By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  There are two versions of what happened next. The first derives from a memorandum Saxe Commins wrote many years later, describing the events of the evening The Hairy Ape opened; the memo was found among his papers after his death; segments were included in the book of letters to and from O’Neill edited by Commins’s wife, Dorothy Berliner Commins.

  In the memorandum, Commins told of how the audience at The Hairy Ape stood and cheered when the curtain fell, calling (in vain) for the author. Commins and Agnes, “all too aware,” as he put it, “of the pathetic errand” on which they believed O’Neill had been engaged, hurried back to the hotel and called him from the lobby.

  O’Neill was so distraught when he joined Commins and Agnes in the hotel lobby that he seemed unable to absorb their effusive report of the play’s reception. “It was shocking to see the ashen color of his skin under the usual sunburnt bronze,” Commins wrote, adding that O’Neill’s words sounded “as if they scraped past a rough lump in his throat.”

  Commins attributed O’Neill’s symptoms to the ordeal of his earlier “gruesome search in the dark cellars of Grand Central Station” for his mother’s casket.

  Dorothy Commins did not include her husband’s graphic description of how O’Neill, after “groping for almost an hour through the subterranean maze,” found his mother’s casket and arranged for its disposition, after which he roused a semi-comatose Jamie in his train compartment and brought him back to the Hotel Netherland in a taxi, where “he promptly passed out on Gene’s bed.”

  According to the second version of the evening’s events, O’Neill never went to the train terminal at all. In this version, which surfaced after Commins’s death in 1958, O’Neill, after having asked William Connor to accompany him to Grand Central, changed his mind.

  At the last moment—after seeing Agnes off to the theater—O’Neill telephoned Connor to say he could not face going to Grand Central Terminal. This was the recollection of Connor’s nephew, Frank W. Wilder, who maintained it was he who accompanied his uncle to Grand Central in O’Neill’s stead.

  At the terminal, according to Wilder, he and his uncle found Jamie in a drunken stupor, and had to locate Ella’s coffin without his help. They arranged to have the coffin sent to a funeral parlor and then took Jamie to an unspecified hotel, after which Connor telephoned O’Neill at the Netherland to give him a terse report and scold him for his dereliction.

  Dorothy Commins eventually accepted Frank Wilder’s version and, after including her husband’s version in her book (in abbreviated form), appended a footnote stating “though Agnes and Saxe never knew it, O’Neill had not gone to the railway station.” In other words, Dorothy was saying that O’Neill, doubtless ashamed of his own nonperformance, lied to Saxe and Agnes. (O’Neill could have based his account to Saxe and Agnes on details told to him by Connor during their telephone conversation.)

  The question is, where was O’Neill and what could he have been thinking during the time between sending Agnes off to meet Commins for the opening of The Hairy Ape, and their return together to the hotel two hours later?

  It’s a good guess that O’Neill had tried and failed to steel himself to confront his mother’s casket—let alone a drunken Jamie. Doubtless fortifying himself with drink, he simply waited in his hotel suite for the next thrust of the knife.

  • • •

  WHEN SAXE AND AGNES returned to the Netherland, a barely articulate O’Neill asked Agnes to wait for him in their suite; he needed to walk with Saxe in Central Park, he said.

  As the two men circled the reservoir, Commins remembered, he held O’Neill’s arm and felt “the tremor that shook through his coat sleeve.” O’Neill wished only to speak of his mother.

  “Several times I mentioned the damp air and suggested that we return to the hotel. His answer each time was, ‘Stay with me.’”

  Commins listened in awed silence as O’Neill spoke of the pain that his mother’s years as a morphine addict had caused their father, Jamie, and himself, and how their love and guilt had shaped and driven the family. Commins understood that his friend was assailed by pangs of mingled reproach and pity; while O’Neill blamed his mother for his childhood wounds, he couldn’t brush aside the times when she was tender and loving.

  Commins was all but overcome by O’Neill’s tormented memories of his mother’s life and their devastating effect on him. As they walked, O’Neill rambled on, a man in a trance evoking his mother’s past.

  • • •

  FOR YEARS, young Gene had listened to his mother’s tales of personal distress and regret.

  Poignant among her oft-repeated recollections was the story of her introduction, as a new bride, to the rigors of a touring actor’s life; she was aghast to find herself engulfed in a rough theatrical milieu that took all her courage to counter.

  At twenty, Ella Quinlan had been gently raised by an adoring, generous father in a sheltered environment (which, later, she often reproachfully contrasted with her rootless married existence). She fondly remembered her convent-school years at St. Mary’s Academy in South Bend, Indiana, close by Notre Dame; there, among the teaching nuns she loved, she had developed her musical gift and become an adept pianist.

  Her long-held dream to be a nun was soon superseded by the vision of becoming a concert pianist, encouraged by her doting father. She had lost heart when he died at forty-one in 1874, when Ella was seventeen. She was still mourning her loss three years later when James O’Neill proposed marriage in 1877. Forgetting her aspiration to a musical career and at last releasing herself from mourning, Ella was swept into a romantic dream life as the courted darling of a handsome thirty-one-year-old matinee idol, whose sole object was to please and cosset her.

  It took James the better part of a year to win the consent of Ella’s widowed mother; Bridget Quinlan had a pretty good understanding of what an actor’s life was like, and she feared for her daughter’s happiness and comfort. But Ella, though shy and reserved, was also stubborn, and James was persistent. On June 14, 1877, they married.

  After a brief honeymoon, James resumed the touring that was to last another forty years, and Ella had her first taste of the seething and alien life she was to endure. Being married to a touring actor in the 1870s and ’80s required a willingness to embrace the often rowdy aspects of backstage life, an easy camaraderie with the actor’s fellow troupers, and a stoical acceptance of unventilated trains, shabby hotel rooms, unappetizing and hastily swallowed meals, and the prevalence of whiskey.

  Ella tried to summon and convey empathy, but the managers, agents, and actors who were James’s daily associates sensed the effort it cost her.

  The young bride, after three months of unpleasant indoctrination into her husband’s world, accompanied him to Chicago, where worse awaited. As Eugene knew from his mother’s telling and retelling while he was growing up, she was thunderstruck when a woman she’d never heard of brought a suit for divorce against James; it drew wide notice in the press, not only in Chicago but also in New York, Cleveland, and San Francisco—wherever James was professionally known.

  Eugene remembered his mother’s disclosure of her hurt so vividly that, decades later, he felt compelled to have Ella’s stand-in, Mary Tyrone, refer to it in Long Day’s Journey Into Night: “Right after we were married, there was the scandal of that woman who had been your mistress suing you,” says Mary, in a speech reproaching her husband for his many perceived transgressions.

  The scandalous divorce action, as Eugene had learned, was brought by a former actress named Nettie Walsh, who had borne James a son but whom he had not married. James had never mentioned her existence to Ella; she was mortified to read her husband’s statement in the newspapers that when (at twenty-six) he took Nettie as his mistress, she was fifteen and “not a chaste and virtuous woman.”

  Ironically, James’s relationship with the fifteen-year-old Nettie had blossomed at the same time and p
lace that Ella herself, as a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, had fallen in love with him.

  It was in 1871, and her father had taken her to one of James’s performances. James was acting with a stock company in Cleveland at the time, and he had been introduced to Thomas Quinlan.

  The two became friends. But Ella’s father had no inkling that James was keeping a teenage mistress, for James had long since learned to conceal the unsavory aspects of his personal life.

  Ella shrank from the intrusion of scandal into her private life. In fairness to James, he was to be a scrupulously faithful husband. As Mary Tyrone observes to her maid (in Long Day’s Journey Into Night), “There has never been a breath of scandal about him. I mean, with any other woman. Never since he met me. That has made me very happy. It has made me forgive so many other things.”

  Nevertheless, during the first months of her marriage, Ella felt lonely and isolated. She was convinced that her own friends had nothing but scorn and pity for her. She could not immerse herself in James’s world, disdaining the well-meant sympathy of his colleagues.

  “I’ve never felt at home in the theater,” says Mary Tyrone, speaking for Ella. “Even though Mr. Tyrone has made me go with him on all his tours, I’ve had little to do with the people in his company, or with anyone on the stage. Their life is not my life.”

  • • •

  O’NEILL APPEARED TO be unaware that during the half-dozen years beginning soon after Jamie’s birth in 1878, his mother’s marriage had been a happy one. When she left San Francisco to once again accompany James on his cross-country touring, Ella took a pleasurable interest in the details that occupied her husband’s stage life. This time, traveling with the baby she loved (and a nursemaid), she befriended Elizabeth Robins, a young actress, who had recently joined the Monte Cristo company in a small role. Ella recognized Robins as more refined and intelligent than most of the actors she had met thus far and she happily admitted Robins into her life.

  Elizabeth, herself inured to the hardships of the road, empathized with Ella’s stalwart acceptance of her role as a backstage wife, but she noted in letters to her family and in her diary that Ella took a lively interest in James’s daily professional routine and often offered him—and Elizabeth—career advice. Elizabeth recorded no hint of the brooding, unhappy wife portrayed in Long Day’s Journey.

  Ella and Elizabeth became intimate friends during the next two years; Ella, who soon knew all about Elizabeth’s ambitions to rise in her profession, took a close interest in her progress. She listened closely to James’s appraisal of her acting ability, and, by extension, Ella grew interested in the backstage life of Monte Cristo as the company set up and performed in one town after another.

  An avid letter-writer and an insightful diarist, Elizabeth Robins left behind a rare portrait of the O’Neills as a compatible (if at times hard-pressed) couple, devoted to each other and to their son, Jim Jr. (as he was then called).

  But apparently Ella’s memory of those happy, early years of her marriage had been obliterated by the death from measles of her second son, the baby Edmund. She had become a guilty, embittered woman long before her third son, Eugene, was born.

  O’Neill, unaware of his mother’s happier days, knew her only as a bemused woman who existed in a dark closet of despair, never letting her husband and two surviving sons forget how she suffered over Edmund’s death.

  • • •

  O’NEILL SAVED THE most realistic litany of his mother’s sorrows for his portrait of her as Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. But in a much earlier play, The Great God Brown, composed three years after his mother’s death, he did write about her with compassion, if briefly.

  In that play, Dion Anthony, the hero O’Neill modeled largely on himself, speaks about the loss of both his parents; after mourning his father’s death, he says, “And my mother? I remember a sweet, strange girl, with affectionate, bewildered eyes as if God had locked her in a dark closet without any explanation.”

  O’Neill’s conception of his mother as a girl locked in a dark closet was influenced by Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata. In that terrifying drama, a woman referred to as “the Mummy” actually lives in a closet and talks to her family like a parrot. Shortly after Ella O’Neill’s death, O’Neill informed Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant that his mother had lived in a room from which she seldom ventured—that, in a way, she was like the Mummy.

  • • •

  ELLA O’NEILL’S BODY was taken to a funeral parlor near St. Leo’s on East Twenty-eighth Street, the church she had attended while living with her husband at the Prince George Hotel. Gazing at his mother in her open casket, O’Neill was pained by what he saw. The California undertaker had made her up to look doll-like and artificial; O’Neill could not reconcile that face with his mother’s.

  He later attributed to James Tyrone Jr. in A Moon for the Misbegotten his own reaction: “She looked young and pretty like someone I remembered meeting long ago. Practically a stranger. To whom I was a stranger. Cold and indifferent.”

  The burial service took place the following day. “The priest who conducted the funeral service turned out to be a Mt. St. Vincent boy,” O’Neill wrote to Joseph McCarthy, with whom he’d shared a room at the Catholic boarding school in the northern Bronx, to which he’d been sent after his seventh birthday.

  Jamie was too drunk to attend the service, nor did he join Eugene and Agnes in accompanying his mother’s body on the train to New London. Ella was buried in St. Mary’s Cemetery beside her husband; her infant son, Edmund; and her mother, Bridget.

  Among the mourners at Ella’s burial service was Mrs. Phillips, the old family friend, who described the burial in a letter to Libbie Drummer. Drummer wrote back: “I am so glad you told me about the funeral. I was so worried. I did not know if Jamie would ever reach New York alive.”

  Also present at the burial were several of Ella’s New London relatives, including O’Neill’s favorite cousin, Lil Brennan, who was ten years younger than Ella.

  O’Neill’s seemingly unalloyed hostility toward his mother appeared to have dissolved, at least temporarily; when his New London cousin, Bessie Sheridan, gave him a photograph of his mother holding him as an infant, he assured her he would treasure it.

  Reminiscing about his mother with another cousin, the clearly bereaved Agnes Brennan (Lil’s older sister), he murmured, “I was just beginning to enjoy her.” As for Lil herself, not given to hypocrisy, she was somewhat more reserved (which was probably why she was O’Neill’s favorite cousin).

  In fact, Lil nursed a long-standing resentment against Ella. This became apparent many years later when, at eighty-nine, afflicted with senile dementia, she was confined to a nursing home in Norwich, Connecticut, not far from New London.

  Visiting her there in 1957, the authors of this biography were lucky enough to catch her just as she lapsed into one of her rare dreamlike states, during which she relived scenes from her youth. Seated in an armchair and watched over by her doctor, Lil was animatedly conversing with someone only she could see. She was obviously reliving a scene from her thirties. With an encouraging nod from Lil’s doctor, Barbara Gelb asked Lil a gentle question about her friendship with Ella O’Neill.

  We received an unexpectedly uninhibited and comprehensive reply:

  “Mama always says, ‘Be nice to Ella, she has a difficult life.’ Mama never can see any wrong in anyone, but Ella O’Neill keeps to herself; she passes me in the street and doesn’t even notice me. She’s stuck-up, that’s what she is, stuck-up—and she touches up her hair.

  “When I go back to New York next week, I’m going to tell Agnes what she said to me.” (It was the New York of 1907 to which Lil referred; she and her sister had lived there for a time while Agnes studied the piano, and Lil tried to establish herself as a milliner. It would seem that Lil thought if she could persuade Ella to become her customer, she could use the pre
stige of the famous actor’s wife to attract other fashionable women.)

  “Do you know what Ella said when I asked her to buy some hats from me? She said she bought her hats at Bendel, but she’d give me her old ones to make over and sell. I was never so insulted!” (Naive Lil was evidently unaware that Ella’s hats, like her dresses, were the last word in expensive good taste.) She rarely went outdoors without a veil as well. The relatives thought she wore veils to protect her smooth white complexion against sun and wind, but more likely she wore them to hide the unnatural, morphine-induced brightness of her eyes.

  17

  Between the approach of spring 1922 and the fortnight following his thirty-sixth birthday in mid-October, O’Neill underwent one of the most consequential periods of his life.

  • • •

  MARCH 11: Too distracted by his mother’s burial rites the previous day, O’Neill finally reads newspaper reviews of The Hairy Ape. Woollcott, in the Times, assesses the play as “a monstrously uneven piece, now flamingly eloquent, now choked and thwarted and inarticulate”; although he concedes the play has what he oddly calls “a little greatness to it,” and adds that O’Neill’s imagination towers “conspicuously above the milling, mumbling crowd of playwrights who have no imagination at all;” he nonetheless disparages it as needing “a fierce, un-intimidated blue pencil.” And Broun (now writing for the World) is even less charitable; he condemns O’Neill for having “found a cause” and “become a propagandist.”

  O’Neill is both exasperated and imperturbable. “I have had quite a large experience now with the critics,” he remarks in a letter, adding that he knows their limitations by heart. “The Hairy Ape is a startling dose for them to swallow,” he writes. “Considering the demands it makes, I think the reaction from critics & public has been more intelligent and hopeful than that given to any play of mine so far. Most of them are trying in this case. Usually they don’t take that much trouble.”