By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  II: NEW YORK

  Toward the end of 1955, having completed the sly refining of her diaries, Carlotta emerges from seclusion in Boston and establishes herself in New York at the Lowell Hotel, where she and O’Neill stayed briefly years earlier; O’Neill’s ghost moves in with her.

  “Two years ago today—at this hour—Gene was dying!” she writes to Atkinson. “Will I ever be able to free myself from this man—and the love I felt for him!”

  Carlotta, at the start of 1956, awaits the publication of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Having forgotten (or not caring) what she recently told Cerf at Random House about O’Neill’s wish to restrict the stage production of the play, Carlotta has agreed to allow Karl Gierow and the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theatre to present the premiere of Long Day’s Journey in Stockholm on February 2.

  In view of O’Neill’s long silence, both the book and the Swedish production create something of a stir, and Carlotta is courted by a number of American producers and directors eager to mount the play on Broadway. She bides her time, turning them down one by one, offering different and often contradictory reasons.

  To one prominent Broadway entrepreneur, Alexander H. Cohen, she writes (in April 1956): “I regret to have to tell you Long Day’s Journey Into Night is not available for production in this country. I am carrying out O’Neill’s wishes to the letter. He wished me to publish this play but not to allow it to be produced by anyone under any conditions! I hope you understand.”

  Carlotta knows perfectly well she is not carrying out O’Neill’s wishes; on the other hand, he did leave his entire estate to her to handle as she saw fit and, knowing her as he did, O’Neill surely expected her to disregard his instructions if she was so inclined.

  Eventually, Carlotta permits herself a remission from active grieving, and adopts a life of moderate socializing. While carefully maintaining an air of semi-seclusion and noblesse oblige, she deigns, from time to time, to invite select acquaintances to lunch or dinner. The meals—sometimes served in her hotel suite at the Lowell, other times in the adjoining Quo Vadis restaurant—are always lavish, prolonged, and festive.

  Despite Carlotta’s volatile temper, her guests find her often funny, loquacious, and entertaining.

  José Quintero has by now become a vital presence in Carlotta’s life. Although presumably she knows he is gay, she has fallen in love with the young director who magically breathed new life into The Iceman Cometh when he recently revived it off-Broadway.

  Quintero is mercurial, sensitive, and often passionately theatrical. In his early thirties, he is handsome, slim, and dark, with O’Neill’s piercing eyes, and he has long identified with O’Neill in a way he himself finds spooky.

  Evidently, in Carlotta’s mind, he is a Latin incarnation of the black-Irish O’Neill. (He was, in fact, born into a Catholic family in Panama, and he attached a mystical meaning to the fact that his birthday—October 15—and O’Neill’s were only one day apart.)

  Smitten as she is, Carlotta suddenly “remembers” that O’Neill actually told her she could allow Long Day’s Journey to be produced on Broadway if she found the right director. And it’s doubtful that anyone but Quintero, with his psychic connection to O’Neill, could have brought off that delicately perceptive and thrilling American premiere, a premiere that forced the critics to reevaluate and reacknowledge O’Neill’s incalculable contribution to the way the world experiences theater.

  • • •

  ONCE THE PRODUCTION of Long Day’s Journey is launched on its successful run, Carlotta has ample reason to congratulate herself. With O’Neill’s ironically grinning ghost looking over her shoulder, she has triumphantly won the battle to restore his luster.

  She sees no reason why she should stop there. Some of the producers who had vied to mount Long Day’s Journey are now petitioning her for the rights to the as yet unproduced A Touch of the Poet, as well as the long-since-abandoned A Moon for the Misbegotten. She rejoices that those plays are now hers to exploit.

  Carlotta, by this time, can afford to move into more lavish quarters, and she settles into the Madison Hotel on East Sixty-third Street (where she and O’Neill had so often stayed twenty years earlier). It is there that she entertains two of her many courtiers, Carmen Capalbo and Stanley Chase. Their off-Broadway revival of Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, directed by Capalbo and produced by Chase, opened in the fall of 1954 and is a sensational long-running hit. Both young men are captivated by Carlotta.

  One day, in the fall of 1956 (shortly before the Broadway opening of Long Day’s Journey), Capalbo and Chase are invited to the Madison for dinner. They send ahead a huge bouquet of yellow chrysanthemums and bring with them a bottle of choice Burgundy.

  “Mrs. O’Neill was appreciative, but acted very coy,” Capalbo recalled. “She said, ‘So charming, so European.’”

  Capalbo is surprised by the lack of sentimental clutter on display in her suite. There are, of course, bookcases filled with volumes of O’Neill’s plays, but the walls are sparsely hung; there are a few framed inscriptions to Carlotta from O’Neill, and several photographs of her and O’Neill together, including a charming one taken shortly after their wedding in Paris, in which they lean against a majestic ivy-covered tree trunk, gazing into their future idyllic life.

  Capalbo ventures to ask where all of O’Neill’s scrapbooks and other effects are kept.

  “I sent everything to Yale,” Carlotta says. “When I need something, they send it here for me.”

  A small ceramic Dalmatian, symbolizing the O’Neills’ beloved Blemie, stands on the mantelpiece of the living room. And then there is the stuffed monkey, Esteban (O’Neill’s first gift to Carlotta), seated in a corner of the couch.

  “That monkey had the silliest grin you ever saw,” recalled Capalbo. “Mrs. O’Neill would jokingly address wisecracks to it, every so often.”

  Carlotta asks Capalbo and Chase what they want to drink. They hesitate, worrying she might disapprove of drinking, but take a chance and ask for cocktails.

  “Good, I like people who take a drink,” says Carlotta, freed from tiptoeing around O’Neill’s alcoholism. “There are three important things in this world: Eating, drinking, and making love.”

  The meal, sent up from the hotel’s haute cuisine restaurant, Passy, is “sumptuous,” Capalbo recalled. “Steak, broccoli Hollandaise, French peas, wine. The waiter who served us was an elderly man whom Mrs. O’Neill had known for years. They reminisced a little about the old days at the restaurant. She treated him in the manner of a great lady to an old retainer—warmly, but aware of the distinction.”

  After dinner, Carlotta insists on serving brandy. The suite is uncomfortably warm, and Capalbo, slightly stupefied from the meal, the liquor, and the heat, suggests opening a window. Carlotta says she keeps the windows closed because the cold affects her arthritic hands, but she allows him to open a window for a few minutes.

  “We’d open it and close it every so often till around 12:30 a.m., when we finally left,” Capalbo remembered. “Stanley and I were reeling.” The two went to Reuben’s, an all-night restaurant, where they sat until dawn talking about their dazzling experience.

  “There had been no sequence to her conversation—it was as though she were on a psychiatrist’s couch. Within a half-hour after we arrived, she started telling us the most intimate things about her relationship with O’Neill.

  “We were stunned, not so much by the information she gave us, but because she talked so freely. She would say things like ‘Gene was such a horror, crazy.’ Then she’d cast her eyes heavenward and say, ‘Oh, Gene, he was my darling baby. I was his mother. He never had a mother. She was a dope fiend.’”

  Carlotta told the two rapt young men, “O’Neill was a tough mick, and never loved a woman who walked. He was an impatient lover—not like a Latin, who is content to simply sit at the edge of a bathtub and watch a woman bathe. With
O’Neill everything had to be quick, quick. He loved only his work. But he had respect for me. I had an independent income, and I told him I’d marry him if he would let me pay one half of all the household expenses. ‘I want a home properly run,’ he told me. And that is what I did for him. I saw to it that he was able to work.”

  Carlotta’s fondness for Capalbo and Chase culminates in May 1957, with their production on Broadway of A Moon for the Misbegotten. It’s a disappointment despite the presence of Franchot Tone as James Tyrone Jr. and Wendy Hiller as Josie Hogan.

  A Touch of the Poet was presented a year later (October 2, 1958) by one of Broadway’s most distinguished producers, Robert Whitehead. Like Moon, it curdled despite its starry (but fractious and embattled) cast: Eric Portman as Con Melody; Helen Hayes as his wife, Nora; Kim Stanley as his daughter Sarah; and Betty Field as Deborah Harford.

  • • •

  THE MONEY FROM the healthy sixteen-month run of Long Day’s Journey (it closed in New York in March 1958), plus royalties earned from the published book (it sold better than any of O’Neill’s previous plays), have provided Carlotta with the means to move into the even more posh Carlton House, a residential hotel at 21 East Sixty-first Street.

  Theodore (Ted) Mann begins visiting her there regularly in 1963. Mann is Quintero’s producing partner at Circle in the Square, where they are planning a revival of Desire Under the Elms, and he discusses with Carlotta their ideas for casting and other details. By the time the well-received production opens, Mann has fallen into the habit of calling on Carlotta once or twice a week.

  “I got to feel very responsible for her,” Mann said. “To spend lunch with her was to practically spend the day.”

  While Carlotta’s appetite is undiminished, she is, at seventy-four, feeling her age.

  “She used to walk very, very slowly” during their strolls together, Ted Mann recalled. “She was afraid of falling. But she enjoyed the exercise. Sometimes we’d walk to the Central Park Zoo. She always went to the monkey house. She loved the monkey house.”

  Mann is amused but not surprised by Carlotta’s evident affinity for monkeys. He had early on been introduced to Esteban and he knew that she had met O’Neill for the first time during the Broadway production of The Hairy Ape. But Mann is startled to see that the zoo’s monkeys seem to return Carlotta’s affection.

  “Even when there was a whole crowd of people looking at the monkeys, they would pick her out,” he remembered. “They would look right at her. She really had a very close thing with them.”

  In a gust of irony, Carlotta, like other of O’Neill’s abandoned lovers (most notably Agnes Boulton and Louise Bryant), has taken to drink. But she is also beginning to have periods of pronounced mental instability that are due to more than heavy drinking. She begins impulsively to give things away—jewelry, clothing, bric-a-brac, even the rights to plays. Mann recalled that once, during the summer, her behavior becomes so erratic that her doctor, Gilbert R. Cherrick, puts her into Regent Hospital, a small private facility on East Sixty-first Street.

  Carlotta “just clicked out,” according to Mann. “She was there about four weeks. I visited her, but I’m not sure she knew who I was.” She made what Mann termed “a remarkable recovery,” during which she would have periods of “tremendous lucidity.” But there were also “times when she would kind of drift off.”

  Mann said that Carlotta, centered on recalling her life with O’Neill, “would interweave episodes and characters from the plays into her conversation, without making any distinction between them and the actual episodes and people in her and O’Neill’s lives.

  “She would also say, often, that she wanted to die. She wasn’t bitter about it, she said she was just tired.”

  • • •

  QUINTERO, TOO, is aware that Carlotta is drifting away from reality. Spellbound by her from the day they met, on intimate terms ever since, Quintero acknowledges that their friendship has had its inevitable ups and downs. How could it not, given the volatile nature of each? The qualities that have enabled Quintero to interpret O’Neill brilliantly and intuitively—the very qualities that recommend him to Carlotta—are also the cause of their quarrels.

  “She would drive me, sometimes, to the point where I wanted to choke her,” Quintero once recalled. “She had a tongue that could cut.”

  III: LIMBO

  Those few people to whom Carlotta draws close during the ensuing years are aware she is a haunted soul; in her mind, she is still embattled with O’Neill, endlessly reliving their marriage, unable to shake off the weight of her guilt, locked into daily conflict with O’Neill’s truculent ghost.

  On October 23, 1964, Carlotta writes a new will bequeathing to Yale’s Beinecke Library all of O’Neill’s papers not yet formally assigned, and naming Yale as the beneficiary of all royalties from the O’Neill plays. (Under a complicated copyright arrangement, Yale shares the interest in some of these royalties with the estates of Oona Chaplin and Shane O’Neill.)

  Carlotta stipulates that a portion of the royalties be assigned to the establishment of “Eugene O’Neill Scholarships,” to be awarded to “worthy students of playwriting.”

  She bequeaths her jewelry, apparel, and personal household effects to Cynthia (who has never fully recovered her health and who will survive Carlotta by only eight months). And in a codicil to the will drawn on March 3, 1967, Carlotta leaves $25,000 each to Cynthia and to her grandson, Gerald Eugene Stram.

  Carlotta’s signature on the 1964 will, while not as flamboyant as it once was, still flaunted the large capital C and confident M of her (assumed) middle name; by contrast, the codicil, signed two and a half years later, bears the signature of a feeble old woman—not cramped like O’Neill’s, but every bit as shaky. That signature is a sorrowful symbol of Carlotta’s decline from the self-assured, assertive woman she was at seventy-five, to the distraught wraith she has become only four years later.

  According to her latest lawyer, Richard Crockett (of the law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft), Carlotta, nearing eighty, had been in poor health for some time. Almost blind, recalled Crockett, she could barely see to sign the codicil even when seated under the brightest lamp in her Carlton House suite and peering through the magnifying glass she’d used to decipher O’Neill’s handwriting.

  • • •

  THE THREE PEOPLE who are in almost daily touch with Carlotta throughout the time she lives in New York are the play agent Jane Rubin, the Beinecke’s Donald Gallup, and Crockett. Of the three, Jane Rubin is probably the most long-suffering.

  After O’Neill’s death, Rubin found herself assuming a number of duties for Carlotta, more out of an old friendship than as the representative for O’Neill’s plays. When Carlotta is in failing health, physically or mentally, Rubin helps to look after her.

  More and more often, there are times when Carlotta is completely helpless. Cynthia is herself unwell and cannot come to her. Most of Carlotta’s former friends are dead or live far away, or have, by now, been dropped.

  Jane Rubin seems to be Carlotta’s only woman friend within calling distance; it is Rubin who, in consultation with Carlotta’s doctor, oversees her stays in the hospital, visits her regularly, pays her bills, and acts as a buffer between Carlotta and her dwindling social and business obligations.

  Carlotta feels closest, however, to Donald Gallup because of his guardianship of, and intimacy with, the O’Neill papers at Yale. In a sense, he and Carlotta now share O’Neill’s life.

  While she lives with her memories of O’Neill, Gallup lives with the tangible evidence of O’Neill’s body of work. He spends the major part of almost every day at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library collating the material in the vast O’Neill collection.

  Dr. Gallup’s involvement with both O’Neill and Carlotta has led him, in 1962, to abet a project that is both quixotic and questionable. With Carlotta’s befogg
ed blessing, he becomes a partner in the reconstruction of the triple-length, very rough, manifestly unfinished manuscript of More Stately Mansions that somehow was overlooked at the time Carlotta helped her husband tear up his cycle notes and unfinished scripts, and then found its way into the O’Neill collection at Yale.

  Describing this misbegotten project, Gallup writes: “In the spring of 1957, Mrs. O’Neill informed Karl Ragnar Gierow, the director of the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theatre, of the existence of More Stately Mansions and eventually gave him permission to attempt to shorten the script for possible production in Swedish translation. There was at that time no question of its publication, either in Swedish or in English.”

  After five years, Gierow believes he has succeeded in making an acting version, guided “in part” (so he claims) by the author’s own extensive notes, but following Mrs. O’Neill’s stipulation that only O’Neill’s words may be used.

  Carlotta herself has once again either forgotten or shrugged off one of her husband’s injunctions: “Nobody must be allowed to finish my [cycle] plays” (authors’ italics). But these are the years during which she is often in a state of confusion.

  When the authors of this biography query her (on April 21, 1961) about the details of the Swedish production (and the coming publication) of More Stately Mansions, Carlotta delivers a tart tirade:

  “Dr. Gierow didn’t change one comma, one dash, one period. He followed instructions left by O’Neill on how it should be cut.” She adds that the working notes by O’Neill on how he intended to cut the play “were contained in the typewritten copy.” And she complains: “I can’t stand it when people question what I’m doing with O’Neill’s plays. I am carrying out his wishes. He gave me the plays and said I could do anything I wanted with them—burn them, destroy them.”