By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  It would not be until November—eight months after the downtown opening—that O’Neill took up arms in defense of the play that was to remain one of his all-time favorites: “People think I am giving an exact picture of the reality. They don’t understand that the whole play is expressionistic. Yank is really yourself, and myself. He is every human being. But, apparently, very few people seem to get this . . . no one has said: ‘I am Yank! Yank is my own self!’”

  On another occasion that month, O’Neill further explained that his play was “propaganda in the sense that it was a symbol of man, who has lost his old harmony with nature . . . the struggle used to be with the gods, but is now with himself, his own past, his attempt ‘to belong.’”

  • • •

  APRIL 17: As O’Neill had hoped, Arthur Hopkins, unfazed by the adverse criticism, moves The Hairy Ape to Broadway (where it will run for 120 performances). Hopkins insists on a new Mildred Douglas, the pampered steamship passenger who faints when confronted by the brutish coal stoker, Yank. The original Mildred, Mary Blair (who earlier won acclaim as the thwarted spinster in Diff’rent), does not suit Hopkins, who regards her as “not luxurious enough” for uptown audiences.

  He replaces her with Carlotta Monterey (whose recollection thirty-five years later of her first encounter with O’Neill will become legend).

  Carlotta: “I thought him the rudest man I’d ever seen, and he had no use for me.” (This, after Hopkins has introduced O’Neill to her during a rehearsal break shortly before the Broadway opening.)

  “One day,” as Carlotta chose to remember it, “I was in the theater talking to someone and a dark young man came over. I’d always heard that O’Neill was dirty, unshaven, messy. This man was clean, neatly dressed. We exchanged a few words and he left.

  “‘Who’s that?’ I asked.

  “‘O’Neill,’ I was told.

  “‘You mean the author of this play?’”

  Accustomed to adulation (and unaware that O’Neill is still brooding about his mother’s death), Carlotta finds him morose and barely civil. “He hadn’t even had the courtesy to thank me for taking over the part on a moment’s notice.”

  After their meeting, O’Neill concedes (to James Light, an early recruit to the Provincetown Players who has become a close friend and a relied-upon colleague) that Carlotta looks the part, but he doesn’t think much of her acting ability.

  “‘Mildew Douglas’ he used to call the girl I played.” Carlotta laughs, recalling their next meeting four years later in Maine, the summer they fell in love. “He would tease me by calling me that when he thought I was putting on airs.”

  • • •

  EARLY MAY: O’Neill is surprised to receive a letter from his all-but-forgotten first wife, Kathleen Jenkins. She meekly suggests he might care to meet his son Eugene O’Neill Jr. and help with his education.

  The boy, nearly twelve, is exceptional in every way, says Kathleen, and should have a chance to attend a first-rate school and college. Kathleen explains she is living modestly in Queens, New York, with her husband, George Pitt-Smith, an office manager, and cannot afford to give Eugene Jr. the education he deserves.

  Kathleen had married Pitt-Smith when Eugene Jr. was five years old; Pitt-Smith was divorced and had a son of his own, a few months younger than Eugene Jr., who spent half his time with his mother and half with his father and stepmother. Kathleen once said that her son loved his stepfather and regarded Pitt-Smith’s own son as a brother; but she spoke often to Eugene Jr. of his famous real father and taught the boy to think well of him.

  Had James O’Neill been alive, it’s less likely O’Neill would have acknowledged the grandson his father had so angrily disowned. But as things stand, in deference to the divorced wife who has never importuned him, O’Neill feels it only fair to assume a measure of responsibility for his long-since-abandoned son. Even so, he hesitates, confiding to Agnes that he fears meeting the boy. What if he has been brought up as conventional, a boy with whom he will have nothing in common? But at Agnes’s urging, he consents to a meeting.

  Eugene Jr., dressed in his best clothes, finds his father shakily awaiting him at his West Thirty-fifth Street apartment. The boy is by far the more at ease and promptly engages his father in a discussion of baseball. He’s delighted to learn his father knows the batting averages of many of the players and several times has gone out of his way to meet a player he admired. (O’Neill, in the 1940s, once arranged to be introduced to Ted Williams, who had wound up the season for the Boston Red Sox with a .406 batting average.)

  To the relief of father and son, they find they like each other. O’Neill tells friends that Eugene Jr. is bright and has been raised carefully, and that he has decided he will finance his education.

  According to Kathleen, her son returns “glowing from the meeting.” Soon after, O’Neill writes to thank her for raising a son to make them proud. He feels remorse for the way he treated the sheltered young woman that she was in 1909, carelessly getting her pregnant and, after a pro forma marriage, deserting her. Gratefully, he allows, “The woman I gave the most trouble to has given me the least.” So taken is O’Neill with his newfound older son that he invites him to Peaked Hill Bars for a visit during the coming summer.

  O’Neill as yet is unaware of Eugene Jr.’s troubled early childhood. The fact is that soon after Kathleen and her husband settled into their home in Douglaston, Long Island, the six-year-old boy was sent away to boarding school in Peekskill, New York—already being pushed along the insecure path that his father had followed as a child. There were episodes of running away from school and being sent back. Eventually, the boy learned that home was a place where he spent vacations—and school was the place where he lived.

  • • •

  MAY 12: O’Neill’s better-late-than-never parental obligation fulfilled, he turns his attention to the tedious details of settling his mother’s estate, which her lawyers have informed him may be worth as much as $147,000. The lawyers have managed to remove the devious and grasping Marion Reed as Ella O’Neill’s executor, and have made it clear to her that Jamie will not return to California to share with her the proceeds from the sale of the Glendale property.

  The way is now clear for O’Neill’s New London lawyer, Frank Dart, to probate the will, and O’Neill notifies Dart that he and his brother “emphatically do not desire the settling of the estate to drag on one second longer than is absolutely necessary.” (He cannot foresee that it will be another two years before the complexities of settling the estate are resolved.)

  While O’Neill has spoken for his brother as well as himself, Jamie is oblivious to what’s going on. His out-of-control drunken episodes are growing more frequent. O’Neill makes periodic efforts to obtain medical and psychiatric care for him, but to no avail. It is all too evident that Jamie is racing toward self-destruction.

  • • •

  MAY 21: O’Neill’s life brightens when Anna Christie brings him his second Pulitzer Prize. “Yes, I seem to be becoming the Prize Pup of Playwriting—the Hot Dog of the Drama,” he mocks in a letter to the critic Oliver Sayler.

  Pleased by the tribute of his Pulitzer, O’Neill is eager to start on a new play. But along with his efforts to curb Jamie’s grotesque behavior, he is shrinking from the unwelcome role of paterfamilias, and he is too jittery to concentrate on his work. He almost regrets his impulsive invitation to Eugene Jr. for a summer visit to Peaked Hill Bars; having invited his son, he cannot disregard Agnes’s seven-year-old daughter, for whom Agnes recently has discovered a sense of obligation; along with little Shane, O’Neill will have to play Daddy to three children.

  • • •

  LATE JULY: O’Neill’s semi-adjustment to the summer’s events seems to shift with the dunes. His longtime Provincetown friend, the artist Eben Given, drives O’Neill and Agnes to the railroad station to meet Eugene Jr. “The boy was reticent, just like
his father,” Given remembered. “Agnes sat in front with me on the way back and Gene sat in back with his son. They didn’t speak to each other all the way home. They just sat there, sizing each other up. Gene would sneak a view of the boy and tug at one end of his mustache, which was a habit of his.”

  Waiting at Peaked Hill Bars is O’Neill’s Provincetown Players colleague James Light, who shares his love of swimming. Light watches as father and son dive into the waves of the Atlantic. “Once they got into the ocean,” Light recalled, “the awkwardness between them disappeared.”

  • • •

  MID-AUGUST: O’Neill isn’t sorry to say good-bye to his older son. Despite his growing affection for Eugene Jr., O’Neill begrudges the time lost from his writing. He is equally chary of the time he spends with Shane, now nearly three. While he takes an occasional interest in his younger son’s activities, he rarely is seen to caress or hold him—unless requested to do so by a newspaper or magazine photographer. “I hardly ever saw Gene play with Shane,” said Given, reflecting the impression of most of O’Neill’s friends. “He seemed detached from the boy.”

  Not that Agnes spends much time with Shane either. She is still sporadically pursuing her own writing career, and leaves her child’s care largely to Mrs. Clarke. But Shane seems a happy child, at least according to his half sister, Barbara, who is six years older. She remembers that Shane called their Peaked Hill Bars home “the house where the wind blows.”

  Barbara Burton retained happy memories of her visits to Peaked Hill Bars, although she was only rarely in the company of her mother and stepfather, spending most of her time with Shane and Gaga.

  “Shane was the most beautiful, golden-haired little boy you can imagine,” she recalled. “He was happy and ebullient and I loved him. He had a golden heart as well as a golden head of hair.” Barbara and Shane, constant companions, “lived in the ocean.”

  When she meets Eugene Jr. for the first time that summer, Barbara finds him “fun and full of zest.” As for her stepfather, she sees him as “a gentle, shy man, with a soft light flickering in his eyes.” Her mother and O’Neill, she said, “would have wonderful evening picnics and invite friends from town.”

  • • •

  LATE SEPTEMBER: Grateful to be released from his paternal obligations, O’Neill moves on to his writing—and to the next thorn in his side, his increasingly dicey relationship with Agnes.

  • • •

  OCTOBER 16: By the time of his birthday, O’Neill has begun outlining a play he is calling Welded. A transparently personal examination of the fractious state of his marriage, it will be the first of his many merciless scrutinizings of marital strife. The play springs from O’Neill’s preoccupation with his parents’ ill-suited marriage, which he believes has become an inadvertent model for his own. Even though his parents’ final years were sanguine (once his mother recovered from her morphine habit), Eugene still bears the scars of their turmoil as he was growing up.

  Although O’Neill has written in his earliest plays (albeit tentatively and symbolically) about aspects of his parents’ dysfunctional life together, it isn’t until now, at thirty-six, that he at last allows August Strindberg’s ghost its uninhibited sway. He has long since learned to empathize with Strindberg’s cruelly embattled husbands and wives—couples who, despite their incompatibility, are locked together by their unrelenting need for each other—as dead-on paradigms for his mother and father.

  It is Strindberg’s The Dance of Death that strikes a particularly responsive chord. In that annihilative play, Strindberg put into the mouths of his embattled married couple words that left audiences affronted and even repelled. O’Neill, however, recognized the sense of those words as a motivating force in his parents’ relationship (and later in his own marriages). At one point in Dance of Death, the husband declares, “We have been trying to depart every single day—but we are chained together and cannot break away.” And a little later, the wife, responding to a family friend’s “Then he loves you,” retorts, “Probably. But that does not prevent him from hating me.” In the equally baleful The Father, Strindberg declares that “love between a man and a woman is war,” and in The Dream Play, he offers the thought that “it’s terribly hard to be married . . . harder than anything else.”

  Perhaps most memorable of all Strindberg’s misanthropic lines is the way a character in The Dance of Death describes the marital relationship: its essence is “love-hatred, and it hails from the pit!”

  As Strindberg’s ardent apprentice, O’Neill was determined to enrapture and astound his audiences (and, yes, shock them) rather than merely divert and entertain them. He would suffer none of the taboos against dialogue about explicit sexuality or the cruelty of societal exploitation. “It was reading his plays,” O’Neill would say in accepting his Nobel Prize in 1936 (in the speech read for him in his absence), “when I first started to write back in the winter of 1913–14, that, above all else, first gave me the vision of what modern drama could be, and first inspired me with the urge to write for the theater myself.”

  Agnes, who knew nothing of Strindberg when she first met O’Neill, recalled that one night early in their romance, O’Neill read Miss Julie aloud to her, “losing himself in the sound of the words and their haunted meaning.” O’Neill relished this tale of sexual passion between the aristocratic young woman (who behaves like a whore) and her father’s valet (who behaves like an operatic villain). O’Neill, however (judging by his own canon), seems to have been even more mesmerized by the audacious preface Strindberg wrote for the published version of the play:

  Perhaps the time will come when we will be so advanced, so enlightened, that we can witness with indifference what now seem the coarse, cynical, heartless dramas life has to offer.

  If my tragedy depresses many people, it is their own fault.

  I find the joy of life in its cruel and powerful struggles, and my enjoyment comes from being able to know something, being able to learn something.

  • • •

  LATE FALL: O’Neill might well have summoned these words of Strindberg’s in support of Welded, the play he was now writing, based on his own increasingly conflicted marriage. His and Agnes’s misunderstandings were growing more scabrous.

  O’Neill, always the protagonist of his own perceived personal tragedy, cast Agnes, in his mind, as the adored enemy, and a worthy antagonist on the matrimonial battlefield—a woman with a masochistic zeal to match his own, a woman who could fight furiously—and who then reciprocates his impassioned lovemaking. He wanted to believe that Agnes answered his insatiable need for a wife-lover-secretary-servant—not to mention whipping boy. (That role, in the end, did not suit Agnes Boulton; it awaited Carlotta Monterey, for whom it was tailor-made.)

  In Welded, depicting his relationship with Agnes hyperrealistically, O’Neill must have believed he was making a universal statement about the Furies that can drive a marriage. Perhaps, with this work, he hoped to prove himself the American Strindberg. “This play ought to be the very finest, deepest, and the most vital thing that I have done,” he wrote to Oliver Sayler, after completing his first draft of Welded the following spring.

  Welded is about a man and wife, both egoists, welded together in a passionate, jealous, possessive love that renders their lives alternately heaven and hell. They have a soul-shattering fight and the wife sets out to spend an adulterous night with a former admirer while the husband attempts to sleep with a prostitute.

  Neither can go through with their plans and both realize their love welds them to each other. There is no solution for them except to stay together, perpetually fighting, reconciling, hating, and loving, in an endless cycle of torment.

  Although O’Neill regarded Welded as the last word in meaningful truth about love and marriage, it didn’t work, for much the same reason that The First Man hadn’t worked. Not surprisingly, he tended to lose his artistic perspective when he
wrote about an intensely personal situation at the same time that he was living it.

  George Jean Nathan, after reading the script of Welded, issued what must have felt to O’Neill like the ultimate insult. The play, he told O’Neill, was little more than “some very third-rate Strindberg.”

  This time he was right. But O’Neill, according to Nathan, “sharply observed that I couldn’t conceivably understand any such play as I had never been married.” The wounded dramatist, Nathan said, “put on his hat, walked out and didn’t let me hear from him for two months.”

  • • •

  END OF OCTOBER: O’Neill, having celebrated his thirty-sixth birthday, was still the same oft-misunderstood-but-resolute artist, as well as a challenged husband, reluctant father, conflicted brother, and wounded son.

  18

  O’Neill and Agnes went shopping in October 1922 for a year-round home within easy reach of New York. They had persuaded themselves that with enough space and serene surroundings, they could live together peaceably. They were still strapped for cash, but O’Neill was expecting his mother’s estate to be settled soon, and he and Agnes were tempted to buy Stormfield, the Florentine-style villa in Redding, Connecticut, where Mark Twain died in 1910.

  When the two were advised that repairs might cost as much as $5,000, they had the good sense to abandon that idea; even so, they overextended themselves when, instead, they put a down payment of $32,000 on a nearby estate in Ridgefield, fifty-five miles from Manhattan. Called Brook Farm, it occupied an area that mingled working farms and mansions.

  Their initial payment, plus the cost of furnishings, carved out a substantial chunk of the $44,000 O’Neill earned that year. He was counting, however, on his $73,000 share of his mother’s estate. And he and Agnes planned to recoup some of their outlay by renting out Brook Farm during the summer while they retreated to Peaked Hill Bars.