by Arthur Gelb
Carlotta begins anew to pursue passage on a train east, but is unable to book space until almost the end of 1945.
While O’Neill confronts his return to New York (and the Broadway theater) with profound misgivings, Carlotta can’t wait to get back.
PART V
UNRAVELING
46
O’Neill dreads his return to Broadway after his voluntary nine-year absence. Still unable to write and with the mock love affair behind him, he is about to recast himself on his fantasy stage—this time in the role of the returning exile, the ultimate hero of his own tragic fate.
Ostensibly, he has returned to prepare for the long-delayed production of The Iceman Cometh, as yet eleven months away, and he allows his spirits to momentarily soar. But he and Carlotta have carried with them that “little drama being practiced in the home.” The thwarted dramatist and his complicit leading lady—henceforward poised to meet him halfway in battle—will soon find themselves mired in Strindbergian darkness.
All of O’Neill’s philosophy of the tragic, for all these years channeled into his plays, is viscerally taking over his life and, by extension, Carlotta’s. But why not? It is O’Neill himself who has pronounced it ill-judged “to think of tragedy as unhappy,” citing the (more enlightened) Greeks and Elizabethans, who “saw their lives ennobled” by the tragic.
And isn’t it O’Neill himself who sees life as “a gorgeously-ironical, beautifully-indifferent, splendidly-suffering bit of chaos the tragedy of which gives Man a tremendous significance, while without his losing fight with fate he would be a tepid, silly animal”?
Then elaborating on the credo formulated years earlier:
“I say ‘losing fight’ only symbolically for the brave individual always wins. Fate can never conquer his—or her—spirit. So you see I’m no pessimist. On the contrary, in spite of my scars, I’m tickled to death with life!”
Has not O’Neill suggested, as well, that “The tragedy of life is what makes it worthwhile,” adding that “any life which merits living lies in the effort to realize some dream, and the higher that dream is the harder it is to realize. Most decidedly we must all have our dreams. If one hasn’t them, one might as well be dead—one is dead. The only success is in failure. Any man who has a big enough dream must be a failure and must accept that as one of the conditions of being alive. If he ever thinks for a moment that he is a success then he is finished.”
Moreover, O’Neill has long since provided himself with what some might consider a casuistic alibi: “If a person is to get the meaning of life, he must learn to like the facts about himself—ugly as they may seem to his sentimental vanity—before he can lay hold on the truth behind the facts; and that truth is never ugly!” If that is what O’Neill still believes, it lets him off the hook about his sometimes outrageous behavior, including his recent folly with Janie Caldwell.
Lawrence Langner finds O’Neill, upon his arrival in New York in late November 1945, looking aged and gaunt; but he is soon pleased to see the moody dramatist’s spirits rising. Langner believes it is O’Neill’s return to the theater that is “doing wonders in bringing him back” to physical and spiritual health.
O’Neill has been readying his manuscript of Iceman for production but he is in no hurry, for it will be many months before rehearsals begin. The active life he now chooses to embrace with friends he hasn’t seen in many months—for him the equivalent of a wild social whirl—appears to soothe his nerves.
He and Carlotta have moved into a two-room suite in the Barclay Hotel at 111 East Forty-eighth Street, while Carlotta searches the crowded postwar city for an apartment to rent.
“I never want to build again,” she writes to the Winthers in Seattle. What she does want is to live in a small New York apartment for six or seven months a year and also “rent a small place in Sea Island or wherever Gene wants to go.”
She evidently has chosen to forget that O’Neill has always claimed to hate living in New York. Perhaps she reasons that, as he is no longer writing, he will now adjust to city living. The subject, which launches an ongoing battle, is held in abeyance pending the production of Iceman.
Soon after arriving in New York, O’Neill dictates to Carlotta a letter for Kenneth Macgowan, updating his plans. Iceman will begin rehearsals in September 1946, he says, to be followed at the beginning of 1947 by either A Moon for the Misbegotten or A Touch of the Poet. Macgowan has asked if he might “grab” for himself the SoundScriber that O’Neill has rejected as useless in writing creatively. He receives a startling refusal: “I have simply got to learn how to use it when I start being creative again, which probably means when we go to Sea Island . . . on May first.” (The O’Neills were planning a four-month stay in Georgia prior to the beginning of rehearsals for Iceman. As it turned out, they did not go, nor did O’Neill ever learn to use the SoundScriber.)
One of O’Neill’s first forays in New York is to Random House, where he ceremoniously consigns to his publisher, Bennett Cerf, the final version of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, to be placed in a safe with instructions that it not be published until twenty-five years after his death.
Another early stop is the northeast corner of Broadway and Forty-third Street, the site of his birthplace. Here is where once stood the family hotel called the Barrett House. Built to the imposing height of eight stories in 1883, five years before he was born, the hotel’s gabled tower with its embedded clock was a landmark for uptown residents and visitors who traversed the cobblestone streets in horse-drawn carriages.
O’Neill had been saddened to learn, in 1940, while still living at Tao House, that the hotel—renamed the Cadillac—had been torn down; he thought back to the many times over the years when he’d pointed out to friends the third-floor room in which he was born. “Every time I go past, I look up,” he once said. “Third window from Broadway on the Forty-third Street side. I can remember my father pointing it out to me.”
In at least one instance, he impetuously hustled a friend to room 236, knocked on the door, explained his mission to the startled occupants, and was granted permission to look around. Now, he complained, he hardly recognized the area. “There is only empty air now where I came into this world,” he quipped.
Joe Heidt, the Theatre Guild’s press agent, is O’Neill’s designated escort. He takes him, sometimes with Carlotta, to hockey games and bicycle races. O’Neill also goes out on the town with Winfield Aronberg, the attorney who has succeeded Harry Weinberger. They go to ball games, prizefights, and the race track (where O’Neill is a ten-dollar bettor), and they delight in hitting the jazz clubs that line Fifty-second Street. “Once in a while,” Aronberg recalls, “Gene will take a sip of a drink just for appearances.”
O’Neill seems to be enjoying a remission of his “sinking feelings,” as well as his difficulty in walking. Carlotta has no faith in the bursts of energy her husband has been displaying since his return to New York; she fears that his near-manic behavior portends an imminent collapse, but she feels helpless to rein him in.
Aronberg earlier endeared himself to O’Neill by negotiating a financial settlement with Agnes that relieved him of annual alimony payments (and enabled Agnes to marry Mack Kaufman). The settlement does not endear Aronberg to Carlotta, who thinks it’s overly generous; she is no more enamored of him than she was of Weinberger. When Aronberg, who finds her “too much of the grande dame,” tells O’Neill, “She hates my guts,” O’Neill does not contradict him.
Aronberg is also of service to O’Neill in dealing with Shane, with whom he has been out of touch for some time; in a letter to Eugene Jr. a few months before leaving California, O’Neill speculated about the chasm that had been steadily widening between himself and his younger son.
Shane, wrote O’Neill, “is like me but also very different from me, as far as a relationship with a father goes.” He was referring to Agnes’s role in “pulling” Shane from him, ignoring his own virtual abando
nment of his son.
Leading up to that difference, O’Neill told Eugene Jr., who had by then read the script of Long Day’s Journey, “My family’s quarrels and tragedy were within. To the outer world we maintained an indomitably united front and lied and lied for each other. A typical pure Irish family.
“The same loyalty occurs, of course, in all kinds of families, but there is, I think, among Irish still close to, or born in Ireland, a strange mixture of fight and hate and forgive, a clannish pride before the world, that is peculiarly its own. Well, there is nothing like that in Shane’s past. He has a background all torn apart, without inner or outer decency.”
Nevertheless, Shane’s biography up to this point has not differed all that much from his father’s youthful searching. After quitting school, Shane tried (and failed) at various attempts to support himself. In 1941, instead of shipping out on a clipper ship like his father, he joined the Merchant Marine, and two years later he was hospitalized with battle fatigue.
When O’Neill and Carlotta arrive in New York, Shane is working at an electrical-fixture factory and living in a cold-water flat on King Street in Greenwich Village with Catherine Givens, to whom he has been married since the summer of 1944. Eugene Jr. has moved into the same building to keep a brotherly eye on Shane, as he reports to his father. O’Neill responds, “Tell Shane to call me, I’d like to see him.”
Cathy Givens is eight months pregnant and feels shy about meeting her in-laws for the first time in this condition, so Shane goes alone to dine with his father and Carlotta at the Barclay Hotel. “We got along well together,” he reports to Cathy. Carlotta is interested to learn about the expected baby, and O’Neill says he is eager to meet Cathy. On November 19, Shane telephones his father to announce the birth of a boy, who has been named Eugene in his grandfather’s honor.
O’Neill, pleased, says he would like to see the baby. Carlotta visits Cathy at French Hospital in downtown Manhattan, bringing a plant and candy; Cathy is impressed with Carlotta’s stylish appearance and with her nonstop chatter. O’Neill did not come with her, Carlotta apologizes, because he isn’t feeling well; but the next moment she explains that the real reason is his fear he might run into Agnes. For the same reason, O’Neill doesn’t accompany Carlotta when she visits the King Street flat, bringing a complete layette for the baby.
Cathy sees that Carlotta is “uncomfortable about our cold-water flat and its meager furnishings.” She preaches to Cathy about the importance of a young couple’s standing on their own feet, and tells her she will soon invite her and Shane to dinner so she can finally meet her father-in-law. A few weeks later, the invitation is issued.
Cathy, who has been “sort of” expecting “the old sailor, the saloon guy” she has read about, instead finds herself in the company of “a very elegant man.” She is impressed by the dinner, served in the O’Neill suite by a hotel waiter; it is accompanied by wine, which O’Neill barely sips, explaining he is “in temperance.” They converse pleasantly, O’Neill asking first about the baby, then switching to literature and discovering that Cathy is quite well-read. Shane pleases his father by talking with animation about jazz, which Carlotta chooses to disparage as “savage” music, “the music of Negroes” who “go by their instincts.” As Cathy drily notes, “None of us commented much on her views of jazz.”
The older O’Neills continue to see both Shane and Catherine at intervals until early the following year, when their cordial relationship ends abruptly.
On February 10, 1946, at 2:03 p.m., Eugene O’Neill III, aged two months and twenty-four days, is rushed to St. Vincent’s Hospital. The examining doctor pronounces him dead on arrival. An autopsy is performed the next day by Dr. Peter Castiglia, of the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office at Bellevue.
For his report, Dr. Castiglia interviews Shane, who tells him Catherine last saw the infant Eugene alive and well at 4:00 a.m. on February 10. At noon, she awoke and found him in his crib, not breathing.
“The infant showed evidence of neglect,” Castiglia states in his report, “with maceration of scrotal tissue and abdomen, probably the result of unchanged diapers.” The death certificate lists the probable cause of death as “postural asphyxia from bed-clothes, accidental.”
The infant’s death would have been a stunning blow for any grandfather; for O’Neill, still emotionally bruised from having relived his mother’s anguish over losing her infant son, Edmund, it was more than enough to unhinge him. Melancholy Irish visionary that he was—disciple of Shakespeare and Aeschylus, a man who was living a Strindbergian tragedy—the death of Eugene O’Neill III must have seemed like the fulfillment of an evil prophecy. Shane and Catherine had several more children, but O’Neill (according to Carlotta) never saw them again—although on several occasions, as Shane’s mental and physical health deteriorated, O’Neill sent Aronberg to assist him with cash and legal help.
• • •
IN A MOVE that strikes some of their friends as ghoulish, Carlotta and O’Neill, in late April 1946, leave the Barclay Hotel and take over the penthouse apartment at 35 East Eighty-fourth Street, vacated after the death of Edward Sheldon, the once-celebrated playwright. Sheldon, who had been blind and partially paralyzed for twenty years, had succumbed to a coronary thrombosis that April 1. O’Neill, always at home with his own ghosts, is spiritually attuned to that of his tragic fellow dramatist.
Years earlier, he had sent Sheldon a warm response to his congratulatory wire about The Great God Brown:
You are one of the rare ones who really understand and have a spiritual right to speak, and be listened to whether of praise or blame. And I have always felt that we should be, and would be friends—(not that you haven’t proved very much of a friend already as far as my work is concerned!)—if my good fortune should ever be to meet you.
Possibly Carlotta finds the atmosphere of her new home less congenial, although she labors, as always, to refurbish the space with O’Neill’s comfort in mind; she decorates the six large rooms in bright colors, moves in some of their stored furniture, and buys a canary (not, as O’Neill had threatened, a buzzard), which she names Jeremiah, and which helps compensate just a bit for their still painful loss of Blemie.
O’Neill buys his first television set so he can watch prizefights, but he mistrusts it, and when the picture fades during a particularly suspenseful bout, he feels insulted and demands that the set be removed the next day.
For the most part, however, he continues in his newly adopted role as a normal social animal; he encourages Carlotta to give small dinners, they dine out with friends, they occasionally attend movies and the theater. But this time, it is Carlotta who feels the stress of an extended urban existence and whose nerves are beginning to fray.
A conciliatory note written by O’Neill to Carlotta on their seventeenth wedding anniversary indicates, despite its warm salutation, that all has not been well between them.
With the same old love deep in my heart I felt for you on that day in Paris, 1929! I wish you could say the same, forgiving as I forgive, all the mistakes and injuries done one to another through thoughtlessness or lack of understanding. In justice, as everyone but ourselves seems to know, our marriage has been the most successful and happy of any we know—until late years. Here’s for a new beginning!
• • •
O’NEILL IS NOW devoting his full attention to the production of The Iceman Cometh. It has been nearly six years since he last had a play on Broadway, the doomed Days Without End, his valentine to the wife he loved with such passionate abandon that it had blinded him to the play’s defects. Perhaps, in one of his mind’s smoky tunnels, he blames the play’s ill-conceived concept on his hyperbolic adoration of Carlotta at that time.
• • •
THE PROMINENT ACTOR and director Eddie Dowling has long since agreed to play Hickey, as well as direct The Iceman Cometh. George Jean Nathan had introduced O’Neill to Dowling in 1939 i
n San Francisco, where he was starring in Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life, which he’d also directed (and which won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for drama).
O’Neill had given Dowling Iceman to read during one of his several visits to Tao House. As Dowling recalled, O’Neill told him, “This is the wrong time for this play. Tragic as the characters are in my play, after all, what are they? Just a roomful of broken men. But there’s a bastard in Germany breaking a world. We’ll have to wait until they bury this fellow and the world gets more back on keel before I’ll allow this play to be done.”
Now it was a question of waiting for Dowling to end his run in the play he’d taken on after The Time of Your Life—Tennessee Williams’s first Broadway success, The Glass Menagerie, which Dowling directed and starred in as Tom Wingfield, the play’s narrator. When at last faced with readying Iceman for production, Dowling realized he couldn’t both perform and direct, and he chose to direct, casting the veteran character actor James Barton as Hickey. “I became not only O’Neill’s director, I practically became his nurse,” recalls Dowling. For a time, he accepts Carlotta’s apparently spiteful caution that O’Neill is “completely helpless, can’t go to the gents’ room without somebody assisting.”
Dowling tries to follow her instructions to light O’Neill’s cork-tipped cigarettes and lift his coffee cup for him. “She said I couldn’t leave him for a minute.”
Soon, however, Dowling is convinced Carlotta was exaggerating, and it isn’t long before O’Neill expresses his resentment.
“Eddie, I can take care of myself,” said O’Neill.
“Well,” replied Dowling, “Carlotta told me all the things that I should do for you, Gene. I don’t want you to think that I mind. It’s a great honor to help you, I’m happy to do it. But I’d be twice as happy if I thought you could do them yourself. So I won’t offer to do anything unless you ask me.”