by Arthur Gelb
Buried within O’Neill’s extensive notes and early drafts are some startling instances that demonstrate the masterful way in which he manipulated aspects of his real life, molding them into inspired dramatic invention.
Although O’Neill undeniably wished the world to understand his life’s true torment, his first priority was to the crafting of a work of art; the dedicated artist in him understood that he could use the true facts of his life only as a figurative road map.
In willful opposition to the family that in life had tightly held the secret of Ella’s addiction, denied James’s terror of the poorhouse, and somewhat tempered the profligate behavior of the two sons, O’Neill deliberately left a paper trail that revealed the truth—his truth—about them. While he placed restrictions on the availability of this material during his lifetime, he plainly wanted the world, one day, to understand the full extent of his suffering; had he wished otherwise, he would have destroyed those notes and early drafts rather than leave them to be probed and analyzed by scholars.
It’s clear from these notes that most of O’Neill’s fictional deviations in Long Day’s Journey were dictated by his sure sense of theater, and that he withheld various pieces of autobiographical information that did not conform to the play’s tragic contour. And deviations there are aplenty.
For example: Mary Tyrone bewails her husband’s neglectful behavior on their honeymoon, implying that her only happy time with James was during the months of their courtship. And although she does speak often of the lifelong love she has shared with her husband, she implies that since the beginning of their marriage he has always preferred spending time with barroom friends rather than her.
But O’Neill left out the real-life fact of James and Ella’s exhilarating early years together, her pleasure in mothering her firstborn son, Jamie, and her ongoing warm friendship (recorded in letters and diaries) with the young actress Elizabeth Robins. (If O’Neill had ever heard his mother speak of those happy early years, he chose to ignore them.)
To make the character of the younger son (himself) more sympathetic, O’Neill left unmentioned his own reckless first marriage (to Kathleen Jenkins), his abandoned son from that marriage, and his ugly divorce; but he did drop an inside reference to those events by giving the Tyrone maid his first wife’s name, slightly altering the spelling from Kathleen to Cathleen. (He also gave the offstage cook the name of his maternal grandmother, Bridget, long dead in 1912.)
In a more complicated twist, O’Neill even softened the evidence of his father’s appalling penury. In the play, James Tyrone first plans to send Edmund to be treated for consumption at the Connecticut State “poor farm”; but, yielding to the taunts of Edmund and his older brother, Jamie, he agrees instead to send him to a privately endowed sanatorium. In real life, James did send his son to the free state institution; it was only after Eugene had fled that place and begged his father to send him elsewhere that James arranged for his treatment at the exemplary Gaylord Farm Sanatorium.
In another instance of soft-pedaling, O’Neill reconsidered an early note for the play in which Jamie tells Edmund he “hated” his baby brother and went into the baby’s room on purpose, “hoping he’d get my measles. I was glad when he died.”
In the final version, Jamie makes no such confession; a reference to Jamie’s involvement in the baby’s death is voiced by Mary Tyrone, who is reliving Ella O’Neill’s mistake in leaving her children with her mother in a New York hotel so she could join James on his theatrical tour in the West. If she hadn’t left them with her mother, she says, “Jamie would never have been allowed, when he still had measles, to go in the baby’s room. I’ve always believed Jamie did it on purpose. He was jealous of the baby. He hated him. Oh, I know Jamie was only seven, but he was never stupid. He’d been warned it might kill the baby. He knew. I’ve never been able to forgive him for that.”
Still beset by love-hate for his mother eighteen years after her death, O’Neill struggled hardest to soften the character of Mary Tyrone. This is evident (as previously noted) from that vicious note in an early scenario in which he described her, when under the influence of morphine, as changing into “an alien demon.” Although he deleted those words in the play’s final version, he did retain a later note describing Mary confronting her younger son “with a hard, accusing antagonism—almost a vengeful enmity”; but that’s about as nasty as it gets. And unlike the venemous and unremitting slings and arrows with which O’Neill riddled Deborah Harford in More Stately Mansions, he gave Mary Tyrone enough redeeming qualities to render her in the end an object of pity.
Similarly, in subtly altering the characteristics and interactions of his real-life family, O’Neill achieved the exquisite, tragic balance and universality of Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
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Soon after completing Long Day’s Journey, O’Neill sank into a morbid funk. Although Carlotta, after all those years, should have been braced for his inevitable letdown, she was appalled this time at his near-pathological reaction.
“He talks & talks—about him being finished as a dramatist—& as a man!” she wrote in her diary. “He kills me when he talks like this. My heart aches so I can hardly breathe!”
With O’Neill laboring to cheat his sliding health and keep writing amid increasing wartime deprivations, he and Carlotta faced a besieged existence. Carlotta was gradually being stripped of the help she counted on to run Tao House and its vast grounds; sturdy as she was, she began to buckle under the demands of her increased responsibilities.
Both O’Neills made heroic stabs at hanging on to the legend of their idyllic love and for a time they succeeded. Month by month, however, their relationship was fraying; not surprisingly, the martyred Carlotta found it ever more difficult to suppress her resentment at being under-valued by her husband.
A persistent cause of distress for O’Neill (shared, of course, by Carlotta) was his perceived betrayal by the children of his marriage to Agnes. The deterioration of his relations with both Shane and Oona did not abate and in April 1941, he was affronted yet again by Shane, with whom he’d believed he was finally on good terms. “The last time he visited I thought we were closer than ever before,” O’Neill had written to Eugene Jr., recalling Shane’s visit in 1940.
That was when Shane had got himself engaged, and O’Neill, remembering his own precipitous entanglement with Eugene Jr.’s mother, for once responded sympathetically; he rescued his younger son by writing to the father of Shane’s fiancée and explaining that Shane, at twenty, hadn’t yet passed his prep school exams and couldn’t even support himself, let alone a wife.
A grateful Shane had promised to heed his father’s advice about his future behavior. But O’Neill, reverting to his scolding mode, sent Shane a peremptory follow-up letter: “You’ve got to find the guts in yourself to take hold of your own life. . . . You have got to go it alone, without help, or it won’t mean anything to you.”
As usual, O’Neill had amnesia about his own inability to go it alone without his father’s help until he was well into his twenties. Shane continued to dabble in this and that. Then, in April 1941, with typical naïveté he asked his father to help start him on a movie career.
“Your letter is comprehensible to me only if I assume that you have decided to forget every word I said to you when you were here a year ago,” O’Neill wrote back, adding it was evident Shane didn’t think any of his advice worth taking.
“I am not questioning your right to decide for yourself, but on the other hand you have no license to ask my help as long as you continue to live as you are living. . . . You seem to have no realization of what is going on in the world. You write as if these were normal times, in which a young man of twenty-one could decide exactly what job he should choose as offering him the pleasantest prospect for a normal peacetime career.”
Did Shane not realize that the country would probably soon be at war and that he was likely
to be drafted? Or that “no one can possibly predict what conditions will be like even a year from now?” Unless Shane could demonstrate he was “making some decision which faces realistically the crisis we are all in,” continued O’Neill, he didn’t know what to say to him.
But O’Neill did have a great deal more to say to his bewildered son: “I am absolutely certain that planning to start a career in the movies at this time is no answer to anything. In fact, at any time, I would not regard it as an answer for you. The farther you stay away from any job that has to do with the theater, the better off you will be.” He then flatly refused Shane’s request for a letter of introduction to Kenneth Macgowan (whose Hollywood career as a producer was not flourishing), admonishing his son it would do him not “the slightest good, anyway, as Macgowan is not in position to hire anyone.”
O’Neill’s final jab was to express his “big disappointment” that after all their talk a year ago, Shane had done so little to make himself independent.
• • •
OONA ARRIVED FOR her second visit to Tao House on July 11, 1941, and it wasn’t long before O’Neill found her even more daunting than her brother. Oona had turned sixteen in May, but with her well-developed figure she looked far more mature. Combining the best features of father and mother, she had dark silky hair, deep-set eyes, and a sensual mouth.
Unlike Shane, she was self-confident; despite growing up in an irregular and unpredictable ménage, she seemed to know what she wanted and where she was going. Her early haphazard education was topped off when Agnes transferred her to Brearley, the private Manhattan girls’ school chosen by her mother for its social cachet; Agnes had moved herself and Oona from their New Jersey home to a small family hotel in New York to have easier access to Brearley.
Somehow O’Neill had always expected Oona would turn out to be a daughter he could be proud of. But Oona’s ideas of glamour and fun were not much different from those of other girls similarly situated. Her two closest friends at Brearley were Gloria Vanderbilt and Carol Marcus—both bright, pretty girls who, like Oona, had grown up in hyper-dysfunctional families. Gloria Vanderbilt was impressed by “Oona’s wonderful quality of Oriental objectivity about life,” while Carol Marcus cited her “enormous understanding.” The three had made a pact to seek out and marry rich and/or famous older men.
Oona’s second visit to Tao House was less successful than the one she’d paid two years earlier. This time, when she left (on July 18), O’Neill grumbled that she had “changed not for better”; he blamed her “damned N.Y. school—or maybe she’s just at silly age.”
His misgivings materialized some nine months later when, in his Work Diary on April 12, 1942, he said, “News comes that Oona has become Stork Club publicity racket Glamour Girl—at this of all times!—I am not amused.”
It seemed that the trendy nightclub had named Oona “New York’s Number One Debutante.” Not yet seventeen and in her final semester at Brearley, she was a girl-about-town, currently dating (among others) J. D. Salinger, the twenty-three-year-old aspiring writer, and Orson Welles, who, at twenty-seven, had already established a successful theater and movie career.
Interviewed at the Stork Club by Earl Wilson, the New York Post’s gossip columnist, Oona pertly described herself as “shanty Irish”; asked how her father would feel about her “triumph” as the “Number One Debutante,” she replied, “I don’t think he’s going to be wild about it. I won’t write; I’ll just let him find out about it himself.” She also confided that, although her college board entrance exams had gained her admission to Vassar, she planned to study art in New York the following year rather than attend college, and was “also going to find out whether I’m any good at acting.”
O’Neill exploded when he received this clipping sent him by Harry Weinberger. Oona’s “adventure into stupid exhibitionism,” he stormed, was “unpardonable,” and the interview she gave “was tops in empty-headed, nitwit bad taste and vulgarity.” He was further incensed that she chose to “trade on her father’s name” to seek newspaper publicity at a time “when everyone is worried to death about serious matters. I’m afraid the young lady is mentally and spiritually a Boulton. Could one say worse?”
Oona had “not dared” to write to him, O’Neill told Weinberger; and he had no wish to see or hear from her “until she has proved she has come out of this silly, brainless stage.”
• • •
A FEW MONTHS before receiving the aggravating news about his daughter, O’Neill had returned to what he had by now outlined as definitely an eleven-play cycle. “Have not told anyone yet of expansion,” he noted in his Work Diary on May 21, 1941. “Seems too ridiculous—idea was first 5 plays, then 7, then 8, then 9, now 11—will never live to do it—but what price anything but a dream these days!”
His return to the cycle had been prompted by his determination to rewrite A Touch of the Poet; on February 16, 1942, he had written that he wanted “to get at least one play of Cycle definitely & finally finished.” The play’s reshaping was to take nine months of on-and-off work.
When he began his revision, Oona had been far from his mind; and, of course, she had been a child of ten when he originally conceived the idea for this play that revolved around a fateful father-daughter relationship.
But as it happened, during most of the same nine months when he was rewriting A Touch of the Poet, with its focus on the antagonistic relationship between Con Melody and his headstrong young daughter, O’Neill found himself assailed again and again by news of his own headstrong young daughter. Oona O’Neill—like the character of Sara Melody, whom O’Neill was developing—had suddenly become a willful, strong-minded young woman to be reckoned with.
It’s a fair guess that to some degree O’Neill’s consuming anger over Oona’s evident disregard for her father’s sensibility influenced his reshaping of Sara Melody’s character.
It was in late September 1942, while in the midst of rewriting Acts III and IV of A Touch of the Poet, that O’Neill was infuriated all over again by Oona’s behavior. He’d received a second letter from Weinberger, asking (on Agnes’s behalf) to approve Oona’s plan to attend the Neighborhood Playhouse dramatic school. Emphatically disapproving, he told Weinberger that Oona should realize the way to become an actress was to prove her ability by getting a job in the theater “however small”—not by going to an acting school.
Egged on by Carlotta (although she herself had attended an acting school in London at eighteen), O’Neill persisted. Why didn’t Oona train to be a Red Cross nurse if she wanted training that meant something? He then proceeded to attribute to the adolescent daughter he’d been neglecting since she was two every vile quality he could summon: in addition to being “a spoiled, lazy, vain little brat” and “a much sillier and bad-mannered fool than most girls her age,” she was sly, parasitical, prideless, “begging and grafting,” and too weak “to face the world and the war—or, for that matter, to face oneself in any world of decent values—in short, pure Boultonism.”
Con Melody’s contemptuous treatment of Sara might well be a reflection of O’Neill’s anger toward Oona; in the revised Act III of A Touch of the Poet, Melody castigates his daughter for taking “satisfaction in letting even the scum see that she hates and despises her father!” Surely Melody’s words convey O’Neill’s own sense (after reading his daughter’s flippant interview with Earl Wilson) that Oona was “letting the scum” see her hostility toward her father.
O’Neill made no reference to if or how he had altered the relationship between Melody and Sara. But that November, O’Neill declared himself convinced that “considering sickness & war strain,” he had made A Touch of the Poet a “much better play . . . a triumph.”
Poet ends with Melody crushed and his daughter triumphant. O’Neill, however, had no intention of allowing his own daughter to better him. His animosity toward her, soon to explode into a Lear-like frenzy, was a decided ov
erreaction. Clearly it had slipped his mind how he had traded on his father’s name (to get his plays read by theater associates of James O’Neill’s) and how his father had paid to privately publish a volume of his early one-act plays (under the collective title Thirst) despite his disapproval of its contents.
Also forgotten was that the woman to whom O’Neill was now married was a non-college-educated former glamour-girl-about-town who’d gone on the stage with scant training and little talent. True, Carlotta had been a great beauty; but Oona, alluring and vivacious, was beautiful enough, and just as qualified to attempt an acting career as Carlotta had been.
O’Neill’s outrage over Oona’s behavior sprang largely from his festering hatred of Agnes, and probably also from the suppressed guilt he must have harbored for failing to give her any emotional support, letting her grow up virtually fatherless.
On October 28, 1941, well before he began to revise A Touch of the Poet, O’Neill imagined a sequel to Long Day’s Journey Into Night. He’d suddenly felt a tug to finish the story of his benighted brother, a story in which Jamie would be the central character, in a situation that would be “entirely imaginary, except for Jamie’s revelation of self.” It could, wrote O’Neill, “be strange combination comic-tragic—am enthused about it.”
Mulling over the play idea while also suffering another attack of prostatitis, he took no note in his diary of the death on October 31 of James (“Papa”) Speyer. Carlotta, however, felt the passing of her onetime lover and longtime benefactor as a wrenching loss.
“A really good man,” she mourned in her diary, “—unselfish, kind, understanding, generous, always helping those in need or unhappy. The best and most loyal friend Gene & I ever had. He can never be replaced!”
Carlotta’s love for and gratitude to the Jewish-born Speyer were unquestionably genuine; it was one of her more bizarre quirks of character that at the same time she harbored a lifelong anti-Semitism, evidently unsuspected by Speyer. But neither was it suspected by one of Carlotta’s closest friends, Van Vechten’s wife, Fania Marinoff. Fania, who was born in Odessa and made her stage debut in New York at twelve, passionately embraced her Jewish faith and (with her Gentile husband’s understanding) regularly attended synagogue services.