by Arthur Gelb
It wasn’t long before O’Neill and Agnes once again began to worry about money. “Come on, you Brown! Daddy needs a yacht!” O’Neill wrote to Macgowan early in March when he had not yet received his first royalty check.
Bellevue, although cheap to rent, was expensive to maintain, demanding the services of an indoor and outdoor staff. In addition to a household that included the four O’Neills plus Gaga and Budgie, there were occasional visits from Eugene Jr. and Barbara (still mostly in her grandmother’s care when not at boarding school) as well as a scattering of the O’Neills’ friends from New York.
O’Neill had (for the present) pushed aside his half-formed thoughts of divorce and instead attempted to redesign a more satisfactory lifestyle. With Agnes’s approval, he decided to sell Brook Farm and make Bermuda their “home port” for the next two or three years; at the same time, he began casting about for a place to spend the summer months when Bermuda was too hot for comfort. Of one thing he was sure: despite his love for Peaked Hill Bars, he had no wish to return with Agnes to Provincetown.
“I want to avoid all the P’town connotations,” he told Macgowan, referring to his hard-drinking friends, protesting that it was not that he was “afraid anymore—but it’s no use making it harder for oneself.” He was thinking, instead, of renting a camp on a lake in Maine, where he could canoe, fish, and play tennis.
Near April’s end, O’Neill complained to Macgowan about his still-unpaid Brown royalties, as well as those from a touring company of Desire Under the Elms and a revival of The Emperor Jones. When Macgowan explained that the triumvirate, financially pressed, was withholding O’Neill’s accrued royalties and applying them to general operating expenses, O’Neill exploded:
“I am not Otto Kahn. I have a large family to support . . . I can least afford to play philanthropist just now when I’m making my first determined effort to get my own affairs stabilized so I can work steadily ahead for the next few years in peace.” Macgowan, embarrassed, quickly steered the owed royalties to O’Neill.
The Great God Brown was the last play produced by the triumvirate. They acknowledged they were no longer able to muster the funding or enthusiasm to continue. By mutual consent, and while continuing to be good friends, O’Neill, Macgowan, and Jones dissolved the partnership.
The back royalties from Brown had reached O’Neill just in time. The owners of Bellevue had declined to give him a long-term lease and now he and Agnes, rebounding from their disappointment, decided they could afford to buy instead of renting. On April 24, they found a property they loved.
This time it was an early-eighteenth-century house called Spithead, large and rambling, unlived in for some years and in need of major repairs. But it was gloriously situated on open water with its own beachfront. On May 1, the O’Neills offered $17,500 and within a week Spithead was theirs.
O’Neill and Agnes shifted residences as casually as nomads. So far, during the eight years of their marriage, they’d folded and unfolded their tent in five places they called home: the Old House in New Jersey, the former Coast Guard station in Provincetown, Brook Farm in Connecticut, the manorial Bellevue—and now, a barely livable “shell,” but as O’Neill described it to friends, “a very fine shell.” He and Agnes planned to repair and decorate Spithead gradually and occupy it as their permanent winter-through-spring abode.
Agnes’s sister Budgie finished typing the first draft of Lazarus Laughed on May 11. Although O’Neill was as always overcome with admiration for his newest creation, he was disappointed that no producer to whom he’d outlined the project shared his enthusiasm. It wasn’t until 1927 that it was finally presented by the Pasadena Community Players in California—without Chaliapin, but “successfully and imaginatively,” according to O’Neill.
On May 16, with Lazarus out of the way, O’Neill turned his attention to “scheming out” what he merrily called his “lady play”—the provocative concept that, unlike Lazarus, proved to be eminently producible on Broadway.
While Strange Interlude was even longer than Lazarus, it was neither pageant nor spectacle; its story owed more to Freud (despite O’Neill’s later disavowals) than to the Bible. Not too long since, he’d read both Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. And Dr. Hamilton, with whom he’d kept up a friendship, served as a sounding board.
Strange Interlude evolved as an even more passionate tale of sexual love and despair than the steamy Desire Under the Elms. O’Neill hoped to finish the first scene before escaping Bermuda’s summer heat.
On June 15, sailing from Bermuda for the two-day voyage to New York, the O’Neills and their entourage were an exotic presence to their shipmates aboard the Fort St. George: the celebrated playwright, handsome, lean, sun-bronzed, his hair edged with silver; his pretty wife, slim, tanned, and chic; the two children—Shane, a beautiful delicate boy of nearly seven, with his golden ringlets, and Oona, a shy, pudgy one-year-old with enormous eyes—together with the sister-secretary, Budgie; Gaga the nanny; and the pony-sized Finn.
Agnes and O’Neill settled their children into the Shelton Hotel on East Forty-ninth Street and, after a weekend visit with Kenneth and Edna Macgowan at their country home, Agnes accompanied her husband to New Haven. There, on June 23, he received an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from Yale—the only such degree he ever accepted.
The honor had been proposed by Professor George Pierce Baker, in whose Harvard playwriting workshop O’Neill had studied for one year in 1914. Baker had recognized and encouraged O’Neill’s as-yet-undiscovered talent (along with such others as Philip Barry, S. N. Behrman, Sidney Howard, and Edward Sheldon). Baker, in 1924, had moved his renowned “47 Workshop” to Yale when the university agreed to build the theater Harvard had denied him.
“I was his best known pupil,” O’Neill later told a friend, “and Yale was really honoring him through me.” Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, who interviewed O’Neill soon after the event, remarked that Agnes “was amused to discover that he became so interested in the spectacle that he did finally enjoy his own part in it, and instead of dying of stage-fright ‘took a bow’ on the applause.”
Most meaningful to O’Neill was Yale’s championing of him as “the first American playwright to receive both wide and serious recognition upon the stage of Europe.” Yale’s salute—together with his recent triumph over alcohol, his success with Brown, his completion of Lazarus, the start of his beguiling new “lady play,” and the beckoning of a lakeside summer vacation in Maine—should have been reason enough for him to count his blessings.
But, somehow, he simply couldn’t. He felt encircled by a vague emptiness, an emotional vacuum that he attributed to his withdrawal from alcohol; he feared he could never fill that void.
He had tried to articulate his new malaise to Macgowan during his recent visit to Brewster, but could only hint at it. Macgowan, looking back years later, said O’Neill had spoken to him of his unhappiness over Agnes’s social drinking; she thought it unreasonable to expect her—not an alcoholic—to give it up for his sake. Macgowan sensed there was more than that on O’Neill’s mind, but O’Neill seemed unable to specify just what else it was that gnawed at him.
Reaching Maine on June 27, his Packard touring car crowded with his family and Finn—and with his endemic devils in tow—O’Neill tried to resume work on Strange Interlude. It wasn’t easy for Agnes to balance his need for quiet against a houseful of vacationing children, which included both Barbara and Eugene Jr. for part of the summer. (At eleven, Barbara was, in her own words, “madly in love” with sixteen-year-old Eugene.)
“We’re a fat family,” O’Neill reported to Macgowan, soon after his arrival in Maine. Briefly, he gave himself to the role of benign patriarch, walking with his children in the fragrant woods behind his cabin, gathering with them on the cabin’s front porch to admire the sunsets.
Amused that his lakeside compoun
d was called “Loon Lodge,” O’Neill wrote to Macgowan, “This, after living in ‘Bellevue’ all winter, makes me suspect God is becoming a symbolist or something.”
What he did not suspect was that the uneasy summer about to unfold would be the springboard for the dissolution of his marriage.
24
It all began with an invitation to come to tea at the home of Elisabeth Marbury, who lived across the lake from the O’Neill campsite. It was Marbury, the business partner of O’Neill’s literary agent, Richard Madden, who had recommended Belgrade Lakes as the ideal place for the O’Neills to vacation. When Marbury issued the invitation on July 15, the O’Neills had been in residence for several weeks.
Marbury, with offices in London and Paris as well as New York, had represented and dealt with dozens of globally known writers and publishers, and was herself a glittering member of the international social set, together with her lover, Elsie De Wolfe, a sought-after interior decorator. Now elderly, overweight, infirm, and mostly housebound, Marbury still maintained her love of good food and good conversation. Her houseguest that summer was Carlotta Monterey, who was trying to recover from her recent painful divorce from Ralph Barton. Carlotta knew that Marbury’s reputation as a lesbian would inevitably incite talk about her own sexual orientation.
“I suppose you’ve heard I was a lesbian,” Carlotta ruefully remarked to the playwright Russel Crouse years later, explaining she “hadn’t a soul to turn to” when she split with Barton, and Marbury had been “so wonderful” to her, taking her in for the summer.
In an interview with the authors thirty years after that Maine summer, Carlotta, as she often did, blended history and histrionics, to say nothing of self-serving hyperbole; in her version of that fateful tea party, she glibly made Marbury sound as though she had thought having the O’Neills to tea was an unwanted obligation, whereas, in truth, Marbury, who had grown attached to both O’Neill and Agnes, was more than pleased to have them as her neighbors.
“I went to Maine as the guest of an old lady who was an invalid,” said Carlotta.
I was living there very quietly. I walked and swam. One day my hostess said, “I have to have the O’Neills to tea and they’re very difficult. He never opens his mouth and she never shuts hers. So it makes entertaining rather difficult.”
“What O’Neills?” I asked. She told me Eugene O’Neill, the playwright. Well, I didn’t see why I had to stay and meet that awful man again, but I was a houseguest, and out of politeness I had to stay. So I put a dress on over my bathing suit. They drove up in a car.
Agnes popped out of the car, and O’Neill followed her. She was very messy. The first thing she said to me was “Oh, Carlotta Monterey, I am so glad to meet you! I want to hear all about your sex life!” Well, I nearly fainted. I thought, What is this? If it’s a joke, it’s stupid. I said, “I have no husband at the moment so I have no sex life.” “Oh,” Agnes squeaked, “but you must have a lover! Don’t you have a lover?” “No,” I said, “no lover.”
And then O’Neill came up and said, “Do you remember me?” And I said, “Yes, when I went into your play The Hairy Ape without any rehearsals and took all the risk—my reputation and everything—you never said thank you.”
As she told the story of her hostile encounter at Marbury’s home with the man whose world she soon would turn upside down, Carlotta chuckled. Her account of what she described as Agnes’s vulgar chatter was patently exaggerated; even three decades after having pried O’Neill away from his wife, Carlotta persisted in vindictively belittling Agnes’s role in his life; she never got over the frustration of being unable to obliterate Agnes’s existence.
Further embroidering on the tea party, Carlotta frequently bubbled with nervous laughter. She was reminiscing during a three-hour lunch with the authors at Quo Vadis, an elegantly subdued Upper East Side restaurant where she felt at home sipping the Monterey Cocktails (gin and Cointreau) the management had named for her.
“O’Neill tried to be friendly,” Carlotta continued, “but I was cold to him. All through tea, Agnes kept chattering about all the writers and theater people she knew. She kept turning to me and saying, ‘You know him—or her—don’t you, Miss Monterey?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m afraid I don’t. I don’t know anyone. I live very quietly.’ It was an awful tea.”
After the stressful tea party, Carlotta said, “my hostess asked me to take O’Neill down to the bathhouse so he could swim. I didn’t want to, but I did it—not very graciously.
“‘You don’t like me, do you?’ O’Neill said, as we were walking down to the lake.
“‘Why, Mr. O’Neill, I don’t know you. How can I like or dislike you?’ I answered.” But then she again brought up his brusqueness on meeting her backstage at The Hairy Ape and, she said, “He apologized, explaining he’d been in mourning for his mother’s recent death. He told me they’d painted up the face so—the way they do in San Francisco—that she looked like a painted doll. He couldn’t relate that face to his mother, and he’d been terribly upset when he met me.”
Neither O’Neill nor Agnes had thought to bring bathing suits, which might explain why Agnes declined to accompany Carlotta for a swim. But according to Carlotta, O’Neill was unconcerned about appearances.
“O’Neill went into the bathhouse and appeared a few minutes later wearing a woman’s bathing suit.” “It must have belonged to my hostess—it was huge, and hung on him perfectly ridiculously. I guess there just weren’t any men’s suits in there, but he didn’t care. He wanted a swim, and he just paid no attention to how he looked. I decided then that he couldn’t be so bad, after all. He dived in and swam—he swam magnificently and the suit kept billowing up. It was most indecent.”
“See Carlotta again!” exclaimed O’Neill in his diary the following week. It was mid-August, however, before their next flirtatious encounter.
• • •
O’NEILL WAS ONLY vaguely aware of Carlotta’s recent divorce from Ralph Barton. Nor could he know that Carlotta at this time was in the midst of an agonizing correspondence with Barton, who, as devastated as she was by their breakup, had fled abroad. From France, Barton had launched an epistolary campaign to win her back.
His most recent letter, received by Carlotta in early June, had told of his despair over their separation, and his inability to concentrate on his work as a caricaturist.
“I think I made a hideous mistake in letting you get away from me,” Barton wrote. “I am horribly afraid that the old nonsense about there being one woman in the world for each man is not, after all, nonsense. I am beginning to cringe under the thought that I need desperately what was fine between us and that I can never find it again. This is what you said would happen and I believe you were right. If it turns out that you were, I don’t think I want to live any more.”
He pleaded with Carlotta to “throw everything in the air, get on the next boat with a free mind, uneaten by memories of what has gone by.”
He swore he had learned his lesson. If she did not come, he wrote, “I will shoot myself with a French pistol”—a variation on suicide threats he often made (and that his friends dismissed as posturing). “I am miserable and hopeless and weep.”
Carlotta was tempted to forgive Barton, and wrote him so. She received his reply a few days after her encounter with the O’Neills at Marbury’s home.
“Your letter just here with your impulse to take the boat. I wish you had obeyed the impulse. . . . I can’t see anything else for us but to forget all this damned nonsense and come back together again, really. . . . Be calm. Sleep! All will arrange itself. I love you.”
Carlotta appears to have persuaded herself that Barton’s faithlessness was a result of her mistreating him, and she wrote as much.
“You didn’t fail with me, as you say,” Barton wrote back on July 28. “What an imbecile I was—but what a good husband I shall make you after this! It was I who failed w
ith you. We are coming together again—we have never been apart.”
Swearing his devotion, Barton informed her he would sail home on September 15. But Carlotta could not have found much comfort in Barton’s concluding remarks, in which he described a prospective leisurely tour of Rome, Florence, Rapallo (“to see Max Beerbohm”), Venice, and Salzburg, and concluding with a tour by car in the south of France.
“Then home to you,” he wrote blithely. “I somehow feel that we both still need this time between.” It sounded as though—believing he’d won her back—Barton no longer felt any urgency to reclaim her.
Carlotta by now must have been beset by second thoughts about the wisdom of her submission. In any event, there was, after all, no reconciliation. After receiving that letter (probably in early August), she considered her relationship with Barton over (although Barton emphatically did not).
Conceivably, she had already begun to think of O’Neill as a romantic replacement. She couldn’t help but realize he was more of a prize than Barton—more famous, more handsome, more serious about his work, more needy of a muse. She didn’t think it was beyond her power to enchant him.
On August 18, answering a letter from New London friends who inquired about his vacation in Maine, O’Neill casually commented that there were “quite a few theater people” at Belgrade Lakes—“Florence Reed [the actress] just a quarter mile away and Carlotta Monterey, the famous beauty (she played in my Hairy Ape in New York at the Plymouth Theatre) visiting not far away.”