By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  O’Neill’s condition would temporarily level off but the severity of this illness was a shattering blow; it precipitated the ever-declining health that would prematurely end his career.

  • • •

  GEORGE BOLL FOUND a buyer for Casa Genotta and, on February 2, with O’Neill recuperating in the hospital, Carlotta tore herself away to vacate the Sea Island house for its new owners.

  The O’Neills had accepted an offer of $81,000 (with an additional payment of $5,500 for some of their furnishings), a substantial price in the depth of the Depression; but they still owed $15,000 on their mortgage, and calculated they were (as always) taking a substantial loss.

  Carlotta estimated she would need to be away several weeks, counting travel time and all the packing and storing, and it was decided that O’Neill—in that more relaxed era of medical care and reasonable fees—would remain in the hospital for the duration of her absence; he would continue to receive treatments for his prostate and also undergo rehabilitative therapy. Carlotta felt reassured that with Dr. Dukes’s supervision, and with Kaye Radovan looking after him, O’Neill would be comfortable.

  On February 17, the Swedish consul in San Francisco, Carl E. Wallerstedt, visited O’Neill, who was seated in a chair in his hospital room, to present him with the gold medal and embossed diploma that constituted the Nobel Prize. Dr. Dukes and Kaye Radovan were the only witnesses to the ceremony.

  Obeying Dr. Dukes’s instructions to keep his remarks brief, Wallerstedt said: “It is customary for Nobel Prize winners to go to Sweden to receive their awards, and only on rare occasions is the order reversed. This is one time when custom must give way to emergency, as my nation no longer seeks to defer honor to a man who has won the highest award which can be made in his chosen field of endeavor.”

  O’Neill was still so weak that his knees shook as he rose from his chair and his hands trembled as he accepted the medal and scroll. While the medal was a replica of all the others awarded for literature, the scroll had been designed especially for him. It stated in Swedish that O’Neill had been chosen from all the playwrights in the world “for his creative drama, for characters marked by virility, honesty and strong emotion as well as for depth of inspiration.”

  • • •

  MISSING CARLOTTA DESPERATELY, O’Neill wrote, wired, or telephoned her daily. On February 20, tracking her route back to him (Sea Island to New York to Chicago to San Francisco), he thanked God, in his diary, that she had “finished 1st lap of journey home!—she has done wonderful job getting all settled so quick.”

  He sent roses to Carlotta’s drawing-room compartment when she entrained for Chicago; he sent roses to her hotel room when she arrived there for her layover; and he sent roses and telegrams to her scheduled rest stops—Omaha, Cheyenne, Ogden—on the final leg of her trip to San Francisco. He took pains to book them a hotel room. “Have arranged all for honeymoon at Fairmont including double-bed!” warbled a rejuvenated O’Neill.

  Carlotta was thrilled with her husband’s newfound tenderness. “He is amazing to think of doing these things for me. It is so foreign to his past life & upbringing—and therefore doubly sweet. I pray there will be no more separations for Gene & me! I am not complete without him!”

  At 7:45 in the morning of March 2, O’Neill, accompanied by Kaye Radovan, met Carlotta at the station in Oakland and proceeded to the Fairmont—where they were shown to a room without a double bed. O’Neill barely kept his temper. As he described the scene in his Work Diary: “[Bell]boys stand with bags while we kick & have bed changed!—a scene for farce, but both of us deadly serious & determined! Honeymoon!” Evidently, the effort was worth it. It was “wonderful to wake beside Gene after three lonely nightmare weeks!” Carlotta rejoiced.

  O’Neill was obliged, however, to return to Merritt Hospital for further treatment, and Carlotta, on Dukes’s advice, checked herself into the same hospital for a week’s “rest cure.” Although both were eager to quit hotel living, the O’Neills were back at the Fairmont on March 13. “We must have a home,” declared Carlotta.

  It didn’t take them long to find the site on which they wanted to build. It lay atop a 2,500-foot hill situated between the towns of Danville and Walnut Creek, thirty-five miles east of San Francisco. Although it was far larger, and somewhat more expensive than what they had sought, they couldn’t resist its beauty and isolation.

  The land was cut off from neighbors to the west by high forested hills of pine where deer, bobcats, and coyotes roamed; blue herons nested there, and quail families sometimes emerged from the forest’s edge. In the more sparsely wooded acres fronting their house site, an old barn stood amid orchards of almond, walnut, and orange trees. To the east, their site had an unobstructed view of Mount Diablo across the small orchard-filled San Ramon Valley.

  Carlotta paid the asking price of $17,000 for the land, and O’Neill assumed the cost of the house, which eventually exceeded something more than $70,000. They took on a sizable mortgage, as they had for Casa Genotta.

  Their next step was to lease a house in the vicinity—in Lafayette, Contra Costa County—from which they could supervise the construction. Since that rental was not available until June, they moved temporarily into a house in Berkeley, where they were at last rejoined by Herbert Freeman, who had driven Blemie to California and was looking after him in a San Francisco hotel near the Fairmont.

  The unstoppable Carlotta, having decided (with O’Neill’s approval) that their new home would be Chinese in style, had already begun to shop for furnishings at Gump’s, famous for its Oriental antiques; among her purchases was a “beautiful large (old) opium couch [carved from teak] for Gene’s bed!”

  After hiring an architect in mid-April, Carlotta and O’Neill made a thorough tour of their 158 wooded acres, seeking the perfect site on which to build. The new house was to be far less grand than Casa Genotta, but just as imaginative in its own way.

  “I wanted to build a Chinese house,” Carlotta once explained, “but I didn’t have the money, so I built a sort of pseudo-Chinese house.” Its two stories were constructed partly of solid brick and partly of concrete blocks that resembled adobe and were painted white—Carlotta’s concept of elegance, simplicity, and purity of design. Its doors and shutters were lacquered in Chinese red, and the rooms on both floors opened onto porches or balconies. There was a formal garden with seating, as well as a large patio that faced Mount Diablo, whose peak was often wrapped in mist.

  “I left the white blocks rough and unpainted on the inside,” said Carlotta, “and I put all my beautiful, very delicate and graceful Chinese furniture against these rough stones, which made a very beautiful effect.” Part of the effect, she added, was created with mirrors—dark green or blue in the living and dining rooms, and a black one in O’Neill’s bedroom.

  O’Neill’s recovery after the hospital was rocky. Even with regular treatments, the pain from his prostate condition was sometimes incapacitating. And when the pain retreated, nerves attacked. He tried to cheer himself with plans for the new home and with dreams of soon resuming work on his cycle.

  O’Neill and Carlotta moved into their second rental, in Lafayette, at the beginning of June, and O’Neill—despite on-and-off medical upsets—tentatively took up his cycle, neglected for the past eight months, as per Dr. Dukes’s orders. It seemed, though, that the O’Neills couldn’t escape from oppressively hot weather even in the normally moderate climate of Northern California. The temperature rose to a startling 102 degrees on June 27, the day Lawrence Langner and Theresa Helburn brought S. N. (Sam) Behrman to Lafayette for a visit. O’Neill and Behrman, who had never met, quickly hit it off during the course of afternoon tea, a swim, and dinner.

  Behrman, whose reputation rested upon urbane comedies, was struck by his host’s exquisite deportment. “O’Neill had the kind of manners you find in Europe, but rarely in this country,” he remarked. “Carlotta talked a blue stre
ak while we were in the house, and after a while O’Neill took me out into the garden. He said, ‘I thought it would be nice to have a word with you.’

  “We talked about vaudeville. I told him I used to go to Keith’s in Boston every Monday afternoon when I was at Harvard, and later to the Palace in New York. I knew a lot about vaudeville, but he knew more.”

  O’Neill told Behrman about the infamous road tour with his father in 1910, during which he (at twenty-two) and Jamie “were drunk all the time because their roles in the production of The Count of Monte Cristo were so ridiculous.”

  Behrman described O’Neill as “beautiful—his head in the sun,” as he sat looking at the mountains and talking about how his plays had been censored in such countries as Germany, Japan, and Russia. He also spoke with pride, Behrman said, about his son Eugene’s achievement as a Greek scholar at Yale.

  At Behrman’s request, O’Neill showed him his Nobel Prize. They also discussed their common enthusiasm for San Francisco. “We became quick friends that day. He made a great impression on me—I loved him.” In his own diary, O’Neill was drier: “Behrman to tea, swim & dinner—like Behrman.”

  In July, he found himself “stuck” on the cycle “in same old place as in ’36.” Admitting he was “frightened for a while,” he tore up many of his earlier notes; but, he vowed, “I’ll get it this time!” And by September, he was making notes for the ninth play, which carried his story back in time to the American Revolution.

  Writing to the critic Barrett Clark he said, “The Cycle goes back to my old vein of ironic tragedy—with, I hope, added psychological depth and insight. . . . It will be a unique something, all right, believe me, if I can ever finish it.” He explained to Clark how difficult it was to think “in terms of nine plays, and a continuity of family lives over a space of 150 years.” He ended his letter with the hope that he would “be ready to drive ahead” on the cycle by the beginning of the new year, when his home would be ready for occupancy. “This is final home and harbor for me,” he wrote. “I love California. Moreover, the climate is one I know I can work and keep healthy in.”

  Healthy climate or not, O’Neill, approaching his forty-ninth birthday, was still making frequent visits to his doctor for the prostate problem, among other ailments, and he was also worrying about Carlotta’s health; she was suffering from what she described as attacks of “sphincter pain,” and she was also having more than her usual trouble with her eyes. All in all, it didn’t sound as though they could be enjoying much of a sex life—yet, on October 6, O’Neill was reciting Baudelaire to Carlotta during a walk with her and Blemie.

  “I am deeply moved when he takes me in his arms—and gives me a long, long kiss!” wrote Carlotta. “I go along, hand in hand with Gene—drunk with happiness!”

  Her happiness—and O’Neill’s as well—was largely due to their anticipated move into their nearly completed home.

  They had decided to name it “Tao House”—“tao” meaning in Chinese “the right way of life.” Their Chinese friend, the artist and writer Mai-mai Sze, had listened tolerantly when Carlotta consulted her about the name. “I didn’t think it was particularly apt,” she once said, “but I thought, what does it matter, if it amuses them. The O’Neills had a naive, romantic idea of China—the wisdom, the pageantry and so forth were superficially conceived and romanticized by them.”

  • • •

  APART FROM O’NEILL’S health issues, another disturbance had surfaced the previous fall when Agnes enrolled Shane, for his senior year, in a preparatory school in Colorado that O’Neill deemed pretentious. Writing to his lawyer, O’Neill abused Agnes as “that wench [and] tramp of a Boulton.”

  His disparagement of Agnes was a matter of course, but his small-minded irritability toward the beleaguered Shane was something else. For a man who, as a child, suffered so unforgettably from parental misunderstanding, O’Neill might have been expected to do better for his own son. But apparently unable ever to forget he had not wanted that son in the first place, O’Neill seemed incapable of offering Shane any sustained fatherly understanding. His all-too-brief moments of affection and empathy for Shane could be usurped in an instant by stony anger.

  Oddly, O’Neill was consistent in his uncritical affection for Eugene Jr., who had been an even less wanted child than Shane; one reason was that O’Neill did not hate Eugene’s mother.

  Unlike Agnes, Kathleen had made no demands on him during the boy’s first eleven years of life. Then, too, Eugene, unlike his insecure and waffling younger half brother, had always seemed self-assured, while Shane was in constant need of propping up. All in all, Eugene was a more congenial and less burdensome son.

  The Colorado prep school was Shane’s third in seven years; although he was popular with his fellow students, his grades and his conduct had been erratic at the first of his boarding schools, Lawrenceville, in New Jersey, and he fared no better at his second, the Florida Military Academy in St. Petersburg.

  In Colorado, as a senior nearing eighteen, he was thin, handsome, and shy, bewildered about his relationship with his father and confused about his future. O’Neill believed Shane should be attending “a good strict college prep school of the more democratic sort where they expect you to study seriously and fire you if you don’t.”

  O’Neill’s tirade had been sparked by a letter from Weinberger, reminding him of a payment of $700 due for Shane’s school, plus Agnes’s monthly alimony of $500.

  “I’ll pay for him till he’s 21, as long as our agreement states I must. After that, I am through—and when I say through, I mean through,” O’Neill blustered to his lawyer.

  What was really eating O’Neill was Shane’s (and to a lesser extent twelve-year-old Oona’s) evident unconcern about their father’s well-being. He complained to Weinberger that neither Shane nor Oona had sent a word of commiseration during his entire hospital stay, and Shane “practically never even acknowledges” his Christmas and birthday gifts (although, he conceded, “Oona does—sometimes.”). Then, in a petty sulk, O’Neill vowed he was “stopping all presents henceforth”; he would treat Shane with “exactly the treatment he gives,” and would neither ask him to visit in California nor “communicate with him in any way.”

  Even more unforgivable, he said, was “these brats’” unconcern for Carlotta, who always treated them kindly, frequently sending Christmas and birthday gifts of her own, for which she was never thanked by Shane, and only rarely by Oona. In sum, he growled, his “dear little ones—unlike Eugene,” were “nothing to be proud of,” and unless they changed “drastically,” he was “off them for life.” O’Neill couldn’t resist a final vicious jab at his former wife: “There is too much greedy parasitic Boulton in their blood—I am afraid—not to add Boulton stupidity in their brains!”

  O’Neill followed this outburst with a letter in early October to Shane, who had little reason to believe his father had ever had more than a passing interest in his existence. It was an appalling letter—insensitive, egoistic, icy. O’Neill wrote that he hadn’t answered an earlier letter from Shane because he was “sore” at him for ignoring his serious months-long illness in the winter of 1936. “During all that time I did not receive one damned line from either you or Oona.”

  Shane could hardly feign ignorance of his father’s condition, O’Neill scolded, as the news of his illness had been in newspapers all over the country, as also had been “the fact that the Nobel Prize medal had to be presented to me at the hospital in Oakland.” He had received “letters and wires of sympathy from all over,” but from his “own children—except Eugene—nothing.” If Shane thought he would tolerate such behavior and still “feel any affection” for him, Shane was “badly mistaken.”

  He excused Oona—she was “still only a kid”—but from Shane he expected the respect and consideration that he’d received from Eugene at eighteen. “If you give it,” he haughtily allowed, “there is no reason w
hy the relationship between you and me should not develop into as fine a one as that between Eugene and me.” He and Eugene were friends, he bloviated, “quite outside of being father and son.”

  He couldn’t resist goading his younger son. A friend was what he wanted to be to Shane, and he proceeded to demonstrate his goodwill with a spiteful warning: “If you proved by your actions you are indifferent whether I live or die, except when you want something from me, then you must admit I would be a poor sap and sucker to waste my friendship on you, simply because you happen to be my son.”

  Oblivious to his increasingly petty, tyrannical tone, O’Neill raged on: “If you take me for granted, and think you can treat me as no friend of mine would dare to treat me without losing my friendship forever, why then I warn you you must be prepared to lose my friendship forever, too.” In conclusion, he intoned, “If you are the boy I still hope you are, despite evidence to the contrary, then this letter should make you think, and so much good will come of it for us both. If you are not—well, then it’s just too bad.”

  After flaying his son, O’Neill abruptly pulled himself up short, affably assuring Shane he was “feeling fine again” after his “long stretch of hospital and illness” during the recent winter and spring, and would soon be able to start “hard work” again; he closed with his own and Carlotta’s love.

  Poor Shane, thoroughly chastened, responded by sending his father a birthday gift, whereupon O’Neill deigned to bestow his pardon. “The carved walrus tusk arrived yesterday. It is a beauty and I don’t know of anything I’d rather have had as a present. I’ve never seen one just like it before. It will look fine on my desk and be very useful as a paper weight. So much gratitude to you! I certainly appreciate your having remembered my birthday with such an unusual gift.” He ended with an invitation for Shane to visit during his next spring vacation (almost a year distant).