By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  As Eline has come to know, Carlotta frequently modifies the actual facts of her life, sometimes heightening, but more often hedging. Although she lacked the essential talent required for a successful stage career, she has many of the attributes of a splendid actress and is in her element assuming a variety of personae in her own offstage drama; her life—at least in the opinion of her detractors—is an endlessly spun-out impersonation. And in truth, her Thanksgiving Day monologue is as operatic as the endless aria of a dying Brunhilde.

  It’s not unreasonable to assume that if she could, for years, sustain her lie to O’Neill about her relationship with Speyer, she could lie to him about a brief encounter or two with Freeman. (It should be noted that Sophus Winther, who is well aware of Carlotta’s intense sexuality, and who must have guessed that O’Neill is no longer functioning vigorously, if at all, suspects that Carlotta did sleep with Freeman.)

  O’Neill, himself hardly a model of sexual probity, has no claim to a wife with an unsullied past or a chaste present. Despite the sanctimonious posturing of Days Without End, the match they made was essentially cynical: her beauty, her private income, her housekeeping skills—in exchange for his artistic prestige and undoubted personal charm (which he could switch on and off).

  There is, however, no doubt that Carlotta is miserable, that she blames her misery on O’Neill, and that the two regard each other with enmity.

  Nor is there any doubt that O’Neill is tormenting himself over his inability to write; his new role as boulevardier is a flimsy cover-up for his suffering. Carlotta has acknowledged from the beginning that writing is O’Neill’s life, and she has always dreaded what might happen if he couldn’t write.

  What they are actually fighting about can only be surmised: clearly she resents the enthusiasm with which he is responding to the attention of flirtatious young actresses; but it’s obvious she also is terrified by the way he is shutting her out of his daily life.

  Perhaps, as she has told Eline Winther, she genuinely believes O’Neill wishes her dead (although it’s hard to believe he’s actually plotting to murder her). And if O’Neill truly demands all that time and effort to get him on his feet every day, who can blame Carlotta for resenting his then going off to disport himself without her?

  There is also the difficulty of gauging how much the behavior of either O’Neill or Carlotta is influenced by the variety of sedating and/or stimulating medications they are each taking. (All of their doctors appear to have been oblivious to any such side effects.)

  All the while that Carlotta is performing “The Imperiled Wife” for Eline, O’Neill and Sophus have been engaged in their own conversation. Carlotta, now slipping without apparent effort into the character of hostess, guides Eline into the living room to join their husbands.

  She serves hors d’oeuvres and produces a bottle of sherry, filling four glasses. It seems O’Neill is drinking wine again, and that Carlotta—doubtless bullied by him—is making no effort to discourage him; perhaps she is even encouraging him, for she takes no notice when he also drinks the champagne she serves with dessert, and the crème de menthe she pours after dinner.

  The dinner conversation has been bland. O’Neill has thrown off his earlier gloom, and he and Sophus recite poetry. O’Neill tells Sophus he has been unable to write and that he hates living in New York. Significant looks are exchanged from time to time between Carlotta and O’Neill, but there is no sign of the turmoil Carlotta has earlier depicted.

  O’Neill gives Sophus the scripts of A Moon for the Misbegotten and A Touch of the Poet and, well into late evening, the Winthers take their leave. Eline can’t wait to convey to her husband every word of the confidential story Carlotta has confided.

  Some time later, O’Neill and Carlotta accept an invitation to dine with Russel Crouse and his wife, Anna, at their home, and to meet the Irving Berlins. Carlotta calls Crouse before the evening of their date to say she and O’Neill have decided to come after dinner; she explains O’Neill is uncomfortable dining with strangers, as he is having difficulty with his tremor and she has to cut his food for him. Crouse says no, please come, he will ask the Berlins to come after dinner.

  The Berlins arrive at nine, themselves wary of the meeting. “I found out later they’d told their chauffeur to wait, thinking they’d stay for a short time,” Crouse remembered. Berlin starts to play some of his songs on the piano, and before long, O’Neill is standing next to him, croaking along with the tunes. Berlin goes on to other popular songs after he’s exhausted his own. At 11:30, the Howard Lindsays and the Bennett Cerfs arrive, having been summoned by Crouse when he sees how well things are going. The O’Neills stay until two o’clock.

  “Carlotta, who had been a little stiff at first, had fun too, after a while,” Crouse recalled. “And Gene had the time of his life. Carlotta told me later that Gene had been so stimulated he had not been able to sleep for hours after he got home.” She writes Crouse a note thanking him for “making Gene so happy.” Like many an embattled couple before them, they have their moments of peaceful remission; but they are moments only.

  Inspired by the success of Crouse’s Irving Berlin evening, Cerf invites the O’Neills to his home for a Burl Ives evening. Ives sings after dinner and O’Neill joins him in some sea chanteys.

  “The songs got dirtier and dirtier,” recalls Cerf, “and Carlotta finally went home by herself. I took Gene home at 3 a.m.” Cerf does not receive a “thank-you” note from Carlotta, who has always been cool to him.

  “Burl Ives is all right for five or six songs,” Carlotta—assuming her pose as the grande dame—later writes to Sophus Winther, who has heard about the evening. “But, as he drank straight brandy along with his singing—& would continue singing—it got to be blurry & a bore after a bit! His ‘off the record’ songs are all right for old gentlemen—but for a mixed party of so-called respectable folk—a bit misplaced & embarrassing! . . . personally, I am not old enough, nor young enough, to be excited by ribald songs.”

  Long buried is the mischievous, ribald Carlotta who, in her early thirties, performed in The Hairy Ape. “We used to play jokes backstage on Wolheim and the other men in the cast,” recalls James Light who, as stage manager, had moved with the production when it transferred from the Provincetown Playhouse to Broadway. One day, before a matinee, Carlotta and Light concocted a scheme to “get the boys riled up,” in Light’s phrase. According to Light, Carlotta volunteered, “Let’s pretend we’re having sexual intercourse.”

  As Light tells it: “We left the door of her dressing room ajar and Carlotta, who was dressed for her entrance in her white gown, sat down in one corner and I sat in another and we began improvising some impassioned and largely inarticulate dialogue—mostly ‘Ahs’ and grunts—and it wasn’t long before heads began popping in at the door. “There we were, at opposite ends of the room, Carlotta sedately reading a book, and my face buried in a newspaper.”

  Small wonder Light was among the earliest of O’Neill’s old cronies to be shut out of their lives by Carlotta. She would have liked to banish Bennett Cerf as well; like Light, he had known Carlotta from the days of her uninhibited love affair with Ralph Barton.

  But the best she could manage, when Cerf came to Sea Island, hoping to add O’Neill to his Random House roster, was to pretend not to know him; eager as Cerf was to land O’Neill, he didn’t make an issue of Carlotta’s assumed amnesia. (On the other hand, Carl Van Vechten, who knew Carlotta’s ribald side better than anyone, remained a trusted confidant to the end of her life—and she would never have believed he would ultimately betray her in his diary.)

  On December 5, Crouse invites the O’Neills to accompany him to a performance of Irving Berlin’s musical Annie Get Your Gun. After some hesitation, they accept. Carlotta tells Crouse she is afraid O’Neill will be swamped by acquaintances and autograph hunters and makes him promise not to let anyone know they are going.

  They bo
th enjoy the show and afterward, Crouse takes them backstage to meet the star, Ethel Merman. They spend about an hour in her dressing room.

  According to Crouse, Merman and O’Neill get on very well. “Chorus kids keep coming in for autographs and Gene has a wonderful time,” says Crouse.

  Carlotta, however, is not enjoying her husband’s social blossoming. She clearly resents that O’Neill, during his recent months in New York, has dispelled the aura of reclusiveness Carlotta has helped him nurture over the years; while she claims to be tired of taking care of him, she is also increasingly jealous of his ability to roam free of her care.

  O’Neill seems equally conflicted. Attempting to make amends at year’s end, he inscribes a hard cover copy of The Iceman Cometh to Carlotta:

  Though I have seemed ungrateful and unaware and lost at times, that was only the surface irritation. But deep in my heart I have never forgotten all you have meant to me and been to me, have loved you as much and needed you.

  I am sorry for the unhappiness I have caused you. How unhappy it has made me, you have seen and know.

  Let us forget and forgive, Darling, as now for a time we have forgotten and forgiven. We have love still, Sweetheart. We [have] the chance of a new life! I love you!

  Forgetting and forgiving, forgiving and forgetting. It was the tragicomic theme for the final act of the O’Neills’ self-propelled drama; helplessly, they would forget and forgive and forget again, spinning in their deadly dance toward the destruction of their marriage.

  48

  A Moon for the Misbegotten, which the Theatre Guild put into rehearsal early in 1947, becomes a playwright’s and producer’s nightmare.

  The major casting headache is the outsized twenty-eight-year-old Josie Hogan. It isn’t easy to find an experienced and charismatic young actress who can convey (while looking uncharismatically overfed) the supernatural earth-motherliness that O’Neill demands. And he insists that the actress who plays Josie must be of Irish descent, as must also be the male lead, Jamie Tyrone, and the actor who plays Josie’s father, Phil Hogan. “We just killed ourselves trying to find Irish actors,” Langner later recalled.

  Mary Welch, who has recently returned to New York from a road tour and who is, in her words, “one hundred per cent Irish from County Cork,” reads for the role but is told she looks “too normal”; O’Neill wants someone who is at least fifty pounds heavier.

  After weeks of stuffing herself with potatoes, bananas, and rich desserts, the twenty-four-year-old actress auditions again. This time O’Neill pronounces her “emotional quality” just right and says he’s confident she’ll continue to gain weight.

  “I signed the contract to play Josie,” remembered Mary Welch, “with the added, unusual clause, ‘The artist agrees to gain the necessary weight required for the role.’” After Barry Fitzgerald turns down the role of Josie’s father, J. M. Kerrigan is selected; James Dunn, an established film star, is cast as Jamie Tyrone, and Arthur Shields, with long experience playing Irish roles onstage and in film, is engaged to direct.

  At the first rehearsal, O’Neill uncharacteristically chooses to tell the cast of his agony when writing the play and, one by one, actors and director dissolve into tears of empathy, O’Neill weeping along with them. But it isn’t long before O’Neill finds fault with the way his play is shaping up. He voices his displeasure to Lawrence Langner.

  “Gene was worried about James Dunn,” said Langner, who had taken O’Neill to see the actor in the movie A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. O’Neill had approved Dunn as being “just right for James Tyrone.”

  But during rehearsals, according to Langner, O’Neill “kept complaining that Dunn wasn’t playing the role with enough gentlemanliness.” O’Neill insisted that his brother, Jamie, had been “a gentleman.”

  Langner’s response was that the real Jamie “may very well have been a gentleman,” but the way O’Neill had written the character of James Tyrone, “that quality didn’t exactly come across.” Dunn, Langner asserted, was “playing the role as written.”

  O’Neill couldn’t accept this, said Langner, adding, “I felt that [Gene] had idealized his brother and would never be able to accept any actor in the part.”

  Dunn’s performance is not O’Neill’s only problem. During one rehearsal, he tells his cast they are playing the tragedy of the play too soon; they should be playing almost for farce in the first act, he says, and develop into tragic stature in the fourth.

  • • •

  WITH BAD GRACE, O’Neill agrees to the Guild’s ill-considered plan for a pre-Broadway tour of several Midwestern cities, to begin on February 20, 1947, at the Hartman Theatre in Columbus, Ohio; but after attending the final dress rehearsal in New York, he refuses to accompany the cast on its tour.

  Predictably, A Moon for the Misbegotten meets with the same sort of puerile reaction once drawn by All God’s Chillun Got Wings and Desire Under the Elms. When, after receiving mixed notices in its earlier stops, the play opens in Detroit on March 10, it is scorned by the local press and greeted with indignation by the chamber of commerce, whose secretary declares himself shocked by reports of “the smut in it.” On the second night, it is ordered closed by the police.

  “It isn’t just a matter of profanity,” declares Police Censor Charles Snyder. “The whole theme is obscene. It is a slander on American motherhood. The play will have to be rewritten before I will let it go on.”

  Theresa Helburn and Armina Marshall, who are overseeing the play’s tour, are summoned to meet with a member of the censor’s staff. “One of the objections he made,” recalled Marshall, “was that the word ‘mother’ was used in the same sentence with the word ‘prostitute.’ He mentioned other words which, he said, should not be used on the stage.”

  “Now, mind you,” the censor warns, “the actor can go ahead and say the sentence right up to the obscene word, and then he can make a gesture. But he cannot use the word.”

  Marshall retorts, “You’ve allowed The Maid of the Ozarks to play here in Detroit and yet you will not allow a play written by Eugene O’Neill, the greatest playwright in America, who won the Nobel Prize?”

  “Lady,” says the censor, “I don’t care what kind of prize he’s won, he can’t put on a dirty show in my town.”

  “This is not a dirty show,” protests Marshall. “This is a great play—which The Maid of the Ozarks is not.”

  “Lady,” he scolds, “when The Maid of the Ozarks came here, it was a very different play. I helped rewrite that play, and we finally let it stay here.” (The play was on tour after having been greeted in New York by the critic for Time as “very likely the most needlessly disgusting play” on Broadway—a play whose “publicity stresses sex, but [whose] long suit is actually scatology—lice, bedbugs, outhouses, and bare, dirty feet planted on the breakfast table . . .”)

  “Well,” responds Marshall, “I’m afraid you’d have your problems cut out for you to rewrite a play by Mr. O’Neill.”

  This visibly disconcerts the censor. “Listen, lady,” he shouts, “I don’t have to sit here and take that from a woman.” At this point, James Dunn intervenes, and eventually the censor agrees to talk things over with him, stipulating he does not want a woman present. After a tedious conference, an agreement is reached: the producers will delete eight words.

  Joe Heidt, who still handles publicity for the Theatre Guild, telephones O’Neill about the deletions. O’Neill laughingly agrees to them.

  • • •

  SAINT LOUIS IS the last stop on the tryout tour for A Moon for the Misbegotten. The Guild wants to recast the play and have another try at it but, according to Langner, “Gene asked us to defer this until he was feeling better and he also asked us to postpone the production of A Touch of the Poet for the same reason.” Shortly before A Moon for the Misbegotten had left for its out-of-town tryout, O’Neill confronted censorship problems with The Iceman Cometh, wh
ich had concluded its Broadway run of 136 performances and was being readied for a road tour.

  In this instance, it was the Boston censor who took umbrage at some of the “unclean” O’Neill dialogue. O’Neill flatly refused to make any of the requested changes, characterizing them as “idiotic.”

  “Boston audiences, I am sure, want plays as written by their authors and produced originally in New York,” O’Neill declared to the press. “They do not want plays weakened and made silly by an ignorant and stupid censorship which knows and cares nothing about drama. This is the sort of censorship I experienced years ago with Strange Interlude, which was barred from Boston and forced to play in Quincy so Bostonians could see it.” In support of O’Neill’s blast, the Guild rerouted the play to Baltimore.

  • • •

  WHILE O’NEILL’S HEALTH continues shaky during the winter and early spring of 1947, his thirst for social contacts remains unslaked. He even manages to have several brief clandestine (if platonic) meetings with Patricia Neal, a young actress who had read for the role of Josie (and whom O’Neill was considering for Sara Melody if and when A Touch of the Poet was to be produced). She has written O’Neill to tell him she liked The Iceman Cometh, and O’Neill has replied, congratulating her on her recent success in Lillian Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest.

  It is soon after receiving Neal’s letter that he decides to pursue the relationship, and she and O’Neill meet several times during the next few months.

  The Theater Guild would call me and ask me to come to their offices to see O’Neill. We would sit and talk in Miss Marshall’s office, usually for about two hours. He’d insist on lighting my cigarettes, even though it might take as much as two minutes.