by Arthur Gelb
There was no answer but the door was unlocked and Elsie, fearing Eugene might be really ill, walked into the living room. She saw Eugene lying at the foot of the stairs.
“Intellectually I knew he was dead,” Elsie said. “But emotionally I couldn’t accept it.”
Eugene’s telephone had been disconnected because he’d neglected to pay the bill, so Elsie ran to the nearest neighbor’s house and phoned for a doctor. Then she called her husband and told him, “He’s done it.”
“When I got back to my house,” Elsie said, “Ruth telephoned, wanting to know what had happened to me. I’d forgotten about meeting her. I told her Gene had killed himself.”
Eugene had apparently left the Meyers’ house around seven or eight that morning, possibly intending to bathe, shave, and change for his trip to New York—for Monday, according to Ruth, was the day he always went through the ritual of trimming his beard and mustache. But sometime during his preparations, he decided to put his razor to a different use.
He drank off the last of Frank Meyer’s bourbon, sat down at the driftwood desk on which his father had written plays in Provincetown, and scribbled on a scrap of paper: “Never let it be said of O’Neill that he failed to finish a bottle. Ave atque vale.”
Then he climbed the stairs, filled the bathtub, stepped into it, and slashed his wrists and left ankle. According to the coroner’s report, he had apparently stumbled downstairs about twenty minutes later, in a kind of animal-panic attempt to save himself.
Neither the Meyers nor Ruth attributed Eugene’s death (as gossip subsequently did) to straitened finances; he had back salary coming to him and was due to earn a minimum of $10,000 during the next year from lectures and various other freelance activities to which he was committed.
Nor did the Meyers consider the possibility that Ruth’s rejection caused the suicide, although Ruth herself tended, at first, to assume the blame.
“I went to pieces after Gene died,” she said. “I went to a psychiatrist for help, and he finally convinced me that the most I could have done was postpone his suicide, but that I couldn’t have prevented it.”
It devolved on Elsie Meyer to break the news of Eugene’s death to his mother. Kathleen Pitt-Smith, now widowed and still living in Douglaston, Long Island, had a standing dinner date with her son in New York for either Monday or Tuesday of each week.
If Kathleen did not hear from Eugene on a Monday, she knew he would call her Tuesday to confirm the time and place of their meeting.
At 5:50 p.m. that Monday, the twenty-fifth, a newspaper reporter telephoned her and asked if she expected to hear from her son that day.
“I thought Gene had gotten married suddenly,” Kathleen later said. “He had told me he was planning to marry Ruth. I told the reporter I didn’t expect to hear from Gene any more that day, but that I’d be seeing him the next day.”
The reporter, with a tact Kathleen later acknowledged gratefully, informed Kathleen her son had been involved in an accident in Woodstock that morning, and urged her to telephone the Meyers at once. Not until then did she learn, from Elsie, that Eugene had killed himself. (Kathleen not only rallied after her son’s death but—perhaps because she’d escaped living with his father—managed to survive O’Neill himself by twenty-nine years, longer than either Agnes or Carlotta; she died in 1982 at the age of ninety-four.)
O’Neill did not attend his son’s funeral, but he paid all the expenses. According to Pitt-Smith, he and Carlotta each sent separate flower arrangements for the coffin.
Two and a half weeks after the suicide, Frank Meyer wrote to O’Neill that Eugene had always wanted his father to have his PhD diploma in case of his death, and asked if he could forward it to him in Marblehead.
“I should have written you much sooner had there been anything I could presume to say,” Meyer went on. “You are probably the only person to whom I can say nothing of significance about him which you do not already know. But if you would like me to write—or care at any time to talk to me—please say so.”
O’Neill answered from Point O’Rocks Lane a week later, saying that Meyer’s letter had been a great pleasure to him. “To learn that Eugene had wanted me to have his Ph.D. diploma warmed my heart,” he said, asking that it be sent to him.
• • •
O’NEILL WAS SPARED the knowledge of his younger son’s suicide on June 22, 1977. Shane was fifty-seven when he leaped to his death from the fourth floor of an apartment in Brooklyn.
“The suicide of Shane O’Neill, whose life in so many ways reflected the problems of despair raised in the plays of Eugene O’Neill, was made known recently,” wrote Richard Shepard, one of the Times’s most gifted reporters. Shane had reportedly jumped “just before midnight” after an argument “with a woman friend.” He had by then separated from his wife, Cathy, and his four children were all grown. In his two-column-long obituary, Shepard vividly summed up Shane’s troubled life, pointing out that his drug addiction had “caused more than normal distress in the father, whose own mother had been addicted to drugs and whose tragedy had inspired what many believe to be O’Neill’s greatest drama, Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”
50
It is four months since Eugene Jr.’s death—time enough to heighten O’Neill’s guilt at having kept his son at a distance and to inflame O’Neill’s anger at Carlotta for persuading him to do so. O’Neill has been tormenting himself over the loss of not only a beloved and admired son but also a trusted friend and confidant.
Indeed, O’Neill’s already frayed mental balance has been rapidly slipping and the idea of his own suicide is much on his mind; he deplores the vestiges of Catholic indoctrination that deter him from taking that step.
He tells one of his rare visitors, Lawrence Langner, with whom he has earlier shared his thoughts about suicide, that he wishes he could kill himself by jumping off his rock into the Atlantic; but, he adds with bleak humor, he’s too good a swimmer and would instinctively try to save himself.
Among the few who have an occasional glimpse of O’Neill during the grim months following Eugene Jr.’s death is a local patrolman, John Snow. A fair-haired man of medium height in his early forties, Snow is a familiar figure to residents of the area. He has been assigned during five consecutive winters to the beat that includes Point O’Rocks Lane, and he makes it a part of his routine to drop in now and then on the scattering of winter residents in the area as a gesture of reassurance.
On several occasions he has been invited into the O’Neill home by Carlotta, who brings him into the dining room for a five- or ten-minute chat with O’Neill. Seated at the long dining table, O’Neill exchanges brief pleasantries with the patrolman. Although Snow, during his first visit, finds it difficult to follow O’Neill’s halting speech, he gradually grows accustomed to it. He listens attentively when O’Neill explains he came to Marblehead both for seclusion and for the pleasure of listening to the pounding surf, especially during stormy weather.
Snow finds Carlotta gracious, and he commiserates with her about her arthritis. The last time Snow visits the house, O’Neill does not speak at all; Snow assumes that speech has become too much of an effort. He’s right. Brooding about past failures, present futility, and a future in which he will grow increasingly helpless and dependent upon Carlotta—O’Neill wishes he was dead.
Wrapped in her own gloom, Carlotta can’t bear the thought of another bleak, icy winter on Point O’Rocks Lane. The little gray house has become a prison of smoldering emotions. She wants to sell it, but O’Neill says they have nowhere else to go.
Carlotta’s growing anxiety dates from Eugene Jr.’s death and O’Neill’s frightening withdrawal. It was then she began taking several teaspoons of a prescribed sleeping medicine nightly, according to doctors who later recorded her medical history. She believes it is chloral hydrate and safe to take regularly, but, in fact, the medicine contains bromide, to which (un
suspected by her doctor) she happens to be violently allergic and—although she doesn’t realize it—it is having a toxic effect.
Carlotta is beginning to hallucinate, and, as she later tells a psychiatrist who takes her medical history, she has episodes of thinking “there is someone around the corner, listening at the door.” She has periods of confusion, during which (in the words of her psychiatric history) “she cannot carry through certain trains of thought.”
By December, she is unable to write a check legibly.
That Christmas, there is no written greeting of love from O’Neill to Carlotta, no birthday gift, and no message of hope for the new year.
Now, both past their sixty-second birthdays, they manage—but only just—to get through the first month of 1951 with no outward sign of the violence seething within. But by the beginning of February, Carlotta (again according to her psychiatric history) has become “a completely disoriented woman, at times calm and at others excited, who speaks of people driving her insane, trying to blind her and hallucinations of rats or bugs in the room,” a woman “lacking insight and judgment.”
The scene is now set for the horrific episode of February 5, 1951, that will become one of the legendary and often-retold events of O’Neill’s life.
It is an occurrence of such operatic thunder that, sixty years later, it will inspire an actual opera with a libretto by the playwright Tony Kushner (who was not yet born in 1951) called A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck.
The real-life setting is nightfall on the Neck. The front door of the little house opens and O’Neill rushes out. Although the temperature is in the low thirties, he is dressed only in slacks and a wool shirt. He has forgotten his cane and, after only a few wobbly steps in his front yard, he stumbles on a rock that is hidden under eight inches of crusted snow, and falls to the ground. His right leg is broken at the knee and he loses consciousness from the pain. For some time, perhaps as long as an hour, he lies in the snow.
Where he was going—whether it was just as far as his legs would carry him, or if he was heading for that final swim in the ocean—is uncertain. But, only too aware that even with the aid of a cane his legs are unreliable, he surely was not out for a stroll in his garden.
There will be many conflicting accounts of the night’s maelstrom and its aftermath—from O’Neill himself, from Carlotta, from Dr. Mayo, and from a number of other (more or less) biased witnesses, as well as from secondhand confidants.
Carlotta’s version—that of a woman suffering from severe drug-induced psychotic hallucinations—is obviously the least reliable (and will be several times revised by Carlotta herself).
“O’Neill and I were sitting in the living room one afternoon and he said he was going out for a walk. When he didn’t come back, I became very much worried. And I heard a noise, like an animal caught in something. Walking to the balcony, I saw it was O’Neill, who had fallen on the rocks and could not get up. I went to him and tried to lift him.
“At that moment, Dr. Mayo arrived. I thought it was very strange he should arrive, when neither of us had telephoned for him to come.”
Dr. Mayo’s account is cautious (if inadvertently biased). He recalls that he received a message at about nine o’clock that night summoning him to Point O’Rocks Lane. Since the message had not stipulated an emergency, he completed his round of calls before heading for the O’Neill house; it’s about 10:00 p.m. when he turns his car into their driveway.
He climbs the front step and rings the doorbell. As he waits in the dark, he hears a faint cry from somewhere in the yard but is not sure of its source. The door opens, spilling light from the house, when he hears the cry again. This time he recognizes it as a call for help. He leaps down the step and starts across the yard, almost tripping over O’Neill, who is lying in the snow, wet and shivering. Mayo helps him up and, concerned about his injured leg, half-drags him into the house. He has no recollection of Carlotta assisting him.
Carlotta, however (in her drug-dazed condition), believes she helped carry O’Neill into the house. “The doctor took O’Neill’s arms and shoulders, and I took his legs very carefully, and we carried him inside.”
According to Mayo, O’Neill lies silently in the living room while Carlotta, wringing her hands, utters phrases of dismay. Preoccupied as he is with O’Neill’s broken leg, and worried about shock and hypothermia, it seems not to occur to Mayo that Carlotta, too, is in need of medical attention.
Dr. Mayo is focused on getting O’Neill quickly into a hospital and he telephones for an ambulance—a private one, so that the call will not be registered in the local police office, thus avoiding publicity in the local newspapers. He can’t help but wonder what has led up to O’Neill’s fall, but he doesn’t ask for an explanation and neither Carlotta nor O’Neill offers one.
“I asked the doctor what should be done about O’Neill’s injured leg and he said O’Neill had better go to the hospital,” Carlotta recalled years later. “The next thing I knew, an ambulance drove up. The Japanese boy [Saki] went to the door and said, ‘Madam, ambulance for the Master.’ I thought the ambulance arriving was very strange, because, as far as I knew, nobody had rung for one.
“I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t think it was my place to say it. But I realized it was necessary for Gene to get proper medical care. I helped the doctor put him into the ambulance, and off he went to the hospital.”
Dr. Mayo is convinced Carlotta has been keeping the all-but-helpless O’Neill a virtual prisoner and, like Dr. Fiske before him, has come to detest her. Evidently feeling no qualm about leaving her to fend for herself, he follows the ambulance in his car to the modern red-brick hospital in the nearby town of Salem. It’s 11:30 p.m. by the time he has seen O’Neill comfortably installed in a private room and has arranged for a bone surgeon to attend to his broken leg.
Driving home, Mayo is haunted by the look of despair that distorted O’Neill’s ashen face.
“After they left,” recalled Carlotta, “I became terribly nervous and worried. I had been instructed by [Dr. Mayo] to take my medicine whenever I felt very nervous and really on the edge of things, and I took a large dose to calm my nerves. After a bit, I began to feel very dizzy.”
In fact, Carlotta has fallen into a drugged sleep, and doesn’t wake until late afternoon of the following day, February 6. Unaware she has lost a day, she continued her account:
“I began to get more worried. I put on my street clothes and told Saki, ‘I’m going over to the hospital to see Mr. O’Neill.’ He said, ‘Shall I take you in my car?’ and I said, ‘No, you better stay here and take messages if anything happens.’
“I walked out to the main road and stood there, thinking maybe a taxi would come along and I could take it, and if not, I’d start to walk. Well, I was walking along quietly, and an automobile stopped; it was an automobile the Marblehead Neck police officers used for going over all the roads in the area once or twice a day.”
Patrolman John Snow, in his own car, is making a desultory check of the neighborhood on the evening of February 6 and recognizes Carlotta, inadequately dressed against the biting cold, walking down the street not far from her home. In a later, very discreet interview with the authors, he describes how he stopped his car beside her and tried to persuade her to return to her house, but she refused. (According to her later psychiatric evaluation, “She stated there were many friends in the house having a party and she wanted to get the friends out of the house.”)
After vainly trying to induce Carlotta to take shelter in a neighboring house, he himself enters that house and telephones the police station to request a police car—all the while keeping an eye on the forlorn figure standing in the street.
The police car arrives with two patrolmen, John Tucker and Norman Powers, and, together with Snow, they coax Carlotta into the car. In a suddenly self-possessed voice, she asks them to drive her to Salem Hospital. Tucker and Powe
rs start off, with Snow following, when, seconds later, Carlotta becomes hysterical. Unsure how to proceed, the cops return Carlotta to her own house, and from there Snow telephones Dr. Mayo. He arrives, calms Carlotta, helps bundle her into the patrol car, and follows it to Salem Hospital.
In Carlotta’s version, she gets into the police car and asks the officer to take her to see her husband at Salem Hospital. “While we drove,” she recalled, “things began to get a bit fuzzy. The last I remembered, I was taken to the patients’ entrance of Salem Hospital. Then I went out like a light.”
Mayo, unaware Carlotta is being poisoned by bromide, believes her behavior requires psychiatric care and he arranges for a staff psychiatrist to examine her early the following morning.
This is the third time in their marriage that O’Neill and Carlotta are patients under the same hospital roof.
Earlier, on that same Tuesday, Lawrence Langner and his wife, Armina Marshall, return from a trip abroad to their home in Westport, Connecticut, and are told by their caretaker that Mrs. O’Neill has called from Marblehead to say that Mr. O’Neill broke his leg and that Mrs. Langner had better come up and look after him; the caretaker says Mrs. O’Neill was barely coherent and “sounded drunk.”
Armina Marshall immediately puts through a call to the house at Point O’Rocks Lane, but is told by the person who answers the phone that Mrs. O’Neill has gone out. Puzzled, Armina tries several times again to reach Carlotta and then makes a series of calls that eventually elicit the information that O’Neill is a patient at Salem Hospital.
When she reaches him there by phone that evening, he says, “Armina, it’s just like before when I broke my arm”; she assumes he is referring to his previous fall, in the New York penthouse. In response to her concerned inquiries, O’Neill tells Armina he had to lie a long time on the snow-covered ground before help came. According to Armina (and later repeated to other friends), O’Neill said that Carlotta, standing in the doorway of their home, called out, “Lie there, little man!”