By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  Even as printed literature, a play about marriage between an American Negro man and a white woman was remarkably advanced for its time. Presenting it on the stage in 1924 was a challenge only O’Neill would have dared to confront. And his portrayal of Jim Harris’s frustrated attempts to become a lawyer predated by a quarter century the putdown endured by Malcolm X when his white teacher told him he could never be a lawyer. (“That’s no realistic goal for a nigger!”)

  But O’Neill—who had sprung to Charles Gilpin’s defense when the star of The Emperor Jones was snubbed by the Drama League—shrugged off any concern for the incendiary reaction All God’s Chillun was bound to evoke. Now, with this new play, he was (in his own fashion) scoring a point for what would become his country’s most profound social upheaval of the twentieth century.

  His choice of title sounded innocent enough, having been drawn from an old Negro spiritual: “I got wings / You got wings / All God’s Chillun Got Wings / When I get to Heav’n / Gonna put on my wings / Gonna fly all over God’s Heav’n. . . .” The title, obviously ironic, was O’Neill’s bold assertion that the wings of a black man in America were shamefully clipped.

  As printed literature, All God’s Chillun caused little stir. There was no public dismay, even over a final scene in which Ella, having lost her mind and reverted to childish babbling, gratefully kisses her black husband’s hand. But when the triumvirate of O’Neill, Macgowan, and Jones announced the play’s impending production and stated that a black actor would be cast as the male lead opposite a white actress, there arose a thunderous outcry. It was led by Augustus Thomas, the hugely popular writer of what was praised by critics as the “well-made play” (and what was, of course, disdained by O’Neill).

  Thomas declared in a newspaper interview that the proposed casting was an “unnecessary concession to realism.” The producers, he maintained, should “do what is usually done in such cases, to permit a white man to play the part of the negro [sic].” He elaborated: “The present arrangement, I think, has a tendency to break down social barriers which are better left untouched.”

  Paul Robeson, whose career had flourished since taking over the role of “Emperor” Brutus Jones, was cast as Jim Harris. Mary Blair, the Provincetown Players stalwart who had been replaced by Carlotta Monterey when The Hairy Ape moved to Broadway, agreed to play Jim’s troubled wife.

  Announced to open at the Provincetown Playhouse at the end of March, All God’s Chillun was postponed when Blair fell ill with pleurisy. The newspapers thus had several extra weeks to expound on the outrageousness of the coming production; there were stories almost daily.

  In place in New York at the time were both a self-constituted “Play Jury,” assigned to judge the fitness of a production, and a self-anointed Society for the Suppression of Vice. (The Play Jury was founded in 1922 in response to growing pressure on politicians from ultraconservative groups bent on suppressing “immorality” on Broadway. Formally known as the Joint Committee Opposed to Political Censorship of the Theater, it was formed as a countermeasure against legal censorship. Its members were chosen from the Dramatists Guild and Actors’ Equity, among other theater organizations. It proved ineffective and was dissolved in 1927.)

  The American—a morning paper owned by William Randolph Hearst—published statements from each group on March 12:

  “We naturally are opposed to any play that may be construed as immoral in any way,” said Brigadier Edward Underwood of the Salvation Army, a member of the “Play Jury,” who hadn’t bothered to read the play. He was joined by the secretary for the Society for the Suppression of Vice, John S. Sumner, who cautioned: “Such a play might easily lead to racial riots or disorder, and if there is any such possibility, police powers can be exercised.”

  To the chagrin of these keepers of the public purity, it turned out that police powers could not be exercised to prevent the play’s production; nor could the license commissioner’s powers be invoked. When the American appealed to the commissioner to take a firm stand, he informed the paper that the Provincetown Playhouse was not within the jurisdiction of his department.

  “No one may gain admission to a performance of the Provincetown Players unless a subscriber, because theirs is not a licensed house,” he said, referring to the fact that Jig Cook and his co-founders had had the foresight to guard against threats of outside intervention in their plan to experiment with complete freedom and had forestalled any such possibility by incorporating themselves as a private club.

  Hearst was undeterred. His crusading American continued to lead the protests and, on March 14, reported that as a result of “the many complaints received at City Hall,” Mayor John Francis Hylan had ordered an investigation of All God’s Chillun Got Wings. The American went on to explain that “the protests against the play are based on the fact that in it a white woman kisses the hand of her negro [sic] husband. . . . The protests come from both whites and negroes in about equal numbers.”

  While acknowledging that the mayor had no power to close a theater “arbitrarily,” the American told its readers it “believed” he could prevent the play’s opening “if it were shown the presentation might incite riots.” Such a danger, the American concluded hopefully, “has been pointed out in many protests.”

  Two days later, the American solemnly informed its readers there had been “discussions of the advisability of substituting an octoroon for Miss Blair.” (It did not disclose the identities of the discussers.) The paper promised “if the play actually is produced, there will be enough policemen at the theater to prevent any breach of the peace.”

  On March 18, prompted by his colleagues, O’Neill secluded himself in the Lafayette Hotel near the Provincetown Playhouse and labored over a defense of his play. With many corrections and crossings-out, it covered two and a half sheets of the hotel’s stationery. Extracts were published the following day in various newspapers.

  O’Neill began by scorning those who hadn’t read even a line of the play. He declared:

  Prejudice born of an entire ignorance of the subject is the last word in injustice and absurdity. . . . We are not a public theater. Our playhouse is essentially a laboratory for artistic experiment . . . we make no attempt to cater to the taste of a general public . . . it is by our subscribers alone we can with any reason be held to account.

  Now, have our subscribers protested against the production of God’s Chillun? Not one. On the contrary, many have written in letters of approval and encouragement, urging us not to “back down” in the slightest. And we shall not.

  O’Neill reaffirmed the casting of Paul Robeson: “A fine actor is a fine actor. The question of race prejudice cannot enter here.” He reminded readers that Robeson, two years earlier, had played opposite the white actress Margaret Wycherly in a play called Voodoo and subsequently had appeared in England with Mrs. Patrick Campbell. “There were no race riots here or there. There was no newspaper rioting, either.”

  Mary Blair was playing Ella Harris, wrote O’Neill, “because she likes the play and the part. As a true artist, she does not recognize any considerations but these as having any bearing.” As to rumors that his objective was to stir up racial feeling, nothing was further from his wish. The play, he declared, was “primarily” a study of its principal characters’ “tragic struggle for happiness,” and even the “most prejudiced” would be bound to see in the play “a deep, spiritual sense.”

  He was certain, continued O’Neill, that God’s Chillun would help encourage “a more sympathetic understanding between the races, through the sense of mutual tragedy involved.” He would, he promised, “stand by it to the end.”

  “I know I am right,” he said. “I know that all the irresponsible gabble of the sensation-mongers and notoriety hounds is wrong. They are the ones who are trying to rouse ill feeling and they should be held responsible. . . . They peek at a headline about ‘Ella’ kissing ‘Jim’s’ hand and their indi
gnation grows stupendous.

  “If they would only take the trouble to look up this passage in the printed play, they would see how entirely innocent of all the inferred suggestion this action is. But they don’t. Indignation, right or wrong, that’s the good old stuff!”

  But the controversy raged on. “It seemed for a time there, as if all the feeble-witted both in and out of the K.K.K. were hurling newspaper bricks in my direction,” O’Neill later wrote to a Princeton classmate, “—not to speak of the anonymous letters which ranged from those of infuriated Irish Catholics who threatened to pull my ears off as a disgrace to their race and religion, to those of equally infuriated Nordic Kluxers who knew that I had Negro blood, or else was a Jewish pervert masquerading under a Christian name in order to do subversive propaganda for the Pope!”

  With Mary Blair’s recovery from pleurisy, All God’s Chillun began rehearsing in April for its May 15 opening. Not only O’Neill, but also Robeson, Blair, and the director, James Light, were now receiving scurrilous letters from the Ku Klux Klan. “We had to intercept Mary’s mail, some of the letters were so foul,” recalled Light. And one letter to O’Neill, on official Klan stationery, warned him he would never see his two sons again if the play went on.

  “We also got a bomb warning stating that if we opened the play we would have a theater full of dead people,” Light later recalled. “We didn’t let any of this interfere with our plans, but there was a lot of tension all around.”

  O’Neill almost certainly was unaware that the FBI, under its then acting director J. Edgar Hoover, had him in its sights that April. Alerted to the furor over All God’s Chillun, an agent of the bureau produced a two-page memorandum for Hoover.

  Misspelling his name, the agent described “O’Neil’s” authorship of, among other works, The Emperor Jones, emphasizing that the play’s “central figure is a negro [sic], this seeming to be a favorite theme of O’Neil’s.” The FBI document implied that O’Neill was a radical who could bear watching.

  Four days before the opening on May 15, O’Neill once again attempted to tamp down the public hysteria. “I admit that there is prejudice against the intermarriage of whites and blacks,” he allowed in an interview with Louis Kantor for The New York Times, “but what has that to do with my play? I don’t advocate intermarriage in it. I am never the advocate of anything in any play—except Humanity toward Humanity. . . . I’ve no desire to play the exhorter in any racial no-man’s land.

  “I am a dramatist. To me every human being is a special case, with his or her own special set of values. . . . What is the theater for if not to show man’s struggle, whether he is black, green, orange or white, to conquer life; his effort to give it meaning?”

  By late afternoon of May 15, Macgowan and Jones grew jittery. One aspect of even a non-public theater’s activities over which the mayor’s office did have jurisdiction was the issuance of licenses to child actors, and there were several in All God’s Chillun. The play opens on a scene set nine years before the adult Jim and Ella marry, depicting them as children among a group of other children, both black and white.

  The triumvirate had applied for licenses in the prescribed manner, but hadn’t yet received an answer. They feared Mayor Hylan had at the last moment decided to use this technicality to try to prevent the play’s opening. They were right. Shortly before curtain time, the mayor’s chief clerk telephoned the theater to say the licenses had been denied; he gave no reason.

  In the meantime, the Provincetown’s subscribers, who included all the first-string critics, had been seated in the tiny theater, beguiled by the promise of an incendiary evening. Policemen by now were stationed outside the theater to make sure the unlicensed children did not perform their scene—and to intervene if they spotted someone with a bomb.

  Momentarily taken aback by the mayor’s edict, the company swiftly rallied. Director James Light stepped on stage. He told the audience what had happened and then he himself read the opening scene.

  The performance proceeded without incident. “It was a dreadful anti-climax for all concerned,” O’Neill later wrote to a Princeton classmate. The critics in particular “seemed to feel cheated that there hadn’t been at least one murder that first night.” It was, according to O’Neill, “really a most ludicrous episode—not so ludicrous for me, however, since it put the whole theme of the play on a false basis and thereby threw our whole intent in the production into the discard.”

  Missing O’Neill’s intent, many of the critics disliked the play. Some praised Robeson while many dismissed Mary Blair. Heywood Broun found it “a very tiresome play”; Woollcott was “disappointed”; Percy Hammond crudely branded it “a vehement exposition of a marriage between a stupid negro [sic] and a stupid white woman.”

  Despite the poor reviews, All God’s Chillun Got Wings had a successful five-month run, having moved to the larger Greenwich Village Theatre, where it played until October 10.

  O’Neill, in a subsequent discussion, stressed that Jim Harris represented the “Oneness of Mankind.” He went on to say, “We are divided by prejudices. Prejudices racial, social, religious. . . . If Harris of the play had been a Japanese and Ella white, and the play had been produced on the Coast, there would have been as great a storm of protest. Or if Harris had been a German, and the play produced in France. Or an Armenian in Turkey. Or a Jew and a Gentile. And these prejudices will exist until we understand the Oneness of Mankind. Life is hard and bitter enough without, in addition, burdening ourselves with prejudices.”

  What O’Neill did not say, although surely it was on his mind, was that Jim Harris also could have been a young struggling shanty Irish actor suffering the prejudices of a Protestant bourgeois society.

  20

  On New Year’s Day, 1924—well before the opening of All God’s Chillun Got Wings—O’Neill awoke at Brook Farm, having dreamed a new play in its entirety. The dream, replete with wrenching personal symbolism, would evolve as one of his most powerful works.

  He later boasted it was the first time a plot had come to him so easily. He said that after outlining a brief scenario, he began writing dialogue, “as if I’d pondered over this play for months.”

  The play was Desire Under the Elms. In it, O’Neill, unable to resolve his own persistent emotional dilemma, explored ever more deeply the enigma of helplessly embattled lovers and a son’s conflicted relationship with his father and mother. Invoking the Bible as well as Greek tragedy, he folded a batter of sin and scandal, pride and greed, envy and lust into a sulfurous pandowdy of adultery, incest, and infanticide. All this was served up with a brew of cosmic pondering on man’s aloneness, God’s severity, and the final acceptance of an inescapable fate.

  What had ignited these new bursts of tragic insight was the onrushing misery and chaos of his life. That winter at Brook Farm he was still obsessively mourning his parents and brother. Compounding his unease was his sense of being trapped in a household run by a clutch of servants whose salaries were a burden and whom Agnes didn’t have the experience to manage efficiently.

  He was less than ever reconciled to being the father of a four-year-old (whose presence he barely acknowledged). Most of all, he was troubled by Agnes’s insistence on living her own life, which he perceived as a selfish flouting of his need for her constant attention and reassurance. Thwarted in his domestic dealings with her, O’Neill could count only on their mutual undiminished sexual hunger, as proclaimed in their panting letters during their brief absences from each other.

  Within five months, Desire Under the Elms was a fully realized script. Unlike Welded, which is talky and bloodless, Desire, in its richly imagined depiction of a sexual tug-of-war, seethes with the anger and mistrust O’Neill felt for Agnes. Their ameliorating passion is reflected in the play’s raw depiction of lust between the volatile lovers, Abbie Putnam and her stepson Eben Cabot. (O’Neill was never perfunctory about the names he gave his characters and it s
eems more than coincidental that he chose Eben because it begins with an E and Abbie, not only because it begins with an A, but because he often called Agnes by her nickname, “Aggie.”)

  It is the fiery liaison between Abbie and Eben that drives the play, and it’s not until Abbie steps onstage in Scene IV of Act I that Desire springs to tormented life. That is the point at which Eben’s aging father, Ephraim Cabot, arrives back home at his farm with Abbie as his sultry bride; she is thirty-five, half Ephraim’s age, and ten years older than Eben, whose recently deceased mother was Ephraim’s second wife. Eben, who has sullenly awaited their arrival, is convinced, the moment he sees Abbie, that she will displace him as the heir of the farm he loves, the farm that was originally his mother’s.

  It’s a reasonable fear, for Abbie is “buxom, full of vitality,” with a pretty face that is “marred by its rather gross sensuality.” She has a strong, obstinate jaw, “a hard determination in her eyes,” and there is about her an “unsettled, untamed, desperate quality.”

  Like the play’s other characters, Abbie speaks in a quirky dialect that O’Neill hoped would convey a sense of mid-nineteenth-century New England farm life: “purty” for pretty, “har” for here, “hev” for have, “hum” for home, and various odd contractions. As O’Neill later explained, he was “trying to write a synthetic dialogue which should be, in a way, the distilled essence of New England.” He never intended the language of the play to be “a record of what the characters actually said.” He wanted to “express what they felt subconsciously.”

  “Har we be t’hum, Abbie,” says Ephraim with “a queer strangled emotion in his dry cracking voice.”