By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  As Carlotta once noted, “This love of mine is tortured by his search for peace—rest—!”

  For the immediate present, O’Neill wished to stay put, for he was now making good progress on Mourning Becomes Electra, and intended to complete it before leaving France. A week after marking the second anniversary of their elopement, O’Neill had read to Carlotta the scenario of the trilogy’s final play, The Haunted. She was “moved beyond words,” and made it a point to congratulate herself in her diary on her contribution to the play’s progress.

  Once Carlotta knew she would soon be vacating Le Plessis, she could admit to the inconvenience of running the vast establishment, which she had come to realize was far too large for them. It was growing more difficult to sustain the role of grande dame, not to mention playing muse and custodian to the Great Dramatist; a merciless role, to be sure, if not (as she sometimes seemed to believe) quite the equivalent of his. “I did everything,” she said. “He wrote the plays, I did everything else.”

  By the end of March, O’Neill was feeling the need “to get a little perspective” on the work he’d done so far on Electra; as he wrote Macgowan, he was “all washed up and in need of a change of scene.” He also wanted to do some sightseeing in the months before he left the Continent for good.

  But before he could go anywhere, he needed more dental work. In Paris, while he had his troublesome teeth attended to, Carlotta shopped—an occupation that continued to consume her almost as totally as writing did O’Neill. But she was appalled when she received her bill for the dresses, suits, shoes, and other accessories she had purchased; it came to $5,841—close to half her annual income from Speyer—equivalent to about $82,000 in today’s currency.

  It was her “last extravagant plunge,” as she later recalled ruefully, for, as she often declared, it was her financial obligation to help her husband with “the burden of the wives and children”; without her help, she insisted, he would not be able to “live decently!” It was, she added, her “duty & happiness to help him.”

  It is something of an irony that O’Neill was beginning to match his wife’s sartorial self-indulgence; between sessions in the dentist’s chair, he found time to supplement his already extensive collection of bespoke clothing. “Am so proud of my husband in his beautiful clothes,” Carlotta gloated, “—they’ll last him forever!”

  Further encouraging his dandification, Carlotta supervised O’Neill’s purchase of three walking sticks and, at his request, she bought him “an evening watch with platinum and pearl chain!” which, she asserted, was “very correct!” In fact, when he returned to America, Carlotta said, “He never bought a suit, a pair of shoes, or anything. He had a complete wardrobe and he was so pleased.”

  In spite of all their regal outward trappings, Carlotta and O’Neill could at times behave like a couple of mischievous children in the privacy of their home. One balmy May evening after dinner, they were relaxed enough to engage in one of the playful moments they occasionally shared.

  “When we start to go upstairs,” Carlotta recalled, “Gene makes a grab at me to carry me—we get to laughing and fall in a heap on the stairs—then we roar with laughter! A house maid rushes in and looks very surprised & embarrassed. And we feel perfect fools—but continue to laugh!”

  On May 29, still in good humor, O’Neill broke away from Electra to attend with Carlotta the Russian Kamerny Theatre’s productions of Desire Under the Elms and All God’s Chillun Got Wings in Paris. He was more than flattered, he wrote to a friend, that “one of the world’s most famous modern theaters, touring the capitals of Europe, selects for two out of the three straight dramas of its repertoire the works of an uncultured Yank! I feel as if I wasn’t a total loss as an American delegate at large of the arts.”

  In his Work Diary, he noted he was “much impressed” with the Kamerny; by then, O’Neill’s plays had already scored a success in Moscow, and the Kamerny’s director, Alexander Tairov, was a fan.

  “If you were to ask me who is the most brilliant, the most important among contemporary playwrights,” Tairov had said, “I would answer without hesitation: O’Neill.”

  Although Carlotta enjoyed the performances, she was uncomfortable visiting backstage. A self-styled “Tory,” she was less willing than O’Neill to mingle with Russian Communists, however gifted.

  “I have a strange feeling—as if danger were lurking! If we were in the Tropics I would think it a poisonous snake!” she wrote in her diary.

  She grew even more uneasy the following evening. After attending All God’s Chillun Got Wings, she and O’Neill joined Tairov and his wife, the actress Alice Koonen, together with other cast members, for a festive supper.

  The Russians made much of O’Neill, and he—to judge by a rather long-winded note he sent the members of the Kamerny two days later—responded in kind. (He wrote, amid many flourishes, that he felt the “most profound gratitude” for the productions, which “rang true to the spirit” of his work and that they were interpreted by “that rarest of all gifts in actors and actresses—creative imagination.”)

  In his approbation of “a real renaissance of the theater” in Russia—and perhaps recalling his friend John Reed’s heartfelt espousal of the revolution—he chose to ignore what had happened there during the preceding decade. (Even Reed, before his death in Moscow in 1920, had expressed his disillusionment with the new Russia.) O’Neill was concerned only that the Russian theater appeared to be thriving. (When he returned to New York for the production of Mourning Becomes Electra, he would tell an interviewer, “It is a new country with new ideas, and tradition does not bind it, nor does commercialism smother it. New men get a chance and new ideas are tried out, and the box office does not play the leading part.”) At the supper with the cast, O’Neill heartily entered into the give-and-take with his fellow theater lovers from Moscow. Reticent though O’Neill could be, when in compatible company, he could express himself with passion about the theater, its history, literature in general, and Russian literature in particular (along with his own work). And the Russians couldn’t help but respond to his love not only of Chekhov, but also of Dostoyevsky, whose novels, together with Tolstoy’s War and Peace, had, O’Neill once declared, “become parts of my life.” (He’d also been influenced by The Lower Depths and he deplored the fact that Gorky had not been awarded the Nobel Prize, calling him, in a letter to Sinclair Lewis, “the top of all living writers.”)

  At the supper, Carlotta found herself silently writhing under a sense of inadequacy. The ravishing looks, the exquisite clothes and carefully chosen jewels, the unfaltering poise and the practiced small talk that she relied on to carry her through social occasions failed to register among these highly vocal Russian intellectuals.

  “Gene seems in this atmosphere to be sincere and free although he doesn’t know one word of Russian!” Carlotta jeered in her diary on June 1. Her own contribution to the animated exchanges did not scintillate. In such company, her beauty was no match for O’Neill’s genius and she felt humiliatingly overshadowed.

  In his ebullience, it didn’t occur to O’Neill that he was not including Carlotta in his dialogue with the Russians. She sat silently listening to the vociferous supper guests, probably expecting that O’Neill would—at the appropriate moment—interpolate into his conversation something about Carlotta’s value to him in his work and speak of his absolute need of her. Evidently, no such praise was forthcoming.

  That evening was an intimation of what lay ahead. It wasn’t a poisonous snake that Carlotta sensed lurking; it was the grinning ghost of Strindberg. In her diary on June 6, after a week of sulking, she sarcastically expressed her distress. “Gene suddenly comes out of his ‘fog’ & sees a woman here—on close inspection it is Carlotta—good old Carlotta!—Well, Hello, darling!”

  The following evening after dinner, a mollified Carlotta told her diary that a penitent O’Neill sat with her on their terrace and dis
cussed “faith—loyalty—love—God!”

  31

  Both O’Neill and Carlotta fell ill with the flu and were confined to bed during what would be their last Christmas in France.

  On January 7, 1931, still enervated from his illness, O’Neill learned that his Peaked Hill Bars home (which he had recently deeded to Eugene Jr.) had been swept into the sea. O’Neill knew the cottage had been teetering for some time at the eroding edge of the Atlantic, but the news dispirited him.

  His melancholia deepened when it seemed that neither he nor Carlotta could shake off the flu’s aftereffects at Le Plessis.

  In Paris, seeking expert medical attention, O’Neill was diagnosed with “anemia, very low blood pressure, kidney and gall bladder upset.” But this time it was Carlotta whose illness was the more serious. Her white-blood-cell count was far too high and her doctor ordered a three-week hospital stay.

  With Carlotta in the hospital, O’Neill checked into his accustomed suite in the Hotel du Rhin to begin a series of medical treatments as an outpatient. Still in the process of editing Mourning Becomes Electra, he engaged a typist to copy his handwritten—and as yet uncompleted—fifth draft. In between his treatments and his editing, he visited Carlotta daily with offerings of flowers and other gifts.

  Carlotta was growing concerned about their living expenses, given the still-plummeting American stock market, but she was relieved to find that, due to Papa Speyer’s guidance, neither her income nor O’Neill’s was seriously threatened.

  O’Neill was earning royalties from foreign productions of his plays and domestic revivals, as well as from movie sales, and he had invested carefully. As Carlotta advised Lillian Gish, who had written to her about her own investments with Speyer: “Just hang on. I sit tight.” Carlotta assured Gish she was in good hands; although Speyer wasn’t “infallible,” she said, he was, after all, “a well known international banker.”

  Toward the end of January, with Carlotta recovered and O’Neill’s typescript nearly completed, they returned to Le Plessis and soon after took off for the Canary Islands to recuperate. Believing the islands “would be full of canaries singing in beautiful gardens,” Carlotta found it instead “a desolate, ugly place.”

  She tolerated it for O’Neill’s sake, watching her “sun child,” as she called him, baking himself in the hot sand after long swims. And when, between swims and sightseeing, he began work on a sixth draft of his trilogy, she rejoiced in going over it with him scene by scene.

  O’Neill’s adoration of Carlotta at times transcended his own self-absorption. But as uxorious as he was, the proposal he made to Carlotta while relaxing on the beach in the Canary Islands was so much out of character as to be mind-boggling.

  “Gene wants me to have a baby!” Carlotta exclaimed to Lillian Gish in a letter from the Canaries on March 2, 1931.

  Actually, Carlotta had dropped a cryptic note—“Gene discusses ‘baby’!!!?”—in her diary a year earlier. Although she made no further comment at that time, she must have whispered about the discussion to a friend (or two), because seven months later (on September 23), she noted, “Gene receives a telegram from the Associated Press in Paris—asking if it is true I am to have a baby!!!”

  It was Walter Winchell who had launched the gossip in his widely syndicated column on September 8, 1930. And on September 25, a note arrived for O’Neill at Le Plessis from a reporter on the Tours newspaper, asking about “the baby.” When, a few months later, O’Neill was queried by Kenneth Macgowan, he tossed off the following reply:

  “The expectant father rumors were all the bunk. Between us we have four children already and find they are expensive and we are not such gluttons for punishment that we want to take on any more of these responsibilities—in bringing into the world fresh victims for the new poison gases which the lads are preparing for our children.”

  That sounded more like the old phobic O’Neill, who had felt betrayed when Agnes produced a child; it more accurately reflected the crabby dramatist who couldn’t wait to kill off the children in his plays. And yet, after sending that letter to Macgowan, O’Neill changed his mind once again, reiterating his aberrant wish to have Carlotta bear his child.

  She, however, felt unsure, as she confided to Gish, cautioning her that this was “entre-nous of course.” After voicing her own concern about already having four children between them, she declared, “But he wants our baby!” and added, “I told him if we get a home I’ll see—but not living as we have all over the place.”

  Carlotta and O’Neill never did stop living “all over the place”; their precious Blemie was to remain the only child of their marriage.

  The O’Neills were still in contented mode on the Canary Islands on March 25, when a cable arrived from Richard Madden informing O’Neill of an offer from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to buy Strange Interlude, netting O’Neill $35,000. Carlotta was thrilled, noting that the money would be the foundation of their new home in America.

  He and Carlotta returned to Paris and, on April 7, he mailed a copy of the completed Electra script to the Theatre Guild. He also sent a script to Nathan with an accompanying note, reliving the grueling months of his creative struggle. “Let’s hope the result in some measure justifies the labor I put in,” he wrote, enumerating his demanding objectives:

  “To get enough of Clytemnestra into Christine, of Electra in Lavinia, of Orestes in Orin, etc. and yet keep them American primarily; to conjure a Greek fate out of the Mannons themselves (without calling in the aid of even a Puritan Old Testament God) that would convince a modern audience without religion or moral ethics; to prevent the surface melodrama of the play from overwhelming the real drama; to contrive murders that escape cops and courtroom scenes.”

  While in Paris, the O’Neills booked passage on the Dutch liner S.S. Statendam, departing for New York on May 9. Carlotta, in a sentimental leave-taking, visited the Tuileries: “. . . my beloved Paris that I know I will never see again—when I leave with Gene—a part of me is dying—for I must live Gene’s life with all my strength and knowledge—it is him now. I must always be there to help, to understand, to comfort,—no matter what!”

  As Carlotta began the process of vacating Le Plessis on April 19, the O’Neills received their final visitor, the editor (since 1922) of O’Neill’s previously published plays, Manuel Komroff. It was he who would oversee the published version of Mourning Becomes Electra at Horace Liveright.

  More than thirty years later, Komroff wrote a reminiscence (never published) about that visit. Komroff was an intense intellectual, without social polish or pretense, and something of a Marxist. Carlotta disdained him as “a weak sort of man, apologizing for living! I don’t feel comfortable with this type of man.”

  Komroff, who had never met Carlotta, soon became aware of her supercilious appraisal. “Here before me was the famous Carlotta,” he wrote. “How many times had I seen her picture in the newspapers? It was all true. She was beautiful.” He acknowledged her “masterful” management of a large servant-run establishment; and he allowed that “she knew how to write a graceful ‘thank you note,’ and how to keep sightseers and boring acquaintances away from Gene so that he had free mornings for his work.”

  But Komroff was disconcerted by the pretentiousness of the lunch served him the following day. Marking his place at the table was “a silver holder with a card neatly lettered in French giving the menu.” When the butler poured him white wine, both Carlotta and O’Neill said, “We’re not drinking,” making him uncomfortable to be drinking alone.

  Komroff later pondered O’Neill’s complacency in the midst of such display. He found it hard to accept the degree to which Carlotta had transformed the lifestyle of the man who wrote The Hairy Ape. He couldn’t believe this was the idealistic dramatist who, seven years earlier, had proclaimed himself the theater’s spokesman for “the under-dog,” the man who wanted to give the public “a chance to see how the other
fellow lives . . . his sufferings, his handicaps . . . to see the sort of life which their brothers far down the social scale must face each day.”

  O’Neill’s unapologetic lifestyle was particularly grating to Komroff in view of the spreading Depression. He had just left behind New York’s multiplying homeless sleeping in shanties in Central Park and waiting in blocks-long breadlines. He wondered if O’Neill and his Marie Antoinette were aware that there were many thousands of unemployed who could not afford eight cents for a loaf of bread.

  Komroff did not count his two-day visit to Le Plessis a success and, soon after, he felt a cooling of O’Neill’s friendship.

  • • •

  PROFESSIONAL PACKERS WERE at work in the château on April 23, readying boxes of silverware, linens, and china to be shipped to New York. Carlotta, having ordered several additional Vuitton trunks, was personally packing them with her own and O’Neill’s extensive wardrobes, including the seventy-five pairs of shoes he had accumulated under her tutelage.

  In the midst of the hubbub, O’Neill sat down to inscribe a manuscript copy of Mourning Becomes Electra to Carlotta. The inscription sang with lyrical feeling:

  In memory of the interminable days of rain in which you bravely suffered in silence that this trilogy might be born—days when I had my work but you had nothing but household frets and a blank vista through the salon windows of the gray land of Le Plessis, with the wet black trees still and dripping, and the mist wraiths mourning over the drowned fields—days when you had the self-forgetting love to greet my lunchtime depressing, sunk preoccupations with a courageous, cheering banter—days which for you were bitterly lonely, when I seemed far away and lost to you in a grim, savage gloomy country of my own—days which were for you like hateful boring inseparable enemies who nag at nerves and spirit until an intolerable ennui and life sickness poisoned your spirit—