by Arthur Gelb
Florence Reed, who, with her actor husband, Malcolm Williams, owned a showplace with its own sandy beach and picture-perfect garden, inadvertently provided O’Neill and Carlotta with a trysting place. Reed, recently triumphant as Mother Goddam, the whorehouse proprietor in the Broadway production of The Shanghai Gesture, had long kept a sisterly eye on O’Neill.
“Gene was extremely shy, dear, sweet, and gentle,” she said.
He would paddle over in his canoe to our beach almost every afternoon about two and I’d take out one of our canoes and paddle across the lake, which was about a mile wide, with Gene swimming alongside. He’d use the sidestroke and talk to me all the while he was swimming. On the other shore he’d rest about twenty minutes and then swim back, using the backstroke.
Once he told me about Lazarus Laughed while he was swimming, and another time he described the plot and characters of Strange Interlude. When we’d get back to my house, there’d be a tray with drinks waiting; Gene always took tea.
One afternoon when we’d just gotten back from a canoe-swim trip, and Gene was sitting on the porch drying off in his bathing suit, we heard a station wagon drive up. It was Bess Marbury and Carlotta and some other people, come over for a visit. Gene pussyfooted away when I went to receive them, but I saw that Carlotta spotted him as he walked through the garden toward his canoe, and that she talked with him.
When Marbury and her guests left, Reed noticed a scarf on the porch and she asked her husband if he had any idea whose it was. He said he thought it was Carlotta’s; he predicted she would be back for the scarf the following afternoon.
“What are you talking about?” asked Reed.
“I suppose you didn’t notice what happened this afternoon,” replied Williams.
“What happened?”
“Carlotta and Gene,” remarked Williams with a knowing smile.
The next afternoon, after O’Neill had arrived as usual, a station wagon drove up. “Carlotta got out,” said Reed, “and asked about her scarf. . . . She and Gene went off in his canoe together after they had talked a while.”
Reed was not surprised that O’Neill was attracted to Carlotta. “She was miraculously immaculate,” said Reed.
She never wore the same shirtwaist twice; she was a wonderful housekeeper. There was nobody like her. She kept the Marbury house going so beautifully. No staff of butlers could do it.
Agnes’s house, on the other hand, always seemed to smell of diapers and lamb stew. There was a lot of noise from the kids. It drove O’Neill almost out of his mind. He finally built himself a one-room plywood-tarpaper shack near the water, about a hundred yards from the house, to get away from the noise and the smells.
Barbara Burton later contradicted Reed’s account, recalling that she, Shane, and Eugene Jr. strictly observed the camp rule that demanded “absolute quiet” when O’Neill was writing. They would take themselves away from the cottage to fish at the water’s edge. “Shane caught the most,” Barbara remembered. “He seemed to have some affinity for the silent sitting and waiting involved in fishing.”
Florence Reed said that Agnes seemed to live in “mortal fear” of O’Neill. “She tried very hard to appease him. Once she drove over to my place alone, and when she started to leave, her car wheel got caught in a sapling and it took fifteen minutes to free it. She was in a terrible state because she thought she wouldn’t get back in time to fix Gene’s supper. Marbury, by the way, was very fond of Agnes and though she liked Carlotta, too, she was distressed when she realized that Gene seemed to be interested in Carlotta.”
Why the O’Neills had not managed to provide themselves with an efficient housekeeping staff and a comfortable place for O’Neill to work was a puzzle. Years later, Barbara Burton recalled that, while the atmosphere in the O’Neill household had seemed, on most of her visits, to be “happy,” she supposed that the last years were not.
“Looking back now,” she said, “I can realize that summer was probably the beginning of the end so far as my mother’s marriage to O’Neill was concerned. I recall a handsome dark-haired woman coming to swim there once and that she wore a boyish white wool-knit bathing suit, with no overskirt, such as bathing suits usually had at the time. I felt there was something very glamorous about this woman, who, in retrospect, I know was Carlotta Monterey. Toward the very end I felt the presence of some sadness which I had never felt in the O’Neill household.” As for Shane, he was more than content to fish and romp with his four-legged “buddy Finn.” He remembered the summer as “wonderful and happy.”
Reed and others were aware that Carlotta had made a friend of Agnes and the children. Carlotta’s revisionist tableau of that initial meeting in Maine, in which she sneered at Agnes as an odious yokel, is in stark contrast to the view she expressed in a note written around that time to her former agent and close friend, Lyman Brown.
Chatting about Florence Reed and other theater people at the lake, Carlotta wrote, “See a lot of Eugene O’Neill and family. Like them—”
O’Neill was clearly exhilarated by Carlotta’s unconcealed interest in him. In his Work Diary, he pointedly noted—without specifying the occasion or location—“Saw Carlotta on August 17, 19 and 21.”
It hadn’t taken long for O’Neill to grow fretful under the domestic arrangements he’d undertaken. He grumbled to Macgowan that he “could do with less progeny about.” He was, after all, not cut out “for a pater familias,” he said, “and children in squads, even when indubitably my own, tend to ‘get my goat.’”Nor was he unaware that Agnes, too, craved a release from the constant company of their children; they both could “do with more real friends to talk with.”
Less than a week later, Eugene Jr. and Barbara were gone. On August 10, Agnes, after presenting Barbara with “a five dollar gold piece and a box of candy,” asked Gaga to see her home.
“Gene seems to think it would be much better for his work if there were no kids here but Shane and Oona, though he hasn’t got a thing started so far this summer,” Agnes wrote to her mother and Budgie. “And as we have no prospective plays going on in the fall, Laz. and M. Millions both seeming to have a hard time getting any backers, I feel it is most important of all to do all I can to get him started. I hope it will be O.K.”
In fact, things were far from okay. The sense of helpless yearning O’Neill had hinted at to Macgowan in Brewster seven weeks earlier had been subtly exacerbated by his dalliance with Carlotta. He was not yet ready to confide in his old friend about his attraction to her, but he did write about his despairing state of mind.
While assuring Macgowan he had no desire to drink, he was feeling “the void” left by what he called “those companionable or (even when most horrible) intensely dramatic phantoms and obsessions which, with caressing claws in my heart and brain, used to lead me for weeks at a time . . . down the ever-changing vistas of that No-Mans-Land lying between the D.T.s and Reality as we suppose it.”
Perhaps he did not yet fully understand how much he longed to play solitaire with his scales, to take a headlong chance with his life. As with Poe’s “The Imp of the Perverse,” O’Neill saw himself standing “upon the brink of a precipice” and peering into it. In that diabolically brilliant story—a favorite of O’Neill’s—Poe describes the sinister intoxication of lingering at the brink, contemplating “the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height.” Poe goes on to imagine the “rushing annihilation . . . that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering,” and, he concludes, “for this very cause . . . do we the most impetuously approach it.”
Deterred from a plunge into the abyss of alcoholism, O’Neill evidently was seeking an equivalent emotional chasm—one that would shatter his unsatisfactory life pattern. He wasn’t long in finding that substitute. In his Work Diary on September 10, he noted, “(Saw Carlotta again.)” She was
shortly to end her visit with Elisabeth Marbury and return to New York. Although the diary entry was laconic, with no hint at any future meetings, O’Neill did not intend to let their flirtation end with her departure.
With Carlotta gone, however, there was less to distract him, and he soon found himself contentedly back at work on Strange Interlude. On October 3, Agnes, in a letter reporting the summer’s events to her ailing father, told him that O’Neill was attempting to put into his Strange Interlude script “all the advantages of a novel,” which was “most interesting and quite unlike anything I have ever read or seen.”
As for the rest of her family, she assured her father that she, Shane, and Oona were “in fine shape”; Oona, at eighteen months, “runs all around now.” Agnes herself had done “a little writing this summer, but not much.” She said she planned to invite her father and mother to visit in Bermuda as soon as “we get it all fixed the way we want it.”
O’Neill and Agnes left Loon Lodge on October 13. Accompanied by Shane, Oona, and Gaga, Agnes headed for a visit to her family’s Connecticut farm while O’Neill made his way to New York to pursue backing for Marco Millions.
“Hello, old Sweetheart!” O’Neill wrote to Agnes, as soon as he’d settled into the Harvard Club on October 14. After a chatty report of his activities, he ended, “I love you and miss you. There’s no one to confide in now.”
Three days later, he was earnestly confiding in Carlotta Monterey.
25
On his own in New York, O’Neill was avid to explore his galloping lust for Carlotta. He would have to work fast; it was now mid-October and he and Agnes were planning to move permanently to Bermuda at the end of November. On October 26, after spending two weeks at the Harvard Club, he settled at the Hotel Wentworth near Times Square; for a time it would serve as his theater district headquarters.
After returning from her visit to her family, Agnes was safely out of the way in Connecticut, sorting, packing, and readying Brook Farm for sale.
With Carlotta on his mind, O’Neill told Agnes he had to stay in New York to continue his search for a producer for Marco Millions, which David Belasco had finally turned down after months of shilly-shallying. Agnes grudgingly acceded to O’Neill’s plan.
While she labored over the shutting down of their home, O’Neill, on October 17, began surreptitiously meeting with Carlotta. He saw her seven times during the next five and a half weeks, punctiliously recording in his Work Diary the dates of their rendezvous—among them three lunches, a concert, and a dinner.
• • •
CARLOTTA CHOSE TO put a somewhat different spin on the beginning of her romance with the married O’Neill. Her version, plainly hyperbolic and self-serving, begins, like O’Neill’s, when he returned to New York from his summer sojourn in Maine. In this version (recollected three years after O’Neill’s death), he invites himself to tea at her apartment.
He drank four cups of tea. He sat there, looking like Hamlet in distress. He began to talk about his boyhood. He talked and talked as though he’d known me all his life. He began with his birth, with his earliest memories of babyhood.
“And,” Carlotta continued, “he talked and he talked, the whole time looking as if he were tortured. He talked about how he’d had no home, no mother in the real sense, no father in the real sense, and how emotionally deprived his childhood had been.
“Then suddenly he looked at the clock, and said, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve got to go,’ and off he flew. Then he rang up again, asking if he could come to tea again. I thought, What is this, that poor man. So I said, ‘Certainly.’ He began right where he’d left off the last time.”
Carlotta tried to evoke O’Neill’s pain as she groped to “recall” his account of his entry into the world, beginning with his mother’s labor in a Times Square hotel room.
There she was, in a hotel room again. She felt pains, and what not, and she rang for the maid and told her to go down to the bar and see if her husband was there, and tell him to come quick. So he came up quick. And she said [to her husband], “Get me a doctor, quick.” And this is what angers me, and upsets me.
They had no nurse arranged. They had no layette. They had nothing. And he goes downstairs, asking for the hotel doctor. Now you can imagine what the hotel doctor is like. He comes upstairs smoking a cigar, and he doesn’t even wash his hands. Well, she’s delivered of Eugene O’Neill. I’m surprised that he lived.
Her imaginative narrative went on:
I sat and listened, and at first I was a little worried and then I was deeply unhappy. I thought it was terrible that of all people to be so stricken, it should be this man, who had talent and had worked hard.
She spoke with a theatrical lilt, often interjecting her comments with a throaty laugh. She sounded rehearsed. “And his face would become sadder and sadder, and he would talk and talk, and then would rush out—and come back the next day and go on.”
Carlotta spoke with relish of her life with the man she referred to variously as “Gene,” “O’Neill,” and “the Master.” She often rambled, but her memories throbbed with the wonder and exultation of having captivated—and been held captive by—the extraordinary man who was her husband.
“Well, that’s what got me into trouble with O’Neill,” she said with a husky, self-mocking chuckle. “My maternal instinct came out—this man must be looked after, I thought. He broke my heart. I couldn’t bear that this child I had adopted should have suffered these things.”
She paused for effect; there’s no mistaking she once was an actress. “One day when he came to tea he had a bad cold—he always had a cold—and he looked at me with those tragic eyes and said, ‘I need you.’ He kept saying, ‘I need you, I need you’—never ‘I love you, I think you are wonderful’—just ‘I need you, I need you.’ Sometimes it was a bit frightening. Nobody had ever gritted their teeth at me that way and said they needed me. And he did need me, I discovered. He never was in good health, he always had a cold, he wasn’t properly fed or anything.”
Perhaps inadvertently, Carlotta allowed her narrative to drift into more revealing detail, as she described one of her dates with O’Neill that November:
I went to this frowzy hotel with rubber plants sitting around, and I went to the desk and said, “I have an appointment for lunch with Mr. O’Neill,” and they phoned up and said for me to go upstairs. I said, “Has he a sitting room?” They said, “Yes, he has a sitting room,” so I went up.
I wish you’d seen the sitting room. It had a table and a frowzy couch and a couple of chairs. I broke my nail and I said to him, “Have you a nail file, please?” And he went in to his frowzy little bedroom and he was fussing, fussing, fussing, and I said, “Do you want me to look?” I wish you’d seen his suitcase. It had nothing in it but a couple of frowzy, torn pajamas—no dressing gown, no bedroom slippers, no anything. That’s what got old, maternal Monterey, you see.
We went downstairs and had a not-too-good luncheon. And I said, “Thank you so much, what size is your neck?” And I went over to Abercrombie & Fitch and I bought him a fitted case, and pajamas and socks and a dressing gown and God knows what else, and sent them to him. Why, he nearly had fits when he got them. He’d never seen such things. [Prolonged throaty laughter.]
Clearly, Carlotta was allowing herself to be carried away. O’Neill was more than adequately clothed during the latter years of his marriage to Agnes. His Work Diary and letters not infrequently noted respectable purchases of both outer- and underwear, and in photographs he is always appropriately attired; Carlotta’s disparagement of O’Neill’s wardrobe was yet another postmortem jab at Agnes.
“I don’t know what his life was like,” Carlotta persisted, “but he didn’t have anything to wear. And he was working all the time, making money, and I don’t know where the money went.”
• • •
AGNES, STILL EMPTYING the house at Brook Farm in mid-November, began to f
eel lonely; O’Neill had managed only a three-day visit earlier in the month (continuing to use the excuse of meetings with producers, in addition to rehearsals for a routine off-Broadway revival of Beyond the Horizon). Leaving Shane and Oona with Gaga, Agnes joined her husband at the Wentworth for several days.
• • •
WHILE O’NEILL FELT GUILTY about his evolving love affair with Carlotta, he had no difficulty summoning his unremitting passion for Agnes. But as soon as Agnes left, he reconnected with Carlotta.
Agnes finally completed packing up Brook Farm and sailed with the children for Bermuda on November 21. Leaning on the excuse of having to await the opening of the Beyond the Horizon revival, O’Neill stayed behind at the Wentworth.
Once again unencumbered, he devoted himself for the next seven days to his new love. After the final rehearsal on November 26, he joined Carlotta in her apartment, not parting from her until 2:30 a.m. the following day. Giving himself just enough time to pack—and to send Carlotta roses—he boarded the November 27 steamer to Bermuda. It was not easy to tear himself away from Carlotta, but once Beyond the Horizon had opened, he had no further excuse to linger in New York.
Carlotta’s involuntary separation from O’Neill, just as he had begun to court her in earnest, was as frustrating to her as it was to him—although she strove, in her interviews with the authors, to give the opposite impression. For example, Carlotta declared that after that “not-too-good” lunch at the Wentworth, she did not hear from O’Neill “for months,” which was a blatant obfuscation.
In fact, in a letter he wrote almost the moment he stepped aboard the steamer that was carrying him back to Bermuda, O’Neill cried out to Carlotta of his “hell of lonely longing” for her, and spoke of “the great rare joy your love has given me . . . only just now you seem so far away, so lost to me. If I could only kiss you again, Carlotta.” Moreover, continuing his letter the following day, he made it plain that his and Carlotta’s intimacy had progressed to the point where he felt compelled to tell Agnes at once about his newfound love. “It will be kinder to all in the end,” he wrote, adding that he could not “live a lie.” He could hear Carlotta’s voice, he said, assuring him “everything will come out as we wish it.”