by Arthur Gelb
On September 20, while nearing completion of The Iceman Cometh, he and Carlotta celebrated the birthday of Silverdeen Emblem O’Neill, better known as Blemie—the only child they loved unconditionally. Their Dalmatian, O’Neill wrote to Nathan, was “now a patriarch of twelve but still going strong.”
In the same letter, O’Neill announced he would shortly forward for Nathan’s “valued judgment,” the non-cycle play he’d nearly completed. “It looks good to me,” he said, adding, “I’m not going to tell you a word about it, not even the title. I want you to read it without any advance information.”
He cautioned Nathan not to mention the new play to anyone, as he might want to keep it to himself “for years”—until a “financial pinch” forced his hand. “Every time I think of making that trip East to face casting, rehearsals and all the rest of the game, I feel a great bored weariness and reluctance, as if I’d had quite enough of that for one life.”
When he turned fifty-one on October 16, O’Neill was still making revisions and cuts on Iceman (with Carlotta obediently retyping the pages he corrected—even those with nothing more than a misplaced comma). He’d felt from the moment he’d begun writing that Iceman would be his greatest achievement thus far; it had “flowed right along, page after page,” as he later told an interviewer for The New York Times. Now he was eager to finish his revisions and move on to Long Day’s Journey Into Night, for which he had equally high hopes.
Family troubles again disrupted the O’Neills’ routine in mid-October; Carlotta’s ill-fated daughter, having suffered through her baby’s corrective surgery and adjusted to her husband’s illness, smashed her knee in an auto accident. Dr. Dukes, who operated on Cynthia, informed Carlotta that her daughter’s kneecap had been cut in two; she would be hospitalized for many weeks and would “probably be lame.”
Between visits to her daughter, Carlotta continued her conscientious typing of O’Neill’s revised pages of Iceman, straining over his ever-more-cramped handwriting. Two weeks into November, nearing his finish line, O’Neill was suffused with a surge of gratitude and love. In her diary, for the first time in months, Carlotta coyly hinted at sexual activity. Alongside the words, “I have a siesta,” she made a crude but unmistakable sketch of a plump, bewhiskered pussycat—a symbol she continued to draw from time to time during the next several years.
Although she once confided to her intimate friend Mai-mai Sze that O’Neill “didn’t function up to par,” she never, in her diary, expressed concern about the effect on their sex life of O’Neill’s prostate problem; in fact, she took pains to give the impression that O’Neill’s sexual desire for her was unflagging.
Herself the possessor of a ravenous sexual appetite and a woman whose physical allure had long been her raison d’être, Carlotta made sure, when she went about the task of modifying her diaries after O’Neill’s death, that there was no suggestion he had ever failed to respond to her seductive prowess—prostatitis or not.
To her delight, O’Neill slipped into romantic mode in mid-November. After finishing dinner one evening—as Carlotta coyly recounted—O’Neill “comes to me in my big Chinese bed” where, after a session of pillow talk, he “remains all night!” On a second evening that month, O’Neill forwent his after-dinner period with the war news to serenade Carlotta with a reading of the poetry of Baudelaire and Francis Thompson.
Her response was to sketch another of her diary pussycats—evidently to denote an amorous celebration; O’Neill, she purred, had been “deeply moved” in the midst of writing his final scene for The Iceman Cometh. Still euphoric, he completed the play on December 20, declaring it “one of [the] best plays I’ve ever written!”
O’Neill, however, was determined to keep the play to himself indefinitely. Nearly two years later, he explained to Russel Crouse that he was convinced “a war psychology” was the wrong time to present it, and it would not be produced soon—“not unless the wolves’ teeth get set in the seat of my pants.” But there was a second reason for delay. “I couldn’t let this play be done without being there every minute, and I simply don’t feel up to that ordeal now.”
With his birthday check to Carlotta on December 28, O’Neill wrote: “Own Beloved: Again and forever, all my love, Darling, and my gratitude for the beauty and peace that your love has given me—and a million poems I am not poet enough to write to your eyebrows and your eyes and your nose and your lips—and your etcetera!” In each of the four corners of the note’s envelope he had playfully sketched his own version of a pussycat silhouette—possibly a happy reminder to them both of a brief remission from prostatitis.
• • •
WITH ITS STARK SURFACE and its even more sinister subsurfaces, The Iceman Cometh is as layered as a Roman dig. For decades, it has beguiled and baffled the actors who have portrayed the central role of Hickey.
• • •
NATHAN LANE, who starred in a highly praised revival in 2012, aptly likened the play’s lunges into the labyrinthine dark to “getting in an elevator and going down to the basement, thinking that’s as far as you can go, and then one night you get in and see there are three more buttons leading to sublevels you hadn’t seen before.”
While Lane saw Iceman as an elevator ride to the lower depths, it can also be seen as a merry-go-round from O’Neill’s private Hell. It was a ride that began when O’Neill, at twenty-eight, wrote the heartfelt, if callow, short story “Tomorrow,” in which the narrator, Art, recalls his derelict days five years earlier; like O’Neill, Art lived near the Battery in a flophouse cum saloon designated as Tommy the Priest’s.
Although the time (winter of 1912) and the place are the actual time and place of O’Neill’s suicide attempt at Jimmy the Priest’s, he was not yet ready to write openly about it. Instead, he chose in “Tomorrow” to examine the successful suicide of a friend, James Byth, whom O’Neill called Jimmy Anderson in the story, and whom he had got to know when he was James O’Neill’s valued theatrical press agent.
Hard-drinking and self-aggrandizing, Byth claimed to have been a Boer War correspondent. He was funny and likeable but not strong enough to surmount the long-ago shock of one day finding his wife in bed with a “staff officer.” O’Neill, in an early list of characters for Iceman, depicted Byth (here in the guise of James Cameron) as one of the drunken derelicts he’d known at Jimmy the Priest’s.
In the short story, Anderson vows every day to sober up and reclaim the newspaper reporting job from which he was fired. But there is always a reason to procrastinate—hence his nickname “Jimmy Tomorrow. Encouraged by Art, Anderson finally does sober up and manages to reclaim his job, but he finds he has lost his knack for reporting. Defeated, realizing at last there is no tomorrow, he jumps to his death from the fire escape outside his cubicle.
In 1919, two years after the story was published (in The Seven Arts magazine), O’Neill felt emboldened to examine more directly the suicide attempt ever present in his mind, and he wrote Exorcism; he set the one-act play, like “Tomorrow,” in a low dive during a time unspecified, but obviously 1912. The fact that O’Neill wished he’d never written Exorcism—and that he disavowed it immediately after its brief run in 1920—is strong evidence that he regretted his candor.
Not until two decades later, at fifty-one and still fascinated by the subject of his own failed suicide, did O’Neill feel compelled to begin the four-act play he tentatively called “Tomorrow”—and quickly renamed The Iceman Cometh, setting it in a low dive circa 1912 modeled (in part) on Jimmy the Priest’s.
The play would, inevitably, be haunted by suicide; but unlike his youthfully fumbled short story “Tomorrow” and his one-acter Exorcism, this new work would be richly peopled by the ghosts of his drunken past, and would possess a depth and power undreamed of in those earlier efforts.
“You will recognize in this play [Iceman] a lot of material I have talked about using ever since you’ve known me,” O’Nei
ll wrote to Nathan in 1940. “But never until a year or so ago, did it take definite line and form as a play in my mind, its many life histories interwoven around a central theme.” With his conception of The Iceman Cometh in 1939, O’Neill ended his merry-go-round ride back where he’d started two decades earlier with “Tomorrow.”
For Iceman, however, he had the maturity to reimagine the friendship of those who shared his days of despondence—along with his flickering moments of hopefulness—and he fearlessly revisited the life that in 1912 very nearly did him in.
When sending Nathan the script of Iceman, he confided that the play had its “basis in reality”; but he added that the play was, of course, his own “imaginative creation.” And while none of his characters was “an exact portrait of an actual person,” all of them were “drawn from life, more or less.”
Stressing this point in a later interview, O’Neill persisted: “I knew ’em all. I’ve known ’em all for years. All these people I have written about I once knew.” He not only knew them intimately, he loved them with a love completely free of judgment, for he believed he owed them his very survival. As a soul adrift, alienated from his family, belonging nowhere, he had found acceptance among them.
The first of these fellow drifters to take him to their hearts and make him one of their own were the sailors with whom he had shipped out to Buenos Aires and back at twenty-two: first as an apprentice seaman on the Norwegian bark Charles Racine, then returning to New York as an ordinary seaman on the steam-powered freighter S.S. Ikala and, a year later, as a crew member of the luxury liner S.S. New York sailing to England; finally, he was befriended by the crew with whom he sailed home—as a proud able-bodied seaman—on the S.S. New York’s sister ship, the S.S. Philadelphia.
“I look on a sailor man as my particular brother,” said O’Neill, shortly after writing The Hairy Ape, which was based on the Philadelphia’s coal stoker, known only as Driscoll, who was one of his close friends from that period. O’Neill liked sailors better than men of his “own kind,” he said, for they were “sincere, loyal, generous.”
“You have heard people use the expression: ‘He would give away his shirt.’ I’ve known men who actually did give away their shirts. I’ve seen them give away their own clothes to stowaways.”
These men, declared O’Neill, were “direct in action and utterance”; they had “not been steeped in the evasions and superficialities which come with social life and intercourse.” They were “crude but honest” and “not handicapped by inhibitions”; they were “free of social hypocrisy.”
After leaving the sea, O’Neill felt equally at home spending his days and nights with the similar lost souls of the fleabag saloons who had never worked on a ship; some of them had once had solid occupations on land and now had no other home.
Although these men had already lived their lives, and O’Neill, in his early twenties, had barely begun his own, they heartily welcomed him as one of them; it was here, at what O’Neill called “the bottom of the sea,” that he felt at home; with their compassionate understanding, he could drink himself into forgetfulness, down his portion of the daily free soup that kept them all alive, and share with them their hopeless hopes for a better tomorrow.
O’Neill refashioned some of these men for Iceman, in most cases lovingly, to suit his dramatic purpose.
They were the true friends whom—despite the patrician aura in which Carlotta had attempted to enfold him—he would never forget.
40
It is 1956, ten years after the heralded but ultimately disappointing Broadway run of The Iceman Cometh.
A newly ascending director, José Quintero, has cast an unknown actor, Jason Robards Jr., as Theodore “Hickey” Hickman in an off-Broadway revival of that all-but-forgotten play.
The production—on the small open stage of the Circle in the Square, a remodeled nightclub in Greenwich Village’s Sheridan Square—astonished the uptown critics; at last, this most challenging of all O’Neill’s plays had received the recognition it deserved. Much of the stage magic was engendered by Robards’s stunning performance as the deluded salesman who hadn’t a clue how much he hated the wife he loved.
Sanctioned (three years after O’Neill’s death) by Carlotta Monterey, the revival was an ironic return for O’Neill. It was here in the Village, forty years earlier, that his genius had first been recognized, when his one-act Bound East for Cardiff (playing time twenty-five minutes) had opened at the Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal Street; and now, only a five-minute stroll west to the Circle in the Square, his four-act Iceman Cometh (playing time four and a half hours) was about to resurrect O’Neill’s faded reputation.
Hurrying to his cubicle at the Times to write his review of the afternoon opening, Brooks Atkinson paused to tell his eager staff, “The actor playing Hickey is pure gold.”
The revival became a smash hit, racking up 565 performances; it launched Robards to stardom and—inevitably—established the character of Hickey as the play’s undisputed protagonist. Robards’s portrayal of Hickey (under Quintero’s inspired guidance) became the play’s iconic role by which all successive revivals have been judged.
However, there is a caveat. Not to disparage the Hickey character’s grip on an audience’s attention, or to understate the way his character aggressively propels the plot, but Iceman also features the equally pivotal character of Larry Slade; in his own way as deluded as Hickey, Slade, who believes he is a detached observer of his fellow outcasts, in the end allows himself to be goaded into an act just as loathsome as Hickey’s.
It is Slade who, in Iceman, speaks O’Neill’s fundamental philosophy, and on whom O’Neill initially built the play. Indeed, Hickey was an afterthought—a dramatically brilliant afterthought, to be sure—but nonetheless a contrivance not conceived by O’Neill until he was well into the structure of the play.
While Hickey, the frenetic traveling salesman, was largely an invention, Slade, the life-weary former anarchist, was based on Terry Carlin, who not only had vitally affected O’Neill’s spiritual and intellectual development as a young man, but also had become his sometime mentor and lifelong friend. It’s not surprising that Slade’s character, while less flamboyant than Hickey’s, has much the greater poignancy.
Carlin had a gaunt face with a big nose, high cheekbones, a lantern jaw (always with a stubble), and a mystic’s meditative pale blue eyes that could glint with sardonic humor. O’Neill would never forget his first meeting with the disillusioned anarchist, then in his mid-fifties, at the Unique Book Store on Sixth Avenue near Thirtieth Street, owned by Carlin’s fellow philosophical anarchist Benjamin R. Tucker.
It was there, in 1906, that O’Neill, under the guidance of both Tucker and Carlin, joyfully encountered a treasury of books by advanced political, literary, and philosophical thinkers: Emerson, Shaw, Tolstoy, Zola, and the German anarchist Max Stirner—not to mention Nietzsche. And it wasn’t long before Eugene had adopted Carlin’s nihilistic philosophy as his own.
• • •
AFTER A THRIVING career as an engineer, Carlin, on principle, had dropped out of society to protest the greed of company owners for ever higher profits, even as they ignored the well-being of their employees. He had not worked for years and Eugene couldn’t help but admire him for his courage. Here was a man who (while doubtlessly delusional) had the audacity and daring to literally act on the biblical warning about profit, gain, and the loss of one’s soul. O’Neill, in developing the character of Larry Slade, surrendered himself to Carlin’s still potent spell. Iceman contains two parallel plots; the subtler of the two deals with Slade’s ultimately futile struggle to hang on to his painstakingly constructed pipe dream; the more spectacular plot revolves around Hickey’s shocking evolution from cocky extrovert to maniacal murderer.
While Larry Slade, in the quieter plot, is onstage from the play’s beginning and fades in and out of the action, Hickey doesn’t make h
is appearance until nearly the end of Act II; but when he does appear, he seizes center stage. He is an amalgam who may or may not have been inspired by a real-life salesman. O’Neill might have had his brother in mind, for he couldn’t help but recall Jamie as typecast in 1910 in the featured role of a traveling salesman named Watts in a touring production of James Forbes’s comedy The Traveling Salesman; and indeed O’Neill did give Hickey recognizable traces of Jamie O’Neill’s cocky mannerisms.
O’Neill described Hickey to George Jean Nathan as “a periodical drunk salesman, who was a damned amusing likeable guy,” and who used to “make that typical drummer crack about the iceman, and wept maudlinly over his wife’s photograph, and in other moods, boozily harped on the slogan that honesty is the best policy.”
Ten months later, however, O’Neill—for whatever reason—gave Kenneth Macgowan a tamer version. “What you wonder about Hickey: No, I never knew him. He’s the most imaginary character in the play. Of course, I knew many salesmen in my time who were periodical drunks, but Hickey is not any of them. He is all of them, you might say, and none of them.”
O’Neill did not draw the attention of either Nathan or Macgowan to the similarities between the character of Theodore “Hickey” Hickman and Theodore Dreiser. O’Neill had known Dreiser since their Greenwich Village days, when Dreiser’s autobiographical novel, The Genius (published in 1915), was the subject of a censorship battle.
As has been pointed out by the literary scholar Brenda Murphy, there are striking resemblances between Hickey and Eugene Witla, the protagonist of Dreiser’s novel; Witla describes his uncontrollable sexual urges and his guilt toward his wife, Angela, who bore his repeated abuse and constantly forgave him.
Moreover, Hickey’s physical appearance and fragments of his personality seem to be modeled on Dreiser himself; with his provincial background and less-than-polished manners, Dreiser was regarded by O’Neill and his Village colleagues as something of a hick—hence the name Hickman—not to mention Hickman’s first name, Theodore.