By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  Armina, although knowing nothing of the bromide poisoning, assumes Carlotta was hallucinating. She promises O’Neill to visit him soon, and makes plans to visit Carlotta.

  On Wednesday morning, Dr. Mayo finds O’Neill despondent. His leg has been put into a cast and everything that can be done for his physical comfort has been attended to. Mayo tells him as gently as he can that Carlotta was brought to the hospital the night before, that a psychiatrist has examined her this morning and found her, in the official words of the “Temporary Care” request issued by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, to be “in need of immediate care and treatment.”

  Dr. Mayo tells O’Neill that the Salem Hospital medical staff thinks it best Carlotta be transferred to McLean Hospital, the renowned psychiatric facility in the nearby town of Belmont. O’Neill listens, but does not respond. At noon, Carlotta is taken away.

  Carlotta remembers nothing about the hours she spent at Salem Hospital, but she is later told she kept repeating, “My husband is sick, my husband is sick, please take me to my husband, I want to see how he is.” Carlotta does remember waking up “just a little bit” in the ambulance that took her to McLean; her feet hurt her, she recalled, “because they were tied.” She lost consciousness again as she was wheeled into McLean.

  Waking the next day in a strange bed, she is “scared to death” upon seeing bars on the windows. “I didn’t know whether I was in jail, or where I was—or what O’Neill had done to me,” she remembered. At last, a nurse arrives and quietly assures her that “everything will be alright.” Soon she is moved to a building in which the patients can come and go as they please, and she gradually recovers her poise. The doctors tell her, “You shouldn’t be here, you should never have been sent here.”

  In the diary Carlotta resumed keeping in March 1951, after the bromide has been flushed from her system and she has been pronounced sane, she pens a cursory summation: “Gene falls on rocks in garden—Friday, Feb. 7 [the wrong date] and Dr. Mayo of Swampscott takes him to Salem Hospital to have leg set—I am sent to McLean Hospital for bromide poisoning—my temperature is outlandishly high & I am delirious! In 48 hours, all is well. During next 4 days receive 2 charming letters from Gene!”

  Inexplicable as it seems, O’Neill does indeed dictate a letter to Carlotta almost as soon as he arrives at Salem Hospital: “My dearest, I had my leg put in a cast last night,” he writes. “I should be able to get around on a crutch within a few days, and I know you will progress rapidly under treatment. Write me as soon as you can. I feel dreadfully lonely for some word from you. With all my love, [signed in a hand indisputably his own] Gene.”

  Soon thereafter, he dictates another letter to Carlotta (received by her, as she carefully notes, “about 4 days after my husband was in hospital”). He is overjoyed, he says, to hear from Dr. Mayo, as well as from Dr. Howard Horwitz at McLean, that she has made steady progress and will soon be well again. He himself has made progress, he says, and can walk a few steps on crutches with the help of “one man on each side of me.”

  O’Neill has been visited by Bobby Jones, Langner, and Aronberg, he informs Carlotta, as well as by their Marblehead cook, Doris, who has also visited Carlotta at McLean.

  “Doris tells me you are worrying about money and what you are going to do.” He assures her that there will be plenty of money. “If you will write to me we can make advance plans about that,” says O’Neill. “There never was a situation that love and money couldn’t conquer.”

  The letter is signed, “All my love, sweetheart,” followed by a painfully shaky “Gene.”

  O’Neill is attended by private nurses in his third-floor hospital room. His day nurse, Clare Bird, is tall and pretty with blond hair, light brown eyes, and an unfailingly gentle manner. Like Patrolman Snow, Bird finds O’Neill difficult to understand at first because his speech is thick; his hands also shake pitifully, and his mind is often cloudy, particularly during the night when he has occasional drug-induced hallucinations.

  Evidently, it doesn’t occur to Dr. Mayo to take O’Neill off the chloral hydrate and bromide sedative he has prescribed for him, but O’Neill happens to have less of a reaction than Carlotta to the drug’s toxic effect.

  An experienced and intuitive woman, Clare Bird tactfully offers O’Neill such help and sympathy as she senses he will accept. She sees it embarrasses him to be fed, and that it upsets him even more to be watched while he feeds himself, so she serves him food that is cut up and then leaves the room. Responding to her thoughtfulness, O’Neill talks to her about Carlotta—one minute calmly, the next weeping and asking to see her.

  “He seemed to want to be alone most of the time,” Nurse Bird recalled, “but every once in a while he wanted to talk, and then he would ramble on about what a mess everything was.” Surprisingly, O’Neill sometimes talked to Bird about his older son’s suicide. “He never mentioned his daughter directly,” says Bird, “but he gave the impression, in his ramblings, that his entire family had gone wrong.”

  Nurse Bird recalls that O’Neill felt guilty when she had to spend Easter Sunday tending to his needs. “You should have been in the Easter Parade,” he tells her, giving her a check for thirty-five dollars with which to “buy an Easter bonnet.”

  A small group of friends, informed of O’Neill’s condition by the Langners, have begun flying from New York to visit him, among them Saxe Commins and Sherlee Weingarten, who had not been welcome at Marblehead. To some of them, O’Neill seems bewildered and helpless, in need of their assistance in reassembling his life. But, according to Clare Bird, “He never got excited when they came to see him, and when they left he would sometimes shrug, as though to say he was glad they were gone. He just let anyone do what they wanted with him.”

  O’Neill does tell Langner that on the night of his fall in the snow, he and Carlotta had “a filthy fight”; he doesn’t elaborate but says he rushed from the house simply to get away from her.

  He gave a more detailed account to Commins, who set it down in an essay that was later included in the book, Love and Admiration and Respect, edited by his wife, Dorothy Commins. It’s an emotional recap, colored by Commins’s virulent hatred of Carlotta and his adoration of O’Neill; it is further embroidered and distorted by the passage of time.

  “What I know,” Commins begins with a melodramatic flourish, “came to me from Eugene’s own lips as he lay immobilized in a bed in the Salem Hospital.”

  His summary of O’Neill’s fall in the snow is similar to Dr. Mayo’s and Armina Marshall’s, except that Carlotta, in Commins’s version, glared from the doorway at her husband lying helplessly on the snowy ground, and said, “How the mighty have fallen! The master is lying low. Now, where is all your greatness?” (Not as Armina remembered O’Neill telling her, “Lie there, little man.”)

  Commins writes that O’Neill “pieced out the story” for him “haltingly and with desperate sadness.” O’Neill told Commins, as he had told Langner, about quarreling with Carlotta, but not saying what the quarrel was about, only that “to escape her wrath” he left the house “coatless.”

  Some weeks into O’Neill’s hospital stay, Dr. Mayo receives a call from one of Carlotta’s doctors at McLean saying Carlotta is eager to visit her husband, and McLean will sanction the visit if O’Neill wishes to see her. When Mayo relays this message, O’Neill cringes. Evidently he has forgotten his recent longing love letters to Carlotta; according to Mayo, he pleads, “Keep her away from me.” He then tells Mayo of a visit by Carlotta to his bedside at Doctors Hospital in New York, when she grabbed his broken arm and shook it, saying, “There’s nothing wrong with you, you’re putting on an act.”

  Nonetheless, and unbeknown to his friends, O’Neill does receive a visit from Carlotta, who is accompanied by a nurse from McLean. Clare Bird, who leaves the room during the O’Neills’ half-hour reunion, later finds her patient just as joyless as he was before Carlotta’s visit.

/>   • • •

  TO BOTH DR. MAYO and Nurse Bird, O’Neill seems reluctant to face a decision regarding his future. He knows he can’t stay hospitalized in Salem indefinitely and he also knows he must decide soon about his future, with or without Carlotta, who is still being cared for at McLean. Whatever their views of O’Neill’s relationship with his wife, both Mayo and Bird are concerned about his pliability in the hands of friends who are pushing him to break with Carlotta and go to New York to complete his recovery.

  Langner, believing O’Neill requires professional therapeutic support, takes it upon himself to call in the Boston psychiatrist Merrill Moore. He has been vouched for by the prominent Broadway writer and director Joshua Logan, who is among Moore’s celebrity patients. A somewhat controversial figure, the psychiatrist is also a prolific writer of pornographic poetry. More’s entrance into the precarious situation complicates rather than ameliorates it.

  After meeting with O’Neill, Moore presents Mayo and Langner with his bleak diagnosis: O’Neill is mentally ill and is unable to take care of himself. The dramatist’s mental condition, Moore adds, is due to his son’s recent death, plus worry over his wife’s illness; O’Neill needs protection from his “difficult domestic situation.”

  In Moore’s opinion, O’Neill “has depression and slowness of timing”; he is “unable to plan” and “cannot make decisions.” Since he cannot stay indefinitely at Salem Hospital and, as it is “unsuitable” for him to return to his home in Marblehead, Moore smugly recommends he be separated from Carlotta and either be confined to a mental hospital or be placed under the care of a legal guardian.

  While Langner et al. are chewing this over, Dr. Moore arranges to meet with Carlotta, whose originally mandated ten-day stay at McLean has been extended, with her consent, for her own protection.

  “I have never felt so frightened of a human being in my life,” Carlotta later recalled, adding she had not wanted to see Moore, and that her doctors at McLean had not been happy about his visit; in fact, one of them remained in the room while Moore interviewed her.

  “He wishes to tell me I must give up Gene!?!” Carlotta scribbles furiously in her diary on March 22. “I must forget him! I must make a new life! (at 62—& having been married to Gene for 23 years!).

  “He is a fool,” Carlotta continues. “He gives himself away as to the real reason for his visit,” she writes, when he tells her, “You must remain here where you will be looked after and guarded.” The word guarded, says Carlotta, “hit me between the eyes. I couldn’t imagine how a stranger dare tell me I must give up my husband.”

  In a later interview, Carlotta elaborated: Merrill Moore “took my hand and kissed it and said, ‘Beautiful Carlotta Monterey. Oh, this is such a pleasure.” Shrinking from his unctuousness, she tells him that the only reason she has agreed to see him is that she wants to know about her husband. Moore tells her O’Neill is ill and needs quiet.

  “I noticed there was a sort of accentuation on the word ‘quiet,’” Carlotta remembers, “and I said, ‘Well, I’ve lived with him a good many years and we’ve never had anything but quiet.’ I said if there was ever any noise or disturbance, it was through him not through me.”

  Carlotta reports that Moore cautions her, “I think it would be better if you made up your mind to live in one place and take up writing, or whatever you like, and allow your husband to have quiet in some sanitarium we can find for him. You know, dear Carlotta Monterey, you wouldn’t want to see the leaf wither on the vine.”

  Carlotta’s doctor at McLean advises her not to worry, as Dr. Moore has “no standing” or influence on McLean’s procedures. But she is so shattered after Moore leaves she is unable to sleep. “I walked the floor all night,” she says.

  Dr. Moore reports back to Langner that Carlotta’s condition necessitates prolonged treatment—a diagnosis that meets with considerably more enthusiasm than Moore’s appraisal of O’Neill’s problems (which is ignored, and is later modified by Moore himself).

  O’Neill and Carlotta by now have spent six and a half weeks in their respective hospitals and it is at this point of confusion that lawyers are called in. On March 23, a day after Moore’s visit with Carlotta, O’Neill allows himself to be persuaded to take a vindictive step that he regrets almost at once. He files a petition in the Probate Court of County Essex, in Salem, stating that Carlotta is “an insane person and incapable of taking care of herself.”

  Urged on by Aronberg and Langner, O’Neill has requested that a local attorney, James E. Farley, “be appointed guardian of said Carlotta Monterey O’Neill.” The petition, signed in O’Neill’s shaky and barely legible hand (and signed also by Merrill Moore), is returnable in one month’s time—on April 23.

  Farley, a portly self-styled country lawyer, pays O’Neill several visits at the hospital “to assess his mental condition from a legal point of view.” He comes away convinced O’Neill is under no mental confusion whatever; he talks clearly, if haltingly, and appears “perfectly aware of what he is doing.”

  O’Neill, however, later tells several friends he hadn’t known what he was doing when he signed the petition. Conceivably, he signed it in the delusional hope that it might serve as a thunderous curtain for Act III, Scene III of his real-life tragedy. Perhaps he was slyly invoking Carlotta to prove her mettle as his leading lady.

  • • •

  CARLOTTA, TRAUMATIZED BY Merrill Moore’s visit and O’Neill’s petition, makes no diary entries for several days. On March 28, she notes she has been told by her McLean doctor she is free to go home.

  The McLean discharge report states that she received “general supportive care and psychotherapy.” She was given no medication except sodium chloride for a few days to aid in the elimination of bromides from her system.

  Her “delirium and hallucinations persisted unabated for approximately ten days, then gradually decreased over the next ten days,” the report continues. “Following this period she seemed somewhat unstable emotionally, but was not psychotic. It was possible for her to be moved to the open ward, where she had friendly relations with many of the other patients, and was able to go to the library, to the coffee shop, and out of the hospital for walks or drives.”

  Carlotta’s prognosis, as described in the “Discharge Summary,” signed by William H. Horwitz, MD, is “good.”

  51

  On March 29, 1951, Carlotta telephones Saki to fetch her home from McLean. Her doctors wish to see her rights protected regarding the pending guardianship petition filed by her husband. To that end, they have called in Dr. Harry L. Kozol, a dynamic forty-two-year-old Boston psychiatrist on the Harvard medical staff; his expertise is legal medicine (and his pioneering research will later help establish the emerging fields of forensic psychiatry and neuropsychiatry).

  Fascinated by the case, Kozol suggests Carlotta countersue her husband and he offers to engage a local law firm to initiate the proceeding. In her diary, Carlotta crows, “The clearing of my name begins.”

  Her petition, filed by Robert Meserve of the eminent Boston law firm Nutter, McClennen and Fish, accuses O’Neill of cruelty, and asks for separate maintenance; it states that O’Neill has failed “without just cause, to furnish suitable support” for his wife, and that she is living apart from him “for justifiable cause”; the petition further states that on or about the first day of February 1951, and “at divers other times prior thereto,” O’Neill has been guilty of “cruel and abusive treatment” of her. The date of return—April 23—is the same as that of O’Neill’s lawsuit.

  When O’Neill learns of Carlotta’s petition, he agitatedly confides to Lawrence Langner that he’s worried about the possibility of “political pressure” being exerted to have him institutionalized; Boston’s power structure has always been hostile to his plays, O’Neill reminds Langner, and if the question of his own sanity arises, he might have a hard time eliciting sympathy.

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bsp; Langner seizes on O’Neill’s concern to coax him to New York, believing that—away from Carlotta and surrounded by caring friends—he will recuperate faster than he ever can in Salem Hospital.

  “I loved and respected Gene,” Langner said, in justifying the manipulations going on behind O’Neill’s back. “I felt the transfer would be in his best interests.”

  Nurse Clare Bird recalls O’Neill’s ambivalence about leaving Salem. “He finally agreed to go, with a reluctant ‘Yes.’ But, even on the day he was supposed to leave, I thought he might change his mind.”

  It is no coincidence that Langner and his allies choose March 30, the day after Carlotta’s release from McLean, as the day to spirit O’Neill away. His leg is healing nicely but it is still in a cast, and they have arranged for an ambulance to take him to Boston’s South Station. Accompanied by Nurse Bird, he is carried by stretcher from the ambulance to a compartment on the New York–bound train.

  That same day, Carlotta worriedly reads the Boston Herald’s article about the two O’Neill lawsuits. Newspapers all over the country pick up the story and to many it appears that the O’Neill marriage, whatever traumas it has withstood in the past, can’t possibly survive this dizzying new round of hostilities.

  • • •

  IT IS DRIZZLING when O’Neill’s train pulls into Grand Central Terminal, where an ambulance waits to take him to a small private facility in the East Seventies, more convalescent home than hospital. Tucked into his bed by Clare Bird, an exhausted O’Neill takes in the dreary hotel-like atmosphere of the room and mutters, “Get me out of this place.”

  Bird reaches Aronberg by phone and he promises to have O’Neill transferred in the morning. With Bird seated nearby, O’Neill sinks into fretful sleep.