by Arthur Gelb
The true cause of O’Neill’s malaise, as Carlotta realized, was his excruciating frustration not only with his play but with his personal dilemma. Having forced himself into a confrontation with the Catholic God of his childhood, he couldn’t make up his mind how to resolve it. Would his protagonist decide yes or no to his return to the Church? And—even more difficult—would he himself re-embrace his lost faith?
“This damn play has a stranglehold on the old bean,” O’Neill wrote to Nathan. What he had so far written, he said, seemed to him “a horrid mess.” Still working on a third draft, he dropped the word “Without” from his title (now calling the play Endings of Days); but that did little to help. Momentarily dismissing his dilemma, he permitted himself to spend what he described as a “lovely Christmas with Carlotta.”
However, three days later, O’Neill was fretting over “something fundamentally wrong” with the play and he decided to abandon it “until, if ever, the right solution of problem dawns—no good thinking any more—pass buck to unconscious—a little inspiration called for here.”
He bade farewell to the year 1932 in his Work Diary with a prayer of gratitude: “What I have to thank God for: Carlotta!”
34
O’Neill found he couldn’t keep the promise he’d made to himself at the close of 1932; instead of shelving Days Without End, he continued to grapple with draft after draft, unable to determine the play’s conclusion—let alone its title (in early April 1933, he had renamed it An End of Days). Carlotta, worried about O’Neill working too hard, feared another crack-up.
It wasn’t until the end of May that O’Neill found the title that stuck: Days Without End. The phrase beguiled him for its double meaning: “without end” could be construed as the prayer book’s meaning of “eternity,” but also as the secular meaning of “without goal.”
He’d also found an ending he thought would work: the spiritually inclined John would at last vanquish the skeptical Loving and embrace the Cross. But, as O’Neill hastened to explain to the writer Sophus K. Winther, he himself was still wavering about his own return to Catholicism. Winther, head of the English Department at the University of Washington in Seattle, was completing a critical study of O’Neill’s work through the writing of Days Without End.
O’Neill had not gone back to the Church, he told Winther, adding, “but I would be a liar if I didn’t admit that, for the sake of my soul’s peace, I have often wished I could.
“And by Catholicism I don’t mean the Catholic church as a politically-meddling, social-reactionary force. That repels me. I mean the mystic faith of Catholicism whose symbols seem to me to approach closer than any other symbols to the apprehension of a hidden spiritual significance in human life.”
With the burden of his religious play lifted, O’Neill turned to the more down-to-earth project of finding a new publisher. Horace Liveright was on the verge of bankruptcy, and Saxe Commins, who at O’Neill’s insistence had become his editor at Liveright, was attempting to collect his friend’s accrued royalties before the firm crashed.
O’Neill was being courted by first-rank publishers, eager for the prestige of his name and aware that his plays in print outsold even those of George Bernard Shaw’s. (As of January 1932, Strange Interlude had sold 120,000 copies and Mourning Becomes Electra, now in its eighth printing, had already sold 60,000; all of O’Neill’s plays combined had thus far sold 700,000 copies.)
By the end of May, O’Neill had decided to accept Bennett Cerf’s offer at Random House; in addition to meeting all of O’Neill’s financial terms, Cerf agreed to give Commins an editor’s job. Liveright’s bankruptcy was a fait accompli on July 10, 1933.
Both Ah, Wilderness! and Days Without End were embraced for production in the 1933–34 season by the Theatre Guild. But O’Neill, far from being gratified, was instead driving himself (and Carlotta) frantic with indecision over which play to present first. Ought it to be the nostalgic comedy or the spiritually wrenching tract? He was troubled, as he told Lawrence Langner, that any play following his popular Electra was “in a bad spot, no matter how good” it was.
He dragged his dilemma with him on August 4 to a campsite on Big Wolf Lake in the Adirondacks, fleeing from the Georgia heat (and leaving Blemie behind in the care of servants). Arriving in a fit of pique, O’Neill told Carlotta he was seriously considering “the advisability of not producing either of the plays.”
He had the good sense to squelch his tantrum, for he was perfectly aware that his only hope of amassing enough cash to support his lifestyle lay in a lucrative Broadway run. Recalling the disastrous reception of the mystical-metaphysical Dynamo when it followed the vastly more accessible Strange Interlude, he wrote Langner he’d decided that Ah, Wilderness! should be produced first. He was, he said, speaking “psychologically” and in the interest of “the best showmanship,” explaining that he didn’t want Days Without End to meet the same fate as Dynamo. He added that Days was “nothing if not controversial, especially in its Catholic aspect,” and he believed Ah, Wilderness! would surprise his followers with its lightheartedness, and would provide a breathing spell before confronting audiences with his dark (and often baffling) religious meditation.
A day later, he unabashedly reversed himself, rushing to apologize to Langner for having sounded “a damn sight more definite” than he really was. “I waver and feel one way about it one day and another the next,” he said, until he was “quite gaga.”
Langner made the decision for him, putting Ah, Wilderness! into production at once for an October 2 opening; aware that O’Neill and Carlotta had planned to extend their Adirondacks getaway through September, Langner apologized for having to cut their vacation short. O’Neill would be needed on August 30 for the start of rehearsals. And so, much to his annoyance, he and Carlotta were obliged to take up residence at New York’s Madison Hotel on August 29 in the midst of a heat wave.
O’Neill had earlier cautioned Philip Moeller, the director of Ah, Wilderness!, that (in spite of the play’s setting in Connecticut) he must not think of it as “a New England play!!!” Connecticut, he told Moeller, “never was real New England, as any New Englander will tell you.” The play, he explained, could be laid in New York State, or New Jersey, or the Middle West with no change.
“I happened to have my old home town of New London in mind when I wrote—couldn’t help it—but New London, even in those days was pretty well divorced from its N.E. heritage” and strongly influenced by New York.
O’Neill always insisted that Nat and Essie Miller and their four children were inventions. He allowed that they might have been very loosely based on those of his own relatives and friends who were present in New London during his youth; but it was “absurd,” he declared, to infer any resemblance between his adolescent protagonist and himself, for they were “exact” opposites.
There is ample evidence, however, that most (if not all) of the play’s characters (including himself) are rooted in the real people who surrounded the seventeen-year-old son of James and Ella O’Neill in New London in the summer of 1906, the year of the play’s setting.
To begin with, Eugene, like his protagonist, Richard Miller, was readying himself to enter an Ivy League college in the fall (in Richard’s case Yale, in Eugene’s Princeton). And Richard, like Eugene, is given to sweeping (if often ill-informed) endorsements of Emma Goldman’s anarchist philosophy.
The character of Richard, however, was also in a sense an homage to Eugene’s New London boyhood friend Hutch Collins, who, not long after accepting Eugene’s invitation to join the Provincetown Players as an actor, had died in 1919 during the influenza epidemic. O’Neill admitted that, like Richard Miller, “the boy does spout the poetry I and Hutch Collins used to,” including The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (the source of the play’s title; O’Neill substituted “Ah” for “Oh” because the former sounded more nostalgic).
But Art McGinley, another freque
nt companion of Eugene’s New London boyhood, was also recognizable as a part model for Richard Miller. Art’s father, John McGinley, was a longtime friend of James O’Neill’s; it was John who, in 1883, had persuaded James to buy a home in New London. And it was John McGinley’s cheerful, closely knit family environment—contrasting so poignantly with O’Neill’s own dystopian milieu—that was reflected in the play.
It was McGinley’s relationship with his son Art, particularly his amiable tolerance of his son’s rebelliousness, that set the mood for Ah, Wilderness!—so different from the then smoldering antagonism between James O’Neill and Eugene.
When Art McGinley wrote O’Neill to say he’d recognized his family in the play, O’Neill, fearing he might have offended, wrote back to assure him no character had been taken from life. All his characters were, he said, “general types true for any large-small town.” The play, he later said, “was a sort of wishing out loud.”
One of O’Neill’s concerns about the play was that, if taken as a portrait of his family (rather than of generic Americans), he himself might be viewed as the product of a benign—rather than a tragic—environment. “The truth,” he insisted on more than one occasion, “is that I had no youth.”
O’Neill, dream-writing Ah, Wilderness! at a distance of twenty-six years, had mellowed so much toward his father as to transfer one or two of his benign quirks to Nat Miller, notably James’s conviction that “a certain peculiar oil” in bluefish had a poisonous effect on his digestion; it was a family joke that Ella served him bluefish under the guise of weakfish. The other trait was James’s tendency to repeat stories of his boyhood and young manhood—illustrated in Ah, Wilderness! by what was probably the only nontheatrical reminiscence in his repertory, concerning the way he had once rescued a friend from drowning.
O’Neill also added the traits of another paternal figure present in the New London of 1906—Frederick Palmer Latimore, soon to give up his judgeship in nearby Groton to become the editor of the New London Telegraph, where O’Neill, six years later, would briefly work as a reporter.
• • •
GEORGE M. COHAN, WHO, five years earlier, had turned down the leading role in Marco Millions and had never appeared in a play written by anyone but himself, agreed to portray the father in Ah, Wilderness! The self-styled Yankee Doodle Dandy had been lured by the Act I setting of the Fourth of July. Ever the wag, he quipped to the press that O’Neill might decide to appear the following season in a Cohan play. Further explaining his reasons for accepting the role of Nat Miller, he ticked off various points of kinship with O’Neill, among them that their fathers had been friends and were both charter members of the Catholic Actors Guild.
Cohan had picked O’Neill “for a winner,” he told the press, when his first Broadway play, Beyond the Horizon, opened thirteen years earlier. “I knew right away he had the goods,” Cohan quipped. “Jeez, he’s written a pile of them, hasn’t he? Well, if this play doesn’t make a hit, I’ll take the kid into vaudeville with me. But I come first. It’s got to be Cohan and O’Neill. That’s my game.”
O’Neill later returned the compliment by inscribing a copy of Ah, Wilderness! to Cohan: “With deep gratitude and appreciation for all your grand portrayal of Nat Miller has meant to this play—and with the real friendship of one (I hope) regular guy for another!”
With rehearsals under way in September, O’Neill, in an interview with the Herald Tribune critic Richard Watts Jr., waxed nostalgic. “Perhaps it is because I am growing old,” he said, “that I begin to look back fondly on my youthful days in a part of the country that was my one real home in those times.”
Rehearsals for Ah, Wilderness! proceeded according to form—O’Neill’s form—which was to cut and pare where he saw fit and decline to cut for mere length (which was where the Guild often saw fit). Carlotta’s presence at all rehearsals and her obvious influence on O’Neill’s decisions were mostly taken in good part by the director, Philip Moeller, and other members of the production, including set designer Robert Edmond Jones.
As the play was a comedy, the actors needed a chance to time their laughs before a paying audience and, over O’Neill’s strenuous objections, the Theatre Guild insisted on an out-of-town tryout of at least a week; O’Neill reluctantly agreed to join the company in Pittsburgh, where the play was staged in the last week of September.
He later claimed that his attendance had taught him “nothing whatsoever except to transpose one speech on account of a laugh—which I could just as easily have done from my hotel in N.Y. on information from Phil”; there had been absolutely no need for him to “watch a sticky audience react!”
O’Neill did, however, make one “cut” during the Pittsburgh tryout. The Guild thought the play was running too long and commissioned Russel Crouse, who was handling publicity, to ask O’Neill to reduce the playing time by ten minutes. Crouse—who eventually quit as a press agent to become a playwright (most notably as co-author with Howard Lindsay of the huge Broadway hit Life with Father)—dutifully delivered the message. He anticipated O’Neill’s reaction and, in fact, agreed with him.
“Right,” said O’Neill. “To hell with them.”
The next day Crouse was on his way out of his room at the Hotel Schenley, where O’Neill also was staying, when the telephone rang. It was O’Neill.
“Come down to my room right away,” O’Neill commanded. Crouse said he couldn’t, he was on his way to the theater to supervise a press interview he had arranged for Cohan.
“I have to see you right now,” O’Neill insisted.
Crouse explained he would be back in an hour or so and would see O’Neill then.
“I have that ten-minute cut for you,” said O’Neill.
Crouse was in O’Neill’s room within seconds.
“Sit down,” said O’Neill genially.
“I’m late,” answered Crouse. “Just give me the script with the cuts marked.”
“There isn’t any script. Sit down,” repeated O’Neill, with a self-satisfied grin.
Crouse threw O’Neill a trapped look, and O’Neill relented. He explained he had decided simply to collapse the first two acts into one, eliminating a ten-minute intermission.
Amused by O’Neill’s tactic, Crouse submitted the “cut” to the Guild, which did not accept it. The play continued to be presented in the original four acts, with its extra ten minutes of running time.
• • •
CARLOTTA AROSE AT six o’clock on the morning of October 3 to read the “marvelous notices” for Ah, Wilderness! and proceeded to “dance round the room like a fool.” As she told her diary, “Gene wakes & thinks I have gone mad! I leap on him in his bed & hug him until he has to fight to protect himself.”
Her favorite critic, Brooks Atkinson, led the encomiums: “As a writer of comedy, Mr. O’Neill has a capacity for tenderness that most of us never suspected. Ah, Wilderness! may not be his most tremendous play, but it is certainly his most attractive. Mr. O’Neill’s point of view is full of compassionate understanding. And in spite of its dreadful title, Ah, Wilderness! is a true and congenial comedy.”
The other critics, after expressing surprise at O’Neill’s shift from dire tragedy to sentimental comedy, lauded the ever-popular Cohan, whose mere presence assured an almost certain hit. The play ran for 289 performances and while Sidney Kingsley’s Men in White beat Ah, Wilderness! for that year’s Pulitzer Prize, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought the film rights for $75,000.
At O’Neill’s invitation, Brooks Atkinson interviewed him at lunch in his Madison Hotel suite the day after the opening. O’Neill said he wanted to explain the play’s background, perhaps wishing to dispel all doubt in Atkinson’s (or the public’s) mind that the Millers reflected his own family, or that his own youth had been as innocently happy as Richard’s. Years later, Atkinson boasted it was the most agreeable interview he’d ever conducted.
Mr.
O’Neill felt like talking about anything. He was even willing to listen; and from the point of view of the interviewer that was bad. Mrs. O’Neill efficiently intercepted the telephone calls, the messengers and the waiters, thus isolating a corner of New York where an amiable dramatist could call his soul his own. And at high noon on the day after the premiere his soul was in excellent condition. Until December, when his next play, Days Without End, goes into rehearsal, he was to be scot-free.
His enthusiasm spread the conversation alarmingly. Sea Island Beach, the Adirondacks . . . swimming, climates, Cecil Rhodes, George M. Cohan—it hardly mattered what he talked about.
Atkinson went on to report that there were fragments of autobiography in Ah, Wilderness! but that O’Neill disclaimed anything but a superficial kinship with Richard Miller or his family. Now that it was on the stage, “and acted very much to his taste,” said Atkinson, “Mr. O’Neill is his own best audience. He is ashamed to admit how much the comedy amuses him. Some things have to be confidential.
“At the age of forty-five, Mr. O’Neill is a little grayer around the temples and the lines are a little more firmly drawn on his face, but his eyes have the luster of a man who is in good health and spirits and who is eager to go on vigorously with the job. It is this interviewer’s private opinion that the tension has relaxed a good deal.”
O’Neill’s geniality with respect to at least one aspect of the Ah, Wilderness! production did not last very long. As with Charles Gilpin, Cohan’s personal triumph went to his head and soon he was embellishing his performance with bits of extra stage business. The curtain was coming down later each night.
Finally, when the play was running twenty-five minutes overtime, the Theatre Guild sent a note to Cohan asking him to please see to it that the curtain came down at eleven. Cohan retaliated by sending his valet to the Guild office with a warning that if any member of the management entered the theater while the play was in progress, he would walk offstage. Then he went right on ad-libbing until 11:25 every night.