By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  On Saturday, March 31, O’Neill is grateful to find himself once again in a cheerful room with a river view at Doctors Hospital. He laments the departure on Sunday of Clare Bird, who must return to Boston, but he is reassured to be under the warmly welcoming care of Doctors Fisk and Patterson.

  Fisk, who has received a report from Dr. Mayo, expects to find O’Neill’s nervous disorder worse than it was three years earlier and is surprised that he is “fairly well oriented” although “generally frail and unsteady”; he weighs only ninety pounds.

  Mayo has briefed Patterson about O’Neill’s tendency to intermittently hallucinate, and one of the first things Patterson does is substitute straight chloral for the chloral-bromide mixture O’Neill has been taking. With the new medicine (as in Carlotta’s case), the hallucinations gradually disappear.

  Patterson is most concerned about O’Neill’s palsy; he refuses to believe that O’Neill has to tremble. “I would give him heck for shaking,” Patterson recalled. “I’d get furious. I’d see he’d be ready for a cigarette and start to shake. I’d scold him for it—with a smile, of course. And when he thought about it, he could control it.” Patterson arranges his schedule of rounds so that O’Neill will be his final call in the evening and he can take the time to sit and chat with him.

  • • •

  DURING THE two and a half months O’Neill is a patient in Doctors Hospital, he appears to take a savage, if concealed, delight in putting on a multifaceted theatrical performance. Releasing all the pent-up dramatics he would much prefer to put into a play, he tells his visitors conflicting stories about his past and present relationship with Carlotta.

  To some, he woefully declares he can’t face returning to her; to others, he signals that a reconciliation is the one thing he longs for. He seems to be testing the psychological effect on the unwitting friends he has cast as minor characters in the play he can’t resist writing in his mind. He is seeking the appropriate denouement for the inchoate scene (or scenes) of his tragedy’s final act.

  He alone understands that Carlotta’s response is the only one that will ultimately matter. He knows (hopes) he hasn’t much longer to resolve his situation. “I’m done for,” he tells Russel Crouse early in his hospital stay. And yet, ineluctably the dramatist, O’Neill is determined to wring the last ounce of drama out of his weeks at Doctors Hospital.

  Possibly, he has recalled, and decided to abide by, some Nietzschean advice that has always been an underpinning of his philosophy: “To many men life is a failure; a poison-worm gnawing at their heart. Then let them see to it that their dying is all the more a success.”

  The pattern of O’Neill’s life has often mirrored Nietzsche’s, and their last years in particular present a striking parallel. Like O’Neill’s collapse in Marblehead, Nietzsche’s final breakdown was brought on, in part, by prolonged physical suffering, heightened by his mental isolation and exacerbated by excessive dependence on the very same hallucinatory drug that O’Neill was taking. And as with Nietzsche, whose friends believed he had gone mad, O’Neill’s sanity is questioned not only by Dr. Moore but also by a number of his acquaintances.

  Not long after his arrival in New York, and unknown to most of the friends who swoop to his bedside, O’Neill is making overtures to Carlotta for a reconciliation.

  Carlotta, still advised by Dr. Kozol, is temporarily living at the residential Shelton Hotel overlooking the Charles River in Boston. Kaye Albertoni, her faithful nurse from California, has flown to her side, with Dr. Kozol’s approval. He tells Kaye that Carlotta has suffered “a nervous breakdown.” It will be Kaye’s job to help Carlotta readjust to the outside world and to make sure “she would behave and not do anything irrational.” As Nurse Albertoni has recalled, “I stayed a long time.”

  On April 4, Carlotta, accompanied by Albertoni and her Boston lawyer, Robert Meserve, drives to the Marblehead Neck house to begin preparations for its sale. Two days later, she agrees to talk to the sympathetic Boston correspondent for Time magazine, Francis Wylie, about her separation from O’Neill, and invites him and his wife to Marblehead. When they arrive in the late afternoon, they find cardboard cartons all over the place with Eugene O’Neill written on them.

  “She served us sherry,” said Wylie, “and she told my wife and me that O’Neill has been writing her love letters and sending her red roses. She told us how much she loved O’Neill and how dependent he was on her and how cruel he had been to her.”

  She also informs Wylie that O’Neill’s action in trying to have a guardian appointed for her “was partly in response to his instinct for drama.” Still quoting Carlotta, Wylie reports that O’Neill “could no longer arouse her romantic interest in him, so he had to do something else to get some sort of a passionate response.”

  Carlotta does not say so, but the reverse is probably just as true: she can no longer arouse his romantic interest; she has lost the authority of her great beauty, and her diminished allure is something she finds hard to live with—as hard as O’Neill finds living without writing. Absent her beauty, Carlotta is no longer secure in her skin.

  Wylie reports the gist of the interview to Time’s home office in New York on April 6, trying to interest his magazine in a thoroughly researched story about the O’Neills’ difficulties. In his summation, Wylie notes that Dr. Kozol, who is seeing Carlotta regularly, is “confident there will be a reconciliation in three weeks.” Time’s home office considers the story “too sad” to publish. (Wylie ultimately agrees, but continues to keep his editors posted, so they will have the background if and when the O’Neills reconcile.)

  On April 17, three weeks after her release from McLean Hospital, Carlotta responds to an elliptically worded letter from Sophus Winther, who has recently learned of her situation; he believes O’Neill is the injured party, but wishes to stay on good terms with Carlotta, at least for the time being.

  Carlotta’s letter is a dire sequel to her Thanksgiving Day rant to Eline Winther five years earlier; it exemplifies how, over time, O’Neill has driven her berserk—and how he himself is just as unbalanced (if better able to disguise it) as she.

  To “Dear Sophus,” Carlotta writes:

  “You carefully omit the crime (literally) committed by my esteemed husband of paying an unscrupulous doctor [Merrill Moore] to swear I was insane so that a guardian could be appointed for me—& if it could be arranged, to keep me in McLean’s. Thank God, McLean’s is of the honest brand—(there are few these days).”

  She should never have been sent to McLean Hospital in the first place, she affirms, but O’Neill was “delighted” to sign her into a mental hospital and to petition to have a guardian appointed for her. Unable to control her bitterness, she goes on, “Poor Gene! As a writer he is superb, & it has been for the writer I have worked all these years.”

  Carlotta then proceeds to condemn O’Neill’s “failure [as] a man.” Unable to acknowledge her own Iago-like role in prodding O’Neill’s abandonment of Shane and Oona—and perhaps worst of all, her successful attempt to keep Eugene Jr. at bay—she accuses her husband of having “failed his children & his wives”; he loathes women “except when he needs them,” and when he no longer needs them, “out they go!” Carlotta is perceptive enough to observe that “with Nietzsche & Strindberg as his gods one can understand this.”

  She goes on to tell Winther that in the “final play” O’Neill is writing “in his imagination,” in which she figures as the leading lady, she is destined either to commit suicide or be killed by him—“by hiring someone to do it, of course.” Carlotta describes to Winther her humiliation when O’Neill “was sneaked out of Salem,” leaving her with no money to pay their numerous bills, and no instruction about what he wished done with their home. Clearly, she writes, O’Neill is either “a despicable cad, or mentally unsound. Or both!”

  Being penniless, she continues, her rage unabated, she cannot afford even a cheap hotel room
but has had to return to Marblehead Neck “to this ghastly tomb.” She needs to “be able to live,” she tells Winther, and now she is afraid of her “esteemed husband,” against whom, she says, she has been warned “since ’45” (during the production of The Iceman Cometh) to be on her guard. (She does not say who warned her.)

  • • •

  CARLOTTA IS LIVING in Marblehead at the end of April, completing the dismantling of the little gray house. Although no longer clinically psychotic, she is still (not without cause) a nervous wreck, unsure of O’Neill’s next move, burdened with the responsibility of disposing of all their joint possessions, and—because the legal proceedings against her have blocked her access to her bank account—in temporary financial difficulty.

  In her diary, she mixes up dates, repeats herself, improvises, and sometimes dissembles to mask her forgetfulness. She writes to Mai-mai Sze, asking her to come to Marblehead and to bring some cash. When she arrives in Marblehead, Mai-mai Sze is shocked by Carlotta’s appearance. “She was fat, pale and puffy and had let her hair go gray. She was a proud woman, and had always touched up her hair and kept her weight under control.

  “She talked for three days without a stop, didn’t leave me alone for a second. She even followed me into the bathroom. She made me sleep with my door open, as she’d always made Gene. She talked about how Gene always had to dramatize everything; she said, ‘He’ll be back, he’ll come crawling to me on his knees.’”

  When Mai-mai leaves on April 22, Carlotta reflects in her diary, “Her visit has helped me a great deal. She is intelligent, clear-headed, & objective.”

  On the following day, Carlotta learns O’Neill has withdrawn his petition for guardianship over her. On Dr. Kozol’s advice, Carlotta withdraws her countersuit for separate maintenance. Nevertheless, the end of April finds her still in financial limbo, with the lawyers on both sides still negotiating about money.

  “It is so easy,” she sneers on April 28, “to be in a hospital, in a distant city, refuse to return to your home to face the result of an act of utter stupidity, dishonesty & cruelty—& have the one you’ve hurt face the music, clean up & pack for you—. Wicked, wicked man—always choosing unscrupulous persons as your friends and advisers!”

  And on the thirtieth, referring to one of those unscrupulous persons (probably Aronberg) as “the Worm,” she notes that said Worm has left her a message via Dr. Kozol saying that “Gene wanted me to come to New York & talk with him personally!!!??”

  By May 2, according to Carlotta, not only does O’Neill’s lawyer telephone Carlotta’s New York lawyer, suggesting a reconciliation, but Russel Crouse also phones Carlotta herself, at O’Neill’s behest, to say, “Gene sends his love—and wants you back!”

  Carlotta’s petulant comment: “‘Back’ to what?”

  According to Aronberg, O’Neill has told him, “I can’t make a new life for myself. I know that I’m going to die.”

  At Carlotta’s request, Dr. Kozol agrees to visit O’Neill in New York on her behalf in early May.

  Among O’Neill’s visitors at Doctors Hospital who, like Crouse, are in touch with Carlotta as well, are Charles O’Brien Kennedy and George Jean Nathan, both of whom have been sure from the start that the O’Neills will patch up their differences.

  Armina Marshall also is in contact with Carlotta, who, having learned of Langner’s role in separating her from O’Neill, will no longer speak to him. Carlotta tells Marshall that O’Neill has asked her to take him back, and Marshall replies that she knows O’Neill loves and needs her, and, of course, Carlotta must take him back.

  While the long-distance battle of wills between O’Neill and Carlotta is being waged under the eyes of one faction of friends, there are those friends who are unaware O’Neill and Carlotta are in touch. This faction consists mainly of people who have been cut off by Carlotta and who, O’Neill knows, will not be pleased to see him return to her.

  One exception is Kenneth Macgowan, heretofore a staunch supporter of the O’Neill-Carlotta alliance. He has somehow got the impression that O’Neill is now through with Carlotta.

  “When I came to New York and saw Gene in the hospital, he took my hand in both of his and said, ‘It’s nice to see you this way,’” Macgowan recalled. “I thought he meant without Carlotta around. I felt very strongly that he was not going back to her.”

  The most misled—and ultimately the most grievously wounded—is Saxe Commins. He rejoices at being reunited with his beloved friend following the dreadful accident in Marblehead Neck, but is overwrought (and sometimes egregiously misinformed) in his later published narrative of their reunion.

  Every day for four weeks after O’Neill’s installation in Doctors Hospital, writes Commins, “We visited together for at least one hour, usually in the evening after work.” O’Neill, says Commins, has “hideous” and “delusional terrors, asleep or awake”; he recounts an instance when O’Neill “sprang from the bed” and “cowered in a far corner of the room.” He quotes O’Neill: “She’s on the window sill. She’s coming toward me. Please keep her away.” Clearly, Commins wants his readers to believe the menacing woman on the windowsill represents Carlotta.

  After citing this bizarre incident, he notes incorrectly that Carlotta “had been committed by Dr. Moore” to a “sanitarium” and, when released, had come to New York and “engaged a room in Doctors Hospital underneath Gene’s.” It was then, writes Commins, that O’Neill begins receiving phones calls from his wife, and although Commins tactfully waits in the hall during their conversations, he feels it is “all too manifest” that Carlotta is “regaining control.”

  By his further account, Commins tries to convince O’Neill that a future without Carlotta is not unthinkable; he goes so far as to beseech O’Neill to allow him and his wife, Dorothy, to become his caregivers. His obsessive devotion has clouded his thinking; he fails to see that no amount of sacrifice or loyalty will signify when and if Carlotta chooses to reenter the picture.

  Toward the end of his account, however, Commins himself is forced to come to this conclusion. He finally acknowledges that “after all, Carlotta had lived with him for almost a quarter of a century, and when she was not in an acute state of disturbance, she could be competent and devoted and even sacrificial in her imperious and managerial way. . . . Together they might help each other; apart there could only be even greater torture and then dissolution.”

  Apart from Commins, the person who spends the most time with O’Neill is Sherlee Lantz (formerly Weingarten). Early in his hospital stay, O’Neill asks Sherlee for a favor: he doesn’t want to deal with his mail—won’t read it and doesn’t even want to be told who it’s from. Sherlee finds the responsibility scary, but can’t refuse him. Uninformed about the relationships between O’Neill and some of his correspondents, she improvises answers as best she can.

  O’Neill is interested in hardly anything. “He was barely articulate most of the time,” according to Sherlee. The one thing that seemed to give him momentary pleasure was listening to classical music over radio station WQXR.

  • • •

  WITHIN THE FIRST week or two of O’Neill’s arrival at Doctors Hospital, Sherlee—knowing little about the background of his estrangement from Oona—asks him if he will consider writing to his daughter; Sherlee innocently thinks a renewal of his relationship with Oona will give him something to live for.

  He is firm in his refusal, and Sherlee—unlike Commins—soon intuits that O’Neill, in spite of having charged his wife with insanity (and despite her countercharge of desertion), is “never anything but en route to Carlotta—even while he appears to be traveling away from her.” In Sherlee’s opinion, the return to Carlotta “was never weighed against any other possibility.”

  “Where can I go?” O’Neill asks her. “You can’t take care of me.” And Sherlee weeps silently over his predicament. “I held him in my arms once, and he cried,” Sherlee reca
lled some years after his death.

  “He didn’t seem to have any flesh left. The neurologist at the hospital told me one day that in the type of disease O’Neill suffered from, the heart goes on but little else. The doctor said, too, that shortly he would become a vegetable. I was so upset I felt like slapping him.”

  O’Neill explains to Sherlee what she has already realized—that he is terribly sensitive about the loss of dignity imposed by his illness. He can’t bear the thought of letting his friends take care of him, nor can he face the dreary prospect of spending his last days alone in an apartment with a male nurse. That, however, is one of the plans that has been advanced for his consideration.

  For some reason, Merrill Moore is still active in the case and is summoned to New York by his co-conspirator Langner to help O’Neill get straightened out. It is Moore who recommends the apartment-with-male-nurse in New York. Having dropped the idea of a guardian for Carlotta, he further proposes that she take an apartment in Boston; the two are to agree to live separately, but they are to be on friendly terms.

  Moore has some misgivings about the reception of his plan and he asks Russel Crouse to present it to O’Neill as “The Crouse Plan.”

  “You present it to him as ‘The Moore Plan,’” snaps Crouse.

  On April 26, Crouse drily notes in his diary: “Gene wants none of the Moore Separation Plan.” A conscientious diarist, Crouse also records that O’Neill was suicidal during the early part of his hospital stay and that the windows of his room are kept locked.

  At the end of April, O’Neill is recuperating from a severe case of pneumonia, which has lasted six days. He is conscious during his illness, but runs a high fever. “We had a bad scare,” Dr. Fisk recalled. “But after the pneumonia he improved quickly. He was up and about most of the day. His tremor improved too.”

  His visitors, during the period of his recovery, find O’Neill often standing to greet them, for the cast has been removed from his leg. One of his visitors is Eugene Jr.’s Ruth Lander. It is Aronberg’s idea, and it is a strange and poignant meeting for both. Trembling with anxiety, Ruth allows Aronberg to present her to O’Neill, whom he has briefed. “He embraced me,” Ruth recalled, “and buried his head on my shoulder.”