By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  The O’Neills moved into Tao House on December 30, with plumbers, electricians, and carpenters continuing to swarm in the unfinished wing. “We are so tired at bed time we hardly have the strength to crawl up into our beautiful Chinese beds!” noted Carlotta. They arranged themselves as best they could in the completed wing, which comprised the kitchen, Carlotta’s bedroom, and O’Neill’s two-room suite. His study—less ostentatious than the ship’s prow installed at Casa Genotta—had a blue ceiling, was paneled in oak, and held a wall of bookcases. One large window looked out toward Mount Diablo and a smaller window had a view of wide-open space ending in a thickly wooded hilltop.

  As Carlotta summed up, it had been “a year full of illness, worry and upheaval!” But, she was quick to add, “Gene tells me he loves me & couldn’t live without me!!”

  38

  Awakening on New Year’s Day, 1938, in their semicompleted mountainside retreat, Carlotta and O’Neill truly believed they were at last embarking on the idyllic life that until now had eluded them.

  Carlotta, who had just turned forty-nine, still looked and felt youthful, although she’d lost some of her vivacity and was concerned about her “expanding waistline.” She did not want again to uproot herself and prayed in her diary, “Dear God, let this be our real & final home!”

  She was infinitely relieved when O’Neill, after a stroll on their vast grounds, assured her that he found Tao House in every way beautiful, and promised that it would be their “happy home” once they were settled and he’d fully regained his health. In his mind, O’Neill was again at work on his cycle—at his own unhurried pace, indifferent to the pressures of production.

  As he now reaffirmed to the Theatre Guild’s Theresa Helburn (and forgetting his careless ad-lib to the reporter in Seattle), he wanted no Broadway openings until he’d finished at least four or five of the cycle plays (and preferably all nine) if he could manage it “without winding up in the poorhouse.”

  The problem was his seesawing health. Within a week of moving into Tao House, he suffered an incapacitating seizure of neuritis that rendered his writing arm “practically useless.” It was “hell,” Carlotta recorded, seeing the man she loved “always so unhappy, depressed, ill or worried.” Adept at finding solutions to problems, she confessed that this time she was at a loss for how to help him.

  Their first year or so at Tao House, while it held intervals of peace and pleasure, was marred by the endless bouts of ill health that critically impeded O’Neill’s writing. He was besieged as well by problems with his children, worries about money, and (not least) his concern—along with the rest of America—about the ever more troubling news from abroad. (“Hitler raising hell in Europe,” Carlotta had exclaimed in her diary a few weeks after moving into Tao House.)

  Both Carlotta and O’Neill were forced to acknowledge that the prospect of O’Neill’s regaining his health completely was a forlorn hope; he would never have more than brief respites of complete wellness, and the underlying cause of his illness was yet to be accurately diagnosed. At least, he was within easy reach of the attentive Dr. Dukes.

  “This bad health stuff is a rotten bore,” O’Neill had recently complained to Harry Weinberger. “It busts up my working entirely. I only have to tear up the stuff I force myself to do when I’m under the weather. It just won’t come right unless I feel reasonably fit. Rotten nerves I don’t count. I’ve always had those. But piling other ills on top of the rotten nerves gets me groggy. I haven’t yet learned to take that extra punishment and go on regardless.”

  For Carlotta, there was the continual worry of finding and keeping experienced servants willing to work in an isolated venue. She also supervised the ongoing work on the grounds, which dragged on with maddening torpor throughout the spring and summer. They were building a pool, grading a patio, planting trees and gardens, creating pathways, and erecting a high wire fence that surrounded the entire property. A private road meandered for three-quarters of a mile to a sturdy locked wooden gate that marked the entrance to their courtyard.

  When he felt well enough, O’Neill helped with the planting, as he had on Sea Island; he also indulged himself as the breeder of a flock of pedigreed Brahma chickens—a throwback to his boyhood when his father, in a mellow mood, had granted him a fling at chicken farming and had even gone on to buy eggs from him at inflated prices. Among the Brahmas was a rooster (named by O’Neill for the prizefighter Sugar Ray Robinson) that, according to O’Neill’s old friend Charles O’Brien Kennedy, “fought everything, animal or human, that came near him.” But O’Neill soon had him eating corn out of his hand, and Carlotta proudly kept track of the Brahmas’ daily output and distributed their eggs among her family, friends, and workmen.

  Other mitigating pleasures were long walks, accompanied by Blemie; exploring the spacious beauty of their landscape; the carefully spaced dinners and teas with a few selected local friends; and the rare visits of friends from the East Coast who came to occupy their only guest room.

  Carlotta bonded with a newly adopted cat, did the marketing, and had herself regularly driven into San Francisco for hair styling and clothes fittings. O’Neill attended an occasional football game and an even more occasional movie; he hungrily bought up new recordings of jazz, show tunes, and classical music to add to his already sizable collection, and often relaxed by treating himself and Carlotta, and sometimes their guests as well, to postprandial recorded “concerts.” (He attributed his love of music to his mother’s talent as a pianist, recalling how, before arthritis crippled her hands, she had enjoyed playing the old pianoforte in their New London home.)

  • • •

  WHILE SHAPING THE family backgrounds of his cycle’s characters, O’Neill’s thoughts often drifted to his own heritage as he’d heard it spoken of by his parents. Imagining the lives of his Irish forebears, many uprooted from their homeland by the famine, he strained to understand and empathize with their bewildering struggle to establish new roots in America. He found himself creating a family dynasty that, in his mind, somehow came to replace his own actual family. While reinventing them as the fictional Melodys, they became more alive to him than the factual O’Neills.

  And yet, always at war with his own feelings, he couldn’t escape the waves of sorrow and guilt that at times enveloped him. He had placed such a vast distance—not only physical but spiritual—between himself and his own roots. He wasn’t sorry he’d fled the East Coast and he had no wish ever again to see New London. But his conscience had recently been stabbed when he’d received a notification from St. Mary’s Cemetery in New London, where his parents, both his brothers, and his maternal grandmother were buried.

  The notice required him to make a decision about repairs at the grave site. O’Neill had little interest in dealing with the remains of his own long-dead family, and this was the sort of decision he always preferred to duck. Compelled to readmit his ghosts into his life, he turned, in something of a panic, to Harry Weinberger.

  “I’ve always had an aversion to visiting graves,” he wrote to his lawyer, then explaining that, although he had long ago arranged for perpetual care for the graves, he could not recall what sort of stones had been placed at the site. “In fact,” he said, “I know practically nothing about this plot.” He asked Weinberger to send someone from his office to the cemetery to assess the situation.

  Weinberger responded that the grounds were well kept, but there were no stones marking the graves of his parents or Jamie; there were only two small stones on those of his maternal grandmother, Bridget Quinlan, and his infant brother, Edmund, ordered by O’Neill’s father, who had bought the plot in 1882. O’Neill, infuriated and embarrassed, asked Carlotta to respond. She told Weinberger, “Gene was shocked to hear that there were no stones to mark” his parents’ or Jamie’s graves. She and O’Neill were concerned, however, about the cost of the stones, coming on top of all their house construction expenses; her husband, said Carlotta,
feared that if he ordered the stones in his own name he would be “scandalously” overcharged; could Weinberger inquire about prices in someone else’s name and get the prices in writing before ordering the stones?

  Carlotta further cautioned that O’Neill wanted the cost of the stones and installation to total “within five hundred dollars.” That was not to be, but Carlotta (while splurging with her usual abandon on furnishings for their home) continued to bargain, asking Weinberger to price different grades of granite. After months of negotiating, O’Neill told Weinberger he had settled on a design for his family’s plots and accepted the negotiated price of $650, although (being the true son of his parsimonious father) he found it exorbitant.

  Brusquely, he informed Weinberger that there was to be but a single headstone for the plot that included the graves of his parents, his two brothers, and his grandmother (whom, like Edmund, he had never known). He gave Weinberger explicit instructions for the engraving: he wanted “‘O’NEILL’ on TOP with list of the five dead underneath,” and then issued a warning: “I DON’T want any space left for those to come, because no one else will ever be buried there.”

  He reiterated what he had often said before: “I am the last of this pure Irish branch of the O’Neills,” this time appending the explanation that his children were “a weird mixture, racially speaking.” He added vindictively, “I certainly would rather be thrown down the sewer than be planted in New London. I want to be buried wherever my home happens to be when I die.”

  He had Carlotta type out the words for the marker:

  O’NEILL

  James O’Neill, actor, Born 1846 Died 1920

  Ella Quinlan O’Neill, his wife, Born 1857 Died 1922

  James O’Neill, 2nd, their son, Born 1878 Died 1923

  Edmund O’Neill, their son, Born 1883 Died 1885

  Bridget Quinlan, mother of Ella O’Neill, Born 1829 Died 1887

  “This is simple and clear, with no chance of mixing up who’s who,” he told Weinberger. “It simply follows [the] pattern of [a] cast of characters in a play, which is absolutely appropriate for an actor’s family.”

  • • •

  WHEN HIS NEURITIS had abated toward the end of March 1938, O’Neill was able to take up work on the scenario of one of the cycle plays he’d been thinking about for the past year and a half—the play that would chronologically follow A Touch of the Poet by four years. It was the play he’d titled More Stately Mansions, which he had foreshadowed twice in A Touch of the Poet: once by Simon Harford’s bipolar mother, Deborah, in her interminable monologue about her husband’s greedy family, and later by Cornelius Melody when he predicts that his ambitious daughter, Sara, will “live in a Yankee mansion, as big as a castle.” The title derived from the first line of the final stanza of the Oliver Wendell Holmes poem, “The Chambered Nautilus”: “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul!”

  “Like it,” was O’Neill’s verdict in his Work Diary, after reading over the scenario’s first act on March 26.

  O’Neill began writing dialogue for Mansions on April 1, with little to distract him beyond routine trips to his doctors and—on April 10—a ten-day visit by Shane; it was his son’s first trip to his father’s wilderness hideaway. Shane was on spring break from what O’Neill disparaged as his “ranch school in Colorado.”

  Resigned, if not sanguine, about the course on which Shane seemed set, O’Neill wrote Macgowan that his eighteen-year-old son had “gone heavily horsey, cowboy boots and all—has learned to break horses and is a fine rider. He’s getting a job this summer as a wrangler.

  “What he will eventually do, God knows, but for once in his life he’s genuinely self-confident and enthusiastic—about horses and stock-raising, not scholastic pursuits, I might add.”

  For her part, Carlotta regretted that Shane (though handsome) no longer resembled her Gene; but she allowed he was “a nice kid” whom she’d always liked. She and O’Neill accompanied Shane to a baseball game in Oakland and O’Neill took him on long walks, discussing his future. Shane returned to school, feeling as much a stranger as his father had at that age; like his father, he was acutely conscious of being overshadowed and belittled by a celebrated parent. Shane, however, lacked the miraculous gift of creativity that had been his father’s salvation.

  O’Neill, vaguely hoping for the best, soon again lost himself in his writing. On May 5, Carlotta noted, “Gene feels better—his brain full of work—thank God.”

  Contributing to O’Neill’s improved outlook was his first swim in his newly completed pool, which was built into the side of their hill. Missing the sea, Carlotta recalled that “he didn’t really think so much of the idea, but it was better than nothing.”

  On the evening of his debut swim and after a day of satisfying work, O’Neill was in a romantic mood, according to Carlotta. She described herself as “bursting with love” as she sat with her husband on their terrace overlooking the moon-bathed San Ramon Valley; she kept silent “until—he tells me he loves me!” With that, she emoted, “I am no longer silent!”

  O’Neill continued in a stable (if not always benign) mood throughout the month, writing to George Jean Nathan that he would have a lot to tell him about the cycle when he came to visit. “The old bean is functioning better than it has in years,” he wrote, and expressed the hope that, as he approached fifty, “the fatal-forties period of physical bog-down and mental meandering” was coming to an end.

  Then, with his usual attempt at jocularity when addressing his wisecracking friend, he spoke about his aging Dalmatian, who would turn eleven on September 9. “We came near losing Blemie last week, and there was much sadness in the Hacienda O’Neill. An intestinal complaint due, I fear, to his lack of will power regarding horse turds, the old rake!” O’Neill explained that teams of horses had been on the estate cutting the hay; “[Blemie] says he can’t understand it, that something he drank must have disagreed with him.”

  At O’Neill’s request, Carlotta had been typing the cycle plays so that she could discuss them with him, as had been their habit while he was writing Mourning Becomes Electra. She was mesmerized by Deborah and particularly taken with the way O’Neill depicted her battle with her daughter-in-law, once rather simplistically noting, “Deborah fights Sara for her son’s love with charm and subtlety, while Sara fights with her body.”

  But, typing her way through the first three acts of Mansions, Carlotta was brought up short when she arrived at Scene I of Act IV. It is in this scene—after many passages of highly surreal and contradictory rantings—that Simon accuses Sara of being afraid of Deborah’s influence and of conspiring with her against him, viz:

  SIMON: Are you going to let her come between us forever? Can’t you rid our life of that damned greedy evil witch?

  SARA: (Stares at him with dread, but with a fascinated eagerness too)—You mean you want me to—

  SIMON: (Sees that Sara has understood him to mean she should goad the mentally fragile Deborah into the final stage of insanity; he switches to a lover’s tone of “playful teasing”) I want you to do anything in life your heart desires to make me yours.

  Carlotta was shocked to realize, as she later recalled, that the play was “full of evil.” And by July, O’Neill himself was hearing the drumbeat of defeat; according to Carlotta, he told her that “the devil of Fear” was whispering in his ear, “You shall not finish this play.”

  Soon, Carlotta had a graver worry. Somehow, over the months, she had evolved as a solicitous mother to her daughter, closely tracking Cynthia’s pregnancy.

  When, on July 14—a day after Cynthia gave birth to a boy—Roy Stram phoned with the news that their baby had a cleft palate and harelip, Carlotta was crushed. What would this do to her twenty-year-old daughter, she wept to O’Neill, gratefully noting, “Gene, when really needed is calm & helpful. Holds me close in his arms—while I weep my heart out.”

  She felt
somewhat reassured after an eminent plastic surgeon, called in by Dr. Dukes, agreed to perform a series of surgical procedures that would ultimately correct the affliction. “God give Cyn the strength and the courage to face life with this new burden,” Carlotta prayed.

  Soon her attention was diverted from her suffering daughter back to her suffering husband. Observing that O’Neill was haunted by the “nightmare” of being unable to finish the cycle, she worried he was “either not well, or aging—I notice this in so many ways! His work eats into him—life itself seems to absorb him.”

  At least part of O’Neill’s unease, Carlotta knew, was due to their disordered household. It humiliated her—as a woman who took such inordinate pride in her ability to run things smoothly—that she was unable to lure reliable help out to their isolated residence. She was worn out from her confrontations with recalcitrant servants.

  Despite all setbacks, O’Neill, for the moment, was making good progress on More Stately Mansions, and he informed Lawrence Langner that he expected to finish a first draft “in another month or two.” And now, he prepared to welcome his older son on his first visit to Tao House.

  In a letter offering to underwrite the visit, O’Neill took concerned note of Eugene Jr.’s recent separation from his second wife after a brief (and childless) marriage; he had expressed his hope that his son’s “marital misadventures” would be swiftly resolved and that he wouldn’t be “nailed for alimony at the last moment.”

  On Eugene’s arrival, August 18, Carlotta noted he was “much heavier and has a ‘black eye’ that he got in a barroom brawl.” Disturbed by what she saw as a change in his personality, she described her own shock and O’Neill’s when Eugene announced he had joined the Communist Party; “The look on Gene’s face!” she exclaimed. (A little more than two years later, after Russia declared war on Finland, O’Neill characterized “the Communist Party in this country as a foreign-controlled, traitor organization.”)