by Arthur Gelb
He then answers questions about The Iceman Cometh and—making no mention of illness past or present—he says he hopes to resume writing soon. “But,” he explains, “the war has thrown me completely off base, and I have to get back to a sense of writing being worthwhile.”
In a separate interview for The New York Times Magazine a few days later, O’Neill once again sits for the writer-artist S. J. Woolf, who draws him with sunken cheeks and fiercely burning eyes. “Like Poe,” writes Woolf, “he looks as if he were surrounded by an aura of mysterious sorrow.” O’Neill talks to Woolf about his father’s oft-repeated prediction that the theater was dying.
“Those words,” says O’Neill, “seem to me as true today as when he said them. But the theater must be a hardy wench, for although she is still ailing, she’ll never die as long as she offers an escape.”
Analyzing his father’s era, he adds, “It was a prudish age which has left its impress in the form of present-day censorship. This to me is one of the biggest obstacles to the artistic development of the theater. Now, before a play can be safely produced, somebody has to say it will not corrupt the morals of six-year-olds.”
Three days before the opening, O’Neill, recovering from a bad cold, is interviewed for the Times Sunday drama section by Karl Schriftgiesser. O’Neill says he is confident that Iceman will hold the audience’s attention throughout its four-hour running time.
“I do not think that you can write anything of value or understanding about the present,” he tells Schriftgiesser. “You can only write about life if it is enough in the past. The present is too much mixed up with superficial values; you can’t know which thing is important and which is not. The past which I have chosen is one I knew.
“You ask, what is the significance, what do these people [of Iceman] mean to us today? Well, all I can say is that it is a play about pipe dreams. And the philosophy is that there is always one dream left, one final dream, no matter how low you have fallen, down there at the bottom of the bottle. I know, because I saw it.”
47
The last O’Neill play produced on Broadway during his lifetime opens at 4:30 in the afternoon of October 9, 1946. O’Neill has given his opening-night tickets to his lawyer and spends the evening at home with Carlotta.
It was nearly eighteen years ago that Carlotta, as O’Neill’s exultant mistress, was his emissary at the opening of Strange Interlude; since then, she has trembled with him through the Broadway openings of Mourning Becomes Electra; Ah, Wilderness!; and Days Without End. She can’t help but speculate that this is the final opening night they will ever share.
For the theater world, the premiere of The Iceman Cometh is a momentous event. Committed theatergoers and the usual celebrities along with the critics all press into the Martin Beck Theatre; at intermission, they gobble dinner at Sardi’s and other theater-friendly hangouts, then hurry back to their seats.
Although many in the audience are fascinated, a good number are puzzled, and a few are bored—a fact that must be blamed largely on the muddled production.
Lawrence Langner is unwilling to shoulder the blame for the inadequacies of the Guild presentation; justifiably, he points out that O’Neill himself had considerable supervisory power over the production. But he later concedes that James Barton’s performance as Hickey is a disappointment; he recalled that during the dinner intermission Barton “unfortunately for us all,” entertained a crowd of friends in his dressing room instead of resting.
“By the time he came to make the famous speech which lasted nearly twenty minutes in the fourth act,” Langner recounted, “he had little or no voice left with which to deliver it. As a result, the last act, which should have been the strongest of all, fell apart in the center.”
Even so, The Iceman Cometh has a respectable run. Langner insisted it would have been even longer, but Barton soon developed laryngitis, and later audiences could barely hear him during his big scene.
“I could not help remarking to Gene,” said Langner, “that, in my opinion, The Iceman Cometh, like [Shaw’s] Saint Joan, would never be properly presented until after the expiration of the copyright, when it might be possible to cut it.” Langner remembered that “Gene smiled at me in his usual disarming way and said it would have to wait for just that.” Later, O’Neill gives Langner a copy of the manuscript, on whose first page he has written: “To Lawrence Langner, The hell with your cuts!”
In fact, most of the critics are respectful of the Theatre Guild production and say nothing of Barton’s sorry performance (unaware of what it could have been in the hands of an actor with more depth of understanding). As for the play itself, the critics are divided among those who praise it (with reservations) and those who find it disappointing. But most of the critics, even those favorably disposed, complain it is unnecessarily long and repetitious.
Brooks Atkinson in the Times salutes O’Neill for having written “one of his best plays,” calling him “a man who writes with the wonder and heart of a poet.” Murmuring gently about its great length, he allows, “But if that is the way Mr. O’Neill wants to afflict harmless playgoers, let us accept our fate with nothing more than a polite demurrer. For the only thing that matters is that he has plunged again into the black quagmire of man’s illusions and composed a rigadoon of death as strange and elemental as his first works.”
Richard Watts Jr., in the New York Post, calls the play “a superb drama of splendid and imposing stature, which is at once powerful, moving, beautiful, eloquent and compassionate.”
Among the influential critics who find the play wanting are Howard Barnes of the Herald Tribune, Louis Kronenberger of PM, and John Mason Brown of the Saturday Review of Literature—who scolded O’Neill for “having said at least twice everything that could have been better stated by being suggested.”
O’Neill is disappointed by the overall critical reception, but unshaken in his own high opinion of his play; and—if he really means what he says to an interviewer for Time two weeks after the opening—he is far from despondent:
“I’m happier now than I’ve ever been. I couldn’t ever be negative about life. On that score, you’ve got to decide Yes or No. And I’ll always say Yes. Yes, I’m happy.” It’s a statement that must have jolted Carlotta—which might have been his intention.
The magazine follows up on this uncharacteristically ebullient comment by disparaging O’Neill as “a master craftsman of the theater,” but not “a great dramatist.” It smugly concludes that although O’Neill “does not seem to be a man of great, searching or original intelligence,” he “remains the greatest master of theater the U.S. has ever produced.”
Many other publications, both in the United States and abroad, choose the production of Iceman as a jumping-off point to review the body of O’Neill’s work; a surprising number have an even testier viewpoint than Time. As a result, O’Neill’s stature during the next few years will undergo a steady decline, and the consistent sniping of small but shrill voices—the voices of “the megaphone men,” as O’Neill derides them—will help to undermine his already ragged spiritual and mental health.
Dudley Nichols commiserates with his friend about the mixed reviews. And ten years later, when the play is posthumously revived as a smash hit off-Broadway, Nichols speaks for O’Neill, suggesting the reasons for those earlier, disparaging notices.
Writing to a friend, Nichols points out that even though all the reviewers complained of the play’s length, they were held by it to its end. “What is really at fault is ourselves,” says Nichols:
I use the phrase which Gene used in telling me, years ago, why he was reluctant to have the play produced.
He said we have been conditioned by radio, TV, the movies, advertising, capsule news and a nervous brevity in everything we do, to a point where we have lost the power of sustained attention, which full-bodied works of art demand.
Unless something moves and jerks, we
soon turn away from it. If it doesn’t chatter or talk like a machine gun, we don’t listen for long. [Walter] Winchell knows this perfectly—he adopted a style which can hold anyone’s attention for fifteen minutes and make what he says sound important no matter how trivial it may be. Winchell is a master of the modern style. He is its arch-creator.
Nichols cites Joshua Logan as an example of a Broadway writer-director who adopts this style for the theater; he and his imitators “make things happen for the eye all the time, no matter whether the play is saying anything or not. Now, a trivial play can be all movement, but a great play cannot. . . .
“The truth is, about The Iceman Cometh, all kinds of things are happening all the time, but you have to listen and watch, and you hear repetition because that is the way O’Neill planned it, so that you cannot miss his meaning, and the emotions generated by his drama.”
Soon after the opening, O’Neill answers a letter from Tennessee Williams, who has written in praise of the play. O’Neill, blatantly contradicting his claim in Time that he is “happier now” than he’s ever been, tells Williams his letter has come just when he needs it, as he always feels a sense of “let-down” after an opening.
Three years after O’Neill’s death, recalling the exchange of correspondence, Williams maintained he’d been troubled at first by the exorbitant length of The Iceman Cometh, but soon “became aware that its length was indispensable to its power, its fullness of passion.”
In an interview for the Times, Williams said O’Neill was his “hero,” and held forth about how O’Neill had fought the Broadway critics years earlier to accept him on his own terms as a writer of tragedy, pronouncing, “O’Neill gave birth to the American theater and died for it.”
If O’Neill, despite good ticket sales for Iceman, is truly feeling a “let-down,” he conceals it from most of his friends. Indeed, during the next few months, his geniality and social expansiveness will reach a high unprecedented since his marriage.
O’Neill’s attitude toward Carlotta, however, has grown alarmingly cavalier; very much troubled, she anticipates new disasters.
• • •
SOPHUS AND ELINE WINTHER haven’t seen the O’Neills for two years when they eagerly pick up their friendship in New York in November 1946. They are pleased to accept Carlotta’s invitation to the penthouse for an intimate Thanksgiving dinner.
Eline, who has never seen Carlotta less than stylishly dressed and groomed, is shocked by the change in her friend’s appearance. Carlotta has gained a good deal of weight and is wearing a shapeless slate-gray dress “much like that of a very proper housemaid,” noted Eline; and because Carlotta is cooking and serving the meal herself, she has tied an apron around her waist.
Eline is also startled by the change in O’Neill since their last meeting in San Francisco. Although he manages “a smile of friendship” (as she later wrote), his face is haggard and his eyes are “like the eyes of a man who has been looking at death”; when she takes his hand, “his fingers are cold and lifeless.”
While Sophus accompanies O’Neill into his bedroom to leave his hat and coat, Eline follows Carlotta into her own beautifully appointed bedroom.
“Sit down,” Carlotta commands, pointing Eline to a sofa and seating herself opposite on a small Chinese stool in the center of the room. Politely if insincerely, Eline tells Carlotta she is looking well. This prompts an outburst from Carlotta.
Eline doesn’t know, says her hostess, that illness had reduced her to “nothing but skin and bones” by the time she left San Francisco; but since arriving in New York she has steadily been gaining weight.
“Now look at me! Why, do you know, I weigh a hundred and sixty pounds! In San Francisco I was under a hundred and twenty. I can’t wear any of my clothes. I’m enormous. I just don’t care anymore. One of the few pleasures I have left is eating, so I eat what I want and when I want it.” Taken aback, Eline concedes that Carlotta has gained “a good deal,” but insists she looks well and is “as beautiful as ever.”
Eline knows Carlotta well enough to realize she is now onstage and playing a role; it’s plain she has prearranged not only her drab costume, but the setting, as well as Eline’s front-row seat, for her performance—and what a performance it is.
If she looks well, inveighs Carlotta, “it’s a miracle, considering the life I lead. You have no idea how terrible things are.” And, after obtaining Eline’s promise not to tell Sophus, she proceeds to disgorge a horrifying tale.
“Not long ago,” Carlotta begins, “I attempted suicide.” She felt such “utter fatigue” that she swallowed the contents of a tube of Amytal (a barbiturate prescribed as a sedative) that she had brought back with her from Europe and stashed away.
“I remember pouring it into a glass, adding water, and holding it up to the light, admiring the color of the liquid, and then I drank it down. I lay down on my bed, and that would have been the end.” But, she tells Eline, she “didn’t time it right.” O’Neill, who had been out, came home for dinner and found her unconscious; he phoned a doctor, who gave her an emetic. “Gradually I began to come back. I was terribly sick. I opened my eyes, saw a blurred image of a nurse. ‘What happened?’ I asked.”
After reassuring Carlotta, the nurse called in O’Neill and left the room. “He came in and he was furious with me,” Carlotta continues. “Would you believe it? I was just barely regaining my consciousness and he began to berate me, saying I had planned this so it would look as though he had murdered me.” Eline, shocked, doesn’t know what to think or how to react; although she knows this is a performance, it’s a pretty gripping one, and it has brought Eline to tears. Finally she asks, “But how could Gene have such an idea about you?”
“How could he?” Carlotta jeers. “Do you know he even suspects me with Freeman? Yes, he thinks I go to Freeman and that we are together in that house out there.” She points out the window to a servant’s annex at the end of the apartment’s terrace, next to the kitchen. “And when I go out on some errand, he thinks I’m meeting men.” Just the other day, says Carlotta, he gave her a “terrible look” as she was about to step into the elevator and—in front of the operator—said, “Well I hope you enjoy yourself.”
She should never have married O’Neill, she rails; she didn’t know “what kind of man he was.” She then tells Eline about the “typist” [Jane Caldwell] in San Francisco whom she’d discovered locked in O’Neill’s bedroom with him. Eline, who has been wondering if she can believe Carlotta’s story of her suicide attempt, does believe her about the typist; Carlotta apparently has forgotten that she mentioned a problem with Caldwell (although not using her name) when Eline and Sophus visited in San Francisco.
Carlotta goes on about the “typist” in greater detail: she hated having “this woman in the house in the first place,” and finally “got so furious,” she confronted her, calling her “a damned whore” and ordering her to get out and never come back. And now, says Carlotta, “he accuses me with Freeman, a servant.”
As Eline recalled, “To hear that Gene was accusing Carlotta of carrying on an affair with this stupid, childlike, good tempered servant of years and years! Fantastic, if true. What was I to think of all this?”
Carlotta then tells Eline that O’Neill, not long since—angry over some imaginary grievance—took her by the shoulders, shook her, and then flung her away from him. Lying in a heap against the wall, Carlotta says, she admonished him, “Next time do that in front of the radiator so that when I fall my head will strike the radiator and I’ll be killed.”
O’Neill responded, says Carlotta, that he could hit her with the belaying pin he kept as a souvenir of his sailing days.
Eline listens spellbound as Carlotta goes on and on—about how O’Neill sometimes comes to her after she has gone to bed and lies down fully dressed beside her on top of the covers and talks of the terrible things he has done in the past, things she doesn’t
want to hear—like how he once hit Agnes so hard her teeth came out. But, she says, he won’t stop talking and she thinks she will go mad.
Engrossed in her monologue, Carlotta seems not to notice it has grown dark in the bedroom as she voices a new complaint. She is worn out by O’Neill’s dependence on her. “Gene doesn’t concern himself with the details of living,” she says.
She has brushed aside the fact that it was precisely by offering to relieve him of those details that she won him away from Agnes; and she has chosen to forget how, for all these years, she has prided herself on having assumed the joyful burden of being his “mother.”
Eline is further dismayed by Carlotta’s depiction of O’Neill as a near-invalid who—with the help of herself, a part-time nurse, and Freeman—requires three hours to ready himself for his day. But when Eline asks if O’Neill’s illness has worsened since he left San Francisco, Carlotta retorts, “He has the constitution of an orangutan,” and adds that “anyone but Gene” who was afflicted this long with Parkinson’s would have been in a wheelchair ages ago. “His doctors all say so. This can go on for years and years.”
If she were to leave him, Carlotta says (which evidently is something she has seriously considered as an alternative to suicide), everyone would think her “a criminal for deserting him in his illness.” Finally, Carlotta confesses that the optimistic plan she voiced on her arrival a year ago, for living at least half of every year in New York, has been angrily vetoed by O’Neill. “He hates it here. He complains all the time that he feels caged up like an animal. I could be contented in New York. But he wants to go away from here, and we quarrel over this constantly.”
Eline is thinking that Sophus and O’Neill, who have been chatting in the living room, must wonder how much longer she and Carlotta will be closeted. But she senses the monologue is drawing to an end.
With a last melodramatic flourish, Carlotta says that she wants Eline to know “all this” in case “anything happens” to her—“For instance if I should die what seems to be an accidental death.” But she warns Eline never to mention any of this in letters to her, “because Gene reads every scrap of mail that comes in”—a statement that would have amused those of her detractors who believed it was she who scrutinized the mail and kept things from him.