By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  In short, he wanted a divorce.

  It was not quite ten years since O’Neill—on the verge of marrying Agnes—had dismissed her rival Louise Bryant in language not dissimilar. If Agnes, once again at the apex of a love triangle, remembered those letters, she might have allowed herself an ironic grin.

  Now, naively, O’Neill invoked the pledge he and Agnes had made at the start of their marriage: if either ever fell in love with someone else, each would understand and readily let the other go. He was certain he could “accept the inevitable in that spirit” if their roles were reversed.

  He conceded there had been moments when their “old love flared into life again,” but the “moments of a very horrible hate have been more and more apparent, a poisonous bitterness and resentment, a cruel desire to wound, rage and frustration and revenge.” In such a climate, he pontificated, “no love, however strong, can continue to endure and live.”

  For Agnes, O’Neill’s patronizing tone did nothing to enhance his argument. He had chosen to present their breakup as a mutually satisfactory solution to their problems; he promised Agnes the use of Spithead for life, and an income sufficient for her “to live in dignity and comfort.”

  Foreseeing resistance, he reiterated that the only fair thing was for her to divorce him. He dismissed the details as something that could be talked over when next she came to New York.

  Agnes was flabbergasted. But she was far from flattened. Over the years, she had survived all too many hateful battles, each inevitably followed by a loving truce. Her husband’s virulent invective this time was to her mind just another of his episodic, half-mad eruptions—his adulterous ravings, his indifference to her humiliation, his self-centered assumption that their split was a fait accompli and that she would meekly accede to his idea of largesse.

  In point of fact, she still didn’t really believe the marriage was over. She accepted O’Neill’s infatuation. She acknowledged Carlotta’s beauty and sexual allure. But she underestimated the importance to O’Neill of Carlotta’s superb managerial skills, coupled with that liberating personal income (from Speyer) and her single-minded, self-sacrificing devotion to all of O’Neill’s needs, both artistic and personal.

  Agnes, convinced that she herself was the woman O’Neill truly needed for his survival, believed he would soon tire of Carlotta. She failed to recognize Carlotta as a force majeure. For that matter, Agnes sometimes wondered if she really even wanted to stay married to O’Neill. But she could not make up her mind to let him go, if for no other reason than, after all these erratic years, he was about to become more successful—and richer—than ever. Should she just hand him over to Carlotta? Or should she fight to keep him?

  Still ambivalent, Agnes notified O’Neill she was coming to New York to talk to him, leaving Shane and Oona in Bermuda in the care of servants (although she’d earlier claimed it “seemed impossible for the kids to be left here alone”).

  Carlotta, when informed by O’Neill of Agnes’s impending visit, sent Kenneth Macgowan a worried note, warning that O’Neill needed all his strength for work on the new productions. She pleaded with Macgowan to help O’Neill keep his balance.

  To O’Neill’s dismay, Agnes chose to check into the Wentworth. But not wishing to antagonize her, O’Neill suppressed his annoyance and took time off from rehearsals of Marco to meet with her for the purpose of negotiating the terms of the divorce. When she caught a cold, he knocked on her door to offer the use of his sunlamp. She was in her dressing gown, preparing for bed, and O’Neill briefly lost himself in one of those moments when their “old love flared into life again,” as Agnes had hoped it would. This, too, he confessed to Carlotta, who—with victory assured—found it expedient to forgive him.

  Agnes’s last-minute attempt to wrest O’Neill from Carlotta came to nothing, although she later used that final coupling in an attempt to blackmail him; she claimed, during their contentious divorce negotiations, to be pregnant with his child—a claim he furiously dismissed as a cheap ploy. (If she was pregnant, he said, it could not possibly be with his child.)

  Agnes’s daughter (recently turned twelve) was present on the day her mother and stepfather parted. As Barbara recalled, Agnes had summoned her to New York to join her in her final farewell to O’Neill. “I think he kissed me goodbye, too,” said Barbara. Presumably, Barbara returned to boarding school when her mother sailed back to Bermuda, well before the opening of Strange Interlude. Shortly after her departure, O’Neill wrote to Agnes, chastising her for having spent an extravagant $122 (on items unspecified) during her final two days at the Wentworth.

  On her return to Spithead, Agnes found a bewildered three-year-old Oona and a devastated eight-year-old Shane awaiting her. Shane’s beloved Finn had been murdered. As Barbara Burton sadly remembered, the “great big wonderful dog who wouldn’t harm a fly” had annoyed a neighbor with his barking “and the neighbor had instructed his butler to shoot the dog.” Years later, Shane’s daughter Sheila recalled, “He was all alone to deal with the death of his dog,” attributing this incident to her father’s depressive personality.

  Agnes saw no choice but to compound her children’s misery. As Shane later confided to his daughter, when Agnes had returned from New York, she told him and Oona “that Dad wasn’t ever coming back home. He left us all for that woman he met in Maine.”

  Perhaps Shane derived some consolation from a letter his father had sent him a few months earlier, attempting to assuage his guilt over his neglected son. Never emotionally comfortable with Shane, O’Neill was entirely at ease relating to him on a literary level. The letter was charming, tender, and cannily endearing; it was the prototype for other occasional letters written while Shane was very young.

  “Your Daddy—meaning myself—was certainly tickled to death to get your nice letter! It is very lonely for me living in this hotel where I don’t know anyone and I often think of you and Oona—and I miss you both like the devil! You mustn’t tell Oona this, though—at least when you tell her you must say ‘like the deuce’ instead of ‘like the devil’ for it isn’t polite to say ‘devil’ to ladies and Oona, let us hope, is a perfect lady!”

  He praised Shane’s prowess as “the prize fisherman of the O’Neill family” for having caught eight of “them yaller grunts” and also for his proficiency as a swimmer. “You’ll get to be such a good swimmer that one of these days I expect you’ll turn into one of ‘them yaller grunts’ yourself and swim out and leave us, and then we’ll have to set the fish pot to catch you and bring you home again!”

  • • •

  AGNES ADMITTED DEFEAT—but only tentatively. She proposed to O’Neill the idea of obtaining a divorce in Connecticut, but was dissuaded by his lawyer, Harry Weinberger, who said that among other complications, it would take much too long; he urged her to go to Reno without delay, a request personally endorsed by O’Neill.

  Agnes responded piteously to O’Neill in early February: “Yes, the situation is a rotten one—rotten for you and Carlotta to have to wait a year, & rotten for me to have to go to Reno & get an immediate divorce.” She said she was not well enough to travel, and that various other reasons would prevent her from leaving any time that spring.

  “As you two are getting all the best of it . . . I think that my wishes—remember, I am giving you the divorce—might be considered.” It seemed to her, she chided, that O’Neill was “in a hell of a hurry” to get her “put safely away.”

  Five months later, Agnes, on a trip to New York, met a hard-drinking former Albany newspaperman, James J. Delaney, in Greenwich Village. They began a love affair. Agnes kept delaying her departure for Reno, hoping to negotiate better terms with O’Neill, but also reluctant to separate from Delaney. He was as devoted to her as she to him, according to a friend of Agnes’s from West Point Pleasant, Elizabeth Murray.

  “Jimmy told me once that Agnes was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen,” said Murray
. Another friend, Sarah Ullman, noting that Agnes remained loyal to Delaney for ten years, sympathetically recalled the difficulties inherent in her situation. “She couldn’t marry him, although they loved each other,” said Ullman. “She had to have the alimony. Her kids loved him. He would pal around with Shane and take him fishing. He was a very charming man.”

  Agnes had not yet left for Reno in early October, and by then O’Neill had grown so incensed by reports of what he characterized as her irresponsible behavior that he suggested Weinberger hire a detective to tail her—so that she could, in his phrase, be “caught in flagrante.”

  Four months later, in mid-February 1929, Agnes and O’Neill (by proxy) signed an agreement by which each consented “to live as though unmarried.” And on March 11, Agnes entrained for Reno. Shane was in boarding school, and Oona and Barbara Burton were being looked after by Delaney, along with Agnes’s sister Cecil, and the long-since-forgiven Gaga, who had returned to help Agnes in the deteriorating New Jersey house.

  • • •

  DURING THE THREE MONTHS Agnes was required to spend in Reno, she began to think of her years with O’Neill as “emotional attrition.” That, purportedly, was how she expressed it many years later to the writer Max Wylie, who wanted to base a novel on her life with O’Neill.

  Agnes had responded with enthusiasm to Wylie’s request for an interview. It was three years after O’Neill’s death and Agnes, then in her sixties, was drinking excessively; she had not yet begun writing her memoir.

  Agnes talked at length with Wylie. Then in his early fifties, he was the ambitious but unheralded younger brother of the prominent author Philip Wylie. Max found Agnes to be “a great gal,” who offered to tell him anything he wanted to know. “Lots of fun in her,” he recalled. Their friendship lasted for several years, during which Agnes, with Wylie’s encouragement, began writing Part of a Long Story.

  Agnes was more candid with Wylie than she allowed herself to be in her memoir. She told him, for example, that she felt “short-changed about everything” in her marriage, branding O’Neill (as Wylie recorded), “a hell of a bore,” as well as “petty, churlish, ungallant, unnoticing, self-immolated, and self-consuming.”

  One day, Agnes confided, she suddenly “stopped thinking of Eugene as a ‘public figure’; of herself as married to such, but instead, as married to a man who was not only unlike all other men, but grossly deficient in every area (except sex) in which a normal woman can find trust, fulfillment, response, or secure companionship.”

  She said there were times when she almost wished O’Neill would not return home after attending to productions in New York. Too often, she added petulantly, having awaited his return with excitement, she was let down; within a day or two, he would revert to his “joyless moodiness, his habitual peevishness, his verbal abuse.”

  Agnes also spoke frankly to Wylie about her and O’Neill’s undiminished mutual lust, confiding that she was “his lover, but never his wife.” O’Neill, said Agnes, “didn’t need or want a wife; didn’t know what one was; didn’t wish to know nor to think about it.”

  Agnes permitted Wylie to copy a hoard of letters between herself and O’Neill, letters she later sold to Harvard and Yale. He made notes on his copies, planning to fictionalize her relationship with O’Neill for his novel Trouble in the Flesh.

  Wylie’s portraits of both O’Neill and Agnes turned out to be near-caricatures. Completely spellbound by Agnes, Wylie portrayed her as a patient, forgiving, compliant, and self-sacrificing saint.

  While he accurately portrayed O’Neill as self-pitying and demanding, and described how Agnes catered to him on many levels, Wylie glossed over Agnes’s own shortcomings—among them her reluctance to concede O’Neill’s entitlement to a quiet and orderly environment in which to write—instead, pitting her own self-centered seeking of social status against O’Neill’s need for privacy.

  PART III

  MISTRESS, SECRETARY, WIFE, AND MOTHER

  29

  It is sixteen months since O’Neill and Carlotta eloped to Europe. They have weathered their Shanghai maelstrom and are settled in their newly rented home at Le Plessis in the Loire Valley a hundred miles from Paris—ensconced as cozily as it is possible to be in a forty-five-room, candle-lit eighteenth-century château with no telephone, no electricity, and no central heating; they have their love (and multiple fireplaces) to keep them warm.

  Forgotten is O’Neill’s near-fatal backslide into alcohol in Shanghai, as is Carlotta’s aborted decision to leave him. Together they have survived the months of nightmare negotiations for the divorce, and O’Neill has all but suppressed the far-off voices of two bewildered young children.

  On June 6, 1929, the day they take possession of their château, O’Neill notes his grand new address in his Work Diary: “Le Plessis, Saint Antoine-du-Rocher, Indre-et-Loire.” (Carlotta has long since ordered the appropriately engraved stationery.)

  In the tower studio Carlotta has created for O’Neill, he gives himself up to the compulsive joy of his writing.

  He is now focusing on one of the numerous projects he has been thinking about on and off for the last three years, an updated version of the Greek Oresteia trilogy for which he has not yet found a title. He is contented as never before in his life.

  He can take melancholy pleasure in having achieved wealth and acclaim far surpassing his father’s quarter century of fame; surely he recalls his youthful boast that James O’Neill one day would be remembered only as the father of Eugene O’Neill.

  On June 14, in a surge of creative optimism mingled with his love for Carlotta, he assures her she will soon be Mrs. O’Neill; and Carlotta croons to her diary, “I couldn’t be any more his wife than I am—except by law! I have gone through so much that I seem to be drained! But I love Gene!”

  Not quite three weeks later—on July 3—O’Neill receives the anticipated cable announcing that Agnes’s divorce was granted in Reno the previous day. “At last, thank God!” he writes in his Work Diary. Carlotta (who dates the beginning of their ordeal from two months prior to their elopement) is more emotional.

  She feels suddenly “weak as after a long illness,” she writes. “We can’t believe this torture of 18 months is over!” She and O’Neill cling together, weeping with joy. “We can’t believe we are free.”

  Their freedom comes with the price of yet another bout of unwelcome publicity. Two days after the announcement of the divorce, the tabloids begin to speculate about when O’Neill will remarry. They remind their readers that Carlotta’s ex-husband, Ralph Barton, is currently seeking a divorce from his fourth wife (the French pianist and composer Germaine Tailleferre, whom he married on the rebound after Carlotta divorced him).

  This is particularly galling for Carlotta, though she has had hints that Barton is still attempting to get in touch with her. According to Carlotta’s old friend Carl Van Vechten, Barton has been keeping an almost daily watch over news of Carlotta. Her impending marriage to O’Neill has apparently pushed the ever-fragile Barton to the edge. In Van Vechten’s view, Barton, despite his own infidelities, had always been possessive of Carlotta, and his egotistical nature “couldn’t stand the idea of her marrying someone even more celebrated than himself.”

  Aware that Van Vechten and his wife, Fania, still see Carlotta, Barton has made a point of often asking them to “give Carlotta my love.” Even more brashly, Barton, when he learns Lillian Gish is planning a visit to the O’Neills in France, asks her to hand Carlotta a letter from him. Gish refuses. “I told him I couldn’t go to a man’s house as a guest and hand his wife a love letter from another man.”

  The tangled comings and goings of Barton, Carlotta, and O’Neill are a feast of nonstop gossip for the tabloids, which scramble to enumerate the divorces and remarriages among them: Barton’s four ex-wives, O’Neill’s two, Carlotta’s three ex-husbands. “If these people—philosophers, seers, men apart—cannot mana
ge their domestic affairs on a sound and permanent basis,” one of the tabloids smirks, “what hope is there for the ordinary bewildered citizen?”

  Carlotta is convinced that much of this public backbiting is being whipped up by Agnes and her supporters. And now, indisputably in possession of O’Neill, Carlotta feels empowered to obliterate her nemesis.

  To Saxe Commins, she looses her full venom toward Agnes: “Her memory is short—re her 18 mos. of lies—blackmailing—selling scandalous interviews—double crossing etc.—I say she’s a liar—G[ene] says she’s just a damn fool!” Carlotta wishes that Agnes “and her friends & Gene’s would-be friends” would leave them “in peace & ignorance of her existence, her plans or her life!”

  But O’Neill can’t entirely ignore those who tie him to his life with Agnes—not least among them their two young children, whom he seems determined to keep attached to him. He writes to Shane and Oona affectionately if infrequently, appealing to their imagination and sense of humor, nearly always ending his letters, “Don’t forget your Daddy.”

  A month after eloping with Carlotta, he encloses snapshots of himself in a letter to Oona, “so you can look at them every once in a while and remember your Daddy.” He has her picture in his room where he writes plays, he tells her, and often looks at it and wonders “how you are and what you are doing and wish that I could see you.” Attaching a check for a present, he ends, “I love you very much. Don’t forget me.”

  He writes at greater length to Shane, also enclosing snapshots of himself and pleading not to be forgotten. Shane, now nearly ten, is treated to a more grown-up account of his father’s life: “I am working hard starting a new play,” O’Neill tells his son, adding that he hadn’t worked during his trip to China “because the tropics took all the pep out of me, it was so darn hot.” He urges Shane to write to his half brother, Eugene Jr., who is trying out for the freshman crew at Yale.