By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  Three years after O’Neill’s death, Carlotta (as is her wont) gives a more histrionic rendering of the event: O’Neill, she said, began tearing the manuscript pages into pieces, but he could “only tear a few pages at a time, because of his tremor”—so she helped him. “We tore up all the manuscripts together, bit by bit. It took hours. It was awful. It was like tearing up children.”

  “Didn’t you try to dissuade him?” Carlotta was asked by an interviewer some years later. “Certainly not,” she replied. “I’d not be so presumptuous. No one could get very far trying to persuade him to do anything.”

  With the destruction of the cycle, O’Neill gave up his last feeble pretense of a grip on life. Nietzsche’s “poison-worm” gnawed more fiercely at his heart every day. Often he wept with despair that death would not come.

  “There was nothing Gene wanted to do, no one he wanted to see,” Carlotta said. “I’d ask him if there were any of his old friends he wanted me to write to for him, or ask to come for a visit, and he always said ‘No.’” Carlotta herself seldom left the hotel or had any visitors, but in letters to a few chosen friends, she whispered poignant scraps of what she knew were her final days with O’Neill.

  In one such letter, she confided the pathos of listening to O’Neill while she prepared him for sleep one night in early October, as he spontaneously (with his flawless memory) recited a poem by the mid-nineteenth-century English poet Austin Dobson, “In After Days”:

  In after days when grasses high

  O’er-top the stone where I shall lie,

  Though ill or well the world adjust

  My slender claim to honour’d dust,

  I shall not question nor reply.

  I shall not see the morning sky;

  I shall not hear the night-wind sigh;

  I shall be mute, as all men must

  In after days!

  But yet, now living, fain would I

  That someone then should testify,

  Saying—“He held his pen in trust

  To Art, not serving shame or lust.”

  Will none?—Then let my memory die

  In after days!

  On October 16, 1953, O’Neill reached his sixty-fifth birthday. He hoped it would be his last. One day, Carlotta tried to feel him out about his wishes regarding a funeral. She decided to approach the subject obliquely. “If I should die,” she began, “I want a simple burial and no man of God.”

  O’Neill “saw through” what she was driving at, wryly recalled Carlotta.

  “I’ll go long before you,” he retorts.

  “Well, what do you want if you do?” asks Carlotta.

  “Get me quietly and simply buried,” he says. “And don’t bring a priest. If there is a God and I meet Him, we’ll talk things over personally, man to man.”

  Carlotta later declared, “I admire Gene more for this than anything I can think of. There are so many Catholics who have lost faith and, the last minute, they have doubts and ask for a priest. Gene stuck to his ideas to the end.”

  Carlotta had been present when O’Neill, some years earlier, had expressed to Sophus Winther his deep disappointment in the Church; O’Neill’s words eloquently echoed his disillusionment with religious orthodoxy after the disastrous failure of Days Without End.

  “Man has been told the truth,” said O’Neill (according to Winther’s meticulous notes). “He has been shown the way to the good life in simple language. Jesus, Confucius, Lao Tzu—a little more complex—Socrates; but it has been futile. Great and simple truth has been perverted into worldly power by organized institutions. The Church in our world has no relationship to Christianity. The Church is a fraud.”

  In her diary, Carlotta had earlier noted, “Gene wants to die with no one near him but Dr. Kozol, Mrs. Welton & myself. He knew we were loyal and loved him—he trusted no one else. He wanted no one but us to see him when he was dead.”

  It is Carlotta’s words on which we must rely for O’Neill’s state of mind during his final months, for he has long since given up dictating letters to friends; those very few friends who still visit do so under Carlotta’s watchful eye, and their recollections are of a strangely altered man—vague, placid, almost vacuous. Now, manifestly close to death, it’s likely he is permitted all the sedation he craves. The only person to whom Carlotta allows her husband to speak privately is Dr. Kozol (who declined to be interviewed by the authors after O’Neill’s death).

  Among O’Neill’s own last recorded words are a letter to Bennett Cerf, signed by him (as dictated to Carlotta) on June 13, 1951, in which he thanks Cerf for sending him back some miscellaneous writings deposited with Random House in 1948, and assuring Cerf he does not want back Long Day’s Journey Into Night, reminding his publisher, “That, as you know, is to be published twenty-five years after my death—but never produced as a play.” (This, of course, contravenes Carlotta’s statement about her husband’s designation of Journey as a nest egg to provide funds whenever needed.)

  • • •

  TOWARD THE END of October 1953, according to Carlotta, O’Neill finds he can no longer smoke a cigarette without burning himself. He loses his appetite and barely eats at all. On October 25, Carlotta describes a heartbreaking episode that takes place after a quiet evening of reading and talk in their living room:

  “At about 9:30 [Gene] said he was tired and would go to bed. I got him his stick—he was slow in getting out of his chair and had shakily taken 2 or 3 steps—then, suddenly, he fell over on his back!” Carlotta, with her arthritic spine, could no longer lift him, and asked O’Neill to let her call for help from the hotel staff.

  “No, I’ll do it myself if it kills me!” was O’Neill’s response. “He struggled with all his strength & could not lift himself—then fell on his face and wept like a child!”

  Carlotta phones the hotel manager for help and he sends two men to the suite. They carry O’Neill to his bed. Later, he tells Carlotta he had tried to walk to see “if this was the end.” He says it is.

  O’Neill had night sweats, and Carlotta had to change his clothes, struggling to lift and turn him. “He tried to help, but he just couldn’t. He had great trouble moving, and even talking,” she recalled.

  Nearly a month later, on November 24, O’Neill stopped eating entirely.

  “An infection had set in,” Dr. Ohler recalled. “What he had was the rapidly fulminating type of pneumonia.

  “It spread quickly because he was at a low level. He had shortness of breath, a cough, and a high fever. He was given antibiotics, but the heart was too weak to rally, and there seemed to be no will to live.”

  Ohler’s words were echoed by Carlotta: “He wanted so much to die. He gradually lost all coordination of his muscles. At last he was like a stone man—his nurse and I had such difficulty in moving him. . . . Together we kept him as comfortable as possible—and loved him, each in her way, which meant much to him. He felt protected, secure.”

  • • •

  IN AN INTERVIEW with the authors shortly after the 1956 premiere of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Carlotta repeated what she said were O’Neill’s last words, uttered on November 24, three days before his death:

  “He clenched his fists, raised himself slightly in his bed and gasped, ‘Born in a hotel room—and God damn it—died in a hotel room!’”

  O’Neill, she said, “was in a coma for thirty-six hours. He never opened his eyes or moved all that time. There was no suffering. I don’t know whether I could have stood it if I’d had to watch him suffer. I never left him during the whole time. I held his hand and stayed at his side. He had beautiful hands.”

  This account by Carlotta was published seminally in the authors’ 1962 biography, O’Neill, at a time when some of her diaries were still unavailable to scholars; in her 1953 diary (later released by the Beinecke Library), she gives a different account:

&nbs
p; On the night of the 25th of November [O’Neill] tried to say something to me—I couldn’t understand—his speech was muffled—I got up on the bed, held him in my arms & said, “Darling, say it again, slowly—please—so I can understand.” He tried once more—his eyes were troubled—he was afraid—I could not understand him—he closed his eyes, I began to cry—he never spoke again!

  Evidently, in her original, highly dramatic version, Carlotta got carried away, as she so often did. O’Neill very probably did utter those “last” words at some point during his final days, if not on his actual deathbed; a more befitting curtain line is hard to imagine, and one can hardly blame Carlotta for making use of it. (But it behooves the conscientious biographer to correct this widely disseminated misapprehension.)

  O’Neill died at 4:39 on Friday afternoon, November 27, 1953.

  “Gene wanted no religious service,” noted Carlotta, and “a private burial with only Dr. Kozol, Mrs. Welton & I [sic] at his grave. I carried out his wishes to the letter—but it was most difficult—&, at times, heartbreaking—the scavenger Press after me—& criticism on many sides. But, thank God, he is at rest, no one can harm him now.”

  EPILOGUE

  I: BOSTON

  Before Carlotta allows O’Neill’s body to be placed in the J. S. Waterman Funeral Parlor, she insists on an autopsy.

  “I wanted to know what in the name of God was the matter with this man I had nursed so long,” she recalled. In an interview with the authors nearly three years after O’Neill’s death, Carlotta looked back in anger: “He never had Parkinson’s disease. Never.”

  As arranged by Dr. Kozol, “Necropsy No. 16,697” was performed on November 28 “at 9 a.m., 16 hours post mortem.” The nine-page report reveals that O’Neill suffered from a rare disease that only superficially resembles Parkinson’s, one in which the cells of the cerebellum are subject to a slow degenerative process.

  Drawing no conclusions about whether, in O’Neill’s case, the disease was inherited, “Necropsy No. 16,697” does point out that one of the initial symptoms, trembling hands, was shared by O’Neill with both his mother and his brother. The report concludes with Dr. Kozol’s “clinical impression” that O’Neill’s “cerebellar degeneration” was “perhaps familial, although the family history was never clear as to details.”

  Carlotta asks Dr. Karl Ragnar Gierow, the director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, to write her an interpretation of the pathologist’s findings; she and her husband, during O’Neill’s final years, had grown close to Gierow, who has proudly presented many of O’Neill’s plays in Swedish translation.

  Gierow is fascinated. “The sickness,” he writes, “destroys only the motor system of the organism. Thus the horror of it is that the cerebrum remains unharmed. O’Neill’s mind was completely clear the entire time, able to comprehend his misery.” As a result of the affliction, Gierow points out, “from top to toe the body loses all control; a helpless wreck, a foundering ship, a hull without a helm.”

  • • •

  CARLOTTA EMBRACES THE ROLE of grieving widow; her diary and letters to friends during the weeks and months after O’Neill’s death are awash in tears.

  “He wanted so much to die,” she writes to Brooks Atkinson on December 11. If he hadn’t left her so much to do, she adds, she herself would have no reason to go on. “The being without him is at times almost more than I can bear.”

  On her first Christmas without her husband, Carlotta exclaims, “Oh, God—what a price one pays for love such as we had—and it was worth it a hundred times—no matter how deep the pain!”

  • • •

  LOCAL AND WIRE-SERVICE REPORTERS had tried for four days to find out when and where O’Neill would be buried. His friends in New York, where a newspaper strike was in progress, also attempted to discover when the funeral would take place. But Carlotta, determined to keep the plans for the burial a secret, secluded herself and issued no comment.

  “I carried out every wish of [O’Neill’s] to the letter,” she later protested in an interview with The New York Times that appeared on November 4, 1956, “and it was very difficult; he wished to keep everything from the papers; he wished no publicity; he wished nobody to be at his funeral; he wished no religious representative of any creed or kind.

  “Well, what I went through! But the employees of the hotel, and particularly two men who were strong of arm, and determined, good Bostonians, were throwing people downstairs and I don’t know what.”

  She added that she and Nurse Welton were forced to go out of their way, changing taxis, to get to the undertaker’s, which was only two blocks from the Shelton.

  “We’d ride miles to keep the place a secret. And then my lawyer and I went out and bought the burial site.” (In his will, O’Neill had written: “I desire to be buried in a burial lot with my wife and I authorize my Executrix to purchase such a lot and erect a simple stone thereon.”)

  A little before ten o’clock on the morning of December 2, the hearse bearing O’Neill’s body moved quietly away from the Waterman undertaking parlor and slipped unobtrusively into the stream of Boston traffic. It was followed by a car bearing Carlotta, Nurse Welton, and Dr. Kozol. No one would have guessed—not even the waiting and watching reporters—that this inconspicuous procession was Eugene O’Neill’s funeral cortege.

  The two vehicles pulled up at a remote corner of Forest Hills Cemetery, on Boston’s outskirts. There, under a pale sun that yielded no warmth, Carlotta, Welton, and Kozol stood in silence as O’Neill’s coffin was lowered into its grave.

  Only one story describing the burial appeared in a local newspaper; it was written by Warren Carberg, of the Boston Post, who did not reveal the source of his information.

  “There were no formal prayers,” wrote Carberg. “A funeral director’s assistant stepped forward and placed a single spray of white chrysanthemums on the casket, and then the three mourners turned and walked to the automobile.

  “Not a word was spoken. No hymns were sung. Mrs. O’Neill wore simple black clothing, with no mourning veil. She was pale and appeared without make-up. There seemed to be tiny lines of grief about her eyes and mouth. No tears showed in her eyes.”

  Carlotta eventually provided the stone—cut from Italian marble, rough around the edges but highly polished in front where the lettering was engraved. It is four feet high and six feet wide, and is inscribed as O’Neill wished.

  “It’s a very lovely cemetery,” Carlotta once reminisced. “It’s got beautiful trees, enormous rhododendrons, and in the spring and summer, with the dogwood, it’s quite, quite lovely. I planted laurel around the headstone, like the laurel wreaths of the Greek heroes.”

  • • •

  FOR A TIME, Carlotta secludes herself in Boston, dredging up memories both good and bad of her life with O’Neill, and “working over” her personal diaries. She decides that the two contentious years she and her husband spent in New York during the production of The Iceman Cometh and the tryout of A Moon for the Misbegotten “were tragic and senseless!” and she destroys the diaries she kept for 1946 and 1947.

  Uncannily, Carlotta has begun to think of herself as O’Neill’s alter ego, in much the same way that Lavinia Mannon in Mourning Becomes Electra assumes the character of her dead mother, Christine.

  Carlotta plays a dual role: that of the dramatically mourning widow who dresses exclusively in black (down to her judiciously chosen brooches and rings of onyx, opal, and obsidian, and strings of black pearls), and that of O’Neill’s alter ego; she manages his literary property in a manner she sometimes chooses to believe is mystically dictated to her by O’Neill’s spirit.

  Carlotta can imagine O’Neill’s acknowledgment that mourning becomes her. “I will never wear anything but black, now that Gene is dead,” she vows in her diary on April 8, 1954, four months after O’Neill’s death.

  Two months later, still absorbe
d in editing her diaries, Carlotta writes again to Brooks Atkinson from the Shelton:

  “Have been working hours a day—up to eleven or twelve at night—Good, in a way. I sleep at least four solid hours a night! A heart-breaking job—beginning February 10, 1928 [the date they eloped to Europe]—until Gene’s death. But, this must be done—I found the diaries were fading! And it must be done right and honestly.”

  After Carlotta confides to other friends that she has deleted certain of her diary entries “to avoid scandal,” a rumor surfaces that she is rewriting O’Neill’s diaries. This is patently untrue; she did ask her husband to delete, or slightly alter, some of his Work Diary entries when he transcribed them into the new set of leather-bound diaries she bought him soon after their marriage. O’Neill obliged his new bride in her wish to erase traces of Agnes and strengthen her own importance in his life. But she would have to have been a master forger to simulate his distinctive crabbed penmanship.

  “I must stick to [rewriting my] diaries—which will take me all summer!” she tells Atkinson. “All I do is work and talk to Mr. Meserve—my lawyer here.”

  Three more months go by before she again writes to Atkinson, this time complaining, with mixed anger and humor, that the Random House set of O’Neill’s plays has been allowed to go out of print. If the books are not to be had in the stores, she argues, “the would-be purchaser gives up his effort of owning O’Neill’s works—and Mrs. O’Neill eats less—so to speak! . . . Gene isn’t dead nine months and this is how they behave! It sickens me!”

  • • •

  WITH THE FREEDOM O’Neill has legally bestowed on her, Carlotta has slipped into the heady role of O’Neill surrogate, and she can be as imperious (and as contradictory) as O’Neill ever was.

  She has by now wrested Long Day’s Journey Into Night from Bennett Cerf’s stubbornly protective custody in its Random House vault. When Cerf insists on honoring O’Neill’s injunction that the play not be published until twenty-five years after his death, Carlotta tells him that O’Neill only wanted to restrict the stage production of the play, not its publication. She puts Long Day’s Journey into the willing hands of the Yale University Press.