Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  In December 1905 Clyde William Fitch, then America’s most famous living dramatist, knocked on the door of 884 Park Avenue, the novelist Edith Wharton’s New York residence. Wharton’s first best seller The House of Mirth had just appeared, and Fitch, a flamboyant and prolific playwright rumored to have enjoyed “relations” with Oscar Wilde, asked if he might persuade her to collaborate on a stage adaptation of her new novel. She accepted the offer, though with reservations.

  Wharton had tried to win over theatergoers with original plays before. But she could never descend low enough for the average audience and had rebuffed a friend’s advice that if she wanted a hit play, she should consider the century-old costumes and “society gags” that sold at the box office. Many illustrious fiction writers such as herself had taken their turn “on the boards” from the 1880s to the early 1900s—Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland, Mary Austin, and Jack London, among others—none of them successfully. “Forget not,” Henry James cautioned would-be playwrights, “that you write for the stupid.”

  Leaving the Savoy Theatre in Herald Square after the New York premiere of The House of Mirth on October 22, 1906, Wharton remarked to her escort, William Dean Howells, “What the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.” And after the play received several poor reviews, she admitted, “I now doubt if that kind of play, with a ‘sad ending,’ and a negative hero, could ever get a hearing from an American audience.” Nearly three decades later, Wharton agreed to another collaboration, this time with playwright Zoë Akins, based on Wharton’s dolorous novella The Old Maid (1924). The play was a resounding success, and it beat out Lillian Hellman’s thematically parallel The Children’s Hour and Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! for the 1935 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. By then, even Wharton’s play was hotly contested as not original or experimental enough for the award, however, and opponents to the decision consequently founded the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award.

  The following year, 1936, Eugene O’Neill, having already won three Pulitzers in the 1920s, emerged as the only American dramatist to date to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was an honor, he told the Swedish Academy, that spoke to the evolution of American drama as a whole: “This highest of distinctions is all the more grateful to me because I feel so deeply that it is not only my work that is being honored, but the work of all of my colleagues in America—that this Nobel Prize is a symbol of the recognition by Europe of the coming-of-age of the American theatre … worthy at last to claim kinship with the modern drama of Europe, from which our original inspiration so surely derives.”

  Whatever one’s prejudice about the Nobel or the Pulitzer, and whatever one’s opinion of O’Neill’s tragic vision, by the 1930s, everyone agreed: American plays like O’Neill’s, with “sad endings and negative heroes,” even while faced with daunting competition from the lighter forms of entertainment amply provided by the Hollywood studio system and the commercial theater, had at last found their hearing.

  ACT I: The Ghosts at the Stage Door

  It is impossible to act in the American play unless we go back and see that the American play really starts with O’Neill. But in order to get to O’Neill, you have to know what was before him. … Before O’Neill in this country, the play was for business, for success, for the star who brought in money, for its fashionableness to an audience. The theater was nothing more, and not thought of as anything more, than a place of amusement.

  —STELLA ADLER, 2010

  Before Eugene O’Neill … there was a wasteland. … Two centuries of junk.

  —GORE VIDAL, 1959

  The Treasures of Monte Cristo

  MARY ELLEN “ELLA” QUINLAN O’NEILL gave birth to her third and last child, Eugene, at the Barrett House hotel in Manhattan on October 16, 1888. Situated on the northeast corner of Broadway and Forty-Third Street, the Barrett House loomed at the intersection of what would become Times Square, the theatrical center of the world. Ella’s hotel room had a corner view of the neighborhood where her newborn’s name would burn brightly on electric marquees as a heady draw for the theatergoing public. Two days after his birth, Eugene was swept away with his family on the first of many national tours with his father, the matinee idol James O’Neill.

  One of the most celebrated actors of his day and a natural successor to the great Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth, James was born in 1845, the son of Edward and Mary O’Neill, Irish immigrants of the peasant class from County Kilkenny. In 1850, Edward had emigrated to Buffalo, New York, with his wife and their eight children to escape the devastation of the potato famine. (James was the seventh child, and his sister Margaret, born in Buffalo in 1851, made nine.) The transatlantic journey was so harrowing that James rarely spoke of it as an adult. A few years later, in the mid-1850s, Edward O’Neill returned to Ireland after his eldest son, Richard, died, leaving the rest of the family to fend for themselves. Edward himself died of arsenic poisoning in Ireland six years after his departure, most likely a suicide.1

  The Barrett House, O’Neill’s birthplace, at Broadway and Forty-Third Street, later Times Square. O’Neill responded to the friend who sent this image to him as a present that the man leaning against the lamppost obviously “had a bun on” (that is, he was drunk).

  (COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)

  James O’Neill, at a mere ten years old, was thus compelled to help support his family by working grueling twelve-hour shifts making files at a machine shop. “A dirty barn of a place,” James Tyrone (O’Neill) remembers the shop in his son’s autobiographical play Long Day’s Journey Into Night, “where rain dripped through the roof, where you roasted in summer, and there was no stove in winter, and your hands got numb with cold, where the only light came through two small filthy windows, so on grey days I’d have to sit bent over with my eyes almost touching the files in order to see! … And what do you think I got for it? Fifty cents a week! It’s the truth! Fifty cents a week!” (CP3, 807). By 1858, the O’Neills had relocated to Cincinnati, Ohio, where they were largely supported by James’s older sister Josephine, who’d fortuitously married a prosperous Ohio saloonkeeper. It was in Cincinnati that James discovered his talent for acting at age twenty, when he made his debut in 1865 during the final days of the Civil War at Cincinnati’s National Theatre and rapidly gained a reputation as a dashing leading man.

  James O’Neill, 1869.

  (COURTESY OF THE HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY THEATRE COLLECTION, CAMBRIDGE, MASS.)

  The reigning “queen of actresses,” Adelaide Neilson, a British performer whose Juliet was thought to be the finest of all time, was once asked which Romeo among the many she’d played opposite was best. Neilson replied brusquely, “A little Irishman named O’Neill.”2 In 1872, James found himself onstage with Edwin Booth, “the greatest actor of his day or any other,” James Tyrone boasts in Long Day’s Journey (CP3, 809). Booth, the brother of Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and James played Othello at McVicker’s Theatre in Chicago, each night alternating the roles of Iago and Othello. During one performance, while waiting for his cue in the wings, Booth remarked, “That young man is playing [Othello] better than I ever did.”3 This single evening, after James had been informed of Booth’s tribute to him, marked the high point of his acting career, perhaps of his entire life. James would never again experience such a genuine surge of professional gratification.

  On February 12, 1883, James accepted a role at New York’s Booth Theatre that would thrust him into the national limelight, though he would notoriously become trapped by its very popularity: Edmund Dantès in Charles Fechter’s 1870 stage adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s novel The Count of Monte Cristo, the title of which, though it’s offen forgotten, Fechter had reduced to the more straightforward Monte Cristo.

  James had played Edmund Dantès back in Chicago on April 21, 1875, while a stock actor at Hooley’s Theatre,
and the reviews for that performance had been excellent. The Spirit of the Times newspaper, however, predicted of the new Booth Theatre production that “Monte Cristo will not run very long.” James had been prevented by heavy snowfall from attending most of the rehearsals, and consequently he’d only had a few days to learn his part. John Stetson, the owner of the Globe Theatre in Boston, ignored the bad notices and kept the production going. Fechter’s widow was brought in as a consultant, and she worked enough magic to make it a hit.4

  The legendary character Edmund Dantès is an upright sailor wrongly accused of treason against the king of France and cast into a dungeon at the Château d’If off the coast of Marseilles. His imprisonment clears the way for the villain Fernand to gain Edmund’s betrothed, the Catalan Mercédès (a name that James, who spoke some French, liked to enunciate affectedly with a rolling “r”).5 After languishing in prison for eighteen years, Edmund makes his getaway with the help of his dying cellmate, friend, and benefactor Abbé Faria. Eventually, he reclaims Mercédès and a son, Albert, who had been conceived before Dantès’s imprisonment (without, as the saying goes, the benefit of clergy). Dantès doesn’t have many lines; most of the dialogue is reserved for the play’s villains pacing about conspiring against one another. But the spectacular prison escape is far and away the most defining scene of James’s career: “The moon breaks out, lighting up a projecting rock,” the stage directions specify, then “Edmund rises from the sea, he is dripping, a knife in his hand, some shreds of sack adhering to it.” He stands up on the stone pedestal and shouts exultantly to the heavens, “The world is mine!” James would enact this climactic scene to as many as six thousand audiences, thus branding his acting reputation forever.6

  Monte Cristo playbill.

  (COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)

  Far more relevant to James’s actual life, however, are the lines that precede the heroic declaration: “Saved! Mine, the treasures of Monte Cristo! The world is mine!”7 “The treasures of Monte Cristo” refer to a hidden fortune on a deserted island that Faria bequeaths to Dantès before dying in prison. After his daring escape, Dantès spends years traveling the world spending Faria’s money lavishly before, apparently as an afterthought, returning to Mercédès. More than about love, then, Monte Cristo is about money, and James soon decided to acquire his own “treasure of Monte Cristo”: the rights to the Fechter script for $2,000. With sole proprietorship of the play as of the 1885–86 season, James O’Neill would perform the role to packed houses for almost thirty years, earning him a profit of nearly forty thousand a year. Like Edmund Dantès, James had escaped from a prison of his own—the prison of poverty. And both men were spared horrible fates by dint of their talent, honesty, and charisma.8

  Charles Fechter’s Monte Cristo is saturated with doses of moustache twirling by evildoers and moral posturing by good-guy swashbucklers. One line from Edmund Dantès neatly sums up the play’s complexity: “Sooner or later believe me, the honest man will meet his reward and the wicked be punished.”9 Those who surrender an afternoon to Fechter’s abysmal dialogue will discover their minds drifting off and returning back to a single question: Why would theatergoers choose to see this grossly melodramatic play night after night, year after year? The script was considered just as hackneyed in those days, and the question was the same then as it is today. “The answer, of course, was my father,” Eugene O’Neill explained toward the end of his own career. “He had a genuine romantic Irish personality—looks, voice, and stage presence—and he loved the part. … Audiences came to see James O’Neill in Monte Cristo, not Monte Cristo.”10

  O’Neill’s vocal contempt for his father’s play once he’d grown old enough to have such opinions would be echoed by him years later in a speech by the guileless Marco Polo in the historical satire Marco Millions (1928). At one point, Marco repeats the lackluster word “good” six times to emphasize his bourgeois tastes: “There’s nothing better than to sit down in a good seat at a good play after a good day’s work in which you know you’ve accomplished something, and after you’ve had a good dinner, and just take it easy and enjoy a good wholesome thrill or a good laugh and get your mind off serious things until it’s time to go to bed” (CP2, 431). Shakespeare similarly derided plays designed “to ease the anguish of a torturing hour” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while in O’Neill’s earliest satire, Now I Ask You (1916), Lucy Ashleigh, a pretentious adorer of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1890), argues against attending vaudeville shows because “those productions were concocted with an eye for the comfort of the Tired Business Man” (CP1, 451).

  Some of the earliest words O’Neill remembered his father uttering were “The theater is dying.” James in fact came to regard his good fortune as a “curse” that had barred him from true theatrical greatness. Although O’Neill later believed that he alone had been told of this family curse, James had been quite open to the press about it. In 1901, for instance, a reporter ran into him in Broadway Alley and asked about his future plans. “My private secretary informs me that I have played Dantes four thousand times,” James said. “I have struggled to elaborate my repertoire, but what can a man do when his greatest measure of success seems to lie in a familiar rut? When a treadmill is grinding out big profits, you know, it is rather difficult to step from it.”11

  In fact, the curse of Monte Cristo had bedeviled the actor as far back as 1885, before he’d even bought the rights to the Fechter script. Just after his second son Edmund’s death, when James was at his most emotionally fragile, he was approached by a meddlesome reporter in a Chicago wine bar and, with his guard carelessly down, confided everything. The article offers a detailed exposition on the “improvidence” of actors like James, whose “great promise has never been realized” and recounts James’s wistful, wine-soaked grief for his “early days,” when “Jimmy O’Neill” “performed Iago to Booth’s Othello with an aptness and clearness of conception that all but eclipsed the star himself.” “And yet, in spite of all his successes in the ‘legitimate,’” the reporter went on, “he forsook the higher walks of the drama, adopting melodramatic roles which are ephemeral as the day when compared with the true art in which he had given such promise.”12 For the remainder of his life, James lamented his choice of profits over the nobler pursuits of the stage. “That’s what caused me to make up my mind that they would never get me,” O’Neill said after learning of this. “I determined then that I would never sell out.”13

  Ella O’Neill, like her husband, James, was born into a first-generation Irish home. Her parents, Thomas and Bridget Quinlan, were also famine refugees, but Thomas thrived in the United States as a tobacco and liquor merchant in Cleveland, Ohio. Ella met the impossibly handsome James, who was twelve years her senior and by then a sought-after bachelor, in 1872 through her father, Thomas, whom James had befriended at the Quinlans’ liquor shop, a popular hangout for performers within a short walk of the city’s Academy of Music. Ella and James were married five years later and had three sons together—James Jr. in 1878, Edmund Burke in 1883, and Eugene Gladstone in 1888. (Charles Fechter, not incidentally, had anglicized Dumas’s hero’s name from “Edmond” to “Edmund.” James’s older brother, named Edward after their father, had died in battle during the Civil War. But James didn’t choose to name his first two sons after his father or his brother, whose veteran’s pension had sustained their mother Mary. Rather, he named them in effect after his dual personae, offstage and on: James and Edmund.)14

  On March 4, 1885, at four o’clock in the morning, Edmund, only eighteen months, died.15 The death of a child is an unimaginable horror for any parent, of course, but the cause of his death was especially shocking. The O’Neills had left Edmund and Jamie, as they called their firstborn, in New York under the care of Ella’s mother, Bridget, while James was performing in Colorado. Jamie contracted measles in their absence, and the obstreperous six-year-old was under his g
randmother’s strict orders not to come in contact with his little brother. He went into the child’s bedroom anyway, and only a few days later Edmund succumbed to the disease. Ella returned to New York by train straight away while James stayed on to finish the tour. “The vast audience,” reported the Denver Tribune-Republican the night Ella departed, “did not know that James O’Neill … was heartbroken. It did not know that at that moment his little child lay dead in far distant New York, and that the agonized mother had just taken a tearful farewell of him to attend the burial of the little one. It laughed and clapped its hands and paid no thought but to the actor’s genius, and dreamed not of the inward weeping that was drowning his heart.”16

  O’Neill became convinced in the years to follow that his mother never forgave his older brother Jim, as he called him, for infecting Edmund; and he himself suffered from a tormenting mixture of survivor’s guilt and death envy, later naming his autobiographical character in Long Day’s Journey “Edmund” and the dead child “Eugene.” The reversal of names in the play appears to have an even deeper symbolic meaning for the mother, Mary Cavan Tyrone, who makes clear that she gave birth to her third son to replace the deceased Eugene, and only at the insistence of her husband James (CP3, 766). Hence O’Neill proposes that his birth was no more than a mistake made out of desperation and that his existence in her eyes was a bedeviling reminder of her guilt over Edmund. It’s no wonder, then, that O’Neill later wrote down, without explanation and despite the fact that his mother was a practicing Catholic, that he’d been born in the wake of “a series of brought-on abortions.”17 “I knew I’d proved by the way I’d left Eugene [Edmund] that I wasn’t worthy to have another baby,” Mary Tyrone says to James while high on morphine, “and that God would punish me if I did. I never should have borne Edmund [Eugene]” (CP3, 766).