by Arthur Gelb
There were days when, by steeling himself for the effort and forming minute letters with his pencil, O’Neill could still cover page after page. But on other days, his fingers could not grip a pencil, and no effort of will could produce anything but a tremulous, illegible scrawl. Carlotta confided to the Theatre Guild’s Theresa Helburn that the situation was becoming more difficult every day.
“There is nothing to do for Parkinson’s, it just gets worse and worse,” she explained. “And now that I have fallen apart I am not so brave in facing it! There are days when my heart aches so I can hardly face him—which, of course, is the worst possible thing for him. . . . I am really stuck, for the first time in my life, as to what is the best thing to do regarding a future home for Gene. He should have warmth, ocean and sand (!), doctors and good nourishment.”
Finding her job as typist too stressful, Carlotta paid her daughter to type O’Neill’s revisions for A Moon for the Misbegotten, but since Cynthia often could not decipher O’Neill’s minuscule writing, Carlotta had to dictate to her. “Even he can’t re-read it!” Carlotta exclaimed.
It wasn’t until July that the O’Neills actually put Tao House on the market; for Carlotta it was more of a relief than a sorrow, but O’Neill truly hated having to give the place up and his unhappiness further exacerbated his nervous condition.
One afternoon in early August, Carlotta found her husband “in his study doubled up in his work chair—his tremor ghastly & he is weeping!”
Two weeks later he broke down again, weeping and shaking. They were rescued the following day by Kaye Radovan (now using her married name of Albertoni), the nurse who had remained a friend since caring for O’Neill during his appendectomy at Oakland’s Merritt Hospital in 1936. “Now she can take over,” noted Carlotta gratefully, herself close to collapse.
“I have not written a line lately, not even a note,” O’Neill told Nathan in late September, describing his recent series of illnesses. He had little hope of his Parkinson’s getting better, he said; he’d had to quit taking the standard drugs like atropine and stramonium because he reacted badly to them. (He also reacted badly, according to Carlotta, to a sleeping medicine called hyoscine.)
“The Docs have also discovered I have an adrenal deficiency and I have to drink large tumblers of a mixture of sodium citrate, plain table salt and water with a bit of lemon juice to take the curse off. You can have no idea what a loathsome beverage this is . . . you may get a grin from the picture of me absorbing salt water highballs.”
After dinner one evening, O’Neill, according to Carlotta, told her that he would kill himself if he didn’t love her so much. “I tell him we both love each other—so we must work together to protect that love and keep it.”
Somewhat later, Carlotta professed herself amazed by what O’Neill had said to her: “Can he really love me that much?!” she asked her diary. “No!” she answered herself. “One day he loves me better than life itself!—the next he hates me! Oh—if he could only make up his mind—& be loyal! So that I could feel he was there, behind me—as I have always been with him.”
The diary entry sounded like the aftermath of an episode Carlotta had omitted to record: she had locked her bedroom door for privacy while having a massage, and when O’Neill tried to enter and couldn’t, he flew into a rage, accusing Carlotta—quite possibly with justification—of having sex with the masseuse. O’Neill hadn’t been seized by such a fit of jealousy since Shanghai, and a terrified Carlotta telephoned her friend Myrtle Caldwell. “Please come quickly, something terrible has happened,” she said.
Myrtle Caldwell and the O’Neills had grown close during the past two years, according to Myrtle’s daughter Jane. Myrtle and Carlotta had renewed their childhood friendship in April 1941, when they attended a reunion party in San Francisco for alumni of St. Gertrude’s Convent Academy, the Bay Area boarding school both women had attended.
At Tao House, Myrtle calmed O’Neill down. “Gene loved my mother,” recalled Jane, “she could always jolly him in various ways.”
At the end of October, a somber Carlotta noted, “We must get back . . . into a living life . . . here, with no help—so many worries—ill health—everything wrong—it is like waiting for death!” Nonetheless, while waiting—if not for death, at least for someone to buy Tao House—O’Neill continued revising A Moon for the Misbegotten, and Carlotta—between nursing O’Neill, cooking, and housekeeping—continued to dictate his revisions to Cynthia, who obediently typed them.
With the decision to leave Tao House by year’s end, buyer or not, O’Neill and Carlotta hobbled through the holidays. On her fifty-fifth birthday, Carlotta began the arduous dismantling of Tao House, the third of their “final” homes. “All the chickens have gone!” she wrote. “The beautiful Brahmas . . . it seems impossible for Gene & me to keep pets, homes, or anything!” A drawing at the page’s bottom, of four pussy cats enclosed in a heart, was an indication of a celebratory coupling.
When a local attorney, Arthur Carlson, made them an offer of $80,000 in early February 1944, they didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry; “We had luck—found a buyer quickly—got out at a good price—what we put into it,” O’Neill reported to Nathan.
After arranging to sell her major pieces of Chinese furniture back to Gump’s, Carlotta busied herself with packing their personal belongings and sorting items for storage: linens, china, and other household items that required twelve large trunks and crates crammed with gramophone records and more than seven thousand books. When the movers from Gump’s left with their booty six days later, Carlotta locked herself into her bathroom and burst into tears over “all the thought, knowledge, labor, love & money I put in this house for our old age!” She and O’Neill were obliged to move into the downstairs guest room “because our Chinese beds are gone!”
Carlotta’s strength was waning and, on February 19, she began to suffer from what she was sure was a serious problem. She noted in her diary, “Every time I void I pass blood—the pain is horrible.” Still suffering on February 24, she had herself driven to San Francisco’s Nob Hill to supervise the unpacking at the suite she’d rented in the Huntington Apartment Hotel; she was determined to have everything in order and welcoming for her husband’s arrival. She returned to Tao House in such pain she could eat no dinner.
The O’Neills left Tao House two days later. “I know it has been our last real home,” she lamented.
45
Still suffering silently, Carlotta moves with O’Neill into the Huntington on the bleak Saturday afternoon of February 26, 1944. Her pain isn’t lessened by O’Neill’s instant reaction to his new home. He hates the suite she has meticulously prepared for him.
The Huntington is among San Francisco’s most elegant hotels, and the O’Neills’ spacious suite includes a good-sized living room, two bedrooms with adjoining baths, a dining alcove, and a kitchenette (to supplement room service meals). But O’Neill can’t help resenting it for not being Tao House, and Carlotta, trying not to add to his misery, continues to ignore her own worsening physical condition.
Soon, however, she is forced to see a doctor, who diagnoses an infected bladder, places her on sulfadiazine, and orders her to bed, where she collapses with a high temperature and has to be nursed by the faithful Kaye Albertoni.
O’Neill, as anxious as he is about Carlotta, is further distressed to learn of the death of Harry Weinberger on the following day. “Twenty-eight years of friendship,” he writes to Nathan. “I only hope he knew the depth of my affection for him—and I feel sure he did.” He also confesses to Nathan he has dosed himself with bromide and chloral to get his hand steady enough to write this letter legibly, explaining that Carlotta is too ill to type it for him.
When O’Neill comes to sit by Carlotta’s bed, she notes that he is “in a shocking state.” Far more distressing than either Weinberger’s death or Carlotta’s collapse is O’Neill’s pounding conviction th
at he will never write another play. As Carlotta is all too aware, he has been trying to deny this by tinkering with A Moon for the Misbegotten, and tweaking A Touch of the Poet and Hughie (sulkily working in his bedroom because he no longer has a study).
O’Neill recently has told Lawrence Langner he fears there will be no more plays because he is rapidly losing all ability to use a pencil. As Carlotta’s health improves, he attempts to dictate bits of dialogue and stage directions to her, but finds it impossible. Langner thinks the stumbling block might be the presence of another person in the room, even someone as close to him as his wife; he sends O’Neill a newly invented recording machine called a SoundScriber.
O’Neill writes Langner that he has started experimenting by reading “a favorite bit” from The Iceman Cometh into the machine’s microphone.
It is the passage, O’Neill tells Langner, wherein Hickey forces Larry Slade “to admit, while refusing to admit, that his saving dream—that he is finished with life and sick of it and will welcome the long sleep of death—is just a pipe dream.”
O’Neill read the harrowing bit while stricken with “the inner shakes,” which he said, you feel “all over your body until even your brain seems to do the shimmy.”
When he played the record back, he heard the voice that was his and yet not his: “I’m afraid to live, am I?—and even more afraid to die . . . and praying, ‘Oh, Blessed Christ, let me live a little longer at any price! . . . let me still clutch greedily to my yellow heart this sweet treasure, this jewel beyond price, the dirty, stinking bit of flesh which is my beautiful little life!’—well, it sure did something to me. It wasn’t Larry, it was my ghost talking to me, or I to my ghost. . . . It really was quite a moment of strange drama.”
But when O’Neill tries, with Carlotta’s encouragement, to dictate dialogue, or any sort of creative amendment to the three plays with which he is still puttering, he finds it impossible. Carlotta, although disappointed, is hardly surprised; she has heard him explain more than once that his thoughts flow from his brain, through his arm, and into his pencil; there is no other process by which he can write.
• • •
O’NEILL KNOWS (and refuses to know) that he will never write another play. Perhaps without conscious thought he has already devised a sly way to compensate for his inability to write a new tragedy; he will, instead, spin one in his mind and then perform it on the stage of his life.
He had cast his leading lady long ago when he eloped with Carlotta, and he has seen signs of her readiness to take on a new role; after years of playing the protective mother of a querulous semi-invalid who is trying to outrun time, she is, O’Neill surmises, ready to adopt the new role in which he plans to cast her (with Strindberg’s collegial approbation)—that of fiery antagonist.
He’s right. Carlotta is feeling mentally and physically bruised. “Even a mule has a breaking point!” she acidly notes, when she has failed to regain her strength by the end of March. And when she is finally back on her feet in mid-April, she complains she is “just weary unto death from being worked beyond my endurance.”
Among his other offenses, O’Neill peremptorily asks her to assume payment of all their living expenses in San Francisco because he’s temporarily broke; grudgingly, she agrees.
Sounding like Mary Tyrone, Carlotta complains of the Huntington suite that O’Neill hates, “Keeping up the ridiculous fantasy that this is a home!” She can hardly be blamed if she mourns the enchanted world she created fifteen years ago as the chatelaine of a French castle, not to mention as the wife of America’s most acclaimed dramatist. Now, having presided over two more grand residences, she is adrift.
The man to whom Carlotta has bound herself is all but forgotten by the public, stubbornly keeping his new plays to himself and depriving himself and his wife of income. She feels cheated out of her onetime role as the glamorous consort of the adulated international wunderkind of the American drama.
Her grand isolation in the hills of Northern California had, in recent months, felt like a sentence to house arrest. No matter how fervently she has always echoed O’Neill’s own genuine horror of public mingling, and no matter how she has (with him) disparaged the superficiality of the Broadway scene and the social bustle of life in New York, she privately misses both. (It would be a wonder if she didn’t.)
Locked inside the martyred mother-nurse-secretary she voluntarily became is the once-fabled beauty who preened in her fashionable gowns and jewels as she attended select social gatherings at the side of the Great Dramatist, or presided over discreet dinner parties for notable men and women who acknowledged her role as O’Neill’s muse.
Much as she always professed to share O’Neill’s frustration over the production of his plays, she felt at home in the theater among the actors, directors, and producers who were her own former peers. It has been a long, long time since she has had that sort of gratification.
Although an aura of romance still hovers over the marriage, Carlotta, like O’Neill, has suffered wounds that will never heal. Time and again, she has warned herself that O’Neill, without the release of his writing, would implode.
Now, as O’Neill embarks on the tragicomic improvisation written only in his mind, Carlotta is about to see her prophecy fulfilled.
It is to be a Grand Guignol that she will later sardonically describe as “a little drama in the home.”
• • •
THE HUNTINGTON FAMILY HOTEL is where O’Neill’s unwritten but intensely lived “little drama” begins, and the young woman he will cast as his ingenue is conveniently close at hand. The plot is motivated by O’Neill’s overwhelming urge to relive a passionate episode of his youth: his romance (at twenty-six) with Beatrice Ashe, the teasing, pretty nineteen-year-old New London girl he wooed with passionate poetry and letters, but couldn’t win.
• • •
THIS TIME (at fifty-five) his object is the twenty-three-year-old Jane Caldwell, who reminds him of the flirtatious Beatrice.
The O’Neills anticipate a longish stay in San Francisco—at least until the German part of the war is over (as O’Neill writes to Nathan in March, three months before the Allied invasion of Normandy). Eager to secure a confidante for the duration of her stay, Carlotta has redoubled her hospitality toward Myrtle Caldwell, to whom she still feels grateful for her intervention in the recent incident with the masseuse at Tao House.
Carlotta also welcomes Myrtle’s daughter Jane, pleased to have her do some desultory typing for O’Neill; soon both mother and daughter are frequent visitors to the Huntington, and Carlotta is relieved that O’Neill finds them an enjoyable distraction. Able to concentrate on work for an hour or so every day, he gives Jane minor corrections to type for his manuscripts of A Moon for the Misbegotten, A Touch of the Poet, and Hughie. Thus begins O’Neill’s misbegotten courtship of the young woman he calls “Janie,” and his declaration of war on his already hostile wife.
Carlotta at first sees no threat from Janie, who had occasionally typed for O’Neill at Tao House (during his writing of Long Day’s Journey and The Iceman Cometh) and with whom O’Neill had formed a casual friendship. Carlotta appears not to have noticed that their pretty, girlish guest has been evolving and is now a sensual woman, nor does she seem to notice that O’Neill’s behavior toward her has changed.
Kaye Albertoni, during her own extended visits to the O’Neills’ Huntington suite, is startled to observe that O’Neill kisses Janie on her mouth in greeting. Kaye, who marvels at Carlotta’s forbearance, refrains from commenting on this perceived unseemliness, thinking, “It’s up to her”; but, as Kaye later remarks, she does not have “a good feeling, watching them.”
According to Janie, Kaye has assumed the role of nurse-companion to O’Neill, mainly to take the burden off Carlotta. “O’Neill doesn’t really need a nurse,” says Janie. “He can shave himself and his tremor isn’t that noticeable.” Janie believes
that Carlotta exaggerates his illness to keep people away from him.
Carlotta had heretofore never doubted that O’Neill’s relationship with Janie was avuncular. In fact, Carlotta was herself much taken with the vivacious young woman. At dinner one evening in Tao House, Carlotta had been extolling O’Neill’s lovable qualities to the Caldwells, and had fondly declared she could live in a tent with him. Carlotta was amused when Janie blurted, “Well, who couldn’t?”
Janie recalls that those were “almost the first words I said to him.” As a consequence, O’Neill gave her a book of his collected plays inscribed, “From one about to order a tent” and signed “Uncle Gene.” Janie suggests that might have been “a forerunner of what was going to come.”
Carlotta had sent Janie notes and gifts, including (on January 1, 1942) a snapshot of O’Neill sitting on the end of a diving board in his bathing trunks (taken at Big Wolf Lake in the Adirondacks). Addressing her as “Janie Sweet,” she wrote, “I thought this would make you smile. You are a good child—and I love you!”
At the Huntington, Janie and O’Neill sit at separate desks in O’Neill’s bedroom with the door closed. On most days, O’Neill declares his work day over at eleven, and he and Janie and Carlotta—sometimes joined by Myrtle and/or Kaye—have coffee. In the living room, O’Neill puts on a record and invites Janie to dance with him.
She is impressed with his record collection, to which he continues to add; he has employed a Mr. Hollis to flesh out his music library, explaining he is “especially weak in 1910–30.” When Mr. Hollis sends him a list of available recordings, O’Neill requests all those made by Al Jolson, Frank Tinney, and Nora Bayes, plus “The Song Is Ended,” “Wistful and Blue,” and “Sam, the Old Accordion Man.”