—and he has stuck.”
Jamie and his mother arrived in California at the beginning of February 1922, planning to spend the next six months there. Jamie had never revisited his birthplace, but he had often heard the stories about how his father—then a hopeful leading man in various touring companies—had gone west to join a stock company in San Francisco, whose prospering theater district almost equaled New York’s. Audiences welcomed James and, overwhelmed by offers, he had decided to forgo touring for a spell. He stayed on in San Francisco for more than a year, affording Ella, pregnant with Jamie, a sense of stability during her pregnancy and Jamie’s infancy.
Now, these four decades later, mother and son settled into a furnished four-room apartment in a modest two-story house on Oxford Street in Los Angeles. The flat was not far from Glendale, the locale of one of James O’Neill’s holdings that Ella hoped to sell; she also intended to inspect a property that James had bought in San Francisco.
As soon as Ella and Jamie were settled, Ella renewed her friendship with her onetime New York hairdresser, Libbie Drummer, who had previously moved to Los Angeles. A few days later, Drummer noticed Ella’s mouth was somewhat twisted and that she was dragging one leg. Ella evidently had suffered a slight stroke. She initially refused medical help, believing the problem would cure itself. But at Drummer’s urging, she submitted to an examination and on February 9 the doctor confirmed she’d had a stroke.
Jamie was flung off balance. After frantically wiring Eugene, he turned to Drummer and an old friend, Marion Reed, for sympathy and support. Reed, who had played minor roles with Jamie during his slipshod stage career, was now a small-time movie actress.
From the evidence of Reed’s subsequent behavior, she was the sort of calculating wanton with whom Jamie, in the days when he was befogged by drink, had felt comfortable. Now, with his resolve to stay sober weakening, he began to lean on Reed. Along with the genuinely well-meaning Libbie Drummer, Reed opportunistically seized the chance to become intimately involved with Ella during her illness.
On February 16, less than two weeks after Ella’s arrival in California, she suffered a second stroke. This one immobilized her and left her barely able to speak. “All of her right side was dead from head to toe,” Drummer confided in a letter to a Mrs. Phillips, a mutual friend of hers and Ella O’Neill’s who lived on the East Coast.
It was too much for Jamie. His brief happy life as companion to the one woman he’d ever truly loved had come to an end. Dissolving into helplessness, he once again sought reassurance in the bottle.
Ella managed to convey to her son that she wished to make her will, and Jamie, guided by Marion Reed (who found him more manageable when drunk), engaged a lawyer and enlisted Libbie Drummer as a witness.
Drummer was distressed to find Reed had suddenly taken charge of Ella’s care and was “running everything.”
“She did not like it one bit that I was there, and let me see it,” Drummer later wrote to Mrs. Phillips, “but I stayed for a few hours as Mrs. O’Neill wished me to.”
Unable to write and her speech seriously compromised, Ella haltingly dictated the terms of her will to the lawyer. To Jamie, she bequeathed the property in California they’d come to sell. The remainder of her estate she left to her “beloved sons” to “share and share alike.” She named Marion Reed as the executor of her will, possibly at Jamie’s urging—or perhaps because, aware that Jamie was again drinking, she no longer cared about anything.
Drummer, writing to Mrs. Phillips, confided that Jamie was “very weak” and that “this Mrs. Reed had him over to her home day and night,” adding, “I did not like her and could see through her from the first moment I met her.”
Jamie, frantic, wired Eugene that their mother was terminally ill and asked him to come at once. Emotionally unable to confront another deathwatch, O’Neill resisted. He telegraphed back, citing his immersion in rehearsals for both The First Man and The Hairy Ape, stressing his dangerously frayed nerves. He could not leave New York, he insisted.
In response, Jamie berated his brother for invoking artistic temperament to justify his absence. Close to hysteria, Eugene drafted a pleading telegram:
NO QUESTION OF TEMPERAMENT. BE FAIR. SPECIALIST SAYS MEANS COMPLETE NERVOUS COLLAPSE IF UNDERTAKE TRIP PRESENT CONDITION. WOULD NOT HELP MOTHER OR YOU? ALSO YOU WIRE SHE IS UNCONSCIOUS, WILL NOT KNOW ME. O’Neill went on to offer HELP ANY POSSIBLE WAY, promising EVERYTHING I HAVE AT YOUR COMMAND. WIRE ME WHAT AND HOW. He also suggested that Jamie, AS A LAST RESORT, might want to consult a Dr. Ingham, the BEST MAN ON COAST. His own plans, O’Neill said, depended on his health: WOULD LEAVE IMMEDIATELY IF ABLE. YOU MUST ACCEPT TRUTH. I AM IN TERRIBLE SHAPE.
O’Neill had by now persuaded himself that it was unthinkable for him to abandon the production of The Hairy Ape, and to rush to Jamie’s support; his presence was crucial at the final rehearsals, for which he was doing most of the directing.
Ella died in her Los Angeles apartment on February 28, 1922. Her death certificate listed the cause as “cerebral thrombosis” (a blockage of blood flow through a vessel in the brain). As no autopsy was performed, the diagnosis was speculative. Her New London relatives, the Sheridans and the Brennans, were later told she’d had a brain tumor.
Jamie telegraphed Eugene that he was making arrangements to bring their mother’s body east for burial, but his messages became increasingly garbled. Libbie Drummer and her sister went to the O’Neill apartment the day after Ella’s death, where they were appalled to find a drunken Jamie being looked after by two of the nurses who had been attending his mother.
“His condition was dreadful,” Drummer later wrote indignantly to Mrs. Phillips. Jamie, she said, wanted to ship his mother’s casket home unaccompanied, because his friend Marion Reed wanted him to remain in California with her.
But Drummer asserted herself. “You are going back with your mother or I wire Eugene,” she told Jamie. She was subsequently informed by the funeral parlor director that Jamie had left it to him to make all the arrangements—not only to engage a New York undertaker to receive his mother’s body, but also to purchase a compartment for himself
on the train.
On the following day, Drummer learned from one of the nurses that Marion Reed had seen Jamie off at the station, and that he had packed ten bottles of whiskey in his luggage.
“I don’t know when I felt so bad for anyone as I did about Mrs. O’Neill,” wrote Drummer. “It was the saddest closing chapter of any story I have ever read.”
• • •
ON MARCH 4, 1922—the opening night of The First Man—O’Neill received the news he’d been dreading: the train carrying Jamie and their mother’s casket would arrive at Grand Central Terminal on the evening of March 9. It was the date on which The Hairy Ape was to open.
Reading the reviews of The First Man on March 6, O’Neill was too numb to react to the pummeling it received. Woollcott derided it as “prolix . . . clumsy of gait . . . at times rubbishy.”
Shaken by his mother’s death and his brother’s relapse into alcohol, O’Neill had three days to pull himself together before confronting—on March 9—both the arrival of his mother’s casket and the opening night of The Hairy Ape. He couldn’t do it.
If, as he’d insisted to Jamie, he’d been in “terrible shape” in late February, he was—by March 9—skidding toward the mental collapse he’d predicted. Agnes, much as she tried, was unable to console him. The news of his mother’s death, he later wrote to an old family friend, “came right on top of the strain of rehearsing two plays at once, just as they were about to open, and I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown anyway. Her body arrived the day the play opened.”
That evening, O’Neill dispatched Agnes to the Provincetown Playhouse, where she was to join Saxe Commins for the opening of The Hairy Ape. O’Neill stayed behind in their suite at the Hotel Netherland (later the Sherry-Netherland), into which he and Agnes had moved temporarily. He had asked William P. Connor, an old friend and theatrical associate of his father’s, to accompany him to the station to meet his mother’s funeral train and help him with whatever arrangements had to be made. That much is beyond doubt.