By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  not happy at the way her life is turning out. A/BG interviews with CVV & FM.

  describe him rather grandly as a “horticulturist.” letter, 6/5/36, to SW, Tao House Library.

  high-spirited woman of Dutch and French-Alsatian descent. According to DG, Beinecke, CM—in her later years—told him her mother spelled her name “Gottcheet.”

  difficulty focusing her eyes, causing severe headaches. A/BG interviews with CM; letter, EO to GJN, 2/27/39, As Ever, Gene (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Madison, NJ, 1987); CM’s grandson Gerald Stramm, interviewed by A/BG, said he believed she suffered from glaucoma.

  scold her for spending so much time in chapel genuflecting. A/BG interviews with CM & Gerald Stramm (CM’s grandson) & Pigeons on the Granite by DG (Yale University Library, 1988).

  think it over for a year before making a decision. told to JQ, who repeated it to the authors.

  aided by her beauty, might attract an upper-crust husband. Pigeons on the Granite & A/BG interviews with JQ & CM.

  “I had never seen anyone so radiantly beautiful.” San Francisco Sunday Call, 5/7/07; added details, Sunday Call, 6/2/07.

  “They will be pleased.” Ibid.

  “In 18 months she leaves & if we are then both of the same mind we will be allowed to announce our engagement.” The finishing school was known as Mme. Yeatman’s.

  “I don’t wish to be laughed at if it falls through.” Moffat letters, Tao House Collection.

  as long as it remained a secret, she would have no objection. Pigeons on the Granite & A/BG interviews with CM.

  the marriage was platonic. Ibid.

  schooled, as she once recalled, in “how to be a conversationalist.” A/BG interviews with CM.

  gave back the Rolls-Royce and the jewelry, and returned to America. Ibid.

  “I’ll always love Carlotta.” A/BG interview with John E. S. Moffat, John Moffat’s son.

  Hazel Tharsing became Carlotta Monterey. A/BG interviews with CM.

  star Lou Tellegen in a farce called Taking Chances. “Placing the Newcomer,” NYT, 8/26/23.

  he’d earned a reputation as a Casanova. NYT, 3/13/28.

  decided to marry the internationally renowned opera diva, Geraldine Farrar. Never a model of stability, Tellegen committed suicide at fifty-three by stabbing himself in the chest seven times with a pair of scissors.

  eugenically suited to father her child. A/BG interview with Mai-mai Sze, a writer and artist, close friend of Carlotta.

  magazines pressed her to pose for photo layouts. To her closest woman friend, Gene McComas, who lived in Monterey, CM wrote (12/30/18), “So you saw the picture in Vanity Fair?—there is one in Jan. Harper’s Bazaar—also a three-year-old-one in this month’s ‘Theater’—I don’t know why, but they are always asking me to sit for them & I try always to find time—because it is free advertisement!!!”

  soon to be associated with the as-yet-little-known O’Neill. The play, by Clare Kummer—in which CM portrayed a siren who drives the character played by the leading lady to near suicide—was well reviewed and ran for eighty-four performances at the Booth Theater.

  realized he had been—in his own words—a “blithering idiot.” letter, RB to CM, 7/28/26, Yale.

  his insensitivity that finally wrecked the marriage. Ibid., & A/BG interviews with CVV.

  “What do you think of my pussy?” she asked the nonplussed photographer. A/BG interview with Pinchot.

  sternly watched her diet, determined to maintain a lissome figure Past Imperfect.

  CHAPTER THREE

  recognized a veiled Carlotta as she passed him in the hotel lobby on her way out. A/BG interview with RR.

  volunteers cuts of his own that exceed Moeller’s concept A/BG interviews with PM.

  Moeller once remarked to Langner, “for if he does, out it’ll go.” The Magic Curtain.

  “That should do it.” GJN in Cosmopolitan, Aug. 1957, by GJN.

  that his marriage to Agnes has collapsed. A/BG interviews with ESS.

  “he gives the impression of being still at the very beginning of a career which is incalculable, except that it will be precipitate, fertile, concentrated, and solitary.” The New Republic, 3/16/27. Also published as “Man with a Mask” in ESS’s Fire Under the Andes (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1927).

  what gives her “standing in Gene’s eyes.” A/BG interviews with ESS.

  continue providing her with financial guidance, along with a lifetime income. A/BG interviews with Richard Ernst, partner in law firm handling Speyer’s affairs & Charles B. Stackelberg, a Speyer business partner.

  off by one year as to the date of O’Neill’s death—he died in 1953— A/BG interview & correspondence with BDC; also letter, EO to BDC, 5/10/27, Dartmouth, SL.

  book separate cabins under false names on the ocean liner they have selected. A/BG interviews with NW.

  “And when you fall in love—as I am sure you soon will—you better bear that in mind, too.” letter, 2/7/28, Harvard, SL.

  “always remember that I love you and Oona an awful lot—and please don’t ever forget your Daddy.” letter (early Feb. 1928), Harvard, SL.

  James Speyer sees them off, bringing flowers for Carlotta. CM diary, 2/10/28.

  “God help us both!” Ibid., 2/15/28.

  waterfronts of Southampton and Liverpool with his brother sailors, not venturing farther afield. interviews with O’Neill’s friend, former seaman James Joseph (“Slim”) Martin.

  “I got him the case—& he was flabbergasted!” CM to DG, former director of Beinecke, What Mad Pursuits! (The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 1998).

  when they were briefly apart soon after the birth of their first child. letter, 11/30?/19, Harvard, SL.

  “In a few days I’ll be back in your arms, My Own, and be your other—and firstborn!—baby again!” letter, undated (12/27/19?), Harvard, SL.

  “Be my Mother!” letter, 2/5/15, Berg Collection, NY Public Library.

  actually as conventional-minded as her father, and the affair was never consummated. BG interviews with BA.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “I wander about foolish and goggle-eyed with joy in a honeymoon that is a thousand times more poignant and sweet and ecstatic because it comes at an age when one’s past—particularly a past such as mine—gives one the power to appreciate what happiness means and how rare it is and how humbly grateful one should be for it.” EO to KM, 2/22/28, Yale, SL.

  “He is letting go.” 2/24/28, Beinecke.

  “I will go Carlotta one better and say that I am so happy I can live!” addendum to letter from CM to ESS, 2/24/28, Beinecke.

  he dropped it on the floor in a mock repudiation of its grandeur. A/BG interview with Mielziner.

  “But, as his wardrobe grew & he could pick & choose—he was like a happy child—all smiles and pleasure.” CM diary, 2/20/28.

  “Lots of other men—though few who were such drunkards as you, I admit—have cut out drinking without selfishly insisting that their wives, to whom it did no harm, cut it out absolutely too.” AB to EO (probably 2/11/28), Boston University.

  she expresses the hope that he will learn to respond in kind. CM diary, 2/24/28.

  “And altho’ our address must not be told now—when all this mess is over I will be proud & happy to scream it from the housetops.” 5/5/27, Francis McComas collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

  “All deepest friendship always, dear!” EO to AB, 3/10/28, Harvard, SL.

  “Outside of the fact that I should hate you for dragging such a nasty mess of notoriety around our children’s ears, when, if you weren’t so eager to get all you can, everything could be arranged quietly on a decent human basis.” late March, Harvard, SL.

  until it was too late to disentangle from Carlotta. Ibid.

  “I will
be the one to take the beating for all this!!” CM diary, 3/19/28.

  “I have my little Puritan prejudices!” 4/22/28, Yale, SL.

  nine-page letter in which he declares all-out war on Agnes. beginning of a nine-page letter from EO to AB.

  actually envious of his work “as compared to what she could do,” and even, at times, “did her best to hamper it.” Ibid.

  “I’ll gladly blow up the works no matter who it crushes so long as it crushes her.” Ibid.

  Agnes, he winds up in a frenzy of frustration, is “a skunk!” Ibid.

  specter of a tabloid scandal hanging over his head “like an unexploded bomb.” 4/23/28, Yale, SL.

  “there is no question of any correspondent, that we simply cannot hit it off together anymore, etc.” Ibid.

  “they’ll lay off of us for good.” late April 1928, University of Virginia, “Wind.”

  “But the wife explained that this was a business visit purely, in connection with a mortgage on a house or something of that kind.” New York World, 4/27/28.

  when he departed for London in 1928 ultimately “were either destroyed or stolen.” letter to Julian P. Boyd, 1/28/43, Princeton, SL.

  “He has gained, at last, a real mother—combined with mistress!” CM diary, 4/30/28.

  He urges her once again to accept his terms and to leave for Reno. early May 1928.

  He is “too old to start in being a sucker,” he adds. letter, EO to KM, 4/27/28, “TTWWF.”

  more generous than Sinclair Lewis’s wife got from him, “considering he must have been making three times my income!” Ibid.

  “they will find out I have been a good father . . . when they are old enough to understand all that has happened and when they really come to know me and about me.” letter, c. 4/8/28, Harvard, SL.

  for the damage he believes Agnes (never he himself) has done to them. 4/22/28, Yale, SL.

  even though it is “hell on the nerves” and “it’s raining boxing gloves!” 4/29/28, Dartmouth.

  “I am your lover!” Inscriptions: Eugene O’Neill to Carlotta Monterey O’Neill (Yale University Library, New Haven, CT, 1960), 5/8/28.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  by writing adulatory articles about the then rising young playwright. A sample article, “O’Neill Lifts the Curtain on His Early Plays” appeared in NYT, 12/21/24.

  “Though I started drinking because of Gene, I became a better drinker than he, because I had a stronger stomach.” A/BG interviews with LK.

  the proprietor caught Kantor, who had climbed up the fire escape, handing O’Neill a bottle through the window. Ibid., & unsigned article in NY Tribune after opening of Beyond the Horizon.

  “I don’t know where I am or what to do!” Carlotta scribbles in her diary on her return. 5/14/28.

  Carlotta later discovers them collapsed on beds in one of the villa’s guest rooms. A/BG interviews with LK.

  “I nearly died!” CM diary, 5/15/28.

  “He mustn’t drink—He should realize this is just what A. wants him to do.” CM diary.

  “I am frightened!” Ibid.

  his brain would turn into “the white of an egg” and sabotage his ability to write. A/BG interviews with KM & ESS, in whom EO confided that it was the psychiatrist Dr. Gilbert V. Hamilton who warned him about the grave consequences of continued heavy drinking; also LL in The Magic Curtain.

  “So, this is genius—this is love! God help us!” she explodes. CM diary, 5/19/28.

  even sanctions a “loan” to Kantor of $500 when at last, on May 21, he leaves the villa. A/BG interviews with LK.

  she was “taught to respect others—& to have self respect” and to be “honest, loyal, unselfish & decent”; and finally, irrelevantly: “to remember I was a woman!” CM diary, 5/23/28; during interviews with A/BG thirty years later, CM frequently recited her pedigree.

  “But how A. & Co. would love to get hold of it!” copy of letter, 8/2/28, given to A/BG by LK.

  the intention being to mislead those friends as well as the press as to O’Neill’s whereabouts. Ibid.

  Dynamo, which he expects the Guild to produce—although he will not venture to predict when it will be completed. EO to Theresa Helburn, 6/10/28, Yale, SL.

  the play is “a good symbolical and factual biography of what is happening in a large section of [the] American (and not only American) soul right now.” 8/26/28, Cornell, As Ever, Gene.

  his conviction that “anyone trying to do big work nowadays must have this big subject behind all the little subjects of his plays or novels, or he is simply scribbling around on the surface of things and has no more real status than a parlor entertainer.” Ibid.

  “He is too worried to do his best—but so anxious to prove to A. he can work in spite of her & the worry she is causing him! Of course that is all wrong—but I dare not offer any suggestions.” CM diary, 6/28/28.

  the detective tail Agnes, so that she can be “caught in flagrante,” which would give him “a weapon” that would enable him “to dictate terms.” 7/2/28, Yale, SL.

  Young ceded the farm to “Agnes B. Burton” on December 30, 1915, soon after Agnes’s daughter Barbara was born. Research by William Davies King for A Wind Is Rising, and confirmed by additional research by A/BG in the Sharon, CT, Town Hall land records: Vol. 46, pp. 325–326. This is further confirmed by the 2014 publication, by Harley Hammerman, on his comprehensive and invaluable website, eOneill.com, of A Formidable Shadow, The O’Neill Connection, by D. C. (Dallas Cline) Thomas, Agnes Boulton’s niece. Cline writes that when Barbara was nearly two, Agnes confided to her mother, Cecil, that there was no marriage in England to a man named Burton, and that Barbara’s father was in fact the unhappily married Courtland Young, who published Agnes’s fiction, and with whom Agnes had a long-term affair; it was he who had paid for the farm, Agnes told her mother; Barbara herself knew who her father was, writes Cline, and kept the secret of her birth.

  so fascinated a scholar of Oriental wisdom that he had learned both Chinese and Japanese. “Alchemy and the Orient in Strindberg’s Dream Play” by Leta Jane Lewis, as noted in Eugene and Oriental Thought, a Divided Vision by James A. Robinson (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale & Edwardsville, 1982).

  By 1925, he was describing himself as “a most confirmed mystic.” letter to KM, Friday (Summer 1923), Yale, “TTWWF.”

  “It’s going to be infinitely valuable to me in its bearing upon my future work.” letter, 9/14/28.

  “I am, for some idiotic reason, fearful of going to China under present conditions—six weeks is a very long time for Gene to be caged up—worrying about so many things—& I am in a humiliating position.” CM diary, 7/21/28.

  “Honestly, to me it is a sort of miracle.” 8/26/28, SL.

  “And then, what about me, his mistress?” CM diary, 8/29/28.

  “My honeymoon is over!” CM diary, 8/30/28.

  “Poor Barbara!” Ibid.

  “Gene is sunk in depression all day.” CM diary, 9/14/28.

  the monkey has long arms, “like Gene,” as Carlotta recalled years later. A/BG interviews with CM.

  the Marquis Esteban de Gonzales, Grandee of Spain, ruined himself with drugs. Ibid.

  informing him he’ll be gone for a year and asking him to have copies made for several friends, including Nathan and De Casseres. letter, 9/14/28, Tao House Library.

  “We are off on our pilgrimage—dear God—guide us.” CM diary, 9/25/28.

  “All men make mistakes in their youth . . . why must he be tormented and made ill?” CM diary, 10/1/28.

  He signs his letter, “With love as ever, James.” 9/25/28, Yale.

  “Whores are paid for their bodies,—not wives!” CM diary, 10/1/28.

  “Much deep love to you, my son, from Your Daddy.” late Sept. 1928, Harvard, SL.

  “All night we hang on to each other—as thou
gh we were in deadly danger!” CM diary.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Germ idea use Greek Tragedy plot in modern setting,” he had noted two and a half years earlier. WD, 4/26/26.

  he makes another note for his Greek tragedy, WD, 11/4/28.

  He also tinkers with another inspiration, “It Cannot Be Mad,” WD, 10/7/28, 10/8/28.

  “His work is him & he is it.” 10/11/28.

  and other one-act plays of the sea. letter to Patrick O’Neill, 9/18/40.

  O’Neill replied he didn’t need vacations. “Writing is my vacation from living.” Gaylord Farm Sanatorium questionnaire, 1924.

  proclaimed his recovery from tuberculosis and his newfound mission as his “re-birth.” letter to Dr. David Russell Lyman (Summer 1914), Yale, SL.

  jolted awake by a nightmare: she’s had a baby and O’Neill has left her. CM diary.

  unnerves Carlotta by impetuously diving into water she regards as dubious. CM diary, 10/22/28.

  she manages a detour to purchase several yards of the black satin-silk she knows is unique to Saigon. CM diary, 10/31 & 11/1/28.

  both he and Carlotta are once again “in awful state of nerves.” CM, 11/9/28.

  grumbles that O’Neill’s swims in the foul tropical waters “didn’t do him any good.” CM diary, 11/13/28.

  “He particularly loved the Police Museum,” Batson recalled years later, “where they had an exotic display of torture items confiscated from the Chinese.” A/BG interviews with Batson.

  Suspicious of Batson, she thinks she recognizes the signs. CM diary, 11/19/28.

  Agnes’s lawyers are “trying to hold me up for an agreement that would make me her financial slave for life.” Feb. 1928, Beinecke.

  the director to whom, after O’Neill’s death, she consigned the Broadway premiere of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. A/BG interviews with JQ.

  She says she “wept like a fool.” CM diary, 11/22/28.

  has been ordered by Dr. Renner to stay in bed. CM diary.

  he’ll arrange for O’Neill to be admitted to the British hospital, and will notify Carlotta. A/BG interviews and correspondence with Batson.

  she plans to return to France—alone. CM diary.