By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

“No one but a fool, especially in these times, likes reading interviews with young girls who have accomplished nothing themselves but whose fathers happen to possess the dubious asset called ‘news value.’”

  What he really found unforgivable was that she had never written him to take advantage of his experience and ask his opinion “while all the time you were riding on my name!” In a calculated slap at Agnes, he told Oona that her advisers were “surely the Goddamnedest morons extant!” and compounded the insult by suggesting there was always a possibility that Oona had been manipulated out of “deliberate malice” toward himself.

  “Cut out the kidding,” he snapped, unable to stem his venom. “You don’t want to see me. Your conduct proves that. And I don’t want to see the kind of daughter you have been in this past year.” In any event, he and Carlotta could not receive her at Tao House; the guest room was “definitely closed” as they no longer had servants or anyone to drive a car for them.

  Not yet satisfied with the cruelty of his caning, O’Neill flung one final insult at the daughter he barely knew: “I had hoped there was the making of a fine intelligent woman in you, who would remain fine in whatever she did. I still hope so.” And in closing, he wrote, “If I am wrong, goodbye. If I am right, you will sometime see the point in this letter and be grateful—in which case, au revoir.”

  As with his letters to Shane, O’Neill doubtlessly believed he had delivered a discourse that, although stern, was both fatherly and salutary. But to his spanked daughter, his undisguised hostility was perfectly clear; Oona confided to her friend Carol that she was deeply wounded. There was to be no au revoir.

  After giving Weinberger a self-satisfied synopsis of his letter to Oona, O’Neill explained he was telling him “all this” so that he would be armed with the facts “in case her idiot mother tries some tale on you. Please don’t see Oona. I meant all I said in my letter to her, and I want it left at that. It was a kick in the pants she richly deserved. If she’s an all-Boulton fool it will have no effect. If she has any latent guts or pride, it may have a good effect in the long run when she eventually realizes what a nitwit public nuisance she has been.”

  Although momentarily knocked off balance, Oona was resilient enough to shake off her father’s evisceration and lose herself in the romantic turmoil of her teenage world. Marking time in Sacramento, her own plans still unformed, she agreed to collaborate in a plot to advance Carol’s tempestuous love affair. Saroyan had made Carol promise she would send him a letter every day during his boot camp training, but Carol feared she couldn’t meet his literary standards.

  “Oona was receiving a letter almost every day from a boy named Jerry,” recalled Carol. “Some of the letters were fifteen pages long, and they were very witty, with comments about all kinds of things. I told her I was afraid that if I wrote to Bill he’d find out what an idiot I was and decide not to marry me, so [Oona] marked the clever passages in her letters from Jerry and let me copy them as my own in my letters to Bill.”

  When Carol next visited Saroyan at his camp, his greeting was surly.

  “I asked him what was the matter, and he told me he’d changed his mind about marrying me. He said he had thought I was a sweet girl, but that ‘those lousy, glib letters’ I’d been sending him had made him wonder.” When Carol reported this to Oona, she said they would have to tell Bill the truth about the letters. “But I knew that Bill hated liars more than anything else,” recalled Carol, “so I didn’t tell him.”

  The two girls left Sacramento for Hollywood, where Oona was met by her mother; and Carol, feeling defeated, soon after returned to New York. Somewhat later, Saroyan got back in touch with Carol and they were married.

  • • •

  AGNES BOULTON WAS in Hollywood with Mack Kaufman, who had recently been hired to work on a screenplay by Charlie Chaplin. Agnes was trying to peddle a screenplay of her own, as well as writing a novel (not about O’Neill) called The Road Is Before Us. (Although it received favorable reviews when published in September 1944, Agnes never wrote another.)

  Eager to launch Oona on a film career, Agnes laid plans to introduce her to Charlie Chaplin, whom she had known casually during her Greenwich Village days. (An admirer of the Provincetown Players, Chaplin had offered to appear as one of the ghost-convicts in The Emperor Jones—under an assumed name. He was thanked but turned down when O’Neill cautioned that if it ever leaked out that Chaplin was in the cast, audiences would flock to see him and disregard the play. Chaplin understood.)

  But he had never forgiven O’Neill for stealing Carlotta from his dearest friend, Ralph Barton, and (as he believed) precipitating Barton’s suicide. When Agnes, at the end of 1942, introduced O’Neill’s daughter as a potential movie actress, Chaplin was at first wary. But he was taken with Oona’s beauty and spirit and offered to coach her for a screen career; with Agnes’s blessing, he was soon escorting Oona about town.

  Once again, Oona became the subject of gossip columns, provoking the expected reaction from her father. Learning that Agnes and Oona were living in Hollywood, O’Neill agreed with Carlotta, who remarked, “They must be up to no good!”

  Oona, by now eighteen, and Chaplin, fifty-two, had fallen in love, and the whole world, it seemed, was shocked at their coupling. It wasn’t just the disparity in their ages.

  For one thing, Chaplin was facing a scandalous paternity suit; he was accused of taking a neophyte actress named Joan Berry across state lines “for immoral purposes” and she claimed he was the father of her unborn child. (Blood tests ultimately proved he was not the father and the charges were dropped.)

  Then, too, he had been married three times—most recently to the film star Paulette Goddard—and had two grown sons close to Oona’s age.

  The scandal evidently did not trouble Agnes, nor did she seem concerned that Chaplin was only a few months younger than Oona’s father. But those facts did trouble O’Neill.

  “You’ve read about my charming young daughter, I expect,” he wrote to Saxe Commins. “Nice! Especially the bit about her mother being there to aid and abet. Two of a kind.” He added that a Hollywood friend “told us stuff he knew from a friend who had an apartment right under the one A. had rented in her name where Chaplin hid out—drunken parties, etc. . . . a nice thoroughly Hollywood affair!”

  But were Oona and Chaplin indeed the grotesquely mismatched couple as they were being painted by the press and being gossiped about from coast to coast?

  Perhaps not, if one listened to the exhaustive explanations of Chaplin’s and Oona’s backstories proffered by the pseudo-psychiatrists. These often simplistic depictions could have come straight out of O’Neill’s own Freudian-inspired Strange Interlude.

  To wit: Chaplin, like many men who grew up unfathered, had a need to feel fatherly; this need (never mind his somewhat less praiseworthy penchant for teenage girls) was what evidently drew him to Oona.

  As for Oona (still according to the psychobabblers), how could she not feel the loss of a father, and be only too ready to be fathered, protected, and adored; she doubtless saw (and savored) the irony of her situation: Here she was—the rejected daughter of a world-famous, fifty-three-year-old stage icon of tragedy—in the embracing, fatherly arms of an even-more-famous fifty-two-year-old film icon of comedy.

  As the newspapers gleefully followed the Chaplin-Oona romance (along with developments in Chaplin’s paternity scandal), Carlotta asked herself grimly (if cluelessly), how Oona could be such a fool as “to give up her father’s love and friendship—for the cheapness & vulgarity she looks upon as glamour & worldliness!”

  Nothing could have disabused the humiliated and anguished O’Neill of his conviction that he was the injured party. Oona, in his mind, had betrayed him—just like all the women in his life except (so far) Carlotta. Doubtless his pent-up anger over all those past betrayals was in some part responsible for his overreaction to Oona’s behavior.


  • • •

  CARLOTTA RECEIVED A phone call at 8:30 a.m. on June 16, 1943, from Herbert Freeman, warning her that word was being broadcast that Oona and Chaplin were to be married that day. (Freeman, who had reluctantly left his job as majordomo at Tao House to join the Marines, was now stationed in San Diego but had stayed in close touch with the O’Neills.)

  “She is doing what she told me she would do, marry a rich man (old!) to insure a good alimony if things didn’t work out!” Carlotta noted. “Gene is very quiet—numb—doesn’t listen to the radio or read papers! I have to answer all queries—Am like an automaton. . . . God—what a life!” When the local doctor, Clifford Feller, who made regular house calls, arrived at Tao House that day, he felt he was walking into a funeral parlor. “You could have cut the gloom with a knife,” he recalled. The next day’s papers (as noted by Carlotta) were “filled with usual filth & nonsense.”

  In a self-pitying and spiteful outburst to his New London cousin Agnes Brennan, O’Neill unburdened himself about the daughter he now regarded as disowned.

  When she last was here with us—two years ago—she appeared to be developing into an intelligent, charming girl. But in New York with her mother to advise her, she suddenly changed into a silly, cheap publicity grabber. . . . She couldn’t see that all they wanted was to use her news value as my daughter.

  That has been her line ever since . . . to get any kind of display no matter how vulgar and stupid—and finally ending up in this typical Hollywood scandal and marriage with a man as old as I am (probably older, for what actor gives out his real age?). Of course he’s rich, and that is the answer, or one of the answers. I need not tell you, I know, that you are never going to hear of our entertaining Mr. and Mrs. Chaplin, or of their entertaining us. Enough is enough!

  Carlotta had her hands full protecting O’Neill from the onslaught of outraged anonymous letters that began arriving, some of them asking how O’Neill could have allowed his daughter “to marry that—pervert!” “Gene,” she noted, was “silent—& does not mention her name! Nor do I—of course.”

  One night, some days after the wedding, O’Neill asked Carlotta to come to his bed and hold him in her arms. “He talks & talks as I hold him close. About his health—his state of mind—the blow Oona’s behavior has been . . . We hold tight and weep—like two sick and frightened children!”

  A year and a half later, writing to Eugene Jr., O’Neill predicted an “Oona Chaplin divorce.” But the marriage was long-lasting. Oona spent the early years of her married life in childbearing. In 1951 (by then the mother of four of her eight children), Oona invited Carol Marcus and her husband, William Saroyan, to spend a weekend at the Chaplin home in Vevey, Switzerland.

  During the weekend, Saroyan raved about a book he was reading—J. D. Salinger’s just-published first novel, The Catcher in the Rye. “This kid is great,” he told Oona and Chaplin. “He’s got it!” Oona threw Saroyan a wicked glance. “You didn’t think much of his style eight years ago,” she said. And Saroyan was nonplussed to learn that Carol had cribbed those disdained phrases from Jerry Salinger’s letters.

  • • •

  BEGINNING IN THE spring of 1941 when, due to the war’s inroads, Carlotta and O’Neill had begun losing their employees one by one, they had striven to manage with makeshift help. Still loath at that time to surrender Tao House, they oversaw a parade of household servants as they came and went. Exasperating as it was, they soon taught themselves to view the experience as a black comedy, its multiple scenes being enacted, week by week, until the end of June 1943:

  CARLOTTA (addressing her diary, May 7 and 8, 1941): “Naomi & Willie asking for more advance money . . . Leonard & Hazel [new couple] come out to look at house! They might be all right—but I wonder! . . . All servants now realize how owners of large houses need help—so are asking for ridiculous wages. Of course this will end with me cooking, washing dishes & taking care of this huge house with no help!”

  O’NEILL (addressing his Work Diary, May 22): “Willy & Naomi give notice—the damned servant problem—poor Carlotta!”

  CARLOTTA (May 25): “Leonard & Hazel are good so far!” [They would turn out to be slovenly.]

  CARLOTTA (August 8, 23, 27): “Exit Leonard & Hazel. . . . A Florence Oliver is en route . . . quiet, neat & a widow! . . . This changing of cooks etc. seems to upset Gene & me no end—his work & mine is completely thrown out of gear!”

  CARLOTTA (May 5, 1942): “Florence is acting ‘queerly.’ I am afraid there is something in the wind!”

  O’NEILL (to his Work Diary, July 30): “Freeman leaves for his Marine training base, San Diego. Carlotta & I up at 5:30 to see him off—hell of a blow to lose him.”

  CARLOTTA (July 30, 31): “A dreadful night—I feel as if were entering an era of trouble & tragedy—& don’t know which way to turn! Our whole program for living must be changed!”

  O’NEILL (August 4, 5): “More servant problem—Florence to go . . . Exit Florence.”

  CARLOTTA (August 6): “Lucille Edmundson to come & cook for us—our first dinner not bad at all!”

  O’NEILL (January 11, 1943): “More servant problem—Lucille sick.”

  CARLOTTA (January 12): “[Lucille] wants to leave—is afraid to say so because I have been so kind to her!!!”

  O’NEILL (January 14): “Exit Lucille, enter Hulda.”

  CARLOTTA (January 14, 15, 18): “Hulda looks like a man in her uniform—and is rough, noisy & a very plain cook. . . . I am staying away from the kitchen—Hulda is a strange being! . . . Gene up in his study ‘away from that damn savage downstairs’ (I agree with him).”

  CARLOTTA (January 28, 29): “While Gene and I are in the dining room trying to eat what Hulda calls ‘dinner’—Hulda comes prancing into the room and starts shouting about Hitler . . . screams at us, ‘Hitler is just a nice poor young man, whom the world hates because he wanted to be something & have power & not do dirty things with women!!!!? (God help us through War and what it brings.) . . . Hulda [the following day] is sheepishly coy! I am sure she is not normal. Must get rid of her!”

  CARLOTTA (January 31, February 2): “After dinner Hulda runs berserk! Dear God, what one has to endure—but, an insane woman is easier to face than a bomb! . . . After much unpleasantness & trouble [get] Hulda in the car.” [She is driven to the railroad station.]

  O’NEILL (February 2, 3): “Hulda eliminated . . . enter Mrs. Green—temporary—nice woman.”

  CARLOTTA (February 3): “[Mrs. Green] comes to work after luncheon. A sweet, motherly soul who is not used to ‘working out’!”

  O’NEILL (March 4, 5): “Exit Mrs. Green . . . [Enter] Mrs. Holladay—nice woman—hope she will do the job & stay with us.”

  CARLOTTA (March 5): “Mrs. Holladay seems efficient, intelligent & willing to do her work & not expect me to! Dear God, I hope so.”

  O’NEILL (April 20): “Exit Mrs. Holladay . . . Carlotta wishes [to] cook—has to teach them anyway and more trouble with them than do work herself.”

  CARLOTTA (April 21): “Get Gene’s breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. Quite a performance at 54! So begin cooking! And keep 22 rooms in order! And—type for the Master!”

  O’NEILL (writing to Saxe Commins, June 30, 1943): “Now Roberts [the groundskeeper] is leaving us. Tough to keep Tao House above water. May have to close up or sell out.”

  Carlotta, who never did anything by halves, had long since assembled a collection of menus for use by the stream of unreliable cooks who dribbled through her kitchen. She patiently typed daily recommendations for luncheon, tea, and dinner, imaginatively varied from month to month, and based on recipes culled from a collection of cookbooks; there were eighty-two loose-leaf pages, held in a ring binder and labeled “Mrs. O’Neill’s Book.

  Her collection contained a recipe by Escoffier; partial to rich desserts based on eggs, butter, and cream, she often served pots de chocolate and cr�
�me brûlée, and she also emphasized O’Neill’s favorite foods, among them popovers and sour cream hot cakes. Included in her menus were three recipes sent her by Carl Van Vechten in 1940: for an Armenian eggplant dish, a frozen salad dressing to be served over avocado, and an elaborate cassoulet à la Languedocienne (with instructions to “follow recipe exactly” and a reassurance that if well made “it gets better every time it is warmed up”).

  “Carlotta taking job in fine spirit, getting [to] be excellent cook—works hard at it,” noted O’Neill in his Work Diary, sounding genuinely appreciative; she “does the cooking, and I wipe the dishes.”

  Eight months later, both cook and dish wiper had had it. In his study, awaiting the new year of 1943, O’Neill once again confided in Carlotta about his horror of a complete breakdown and once again she tried to soothe him. “We lie in each other’s arms and weep until we are exhausted! We are both terrified of the future!”

  On a foggy, chilly day a week and a half into the new year, they discussed how they would live after leaving Tao House. Carlotta wrote, “There’ll be no more houses & all they mean! We’ll live in an apartment! Dear God, if I am ever able to get all the responsibilities & hard labor of this place off my shoulders—I’ll be a new human being.”

  At the end of January, still in Tao House and still able to summon patches of energy, O’Neill told Robert Sisk that the rewriting of A Moon for the Misbegotten was “going well”—on those days when his “hands behaved.” But in his Work Diary, he complained that as eager as he was to finish the play—for which he had developed a “real affection”—he could not produce more than one page during three hours of writing before “fading out.”

  When he tried to work on March 1, it was “no go . . . would ask any Jap to kill me, and many thanks for the favor.” And on March 10: “Eager but little done because nerves jumping out of hands, arms, can’t control.” And so it went.

  By month’s end, Carlotta and O’Neill, sounding like a couple of pipe-dreaming escapees from The Iceman Cometh, were imagining their ideal future home: “Five rooms—none for servants—just Freeman—no ground other than a pool for Gene, easy to keep up—small expense—!”