By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  “I was a young doctor then and got all emotionally involved in the life of the great playwright. I felt he was married to a virago; he looked so benign, he was a warm, understanding human being, he never was temperamental or complained; the nurses all loved him.”

  On one of Carlotta’s visits to Fisk’s office, she makes a derogatory comment about O’Neill, which Fisk counters by insisting O’Neill is a gentleman. “My remark set off a volley of ranting,” said Fisk, “and there were patients waiting outside who heard every word.” He finally quiets her but he knows she will always regard him as a villain. He’s right; she describes him in her diary as “stupid, insensitive, trouble-making.”

  Dr. Fisk is among the many who have seen only O’Neill’s gentle, thoughtful side and who have sympathized with his sorrowful stories of ill treatment by Carlotta. But then, O’Neill has always been a more adept dissembler than his wife; she can be warm and gracious to those she trusts and can simulate charm and generosity to those she needs. But she doesn’t trouble to ingratiate herself with those she regards as nobodies, nor does she check her outspoken antagonism toward those she suspects of bearing her even the slightest ill will.

  Carlotta impulsively resumes her visits to O’Neill’s bedside on February 10, the twentieth anniversary of their elopement. When she arrives with a token gift for him, a nurse hands her roses he has ordered for her, together with a sealed note addressing her as “Darling” and begging her to “let this anniversary of our setting out together not make you think of a flop!”

  Assuring her she has been his “life,” protesting that without her he is “nothing,” he pleads, “Please, Sweetheart, I have been through hell and you have. I could never act again as I have acted. I love you, Darling, Darling! I love you! I love you. I am yours! Don’t leave me!” Carlotta exits the hospital, her head in “a whirl.”

  During a long visit two days later, she and O’Neill agree they will never return to the penthouse, nor will they rent or buy a house; they will live in hotels where they can get prepared meals; they will let Freeman go, for they will need no servants.

  On February 16, Carlotta finds O’Neill feeling sorry for himself. He must always dramatize himself, she storms in her diary, “—weep—miserable—but never remembers fact, truth, or what he has done to me—my loneliness—humiliation, hurt—just because he ‘hated me!!’”

  Ten days later, after speaking on the phone to Walter Casey, as well as to the man she describes in her diary as “that disgusting Palestinian”—her latest euphemistic denigration of Saxe Commins—Carlotta angrily notes, “It is no go—Gene would be all right—but not his horrible friends—I am so weary of all this.” She stays away from the hospital for the next ten days, presumably to make O’Neill long for her; when she does visit on March 1, O’Neill exasperates her by failing to give her a promised check. “I can’t make him out,” she writes.

  The following day, O’Neill sends the check “with a very offhand note.” He acts, she says, “as if he were in a fog like the old days.” A day later, she telephones Dr. Fisk to inquire about O’Neill’s condition; he asks her (so she says) why she doesn’t get a divorce. “The impudence!” she fumes in her diary. “Have had enough of this.” She hastens to instruct Melville Cane to sue for a separation.

  Two days later she has another inexplicable change of heart; she records that she has tried to discuss with O’Neill the possibility of their renting a suite at the Lowell Hotel on Sixty-third Street off Park Avenue when he leaves the hospital.

  “Gene does not seem to know what I am talking about,” complains Carlotta. “Does not hear well or misconstrues. And insists the past must not be mentioned.”

  As a conciliatory gesture, she presents him with an expensive tie; it’s no easier to gauge cause and effect in the unwritten drama unreeling in O’Neill’s mind than it is to track Carlotta’s twists and turns. From March 8 onward, Carlotta visits O’Neill almost daily, sends him flowers, and brings him cakes—at least that is what she sets down in her diary.

  O’Neill’s room at Doctors Hospital has begun to hum with the intrigue of a sixteenth-century royal palace. The courtiers are divided between those who want O’Neill to separate from Carlotta, and those who realize he needs her and will never leave her (if only she will take him back).

  Saxe Commins, in Carlotta’s view, is a crafty Cromwell who wishes to control her husband’s literary legacy, although poor Commins wants only to save his friend’s life; he sincerely believes Carlotta is a witch who has placed a spell on O’Neill and is waiting for him to wither away.

  Long after Carlotta’s death, Saxe described an event that for him substantiates his opinion of her “cruelty and vindictiveness.” He explained, “It was not the first time that I had been made privy to domestic scenes of spite and violence on one side and a tormented meekness on the part of the other.” Evidently, Commins has never witnessed any of O’Neill’s equally cruel and vindictive onslaughts against Carlotta.

  In the episode he described, Commins is a dinner guest at the O’Neills’ suite in the Barclay (before they moved into the Fifth Avenue penthouse). He is aware that Carlotta is angry at O’Neill and that O’Neill is apprehensive. It seems that a large bundle of manuscript material, including finished and unfinished playscripts, has gone missing; it is a bundle that, earlier in the day, O’Neill ascertained was safely stored in the trunk where he kept it.

  He and Carlotta have fruitlessly searched everywhere in the suite and O’Neill is devastated. Carlotta, said Commins, was taunting O’Neill with having lost his memory, growing senile, and not knowing “what he was doing most of the time.” Commins suggests a second search and, after opening every closet and drawer in the suite, Saxe concedes the bundle has “disappeared without a trace.”

  Two days later, says Commins, when he and O’Neill are alone for a moment, O’Neill tells him the manuscripts have been found, and begs him to “forget the entire unhappy episode.” Carlotta, he explains, had taken them out of the apartment and hidden them, to “punish him for reasons totally obscure to him.”

  • • •

  O’NEILL PUTS ON different faces for different visitors to his hospital bedside. To some, he seems in good spirits. He dictates upbeat notes to friends that are transcribed by Sherlee Weingarten, who has offered her services as secretary. “I’d love to see you anytime in the evening beginning next week,” he writes to Russel Crouse on February 3. “By then I ought to be able to cook up a smile of welcome or sing to you faintly, ‘Oh, Come and Be Sweet to Me, Kid.’” He also writes to Carl Van Vechten and his wife, Fania Marinoff, thanking them for their flowers and asking them to visit.

  He is amused and cheered by a visit from George Jean Nathan and Eddie Dowling, who (in Dowling’s words) round up “three lovely little girls,” and “burst in on him.” The “girls” are young actresses who are flattered to be at the bedside of the great dramatist. “O’Neill beamed,” recalled Dowling. “We had a lovely visit.”

  Some of O’Neill’s friends interpret his cheerful frame of mind as evidence that he is resigned to a permanent break with Carlotta; those who believe she has been holding him on too tight a rein are ready to congratulate themselves on his timely escape. Among them, according to Carlotta herself, is Eugene Jr.; it’s unclear how she knows this, but she later maintains that Eugene called his father at the hospital “and told him to leave the old Tory and come and live with him.”

  Others are convinced the separation is temporary. “It was Tristan and Isolde all the time,” Crouse said, adding that whenever Carlotta got angry with O’Neill, she would go out and buy a hat; sometime during this period she shows off her impressive millinery collection to Anna Crouse.

  (The director José Quintero once fondly recalled a mystical encounter with Carlotta’s hats, to which he attributed her granting him permission to revive The Iceman Cometh. When he visited her hotel suite, she astonished him by takin
g his hand and guiding him to her bedroom, where she had laid out several boxes.

  “I am going to show you four hats,” she said, taking the first one from its box and settling it on her head. Quintero, intuiting this was some sort of test and too terrified to dissemble, said a soft but brief “No.” Carlotta replaced the hat and modeled a second and a third, to both of which Quintero whispered, “No.” Finally, according to Quintero, “she brought out, like a bird from its nest, the last hat and quickly and expertly placed it on her head, then turned to look at me. ‘That one,’ I said.” Carlotta’s response was to grant him, on the spot, the rights he sought, explaining the hat he chose was the one she wore to bury her husband.)

  The Crouses were amused by Carlotta’s hat fetish, but Saxe Commins might have argued that no hat could conceal the serpentine locks of a Medusa. Carlotta, during the prolonged period of O’Neill’s hospitalization, mentions fittings at Mainbocher, in addition to shopping for shoes as well as hats, nor does she deprive herself of regular visits to her hairdresser and manicurist.

  “We knew Gene couldn’t live without Carlotta,” Fania Marinoff said. “A great many people thought he could, but Carl and I knew they needed each other, and would always go back together.”

  Carlotta, who has begun packing up the penthouse prior to subletting, makes a routine visit to O’Neill’s hospital room on March 15, and is thrown off balance when O’Neill switches from his “quiet mood” to a burst of anger. He shouts at her for her refusal to “forget the past,” and makes a rush at her. In a panic, Carlotta rings for the nurse. “She lets me out of room—Gene runs down the hall after me! It is ghastly.”

  While she doesn’t explain what actually provoked O’Neill’s outburst, there is a likely reason for his rancor: he has recently learned (as he has told Sherlee Weingarten and several others) that Carlotta was Speyer’s mistress and that it is Speyer’s money she’s been living on (and helping O’Neill to live on). The matter surfaced when Carlotta’s lawyer, apprised her that Speyer’s heirs were contemplating a suit to void Carlotta’s trust fund. To her huge relief, the relatives decided for the sake of Speyer’s reputation not to sue; but O’Neill’s lawyer has probably got wind of the proceedings and reported to O’Neill.

  In the days following, Carlotta grows more and more incoherent. In her diary on March 26, she scribbles that her doctor has given her “heavier sedative & other remedies.” On March 27, the day before Easter, she writes, “My mind goes round and round. How will it all end?”

  According to Carlotta, she becomes Dr. Patterson’s patient on March 27, for treatment of an arthritic toe, but according to Patterson’s records, she comes to him for treatment of “an acute back pain”—no mention of a toe. Back pain is one among Carlotta’s many ailments; she is seeing other doctors at this time and she could have been confused by drugs and stress. Patterson, for his part, appears to have simply misremembered certain details when interviewed some years later. Between the two, it’s possible to reconstruct only a fuzzy picture of the next several weeks.

  Carlotta seems to have been admitted to Doctors Hospital on April 2. Patterson’s recollection is that O’Neill, on the tenth floor, is unaware of Carlotta’s presence on the floor below, and that he does not enlighten him. “I’d listen to her side of the story, and then take the stairs up to the tenth floor and listen to O’Neill’s side. I talked to both of them about being understanding.” Carlotta leaves the hospital on April 5.

  On that same day, she records that her lawyer and O’Neill’s are to meet “tomorrow.” She also mentions for the first time that “Master has detectives watching me” and claims that they follow her when she goes out. “Nervous, detectives still there,” she writes on April 8, adding that the meeting between Cane and Aronberg has been postponed.

  On April 9, O’Neill writes a jittery note to Melville Cane, explaining that Carlotta “has forbidden any direct communication with her” and “would only tear up” any note from him. “Nevertheless,” he writes, “will you tell her from me that I love her and always will.” He continues: “It is disgraceful, that a marriage rightly estimated for fifteen years to be a model of mutual respect, and help, and love, should end up in bitter recrimination over nothing, suspicion over less, and loss of temper by two sick people.”

  After excusing himself for being “emotional,” he ends, “In a case like this, I don’t see how anyone ever understands any of the true issues.”

  On the same day, Freeman phones Carlotta to say good-bye. The relationship that she and O’Neill have shared with the man they once regarded as a son has finally shattered.

  “Poor soul, he is as baffled as I am,” writes Carlotta, “his faithfulness to the Master is thrown into gutter [together] with my 20 yrs service & love & loyalty.” In fact, Freeman has found that he hates New York and is only too happy to return to California.

  None of their friends can pinpoint precisely when or how Carlotta and O’Neill become reconciled—and surely none would venture a bet on how long that reconciliation will endure. But by mid-April, even though O’Neill’s arm is not completely healed, he is deemed sufficiently fit to continue treatment as an outpatient.

  He and Carlotta have agreed to move to Boston. They have decided that they must, after all, have a real home, and they will live in a hotel only temporarily while they search for a small house in the near suburbs. There they can reside in semi-seclusion away from New York and yet be close to what Dr. Patterson considers “the tops in orthopedic circles.”

  A week before leaving New York with O’Neill for Boston, Carlotta telephones Walter Casey, foolishly hoping to placate as well as mislead him. She offers Casey her hypocritical thanks for his loyalty to O’Neill and tells him (falsely) that together they are going to enter the Silver Hill psychiatric and rehabilitation center in New Canaan, Connecticut. Instead of voicing his approval, Casey (as she notes in her diary) “says the most horrible things to me—that I’m trying to kill or drive Gene mad! He and Gene’s friends are watching me to turn me in! The shock to my already sick body and nerves almost ends me.”

  • • •

  ON THE EVE of O’Neill’s departure on April 19, Dr. Patterson admonishes him jocularly: “I want to receive a letter from you in your own hand after you arrive in Boston.”

  “I can’t do it” is O’Neill’s rueful response.

  “You go to your desk and sit down,” instructs Patterson, “and you’ll hear a voice.” The voice would be Patterson’s and it would say, “Quit shaking and write me.”

  A few weeks later, Patterson receives a letter from Boston on Ritz-Carlton stationery; it is written shakily in O’Neill’s own hand. “Just a few inadequate words of gratitude: that my arm was saved, that I had for a while the privilege of knowing as fine a man as you—and lastly that through your influence Mrs. O’Neill and I are together again with hope and love and a future!”

  49

  The sentiments of love and hope that O’Neill relayed to Dr. Patterson in May have a somewhat delusional ring. It’s hard to believe he foresees any such rosy future. True, he is desperately trying to convince himself that his tremor has actually begun to abate and that he will miraculously recover the manual strength to transpose his ideas to paper.

  Even if that happens, though, both he and Carlotta know (much as they may deny it) that this time they have wounded each other too poisonously to ever again be trustful lovers. Now, as hero and heroine of their own self-willed tragedy, they see no choice but to ad-lib their way through the baleful final scenes of their epic marriage. O’Neill writes to Melville Cane, thanking him for his painstaking efforts to get him and Carlotta back together without undue publicity, thus sparing them from becoming what O’Neill calls “a gutter tabloid sensation.” (At least for the moment.)

  Carlotta is surprisingly clear-eyed in her retrospective judgment of their climactic last act: “O’Neill died when his violent shaking hands made it i
mpossible for him to write,” she told José Quintero in 1956, three years after her husband’s death.

  “I, too, began to die then. His work was what [had] held us together. It was what made it possible for me to bear the insults, the humiliations, the betrayals. When that was gone there was nothing but disappointment and despair between us.”

  O’Neill doesn’t succumb without a last desperate effort. “I feel I shall be able to write again,” he tells Saxe Commins in August 1948 shortly after he and Carlotta have reconciled in Boston. “The tremor is better, too, but I’m just cursed with it for life, I guess, and the best to hope for is to circumvent it. This letter, for example, is written during a good spell and it’s not so bad, eh? And why complain when the world itself is one vast tremor.”

  Four months later, he confides in two other trusted friends about his renewed hope to circumvent his tremor. He plans to return to his “old occupation of playwriting before too long,” he writes to Nathan, adding, “God knows I have plenty of ideas.” His legs have gotten shakier, he admits, but “the tremor which had me stopped for so long—along with war, critics, hotels, and apartments—seems now to affect my hands less.” The “proof,” as he pathetically points out, is that “this letter is being written legibly, without medication.”

  The following day, he sounds the same theme to Dudley Nichols, again citing his letter as an example, but hastily adding, “I better knock wood! The damned thing has nothing predictable.” He goes on to tell Nichols he derives some hope from the new medical research under way into the cause of Parkinsonian tremors. But even with continuous medical treatment from the best specialists in Boston, O’Neill’s tremor steadily worsens. As the months go by, he is forced to acknowledge he will never finish his cycle, nor will he take on any of the many lesser plays he has outlined. He is now convinced he has forever lost the strength for the sustained physical effort needed to write.