By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  In early May, Dr. Fisk finds O’Neill so much improved, he recommends an outing. Illustrative of the esteem in which he holds O’Neill, Fisk proffers his own services as chauffeur and, at O’Neill’s request, they head downtown.

  “We drove along the waterfront and O’Neill pointed out to me many of the places where he had spent his early days—here had stood Jimmy the Priest’s, there a brothel.”

  O’Neill talks about the dockworkers and the men of the sea. They led a rough life, he tells Fisk, and they were his friends. Driving through Greenwich Village, “O’Neill talks about whores, comparing them with Mother Earth, endowing them with what he calls ‘real souls’ and the capacity to ‘solace man and give him comfort.’”

  This leads O’Neill into a discourse on the mythological giant Antaeus, whose mother was Earth and whose strength was indestructible as long as he stood on the earth.

  Surely O’Neill is thinking of the strength he has long derived from Carlotta, and his helpless weakness when separated from her, as he goes on about how Antaeus loses his power when Hercules wrenches him away from his strength-giving source.

  However Fisk interprets this, and as much as Fisk hates and distrusts Carlotta, he is among those most firmly convinced that O’Neill will go back to her.

  On May 7, with her packing up of the Marblehead house completed, a weary Carlotta talks to Dr. Kozol about his imminent visit with O’Neill in New York. She wonders, in her diary, what O’Neill will tell Kozol—and what it is that she wants from the man who, after twenty-three years of marriage, threw her “out to the dogs?”

  For one thing, she wants to know “why & how that dreadful Salem incident occurred. The cruelty of it—& the stupidity.” She asks herself whether O’Neill wants her because he loves her, or to save the money it would cost him to pay for her to live separately.

  She wonders if O’Neill feels at all guilty, and whether he is willing, for her sake, to “give up” Langner, Moore, and Aronberg. Never, she tells herself, will she be able to “trust or love him again.”

  Invariably, she’s quick to console herself. The next day, she has her hair done and the day after that she has a fitting for a new black suit.

  Kozol spends three hours with O’Neill in the hospital on May 9. He appears to have been a somewhat tactless intermediary, for his report (as Carlotta records it) propels her on a fresh rant of fury and resentment.

  He confirms that Merrill Moore is “the real villain” of her breakup with O’Neill. Moore, it seems, is a cousin of Ralph Barton’s and (like Charlie Chaplin) blames Barton’s suicide on Carlotta’s marriage to O’Neill. Moore claimed that the staff at McLean informed him Carlotta would have to be confined to the hospital for eight months; he reported this to O’Neill, who (Kozol tells Carlotta) believed it.

  “How could he,” storms Carlotta, “when he knew I had left the hospital and was in Boston the day he left? Gene lies as beautifully as Moore!” What O’Neill said to Kozol, Carlotta notes, is “proof to me his memory & thinking is through a haze—anything to give himself an alibi. To live with him would be dangerous—because he has no moral sense and always hides behind someone else when he, Gene, is at fault.

  “There is nothing else for him to do but kill me! And, as he has often boasted, Aronberg could easily find someone to do that ‘for a consideration.’”

  Carlotta then phones her former McLean doctor, William Horwitz, who, she maintains, informs her that “Moore is a liar” and says he himself told Moore that Carlotta for weeks had been ready to go home, but was waiting for her husband to make up his mind what he wanted to do. But Moore kept repeating that McLean must keep her there.

  In response to this dismaying information, Carlotta undergoes a “ghastly attack of ‘terrors’—is Gene up to some trick—or can he really want me?” After speaking on the telephone with her husband at the hospital on May 10, however, she notes that she feels better.

  Dr. Kozol meets with Russel Crouse at New York’s Waldorf Astoria and informs him of his conversation with O’Neill, after which Crouse writes in his diary: “Gene very gay and reports he and Carlotta will live in a hotel opposite Dr. Kozol’s office which is good.” The hotel is the Shelton, where Carlotta currently has a room, and the reconciliation is scheduled for May 17.

  On May 15, two days before O’Neill is to leave for Boston, Carlotta rises early for an appointment with her dressmaker. In a flutter of nervous anticipation she is having her dresses altered to accommodate her newer, thirty-pounds-lighter figure.

  Robert Meserve phones from New York to confirm that O’Neill, as agreed, has altered his will to once again make Carlotta his executor. “This ‘agreement’ thing breaks my heart,” she notes. “That I should need legal protection from my own husband whom I love so dearly.”

  She asks God for “the strength to nurse Gene & make him feel secure.” Not even Strindberg himself could have conjured so potent an embodiment of the marital love-hate trap (or hatkärlek in his native Swedish).

  For the past week, Carlotta has been speaking with her husband by phone twice daily. She has also been in touch with his primary nurse at Doctors Hospital, a middle-aged woman named Sally Coughlin, who will accompany O’Neill to Boston.

  Nurse Coughlin, along with Sherlee, has been opening the letters O’Neill refuses to read. There are two from the Winthers, both informing O’Neill they have heard from an irate Carlotta, who decried her husband’s actions against her during the past two months. Carlotta, writes Sophus, was offended by his skeptical response and he and Carlotta are now on “unfriendly” terms. Sophus wants to assure O’Neill that his loyalty “makes it impossible [for him] to accept her story at its face value.” He is sorry for Carlotta but, he pronounces, “she is trapped by her own nature and from that there is no escape.”

  Eline, hedging her bets, informs O’Neill that she wishes to avoid taking sides, as she loves him and Carlotta equally.

  Nurse Coughlin takes it upon herself to write to the Winthers on April 18, informing them she will give O’Neill their letters “when his nerves are in better shape.” She is “dreadfully sorry” for O’Neill, she says, but there is little she or anyone can do to help him, as “his one desire now seems to be to return to Carlotta even though he regards her as a mental case.”

  Not quite a month later, on May 11, Nurse Coughlin writes again to Sophus Winther, informing him that O’Neill will be leaving Doctors Hospital within two weeks, that he is joyful at the prospect of being reunited with Carlotta, and that she (Coughlin) still believes it unwise to give O’Neill the letter Sophus wrote to him and therefore is returning the letter to Sophus. Rather sourly, she comments, “He only seems interested in being with her again.” (She doesn’t mention Eline’s letter, but presumably she returns that one as well.)

  • • •

  A TWO-ROOM SUITE at the Shelton is being readied for O’Neill’s arrival. The little gray house on Marblehead Neck is a mansion by comparison, and as for Le Plessis, Casa Genotta, and Tao House, they are dream palaces from a distant past. But the irony of Carlotta’s reduced lifestyle isn’t something she dwells upon. She doesn’t comment in her diary on the fact that she and O’Neill will now, of necessity, share a bedroom (albeit furnished with two beds); she describes the suite that is to be their final destination as “charming,” with its sun-filled living room whose windows overlook the Charles River.

  “Phone Gene—he says he has jitters! So have I!” she notes on May 16. Dr. Kozol phones to tell Carlotta he plans to see O’Neill “every day for a bit & then three times a week.” The “beginning,” he says, is “most important.”

  Although O’Neill has known for several weeks that he is going back to Carlotta in Boston (on her terms), he has once again deliberately misled a number of his friends. To Joe Heidt, for one, he has confided he doesn’t want most of his friends to know he is going back to his wife; he is particularly reluctant to mention
his imminent departure from the hospital to those who, he is certain, will never be allowed by Carlotta to come near him again. But to Heidt, he confesses his eagerness “to get home.” As Heidt recalled, “He was all smiles.” He had just talked to Carlotta on the telephone, he said, and “was only waiting to get a little stronger.”

  Bennett Cerf is among the unenlightened. Visiting O’Neill on May 16, the day before his planned departure, Cerf presses his own offer of moving O’Neill into a suite at Manhattan’s Carlyle Hotel with a male nurse (already tentatively engaged), to which O’Neill makes a vague answer that Cerf evidently misinterprets. “The nurse was supposed to call for him the next day,” Cerf remembered. “O’Neill was all set to go to the Carlyle. The next day, he left for Carlotta, instead.”

  Another visitor, Brooks Atkinson, observes that O’Neill is in good spirits. “He said he was happy about going back,” recalled Atkinson, “but I was shocked at how thin he was; and his hands shook so. He was in a humorous mood. I told him I had just seen the movie version of The Long Voyage Home and he said he had had the opportunity of taking a flat sum or a royalty on the deal; he’d chosen the flat sum and lost a lot of money. He said he always made the wrong decision when it came to money.” (The surprising fact is that O’Neill’s enormous output during his lifetime brought him a net profit of under a million dollars.)

  The most emotional leave-taking occurs between O’Neill and Commins. Among the last to be told that O’Neill is going back to Carlotta, Commins goes with Dorothy to say good-bye; he is certain he will never see O’Neill again.

  “Saxe brought a letter he had gotten from Oona,” Dorothy Commins later recalled. “Oona had asked Saxe to give the letter to her father. Gene said he’d like to have it, and he put it under his pillow.” (The gesture was probably to avoid offending the Comminses, who, being devoted parents themselves, were distressed about O’Neill’s estrangement from his children. It is highly unlikely that O’Neill answered the letter, nor did he ever see his daughter again. Oona, with a happy marriage and eight grown children, seemed to be O’Neill’s one stalwart offspring. But as Chaplin—by then Sir Charles—began to ail, she herself gradually fell apart; after he died, at eighty-eight, on Christmas Day 1977, Oona, now Lady Chaplin, set about drinking herself to death. (She died fourteen years later of pancreatic cancer, on September 28, 1991. She was sixty-six.)

  • • •

  “SAXE AND I had offered Gene a home with us in Princeton,” Dorothy recalled. “I would have nursed him. But Gene said, ‘I’m absolutely helpless. I can’t even hold a cup of water. I can’t burden you with this.’

  “Gene put his arms around Saxe; his whole frame shook. He said, ‘Goodbye, my brother! God knows when I’ll see you again.’” Dorothy left the room weeping.

  Commins was shattered; try as he might, he could not understand O’Neill’s motives in preferring to return to Carlotta rather than live with him and Dorothy.

  Taking his leave of Armina Marshall, O’Neill tells her: “I know you and Lawrence and Saxe would do everything to help me, but I just can’t live on your doorstep—or on anyone else’s.” According to Armina, O’Neill fears he and Carlotta might be short of cash, and he asks for a loan of $5,000.

  “Of course, I wrote him a check at once,” Armina recalled, “and I asked him to sign a slip of paper with ‘I.O.U. $5,000’ written on it—no date, no strings or anything—just a note for the Theater Guild’s records.” (A few days after O’Neill’s departure, Armina receives a check for the $5,000 and a request from Carlotta to return the I.O.U; Armina puts the I.O.U. in the mail. She never hears from either of the O’Neills again.)

  Aronberg, although he has loaned O’Neill no money and has not offered him a home, knows that because of his part in the legal proceedings against Carlotta he is slated for amputation. With cynical foresight, he tells O’Neill, on the day he leaves the hospital, “Goodbye, Gene. I’ll be fired in a week or so.” O’Neill protests. (But it isn’t long after O’Neill rejoins Carlotta in Boston that Aronberg receives notice of his dismissal.)

  Sherlee comes to say good-bye on the morning of May 17. She is touched when O’Neill, forming the words with painful hesitance, comments on the new hat she is wearing. “That is very natty!” he says. Sherlee herself is all but speechless with grief.

  “You can’t look at someone you love and just say good-bye, when you know it’s the last time you’ll see him,” she later said. She finally thinks of a way to save both herself and O’Neill the pain of an emotional farewell.

  “I’d like to take you to your train,” she tells him, knowing that arrangements have already been made for a nurse to accompany him, and that neither she nor O’Neill would wish to say good-bye at the station. O’Neill, understanding, answers gratefully, “I’d like you to do that.” Sherlee throws him a kiss. “I’ll phone you later,” she lies, and hurries from the room, fighting back her tears.

  Later, knowing O’Neill has left, she calls the hospital, asking to speak to him. As she expected, he has left her a message saying good-bye and asking her not to come to the train, because he doesn’t want a dramatic farewell scene; he has already played too many.

  • • •

  IT IS SHORTLY before noon on May 17 when O’Neill leaves Doctors Hospital with Nurse Coughlin. She settles him in a roomette on the Yankee Clipper for the four-hour ride to Boston’s Back Bay Station.

  O’Neill sits huddled in an overcoat that emphasizes his fragility, and Sally Coughlin sits opposite him. As they await the train’s departure, Dr. Patterson hurries into O’Neill’s roomette to say his good-byes.

  “I don’t think I would have done this for any other patient,” Dr. Patterson later said. “I wanted to make his trip easier for him. I felt that he loved Carlotta and wanted to go back to her. But he was suffering from hospitalitis. Everything had been secure for him at the hospital. We took care of all his thinking, and he hated to make a break.”

  Accustomed to seeing O’Neill in his bathrobe, Patterson observes that he “looks small, for all the clothes he is in.” But Dr. Patterson is pleased to see O’Neill is not shaking.

  Patting O’Neill’s shoulder, the doctor reassures his patient, “You’re going to a good place. Everything is going to be all right.”

  O’Neill at first cannot bring out his words, but finally manages a broken “Thank you.”

  Doctor and patient shake hands and Patterson leaves the cramped roomette with a cheery wave.

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  Dr. Kozol meets O’Neill’s train with a wheelchair in the late afternoon of May 17 and drives him and Nurse Coughlin to the Shelton, where Carlotta nervously awaits them.

  “Seeing Gene again is a ghastly shock,” she notes. “He looks so thin and ill.” Her mind instantly goes to her three arch-nemeses. “What a curse Langner, Moore and Aronberg have been!” she deplores. O’Neill is exhausted and Carlotta and Coughlin put him to bed. After the nurse and Kozol leave, Carlotta sighs, “Finally we are left alone. I can’t believe Gene has finally come home.”

  In a later, rehearsed version of O’Neill’s homecoming, she recalled the occasion with more brio: “When O’Neill came back to me in Boston, I didn’t go to the train to meet him. I couldn’t do it. He had done something to me that never could be erased. I didn’t know how he would act.

  “The nurse brought him to the Shelton Hotel, and when he came in, he looked like a dead man. And as he walked by me, he said, ‘I’m sorry, forgive me, I love you.’ He didn’t even stop to say it. He walked right on and into his room. And that was that.”

  Carlotta and O’Neill have raised the curtain on the last scene of their final act. It will stretch painfully over the next two and a half years and the single confined setting—their small suite at the Shelton—will resound to the histrionics that both will savor to their last breath.

  While there’s no question O’Neill is now a fragile invalid and needs Carlott
a’s constant nursing, he needs her even more to stir his soul. His mind is still robust; he has somehow summoned the ferocity of a thrashing five-hundred-pound tuna determined not to be landed without a fierce fight.

  As for Carlotta, she more than adequately fulfills his expectations; she is prepared to assume the heroic double role of tender nurse-protectress and vengeful widow-in-waiting. They both go through the motions of pretending (at times, no doubt, even believing) they are lovingly reunited. Within less than two weeks of his return, O’Neill formally signs the revised will he agreed to as part of Carlotta’s condition for taking him back. After bequeathing all his worldly goods to his wife in Article III, and excluding Shane and Oona and “their issue now or hereafter born” from “any interest” in his estate in Article IV, he gets down to the nitty-gritty.

  In Articles V and VI, he appoints Carlotta as his executrix and states that she “shall have power to sell at public or private sale, without the necessity of obtaining license or authority of any court, the whole or any part of my real or personal property . . . to which I may be entitled at the time of my decease.”

  In other words, Carlotta, after her husband’s death, will have absolute control of the disposition of O’Neill’s entire oeuvre, including Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which O’Neill has heretofore consigned to a twenty-five-year postmortem slumber in the vault of Random House. Dr. Harry Kozol is one of the three witnesses to the will, a copy of which is filed in the Suffolk County Probate Court.

  O’Neill’s role is to humor Carlotta from time to time by playing the converted miscreant, ostensibly chastened and contrite. Hers is to propitiate the goose that laid the golden egg and make certain that egg will be ultimately her own.