By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  O’Neill was less concerned about the late curtain than angered that Cohan was distorting the play’s values, and he didn’t hesitate—any more than he had with Gilpin—to go backstage and have it out with his star. Evidently Cohan gave in, for their relations continued to be cordial.

  Carlotta’s gift for O’Neill’s forty-fifth birthday arrived belatedly at Casa Genotta on November 13. It was an ancient player piano that Carlotta had bought for him at the Wurlitzer Electric Piano Company, where it was being outfitted with a new motor; she had taken O’Neill to see it a few days after the opening of Ah, Wilderness!

  O’Neill christened the piano Rosie. “It was a great moment in my life when she first burst on my sight in Wurlitzer’s remotest storeroom in all her gangrenous-green, festooned-with-rosebuds beauty,” O’Neill wrote to Robert Sisk, formerly the press agent for the Theatre Guild and now a Hollywood producer. He added, “There sure must have been an artist soul lost to the world in the New Orleans honkey-tonk—or bordello—she came from.”

  According to Carlotta, the piano resembled the player piano in the barroom scene of Ah, Wilderness!

  It came complete with rolls of the old songs O’Neill loved, including dance tunes. Late one night, to Carlotta’s delight, O’Neill danced her “gaily up and down the long hall of Casa Genotta with a ‘bunny hug’—& enjoys himself no end!”

  He loved showing Rosie off to visitors. “Gene adored that piano,” recalled Carl Van Vechten. To record O’Neill’s pleasure, Van Vechten photographed him sitting at it, his hands on the keyboard, his face lit with a rare grin of delight. O’Neill enjoyed posing for Van Vechten. “I could have photographed Gene all day if I’d wanted to,” said Van Vechten.

  Robert Sisk was amused by O’Neill’s habit of keeping a box of nickels on his piano. “He’d drop a nickel in the slot and listen blissfully to the damn thing tinkle.” And Lillian Gish recalled that during one of her visits with Nathan to Casa Genotta, O’Neill joined him in a boisterous sing-along. “They were no Ezio Pinzas,” she said, “but it was amusing to listen to them.”

  It was a good thing O’Neill had Rosie to cheer him, for during most of November he was once again driving himself frantic over Days Without End. With rehearsals looming, he suddenly felt renewed misgivings about the play’s ending, and was actually considering a rewrite of the sixth draft, which he’d submitted to the Theatre Guild on July 3, 1933, as the final version—the one that was now being readied for its January premiere.

  “Gene would walk up and down the beach, painfully wrestling with the problem,” said Carlotta. “He couldn’t make up his mind whether or not to have the man go back to the Church.” She worried silently: “He will either reach a big ‘Yes’—or go to a much firmer ‘NO’!”

  O’Neill also sought guidance on aspects of Days Without End, as well as on his personal religious quandary, from several Jesuit priests, according to Carlotta. At one point he thought of having his protagonist shoot himself at the church altar.

  Despite having toyed with the alternative of a seventh draft, O’Neill returned (albeit only half-convinced) to the affirmative version of his sixth draft, once again calling the play finished.

  “It was the Jesuits,” said Carlotta, “who finally persuaded him to end the play with the protagonist going back to the Church.”

  • • •

  AGAIN OVERRIDING O’NEILL’S PLEA to forgo an out-of-town tryout, the Theatre Guild took Days Without End to Boston on January 1 (1934), for a week’s run. Once there, O’Neill eliminated three and a half pages of the script. (Earle Larimore, who had played Orin in Mourning Becomes Electra, portrayed the “John” half of John Loving, and his wife, Selena Royle, played Elsa, the character modeled on Carlotta; Ilka Chase was cast as Lucy Hillman, the woman with whom John commits adultery, and the English actor Stanley Ridges played Loving.)

  Philip Moeller, after dining with O’Neill and Carlotta in their Boston hotel suite on New Year’s Eve, was impelled by his sense of the play’s significance in O’Neill’s life to make notes about that dinner and its postprandial conversation.

  “It is obvious from what was said that [Days Without End] is more her play than his. They both, definitely, acknowledge this. She says Gene was and is still a Catholic, and that she hopes he will return definitely to the faith and that she will gladly go with him when he is ready. But he must not be forced.

  “There were long disquisitions over the mystic beauty of Catholic faith,” Moeller wrote, adding that the end of the play was undoubtedly a wish fulfillment on O’Neill’s part. “He told me about the simple trusting happiness of some of his Catholic relatives. He wanted to go that way and find a happiness which apparently he hadn’t got and which obviously this perfect marriage doesn’t seem to bring him.”

  While Moeller found O’Neill’s candor touching, he was less charitable to Carlotta. “Madam was again amply rich in banalities—but her striving to hold it all together is somehow appealing and irritating at the same time.” He went on, surprisingly, to theorize that O’Neill, deep down, was not altogether satisfied with Carlotta as a wife, and expressed his misgivings about the ultimate success of their marriage.

  Lawrence Langner was blunter than Moeller about the O’Neill marriage. “Because both Carlotta and Gene had been married and divorced,” he said, “there was only one subject on their minds: ‘Is this marriage going to last?’ Gene wrote Days Without End because he’d swallowed this guff about love after death.”

  Both men had accurately intuited the precarious undercurrents of the O’Neills’ marriage. O’Neill himself seemed unsure of having truly achieved his ideal union, as witnessed by his inscription to Carlotta in a bound manuscript of the play that he gave her, quoting a speech in which Elsa refers to her husband: “He said no matter if every other marriage on earth were rotten and a lie, our love could make ours into a true sacrament.” To which O’Neill appended (pleadingly? doubtfully?), “And ours has, hasn’t it, Darling One!”

  • • •

  DURING THE TRYOUT in Boston, O’Neill’s mixed feelings about the production intensified. On the one hand, he would have been pleased to have formal Catholic endorsement and, on the other, he wanted his public to judge the play purely on its literary merits. He believed the concessions he’d made to Catholic dogma entitled him to the Church’s acceptance, yet he was not happy about those concessions—and he grew furious when he learned some priests regarded them as insufficient.

  He was particularly enraged when a priest contacted Russel Crouse with an offer on behalf of the Catholic Writers Guild. He would personally endorse the play, said the priest, if O’Neill would make clear in the script that the heroine’s first husband had died rather than leaving a suspicion that there might have been a divorce. After listening to Crouse’s report, O’Neill sputtered, “To hell with them! I don’t say she’s divorced, in so many words—and I won’t say the husband died; let them draw their own conclusions.”

  Evidently there was controversy within the clergy. One prominent Jesuit priest, the Reverend Gerard B. Donnelly, was moved to write a staunch endorsement of the play in the Catholic publication America. He called Days Without End a “magnificently Catholic play, a play Catholic in its characters, its story and its moral.”

  Although the play was praised by the critics of the Boston Transcript and the Herald, it displeased most of the New York critics when it opened in New York on January 8, 1934, at the Henry Miller’s Theatre.

  Carlotta did no dance when she read Atkinson’s review. “One of the most amazing things about Mr. O’Neill is his capacity for seasoning his valiant career with bad plays,” said Atkinson. “His Days Without End belongs in that doleful category.” Citing the play’s lack of “size, imagination, vitality, beauty and knowledge of human character,” Atkinson could not resist some mild scolding: “Sometimes Mr. O’Neill tells his story as though he had never written a play before. In view o
f his acknowledged mastery of the theater it is astonishing that his career can be so uneven.”

  It was soon clear that the play was both critically and artistically a failure. “Critics very prejudiced against play as I foresaw,” O’Neill wrote in his Work Diary on January 9. To Sophus Winther, he ridiculed New York’s critics for dismissing his play as a “sentimental anachronism” and condemned them as unfit to judge its present-day religious relevance.

  Days Without End challenged and insulted their superiority complexes in this respect, he blustered, “and they reacted like bigoted, priest-burning, Puritan atheists!” The clincher to his argument was shockingly naive and blinkered: “Also my play treats adultery seriously—as a sin against love—and how could the first-night intelligentsia of New York countenance that!”

  But, as attested to by Carlotta, O’Neill did blame himself for his decision to end the play with the protagonist’s return to the Church. “Later he was furious with himself for having done this,” she recalled. “He felt he had ruined the play and that he was a traitor to himself as a writer. He always said the last act was a phony and he never forgave himself for it.” According to Carlotta, Days Without End was his “last flirtation” with Catholicism.

  It was not, however, the end of his search for a spiritual faith by which to live. “I do believe absolutely that Faith must come to us if we are ever again to have an End for our days and know that our lives have meaning,” he wrote in answer to a fan, taking pains to point out that all of his past plays, “even when most materialistic,” were “in their spiritual implications a search and a cry in the Wilderness protesting against the fate of our own faithlessness.” O’Neill never abandoned that search; his cry in the “Wilderness,” although more obliquely expressed, would be heard in all the works yet to come.

  Subduing his rage over the negative reviews, O’Neill sent his somewhat demoralized cast a telegram that would have put a champion cheerleader to shame. He thanked them for their “splendid” work and told them to ignore the bad reviews. “This is a play we can carry over the critics’ heads. So carry on with confidence in the final result and make them like it. Are we downhearted? No. We will get them in the end. . . . Again my gratitude to you all.”

  Days Without End survived for a seven-week run, just long enough to fulfill the Theatre Guild’s subscription list. While it failed as the inspiring spiritual drama O’Neill had in mind—and deserves little space in his canon—the writing of it was for him a soul-purging experience. Few of his colleagues sympathized, however, and, in at least one instance, the play cost O’Neill a valued friendship. Benjamin De Casseres, a notorious atheist (“I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose”), took the play as a personal insult.

  “When Ben saw the play, he blazed,” Bio De Casseres reminisced after her husband’s death. “He thought O’Neill had betrayed his Demon. He equated O’Neill’s ‘fall’ with the fall of Lucifer.”

  De Casseres wrote a vicious attempt at parody entitled Drivel Without End, which he had privately published as a pamphlet, sending copies to his literary acquaintances, not neglecting to send a copy to O’Neill. The two men never spoke again.

  O’Neill’s cloud of gloom was somewhat lightened when William Butler Yeats—“no Catholic,” as O’Neill pointed out to the Guild’s business manager, Warren Munsell—cabled to say that Dublin’s Abbey Theatre wanted to produce it immediately. “If a poet like Yeats sees what is in it,” said O’Neill, “all my hard work on it is more than justified.” (Twelve years later, O’Neill had a total change of heart about the intrinsic splendor of Days Without End. Perhaps measuring it against his majestic final works, he succinctly explained to the writer Kyle Crichton why the play had failed: “The critics didn’t understand it and it wasn’t any good.”)

  A few days after the play’s closing, O’Neill told Russel Crouse he was thankful the production was over and done with. “Hoping against hope is a wearying game,” he said, “and the handwriting on the wall was always plainly there to be read—in red ink.”

  O’Neill said he wouldn’t begin work on a new play for some time. He was intent “on doing a little serious loafing and forgetting of ‘Ye Olde Show Shoppe,’” as he was “stale as hell on the drama.” And he wasn’t at all sure what he would take up when he did start writing again.

  PART IV

  “TIME’S WINGED CHARIOT”

  35

  Alone with Carlotta in his New York hotel suite, O’Neill was far from contemplating any “loafing and forgetting.”

  Giving way to his feeling of powerlessness and his dread of the future, he flung himself into the arms of his wife.

  “For God’s sake, hold me tight,” O’Neill gasped, breaking into sobs. “I feel as if I’d burst through my skin.”

  Holding him, Carlotta told herself she’d “always felt this wretched play would hurt him!” Something hidden was “eating him—at his very heart! He isn’t well! I don’t know what to do!”

  What worried Carlotta most was his new habit of sleeping well into the afternoon; she suspected he might be surreptitiously augmenting his prescribed sedatives. But she hesitated to question him, fearing a quarrel.

  She and O’Neill, both haggard with nervous tension, limped back to Sea Island in late January 1934. They were momentarily soothed at being greeted by Blemie, who all but sang with joy on seeing them. While grateful to be home, O’Neill did no writing during all of February; his nerves, liver, and digestion, he complained, were “all shot,” and his weight was down to 137 pounds. Carlotta had her own grievance; recently turned forty-five, she brooded about the “torture of being no longer young.”

  The O’Neills soon were back in New York, where O’Neill’s doctor, after prescribing insulin for weight gain, warned he must give up all work for six months if he wished to avoid a nervous collapse. O’Neill obeyed. The daily insulin injections (administered by Carlotta) seemed to have worked; by mid-May, he’d gained fourteen pounds.

  He was lucky he had got “due warning,” or he would have “cracked up,” he wrote to Lee Simonson, the set designer for Marco Millions. Even the overwhelming critical acclaim for Mourning Becomes Electra had caused him nothing but gloom and a nervous exhaustion so profound he’d been forced to take to his bed for nearly a week.

  Success, he told Simonson, was for him “as flat, spiritually speaking, as failure.” He no longer derived any “real spiritual satisfaction” from theater productions; he was happy, now, “to forget about work for a time.” Indeed, he declared, he might soon confine his future work to “publication only.”

  On this occasion, his sentiment was heartfelt. Although he would continue, month after month, to write hundreds of thousands of words, the commercial Broadway “show shop” that he derided would hear not a whisper from him for the next dozen years.

  He and Carlotta had once again gone to Big Wolf Lake that summer to escape the Georgia heat. On August 10, he glanced through some of his scribbled ideas for future plays, but found “no impulse” to work. Although his weight had gone up to 156, his nerves were still screaming. The end of September found him again in New York being doctored.

  Pinned down in the city with his anxious wife during most of October, O’Neill sought distraction in the company of a new friend, Sean O’Casey. This was the Irish playwright’s first (and only) visit to New York. He had been living in Devon, England, in what he called “voluntary exile” from Ireland since 1928, the year the Abbey Theatre rejected his play The Silver Tassie.

  George Jean Nathan brought O’Casey to dinner at the Madison Hotel on October 16 as a forty-sixth birthday gift for O’Neill, and their subsequent sorties gave O’Neill the brief, joyful lift of a love affair.

  The feeling was mutual. “He and I fell for each other at once—at least I know I fell for him, and I believe he fell for me,” O’Casey later said.

  At fifty-four, revered but far fro
m affluent, O’Casey was awaiting the Broadway production of his play Within the Gates. He’d arrived in a brown suit and matching cap, carrying nothing with him but an extra set of underwear, a single shirt, a pair of socks, and a sweater. After registering at the Royalton Hotel on West Forty-fourth Street, where George Jean Nathan lived, he spent his first hours testing all the electrical gadgets in his room and carefully distributing his few items of clothing among the drawers of his bureau.

  During their evening at the Madison, Carlotta presented O’Neill with a birthday gift—a pair of slacks—and O’Neill modeled them coquettishly, throwing O’Casey and Nathan into gales of laughter. O’Neill made him laugh often, O’Casey recalled, telling him jokes “only two Irishmen can share.”

  As for O’Neill, he admired O’Casey enough to brave the crowds of Broadway and attend a performance of Within the Gates. For his part, O’Casey had especially admired The Great God Brown and Strange Interlude, and was impressed by the way that O’Neill had finessed his way “back to the Greeks” in Mourning Becomes Electra.

  “When O’Casey told my husband, ‘You write like an Irishman, you don’t write like an American,’” Carlotta said, “Gene was so pleased he didn’t know what to do.” O’Casey, some years after O’Neill’s death, summed up his impressions of his American colleague:

  “He was a great and lovable man; deeply thoughtful of the world’s woes, but holding fast within him the delightful qualities of a child—reminding me of: ‘Except ye become like little children, ye are in no wise fit for the Kingdom of Heaven.’ Well, if there be a heaven, certainly Eugene was fit to live there. English critics didn’t care for his work; but then they are, I fear, nearsighted, looking at the playfulness of the magpies, but with eyes too weak to watch the soar of an eagle in the upper skies.”