by Arthur Gelb
Then, reverting to the ingrained helplessness he often affected with his women, he shifted the burden to her. What did she think he ought to do? “You have a much better head for this than I,” he wrote, attempting to soften his effrontery with blandishment. “Try and tell me, Beloved One, whose heart is now my heart. . . . My love, I adore you! Do not forget me!”
O’Neill might not yet have realized it, but in Carlotta he had at long last found the mother substitute he’d been pining for, just as Carlotta was happy to avow, “This Lover of mine is also my child.”
• • •
IT WOULD TAKE Carlotta a little more than a year to pry O’Neill away from Agnes, his children, and the Bermuda dream home he would never see completed.
As the rites of seduction go, that doesn’t seem a long time, especially since, during much of that year, O’Neill was profoundly occupied with his triple-length Strange Interlude—another career milestone and one that was to bring him the greatest fame and fortune he’d yet experienced.
Between October 20, 1926, when he’d had his first acknowledged date with Carlotta, and February 10, 1928 (a year and four months later), when he and Carlotta eloped, O’Neill was in an erotic and creative turmoil that was vividly reflected in his “lady play.”
He’d actually had the original idea for Strange Interlude as early as March 1925, even before completing The Great God Brown; but it wasn’t until that September that he got around to writing a scenario, and it was not until May 1926 that he hit on the technique of spoken asides; “speech-thought method,” he called it.
“I did most of a second scene two separate times and tore them up before I got started on the really right one!” O’Neill wrote to Macgowan three months later, on August 7, 1926. He added that there was going to be more work on Strange Interlude “than on any previous one—with no end to the going over & over it, before I’ll be willing to call it done.”
His work, he explained, was “much deeper and more complicated now” and he was less easily satisfied with what he used to dash off.
This new depth and complexity had coincided with the beginning of his dalliance with Carlotta, when he subtly began to incorporate her essence into the multifaceted character of Nina Leeds (along with the flock of lovers—not excluding Agnes—who’d previously roiled his life).
Macgowan, who was by now in O’Neill’s confidence about the love affair, was perplexed upon receiving a letter from O’Neill two days after his return to Bermuda, in which he more or less avowed his hapless intention to hold on to both Agnes and Carlotta. In one breath, O’Neill affirmed his love for Agnes and his children, insisting that nothing could ever take their place; in the next, he spoke of his longing for Carlotta.
“Oh Christ,” he agonized to Macgowan, “there are also other things—‘on the other side of the hills’—the curse of being an extremist is that every ideal remains single and alone, demanding all-or-nothing or destruction.” Macgowan worried about the game his friend was playing.
• • •
IN BERMUDA, Agnes greeted O’Neill with the news that her father, Teddy, suffering from an advanced case of tuberculosis, was about to be confined to a sanatorium. Obliged to give Agnes some husbandly solace, he postponed the confession of his love for Carlotta. But he couldn’t put her out of his mind, any more than he could stop thinking about Strange Interlude.
“With all that’s inside me now I ought to be able to explode in that play in a regular blood-letting,” he wrote to Macgowan on December 7. He enclosed a $25 check with his letter, asking his friend to send Carlotta a bouquet of roses attached to a note he was also enclosing “to get to her on Christmas a.m.”
It wasn’t long before O’Neill, despite Agnes’s growing worry over her father, felt he could no longer keep his new love a secret. Confessing he’d fallen in love with Carlotta, he nevertheless swore he loved Agnes as well and promised he would never leave their marriage.
Metaphorically hopping from one foot to the other, he immediately reported this conversation with Agnes to Carlotta. Sounding a lot like the befuddled Dion Anthony of The Great God Brown, he said Agnes was “being very fine about it” and had even offered to set him free. Then, back on the other foot, he solemnly assured Agnes that he and Carlotta had not slept together.
So much for not being able to live a lie. (O’Neill took the precaution, a few months later, of warning Agnes to be on guard against malicious gossip about him and Carlotta from any putative friends; Agnes should, he said, “shut them up” at the first word; “After all, we’ve got to remember I’m in the ‘show business’ and a good subject to hang any rag of scandal upon.”)
It’s difficult to imagine what Agnes did believe. Dr. Hamilton would have recognized that O’Neill was “acting out,” as he so often tended to do; he was watching himself play with fire, fascinated by his own daring. He tried to explain his bipolar tendencies to a none-too-pleased Carlotta:
“I have always been either hilariously shooting in on the crest of a wave or else bogged down up to my neck in a swamp. The dry, warm sure-footed ground was the one place where I was never taught to walk. So I finally escaped on to the plane of my work where I can always dance and drown and be reborn to dance and drown again. When work wouldn’t come I had to escape via masks of solitude, alcoholic and otherwise, provided only they were excessive.”
Agnes, thoroughly aware of O’Neill’s weakness, tried to keep her balance. It helped that she could summon the memory of how O’Neill had dithered, years earlier, when faced with the choice of staying with her or resubmitting to the tempting Louise Bryant. As she had done at that time, Agnes evidently decided to wait him out.
Concurrently, a bemused Carlotta was wondering what she’d let herself in for; it looked as if the path to becoming Mrs. Eugene O’Neill was going to be a steep climb, and she communicated her distress to him.
After reading and rereading Carlotta’s letters, O’Neill wrote to her at the end of December, expressing his acute distress at learning she was suffering over him. He said she had thrown him into “a terrible state of guilty conscience and self-loathing.” He couldn’t bear to think it was he who was causing her pain. She ought to put him out of her life—but he couldn’t bear to lose her love.
O’Neill realized he was cornered, but he was unwilling to confess that what he really wanted was an extramarital love affair that he could turn on and off at his convenience. With a startling lack of guile, he had thought—after having candidly declared his love for both Carlotta and Agnes—that he had the situation under control. At the time, Carlotta—as fearful of losing O’Neill as he was of losing her—had meekly accepted his determination to stay married to Agnes; but, in fact, she had planned to wheedle him out of that decision.
It distressed O’Neill that Carlotta now appeared to be seeking a deeper commitment. Unwilling to confront the reason for her discontent, O’Neill once again tried to foist on her the responsibility of resolving his dilemma:
“What can I do? What must I do? Haven’t you an answer, Dear One?”
Perhaps predictably, he pushed aside his personal quandary and prepared to throw himself back into his writing. To Macgowan, on December 30, he wrote, “I am intending to start work on Strange Interlude tomorrow . . . one year on the wagon, my boy! I am going to drink fifty lime squashes watching the new year in.”
26
With Agnes waiting him out in Bermuda and Carlotta stewing in New York, it was going to take O’Neill more than lime squashes to sail unscathed through the squalls of 1927.
Launched on his second year of sobriety, he was wrestling with his need for both women while also attempting to portray that need through his Everywoman, Nina Leeds.
As he told Kenneth Macgowan in mid-January, he was “groaning in spirit and sweating blood” over his nine-act Strange Interlude. Throughout January and February, he wrote and revised, often working eleven hours at a
stretch, taking breaks only for meals, a daily swim, and an occasional inspection of the slow-moving renovation of the house at Spithead.
O’Neill wrote only occasionally to his “Dearest Carlotta,” and then it was about his play. When exhilarated by work that was going well, he existed in a world apart.
At such times, no one was real to him but the characters in the play he was writing. He expressed his absolute ruthlessness in a note for an autobiographical work labeled “Modern Faust Play” (never written), in which a terminally ill writer makes a bargain with “the spirit of God” to trade not only his fame and money, but the lives of his wife and children, for time to finish his life’s work.
So wrapped up was O’Neill in Interlude, he barely registered Carlotta’s news from New York that she was planning a trip to Europe from mid-June to early September. She evidently intended the trip to test the strength of O’Neill’s attachment to her; perhaps she hoped that the threat of her extended absence would lure him back to New York in time to prevent her departure—and might even bring him around to committing himself to her.
But O’Neill, distanced from the spell of Carlotta’s potent sexuality, did not take the bait. “God knows when we will see each other again!” he wrote to her. “Probably not until you return in the fall.” He explained he was obliged to stay put in Bermuda for financial reasons. He sounded resigned: “I want you in my life,” he wrote, “but I know I am losing you.” He has loved her “deeply,” he added, “but now Carlotta leaves me and becomes a dream.”
O’Neill and Carlotta nonetheless continued to correspond. Still in New York that March, she welcomed the news that O’Neill had completed Strange Interlude. All his feelings about it now, he said, were confined to “deep joy that such a ‘work’ is out of my system. I’m exhausted and pining to rest.” His face, he said, was “all caved in as if some vampire had been ‘scoffing’ my life up!”
What he didn’t tell Carlotta was that his exhaustion arose partly from his effort to cope with a sulky, disconcerted Agnes; she had waited long enough for him to decide between her and Carlotta, and was pressuring him to resolve their triangular quandary. Although still vacillating, O’Neill helped Agnes move out of the cramped Spithead gatehouse in which they’d been living and into the main house. While there was as yet considerable renovation work in progress, the house was now livable and even comfortable enough to accommodate visitors.
Among their earliest was Eugene Jr., on his spring vacation. Now nearly seventeen, he was six feet tall and—to his father’s delight—had developed an interest in Shakespeare. “I find him a son I can well take a paternal pride in,” O’Neill wrote to Carlotta. “He is my sort.”
Also visiting were James Light with his new wife, Patty; they had been invited to spend several weeks as a wedding present from O’Neill and Agnes. According to Patty, there was “a good deal of domestic tension” throughout their stay. Agnes was not even on hand to greet them when they arrived. O’Neill explained he and Agnes had quarreled and that Agnes had “gone off somewhere.”
Other friends who visited also found the household in disarray. The writer Bessie Breuer recalled that Agnes “didn’t seem able to cope with anything. She would have trouble even in finding a shoe.” Unlike most of their friends, Breuer regarded O’Neill as a devoted parent. “Gene was in a dream most of the time,” she insisted, and “that gave people the impression he may not have been paying attention to his children, but actually he was terribly attached to them.”
Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, who spent six weeks at Spithead during March and April, thought otherwise. “It seemed to me that Shane was neglected by both Gene and Agnes. Once I found Shane walking and shivering by himself near the water in the late afternoon. I took him into the house and asked him if he wanted me to read to him. He was delighted.”
The O’Neills had invited Sergeant to Spithead to recuperate from injuries recently suffered in a traffic accident in New York. She had been on her way home from her publisher’s office, after picking up an advance copy of her book Fire Under the Andes (a collection of profiles, including one about O’Neill called “Man with a Mask”) when a truck crashed into her taxi.
Upon her arrival at Spithead, Sergeant was taken aback when Agnes told her O’Neill wouldn’t allow liquor in the house because he wasn’t drinking, but that Sergeant could have a private bottle of brandy to keep in her closet if she wished. Later in Sergeant’s visit, Agnes confided she had fallen in love with O’Neill and married him because he was drunk all the time and needed her help. Agnes thought she was marrying a bohemian, she told Sergeant; she enjoyed going to cocktail parties, but Gene seldom wanted to, and so she sometimes went by herself.
It seemed to Sergeant that Agnes believed O’Neill was helplessly dependent on her. She had the impression, though, that “Gene was getting less dependent on her since he had given up drinking,” and that Agnes “was foolishly overconfident of him.”
• • •
THE THEATRE GUILD’S Lawrence Langner had heard rumors that O’Neill was at work on a highly original new play, and in early March 1927 he decided to combine a vacation in Bermuda with a business visit to the playwright. Their encounter would set O’Neill on a new professional course. Up to now, his relations with Langner had been no more cordial than with any other Broadway producer; the Guild, in fact, had been among the producers who had rejected several of O’Neill’s earlier efforts, including Anna Christie, a decision Langner deeply regretted.
Most recently, the Guild had been halfheartedly negotiating for Marco Millions, but what Langner was really interested in was learning about O’Neill’s new play in progress. Pretending an enthusiasm for Marco, Langner got in touch with O’Neill. He was not disappointed.
Although O’Neill listened somewhat skeptically to Langner’s assurance that the Guild wanted to mount Marco in the coming season, he couldn’t resist telling the producer all about Strange Interlude. Among the play’s other innovations, he revealed that its characters would speak their private thoughts aloud. “The idea fascinated me,” recalled Langner. O’Neill also mentioned that the play would take six hours to perform. Langner was undaunted, recalling his experience with Shaw’s marathon Back to Methuselah. Langner asked if he might read the script.
“All night long I read and read,” Langner remembered, “and at four o’clock in the morning, my eyes strained and throbbing, I finished the sixth act. I judged it one of the greatest plays of all time.”
O’Neill informed Langner he had offered the role of Nina Leeds to the mighty Broadway leading lady Katharine Cornell, who was currently reading the script; if she agreed to play Nina, her husband, Guthrie McClintock, would direct and the choice of producer would be theirs. But if Cornell turned Interlude down, the Guild could produce it. (Cornell subsequently did turn it down.)
On the day following Langner’s reading of the script, he was “all steamed up about it,” as O’Neill reported to Macgowan. Not optimistic about Cornell, O’Neill told Macgowan he was hopeful Langner could communicate his enthusiasm to his Guild colleagues, for he was “in a bad way with no prospects.”
Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant recalled that Langner, while assuring O’Neill he very much wanted to do the play, said he was certain it wouldn’t run for more than a few weeks. Sergeant, who listened with interest to O’Neill and Langner’s shop talk, said that Agnes at one point walked out, later telling Sergeant she “simply couldn’t stand any more talk about the theater.”
O’Neill originally had thought the nine acts of Interlude would have to be presented on two consecutive evenings, but Langner eventually convinced him that it could be performed in one evening if (like the Guild’s production of Back to Methuselah) it began at 5:15 instead of 8. Including a seventy-five-minute dinner intermission, it would still end only a little past 11.
When Langner left Bermuda, O’Neill promised to send him the finished script as soon as he h
ad edited it. Langner in turn promised O’Neill he would try to obtain a quick decision about a production date for Marco Millions.
In the end, though, O’Neill changed his mind about editing Interlude. When Sergeant left Bermuda on April 4, he entrusted the unedited script to her for delivery to the Guild. To Langner, he wrote that he was “too close” to the play to do a good job of editing: “I would have liked to let this play rest for a couple of months more at least and then go over it before submitting it to anyone, but as you told me you are now in the midst of plans for next season, I am taking a chance on its present form.”
Soon after, Langner reported to O’Neill that the first reaction of the Theatre Guild board was “favorable.” He didn’t mention that not all board members shared his own enthusiasm; one thought the play would be greatly improved if all the asides were deleted, and others felt it needed serious cutting.
On April 21, Langner wrote his board “a stinging letter,” as he put it, pointing out that in Interlude the Guild probably had “the bravest and most far-reaching dramatic experiment which has been seen in the theater since the days of Ibsen. If we fail to do this great experiment, if we lack the courage and the vision, then we should forever hang our heads in shame.”
• • •
WHILE LANGNER WAS extolling O’Neill for his daring and assurance as an artist, O’Neill was berating himself as a man too timid and perplexed to make a choice between wife and mistress.
A week earlier, O’Neill had had a nervous collapse after Agnes hurriedly left Bermuda to be at the bedside of her father, now dying of tuberculosis. (Teddy Boulton was confined at the Laurel Heights Sanatorium in Shelton, Connecticut, on the site of the TB hospital where O’Neill briefly had been a patient in 1912.)