By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  Giving More Stately Mansions to Sweden’s national theater, she insisted, is a tribute from O’Neill; compounding her lie, she concluded, “The play is not to be produced by any other theater and not to be published ever.”

  In 1964, in a “Prefatory Note” to the published version of More Stately Mansions, Gierow writes:

  “Mrs. O’Neill now feels that this play should be produced in future only in the repertory of the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theater, but she has agreed that its text may be made available for students of O’Neill’s work.”

  Gierow concedes that O’Neill, “had he lived, would certainly have revised and rewritten extensively, as he always did.” He then brazenly asserts that the text he himself has presumed to shorten “is one which O’Neill himself might well have authorized for publication,” because he, Gierow, was a man “in whose judgment [O’Neill] had confidence.”

  Gierow, as a writer, might have deluded himself that this was so; but surely Donald Gallup, in his heart, cannot believe that. Nor is Gallup embarrassed to mention in his own preface to the published play that, on a flyleaf laid into the unfinished manuscript of More Stately Mansions, O’Neill had written: “Unfinished work. This script to be destroyed in case of my death!”

  That Gallup ignored O’Neill’s written instructions is bizarre, as is his clumsy and misleading claim, in the published version of More Stately Mansions, that it is “a new play by Eugene O’Neill.”

  In fairness, the record should show that More Stately Mansions, as published and promoted, is the Gierow/Gallup version of an unfinished and disowned manuscript. It is simply and unequivocally not “an O’Neill play.”

  From publication, it’s a short, greedy hop for Carlotta to a Broadway production that opens on October 31, 1967, at the Broadhurst—again in the misleading guise of “a new play by Eugene O’Neill.” It is directed by Quintero, who at the time is undergoing treatment for a life-threatening throat cancer.

  The play is not well received by the critics but it ekes out a four-month run, largely because it stars Ingrid Bergman making a Broadway comeback as the more-than-half-mad Deborah Harford (the role O’Neill once jokingly suggested should be played by Carlotta).

  • • •

  QUITE EARLY IN their friendship, Carlotta had presented Quintero with O’Neill’s wedding ring, insisting he wear it. Now, during mental lapses when she relives frightening moments with O’Neill, she sometimes addresses Quintero as “Gene.” She shouts at “Gene” to stop tormenting her, to stop accusing her. At other times, she tells Quintero, “He comes and stares at me in the night.”

  On these occasions, Quintero does his best to defend Carlotta to her husband’s ghost. Quintero is well aware that Carlotta feels persecuted not only by O’Neill’s ghost but also by those of O’Neill’s friends who believed him a prisoner and who accuse her (behind her back) of faking the ardent inscriptions that she claims O’Neill wrote to her in his frail final years. (It is primarily to dispel this myth that Carlotta, in 1960, has had O’Neill’s handwritten inscriptions photographed, and has shared the cost with the Yale University Library for privately printing five hundred copies of the volume she has entitled Inscriptions: Eugene O’Neill to Carlotta Monterey O’Neill.)

  While Quintero’s conversations with Carlotta were certainly authentic (he took notes), his report should probably be read as a blend of his own vivid vocal timbre and Carlotta’s actressy declamation—as when, for example, he quotes her thus:

  “When I accepted O’Neill’s terms, I committed myself to a monastic existence surrounded by silence. Like a deaf mute I stood by his side, watchful of anything or anybody that could penetrate the enclosure we had built so his work could go on undisturbed.

  “I became the feared dragon by the gate. That is why I am hated so. Not that Gene, in spite of all his dedications and little notes swearing love and begging for forgiveness, didn’t also hate me.”

  • • •

  SHORTLY BEFORE THE breakdown that sent Carlotta to Regent Hospital, Quintero became aware that Carlotta was (as he put it) “falling into a certain kind of pattern.”

  “She gave away a ruby bracelet to the [hotel] elevator operator,” he recalled. “She would give me jewelry for my sister and my mother. I’d leave it on the table when I went. One time she began talking to an empty chair, as though O’Neill were sitting on it.

  “But when she was at her best, she was the most charming conversationalist. She had a very broad, all-encompassing kind of humor. She was enormously pleasant to look at. She hadn’t just shared a life with O’Neill. She had embraced his life and lived it with him. She really had a right to be Mrs. Eugene O’Neill. And she was tremendously loyal to him as an artist.”

  Early in 1968, Quintero leaves for Mexico. (He has not planned a long stay, but for various reasons his visit there is extended to a year.)

  By October 1968, Carlotta is nearing her eightieth birthday, and her behavior has become increasingly irrational; she seems again to be verging on a breakdown. Some members of the Carlton House staff attribute her behavior to drinking, but as it turns out, she is in the early stages of senile dementia.

  Donald Gallup, who sees Carlotta in October, recalls it is he who persuades her to enter a nursing home. “It was very plain that she needed care,” he explained.

  But it is Jane Rubin who, toward the end of October, accompanies her, once again, to Regent Hospital. The stuffed monkey Esteban is among those personal effects of Carlotta’s that Rubin takes along for her comfort.

  Carlotta’s doctor tells Rubin that Carlotta will never again be able to live on her own, and Rubin realizes it is “clearly hopeless” for Carlotta to return to the Carlton House.

  As Dr. Cherrick recalled, “The management was becoming exercised about Mrs. O’Neill’s behavior. She would wander in the halls, and go down to the desk and complain that people were spying on her.”

  Carlotta had become Dr. Cherrick’s patient in 1967 when the older doctor who had attended her for many years during her stays in New York retired and left Cherrick his practice; although quite young, Dr. Cherrick has excellent credentials. He becomes quickly convinced that Regent Hospital cannot give Carlotta the care she needs, and in November 1968, he arranges for her admission to the psychiatric ward at St. Luke’s Hospital on Amsterdam Avenue at 114th Street.

  It’s highly unlikely that Carlotta, given her mental state, is aware of the death in that same month—November 1968—of her nemesis, Agnes Boulton Kaufman. There is no evidence that either Carlotta or O’Neill had known or cared about the mess Agnes made of her final years. By then a confirmed alcoholic with little means, she had retreated to the Old House in New Jersey where, from afar in Vevey, Switzerland, she was looked after and partly supported by daughter Oona.

  Agnes’s health rapidly deteriorated. When she was hospitalized in 1967, Oona flew to the United States to be briefly at her mother’s side (to the distress of the aging Charlie Chaplin, who hated being separated from his wife). And on November 25 of the following year, Agnes died; she had outlived O’Neill by fifteen years.

  • • •

  THE SUITE AT the Carlton House is given up, and Rubin packs Carlotta’s possessions and sends them to storage. In an interview with the authors, Rubin listed those possessions: “Several wardrobe trunks of clothes, her jewelry, books, papers and a few items of furniture.” The one item that Rubin, while packing, was unable to account for was Esteban; she couldn’t recall ever seeing the stuffed monkey again after she deposited it with Carlotta at Regent Hospital. Of no intrinsic value, its loss was keenly felt for its sentimental value by several of Carlotta’s old friends; they believed that, rightfully, it should have taken its place among other memorabilia in the O’Neill collection at Yale.

  Rubin’s explanation of why Carlotta, with her ample financial means, was transferred to St. Luke’s, and not to one of the better-known local psychia
tric facilities such as Payne Whitney, was that “we wanted to avoid publicity, we wanted Carlotta somewhere she would not be known.”

  Dr. Gallup’s recollection, however, was that St. Luke’s was chosen because Dr. Cherrick was an attending physician there; Cherrick himself believed the psychiatric facilities were much the same as those of any other reputable hospital.

  “The only thing better would have been round-the-clock nursing care in her own home,” he said, “and that kind of arrangement for Mrs. O’Neill, or for almost anyone, would have been prohibitively expensive. [Plus the Carlton House did not want her and she had no other home to go to.]

  “At St. Luke’s,” concluded Cherrick, “Mrs. O’Neill was very attentively looked after by the staff, and she could not have had better treatment in any other hospital.”

  Carlotta, according to Dr. Cherrick, is now suffering from a severely aggravated form of senile psychosis. “Her behavior was, at times, violent,” he recalled. “She was somewhat paranoid and believed that certain people were out to molest her. She had delusions.” At St. Luke’s, she is given custodial care and treated with Thorazine, a strong tranquilizer.

  Gallup visits Carlotta for the first time at St. Luke’s in late December 1968. “She was on the violent ward, and a visitor had to be passed through locked doors,” he recalled. “Off the corridor there were four rooms, and Mrs. O’Neill was in one of them. It was a large, bare room, with a barred window.” To Gallup, she seemed “quite rational.”

  On Gallup’s second visit, about a month later, he observes that Carlotta’s condition has worsened, and he attributes this to her grim surroundings.

  “At one point,” he recalled, “a woman wandered into Mrs. O’Neill’s room and began talking to me about something that was obviously very important to her, but didn’t make much sense. Mrs. O’Neill said, ‘Pay no attention, she’s a loony.’”

  • • •

  JOSÉ QUINTERO RETURNS to New York at the end of January 1969. He has brought back a few small gifts for Carlotta, with whom he has been completely out of touch. When he telephones the Carlton House, he meets with what he regards as “very mysterious” resistance.

  The manager tells him Mrs. O’Neill has left, but won’t say when or where she has gone. “He was very courteous,” Quintero says, “but told me he was under strict orders not to let anyone know where Mrs. O’Neill was.” When Quintero called Jane Rubin and told her of the Carlton’s refusal to inform him of Carlotta’s whereabouts, he ran into another stone wall. “I could tell by her voice that she was sorry she had answered the phone,” Quintero recalled. “But I told her that the hotel would not tell me anything about Mrs. O’Neill, and that I wanted to know where she was. She said she was very sorry, but she couldn’t tell me that. I said I had to find her, I was going to find her some way, even if I had to put an ad in the newspapers. Finally she said that the best she could do was to give me the name of Mrs. O’Neill’s doctor.”

  According to Quintero’s account, he telephones Cherrick, who, after some hesitation, concedes that Carlotta is “very ill” and confined at St. Luke’s. Dr. Cherrick suggests Quintero meet him in the hospital lobby at seven that evening. The visiting hour is seven to eight, he tells Quintero; they will have coffee in the cafeteria, and he will “explain certain things.”

  “I went,” said Quintero, “and it got to be 7:15—no doctor; 7:30—no doctor.” At 7:40, fearful of missing the visiting hour entirely, Quintero, armed with the doctor’s name, talks his way onto the floor where Carlotta is confined. There, he tells the nurse he is a relative of Carlotta’s “on the Spanish side, the Monterey side, we’re first cousins,” and he is let into the ward.

  “It was not a private room. It was not even a room for two,” Quintero said, recalling his initial shock. “Three women were in this room. There was a small window with bars in it. Part of the room was in gloom. Mrs. O’Neill’s lamp was off and she was sitting at the very edge of the bed, looking out through the barred window. I didn’t recognize her from the back at first, because her hair was down to her shoulders.

  “I said, ‘Mrs. O’Neill.’ No response. I said, ‘Carlotta.’ No response. Finally, she looked at me and said, ‘There you are—bothering me again, Gene. Haven’t I expiated enough? Not even Lavinia had to go through what I’ve gone through.’

  “Finally,” according to Quintero, “she recognized me, and we had a chat.” He is horrified at how Carlotta looks. “She was wearing a once-elegant black street dress, now soiled.

  “Her hair was a mess, and her nails, which she always wore very short and polished, were so long and ragged. . . . I couldn’t believe that the widow of America’s greatest playwright was in this kind of situation.

  “And she told me she had only that one dress she was wearing, and a white hospital gown that she could change into while the black dress was being cleaned. She said she didn’t need much.”

  During the course of the conversation, according to Quintero, Carlotta switches back and forth between addressing him as “José,” and accusing him of being “Gene, who has come to upset her.” At one point, she begins talking about “those beautiful kimonos we bought in Shanghai.”

  “Don’t you remember, Gene?” she asks. “Or were you too drunk to remember?”

  Quintero is able to follow Carlotta’s rambling, for she has previously told him about the trip to Shanghai. “The conversation did not seem mad at all to me,” he recalled.

  Carlotta has moments in which she is oriented enough to ask Quintero quite rational questions about his mother and sister. She tells him that she wants to leave the hospital, and asks if he will come back.

  At one point, Quintero asks her why she has let her hair grow so long. She replies that she won’t let “that butcher” (the hospital barber) touch her hair.

  Quintero, like Gallup, feels that Carlotta’s surroundings might be a contributing factor to her mental condition.

  “I could understand how she felt,” he said. “You couldn’t ask Carlotta Monterey O’Neill to submit to that. She had grown accustomed to a certain way of being handled. It was impossible for her, really impossible. She was a vain woman—with cause.

  “When I left, I promised her I would come back.”

  To mitigate somewhat the squalor of Carlotta’s existence, Quintero does the one thing in his power; he persuades her former hairdresser from the Carlton House to accompany him to St. Luke’s and give her a proper trim.

  “He cut her hair, and she was perfectly willing to let him trim her nails, too,” recalled Quintero. “People came to the door to watch. I chatted with her, and she was quite lucid. We talked about the theater, and about O’Neill. She was wearing a clean dress. Jane Rubin had brought it.”

  Shortly after this visit, Quintero’s father dies, and he is obliged to return to his native Panama for a long stay. He never sees Carlotta again.

  Donald Gallup speaks to Dr. Cherrick about the possibility of moving Carlotta into a more felicitous atmosphere. Cherrick agrees that Carlotta is deteriorating but believes, as he puts it, that “she would not have reacted well to any institutional setting,” and her disorder is such that an institutional setting is mandatory. But he professes his concern.

  “At one time, I really feared for her life,” Cherrick recalled. “She stopped eating, and lost a shocking amount of weight.”

  Surprisingly, however, Carlotta makes a sudden recovery. “In a sense, you could say it was a complete recovery,” recalled Dr. Cherrick. Although Carlotta still has senile trends, “she got back to the state she had been in before coming to St. Luke’s.”

  On his final visit to St. Luke’s, shortly before Carlotta is discharged, Donald Gallup finds she has been moved out of the psychiatric ward into a private room in the general medical section.

  • • •

  IN MARCH 1969, Carlotta is transferred to the DeWitt Nursing Home on East Seven
ty-ninth Street, where she spends the next fifteen months—until July 1970. There she is visited regularly by Richard Crockett, as well as by Gallup and Rubin. Dr. Cherrick continues to attend her.

  “She was no longer on Thorazine,” he recalled. “That had gradually been tapered off before she left St. Luke’s.” With Cherrick, Carlotta would “ruminate about O’Neill, and often about her own early life.”

  In the winter of 1970, Jane Rubin is seriously injured in a car accident and confined for a lengthy hospital stay. When she recovers, she decides to retire and move with her husband to Sarasota, Florida.

  “Carlotta didn’t know me,” said Rubin, recalling her last visits before she leaves New York. “There was really nothing I could do for her anymore.”

  To fill the gap left by Rubin, Crockett engages a part-time aide, Marjorie Miller. “She looked after her clothes, bought her underwear, did the kind of things Carlotta needed a woman for,” Crockett recalled. “She visited Carlotta twice a week.”

  • • •

  CARLOTTA GROWS UNHAPPY with the DeWitt Nursing Home.

  “It was as good a nursing home as any,” said Crockett, “but it was a big institution, with all the drawbacks of that sort of place.

  “One of the things Carlotta complained about was that an attendant was always at her side. Carlotta still had a tendency to wander; she would wander into other patients’ rooms and disturb them. DeWitt insisted on keeping someone with her to prevent this. She didn’t like the way she was handled.”

  It is decided in consultation between Crockett and Gallup that Carlotta will be happier in the country, and in June 1970, the lawyer and his appointed aide, Miller, drive Carlotta to Westwood, New Jersey, to look at the Valley Nursing Home, which is situated in restful country surroundings.

  The place appears to please Carlotta and, accordingly, she is transferred there in July.