by Arthur Gelb
Gish managed a stiff upper lip until she arrived at the O’Neill’s’ suite at the Madison Hotel, where Carlotta awaited her. Gish then burst into tears. Carlotta, although she tried to comfort her, was privately unsympathetic, and later observed, “Surely she knows herself better than to ever want to play Lavinia. Lavinia was not the ‘little flower’—the ‘tender virgin!’” Both O’Neills were relieved that the episode didn’t impair their friendship with Gish and Nathan.
The role of Lavinia was accepted somewhat reluctantly by Alice Brady, the irreverent film and stage actress who (along with Katharine Cornell) had turned down Nina in Strange Interlude, and who had her doubts about Lavinia as well.
“Personally I feel that Mr. O’Neill meant Lavinia to be a symbol, rather than a living, breathing human being who buys hats and gloves and eats lamb chops,” she said in an interview, shortly after the play opened. “I may be wrong, but I’m quite sure that Lavinia could never eat a lamb chop.” O’Neill, she went on, hammered in the fact, at rehearsals, that no sentimentality must creep into the characterization of Lavinia and that “no one should feel sorry for her” at the final moment when she boards herself up in the Mannon house with her memories of the dead.
“The part is not ‘me’ at all,” Brady concluded. “I had to create a character totally foreign to my nature and to anything I had ever done before. . . . But I love the part. It has a tremendous sort of abstract excitement for me.”
After approving of Nazimova as Christine, O’Neill also signed off on Earle Larimore (a favorite ever since he’d played Sam Evans in Strange Interlude) for the role of Orin. With the selection of Lee Baker (a veteran stage and movie actor) as Brigadier General Ezra Mannon, and Thomas Chalmers (a former Metropolitan Opera baritone) as Adam Brant, the casting of the Mannon family was complete.
Carlotta, as intent as her husband on the impending production, needed no urging from O’Neill to wire Brooks Atkinson an invitation to Beacon Farm.
Shortly after the O’Neills’ return from France, Atkinson had asked O’Neill what background reading he should do to help him understand the Electra trilogy. O’Neill replied he need not do any research, that the play was self-contained and not at all esoteric. Would Atkinson like to read it? Atkinson, who rarely if ever read a contemporary play in advance of seeing it onstage, made an exception, having long since recognized O’Neill as a giant of the American theater.
He read the trilogy and was somewhat disappointed. He read it a second time before writing to O’Neill to say—after praising the work as a whole—that he thought the public would be overwhelmed by the first play, let down by the second, and would find the third better than the second.
O’Neill, after thanking him for his “favorable reaction to the whole work,” disagreed with his appraisal of the individual plays, going into defensive detail about each, and trying to arrange a meeting in New York during which they could “argue a bit.”
He followed up with a second letter to the critic two months later: “The more of the inner workings and background of the writing of the trilogy I can set before you . . . the better for me in the sense of my getting more value out of your criticism, for or against.”
Most criticism of real value, O’Neill pointed out, did not come until after the opening, when it was too late. “That’s one of many reasons,” he explained, “why I’m always glad to have any critic (whose opinion I respect, and whose right to criticize the drama I admit) read my scripts before the openings.”
It was because O’Neill had failed to connect with Atkinson in New York that he was now suggesting the critic come to stay for a day or more in Northport. Neither O’Neill nor Atkinson seemed to think it at all remarkable that a theater critic of Atkinson’s stature should sit down with a practicing dramatist (no matter what his stature) and—in essence—collaborate on the structure of a play that would eventually be reviewed by that critic.
In preparation for their forthcoming discussion, O’Neill reread the trilogy. He found that he liked it. He then added an entry to the Mourning Becomes Electra Work Diary he’d been keeping since the spring of 1926. Dating it “August 1931,” he wrote that all three plays had “power and drive and the strange quality of unreal reality I wanted.”
During Atkinson’s two-day stay at Beacon Farm, he and O’Neill discussed Electra in detail and the critic bluntly told his host he felt the trilogy was “overwritten.” “Gene, of course, disagreed,” said Atkinson. He specifically recalled that during his visit, Carlotta was mostly invisible, that Blemie was present “at all meals,” and that O’Neill “drank a lot of Moxie” (a then-popular carbonated drink) and swam in the afternoon. “We were both enchanted,” he said, “when a Boston steamer, headed for New York, passed by.”
• • •
WHILE RESOLVING TO keep Beacon Farm open for weekends, Carlotta and O’Neill moved into their Park Avenue duplex in early September. Carlotta had lovingly filled O’Neill’s study with mementos of the sea: three paintings of clipper ships including the legendary three-master Flying Cloud; a scale model of another clipper ship, the Thomas F. Oakes; and a vintage brass ship’s lantern.
Rehearsals for Electra were now set to begin on September 7, and O’Neill looked forward to working with Bobby Jones, with whom he hadn’t collaborated since The Great God Brown, nearly six years earlier. He was also pleased to be reunited with Philip Moeller, who had staged Strange Interlude. O’Neill attended rehearsals scrupulously, and Carlotta, proudly possessive of “her” play, nearly always accompanied him. “I loved working with Gene behind the scenes,” she said. She would sit beside her husband and take notes.
Ann Pinchot, whose husband, Ben, took photographs of O’Neill in connection with the play, remembered Carlotta hurrying along West Fifty-second Street in the September heat, on her way to rehearsals. “Carlotta did all the routine chores,” Pinchot recalled, adding that she would bring O’Neill a paper bag with his lunch: a pint bottle of milk, and rye bread–and-butter sandwiches—for when O’Neill was in the midst of rehearsals, he did not leave the theater.
Electra, like Strange Interlude, was to forgo an out-of-town tryout and, because of its length, had been allotted seven weeks of rehearsal time instead of the customary four. Carlotta sat through most of them. “I never was bored a minute,” she recalled. “It was wonderful.”
Ann Pinchot remembered that O’Neill looked to be “in good shape, and not too nervous,” although she recalled that his hands sometimes shook badly. She was struck by O’Neill’s insistence that none of her husband’s photographs of him should be retouched. According to Pinchot, O’Neill was the only man who ever made that request; O’Neill did, literally, want every line, every gray hair, even the faint pouches under his eyes to be visible.
O’Neill pruned extensively during the first two weeks, considerably reducing the trilogy’s overall playing length. Schemes for presenting each of the three plays on consecutive nights were abandoned, and it was decided to present the trilogy in one chunk, like Strange Interlude. But even with O’Neill’s trims, Electra was still approximately an hour and a half longer than Interlude, and so it would begin a little earlier in the afternoon, end a little later at night, and have a shorter dinner intermission.
The Theatre Guild issued an announcement to this effect, explaining that the first complete rehearsal had disclosed that “the unity and suspensive action of Mourning Becomes Electra would be aided if the plays were presented in a single day.”
O’Neill was more expansive with his cast than he had been during previous plays, partly because Carlotta, as an actress, felt at home backstage, and eased his way. He was especially affable to Alice Brady, who happened to be an old friend of Carlotta’s. One day during rehearsals, Sammy—one of Brady’s four dogs—got into a fight outside the theatre with Blemie, and O’Neill had to separate them. He picked up Sammy and carried him into Brady’s dressing room.
“
Sammy met my dog outside,” O’Neill told her. “Sammy sniffed and said, ‘My mother’s appearing in your father’s rotten play,’ and my dog naturally leaped on him. Sammy should know better.”
As rehearsals progressed, O’Neill, according to Carlotta, became fascinated by the characterizations of Nazimova and Brady. But, although “they were so wonderful,” Carlotta said, they were “not what Gene had fancied.” O’Neill, she explained, was “disturbed” that Brady’s robust Irish-French heritage somehow seeped into the persona of the rigid New Englander she was portraying.
On the other hand, he was amused, rather than annoyed, with the Slavic-born Alla Nazimova’s occasional flare-ups of temperament: “A.N. has ‘Odessa Vapours,’ (as Gene puts it!),” Carlotta once observed. Much later, O’Neill told an interviewer: “Alice Brady and Alla Nazimova gave wonderful performances in Mourning Becomes Electra, but they did not carry out my conception at all. I saw a different play from the one I thought I had written.”
O’Neill continued to make cuts until the last minute. Alice Brady later recalled her terror on opening night that she would forget her lines. “You see, Mr. O’Neill kept changing and changing the lines at every rehearsal. He even made some minor changes on the day of the opening performance. So that every time I’d think of a line, I’d wonder with horror whether that was the line which had been cut or changed in the script.” She calmed down after the first two scenes but even so, she said, she “wouldn’t go through it again for anything in the world.”
After sitting through the final dress rehearsal on October 25, Carlotta was as exhausted as O’Neill. “My whole body aches,” she wrote in her diary. “He is silent—& dying by inches!”
In his own diary, O’Neill mourned the end of his frenetic and protracted love affair with the tragic Greek family he’d resurrected and revitalized: “Farewell (for me), to the Mannons!”
• • •
TO ACCOMMODATE THE CRITICS, the curtain rose at the Guild Theater on October 27, 1931, at 4:00 p.m. and fell shortly before eleven. (Subsequent performances began at five and ended shortly before midnight.) The reviews for the six-hour trilogy were glowing.
Atkinson, delighted with O’Neill’s massive cuts and revisions, acclaimed the trilogy “a universal tragedy of tremendous stature—deep, dark, solid, uncompromising and grim . . . heroically thought out and magnificently wrought in style and structure.” O’Neill, he said, “has never before fulfilled himself so completely; he has never commanded his theme in all its variety and adumbrations with such superb strength, coolness and coherence. To this department, which ordinarily reserves its praise for the dead, Mourning Becomes Electra is Mr. O’Neill’s masterpiece.”
In the New York Evening Post, John Mason Brown wrote that Electra was “uneven,” but so were “the Himalayas.” Although he enjoyed the play, The New Yorker’s Robert Benchley couldn’t resist mocking it. It was less Greek tragedy than “good, old-fashioned, spine-curling melodrama,” he argued, and then asked:
Are we not forgetting one very important source of O’Neill’s inspiration, without which he might perhaps have been just a builder of word-mountains?
Was there not standing in the wings of the Guild Theater, on that momentous opening night, the ghost of an old actor in a white wig, with drawn sword, who looked on proudly as the titanic drama unfolded itself, scene by scene, and who murmured, with perhaps just the suggestion of a chuckle: “That’s good, son! Give ’em the old Theater!”
The actor I refer to needs no introduction to the older boys and girls here tonight—Mr. James O’Neill, “The Count of Monte Cristo” and the father of our present hero. It is his precious inheritance from his trouper-father, his father who counted “One,” “Two,” “Three” as he destroyed his respective victims, one at the curtain to each act; it is his supreme sense of the Theater in its most elementary appeal, which allows Eugene O’Neill to stand us on our heads . . . and keep us there from five in the afternoon until almost midnight.
Electra went on to become more than merely theater news. The Times was moved to gently mock its mise-en-scène editorially on October 31:
Poor New England! She appears to be fated to chronic depression; hush, hark, crash, bang! what is that? It is another cheerful little Eugene O’Neill bulletin about New England. This time it is a couple of murders, a suicide and the regular assortment of repressions, explosions, seductions, lusts and incests.
Critical opinion seems to be unanimous that Mr. O’Neill’s restatement of the complicated troubles of the Atreus family has resulted in a dramatic masterpiece. But it does seem a bit hard on New England, coming after the same author’s celebrated Elms of a few years ago.
Surely there are enough trunk murders in Los Angeles, enough love-nest slayings in New Jersey, enough axe murders in Seattle, to suggest a respite for the country east of the Hudson. New England has been accused of so many things that there’s danger of people coming to regard Horror as peculiarly a New England product.
And an anonymous contributor sent a jingle, parodying an old song, that appeared in the syndicated newspaper column “The Conning Tower” (whose author, Franklin Pierce Adams, famously signed himself “F.P.A.”):
My sister was Electra,
Like yours, you will allow;
And you may have a mother
That needs a bullet now.
I’ve come to this great drama,
Destruction for to deal;
And if you dare insult me, sir,
I’ll tell Eugene O’Neill.
Inevitably, the day after the reviews and the outpouring of congratulations, O’Neill’s mood plummeted: “Sunk—worn out—depressed,” he wrote in his Work Diary. He painfully missed his Mannons, whose breath he’d been breathing, whose thoughts he’d been thinking, for the past five years. “Sad that the Mannons exist no more—for me!”
• • •
DESPITE ALL THE ACCLAIM, Electra did not capture that year’s Pulitzer Prize. The winner was the musical Of Thee I Sing by George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, and George and Ira Gershwin. Perhaps more upsetting for O’Neill, following the play’s publication, St. John Ervine, on leave from his job as the highly regarded English theater critic for the Observer, viciously tore into it as a guest critic for the World.
In his review, Ervine attacked the publisher’s claim that O’Neill was “generally regarded as the world’s greatest dramatist.”
“Generally?” jeered Ervine:
There happen to be alive simultaneously with Mr. O’Neill the following American dramatists: Marc Connelly, Susan Glaspell, Paul Green, Sidney Howard and Elmer Rice, in addition to two authors of light comedies, Mr. Philip Barry and Mr. S. N. Behrman. . . .
The following British dramatists are also contemporaneous with Mr. O’Neill: Sir J. M. Barrie, John Galsworthy, Harley Granville-Barker, Somerset Maugham, Sean O’Casey, Sir Arthur Wing Pinero and Bernard Shaw. . . . Clearly, if Mr. Eugene O’Neill is superior to all of these authors, he is a most remarkable man, and his plays, therefore, must be tested, not by local and contemporary standards, but by standards that are universal. Mr. O’Neill, in brief, is to be placed in comparison with the great Greeks, with Shakespeare, with Moliere and Racine, with Ibsen and Strindberg and Chekhov. Can he bear to be compared with them?
O’Neill himself had the last word when, five years later, he was awarded the Nobel Prize, becoming his country’s only American playwright (as of this writing) to earn that honor, at which time he maintained that Mourning Becomes Electra was the play from which he had derived “the most personal satisfaction.”
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With the turmoil of Mourning Becomes Electra behind him, O’Neill went in search of that sunny clime he had dreamed of in his rain-bound French château. New York was not, after all, the city he had recently praised for its life and vitality, nor was it “the place for ideas.” He hadn’t jotted a note for a play in six weeks—no
t since early October; he knew he must find a more writer-friendly environment.
O’Neill and Carlotta made their leisurely way in mid-November 1931 to the high-end tropical resort of Sea Island, Georgia, recommended by Ilka Chase as the sunny haven in which to build their home. In their chauffeur-driven Cadillac, Carlotta was wrapped against the late-autumn chill in a fur neckpiece fashioned for her by Revillon from the finest Russian sables—a gift from O’Neill for her unflagging support during the ordeal of Electra. They were, he said, “Three skins for the Trilogy.”
Justifying his possession of a Cadillac in the unrelenting era of the Depression, O’Neill told friends he’d bought it at a bargain. “I snared it second-hand,” he somewhat sheepishly informed Brooks Atkinson. “Only used 2,000 miles, ironclad guarantee attached, looking brand new, over one thousand dollars off, who could resist this splendid gift of world depression? Not I, who have always been an A One snob when it came to cars and boats, which must have speed and line and class or ‘we are not amused.’”
This “snootiness,” explained O’Neill, dated from early boyhood when his father (for once disregarding his penny-pinching Irish-famine roots) “always got me the classiest rowboat to be had, and we sported the first Packard car in our section of Connecticut.”
Impressed with the remoteness, natural beauty, and sunshine of Sea Island, O’Neill was eager to price beachfront properties. All too familiar with her husband’s impulsive streak, Carlotta ventured that it might be wiser to rent first, to be sure they wanted to live there permanently. But O’Neill insisted—as he had three years earlier when (still married to Agnes) he began rebuilding his “permanent home” in Bermuda; now Sea Island was where he wanted to spend the rest of his life.
“We have just taken an apartment in New York that has cost quite a bit of money to do up,” Carlotta reminded him, “and we have it for three years at over $7,000 a year.”