by Arthur Gelb
she’d finally had to “go and pay $15 to get my arm operated on . . . it nearly killed me—I wept—but I’m glad, as for the first time in two weeks I’ve been without pain.” 8/25/21, Harvard, “Wind.”
“I don’t think he spoke to any member of the cast,” she said, “but I do recall his dramatic brooding face.” A/BG interview with Gillmore.
described by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant as “betrayal, rather than portrayal.” “Portrait of Pauline Lord,” Fire Under the Andes.
plot of a new play he was calling The Hairy Ape. A/BG interviews with Kennedy.
calling it “a play written with that abundant imagination, that fresh and venturesome mind and that sure instinct for the theater which set this young author apart . . . from a lot of funny little holiday workers in cardboard and tinsel.” NYT, 11/3/21.
a bigoted egomaniac eaten by ulcers. A/BG interview with BA.
“If the gloomy trademark of Eugene O’Neill’s depressing product has kept you hitherto away from his plays, disregard it for an hour or so and go to see Anna Christie.” Tribune, 11/3/21.
remarked that “the happy ending” worried him. Louisville, Kentucky, Courier-Journal.
“It is the acceptance of suffering and happiness lived out into a new life.” Globe, 11/3/21.
“I love every bone in their heads.” In the Gelbs’ 1962 O’Neill, the quote appeared as “I hate every bone in their heads”; this was challenged by several of EO’s close friends, including KM and JL, who said the quote should have read “love,” not “hate”—which of course is funnier—and we have now corrected it.
“(In fact, I once thought of calling the play ‘Comma’).” The Theater of George Jean Nathan, by Isaac Goldberg (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1926).
found it “sufficiently dramatic and in harmony with any deep rhythm of life.” EO to Malcolm Mollan (Dec.?) 1921, Conn. College, SL. Mollan, who had befriended O’Neill during his brief stint as a reporter on the New London Telegraph in summer of 1912, had sent him a list of questions, preparing for an article published in the Philadelphia Public Ledger Sunday Magazine, 1/22/22.
“A work of art is always happy; all else is unhappy.” Ibid.
he confessed to the writer Malcolm Cowley. Brentano’s Book Chat, July/Aug. 1926.
with the proviso that Anna Christie not be one of them. AG conversation with JWK, 1962.
“We shall live in hopes that it may not recur.” letter from Dr. John Aspell to James O’Neill, & Dept. of Pathology, St. Vincent’s Hospital records.
“I believe you are going to be very much interested in this play, whatever your verdict may be.” 1/2/22, Cornell, SL.
those two plays, said O’Neill, were “certainly two of my finest, while [Nathan] did like Gold and The Fountain (two of my worst).” letter, EO to Richard Madden, 3/11/29, Yale, SL.
“Think I have got the swing of what I want to catch and, if I have, I ought to tear through it like a dose of salts.” 12/10/21 (private), SL.
aboard the luxury liner S.S. Philadelphia. EO’s Shipping Articles, S.S. Philadelphia, lists E.G. O’Neil [(sic]), “AB,” as one of two crewmen transferred from the S.S. New York on 8/19/11. His wages “per month” were $27.50.
rare look into the fearsome life of the coal stoker. Driscoll was listed as J. Driscoll on Shipping Articles Public Record Office, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, England; and General Register Office of Shipping and Seamen, Cardiff, Wales.
“It seemed to give him mental poise to be able to dominate the stokehole, do more work than any of his mates.” NYT, LK (aka Louis Kalonyme), 12/21/24. The same quotation (unattributed) appeared in New Yorker, Profiles, Part II, Hamilton Basso, Profiles, Part II, 3/6/48.
O’Neill learned, “by jumping off a liner in mid-ocean to the bewilderment of everyone who knew him, for there never lived a more self-assured, self-contented guy, seemingly.” letter, EO to Ralph E. Whitney (private), SL, 3/11/41.
“He chose to write about the hairy stoker, victim of modern industry, a man far removed from [O’Neill] himself in actual circumstance,” reported Sergeant, “in order to voice through Yank that social rebellion and sense of buffeted frustration which was his philosophic message at the time.” portrait of O’Neill, Fire Under the Andes.
was again “about to have the ghastly joy of attending two sets of rehearsals at the same time.” 9/23/22, Yale, “TTWWF.”
Wolheim, according to Kennedy, “roared his profane affirmative.” A/BG interviews with Charles O’Brien Kennedy.
marked too many of his earlier efforts. letter, 1/2/22, Cornell, SL.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“My mother got him to go on the wagon and stick—and he has stuck.” letter to Harold de Polo, 1/10/22, Virginia University, SL.
had suffered a slight stroke. letter from Libbie Drummer to her friend, a Mrs. Phillips, undated, c. 3/20/22, is among the files of Hull, McGuire, Hull, the New London law firm that handled the O’Neill estate; in LS collection, Conn. College.
doctor confirmed she’d had a stroke. Ibid., & Ella O’Neill death certificate signed by Dr. Hunter & filed in Bureau of Vital Statistics, California State Board of Health.
intimately involved with Ella during her illness. letter from Libbie Drummer to her friend, a Mrs. Phillips, undated, c. 3/20/22, is among the legal files of Hull, McGuire, Hull.
mutual friend of hers and Ella O’Neill’s who lived on the East Coast. Ibid.
“She did not like it one bit that I was there, and let me see it,” Drummer later wrote to Mrs. Phillips, “but I stayed for a few hours as Mrs. O’Neill wished me to.” Ibid.
“I did not like her and could see through her from the first moment I met her.” Ibid.
for which he was doing most of the directing. letter, EO to SC, “Love and Admiration and Respect.”
later told she’d had a brain tumor. A/BG interviews with Sheridan & Brennan family members.
“It was the saddest closing chapter of any story I have ever read.” letter, Drummer to Phillips, undated, c. 3/20/22, Hull, McGuire, Hull files.
“Her body arrived the day the play opened.” letter to Milton Salsbury, 5/17/22 (private), SL.
edited by Commins’s wife, Dorothy Berliner Commins. “Love and Admiration and Respect.”
hurried back to the hotel and called him from the lobby. Ibid.
his earlier “gruesome search in the dark cellars of Grand Central Station” for his mother’s casket. Ibid.
where “he promptly passed out on Gene’s bed.” SC’s typed manuscript of the memorandum.
scold him for his dereliction. O’Neill, Son and Artist, by LS (Little, Brown and Company, New York, 1973).
“though Agnes and Saxe never knew it, O’Neill had not gone to the railway station.” “Love and Admiration and Respect.”
she was fifteen and “not a chaste and virtuous woman.” divorce petition by Nettie O’Neill, Supreme Court Chicago, 9/7/1877; Chicago Tribune, 3/7/1874; Chicago Chronicle, 2/26/1894; interviews with Brendan & Sheridan families; records Circuit of Court Chicago (#25927-1263) and NYT, 9/8/1877; Chicago Tribune, 9/8 & 9/16/1877; Chicago Inter-Ocean, 10/24/1877; and see LWMC.
learned to conceal the unsavory aspects of his personal life. Ibid.
devoted to each other and to their son, Jim Jr. (as he was then called). Robins diaries & letters, Fales; & see LWMC.
in a way, she was like the Mummy. A/BG interviews with ESS.
could not reconcile that face with his mother’s. interviews with CM.
to which he’d been sent after his seventh birthday. The school’s formal name was St. Aloysius Academy for Boys. See LWMC.
“I did not know if Jamie would ever reach New York alive.” letter, Drummer to Phillips, undated, c. 3/20/22; files of Hull, McGuire, Hull.
“I was just beginning to enjoy her.” A/BG interviews with Bessie Sheridan & Agnes Brennan
.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Usually they don’t take that much trouble.” letter to Marjorie Greiser, 5/5/22, SL.
“‘Yank is my own self!’” Mary B. Mullett, American Magazine, Nov. 1922.
his play was “propaganda in the sense that it was a symbol of man, who has lost his old harmony with nature . . . the struggle used to be with the gods, but is now with himself, his own past, his attempt ‘to belong.’” New York Herald Tribune, 11/16/24.
“not luxurious enough” for uptown audiences. A/BG interviews with KM.
(whose recollection thirty-five years later of her first encounter with O’Neill will become legend). A/BG interviews with CM.
“‘You mean the author of this play?’” Ibid.
“He hadn’t even had the courtesy to thank me for taking over the part on a moment’s notice.” Ibid.
he doesn’t think much of her acting ability. A/BG interviews with JL.
“He would tease me by calling me that when he thought I was putting on airs.” A/BG interviews with CM.
Eugene Jr. the education he deserves. A/BG interviews with KJP.
taught the boy to think well of him. Ibid.
he consents to a meeting. A/BG interviews with LK.
he has decided he will finance his education. A/BG interviews with KM & JL.
her son returns “glowing from the meeting.” A/BG interview with KJP.
“The woman I gave the most trouble to has given me the least.” quoted by CM in interviews with A/BG.
school was the place where he lived. A/BG interviews with Frank & Elsie Meyers.
he and his brother “emphatically do not desire the settling of the estate to drag on one second longer than is absolutely necessary.” letter, 5/12/22; Hull, McGuire, Hull papers, Conn. College.
in a letter to the critic Oliver Sayler. 5/25/22 (private), SL.
“Gene would sneak a view of the boy and tug at one end of his mustache, which was a habit of his.” A/BG interviews with EG.
“Once they got into the ocean,” Light recalled, “the awkwardness between them disappeared.” A/BG interviews with JL.
constant companions, “lived in the ocean.” letter from Barbara Burton to AG, c. 1960.
“would have wonderful evening picnics and invite friends from town.” Ibid.
read Miss Julie aloud to her, “losing himself in the sound of the words and their haunted meaning.” Part of a Long Story.
completing his first draft of Welded the following spring. 4/16/23 (private), SL.
little more than “some very third-rate Strindberg.” The World of George Jean Nathan (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1952), section “Eugene O’Neill.”
Nathan said, “put on his hat, walked out and didn’t let me hear from him for two months.” Ibid.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
while they retreated to Peaked Hill Bars. A/BG interviews with EG, who occasionally accompanied AB & EO in house-hunting.
doctor’s advice to switch to country air. A/BG interviews with EG & JL.
two with fireplaces, and the servants’ quarters. A/BG interviews with KM, EG, & Bernard Simon.
he was “a person to whom Rolls-Royces and similar titillations mean less than nothing, and who desires no greater extravagance than food.” Philadelphia Public Ledger, 1/2/22.
got on his nerves. A/BG interview with KM.
Kantor believed, “on the question of equality.” A/BG interviews with EG, LK, & BB.
“My dear dearest, I want to write my soul out for you, telling the way I feel about you.” Autumn 1922?, Harvard, “Wind.”
“So what can I do?” to C. Hadley Hull, 12/13/22, Conn. College.
“NEW LONDON WILL HAVE MY FULL APPROVAL” to C. Hadley Hull, 12/17/22, Conn. College.
“He does not like the place, the food is wretched, and he cannot sleep during the night.” 7/18/23, Beinecke, and A/BG interview with Cadenaz.
“I’m sure a letter from you would be very bracing,” she prodded gently. Ibid.
“He’ll only get drunk, I guess, after he gets out and then he’ll be all blind.” 8/7/23 (private), SL.
Death came on November 8, 1923. A/BG interviews with members of Sheridan family.
“He and I were terribly close to each other.” 2/18/31, Dartmouth, SL.
“And so he lived on cursing & drinking, being slapped on the back and no one ever caught him.” Beinecke.
long-dead brother who had once been his hero. Some of this material has been extracted from an article by BG, NYT, 3/19/2000.
giving up “self & the world to worship of God.” Beinecke.
anything but the rosiest of futures for him. “School Days at Notre Dame,” Vol. 4, Charles Warren Stoddard, 1936. University of Notre Dame archives; Eugene O’Neill Review, Vol. 15, No. 2, articles by Edward L. Shaughnessy; Hessbergh Memorial Library archives, University of Notre Dame.
decline from which he would never spring back. A/BG interviews with AMcG, PS, & St. John’s (now Fordham University) archives.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“It makes me feel old and weary sometimes.” 5/28/24, letter copied with permission of Clarke.
“—those vulgar speeches, God!” A/BG interview with Young; and Young’s “From My Journal,” Harper’s magazine, June 1957. The article consists of “entries” dated from 1924 to 1946; Young later admitted he did not actually keep a journal but reconstructed the entries from memory.
“I’m still ashamed of myself for letting Doris Keane play the role,” he later confessed. A/BG interview with Young.
all concerned “had been breaking their necks to keep him sober.” A/BG interview with Ben-Ami.
“There is no temptation for me to compromise.” magazine, Philadelphia Public Ledger, 1/2/22.
“Being a just God, and a Great Producer, he will no doubt spare the two of us; and we can then rehearse this dialog on Mount Ararat as a first step toward the Theater of the Future.” Shadowland, April 1922, “The Artist of the Theater: A Colloquy Between Eugene O’Neill and Oliver M. Sayler.”
and even Arthur Hopkins. In a sentimental reversal at the end of his writing career, O’Neill wrote to Hopkins about his “deep gratitude for all you did for me. That, believe me, I have never forgotten nor ever can forget.” EO to Hopkins, 6/5/44, Yale, SL.
“Our richest, like our poorest, have desired most not to give life but to have it given them.” interview with Edna Kenton, who permitted A/BG to copy the letter.
“I’ll have to help create a new outlet—or remain gagged.” EO to GJN, Sunday (Dec. 1923), Cornell University, As Ever, Gene.
along with fresh new American work. A/BG interviews with KM & Edna Kenton.
“Whenever I think of him it is with the most self-condemning remorse.” 5/26/24, Virginia, SL.
“It’s hard to say how much we owe him.” The New Yorker, Profiles, Part I, Hamilton Basso, Profiles, Part I, 2/28/45.
from the loss of an infant. Three years after the play’s production, the psychoanalyst Dr. Louis Bisch, who had befriended O’Neill and was sometimes the recipient of his confidences, informally deduced that O’Neill was “emotionally starved.” After O’Neill’s death in 1953, and the publication three years later of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Dr. Bisch posited (in an interview with the authors) that many of his plays “showed an antagonism toward women, stemming from a deep antagonism toward his mother.” Somewhat glibly, Bisch concluded that while O’Neill loved his father, he hated his mother, and because his mother had failed him, all women would fail him.
“But the sets which I described in my stage directions were so ‘natural’ that they inevitably conjured up all the unimportant paraphernalia of living, daily existence, to stand between the life of my characters and the lives in the audience.” “O’Neill Defends His Play of Negro,” NYT, 5/11/24.
&nbs
p; (“That’s no realistic goal for a nigger!”) quoted by David Remnick, in The New Yorker, 4/25/2011.
“The present arrangement, I think, has a tendency to break down social barriers which are better left untouched.” 2/25/24, Brooklyn Eagle.
“Indignation, right or wrong, that’s the good old stuff!” NYT, 3/19/24, American Magazine, et al.
“—not to speak of the anonymous letters which ranged from those of infuriated Irish Catholics who threatened to pull my ears off as a disgrace to their race and religion, to those of equally infuriated Nordic Kluxers who knew that I had Negro blood, or else was a Jewish pervert masquerading under a Christian name in order to do subversive propaganda for the Pope!” letter, EO to Carol Bird in “Fifteen-Year Record of Class of Princeton University,” 1925.
“We didn’t let any of this interfere with our plans, but there was a lot of tension all around.” A/BG interviews with JL.
a radical who could bear watching. Bruce J. Mann, The Eugene O’Neill Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 1991; Mann resourcefully dug up the document by invoking the Freedom of Information Act.
“What is the theater for if not to show man’s struggle, whether he is black, green, orange or white, to conquer life; his effort to give it meaning?” “O’Neill Defends His Play of Negro,” NYT.
according to O’Neill, “really a most ludicrous episode—not so ludicrous for me, however, since it put the whole theme of the play on a false basis and thereby threw our whole intent in the production into the discard.” letter, EO to Bird in “Fifteen-Year Record of Class of Princeton University.”
“Life is hard and bitter enough without, in addition, burdening ourselves with prejudices.” Carol Bird, Theater magazine, June 1924.
CHAPTER TWENTY
dreamed a new play in its entirety. WD, 1/1/24.
a plot had come to him so easily. EO to Walter Huston (who starred in Desire) confirmed in A/BG interview with Huston’s son John; and EO to the critic, Richard Watts Jr., New York Herald Tribune, 9/9/33.
writing dialogue, “as if I’d pondered over this play for months.” EO to a “Mr. Maxwell,” 5/8/45, Yale, SL.