By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  Oddly, O’Neill, the father of three children, had little interest in the world his progeny would inhabit, while Shaw, who was childless, had enormous interest in and curiosity about the future. While Shaw went back to Methuselah, he also propelled his vision far forward into a future that no child of his would inhabit, whereas O’Neill was preoccupied only with the world that had shaped his forebears and himself.

  O’Neill’s personal tragic take on the space-time continuum is memorably expressed by Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night: “The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too.”

  36

  In early July 1935, routinely opening O’Neill’s mail in her capacity as confidential secretary, Carlotta was alarmed by a letter from George Jean Nathan regretting he was unable to send a promised case of imported Pilsner beer.

  Carlotta made no comment as she handed her husband the letter, although she could have reminded him of his boast of sobriety, only two years earlier, to his New London cousin, Phil Sheridan, with whom he’d gone on benders in his youth, and with whom he’d stayed in touch by letter.

  “I haven’t even sipped a glass of beer in seven years now,” O’Neill had written Sheridan (discounting, as always, his binges in Guéthery and Shanghai). “I hear you tie or better that mark. Well, well, who would have thought it, what?”

  Carlotta, thankful there was no Pilsner on its way, was unwilling to confront O’Neill. Yet she feared the worst—“because,” as she confided to her diary, “though beginning with simple beer . . . step by step, it will reach Bourbon & then, God help Gene—& me!”

  It was soon evident that God’s help would be needed.

  On the following day, O’Neill asked Carlotta to see about ordering some imported beer and ale from the nearby Cloisters Hotel, leading her to conclude he’d evidently had “a beer or two” there during Nathan’s recent visit. Her heart “turned cold,” as she put it, but she didn’t dare object, fearing the fury of O’Neill’s long-dormant black-Irish temper. “He swears he wants only that!” she told herself. “I want to believe this.”

  At dinner ten days later, Carlotta chose to overlook O’Neill’s open enjoyment of the imported Scotch ale fetched by George Boll from the Cloisters; and on July 21, she silently noted her husband’s consumption of Würzburger beer with his dinner.

  Since he showed no sign of tipsy behavior, Carlotta held her breath, hardly daring to hope that the beer and ale would not, after all, lead to anything stronger.

  Carlotta worried that if anything was going to step up O’Neill’s craving for something stronger than beer, it would be the punishing strain he was under while writing during August’s record heat. But O’Neill was determined not to budge from Sea Island before the end of autumn, when he expected to have his entire cycle outlined.

  Driving himself to a rigid writing schedule, he spent much of that month zeroing in on his characters’ psychological and hereditary traits, and pursuing historical research. But the pounding heat and the ever more complicated details of the cycle’s individual plays were making O’Neill edgier than Carlotta had seen him since his alcohol-induced breakdown in Shanghai.

  In fact, she was almost certain O’Neill had begun to quench his thirst with something stronger than beer. Although braced for the worst, she was caught off guard when, on August 23, he lashed out at her in a rage that instantly brought back memories of their blowup in Shanghai nearly seven years earlier when, in a drunken fury, he had struck her.

  It began when O’Neill stormed into Carlotta’s office, where she spent most of her mornings filing, typing answers to her own and O’Neill’s letters, and paying household bills. In his trembling hand was a letter from his lawyer, Harry Weinberger (whose correspondence Carlotta never opened), evidently regarding ongoing discussions about O’Neill’s will.

  He now demanded that Carlotta make a reciprocal will, leaving all her money to him. Although flabbergasted, she kept silent, fearful of arousing his temper. But she could barely wait to express her outrage—to her diary.

  “Over a year ago,” she wrote on August 23, “I made a Will leaving him everything (& Cyn nothing!). I feel this is disgusting and uncalled for—and showing little thanks or appreciation, or even knowledge of what I have done and am doing for him.” Carlotta finally faced her worst fear: “He sounds either crazy or drunk.”

  Crowding her angry thoughts onto a single page of her diary—writing in small cramped letters totally unlike the loopy ones with which she customarily filled the half pages and quarter pages of her entries—she stormed about having always paid “a flat ½” of all their living expenses; in addition to paying for her own clothing and doctors’ bills, she had “purchased all linen, silver, glass—& God knows what for our home—always buying things for him.”

  Beside herself with resentment, she asked, “What, in the name of God, is the matter with the man?” On the following day, O’Neill again brought up the will. Carlotta, although acknowledging she was “frightened,” this time blurted out her hurt and disdain:

  “One year ago, without being asked, or without even mentioning it to you, I made a Will leaving you anything & all things I own. I left Cyn nothing. I did this because I loved you. Perhaps I shouldn’t have done it!”

  O’Neill sat silently staring at Carlotta, his face (as she noted) “dark with hate.” She stood up, but had to sit down again because she was shaking so. “I began to feel nauseated from fear,” she later recollected. “This was the man who was supposed to love me so much? What was wrong?” It actually crossed Carlotta’s mind that perhaps he was unwilling to wait for her to die. “Did he want what I had NOW?”

  The scene was quintessential Strindberg—the “love-hatred” that “hails from the pit.” And so was the contradictory scene that followed a day later, when Carlotta assumed the role of martyr ministering to her unapologetic genius when he complained of feeling ill. “I put him to bed, doctor him, & bring him his dinner on a tray,” she wrote (unaware of how very much she sounded like the similarly martyred Agnes in the days when she nursed the hungover O’Neill after drinking binges).

  Sometime later, O’Neill admitted to Carlotta that Weinberger was trying to bully him into forcing her to accept him as her lawyer; Carlotta interpreted this as Weinberger’s attempt to pry into her finances and manipulate her (as she believed he did O’Neill). Expressing her contempt for Weinberger, she told O’Neill she preferred to stay with her own lawyer, and O’Neill acquiesced.

  Naturally, she did not tell O’Neill that she feared Weinberger’s probing might turn up the fact that it was Speyer—not her aunt—who had set up the fund that gave Carlotta her financial independence.

  When a new shipment of beer arrived on the same day that Carlotta was catering to O’Neill’s hangover, her heart plummeted anew. It must have been clear to her by now that O’Neill’s drinking was unstoppable. “But of course, I can say nothing!?!” she noted in her diary, still incapable of confronting him.

  Cautiously, the O’Neills passed the next five days in pursuit of their normal routines—he working (or pretending to work) on the cycle and she attending to household and secretarial chores. They gardened, swam, lunched, and dined together—with nary a mention of wills or alcohol.

  On the next-to-last day of that doleful August, O’Neill waded into the ocean to where Carlotta was standing after a solo swim, and threw his arms around her. “For God’s sake forgive me,” he beseeched her. “I must have been crazy—but Weinberger keeps hammering at me!” And then they swam together, returned to the house for tea, listened on the radio to news of increasing unrest in Europe, and ended their day with their accustomed after-dinner reading. Carlotta, the triumphant, forgiving mother, crossed her fingers.

  By October, O’Neill had been transported “full force” into one of his “heeby-jeeby” episodes (as he characterized them)—induced, as Carlotta noted, by worry over vanishing income fro
m his European investments, coupled with concern over the ascendancy of Nazism. Nevertheless, he managed to complete the required preliminary work on the cycle—or so he claimed.

  He then announced he needed a break from Sea Island, and wanted to consult his doctor in New York about a pain that had been troubling him for the past two months, and which he thought originated in his liver. Carlotta prayed his discomfort was not being caused by hard liquor.

  During their two and a half weeks in New York, O’Neill, in addition to visiting his doctors, threw himself, with Carlotta, into an uncharacteristic frenzied social whirl that included dinners with George Jean Nathan, James Speyer, the Van Vechtens, the Comminses, the Skinners, the Langners, Theresa Helburn, Madden, and Sisk.

  While Carlotta was unsettled by O’Neill’s manic behavior, she voiced no suspicion in her diary that it might be caused by his secretly swigging hard liquor—although she did note that he enjoyed the beer he drank at dinner with Nathan, as well as the Burgundy he ordered during a private dinner with Carlotta to celebrate his forty-seventh birthday.

  Toward the end of October, after O’Neill’s liver tests indicated no need for treatment, he and Carlotta returned to Sea Island. On October 31, O’Neill wrote in his Work Diary that he was “very depressed—can’t concentrate on anything,” and Carlotta complained, “he has withdrawn into himself.”

  When O’Neill voiced regret at being “so far away from his friends,” she reacted with a peevish rant to herself, pointing out that after creating a beautiful home for her husband on Park Avenue so he could be with his so-called friends, within a few months he’d come to hate it; and after insisting she create a home in Georgia, he had come to hate that as well.

  By November 1, O’Neill had withdrawn to the point of not speaking to Carlotta during meals. She tried to be understanding but she was unnerved. “I become so self-conscious when these silent moods are on!”

  O’Neill, without much enthusiasm, took up the scenario for the play he was then calling The Hair of the Dog, but noted, three days later, that it needed “to be reconceived.” Had he foreseen that this play, in its final version as A Touch of the Poet, was destined to be the only cycle play he would complete, he might have had a good chortle over the irony of it all.

  • • •

  ABRUPTLY, ON AN evening in mid-November, O’Neill asked Carlotta to join him for a walk on the beach. As they strolled in the moonlight, he earnestly reiterated what he’d hinted at before: he’d made up his mind that—regardless of the financial sacrifice it would entail—he intended for the time being to keep his future plays to himself and not have them produced or published.

  He was convinced, he told Carlotta, that no producer existed who could do justice to his work. He felt demeaned by the Theatre Guild, whose board members knew nothing of “imaginative theater.” They had no “pioneer spirit,” no “desire to do a beautiful thing,” said O’Neill. He asked Carlotta to understand that, after slaving this long to break every tradition in the American theater, he could not bring himself to work for such “an uninteresting, stupid” organization.

  Carlotta did understand. “Gene’s one dream was never to have to go to New York for production. The only thing he cared about was his writing. He used to say, ‘Oh, God, if only some Good Fairy would give me some money, so I’d never have to produce a play, and I could just write, write, write and never go near a theater!”

  With that pronouncement off his chest, O’Neill resumed speaking to Carlotta at mealtimes. Grateful for this unexpected benefit, she felt she had to tolerate his beer drinking with meals.

  One evening, while she and O’Neill were playing cards with George Boll, Eugene murmured to her, “If I felt any better I couldn’t stand it!”

  It was the first time in eight years, Carlotta marveled, that she’d heard him utter anything so optimistic—“or be so gay!” Had she heard right? she asked herself. “It sounds too good to be true!” It was.

  The next day, Carlotta found her husband sunk in “complete mental lethargy.” He did not perk up until December 7, when the O’Neills were hosts to the writer Somerset Maugham and his secretary-lover, Gerald Haxton.

  Maugham, himself not a gregarious man, believed O’Neill was carrying things too far in his efforts to safeguard his privacy. To his close friend, the playwright S. N. Behrman, Maugham delivered a memorable description of O’Neill in his splendid isolation: “The house he lived in was by the sea, and far from any other habitation. I didn’t see another soul while I was there, but he constantly complained and said he must leave the island because it was so thronged with people.”

  • • •

  WHEN GEORGE JEAN NATHAN sent the O’Neills a barrel of Edelbrau beer in mid-December to celebrate the holiday season, Carlotta—lulled into a sense of security and still hopeful that beer was O’Neill’s only tipple—joined him in drinking lustily. She joked to Nathan that she and O’Neill had drunk beer with lunch, beer instead of afternoon tea, beer for dinner, and beer for a nightcap, adding, “Rosie plays and the Edelbrau flows.”

  Carlotta was so intent on denying her husband’s true predicament that she was foolishly unworried when, along with Boll, O’Neill toasted Christmas Eve with champagne at dinner. After dinner, however, while O’Neill and Boll played songs on Rosie, Carlotta noticed that O’Neill was periodically slinking upstairs.

  Finally she followed him, concerned he might be ill, and to her dismay found him drinking whiskey out of a bottle.

  Caught in the act, O’Neill laughed; swinging his bottle, he strode defiantly downstairs to rejoin Boll. In her bedroom, Carlotta suffered late into the night from the sounds of their drunken merriment. She was forced to confess to herself at last that ever since their stay in New York she had known O’Neill was surreptitiously drinking hard liquor.

  Actually, it was remarkable O’Neill had stayed sober as long as he had. Like any recovering alcoholic, he was vulnerable to backsliding under conditions of severe stress. He was terrified that encroaching physical disability would render him unequal to the challenge he’d set himself with his cycle and he’d fallen back on alcohol to appease his terror. And now he was trapped in a vicious circle: being drunk gave him the excuse to dodge writing; not writing drove him into a frenzy of frustration—and impelled him to drink even more.

  While Carlotta’s magical environment and skillful nurturing had enabled O’Neill to leap the hurdles of Mourning Becomes Electra at Le Plessis, she had somehow lost her healing touch at Casa Genotta in the face of the cycle’s far greater challenge.

  Carlotta dreaded to think that O’Neill’s drinking augured a secret wish to destroy their marriage (never mind his ability to write). Perhaps even more, she feared posterity would blame her for O’Neill’s collapse.

  Struggling to keep her balance, Carlotta noted on Christmas Day of 1935 that O’Neill was “feeling very sorry for himself—but we both know he should never touch alcohol in any form.” Believing he’d hidden his liquor supply in his study, Carlotta tried to keep him by her side. After giving him a bath, she fed him warm milk and a sedative. She kept watch in his bedroom all night and repeated the routine the following day.

  On Carlotta’s forty-seventh birthday three days later, O’Neill made an effort to pull himself together. He presented her with his rehearsal copy of the Electra trilogy with an inscription dripping in guilt:

  To Carlotta—on this, her eighth birthday since our elopement—with, again, as ever, my amazed wonder at her forbearance with my blunders and weaknesses, my wondering amazement at her patience with my lost preoccupations and forgetfulness—and last and warmest, my heart’s and soul’s gratitude for her love, which is this Stranger’s only home on this earth!

  On December 30, however, O’Neill unapologetically drank ale with his dinner and informed an exasperated Carlotta that he had decided to return to a diet of “just wine and beer.” And on New Year’s Eve, his mood,
as Carlotta observed, “turned to elation,” a sign she now understood to mean he was sneaking drinks of hard liquor. She silently addressed O’Neill in her diary:

  “Whither are we going, darling? . . . Try to remember how deeply I love you—and always will—no matter what!” On impulse, three days into the new year, Carlotta wove her long silky hair into two braids and then cut them off. To her surprise, O’Neill asked for them as keepsakes.

  • • •

  DURING THE FIRST WEEK of the new year, O’Neill again began fussing with his cycle, but soon grasped at an excuse to again set it aside; two caps had fallen off his teeth, necessitating a trip to his New York dentist, accompanied, of course, by Mama Carlotta.

  Amid the flurry of arranging their departure, O’Neill had fresh cause for distress (and drink). On January 6, he read about the death, in Paris, of Louise Bryant, whose life had ended as bleakly as that of any heroine he himself could have created. She was stricken, at forty-nine, by a cerebral hemorrhage while climbing the stairs of a shabby hotel on the Left Bank.

  Following their hostile parting eighteen years earlier, O’Neill had periodically tracked Louise in newspaper accounts. He had read with sorrow of Reed’s death from typhus at thirty-three on October 17, 1920, and of the official funeral in Red Square that professed to honor him. It had been a grotesque circus-like ceremony, and O’Neill was appalled to read of Bryant’s fainting in the square, overwhelmed by the oppressive crowds and her own emotions.

  Three years later, Bryant was again in the news when she married William C. Bullitt, the scion of a Main Line Philadelphia family, who had idolized Reed. Also widely reported was her scandalous divorce from Bullitt in 1930, during which she lost custody of her daughter. Later, O’Neill heard rumors of Bryant’s life after the divorce; she had drifted back to Greenwich Village, moving into an apartment she’d once shared with Reed (and briefly with O’Neill), and living a hand-to-mouth existence.