By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  In short, days in which you collaborated, as only deep love can, in the writing of this trilogy of the damned! These scripts are rightly yours and my presenting them is a gift of what is half yours already. Let us hope what the trilogy may have in it will repay the travail we’ve gone through for its sake!

  I want these scripts to remind you that I have known your love with my love even when I have seemed not to know; that I have seen it even when I have appeared most blind; that I have felt it warmly around me always (even in my study in the closing pages of an act!), sustaining and comforting, a warm secure sanctuary for the man after the author’s despairing solitudes and inevitable defeats, a victory of love-in-life,—mother, and wife and mistress and friend!—

  And collaborator!

  Collaborator, I love you!

  A week before sailing, O’Neill was relieved (if not surprised) to receive a cable from the Theatre Guild accepting Mourning Becomes Electra for production.

  Carlotta took a tearful leave of Le Plessis’s household help. She and O’Neill gave their Gordon setter, Ben Lomond, to the children of one of the staff, since they were taking only Blemie with them to New York.

  “Farewell to Le Plessis!” was O’Neill’s laconic comment in his diary—and on May 9, boarding the Statendam in Boulogne, it was a dismissive “Good’bye to France!” (Whether knowingly or not, his diary notation mimicked his brisk “Exit—S.S. Berengaria” that had recorded his and Carlotta’s furtive departure from New York three years earlier.)

  It would be surprising if O’Neill, aboard ship, did not glance at his worn copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra, which he had kept with him ever since falling under Nietzsche’s spell at eighteen. He had remained transfixed by the book all his life and, indeed, it was not long since that O’Neill (then approaching his fortieth birthday) had remarked to Ben De Casseres that Zarathustra “has influenced me more than any book I’ve ever read.” At the time, he was recalling his first encounter with Nietzsche in 1906 at the anarchist Benjamin Tucker’s Unique Book Store shortly before his expulsion from Princeton.

  “I’ve always possessed a copy since then and every year or so I re-read it and am never disappointed, which is more than I can say of almost any other book. (That is, never disappointed in it as a work of art, aspects of its teaching I no longer concede.)”

  Long before uprooting himself from yet another home that had failed him, he had underlined a favorite passage: “I am a wanderer and a mountain climber . . . I like not the plains, and it seemeth I cannot long sit still. And whatever may become my fate and experience—a wandering and a mountain climbing will be part of it. In the end one experiences nothing but one’s self.”

  Five years earlier, after parting from Carlotta in New York to sail back to his Bermuda home, O’Neill had written to her of his own unyielding sense of “seeking flight.”

  “What a thrill of life it gave me,” O’Neill said, recalling his “sailor days” and “that first feel of the great ground swell of ocean heaving under me. It meant a release then, an end of an old episode and the birth of a new. Life then was simply a series of episodes flickering across my soul like the animated drawings one sees in the movies, and I could not then see how the continuity of my own seeking flight ran through them as a sustained pattern.”

  • • •

  USING ALL HER WILES, Carlotta wangled permission to keep Blemie in her cabin on their six-day voyage. She also arranged for their luggage to be pre-inspected and sent ahead through customs, so that she and O’Neill could disembark quietly, bypassing the reporters who awaited the reclusive dramatist after his long absence from Broadway.

  They checked into the Madison Hotel on May 17 and greeted George Jean Nathan and Eugene Jr. at dinner that evening. “Excited, tired and worried,” Carlotta told her diary, wondering, “What next?” She had her shocking answer all too soon.

  The Theatre Guild’s business manager, Warren Munsell, insisting that O’Neill make a statement and answer questions about his forthcoming play, had scheduled a press conference for the afternoon of May 21; O’Neill had five days to steel himself. He and Carlotta secluded themselves in their hotel, resting and taking all their meals in their suite.

  On May 20, shortly before 1:00 a.m., Carlotta’s ex-husband Ralph Barton sat at his typewriter in his penthouse at 419 East Fifty-seventh Street, just a few blocks from the Madison Hotel, and wrote a long note, which, in red ink, he headed, “OBIT.”

  He donned his pajamas, got into bed, lit a cigarette, thumbed through a worn copy of Gray’s Anatomy until he came to a section dealing with the heart, set the book aside—still open to that section—smoked another cigarette, and then shot himself with a .25-caliber revolver—not in the heart, but through the right temple.

  Barton’s body was discovered at ten o’clock that morning by his maid. The editor of The New Yorker, Harold Ross, was one of the first to hear of his death and he called Carlotta at once, hoping to cushion the shock. It was apparent to Ross, as it was to other friends, that Barton’s act was an attempt, at once pitiful and tragic, to upstage the triumphant return of the man he considered his rival.

  Poor Barton’s statement certainly had its shattering impact. The note he left, widely quoted in the press, cited his remorse over his “failure to appreciate my beautiful lost angel, Carlotta, the only woman I ever loved and whom I respect and admire above all the rest of the human race.

  “She is the one person who could have saved me had I been saveable. She did her best. No one ever had a more devoted or more understanding wife. I do hope she will understand what my malady was and forgive me a little.”

  Headlines of the afternoon papers shouted the names of Eugene O’Neill and Carlotta Monterey; The New York Times, among other papers, quoted the suicide note in its entirety. In response, O’Neill’s lawyer issued a statement to the press saying, in part, that “Mrs. O’Neill, the former Carlotta Monterey, desires to state definitely that she never saw or heard from Mr. Barton since her divorce from him more than five years ago.” (Understandably, she neglected to mention the brief and futile correspondence Barton had initiated with her following the divorce.)

  By the time Carl Van Vechten arrived at the Madison for a previously scheduled lunch in the O’Neills’ suite, he found them fully informed. “Gene was very quiet during the lunch,” Van Vechten recalled. “But Carlotta talked about it. She said she couldn’t understand this horrible thing—that Barton wasn’t in love with her.”

  The O’Neills had earlier invited Benjamin and Bio De Casseres to dine with them that evening; upon hearing the news, the couple expected to be called off, but they were not.

  “Well, Ralph Barton blew his top” was O’Neill’s tart comment when they arrived. That was the only reference made to the subject. But Carlotta, stricken, wrote in her diary, “After dinner I almost pass out—Gene is gentle and sweet.”

  Nearly two weeks before Barton shot himself, he had addressed a letter to Carlotta at Le Plessis; he dated it May 7 and posted it the following day, unaware she would be sailing for New York before the letter could reach her.

  Reminding her that it was nine years since he’d first met her, he said he would be a happy man “instead of a very wretched one” if he had known then what he knew now. The past five years, he said, had been his punishment for “the wanton murder of the only thing I want or love in the world.” He would trade “ten times over” all the gifts he’d since been given “to have you walk by my chair and give me a pat on the head.”

  He asked her forgiveness for writing. “The pain of living without you twenty-four hours every day becomes insupportable sometimes. I love you, my dear lost angel.”

  O’Neill and Carlotta worriedly talked over the impending Theatre Guild press conference, which had been postponed a day, to May 22, because of the Barton suicide. To spare O’Neill the stress of individual interviews, the Guild’s Warren Munsell had invited
the full contingent of New York’s theater reporters. One of the Guild’s press agents, Joe Heidt, assured O’Neill that he’d telephoned the drama and city desks of all the New York newspapers, requesting them to instruct their reporters not to ask questions about Barton or Carlotta. “They all promised,” Heidt recalled.

  O’Neill was not reassured but, as he told Carlotta, he knew he had to go through with the press conference for the sake of Electra, no matter how much he dreaded the ordeal. It would be “like walking into hell,” Carlotta predicted.

  The press conference began at 3:00 p.m. A perspiring O’Neill stood before the reporters, critics, and photographers who packed the Guild’s boardroom. It was the largest and most suspenseful theater press conference anyone present could remember. According to the critic for the New York Daily News, John Chapman, O’Neill had stipulated that he would take questions from only one of the more than two dozen reporters present, and Chapman was selected by his peers to be that one.

  O’Neill was “pallid and shaking and sweating when he faced his lone inquisitor—and so was I,” Chapman recalled. During the interview, which lasted an hour and a half, O’Neill declared, among other things, that living abroad had enabled him “to see America more clearly” and “to appreciate it more.”

  He answered questions about the relative merits of the European and American theater. Europeans, he said, would “soon be coming over here to learn from us,” adding that “the American stage has a dynamic quality and freshness theirs lacks.”

  He discussed his plans for the future. He and Carlotta would go to California soon to visit her relatives, but not to work for the motion pictures; it wasn’t that he had “a snooty attitude toward the pictures,” he said, but because he had work of his own planned for the next five years. He also announced that rehearsals for Electra would begin in mid-August.

  As he had feared, one reporter managed to shout a question about Barton, and O’Neill felt obliged to answer. “As far as I know I never met Ralph Barton. He did not call on us. . . . I know that he had made no effort to see Mrs. O’Neill.”

  According to Heidt, except for that one question, the press “behaved beautifully,” although one woman lingered to ask more questions about Barton. O’Neill declined to answer, believing he had more than met his obligation.

  After the reporters had left, Heidt and O’Neill congratulated each other on how well things had gone. He was now presumably safe from further inquisition, for his address in Manhattan was a secret and he had safeguarded the privacy of his immediate future by announcing (untruthfully) that he was leaving for California.

  O’Neill’s tranquillity was shaken when Heidt happened to look out the window and saw taxicabs lining the curb; the reporters were waiting for O’Neill to leave so they could trail him to wherever he was staying.

  If the press conference was something of a requiem, its encore was a Harold Lloyd farce. O’Neill was eager to depart, and Heidt knew of a way to smuggle him out of the building. But the escapade would entail some undignified moments and Heidt hesitated to propose it; he would have to guide O’Neill over the roof of an adjacent building and out a side-street exit. Finally, he did suggest it, and O’Neill thankfully agreed.

  Heidt telephoned the skating rink that was housed in the building adjoining the Guild, and received permission to cross their roof, “so they won’t think we’re a couple of burglars and take a shot at us,” he told O’Neill. Then he guided his charge to room 64, the Guild’s rehearsal space on the top floor. From there, Heidt and O’Neill clambered up a fire escape ladder leading to the roof, crossed over to the adjoining building, and climbed down its rear fire escape. Heidt put O’Neill into a cab. As he drove off, O’Neill, his dignity intact, wore a mischievous grin. Heidt, also smiling broadly, walked around the block to the front of the Theatre Guild building, where he told the reporters there was no use waiting, because O’Neill had left.

  They refused to believe Heidt. They said they knew there was an apartment in the Guild building and that O’Neill obviously intended to spend the night there. They were so preoccupied with tracking O’Neill that it didn’t occur to them to question how Heidt himself had managed to get out of the building.

  There were still three taxis in front of the Guild when Heidt returned the next morning at ten. “They’d been there all night,” he recalled. “They never did find out where O’Neill was staying.”

  32

  Mother of God, I have another home to create for Genie,” Carlotta sputtered to her diary. “I wonder if he will live in it!”

  It was the end of June 1931, just over a month since she and O’Neill had returned to New York.

  They were barely settled in a rented beachfront house called Beacon Farm on the Sound in Northport, Long Island, about an hour’s commute from Manhattan and staffed with Carlotta’s accustomed efficiency, when O’Neill underwent one of his Olympian flip-flops.

  Abruptly dismissing his long-held conviction that it was impossible for him to get any writing done amid the distractions of the city, he decided he wanted a permanent home in Manhattan. To Carlotta’s dismay, he insisted on signing a long-term lease for a duplex apartment in a just-completed eighteen-story building at 1095 Park Avenue and Eighty-ninth Street. “Why I ever left here, damned if I know,” he told George Jean Nathan. “There’s life and vitality here. It’s the place for ideas!”

  And now, the man Carlotta had begun to wryly characterize as “the Master,” commanded her to have his Park Avenue abode ready by summer’s end, when rehearsals were to begin for Mourning Becomes Electra. While O’Neill continued to revise Electra in their Northport house between swims in the Sound and entertaining an occasional guest, Carlotta shopped relentlessly for their future home on Park Avenue.

  First among his guests, on June 16, was Eugene Jr., accompanied by Elizabeth (Betty) Greene, whom he’d introduced to his father and Carlotta in New York two weeks earlier and who, he now announced, he had just married. O’Neill (in Carlotta’s words) was “disappointed” in the choice he’d made.

  Recently turned twenty-one, Eugene was distinguishing himself as a Greek scholar at Yale, where he’d just completed his junior year. Tragedy had already touched his life, which in many ways was to mirror that of his father’s; Eugene’s younger stepbrother (by his mother’s second marriage), to whom he’d been close, had recently died in an unexplained fall from the nineteenth floor of an office building in New York.

  O’Neill was eager to solidify his relationship with his son and swallowed his qualms about Betty Greene. He saw Electra as a project that would bind father and son intellectually, but Eugene Jr. far outshone his father in his knowledge of Greek tragedy. “I can’t talk to him. He’s too erudite for me,” O’Neill told Lillian Gish with a wistful smile after one of his son’s visits.

  O’Neill had been unable to arrange a visit from his younger son—whom he hadn’t seen in more than three and a half years—until later in the summer; they were reunited on August 4, when Shane arrived for a two-week visit. Almost twelve, he was about to enter the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey.

  Carlotta and O’Neill were driven to New York by their chauffeur to meet Shane, and Carlotta whisked him off to Abercrombie’s to “fit-him-out so to speak.” After an early dinner, she and O’Neill drove back with Shane to Beacon Farm.

  On the following day, Carlotta tactfully left father and son alone on the beach, so that they could have the whole day to become reacquainted. After that first day, Carlotta took it on herself to entertain Shane while O’Neill wrote. She gave the boy dancing lessons: “He enjoys this and it has become quite a frolic!” she noted. (She had not as yet reunited with her own child, from whom she’d been separated even longer than O’Neill from his children; she was evidently content to wait until Christmas for her mother to bring Cynthia from California for a visit.)

  O’Neill swam and conversed with Shane almost every day, but wh
en his son left, he brushed off the visit in his Work Diary with a nonchalant “Au revoir to Shane.” He seemed unperturbed at postponing a visit with Oona, the daughter he’d so earnestly beseeched in his letters not to forget her Daddy; at six, she was deemed (probably by Carlotta, if not by Agnes) as too young for an extended visit, and she did not see her father until five months later.

  • • •

  O’NEILL NOW—less than ever—could spare little thought for progeny, his own or his wife’s (despite his recent anomalous desire to father a child with Carlotta). He was immersed in casting for the October opening of Mourning Becomes Electra and he was about to confront the casting of a Lavinia.

  Lillian Gish had asked to read for the role; at thirty-eight, with her spectacular silent-movie career winding down, she was eager to reestablish herself as a stage actress, and in view of O’Neill and Carlotta’s close friendship with Gish and George Jean Nathan, he could hardly deny her a reading. But he was certain she was all wrong for Lavinia, and he was uneasy as he took his seat at the Theatre Guild’s audition with other members of the production team.

  Gish read a scene with Alla Nazimova, the internationally acclaimed Russian actress, soon to be cast as Lavinia’s mother, Christine; O’Neill remembered Nazimova reverently from the time he first saw her in Hedda Gabler in 1907 during his visits to New York while he was a student at Princeton.

  His fears about Gish were confirmed almost at once. Her personality and acting style—as the beautiful, winsome-but-fragile heroine of dozens of silent-screen melodramas—were utterly unsuited to the role of his hard-bitten, ruthless Lavinia.

  O’Neill privately and gently informed a crushed Gish that she was not right for the role. “I told her the truth, the whole truth,” he reported to Theresa Helburn. “She is a game sport and took it in fine spirit. But it was a tough job for me!”