Cook and Glaspell owned a modest whitewashed house at 564 Commercial Street across from the Wharf Theatre, which they inhabited with their cat, Carnal Copulation, or “Copycat” for short. Each day, Cook labored away in the front yard constructing theater props and household improvements while Susan tapped out their living on the typewriter within. Max Eastman characterized the couple’s lifestyle as an old-fashioned tableau of American domesticity, “an atmosphere of Christian conservatism, a quiet piety” in which Cook was the “husky, brown-skinned farmer” and Glaspell “an overtired but sweetly conscientious farmer’s wife.”30
Honest-spoken and hardworking to a fault, Cook and Glaspell were typical midwesterners in temperament but with eastern-style intellectual bravado. A larger-than-life personality among the Players, Cook was a modernist thinker who worshiped the Greeks. (He’d translated Sappho and often thought in Greek.) But he was keenly aware that writing wasn’t his strong suit. It wasn’t a lack of ability so much as a lack of self-discipline. Cook’s zeal for “social creativeness” and the commitment of his volcanic energy to O’Neill’s and Glaspell’s work, Eastman observed, might best be explained “by his abstract wish to be a genius combined with an inability to retire into a lonely corner and get down to concrete work.”31
In contrast to Cook, and most of the other Players, O’Neill excelled at locking himself away to write for days on end. “O’Neill was quite savage in his determination to find solitude,” said Harry Kemp, who like Cook preferred communal activity to writing. “No early Christian martyr sought his hilltop remote from men, in order to be with his God, with greater zest than O’Neill, solitude to be alone with his work.”32
Cook’s impassioned speeches commanded a room with the grandiloquence of an orator in the ancient tradition of Cicero. When he spoke, pipe jutting from his mouth, jaw clenched, everyone listened. If he demanded total silence, he got it. A more festive atmosphere? He got that too. When O’Neill spoke, a rarity in itself, he mumbled out of the side of his mouth. He avoided eye contact, Kemp recalled, but instead “looked straight through those in his presence.” If he didn’t want to talk with you, which was generally the case, he just turned and walked away without a word.33 One day, the usually gregarious Kemp tested O’Neill’s taciturn nature by walking past him with a simple “Hello.” Sure enough, though O’Neill resented intrusive small talk, he found Kemp’s off-handed dismissal of him even more upsetting. As Kemp strode away, he heard “this pat-pat-pat like a big St. Bernard dog” behind him. “You know,” O’Neill said, “I’d have liked to be a prizefighter … but I got a blow once that loosened all my teeth.”34
Jealousy was not an issue with Cook, not publicly at least, and his management and leadership skills were indispensable to the group’s success. Cook had “all the resources of the University” at his mental disposal, according to Hapgood, but he was no academic snob or well-heeled layabout.35 Back in Iowa he’d run a truck farm and taught English at the University of Iowa, where he studied as an undergraduate before moving on to Stanford University. (By the time Cook was finished with theater and had moved to Greece in 1922, after a falling-out in which the Players became too professional for his taste, he left behind an impressive record: he had cultivated as many as fifty writers and ushered over one hundred plays onto the boards.)
Cook was the indisputable “big man” among the Players, O’Neill said later, “always enthusiastic, vital, impatient with everything that smacked of falsity or compromise, he represented the spirit of revolt against the old worn-out traditions, the commercial theater, the tawdry artificialities of the stage.”36 In his autobiography, Hutch Hapgood neatly sums up Cook’s critical role in O’Neill’s career: “Eugene O’Neill might never have been heard of in the theatre, certainly not for long after this [summer], had it not been for the work of George Cram Cook. Every writer needs a sympathetic background; that background was entirely absent from Broadway at the time and, as far as O’Neill’s personality was concerned, it was absent everywhere. The man who felt O’Neill’s personality vividly and who created, not only the social enthusiasm for it, but the definite mechanical body and setting, was George Cram Cook.”37
Cook, like his new protégé O’Neill, was also a passionate devotee of the bottle. At Provincetown soirees, he christened wine casks with names like Bacchus, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, and he invented “Fish House Punch”: four parts three-star Hennessey brandy, two parts rum, two parts peach brandy, two parts lemon juice, and a heap of sugar poured into a bowl over a giant block of ice.38 At Cook’s gatherings, O’Neill would squat on the floor apart from the others and hold his tongue until he’d gotten thoroughly intoxicated. Agnes Boulton explained later that for O’Neill, especially among this cohort of boisterous thespians, drinking whiskey “seemed a needed prop to meet the situation, rather than an escape from it. … In more important things, alcohol enabled him to do what he wanted to do—not what was expected of him, or was the conventional thing to do.” Harry Kemp similarly recalled that “in the midst of a party he kept that aura of being apart. When he spoke it was hesitatingly and haltingly. It was only when he drank that he expressed himself fluently. Then he was worth listening to.”39
Mabel Dodge arrived late that July and looked on as the Players habitually got inebriated, though not, to her mind, in an obnoxious way: “Everyone drank a good deal, but it was of a very superior kind of excess that stimulated the kindliness of hearts and brought out all the pleasure of these people. Eugene’s unhappy young face had desperate dark eyes staring out of it and drink must have eased him. Terry of course was always drunk. A handsome skeleton, I thought. Jig Cook was often tippling along with genial Hutch. The women worked quite regularly, even when they, too, drank; and I envied them their ease and ran away from it.”40
Hutch Hapgood laid down his own unapologetic love of alcohol in his memoir “Memories of a Determined Drinker; or, Forty Years of Drink,” for which he failed, unsurprisingly, to find a publisher. The title might reassure a prospective editor that the book was yet another temperance memoir warning readers against the “demon rum.” Nothing could be further from the truth. “Without the glass Cook’s genius would never have been,” Hapgood wrote, and then linked O’Neill’s debt to whiskey to its inevitable conclusion: “It is fair to say that without Cook the Provincetown Players would never have existed. His was not the original idea, but his was the complex activities which made it possible. … Without him O’Neill’s talent would not, at any rate for many years, have found a means of putting itself over.”41 By the time Hapgood wrote this exhortation, 1932, O’Neill was in his judgment “our only important American playwright,” and without the Players’ drinking habits in Provincetown that summer, he said, the state of American theater as we had come to know it would not exist.42
One of the despised rules of nature, of course, is that heavy whiskey drinking invariably leads to its less delightful result: the hangover. And O’Neill’s hangovers were epic. “There was no such darkness as Gene’s after a hangover,” Mary Vorse recalled. “He would sit silent and suffering and in darkness. You could have taken the air he breathed and carved a statue of despair of it.”43 O’Neill’s New London friend Art McGinley, who later came to visit O’Neill in Provincetown, described his mercurial friend’s drinking habits this way: “Gene was a periodic drinker, and once started wouldn’t stop—I guess he couldn’t stop—until he was really sick. He was the most trying morning-after drinker I’ve ever known. He would gloom up and not say a word, or else talk of suicide, he was so disgusted with himself. But when he stopped drinking, he would work around the clock. I never knew anyone who had so much self-discipline.”44
O’Neill wrote prolifically that summer despite his hangovers. Along with revising The Movie Man, he turned out the one-act Before Breakfast, the short story “Tomorrow,” and a full-length comedy about pretentious bohemianism entitled Now I Ask You. The story of an upper-middle-class young woman with a studied affectation of Greenwich Village ra
dicalism, Now I Ask You echoes the Players’ mordant view of affluent would-be radicals who disingenously promoted revolutionary politics and free love merely as an outlet to escape bourgeois ennui. And along with Cook and Glaspell’s Suppressed Desires, Neith Boyce and Jack Reed wrote similar satires on the subject, Constancy and The Eternal Quadrangle. As a Boston Post reporter noted, “The Provincetown Players are so modern that they not only write about modern things, but satirize them.”45
That July, O’Neill plunged into an affair with a determined nondrinker, Louise Bryant. Bryant’s father had been a severe alcoholic, and for a long time she disdained people who drank to excess. (In her later years, however, she fell to drinking so heavily that her second husband, the wealthy diplomat and a close friend of Reed’s from Harvard, William C. Bullitt, would win custody of their daughter Anne on the grounds that she was an incompetent mother.)46 O’Neill’s fruitful summer of writing was attributable in part to Bryant, as she helped him control his whiskey intake just enough to work. Reed knew about the affair, of course, but his one-act play The Eternal Quadrangle suggests that extramarital affairs bothered him little, and he himself had been recently involved in a long-standing and public romance with the married Mabel Dodge.47
A rare photograph of O’Neill and Bryant together, the only known portrait of them offstage, captures the two lovers languidly sunning on a cottage’s front steps. In this picture, published here for the first time, Bryant poses for the photographer with a fetching if somewhat strained smile. O’Neill is gripping an uncooperative cat and appears more hungover than haunted. Reed, as it happens, is seated off camera over O’Neill’s left shoulder; a highly circulated photograph of O’Neill and Reed from that afternoon, this time with Bryant off camera to O’Neill’s right, confirms that the three were relaxed and happy in each other’s company.48
Placed side by side, the two images produce an almost cinematic quality. One can imagine that Reed had just snapped his friend out of a dark mood with a wisecrack. O’Neill is also, fittingly enough, separating the couple. Of the two, a stranger might think it was O’Neill, not Reed, who would soon marry the coy-looking young woman beside him.49 (The three-way romance was later dramatized for the big screen in the 1981 film Reds with Diane Keaton as Bryant, Jack Nicholson as O’Neill, and Warren Beatty as Reed.) Bryant, who was often seen following O’Neill around in Provincetown, initiated her romance with the playwright on the Fourth of July with a love poem:
Dark eyes
you stir my soul
Ineffably.
You scatter
All my peace.
Dark eyes,
What shall I do?
The sentiment was entirely mutual. “When that girl touches me with the tip of her little finger,” O’Neill told Carlin, “it’s like a flame.”50 Two days later, he sent her this impassioned, only recently found reply:
Blue eyes.
You stir my soul
Ineffably.
You scatter all my peace.
Blue eyes,
What shall I do? …
I dream
In a great wide space
Where horizons meet
And the unattainable is possessed.
Blue eyes.
The sky is blue,
I dare not look at it
Because my soul is lonely.
Don’t you know then
Why,
Blue eyes?51
Terry Carlin arrived at his and O’Neill’s shack one day delivering a pleading note from Bryant: “I must see you alone. I have to explain something, for my sake and Jack’s. You have to understand.” At the ensuing liaison, Bryant informed O’Neill that she and Reed weren’t sexually active, that they lived like siblings because of a kidney ailment he suffered from that required surgery. It was true about the kidney at least (he would have surgery that fall), and O’Neill and Bryant’s affair began in earnest; it would last, on and off, for nearly two years. In theory, O’Neill was still involved with Beatrice Ashe. In one of his last letters to her, sent on July 25, he implored Ashe to visit him on the Cape, as he didn’t have the money for a ticket to New London; but he understood that by then she’d been mulling over her future, and he had no place in it.
Louise Bryant and Eugene O’Neill in the summer of 1916, Provincetown.
(COURTESY OF HENRY W. AND ALBERT A. BERG COLLECTION OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE, NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY)
Eugene O’Neill and John Reed in the summer of 1916, Provincetown.
(COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)
The Players as a group neither liked nor respected Bryant. Most of the men considered her a “bitch,” a “nymphomaniac,” and a “whore”; the women resented her preferential treatment at the theater as exclusively the result of her relationships with Reed and O’Neill.52 “Just because someone is sleeping with somebody,” one of them scoffed when Bryant’s The Game was accepted for the double bill with Bound East for Cardiff, “is no reason we should do her play.”53 “Bryant was not really a playwright,” another quipped, “she only slept with one.”54 News of the affair quickly spread to New York, and Mabel Dodge had gone to Provincetown to see if, under the circumstances, she might win Reed back: “I thought Reed would be glad to see me if things were like that between him and Louise—but he wasn’t.”55
In an unpublished memoir, Bryant offers a telling anecdote about Reed’s reaction to her sexual relations with O’Neill. Reed had a friend, Fred Boyd, whom he’d rescued from prison after Boyd was arrested at the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913. From that point on, Boyd was loyal as a hound. According to Bryant, when Boyd found out about the romance brewing between O’Neill and Bryant, he showed up drunk at Reed and Bryant’s house at four o’clock in the morning and demanded $40. When Reed asked what the money was for, Boyd told him it was to buy a gun to murder O’Neill. Reed responded by kissing his fiancée tenderly and telling Boyd to go home and sleep it off. Later that morning, he went to O’Neill’s shack and warned him, “Boyd was drunk last night and shooting his face off around town. If you hear any stories don’t pay any attention to them. And I wish you and Terry Carlin would take all your meals with us for a while.”56 For most of their friends, as Suppressed Desires and Now I Ask You satirize, the belief in free love was so much bohemian posing. On this matter, Louise Bryant and Jack Reed were no posers.
By the end of the summer, the Players were desperate to schedule plays for a final bill and thus premiered a second O’Neill play, Thirst, on September 1. Unlike the storied premiere of Bound East, this bill, which included a revival of Cook and Glaspell’s Suppressed Desires, wasn’t the Players’ finest hour. O’Neill, darkly tanned and lithe from swims in the harbor, took the role of the mulatto sailor, the largest role of his truncated acting career, while Cook played the gentleman and Bryant the erotic dancer. During rehearsals, the Zorachs had fashioned as symbolic a set for Thirst as they had with Bryant’s The Game, but O’Neill wanted the production to seem as realistic as possible and refused them; thus, instead of a symbolic ocean, the water was represented by long yards of “sea cloth with someone wriggling around underneath it.”57 Bryant wanted to bare her breasts in the final scene, since O’Neill’s stage directions called for the dancer, driven insane by thirst, to tear off her bodice, but the Players opted for discretion. (Bryant was indeed comfortable in her own skin. Along with nude sunbathing in Provincetown, William Carlos Williams said that at his first encounter with her in New York that fall, she wore “a heavy, very heavy white silk skirt so woven that it hung over the curve of her buttocks like the strands of a glistening waterfall. … There could have been nothing under it, for it followed the very crease between the buttocks in its fall.”)58
A performance of Thirst at the Wharf Theatre in August 1916. From left, Louise Bryant appears as the dancer, George Cram “Jig” Cook as the gentleman, and Eugene O’Neill as the mulatto sailor.
&
nbsp; (COURTESY OF THE YALE COLLECTION OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, NEW HAVEN)
Though no formal review of Thirst’s premiere exists, a Boston Sunday Post article entitled “Many Literary Lights among the Provincetown Players,” announced in September, less than a week after the Players had officially incorporated on the fourth, that “the Provincetown Players, like the Irish Players, are trying to get away from stage convention, to act naturally and simply, to be on the stage much as they are off the stage. … It begins to look as if the American drama may be richer for the fun and the work of the Provincetown Players this summer. They have put on two plays by Eugene O’Neil [sic], a young dramatist whose work was heretofore unproduced and who, they are confident, is going to be heard from in places less remote than Provincetown.”59
Jig Cook didn’t need a reporter to tell him what he already knew.When his friend Edna Kenton, a founding member of the feminist group Heterodoxy, arrived for a visit in early September, Cook immediately ushered her out to the Wharf Theatre. Kenton remembered the tides rolling beneath the wide, sand-strewn planks while she gazed about at the “net-hung, shell-hung, seaweed-fronded walls.” Then Jig thrust open the backdrop to “let in the sparkling sea.” “You don’t know Gene yet,” he told her. “You don’t know his plays. But you will. All the world will know Gene’s plays some day. … Gene’s plays aren’t the plays of Broadway; he’s got to have the sort of stage we’re going to found in New York.”60
Below Washington Square
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 16
