By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  The house, which cost $100,000—a lordly sum for the Depression era—and left the O’Neills temporarily broke, was set in an area famous for its cotton crop and for its traditional Southern gentility. The house boasted a courtyard and formal garden in front and a stretch of beach leading to the Atlantic in the back. To its neighbors’ discomfiture, however, Casa Genotta announced its un-neighborly aloofness with a surrounding eight-foot-high wall designed to ensure privacy.

  O’Neill’s study on the second floor jutted out over the ground-floor dining room, and its curved wall, suggesting that of a galleon’s prow, had windows facing out to sea. Inside, it was fitted as a ship’s cabin, with exposed wooden planking on the ceiling and walls and a built-in bunk-sofa beneath the curved windows, among other nautical touches. A circular iron stairway led from the study to the “crow’s-nest” on the roof.

  Carlotta once told Ann Pinchot that she’d had a mental image of what she wanted to build, “down to the last towel rack,” before one brick of the house was put into place. In notes for a magazine article (which never materialized), Pinchot wrote that Carlotta, after her experiences with the French château, “was very decisive in her admiration of American plumbing, and she made certain that kitchen and bathrooms had the best—including, she told me, a bidet. The house was both comfortable and practical—no waste or extravagance, for display purpose; only a clean and precise and beautiful compactness.” The huge living room, rising the full height of the house, was furnished with somewhat starchy comfort; on the walls hung old icons and the masks from The Great God Brown.

  O’Neill once more put aside Without Endings of Days to help Carlotta get settled. He said he had “gone stale on work—thrown off stride by moving and so many distractions.” The challenge he’d set himself this time was more than he’d bargained for, but he did not as yet fully comprehend the paralyzing impact of the gauntlet he’d flung at his own feet.

  At least he could now conduct his creative combat in surroundings far removed from the clamor of the city. As in his isolated French château, he entertained selectively, inviting occasional houseguests. To test the mettle of their staff, he and Carlotta began with family—Eugene Jr.; his wife, Betty; and Shane—as their first houseguests for a two-week stay in early July 1932. Things ran smoothly enough and the trickle of guests continued. Ilka Chase, when she visited, found the house “quiet and exquisitely clean, with special boxes and bags to keep the mildew out of things and with little colored maids polishing like Dutchmen.”

  Lawrence Langner, who visited with his wife, Armina, along with Fania Marinoff, was not surprised to find that the household revolved around O’Neill’s writing: “He worked in his study until noon. Then, attired in his dressing gown, he came down to the beach. After a while we went swimming in the sandy colored water which is, to me, one of the most unattractive features of Sea Island. Gene was the best swimmer and swam far out to sea.”

  Sea Island was at its best during the spring. It grew excessively humid and hot in the summer and, according to Langner, was “by no means the paradise the O’Neills expected it would be.” It was so damp “that special bronze had to be used for all the window hardware, for ordinary metal would rust away.”

  The weather was also often stormy. With clear sunny days not to be counted on, Sea Island seemed, after all, not much of an improvement over the Loire Valley. Another unpleasant feature of the island was disclosed to Langner when he asked Carlotta why all the bushes in the patio were clipped up a foot from the ground. “That’s so we can see if there are any snakes under them,” she told him, explaining that the island abounded in rattlesnakes.

  “Gene added smilingly that these were relatively harmless compared to the pretty little pink coral snakes which also disported themselves in this paradise,” said Langner, adding that Fania, “who hated snakes even more than I did, trod very gingerly around the countryside after this, and I was never quite at ease either.”

  The most frequent guest at Casa Genotta was George Boll, who had fled his native New York for the easygoing life of a Sea Islander. A young bachelor with time on his hands, he was invited to join the O’Neills three or four times a week, where he entertained O’Neill and Carlotta with gossip about their well-heeled Sea Island neighbors, and made up a welcome third for the card games and word games the O’Neills liked to play in the evenings.

  Once or twice a week Boll accompanied O’Neill on fishing expeditions, and he joined him many afternoons on the beach when O’Neill, after a morning’s writing, sought relaxation in exercise. After attacking his punching bag, O’Neill sometimes sparred with Boll, who had particularly endeared himself to O’Neill as a fellow prizefight enthusiast. Boll was an eager listener when O’Neill described the night of September 14, 1923, when he’d sat ringside at the Polo Grounds watching the twenty-eight-year-old Jack Dempsey defend his world championship title against the twenty-nine-year-old challenger Luis Angel Firpo, “The Wild Bull of the Pampas.”

  O’Neill had stood on his seat, along with everyone else in the stadium, hollering and stamping wildly during the three minutes and fifty-seven seconds that the battle raged. Firpo was knocked down nine times, and Dempsey was belted out of the ring, into the laps of the sportswriters, who promptly threw him back.

  Boll listened in awe as O’Neill (at that time already the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes) described his visit to Dempsey’s dressing room after he’d knocked out Firpo. Dempsey, nursing a black eye, told O’Neill he had forgotten to duck.

  Dempsey was superseded as hero in O’Neill’s sports pantheon by Gene Tunney, who, three years later, vanquished Dempsey in Philadelphia. The reason he liked Tunney, O’Neill told Boll with a grin, had less to do with the champion’s prowess than with his passion for literature. George Bernard Shaw, too, had been drawn to Tunney for that reason. But Tunney had disarmed O’Neill when—invited by Professor William Lyon Phelps in 1928 to address his popular class in literature at Yale—Tunney declared that while the Bard was “overwhelmingly great,” he “secretly cherished the thought that Eugene O’Neill is greater than even Shakespeare.”

  When Boll was not available, O’Neill called on Herbert Freeman to be his sparring partner. Freeman, twenty-three, had been highly recommended as a chauffeur by one of the O’Neills’ Sea Island neighbors. Born in rural Georgia, Freeman was sketchily educated and spoke with a thick drawl. His German wife, Lisa, was engaged by Carlotta as a parlor maid; but she proved unsatisfactory and was soon fired, prompting Freeman to divorce her.

  In addition to driving the O’Neills and their guests, Freeman acted as man Friday and gradually became an indispensable member of the Casa Genotta household. Affectionately called Herb, he was treated almost as an adopted child.

  Freeman was devoted to Carlotta. “She was perfect to me,” he said, recalling that Carlotta had once invited his mother to spend a week at Casa Genotta. “You couldn’t keep from loving anybody like that. But yet, at the same time, we’d battle.” Freeman was wary of Carlotta’s “awful quick temper,” for it led to bursts of fearsome cursing.

  “I don’t think I heard any Marine drill instructor that could beat her,” Freeman once recalled, after returning from a wartime stint with the Marine Corps. “When she’d sometimes raise Cain, I’d say, ‘You just told me the other day, Miss, that I was your child. How’re you talking to a child like this?’ She’d laugh and say, ‘Go on, get out of here.’” If O’Neill happened to be nearby, he would side with Freeman, telling him, “That’s right. Give it to her!”

  O’Neill was completely relaxed in Herb Freeman’s company and often joked with him and lightly confided in him. According to Freeman’s verbatim report, the following dialogue ensued one day at the beach when O’Neill asked him if he could guess who had just telephoned him.

  Herb: “Shane? Eugene Jr.?”

  O’Neill: “Oh, no. Katharine Hepburn.”

  Herb: “What did she want?”
<
br />   O’Neill: “She wants to be in one of my plays. I don’t want her. She’s a great actress. But she’s just a titless wonder.”

  One of Freeman’s duties was to carry O’Neill’s kayak down to the beach. He would watch as O’Neill paddled way out beyond the surf. When he returned, Freeman sometimes joined him for a swim, trying to keep up. “I couldn’t do it,” Freeman said.

  Casa Genotta was staffed with a live-in cook (as well as a housemaid who cooked when necessary), but O’Neill would sometimes ask Herb to prepare a special meal for him. “I’d make cornbread and fried chicken,” said Freeman. “I heard him tell the cook one time, ‘Why the hell don’t you fry chicken like Herb does?’ She was a good cook . . . but [after that] she didn’t like me no more.”

  • • •

  AGAIN TAKING UP Without Endings of Days during August 1932, O’Neill blundered into one after another of the traps he’d inadvertently set for himself. “Dull—no go,” he scribbled in his Work Diary on August 8. And four days later: “Stuck again—discouraged.”

  On the following day, Carlotta marveled in her diary: “Gene talks to me at great length of one of his favorite topics ‘Mother God’! And then with that most charming smile of his, he says ‘I want to go to church’! We went!” That same day he started a “new 1st Scene” and continued working on the play throughout the month, when once more he was stuck. After doing “battle with it again” from midnight to 2:30 a.m. on September 1, he gave in: “no flow—sunk!” He fell into a despondent sleep—and a dream came to his rescue.

  • • •

  HE AWOKE THAT MORNING with the idea for a “Nostalgic Comedy,” as he described it. Finding it “fully formed and ready to write,” he armed himself with pad and pencil and by 3:30 that afternoon he had sketched an outline for Ah, Wilderness! On the following day, noting that the play seemed “crying to be written!” he put aside Without Endings of Days. He was only too happy to let himself be distracted from memories of his own tormented Catholic childhood and to deal with the “very simple people” (as he described them to Eugene Jr.) of Ah, Wilderness!

  “It has very little plot,” O’Neill told his son. “It is more the capture of a mood, an evocation [of] the spirit of a time that is dead now with all its ideals and manners & codes—the period in which my middle ’teens were spent.

  “Perhaps, if I give you the subtitle you will sense the spirit of what I’ve tried to recapture in it, ‘A Nostalgic Comedy of the Ancient Days when Youth was Young, and Right was Right, and Life was a Wicked Opportunity.’” After cautioning Eugene that it was “not a play one can explain,” he nevertheless attempted, haltingly and at considerable length, to explain it:

  “Yes, it is a comedy—and not in a satiric vein like ‘Marco M’—and not deliberately spoofing at the period (like most modern comedies of other days) to which we now in our hopeless befuddlement and disintegration and stupidity feel so idiotically superior, but laughing at its absurdities while at the same time appreciating and emphasizing its lost spiritual & ethical values.”

  It was a pleasure, he went on, to switch from his usual preoccupation with the “tragic hidden undertones of life” he ordinarily pursued in his plays. Ah, Wilderness!, he said, was surely “the last play they would ever suspect me of writing.”

  And so O’Neill again put aside his dolorous miracle play in favor of his new comedy. What he now wanted was to capture the spirit of the typical American large small town at the turn of the century, he told his elder son. That past, he said, “possessed a lot which we badly need today to steady us.” He was recalling the middle-class families of the New London of 1906 among whom he’d spent the summers of his youth, and which, in retrospect, seemed to have been governed by a homespun ethos that no longer existed.

  The play’s curtain rises on the morning of the Fourth of July, 1906, and revolves around the Miller family: Father, Nat, the editor of his hometown newspaper; Essie, his maternal, efficient, and sweet-natured wife; their four robust, affectionate children—three boys and a girl ranging from eleven to nineteen; Nat’s spinster sister, Lily, in love with Essie’s unregenerate bachelor brother, Sid, a reporter for Nat’s paper.

  The slender plot hinges on the small war between the mildly rebellious second son, Richard—going on seventeen and about to enter Yale—and his morally steadfast but indulgent father, who tolerates Richard’s frequent spouting of radical poetry.

  The play’s modest denouement occurs when Richard, thwarted in his tentative romance with a pretty local girl, fifteen-year-old Muriel McComber, gets drunk in a barroom, where he has a brief and indeterminate encounter with a prostitute.

  O’Neill’s memory of his own adolescent rebelliousness (and his father’s less tolerant attitude) had been jogged by his impulsive visit to New London the previous summer. On July 1 of that year, he noted, “revisit Pequot Ave. old time haunts.” Carlotta, years later, recalled that she had thought the visit unwise; but O’Neill insisted, and they stopped in New London during a motor trip up the coast of Long Island and Connecticut.

  “Don’t do it, darling, don’t do it,” Carlotta warned him. “Don’t ever try to go back; keep your ideas, but don’t go back.”

  O’Neill ignored her. “No, he must go,” recalled Carlotta.

  As they drove along Pequot Avenue, O’Neill complained, “I can’t find it, I can’t even see it. This can’t be Pequot Avenue.” He was aghast at the changed landscape. Carlotta knew that the grounds in front of the O’Neill cottage had stretched to the water, “but in the time that Gene had been away,” she noted, “the town had cut a street through and built little houses along here to the water, and everything was so changed. I was thunderstruck when I saw this quaint little birdcage of a house, sitting there.” They didn’t go in, for somebody had bought it and was living there.

  “I shouldn’t have come,” said O’Neill.

  “Well, never mind,” said Carlotta, “you have come, now let’s get out of here.”

  “Yes, let’s go away,” O’Neill agreed. “I don’t want to look at it.”

  It was on September 1, 1932, after a swim off their Sea Island beach, that O’Neill read the first act of Ah, Wilderness! to Carlotta. She found it “charming!”—a word she was apt to apply to anything from a new pet canary to a brilliant sunrise, or a love letter. In this instance, she elaborated:

  “[The play] is Gene’s dream of how he would have liked his childhood to have been! Poetic, humorous, & a wee bit pathetic!” The “Gene” she had known in the 1920s, she added, “could not have written this!” She was quite right. But what she didn’t specify was that, among other things, it was the only play he had written so far in which all the female characters were motivated by good-heartedness toward the male protagonist (in this instance, O’Neill’s youthful fantasy-self).

  O’Neill completed Ah, Wilderness! on October 3, only six weeks since he had dreamed it. “Great affection for this one,” he had noted. On October 28, a week after celebrating his forty-fourth birthday, he reluctantly resumed work on Without Endings of Days. After listening to O’Neill read aloud his second draft of Act I, Carlotta privately worried that the play was causing “torment and battle with himself.”

  Two days later, when he read aloud Act II, Carlotta felt even more convinced that he was heading into an emotional hurricane. But she dared not presume to warn him. “It is all so personal with him,” she noted, “and unless he asks me to give my honest opinion I will remain silent and let him exorcise his own devils—or saints! Poor darling, he must always be tormented!”

  But when he later read aloud Act III, Carlotta described herself as truly moved. “I hope he does not change it.” The following day, according to Carlotta, O’Neill was “going through a terrific spiritual experience in writing this play—So am I in watching his reactions!”

  So absorbed was O’Neill that he could pay only fleeting attention to the momentous presid
ential election on November 8. Carlotta, staunch Tory that she claimed to be, favored the incumbent, Herbert Hoover. “He sounds more honest than Roosevelt—not so much the slick politician,” she remarked to her diary.

  O’Neill was quite certain Roosevelt would win. “It was a Democratic landslide, as everyone expected,” he wrote to Eugene Jr. His own increasing gloom about the future of America was reflected in his cynical comment to his son: “I doubt if the substitution of Democratic crooks and windbags for the Republican brand will put any chicken in anyone’s pot.” (A few months later, however, he was [briefly] more optimistic: “Roosevelt, whatever mistakes he may make, is a man with guts who is honestly facing the facts and acting upon them—no flabby, spineless Hoover!” he wrote to his son.)

  After griping about the state of the nation, he couldn’t help boasting of a piece of good news that had come his way. “I was asked to be a member of the Irish Academy being organized by Shaw & Yeats & Robinson, etc.—and accepted.”

  He regarded it as an honor, he said, whereas other academies meant little to him. “Anything with Yeats, Shaw, A.E. [George William Russell], O’Casey, Flaherty, Robinson in it is good enough for me.”

  But he continued to feel gloomy about the state of the economy, particularly as it affected his own dwindling bank account. His financial concerns, along with his distress over Sea Island’s unexpectedly capricious weather and some new difficulties with his play, caused an outburst that stunned Carlotta.

  “He talks to me about being unhappy here!?! Mother of God—he has the ocean to swim [in]—the beach to walk on—the ocean to fish in—male companionship.” It was, after all, O’Neill himself who had insisted she make a home in Sea Island, she exploded. No place, person, or condition was perfect, nor was any love perfect, “but once in a hundred years it comes damn near it—unless one is blind.”

  It was the first time since their marriage that Carlotta had expressed her open outrage, and O’Neill, realizing he’d overstepped, soon apologized.