by Arthur Gelb
We talked about everything. Once we talked about my name. I had some Irish blood, and my grandmother’s name was Fitzgerald. He said he was sure that the name, Neal, was actually O’Neill, gone north.
After one of our meetings, he decided to take me to Hick’s for a soda. He held his glass in both hands, close to his chin, and kept it there, drinking his soda through a straw. He was pleased he did so well. He had the kind of face I loved—craggy. That day at Hick’s I told him, “I’m twenty-one today.” He said, “I wish I’d known someone like you when I was twenty-one.” He told me that I could do any of his plays I wanted to.
But she never saw O’Neill again after she left for Hollywood.
Carlotta learned of those meetings and was reminded of a humiliating episode six years earlier while living in Tao House, involving her husband’s brief encounter with the even more alluring Ingrid Bergman. He had learned that the twenty-six-year-old Bergman, recently launched on her movie career, was making a lauded stage appearance in a revival of Anna Christie in San Francisco; he sent Carlotta to see it, thinking Bergman might be right for More Stately Mansions and some of the other cycle plays when and if they were completed and produced.
Carlotta thought Bergman promising and invited her to lunch at Tao House. Explaining that O’Neill was not well, and tired easily, Carlotta told Bergman she would signal the beautiful young actress with an emphatic nod of her head when it was time for her to make her excuses and leave.
Bergman was struck by O’Neill’s “stillness” and entranced by his eyes, which she thought were “the most beautiful eyes I have seen in my whole life. They were like wells; you fell into them, and you had a feeling that he looked straight through you.”
Soon after lunch, Carlotta gave Bergman the agreed-upon signal, but Bergman ignored it and accepted O’Neill’s invitation to visit his study, where he showed her his manuscript for More Stately Mansions. He told her about his plans for a repertory company that would produce all the cycle plays over a four-year period and asked Bergman to join it. Bergman couldn’t see herself committing to a four-year stage project when a promising movie career was looming, and declined his offer. He said, “You’re abandoning me,” and she replied, “Maybe later,” and finally, to the relief of a jealously stewing Carlotta, Bergman took her departure.
If Carlotta couldn’t revenge herself on Bergman, she did manage to spite Patricia Neal. In 1952, a year before O’Neill’s death, when a revival of Desire Under the Elms was being planned, Neal was asked by the producer Robert Whitehead to play the role of Abbie Putnam.
“I began arranging my Hollywood schedule so I could come east to do the play,” recalled Neal. “Suddenly I got word from Whitehead that I couldn’t have the role, after all. He told me he had received a wire instructing him to stop negotiations with me. He said that the O’Neills felt I hadn’t developed enough as an actress to play Abbie.” (Carlotta made no objection when José Quintero cast Ingrid Bergman in More Stately Mansions in 1967, fourteen years after O’Neill’s death.)
• • •
IN THE SPRING OF 1947 (after A Moon for the Misbegotten has closed out of town), Carlotta is growing frantic about O’Neill’s overextending himself. In a distraught letter to Sophus Winther, she blames it on their environment. “This town (that I always loved)—I loathe,” she writes.
“God knows where the real New Yorkers are,” she complains, citing the lack of gentility among the people with whom she comes in contact. “Gene is exhausted—his tremor much worse” and “more depressed than usual.”
Abruptly, she confides that she is “trying to get a parcel of land in a very select part of East Hampton,” asserting that “the village is very charming and quiet,” and approvingly describing “all the people” there as “‘bloody reactionaries!’” It will be “quiet, dignified and restful” and will, she hopes, allow them “to die in the manner we prefer—not in the manner of ‘Uncle Joe’ [Stalin]!” She is busy designing what will be their “last home”—a “wee house—but I hope unusual and attractive”; they probably won’t be able to build it for at least a year, she says, as they are having to budget their money.
Carlotta has all but given up her attempts to restrain what she regards as her husband’s unseemly social prancing. Answering a letter from Charles O’Brien Kennedy, the old actor friend of O’Neill’s father, she complains (in a restrained way) of the “over fatigue” that has led to a recent spell of “temperature & tummy upset.”
Evidently, O’Neill has been consulting doctors (doubtless at Carlotta’s urging), all of whom, she tells Kennedy, have warned her against allowing him to do too much; she tries “to guard him against this evil.” But “who can keep an Irishman from stepping over a cliff?”
O’Neill, however, is still riding a wave of youthful optimism. He has never stopped hoping a cure for his illness will be found that will allow him to write again.
“It’s very hard right now, not being able to work,” he tells the writer Hamilton Basso, who is interviewing him during this period for the three-part profile that will be published in The New Yorker the following winter. “I want to get going again. Once I get over this thing—these shakes I have—I feel I can keep rolling right along.”
O’Neill takes time to express his optimism to Carlotta’s daughter when he sends her his wishes for a happy birthday that August; he tells Cynthia he will write soon to her husband, Roy, now that his “ability to write in long hand has improved.”
Still trying to curtail her husband’s social activities, Carlotta takes it upon herself to decline Sherlee Weingarten’s invitation to her wedding to Steve Alexander on November 7; she says she and O’Neill never go to parties, but to soften the refusal she amends that she would like to arrange a wedding dinner for Sherlee at their apartment.
To Sherlee’s surprise, O’Neill does attend her wedding party—without Carlotta. “He was gracious to everyone, and wonderfully alive,” Sherlee recalled. He drinks two glasses of champagne. He listens happily to a pretty actress who (according to Sherlee) lectures him for being too reserved and for not having a political conscience. “She shook a finger at him; he adored it,” says Sherlee. As O’Neill is being dropped off at his apartment house by the newlyweds after the party, he remarks, “I’m going to catch hell for this.” (The marriage lasted fewer than three years; after divorcing Alexander, Sherlee married Robert Lantz, a prominent literary agent, in 1950.)
O’Neill apparently relishes his little fling and is rather pleased to have piqued Carlotta, for soon after the party, he gleefully tells his old Princeton classmate Richard Weeks of his escapade and of Carlotta’s disapproval.
Carlotta gives the promised wedding dinner for Sherlee and her husband a week later, presenting them with their wedding present, a check for $170—the royalties for the Czechoslovakian production of The Iceman Cometh. But Sherlee notices a coolness in Carlotta’s treatment of her. Sherlee later attributes Carlotta’s attitude in part to her having given O’Neill a copy of Djuna Barnes’s sexually provocative novel Nightwood after learning of his friendship with Barnes during his Greenwich Village days. Carlotta, the next time she sees Sherlee, expresses her disapproval of the book and of Sherlee’s interest in it.
To such transgressions as his meetings with Patricia Neal and his having gone alone to Sherlee’s wedding party, O’Neill now adds another solo social engagement. On December 18, he attends a stag dinner at a West Forty-fifth Street restaurant to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of Robert Edmond Jones. He makes the effort to speak in tribute to Jones, painstakingly signs the souvenir programs of the other twenty-two guests (among them Arthur Hopkins, Jo Mielziner, Lee Simonson, Walter Huston, and John Mason Brown), and sits for a group photograph for which he produces a cheerful grin.
Soon after, however, he grows remorseful about upsetting his wife. His birthday message to her on December 28 is abject. Asking her please not to “sneer,” he a
ssures her, once again, of his love for and need of her—a truth, he says, which can support them in their old age against “the sneers of the world.”
“I do not offer you anything but my love, my heartbreak, my need of your love—and my apology that I should have forgotten your card at Christmas,” he writes. “I paid for that in tears. I love you, Carlotta, as I have loved you, as I always will!” Carlotta chooses to disbelieve him.
• • •
AT THE END OF 1947, Carlotta has resumed keeping a diary, but it is a haphazard one; some of its pages are blank, the writing at times is incoherent and at other times illegible. On December 29, she writes: “No Christmas or birthday presents for me—but he gets all the suggests [sic] I get for him. It is like living in a mad house!”
She describes New Year’s Eve as “ghastly!” and on January 2, she notes O’Neill is “in a fog—and loathes me”; he is drinking too much Dubonnet, she writes, and she is terrified it will lead once again to rampant drunkenness.
• • •
ON THE EVENING of January 16, O’Neill, Carlotta, and Saxe Commins are having after-dinner coffee in the penthouse when Carlotta answers the phone, hears the name of the caller, and angrily thrusts the instrument at O’Neill.
The caller is Eleanor Fitzgerald, known as “Fitzi” by her colleagues from the long-ago days when she was the nurturing executive manager of the struggling Playwrights’ Theatre. O’Neill has lost touch with his old friend, as he has with most of the Provincetown Players. Fitzi tells O’Neill she is in the emergency room at Mount Sinai Hospital with severe abdominal pains; her doctor wants to admit her to the hospital for tests, but she doesn’t have the hundred dollars required as a deposit on a room. She is calling O’Neill in desperation to ask for a loan.
Carlotta grows more and more enraged as she listens to O’Neill’s assurances to Fitzi that he will send her a check immediately for the hundred dollars, and asks if she is sure that will be enough. Hanging up and trying to ignore Carlotta’s rage, O’Neill begins to reminisce with Commins about Fitzi and the Greenwich Village days. But Carlotta will not be ignored.
“All of Gene’s former friends were roundly cursed [by Carlotta], blamed for his illness and branded as parasites and hangers on,” said Commins, recalling that “Fitzi, particularly, was singled out as the worst miscreant, as a bum and scrounger who was interested only in preying on Gene.” O’Neill’s efforts to placate his wife have no effect, said Commins, and, embarrassed to be a witness to their quarrel, he excuses himself and goes home.
In her diary, Carlotta confirms that she and O’Neill had a quarrel on January 16; but, without mentioning its cause, she blames it on O’Neill. “It is obvious,” writes Carlotta, “he is working up one of those black rages.” The quarrel continues the next day; its “sadistic climax” is that he hurts her “badly.”
The following day, O’Neill calls Commins to tell him, “My frau has flown the coop,” and asks him to come to the penthouse. It is spookily reminiscent of the episode twenty years earlier in the Shanghai Hotel when Carlotta packed her things to escape a drunken O’Neill after he knocked her down. However, in Commins’s version of the actual events leading to Carlotta’s current departure, she is cast less as victim than as co-instigator. (It was not until years after Carlotta’s death that Commins dared to set down his version.)
When he arrives at the penthouse, said Commins, O’Neill gives him an account of what happened after he left the previous evening. Carlotta, says O’Neill, renewed her harangue against his friends and accused him of “weakness and cowardice” in tolerating them.
O’Neill, determined not to reply to any of Carlotta’s accusations, maintained a stoical silence that further infuriated her; she rushed into the bedroom and “lifted the glass that covered his dressing table over her head and crashed it to the floor where it broke into hundreds of splinters.”
“Underneath this glass,” Commins continued, “Gene had kept the only picture he had of his mother and himself as a baby. Carlotta, now at the summit of her frenzy, snatched the picture and tore it into bits, crying, ‘Your mother was a whore!’
“This was the last straw,” said Commins. With obvious reluctance, Commins went on to reveal that his gentle-mannered friend slapped Carlotta’s face. She responded by screaming “maniacally” and, after hurriedly packing a bag, “made a melodramatic exit, swearing she would never return.”
For the moment, at least, Carlotta means it. After checking into a hotel, she consults her lawyer, Melville Cane, and then sets about removing her clothes and some of her other possessions from the penthouse.
O’Neill somehow discovers where Carlotta is staying and, on January 19, writes her an anguished note. “Darling: For the love of God, forgive and come back. You are all I have in life. I am sick and I will surely die without you. You do not want to murder me, I know, and a curse will be on you for your remaining days. I love you and I will! Please, Darling!”
Carlotta does not respond to O’Neill’s plea. But on January 22, she telephones O’Neill’s doctor, George Draper (who had helped O’Neill dry out twelve years earlier), telling him her husband has begun to drink again, and asking his help in “getting Gene into a sanatorium.”
Commins, concerned about O’Neill living alone in the penthouse, urges him to invite a friend to stay during Carlotta’s absence, and O’Neill calls on Walter Casey. A boyhood friend, Casey had worked on the New London Telegraph with O’Neill and hero-worshipped him; now living in New York as a freelance writer, he is only too happy to move in with O’Neill.
What Commins doesn’t know is that Casey is an alcoholic; nor is Commins aware of O’Neill’s several dives back into drink since his boastful “conquest” of his own alcoholism in 1926—invariably in conjunction with a hard-drinking male companion; Walter Casey is following in the footsteps of Louis Kantor (in France), Alfred Batson (in Shanghai), and George Boll (in Georgia).
O’Neill conceals his drinking from Commins, who checks regularly on his welfare. Commins spends the evening of January 27 at the penthouse drinking coffee with O’Neill and Casey until 1:00 a.m.; as soon as Commins leaves, they switch to whiskey and stay up drinking until 3:00, when Casey takes several sleeping pills and they both retire.
An hour later, O’Neill trips on his way to the bathroom. He feels a sharp pain in his arm, but isn’t aware how badly he is injured until he tries to lift himself up.
“You don’t realize,” he later tells Sherlee Weingarten, “that when you lose the use of an arm, you lose your equilibrium. I couldn’t coordinate—couldn’t get to my feet.”
He shouts for Casey, but Casey, in a deep sleep, doesn’t hear him. He kicks his feet against the floor, hoping to arouse the tenants below, but that brings no response. “It was a terrifying experience,” as he later tells Sherlee. “I lost all track of time. I felt as though I was alone, in a nightmare.”
Casey, waking at about five in the morning on January 28, finds O’Neill lying on the floor in a semi-stupor. Casey is appalled and remorseful over the drinking and the sleeping pills. He immediately notifies Commins and then telephones Dr. Draper, who sends a younger associate, Dr. Shirley Fisk, to the penthouse; Dr. Fisk orders O’Neill into Doctors Hospital.
In his thirties, Dr. Fisk is lanky and blond and his blue eyes are good-naturedly appraising behind horn-rimmed glasses. Like every doctor who treats O’Neill, he is immediately charmed by him, as is Dr. Robert Lee Patterson, the orthopedist Fisk calls in. “O’Neill was a damn good patient,” recalls Dr. Patterson. A congenial man, with more than a trace of Southern drawl, Patterson (who had once been Franklin Roosevelt’s doctor) is some years older than Fisk. “O’Neill would always greet me with a little smile, and say, ‘Nice to see you, Doctor,’” Patterson recalled.
O’Neill’s X-rays show that the fracture is severe, and Patterson realizes he must be in considerable pain, but O’Neill never complains and i
t is difficult for the doctor to estimate what sedatives to prescribe.
“We didn’t have his arm in a cast. It was in a sling with a circular bandage around the chest wall. I always saw him when he was propped up in a semi-sitting position—we kept him cranked up like that because it made it easier for the fracture to heal. He always managed a smile at the end of our meeting, even when he was uncomfortable.”
Evidently, O’Neill’s primary doctor, George Draper, knew where to reach Carlotta, for she hurries to the hospital on the day O’Neill is admitted. She finds him ensconced in a corner room on the tenth floor, gazing from his bedside window at the passing boats on the East River. “He seems touched & glad ‘mama’ has come back,” Carlotta writes in her diary on January 28.
His hospitalization, which will last until late April, will subsequently be testified to by his doctors and his friends, often minutely and sometimes conflictingly. Carlotta herself left an episodic, frequently muddled, and at times deliberately distorted account of those twelve weeks.
According to her diary, Carlotta enjoys amicable visits with O’Neill on each of the first five days of his hospitalization; but on February 2, she finds him depressed: “We go over same old thing & tells me ‘if you can’t come here with a smile, forgiving all, & thinking only of our future, I don’t want to see you at all.’ Naturally, I go!” No longer amicably inclined, she sobs in her diary that she has “wasted twenty years” on O’Neill, asking herself, “Where can I take up life at 60?”
Meanwhile, she writes, she has a visit with Dr. Fisk, who has asked to see her.
According to Fisk, it was Carlotta who approached him. “As soon as Carlotta found out I was taking care of Gene she got in touch with me. She’d call me and tell me how he used to beat her up; my own private feeling is that she was the more powerful, and if anyone did the beating, she was the one who did it.