by Arthur Gelb
Carlotta’s willingness to overlook both Speyer’s and Marinoff’s despised heritage is hard to comprehend; her bigotry was not the sort of casual (if deplorable) knee-jerk anti-Semitism that was, at the time, ubiquitous and unabashed.
In Carlotta’s case, the hatred—from wherever it stemmed—was deeply internalized. During the year following her marriage to O’Neill, when she was trying to rid their life of those of O’Neill’s friends who sympathized with Agnes, she wrote to Kenneth Macgowan, “The jews [sic] in N.Y.—that man [Norman] Winston (or whatever he calls himself), even G’s attorney—I never in my long and varied experience, have come across such tactless, thick skinned people.”
She was unable to banish O’Neill’s “little Jew-lawyer,” as she labeled Weinberger; but two of O’Neill’s friends before his elopement with Carlotta, Norman Winston and Robert Rockmore, were among those who became persona non grata. “Carlotta didn’t want O’Neill to have any contact with us, because she knew we all knew too much about her,” Rockmore said angrily many years later, insisting she was “a woman of no morals.”
In a letter to her Seattle friend Eline Winther, Carlotta attempted to analyze and justify her long-held contempt for the world’s Jews. As she told Eline, she was reading The Brothers Ashkenazi by I. J. Singer who, “being himself a Polish Jew,” as she put it, “shows us Gentiles . . . how different we are” in terms of “opinion, of upbringing, viewpoint, of emotional reactions. . . . It is the old oil-and-water thing. They just don’t mix.” If Eline had read Singer, Carlotta opined, she, too, would doubtless feel “no kinship with these people.”
It wasn’t a question, she said, “of feeling one is above or beneath—it is a question of not belonging to that particular civilization. One just doesn’t speak the same language. One doesn’t fight with their weapons—one doesn’t stand a chance to exist with their emotional reactions towards each other.”
Not that she believed Gentiles were “angels, and honest, and fine,” she said, concluding with an incoherent pronouncement: “But, we do know what is going on in their heads even when we are the defeated one. Or am I just an idiot??????”
She reserved her most vicious spates of Jew-hating for Saxe Commins, who (at the time) she did not dare disparage to O’Neill, but who she ran down openly and often to Sophus and Eline Winther. With close friends she sometimes slyly used the word Eskimo as code for Jew.
O’Neill tolerated Carlotta’s bigotry, as he did her reactionary politics and her social snobbery. But he himself, sad to say—despite his warm friendships with Weinberger and Commins, among others—failed to rise above the sort of thoughtless, almost Pavlovian bigotry then practiced by most of his Gentile friends.
An early example: during negotiations in 1919 over James O’Neill’s purchase for his son of the abandoned Coast Guard station in Cape Cod, O’Neill wrote to John Francis, his Provincetown landlord, of his concern regarding the transaction. He said he feared the owner of record, the philanthropist Samuel Lewisohn, might remove some of the cottage’s furnishings. “This may sound mean, Mr. Francis,” wrote O’Neill, “but I have had too many dealings with Jews, and millionaire Jews, too, in the theatrical business not to trust one of them any farther than I could throw your store with my little finger.”
In another instance, O’Neill wrote to his agent, Richard Madden, complaining of his then publisher Horace Liveright’s response to a request for an advance on royalties: “All he sent was a lousy $200—which is no way to treat me even if he is a Jew.”
To Kenneth Macgowan, he dispatched a similar disparagement of the prominent investment banker Otto Kahn, who had made Macgowan a business proposal: “Kahn, I think, is a two-faced tin-horn Kike whom you can trust not to double cross you about as far as a worm can walk on its hands.”
Also to Agnes, when he thought he had lined up a buyer for their Ridgefield home, he wrote that an agent “has a rich Jew in tow who seems to mean business.” And, when the deal fell flat: “the damned Jew changed his mind.”
Even in his published writing O’Neill (on at least one occasion) couldn’t resist an anti-Semitic slur; Waldo Frank, co-editor of The Seven Arts magazine in 1917, felt obliged to delete the characterization “a fat little Jew” from the short story “Tomorrow.” All this despite O’Neill’s steadfast moral stand on the subject of prejudice in general.
O’Neill’s casual bigotry, while unworthy of him, has, of course, been prevalent among many of the world’s most revered writers, from Shakespeare to Dostoyevsky. It was only slightly less reprehensible than other of his lamentable traits, like his blind insensitivity to his children’s emotional needs or his nasty tendency, when in a drunken rage, to knock his women about. (One scholar, a literary purist, has suggested facetiously that O’Neill’s callous disparagement of Jews was no more unworthy of him than the bad poetry he persisted in writing.)
It took Hitler’s persecution of the Jews to awaken O’Neill to the lethal consequences of casual anti-Semitism. In a version of his unfinished play “Blind Alley Guy,” he equated his gangster antihero Walter White with Hitler, imbuing White with Hitler’s anti-Semitism, along with his “inability to feel” and his “hatred for Christ.”
“My work is one of the few things I don’t feel depressed over,” O’Neill wrote to Eugene Jr. shortly before embarking on his sequel to Long Day’s Journey. Confronting a recurrence of bad health, he said he lacked “the vitality for the grind” of hard work. “When you live through the play you write, you have to have a lot of reserve life on tap.” He persuaded himself that somehow he would summon the strength to write a final masterwork.
O’Neill first entitled his sequel “Moon of the Misbegotten,” but changed it five days later to A Moon for the Misbegotten, noting that the addition of “A” and “for” rendered the title “much more to [the] point.” Thus began his wracking trudge through the last play he would ever complete.
O’Neill launched himself into the writing of Moon, periodically battling the attacks that at times made walking an unbalanced hazard and other times deprived him of the use of his hands. He worked on his misbegotten moon until December 7 when, with the rest of the free world, he was stunned by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. “Now the whole world goes into the tunnel!” he wrote in his diary. “We should have beaten the bastards to the punch!”
But war or not, he was determined to complete at least a first draft of Moon. It was, he admonished himself, the “artist’s responsibility to stick to his job” and he forced himself to work at least part of almost every day. “It was terrible to see him come out of his study, shaken and miserable,” Carlotta later recalled.
A Moon for the Misbegotten, like Long Day’s Journey Into Night, was a play of “old sorrow,” carrying the story of Jamie O’Neill to its tragic conclusion. Carlotta believed, as she once said, that O’Neill was writing it to give Jamie “his final due.” She did not like the play, convinced it was “unnecessary to rub it in.” Indeed, the demonic intensity with which O’Neill relived the last chapter of Jamie’s life was, in itself, enough to give both Carlotta and him a retrospective hatred of the play.
One night Carlotta was lying on her Chinese bed, listening to a Hitler speech on the radio. “Gene came in and asked if he could lie down beside me and listen,” she recalled. “It was horrible, guttural—and Gene was terribly distressed by it.” After quietly talking about the speech, they began to make love; but O’Neill suddenly pushed her from him and sprang from the bed. “Goddamn whore!” he shouted, and ran from the room.
A few seconds later, Carlotta heard him weeping in his own room. Controlling her mortification, she went to comfort him, and found him lying, facedown, on the floor. “He implored me to forgive him,” Carlotta said. “He told me he hadn’t known what he was saying, and explained that he had been reliving his days with Jamie—the days they had spent in whorehouses together. He was completely shattered. We talked and talked for
the rest of the night.”
Doubtless, he was also reliving the episode of Jamie’s despicable behavior—both at his mother’s deathbed and while locked in his stateroom with a whore when accompanying his mother’s body home from California.
“Gene was such a peculiar mixture,” said Carlotta. “Sometimes he was so soft-spoken, and he had the smile of a child of five; you would forgive him anything. But then he could turn around and—like that—I don’t think the word ‘savage’ exaggerates when he was in those moods. He was very much a sadist at times, terribly so; but if he did anything, when the mood changed and he realized it, he suffered terribly from guilt. And his guilt—to watch his guilt hurt me much more than when he was a sadist. I couldn’t stand to see my child so miserable.”
Although exhausted, O’Neill was close to completing A Moon for the Misbegotten in late December when, one evening after dinner, he abruptly told Carlotta, “Darling, this is the end of us. I won’t be able to work any more, and when I can’t work I’ll die. Maybe not physically—but all the best of me that loves you—and that you love.” It was an ominous echo of the last time he’d declared himself “finished,” and this time there was no rapid recovery. He had been given a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, which was, in effect, a death sentence. There were medications to alleviate the symptoms and prolong life, but there was no cure.
O’Neill accepted the diagnosis; but it was, in fact, erroneous, and the various medicines he was given often worsened his symptoms. Not until after his death was it revealed that O’Neill had, in the words of his autopsy report, suffered from “a rare disease that only superficially resembles Parkinson’s, in which the cells of the cerebellum are subject to a slow, degenerative process.” Whether O’Neill could have been more successfully treated if that particular “rare disease” had been correctly identified is anyone’s guess.
O’Neill, stunned by his recent diagnosis of Parkinson’s, and believing himself unfit to work, nonetheless struggled through the end of December to write the final scene of A Moon for the Misbegotten.
“Parkinson’s very bad,” he wrote in his Work Diary. “Can’t control pencil this a.m.—also [tremor] in upper arm & shoulder—not so good, this progress!”
On the last day of 1941, he spoke to Carlotta of his “damnable disease,” which made it “impossible for him to write 85% of the time.” As they sat pressed close together, she grew “conscious of the tightening of his muscles & of the tremor—which becomes worse & worse as he talks. His whole body shaking, his solar plexus, his arms & hands—then he stops—& begins to weep—as I do! What in the name of God is going to happen to us? This man beside me, my husband & my child!”
In spite of all, O’Neill did manage to finish the first draft on January 20, 1942. He noted, however, that the play needed “much revision—wanders all over place.”
When Lawrence Langner wrote to O’Neill about a recent illness he’d undergone, O’Neill countered with a burlesque of his own monstrous ailments. “Next time we meet, you can tell me all about your intestines, and I’ll tell you all about my gall bladder and liver and low blood pressure and pyloric spasms.” Hour after pleasant hour would pass unheeded, he said, and then, if anyone asked them about the war, he and Langner would reply, “What war?” There was, quipped O’Neill, “nothing like having a real good ailment.”
Relishing his own wit, O’Neill went on to spin a mocking scenario of the French Revolution, in which “one of the Knitting Women” called out to Louis XVI as he ascended the scaffold to the guillotine, “Well, Capet, how are the old kidneys lately?” and he would have “waved the headsman aside and begun a serious conversation” about having “to get up and urinate no less than eleven times,” at which point the executioner would have offered “a little anecdote about his arthritis, and all the Knitting Women would have told of their hot flashes, irregular menstrual periods, varicose veins, flatulence, flat feet and what not.”
Danton would have “muscled in” with a harangue about his “horrible hangover,” Robespierre “would have addressed the mob for two hours on the new pills he was taking to get rid of his pimples, and the Revolution would have been forgotten.”
O’Neill went on to suggest that “the quickest way to stop Hitler” would be for “some Allied agent” to ask, “Well, Adolph, how are the old hysterics lately?” Hitler, opined O’Neill, “would promptly ask for an armistice in which to start the tale properly, and then sue for peace at any price” so he would have time to detail all his symptoms.
“Fantastic?” O’Neill challenged Langner. “Not a bit of it. Nerves are the most absorbing ailment of all. There is practically no limit to their symptoms. Why, listen, Lawrence, only last night I woke up in a cold sweat. Everything was shaking. I thought, my God, an earthquake! But it wasn’t. It was me. And then—But I better stop or I’ll be writing you a brand new farce.”
• • •
AFTER COMPLETING HIS first draft of A Moon for the Misbegotten, O’Neill filed it away at year’s end (1941), unsure of its final fate. He rallied sufficiently to complete his revision of A Touch of the Poet during 1942.
That was a particularly perplexing year. With inefficient (if not disastrous) household help and the prospect of gas rationing that would limit access to medical treatment, O’Neill and Carlotta had concluded early in the year that they would have to leave Tao House.
To compound their misery, on March 13, two days after they’d made their decision to move, Dr. Dukes died. “Gene and I have lost our best and dearest friend,” Carlotta mourned. “We are now alone!”
O’Neill worked halfheartedly on one or two of his earlier play ideas until mid-December, when he was stopped by a serious tooth infection, followed by one of his old sinking spells:
“Lower than low—mind dead,” he complained in his Work Diary on December 13; three days later, he appended, “Complete exhaustion—can hardly crawl—melancholia & Parkinson’s very bad.”
The O’Neills ended 1942 with Carlotta suffering from back pains and a severe sore throat, while O’Neill declared himself ready to “hop right out of my skin.”
44
The last thing O’Neill needed was to deal with the public antics of his daughter. To him, Oona’s behavior was incomprehensible.
At least one of Oona’s suitors—the young writer, Jerry Salinger—would have agreed with her father about her pursuit of frivolity. Oona had met Salinger in the early fall of 1941, soon after returning home from her second visit to Tao House. She was still living with her mother in West Point Pleasant, together with her mother’s lover, Morris (“Mack”) Kaufman, a married man ten years Agnes’s junior who—like her previous lover James Delaney, enjoyed drinking along with her; he affected a black eye patch and called himself a writer, but he earned his living, such as it was, as a casual fisherman.
It was in this freewheeling environment that Oona was casually introduced to Salinger by Agnes’s neighbor and close friend, Elizabeth Murray. When mother and daughter moved to New York in anticipation of Oona’s transfer to Brearley, Salinger began dating her. He confided to Mrs. Murray that he was “crazy about Oona”; but the romance did not run smoothly. “Little Oona’s hopelessly in love with little Oona,” Salinger told Mrs. Murray. He continued to see Oona, however, and they wrote to each other after he was drafted into the army in 1942.
They were still corresponding when, after graduating from Brearley in June 1942, Oona accompanied Carol Marcus on a cross-country motor trip that ended in California, where Carol’s fiancé, the thirty-five-year-old playwright William Saroyan, lived. Awaiting induction into the army, Saroyan had asked Carol to come west to meet his family.
Saroyan was sent to Sacramento for his basic training and Carol, accompanied by Oona, followed him there. After checking into a motel, Oona telephoned Tao House, asking if she could visit, but was put off with an excuse by Carlotta.
Then, in the late fall,
Oona wrote to her father, saying she’d like to see him, and infuriating him—as he indignantly reported to Weinberger—by offering “no word of excuse or apology for all her cheapness in the eight months she had not written me.” Self-righteously, O’Neill bragged to Weinberger that he’d answered his daughter with a letter designed “to knock her ears down.”
“You appear to have developed into a vain, seventeen-year-old nitwit, without manners, good taste, self-respect, or pride,” wrote O’Neill. He told her he had no way of judging what she had become, except from newspaper clippings of her interviews; but from reading them, he concluded she was unaware of “living in a gigantic world upheaval, which affects the lives and work and ambitions and future of everyone, including you—and me.
“Your present joyride to the Coast, at a friend’s expense, when no one is supposed to travel except on absolutely necessary business, hardly convinces me you have gained any pride, or a realization of responsibility toward anyone but yourself.”
He went on to berate her for “the cheap publicity” she’d engendered in New York. With unrestrained sarcasm, he told her that one thing he happened “to know a little about” was that “newspaper men never tie you down and pry open your mouth and force you to give interviews”; she’d invited the “wrong kind” of publicity—unless it was her ambition “to be a second-rate movie actress of the floozie variety—the sort who have their pictures in the papers for a couple of years and then sink back into the obscurity of their naturally silly, talentless lives.