By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  • • •

  DURING THAT STEAMY Bermuda summer of 1927, Agnes somehow managed to take a clinical view of O’Neill’s suffering. She was grateful that at least he was showing no sign of backsliding into alcoholic oblivion, and she finally decided, at the end of August, that the best way to cope with his fretfulness was to send him off at once to New York rather than await the expected summons from the Theatre Guild in early fall. He could get himself organized there, she told him, and be on hand whenever the Guild was ready for him. He could also avail himself of the specialized medical checkups he required for the lingering aftereffects of the flu that had recently plagued him.

  She vetoed O’Neill’s suggestion that they open Brook Farm so that he would have a place near the city to escape to when needed, a space for the whole family once she and the children joined him. Agnes argued that it would be impossible: the house was almost stripped of furniture, she said, and it would be too expensive and impractical to move the family there, especially since a buyer might turn up at any time and wish to occupy the place.

  Agnes was aware that Carlotta was due back from Europe in early September, but she had brought herself to accept her husband’s repeated assurances that the affair was over; he promised that if he happened to run into Carlotta, it would be as a friend only (and perhaps he’d actually managed to talk himself into believing that).

  Almost as if to convince himself (let alone Agnes) that he no longer needed Carlotta, on the night before his departure, O’Neill made ardent love to his wife. Under brilliant starlight, they frolicked passionately in a steamer chair on the stone plaza fronting the house.

  Although Agnes was reassured, her trust in her husband was misplaced; his lovemaking under the stars proved to be no more than a ruse to secure her continued devotion. He had never ceased to hunger for the irresistible Carlotta and he fully intended to renew his affair with her upon her arrival home on September 9. As for Carlotta, like a cat watching a mouse hole, she was ready to pounce.

  • • •

  ON AUGUST 29, O’Neill once again took up residence at the Wentworth. He was now swimming the existential race of his life, with only the most confused notion of where (or indeed if) he would be flung ashore.

  His somewhat haphazard jaunt to New York did not begin propitiously. The city in those days virtually emptied during the hot summer months. Langner was on vacation and Theresa Helburn, the only other Guild director still in town, was ill. With eleven days before Carlotta’s return from Europe, O’Neill cast about for some sort of diversion. But all his friends were away and those with country houses were entertaining guests and had no room for him.

  Very much at loose ends, and overwhelmed by self-pity, O’Neill turned on his usual scapegoat. He wrote to Agnes, berating her for having “acted wrongly” in refusing to move into Brook Farm. “It is not good for me to be lonely and homeless under the most unfortunate conditions when I’m sick in the bargain,” he scolded, presumably laying the groundwork for the self-justifying defense he’d need when he resumed his affair with Carlotta.

  “You have thought of yourself and the inconvenience that moving the kids would cause you,” he insisted, “but you have not considered me or my work—or even my health; and I tell you again it is not fair!”

  Not bothering to veil his threat, he warned Agnes that leaving him homeless was “dangerous” for their future. “By the time rehearsals start, I ought to be a fine morbid wreck.” He couldn’t resist a meanly sneering postscript: “The alcoholic days were much pleasanter!”

  All too familiar with her husband’s posturing, Agnes allowed his epistolary spite to glide by. She was relieved when O’Neill shifted his fury to the Theatre Guild after Theresa Helburn, on September 2, informed him Marco Millions could not be produced until January and that Strange Interlude (if indeed the Guild ultimately committed to producing it) would also have to wait for a January opening.

  Just as in the bad old days, O’Neill found himself waiting on a producer’s whim. Moreover, without the prospect of an imminent production, he would have no excuse to dally in New York with Carlotta. Still, on September 8, with Carlotta expected back the next day, he wrote Agnes without apparent qualm that he was “longing most damnably” for the time when his “Own Little Wife” would be in his arms again and advised her not to “worry about anything!”

  It was, however, Carlotta’s arms that held him the following day. And it took her only three days to all but persuade him that it was she and not Agnes for whom he had been “longing most damnably” and whom he could not live without.

  The ensuing seven-page letter he sent to Agnes was a lordly mélange of guilty dissemblance and self-justifying anger (not to mention literary posturing). His letter veered from wild accusation to professions of tenderness and back again.

  He was writing to her, he said, while sitting alone in his stuffy hotel room, “looking out over the dirty, smelly, roofs and streets, feeling low and sick and depressed and lonely.” Then—oh so casually—he mentioned he’d had lunch with Carlotta and remarked that Baden-Baden had done her a lot of good “in appearance and nerves.”

  Shamelessly fishing for sympathy, he told his “Dearest Aggie” that Carlotta had noticed how thin and ill he looked, adding, “She’s quite right.” Abruptly, he demanded to know why this was all happening to him, and what he had done to Agnes that he should be treated this way.

  Then, summoning the trusty device of accusing the injured party of one’s own misdeeds, he charged Agnes with having a lover. That, he snapped, would explain why she’d deliberately left him alone in New York. She didn’t care what he did.

  “Do you want me to love someone else?” he demanded. “What sort of game is this you’re playing, Agnes?” Picking up steam, he launched into a madman’s soliloquy:

  “Either I’m crazy, or you are! Probably I am, anyway.” He fervently wished he “could escape from this obscene and snaily creeping tedium of dull days, and empty hours like nervous yawns, into some madness—of love or lust or drink or anything else!”

  He said he was “beginning to crack,” and then softened his tone: “Oh well, I suppose it isn’t as desperate as it feels now”—after which he offered a blatantly false “synopsis of this long story.” He said he was not well, he was lonely, he loved her. “That’s the whole case in a nutshell,” he ended, signing himself “Your Gene.”

  Letters between New York and Bermuda took their time, for the boat that carried them sailed only twice a week. Before receiving O’Neill’s rant, Agnes, in a loving letter, had encouraged him “to try & get some sort of enjoyment out of life that will compensate for drinking,” hastily adding, “This does not mean I am trying to force you into a love affair!” (It is to be hoped that O’Neill, on receiving this letter, had the grace to blush.)

  When Agnes eventually received that unhinged seven-page missive, she swiftly fought back. He certainly must realize, she said, that the idea of her having a lover was “from any angle absurd.” Who could he possibly suspect? “God damn it,” she fumed, “if you knew how damned bored and lonely I was here—never mind, I think I’ll pack up & arrive in New York, kids & all—then we’ll see how that will work.”

  As for his threat of taking to drink or a love affair, Agnes smugly responded, “Well, do it. (Love not drink).” She seemed unperturbed by Carlotta’s reentry into her husband’s life; either she chose to believe his relationship with Carlotta actually was platonic—as O’Neill kept insisting—or perhaps she was thinking a fling with Carlotta would once and for all get her out of his system.

  She shifted to a subject O’Neill had become expert at dodging—her lack of cash for household expenses and for ongoing repairs to Spithead. Work had stopped, she said, and she was no longer interested in doing anything about their dream house. She was tired of hearing again “the old mistrust” and almost wished there was “an interesting man around somewhere.” Didn�
��t he realize that letters like his were enough to make a woman go out looking for a lover? “Damn you anyhow Gene—something must be all wrong for you to say such things.”

  She was glad, she concluded, that “Carlotta’s nerves are gone. Do you think she would be interested in taking charge of Spithead? If so, tell her I’ve given up the job.” There was pathos in her afterthought: Carlotta, she wrote, “is certainly much more beautiful than I am.”

  It’s conceivable that rumors had reached O’Neill of an affair between Agnes and John Johnston, the head carpenter on the Spithead renovations. He was a married man, six feet two, blond, blue-eyed, the son of a white father and black mother. This putative affair was recorded by a later owner of Spithead, Joy Bluck Waters, who published what she described as a “glimpse of the lives” of the O’Neill family in Bermuda; she recorded the gossip about Agnes’s involvement with Johnston—gossip, she said, that had circulated for years among island contemporaries of the O’Neills.

  One of the rumors concerning the O’Neills (still according to Joy Bluck Waters) was that their housekeeper, Gaga, had begun to spy on Agnes and had reported to O’Neill (presumably by letter) that Agnes was romantically involved with Johnston.

  Agnes was enraged, wrote Waters, when O’Neill passed on Gaga’s suspicions, and immediately fired her, putting her on the next boat out of Bermuda. The truth of this rumor is at least partly supported by a letter from O’Neill to Agnes when, six months later, he learned of Gaga’s dismissal and of Agnes’s refusal, despite Gaga’s apologies and pleas, to take her back.

  “God damn it, Agnes, whatever her faults, we’ve both loved her, our children have loved her, and she’s loved all of us, and stuck to us since Shane was born.” He scolded Agnes for holding against Gaga what he termed her “idiotic” gossiping, thus “wounding an old woman who has been a good friend to us, if there ever was one.”

  Gossip or not, it would hardly have been surprising if Agnes had indeed succumbed to the handsome Spithead carpenter. During the Bermudian summer, with its thinned population, Agnes had little if any congenial companionship. O’Neill had left her alone in Bermuda with insufficient cash, expecting her to cajole Johnston and his helpers into continuing the major repairs to their too-large, too-expensive home. O’Neill also had burdened her with the sole responsibility for their children and household staff. Agnes surely couldn’t help but envy her husband’s busy creative life away from her (no matter how bleakly he described his existence).

  On September 16, 1927, O’Neill at last received definite word that the Guild would produce Strange Interlude—but not until late January, following the opening of Marco Millions on January 9. While he had contrived to stretch out his stay in New York, he knew Agnes would now expect him to return to Bermuda and stay there with her until he was needed for rehearsals in mid-November. Hastily forestalling her threat to join him in New York with their children, he promised he would return to Bermuda soon.

  It was Agnes herself who inadvertently provided a reprieve when she suggested he pay a second visit to the astrologist Evangeline Adams. He did so, and Adams warned him not to embark for Bermuda before his birthday on October 16, enabling him to celebrate the occasion with Carlotta.

  As it happened, Carlotta had just about convinced him to leave his marriage, and he was almost ready to abandon his double game.

  28

  By early winter of 1927, O’Neill and Carlotta were no longer concealing their love affair from close friends. Lawrence Langner, for one, knew they were seeing each other daily.

  “He told me he had fallen in love with her,” Langner recalled. “He said one reason he got on so well with her was that she was such a good manager; she arranged for railroad tickets, and so forth. Agnes could seldom plan ahead; she was easygoing and helpless, and needed to be looked after by him. But it wasn’t until later that year, in November or December during rehearsals of Marco Millions and Strange Interlude, that he talked to me about divorcing Agnes.”

  O’Neill and Carlotta had begun plotting their secret getaway while celebrating O’Neill’s thirty-ninth birthday on October 16. Their long-range plan was to sail for Europe on February 10, eleven days after the opening of Strange Interlude; they agreed that for their plan to succeed, Agnes had to be kept in the dark. Savoring victory, Carlotta cautioned O’Neill not to “shoot the works” when he returned to Bermuda on October 19.

  Within a few days of rejoining his family, O’Neill wrote to Carlotta, assuring her he had said “nothing at all” to Agnes. The next four weeks in the Spithead household throbbed with tension. Agnes, still sharing her husband’s bed, was unaware of the depth of his perfidy. She felt oppressed, however, by his emotional distance; ironically, after having helped him to sobriety, she herself now began to seek solace in alcohol.

  To her terminally ill father, she divulged two terrifying hallucinatory episodes. “I was wide awake, couldn’t sleep,” she wrote to him,

  when something came into the room. I cannot describe it, as it had no form, was more like a force; but I had a terrible feeling of horror, as though it was something evil. It came up close by the bed, and I cannot say that it touched me, as it had no hands or form, but it seemed somehow to come in contact with me, and I was unable to move or speak, though I could see everything in the room quite clearly.

  Then, two nights later the same thing happened. I seemed to be in a trance, felt this formless thing, when suddenly a little wizened, naked baby appeared and began to nurse! You can imagine how I felt! The poor child seemed to be starving; well I made a final effort and sat up in bed, and it disappeared.

  She had never before experienced anything of this sort, she told her father. She had heard that the bones of some murder victims had been discovered in the cellar of Spithead, and she was trying to find out if one of the victims had been a baby. “The queer part of it,” continued Agnes, was that she was in a trancelike state, awake and “able to see the room, and Gene all the time.”

  When O’Neill left Bermuda for New York on November 17, for the casting of Marco Millions, he knew he would never go back. He continued to write chattily to Agnes, nonchalantly dropping Carlotta’s name from time to time (in case she should hear any rumors); they had attended a concert together to evaluate possible background music for Marco, he wrote toward the end of November. His big news was that he’d accepted an offer of $30,000 for Brook Farm, glad finally to get rid of it “even at a loss.”

  In early December, O’Neill cautioned Agnes not to count on the cash from the Brook Farm sale to pay for additional renovations to Spithead, as he was going to invest the money as a cushion against lean years, should his plays end up as flops. “If you think anything of my peace of mind,” he warned, “don’t go making plans for Spithead beyond what we’ve already agreed on.”

  Uneasy about Agnes’s decision to attend the opening nights of Marco (on January 9) and Interlude (three weeks later), he told her, with feigned sympathy, that he would understand if her chores regarding the final vacating of Brook Farm prevented her presence in New York; he said she could see the plays just as well after their opening nights.

  He was now eager to gain possession of his papers and he contrived an excuse for asking Agnes to send him all the original scripts of his plays. He needed them immediately because a prominent dealer in rare books was interested in trying to sell them on his behalf.

  “It could be a big ‘ace in the hole’ for us and the kids,” he cajoled, issuing complicated instructions about how to pack the stored manuscripts and how to ship them securely. “Be sure to send everything you find,” he said, stressing that the dealer must be convinced the set was complete.

  On December 9, O’Neill informed Agnes he’d taken an hour off to buy Christmas toys at F.A.O. Schwarz for Shane and Oona; if he couldn’t find “anything good” for her, he said, he would send her a check. The harsh words with which he chose to close his letter signaled that the chara
de was over. The time had come, he announced, for both of them to reach a new understanding. He now had “a real objective perspective on things,” he wrote, and suggested she go out and enjoy herself; she was free to pursue her life “in whatever freedom you desire as I am with mine.”

  Whatever Agnes’s response, it provoked an openly hostile letter from O’Neill a few days before Christmas. Although he began neutrally with progress reports on Marco and Interlude, he interrupted himself with the caustic apology that it was “tactless” of him to speak so much about his plays when it was “quite evident” she was not interested, since she never mentioned them.

  “You can’t hurt me any more, thank God!” thundered O’Neill. “You’ve tortured your last torture as far as I’m concerned. Something in me is so damn utterly dead that I don’t care about anything anymore except my work.”

  More calmly, he rationalized that what had happened to him and Agnes was “simply the curse of the soul’s solitude, the grinding, disintegrating pressure of time.” He would always be her friend, he assured her, although he feared that as a husband he’d been “a miserable misfit.” Thinking better of it, he brazenly attempted to shift onto Agnes the entire blame for their failed marriage: “Look into your own heart and face the truth! You don’t love me any more. You haven’t for a long time.”

  It wasn’t until a week later that O’Neill stopped jabbing at Agnes and delivered what he must have regarded as a well-considered knockout punch. His announcement was clumsy and insulting; it was expressed in language more appropriate for a Ladies’ Home Journal romance writer than for America’s most distinguished dramatist. It’s quite possible that Carlotta had dictated much of it.

  He was leaving Agnes, said O’Neill, for “someone else.” Withholding the name of that “someone” (as if Agnes could possibly be in any doubt), he dribbled on about how he loved that someone “most deeply,” and how that someone “loved him.” He felt it would be “impossible” for him to live with Agnes even were she willing.