by Arthur Gelb
“I have quite a few of [Ruth] Etting already,” writes O’Neill. “Re the Hoosier Ha-chas, if you could send them all to me, I would imagine there would be a lot I would want because they revive so much of popular forgotten stuff. The same applies to Frank Novak and his Rootin-Tootin Boys, about as terrible an aggregation of orchestra and chorus as ever drenched the air. But somehow I love them because I remember the tunes played by just such orchestras, 5th rate Ted Lewis, and joining in choruses myself which contain just as many flats.”
To give Mr. Hollis a more rounded sense of his eclectic taste, O’Neill mentions his affection for Irving Berlin’s “I Love a Piano,” “That Mysterious Rag,” and “At the Devil’s Ball,” as well as Al Jolson’s “Don’t Blame It All on Broadway,” which he describes as “a beautiful lament and apology” for that world-famous thoroughfare. When sung “with upturned eyes by a well-stewed waiter endowed with the proper adenoids, it positively wrung you to pieces!”
O’Neill’s doctor has told Carlotta it’s good for him to dance. “That is the fun part,” Janie recalls. “That’s when he begins whispering sweet nothings in my ear; and Carlotta is sitting there, sometimes my mother is sitting there, and I am dying—right in my ear! And it is sweet. And I laugh and laugh—I bend over with laughter.”
Janie’s mother warns her about Carlotta’s jealousy, saying she can “see it coming.” Janie cannot fathom Carlotta’s apparent blindness to what’s going on. “If my mother senses it, Carlotta should; but she doesn’t.”
One explanation might be that Carlotta, feeling remorse for her own little sexual jaunt with the masseuse, thinks O’Neill is entitled to a retaliatory fling, and is prepared to wait it out. But not indefinitely.
Janie, whose long hair was blonde when she first met O’Neill, has let it grow back to its natural light brown, which she believes O’Neill prefers. “He’d save my hair and use it as bookmarks,” she recalls. “I thought that was pretty cool; I know that was pretty romantic.” She is touched when, after failing to turn up at the Huntington on a weekend when she has a date, O’Neill tells her it was a “black weekend.” But she doesn’t take him nearly as seriously as he does her.
Janie is dating several young men, including the man she hopes to marry, and she is accustomed to being flattered and courted. Although she concedes, after a time, that O’Neill has her heart—“not my body, my heart”—she feels she can keep the romance within bounds.
When O’Neill, one day in late May, complains to Carlotta that he has no privacy, Carlotta indignantly scribbles, “He hasn’t a special ‘study,’ but he has an extra large bedroom” that she never enters “unless asked.” She is even more outraged when, the next day, he asks her to find a better apartment, one that overlooks the Bay—fully aware that in the crowded wartime city he is asking the impossible. (She nonetheless goes through the motions of seeking another apartment, knowing her search is futile.)
In her diary, Carlotta initially attributes O’Neill’s insensitivity toward her to his absorption with his work. “It is like the slavery of a man wooing a woman he adores!” she writes. His work “is his love, his passion, his integrity, his joy, his achievement!”
But she is at last unable to ignore the signs that O’Neill has begun to woo an actual woman he adores. Carlotta, in many ways narrow-minded and a bigot, is nonetheless shrewd and intuitive; less of a self-pitier than O’Neill, she can read him more clearly than he reads (or wants to read) her.
On August 6, Carlotta records that when Myrtle and Janie come to take her and O’Neill to their home for dinner, she notices “a queer smile on Genie’s face”; she offers no explanation, but complains about the uncomfortably long drive to their house and back, and the fact that at dinner “they drink and we don’t.” After sitting together in glum silence in their suite, O’Neill mutters, “God, I wish I could drink a bottle of ‘Old Taylor.’”
He resists the temptation, but he is casting about for a reason to quarrel with Carlotta, and, a few weeks later, he accuses her of “not being interested in his work.” That was the charge O’Neill brought against Agnes (with Carlotta’s encouragement) as a justification for his leaving her. Carlotta is deeply offended. Although she frequently protests (in her diary and to one or two intimates) that she suffers O’Neill’s “sadistic” stabs silently, she knows how to be cruel to him in her turn.
Janie recalls a time when Carlotta is angry at O’Neill and spitefully serves him his luncheon soup in a shallow bowl rather than his accustomed cup; instead of drinking the soup, he is obliged to use a spoon that he can barely hold in his trembling hand. He doesn’t blink an eye, said Janie. “He just goes ahead and has his soup that way.”
Although Janie recalled that O’Neill’s tremor often is not noticeable, Kenneth Macgowan, on a visit to the Huntington, is shocked at how bad it is; when O’Neill attempts to inscribe a couple of sheets of his early poetry, “his hands are so unsteady that he writes the inscriptions with one hand helping the other to hold the pen.”
Carlotta evidently believes she has persuaded O’Neill they will be more comfortable waiting out the war in New York, for at the end of July (1944), she begins negotiating to reserve a drawing room on the so-called streamliner train going east in October and books a suite at the Gotham Hotel on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan for November 14. But O’Neill doesn’t really want to leave San Francisco.
On September 21, after wangling to reserve the train tickets, Carlotta notes her worry about O’Neill’s fluctuating mind-set. “Gene changes every day as to where we should go & what do! Has even mentioned South Africa—& Mexico!”
O’Neill receives a reprieve when, on October 10, his doctor cautions him against leaving California so late in the year. “We can’t go East until spring,” a resigned Carlotta tells her diary, “winter too dangerous for us.”
A week later O’Neill celebrates his fifty-sixth birthday by visiting what he calls “a really swell columbarium.” Describing the trip to Carl Van Vechten, he writes, “California, as is well known, leads the world in the swellness of its columbariums designed, apparently, to keep the dead lively, cheerful and constantly amused.” He had intended “to price a few snappy urns,” just by way of safeguarding his future, but neither the “curator of the dump” nor he could make themselves heard above “the roaring of ten thousand savage canary birds and horrid gush of fancy fountains,” so it all came to nothing. He had left the place swearing he would live forever “to spite those damned canaries” and vowing that his next pet bird would be a buzzard.
O’Neill was still in a macabre mood when Sophus and Eline Winther visited the Huntington a week later. “He stood there,” recalls Winther, “tall and slender, his arms folded in the way he could best control the shaking of his hands, and said, ‘Remember that this is what I want on my tombstone:’”
EUGENE O’NEILL
There is something to be said
For being dead.
He shows the Winthers some of his early efforts at poetry and gives them Hughie to read. When they leave, he falls into a state of melancholy.
“Poor darling,” records Carlotta, “life hasn’t ever given him happiness—& never will—I now understand that I am useful (more so than he realizes) but am in no way a fulfillment to him . . . Nor would any woman be—”
In late November, O’Neill and Carlotta make the incomprehensible decision (which they will shortly rescind) to return to Sea Island and build a house there; they speak of being reunited with Freeman, who has agreed to accompany them to Georgia after his discharge from the Marines.
In a letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, whom O’Neill has come to address affectionately as “Essie,” he explains this seemingly perverse decision: he and Carlotta left Sea Island, he says, “because we had been too blind to its virtues and too impatient of its minor defects.” And Casa Genotta (like Tao House) had been too large for two people.
“We wi
ll not make that mistake again.” (Eight years earlier, as they were about to abandon Sea Island, Carlotta had listed those “minor defects” in a letter to Eline Winther: “decay, heat, storms, snakes, insects, uninteresting people.” She and O’Neill had been “idiots” to have settled in “a resort,” she said. “Only fools with more money than brains ever live in resorts.)”
O’Neill goes on to bare his soul to Sergeant, who has never failed to respond with empathy; but not even to her does he mention his forlorn obsession with the twenty-three-year-old Janie Caldwell (although an intuitive reading between the lines might have alerted Sergeant to something troubling being suppressed).
“I haven’t done a line of work in a long while,” wrote O’Neill. “It came to a point where sickness, worry, and uncertainty kept piling one on top of another month after month.” His “creative urge just balked.” The worst of his Parkinson’s, he continues, are the spells of melancholia. “God knows I have had enough of Celtic Twilight in my make-up without needing anymore of the same. And this isn’t the same. It isn’t sadness. It’s an exhausted, horrible apathy.”
After spending Christmas day with the Caldwells, Carlotta sourly notes (conspicuously not referring to her husband as “Gene”), “Janie and Eugene dance before and after dinner—& have much fun.” On Carlotta’s birthday four days later, Kaye Albertoni gives her a “surprise” party. “Quite a fuss for an old woman of 56!” she observes in her diary, mentioning the presence of her friend Myrtle, but not her daughter Janie.
O’Neill presents Carlotta with a check, together with what she listlessly describes as “a charming edition” of Grimm’s Fairy Tales; in his inscription, he declares he has tried but failed to think of something “new” to say; he writes that he must fall back on “the one thing which retains its old deep meaning: My love and your love and my gratitude for your love,” adding, somewhat lamely, “With that love we can grow old together without fear, even in this kind of world.”
In view of O’Neill’s hurtful behavior with Janie, Carlotta surely reads these words with considerable skepticism. She nonetheless sees fit to draw an emphatically plump pussycat at the bottom of her diary entry.
• • •
WHEN GERMANY SURRENDERS that May, Carlotta doesn’t see how O’Neill can any longer postpone their departure from California. But, still atremble on the cloud of his romance with Janie, he clutches at new reasons for delay.
On a sunny day in June, Janie drives O’Neill and Carlotta to the beach so that he can glimpse his beloved ocean. Carlotta stays in the car; she is having trouble with her eyes again and, even with dark glasses, she can’t tolerate the bright sunlight. She later mis-dates their drive to the beach as October 1944; it is one of numerous misleading notes and omissions in her sanitized diary regarding both Janie and Myrtle.
• • •
JANIE AND O’NEILL stroll at water’s edge. After remarking how charming she looks in her purple coat with its high collar buttoned under her chin, he at last tells her she reminds him of Beatrice Ashe, his early love who proved to be unavailable despite the amorous poetry with which he wooed her. Thinking back to those poems, including one called “On the Beach,” he murmurs a few lines of a new poem he is writing to Janie in his mind:
We walked to the sea’s edge,
You and I,
Driven in hopeless pilgrimage
To beseech the sea
For a moment’s dream
Of life’s forgotten mystery.
Aware of Janie’s fluttering responsiveness, O’Neill tells her he has fallen in love with her; he wants to marry her!
Janie, in a trance, feels she could stand there on the beach listening to O’Neill forever. At the moment, she believes she truly returns his love. “If the ocean washes us away right now, it would be okay,” she remembers thinking.
She soon realizes, though, that she has misread her own feelings and also misjudged the depth of O’Neill’s. Years later, she acknowledged she was too inexperienced to cope with the situation: “If I’d known how to handle it, I might’ve—I don’t know what I would’ve done—I didn’t want—he was older, he was older, he was older—”
One day soon after the scene on the beach, Janie—after typing some minor revisions for A Moon for the Misbegotten—comes from O’Neill’s bedroom into the living room, closely followed by O’Neill. She announces to Carlotta, “Oh, we finished the play.” This is too much for Carlotta; she finally decides to notice what is happening. As Janie recalled, “The ‘we’ sets her off, and she lays into me. Who do I think I am? I’m not that important; she mentions about my ‘flirty flirty eyes.’”
O’Neill intervenes: “Don’t pay any attention to her,” he tells Janie. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
But Janie is dismayed. Suddenly she feels the full impact of a situation well beyond what she can handle. “I don’t know where that would have gone,” she later mused. “I couldn’t take care of him; I mean, I wasn’t about to.”
In any event, Carlotta has had it with her sweet Janie. She tells her to leave and not come back. As Janie is about to walk out, O’Neill pulls her aside and asks her to meet him at a neighborhood coffee shop on the following day, when he returns from a doctor’s appointment; they need to iron things out, he pleads. Janie believes Carlotta’s reaction “made O’Neill more intense about wanting to marry me.” Fully aware now that she is in way over her head, Janie decides not to show up at the coffee shop.
“So that was it,” she later recalled. “But I’ve never forgotten him. His eyes, and the beauty of speech he had—his laughter, his dancing, I loved to dance with him.” Janie Caldwell married not long after and lived on, unaware of the disaster she was leaving in her wake.
• • •
O’NEILL, FOILED IN his pitiable attempt to relive his youth, is now at Carlotta’s mercy. Carlotta, in turn, can now openly exploit her role as the betrayed wife of a philandering husband. The mutual resentment they’ve barely managed to hold at bay erupts into a furious weeks-long confrontation; it requires the frequent intervention not only of Nurse Albertoni, but also of Carlotta’s and O’Neill’s doctors.
On the advice of those doctors, Albertoni gives both Carlotta and O’Neill daily injections of potent sedatives. Carlotta stays in touch with Myrtle by phone, but only to run down Janie. Kaye Albertoni is now Carlotta’s closest confidante. She becomes a sort of buffer, or mediator, between Carlotta and O’Neill, Kaye recalled (mentioning that she herself never called O’Neill by his first name).
According to Kaye, “Carlotta would have such tantrums.” She and O’Neill hurl insults. She calls him “a nasty, dirty senile old man”; he counters with accusations of her sexual betrayal with her masseuse. She tells Kaye one morning that the only reason she has decided not to commit suicide is to spare Kaye from having to cope with the mess. But, she tells Kaye, she would happily kill O’Neill.
After one argument, Carlotta asks Kaye to help her pack, as she is leaving immediately for New York (which she knows is impossible, as the war with Japan is still imposing restrictions on train travel). When Kaye returns the following day, Carlotta tells her to keep O’Neill away from her or she will kill him. A few days later, she describes to Kaye how O’Neill, brandishing the pistol he has kept by him since purchasing it in Bermuda, threatened to shoot her, and that she armed herself with a butcher’s knife in self-defense.
Then, says Carlotta, they both dropped their weapons and O’Neill began choking her, after which he knocked her out. Kaye believes her after she examines Carlotta’s slightly swollen jaw, and later notices O’Neill’s slightly puffy right hand.
Despite all, within a few weeks Carlotta and O’Neill have negotiated a fragile truce. She has too much invested in him; she can’t walk out before at least sharing the excitement of the upcoming Broadway production of The Iceman Cometh; if nothing else, a successful run could bring in enough cash to
refresh her dwindling income. And can she really bring herself to abandon this ailing man who depends on her for every aspect of his well-being?
For his part, O’Neill is forced to acknowledge he has been deluding himself about the possibility of an independent existence; he knows full well his survival depends on Carlotta. And on whom would he vent his fury and frustration if they were to separate?
According to Kaye, Carlotta is more than ever eager to return to the East Coast, but O’Neill, blaming his ill health, is still reluctant to leave; perhaps he has not quite shed his illusory hope of somehow reuniting with Janie. But he knows he can’t dangle indefinitely in the limbo in which he now finds himself.
When the atom bomb is dropped on Japan, ending the war shortly thereafter, Carlotta renews her pressure on O’Neill to return east; although he continues to procrastinate, citing his ill health, Carlotta begins pulling strings, chopping through red tape, and, for the second time, she secures train accommodations.
“I had everything packed and on the train,” she recalls, “and just at the last moment Gene said, ‘No, I don’t think I want to go.’ So I had to return to the public relations man at the railroad, thank him for his courtesy, and tell him I was very sorry, but Mr. O’Neill had changed his mind. He told me I needn’t be sorry, he had a hundred people waiting for the canceled space.”
In mid-September, O’Neill writes to George Jean Nathan: “Carlotta and I continue to suffer from ill health spells, and I’m so sick of this apartment I wish they’d give me a short stretch at Alcatraz just to enjoy the sea breezes, a change of view, and the interesting company.” They are longing to return to New York, he tells Nathan, and “will surely make it by the end of March.” But, he adds—thinking of his promise to the Theatre Guild to produce The Iceman Cometh after the war ends—“I have become so apathetic about the theater that I really don’t give a damn whether any play of mine is produced again or not. I have to fake an interest.”