By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  “I’ll tell you, Eddie, when I need you.”

  The Broadway opening for The Iceman Cometh is set for October 9, but because O’Neill once again has declined to submit to a pre-Broadway tryout, the Theatre Guild has allotted an extended rehearsal period. The Guild has assigned a young production assistant, Sherlee Weingarten, to provide O’Neill with secretarial assistance. Sherlee is a slender, pretty, dark-haired woman with large blue eyes; in her early twenties, she is gifted with a rare sense of tact and empathy and quickly endears herself to O’Neill.

  “At our first meeting I was scared,” she later recalled. “O’Neill had been an institution to me. The day after we were introduced, he was given a little office at the Guild, where he arranged to come every afternoon at two o’clock. He was in his office ahead of me the first day he came in to work, and when I arrived he stood up.”

  “Please don’t stand up, you don’t have to do that sort of thing in an office,” Sherlee murmurs.

  “But offices would be so much more pleasant if men would observe the rules,” O’Neill replies.

  Unlike Dowling, Sherlee finds O’Neill to be somewhat incapacitated. She recalls his accepting a proffered cup of tea, but because of his trembling hands he cannot bring it to his lips.

  Embarrassed for his sake, Sherlee remarks that the day is too warm for tea and suggests O’Neill might prefer Coca-Cola. O’Neill, embarrassed by Sherlee’s embarrassment, agrees, and she fetches him a bottle and two straws, which he accepts with relief.

  Sherlee works with O’Neill almost daily, typing not only the final edited script of Iceman but also his revised versions of A Moon for the Misbegotten and A Touch of the Poet. O’Neill grows so dependent on Sherlee’s assistance that he asks her to be present at all rehearsals.

  O’Neill smokes “a lot,” recalled Sherlee, and it’s a struggle for him to light a cigarette because of his tremor. Thinking it will discomfort him if she lights his cigarette every time he reaches for one, she takes one too; that way, she says, she can light his without making a production of it. The price is that she becomes “a cigarette fiend.” (In an inscription to her copy of Iceman, O’Neill thanks her for “all the kindnesses in the many small things that only the sensitive do, or the sensitive appreciate.”)

  Carlotta accepts Sherlee with the same warmth she initially offered Janie Caldwell, apparently believing O’Neill has learned his lesson; she is also reassured by Sherlee’s impending marriage to Steve Alexander, the production assistant on Iceman. Sherlee responds happily to Carlotta’s affection and is invited to dinner at the O’Neill penthouse on several occasions.

  Carlotta is less sanguine about O’Neill’s mild flirtations with the three young actresses who have been cast as the status-conscious prostitutes who insist they are “tarts” rather than whores. O’Neill has personally chosen Marcella Markham to play Cora (the chattel of the saloon’s daytime bartender, Chuck Morello). Marcella, who has vivid red hair and is a student of the Stanislavski method, asks O’Neill at a rehearsal one day, “Have you ever really known a Cora?”

  “Now, Marcella,” O’Neill chides, “do you want to know, did I know a Cora, or how well did I know a Cora?” Marcella blushes, and O’Neill smiles at her confusion. “He loved to tease the girls in the play,” recalled Marcella, “not only me, but Ruth Gilbert whom he knew from Ah, Wilderness!” (Gilbert had played the adolescent Muriel McComber.)

  Once during a rehearsal, Marcella recalled, O’Neill happened to overhear a kidding conversation she was having with one of the actors, who was propositioning her; she tells him he is “marvelous, but doesn’t have the right smell.” O’Neill teases the actor, “Too bad, boy.”

  When the actor walks away, O’Neill asks Marcella, “Do I have the right smell?”

  “Positively,” responds Marcella.

  Later, she recalled, he is “the most gentlemanly man I’ve ever known.” Even though he is ailing, Marcella said, he has a remarkable vitality. She is unaware that this newfound vitality springs from his long-unaccustomed and joyful interaction with the many colleagues and friends who have welcomed him with warmth and obvious adulation into their own stimulating environments.

  Only Carlotta (and her domestic staff) know that he returns home exhausted and collapses into unmasked physical and emotional fatigue, from which he doesn’t recover without steely effort.

  • • •

  IN EARLY FALL, during the period allotted for dress rehearsals, Dowling arranges for the entire Iceman cast of nineteen, together with O’Neill and himself, to lunch at Gilhuly’s, a respectable, old-fashioned Irish saloon, out of place in the seedy area of raunchy bars, pawnshops, and porn movie houses of Eighth Avenue.

  As they walk the short distance uptown from the Martin Beck Theatre on Forty-fifth Street (later renamed the Al Hirschfeld)—the actors in costume and makeup, looking like bums and streetwalkers—they notice that half a dozen real bums have fallen in with them, apparently thinking they are joining some fellow derelicts.

  When the group arrives at Gilhuly’s, the owner, who recognizes O’Neill and Dowling but not all the actors, starts throwing out some of the Iceman cast along with the genuine bums. O’Neill asks Gilhuly to let them all stay, and the real bums lunch along with the actors as O’Neill’s guests.

  Another time, when just O’Neill and Dowling are about to enter Gilhuly’s for lunch, a tall heavyset man with a black Vandyke beard approaches them and, to Dowling’s surprise, addresses O’Neill as “Dad.” It is Eugene Jr. He asks if he can look in on a dress rehearsal, and Dowling invites him to come to the theater that afternoon. Eugene tells his father the production is wonderful.

  After rehearsal that evening, although a light rain is falling, O’Neill decides to walk all the way home from the Martin Beck to his East Eighty-fourth Street apartment. Dowling, fearing the walk might be too much for O’Neill, decides to accompany him. As they walk, O’Neill talks about Eugene with warmth and admiration for his accomplishments as a scholar.

  Eugene attends several more rehearsals, and his father is always glad to see him at the theater, for it has become uncomfortable for father and son to meet in O’Neill’s apartment.

  Carlotta’s disapproval of Eugene’s leftist political affiliations has grown into open hostility. “He changed suddenly; he grew a beard, a fat belly from drinking and became a Communist,” she later recalled. Eugene enjoys taunting her. “How’s the old Tory?” becomes his habitual greeting whenever he and Carlotta happen to meet.

  The beard was grown as payment for an election bet and was considered rather attractive by Eugene’s friends. The fat belly was barely noticeable, for Eugene’s large frame could carry considerable weight. It’s true he was a heavy drinker, but none of his friends considered him an alcoholic; at his worst, he never matched his father’s youthful excesses. Eugene had been antiwar (as his father, with better reason, had been in 1914). Nonetheless, Eugene had made a contribution to the war effort, working in two factories that supplied military weaponry; when called up by his draft board, he was turned down because of his childhood injury (the result of his bicycle accident). He then tried to get into the OSS (predecessor of the CIA) but was rejected.

  Now thirty-six, Eugene is teaching the classics at Yale, and has co-edited a two-volume edition of Greek drama, which is acknowledged as a major scholarly accomplishment. But his personal life has grown increasingly unstable. He is divorced from his third wife, Sally, and is living with a woman named Ruth Lander, who is separated from her husband. His radical politics, heavy drinking, and messy love life are beginning to draw censure from his colleagues.

  Yale is beginning to have misgivings about him. According to his close friend Frank Meyer, Eugene is “running away from his real gifts and diverting his real talent.” In May 1944, while still teaching at Yale, he became a radio announcer at WTIC in Hartford, Connecticut. This led to a fifteen-minute Sunday-morning program dur
ing which he discussed such erudite subjects as Marius the Epicurean and Cicero’s Orations.

  Eugene’s father may have been among the few who understood what he was talking about and he enjoyed engaging Eugene in intellectual discourse by mail. Acknowledging that the brief time span of the program precluded analysis in depth, O’Neill wrote:

  “What would have interested me would have been to show the importance of Oratory in Cicero’s time and the period in our history when the orations, not speeches, of our Senators had a comparable importance—the pre–Civil War period of Webster, Hayne, Calhoun, etc.”

  After the program had run its brief course, Eugene also had a fling as a panelist on a television program, but he began arriving at the studio in various degrees of intoxication and was soon disinvited.

  O’Neill professes to be far less perturbed by Eugene’s increasingly aimless lifestyle than Carlotta, and refuses to intervene when she and Eugene argue. “Gene just sits there and never interferes,” says Carlotta. After Eugene leaves, Carlotta tells her husband, “I make a home for you; how can you sit there and let him talk to me that way? And Gene says, ‘Why don’t you leave the room when he comes? Why don’t you go into the bedroom?’”

  • • •

  THE IMPENDING BROADWAY OPENING of the first new O’Neill play in more than twelve years, coupled with O’Neill’s personal reemergence from isolation, does not go unheralded by the press. He gives multiple interviews to reporters and patiently answers questions posed by magazine writers who are preparing extended profiles. Most of the reporters find him genial and expansive, if physically frail.

  In early August, two months before the premiere, O’Neill sits on the terrace of his penthouse with the New York Post columnist Earl Wilson (presumably having forgiven him for his interview with Oona), and tells him his wife can’t join them because she’s “terribly busy killing cockroaches in the kitchen.” When O’Neill later tells Carlotta of his quip, she is not amused. Humorlessly, she phones Wilson, who solemnly reports in his column that Carlotta “didn’t like the joke at all” and that she told him “pretty severely” that she’d been busy cataloguing O’Neill’s books and that “they DO NOT have cockroaches.”

  A few weeks later, O’Neill grants George Jean Nathan an exclusive interview, in which he discusses not only his current work, but also a jocular scheme to join Nathan in opening a saloon. He informs his old friend that he has been unable to cut The Iceman Cometh by more than fifteen minutes. “If there are repetitions, they’ll have to remain in, because I feel they are absolutely necessary to what I am trying to get over.”

  He also tells Nathan that A Moon for the Misbegotten will go into rehearsal immediately after Iceman has opened; it requires no cutting, he says, which will give him “just that much extra time” to worry about the third play, A Touch of the Poet.

  As for the saloon, it is to be the realization of a boyhood ambition. Nathan quotes O’Neill (with his typical freewheeling inventiveness): “When these three plays of mine are on, why don’t we open up one together? Not in town, but somewhere out on Long Island near the ocean because I still don’t want to miss my swimming. You once said you had a good name for such a dump, ‘High Dive.’ It wouldn’t cost us much to start it, and I’ll throw in my old barroom piano that you drop nickels into. . . . It’s in storage now and I’m getting lonesome for it. We might not make any money, considering that most of our friends would open charge accounts and lovably forget them, but it would be a great sensation again to eat up the free lunch.”

  During a later interview with an out-of-town reporter, Herbert Stoeckel, who asks about the saloon, O’Neill assures him he hasn’t forgotten about it. “Nathan can handle the bar, but I want to be at the cash register.”

  • • •

  AMONG HIS LONGER interviews are three with Elizabeth Sergeant, who is planning—with his blessing—to go far beyond the intuitive “Man with a Mask,” which she wrote in 1927; she will undertake a full-length biography. Although she jots voluminous notes and sketches dozens of random assessments, she never manages to put it all together. But in her many meandering and sometimes illegible pages there are nuggets of a kind only she could elicit, insights into the state of mind of this celebrated fifty-eight-year-old dramatist whom she has known through the production of five plays and two marriages.

  She is now confronted by a man who—anticipating his eleventh Broadway production—is helplessly ailing (but denying his illness); a writer no longer capable of shaping words with his pencil (but determined to continue writing); a still-handsome and charismatic man who is fed up with his marriage of seventeen years and yearning for romance (but unable to function without the care of his disillusioned, aging wife).

  Sergeant notes that despite his incapacities, “Gene looks wonderful, entirely different.” He is relaxed and garrulous, as she leads him to reminisce about his early life and all aspects of his career. He goes into intimate detail about his unfinished cycle (which he still hopes to finish) and, of course, he dwells on the forthcoming production of The Iceman Cometh.

  At one point, Sergeant remarks, O’Neill appears to be reassessing “his intuitive insight, the hopelessness of the mind that produced a world war. Look below the mean repellent surface (he seems to say) and complex, terrible and unadmitted aspects of the human ego come to light: a man may really hate his mother enough to destroy her. Another may despise his wife to the point of murder because in her mothering she tolerates his vices and yields to his charm, instead of lambasting him and throwing him out of her life.”

  Sergeant quotes O’Neill: “I was a bum myself, with my head on a barroom table, and shared a room with a suicide. With my head swimming in alcohol and bright-dark dreams, I wondered if I’d ever get out of that door myself.” She adds, “He did, for the obvious reason that he was a genius of enormous will power, a worker of workers, a man of great purity, no real choice but to contribute to the art of his time.” Commenting that many of his fellow idealists had succumbed to the hostile political and social atmosphere of the time, she says that O’Neill was “the lucky guy who could always work, always write”—until now.

  “God, if you only knew how I long to get back to the sea,” O’Neill tells Essie, pointing out that Iceman was written at his inland estate in California, unlike some of his successful midcareer plays that were written while he lived near the sea.

  One thing his ranch in the San Ramon Valley taught him, he continues, was that although he could objectively admire the beauty of the hills, woods, and meadows, “in a deep spiritual sense” he did not “belong.”

  “I am not it and it is not me. Beach grass is the only verdure I really understand. Dunes are my hills, the beach sun is my only sun, and the sea is the symbol of life to which I belong and has been that for me since I was a small boy. Sometimes, in a moment of sun-beach-sea, or on the sea, I have lost myself, all identity, and am at one with the rhythm of life itself.”

  Sergeant comments, “His big attentive ears probably never cease to hear the sound of the sea, no matter how far he feels from it.” Sergeant ends by describing him as “still a silent, tender man; he dresses like a dandy, but the forehead dome, from which very well-brushed gray hair recedes, is still wrinkled with thought and concern for the underdog.”

  She suspects he continues to identify with the loser despite his “great good fortune to earn over two million dollars by dramas greater or lesser.”

  • • •

  ON SEPTEMBER 2, a month before the opening of The Iceman Cometh, the Theatre Guild sponsors a press conference with O’Neill as it did fifteen years earlier, pegged to the opening of Mourning Becomes Electra. O’Neill is outspoken, disregarding the conformist postwar optimism of the day, indifferent to the surge of elation over his country’s victorious emergence as the leading world power. With resolute calm, he expresses his view that the victory is a hollow one and that America “is a flop.”
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  “I had a French friend, one of the delegates at the San Francisco Conference, who came to see me,” says O’Neill. “I asked him, ‘If it’s not betraying any great secrets, what’s really happening at the Conference?’ He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘It’s the League of Nations, only not so good.’ And I believe it. Of course, I may be wrong. I nearly always am.”

  He then offers the dumbfounded reporters the philosophy that underlies his cyclical eleven-play Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed, which he still hopes against hope to finish:

  “I’m going on the theory that the United States, instead of being the most successful country in the world, is the greatest failure. It’s the greatest failure because it was given everything, more than any other country. Through moving as rapidly as it has, it hasn’t acquired any real roots.”

  O’Neill plows ahead: “Its main idea is that everlasting game of trying to possess your own soul by the possession of something outside it, thereby losing your own soul and the thing outside of it, too. America is the prime example of this because it happened so quickly and with such immense resources.” And lest anyone doubt the sterling source of his doctrine, O’Neill once again invokes a favorite maxim: “This was really said in the Bible much better. We are the greatest example of ‘For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’ We had so much and could have gone either way.”

  In his summing up, O’Neill rises to his most majestic: “If the human race is so damned stupid that in two thousand years it hasn’t had brains enough to appreciate that the secret of happiness is contained in that one simple sentence, which you’d think any grammar school kid could understand and apply, then it’s time we dumped it down the nearest drain and let the ants take over.”

  Allowing this pronouncement to sink in, O’Neill shifts to a lighter vein, griping that during his absence from New York “they tore down the old Cadillac Hotel where I was born,” and adding, “That was a dirty trick.”