“It isn’t Expressionism,” O’Neill explained. “It isn’t Naturalism. It is a blend—and, as far as my knowledge goes—a uniquely successful one.” O’Neill was thus moved to invented an “ism” of his own, “super-naturalism,” or rather, he co-opted the term from Theodore Dreiser’s Plays of the Natural and Supernatural (1916), a collection meant to reveal, in the novelist’s words, “the inscrutability of life and its forces and its accidents.”5 O’Neill would also come to borrow this language from Dreiser several years later in his explanation to his first biographer, Barrett Clark, telling him that his overall goal was to reveal through writing the “inscrutable forces behind life.”6
O’Neill had nevertheless instructed the Players that the set designs “must be in the Expressionistic method,” and Bobby Jones and Cleon Throckmorton accepted his challenge with extraordinary ingenuity. For one thing, they made Cook’s dome once again earn its keep: Alexander Woollcott, writing for the New York Times, applauded the designers of what he considered (although he was frequently critical of O’Neill’s plays) “one of the real events of the year.” They’d transformed, he said, by means of the dome “that preposterous little theatre … one of the most cramped stages New York has ever known [and created] the illusion of vast spaces and endless perspectives.” “In that tiny space,” wrote Robert Benchley in Life, “are produced scenic effects which make those of up-town theatres appear like something you might do in the barn.” Benchley advised his readers “to see ‘The Hairy Ape’ before it moves up-town (as it unquestionably must), for Jones and Throckmorton have achieved a focus with their effects on this miniature stage which may be lost or diffused in a larger and more commercial theatre.”7
The casting for Yank Smith had been critical to the play’s success, of course. Yank is arguably the most demanding role in O’Neill’s repertoire: his emotional transitions are erratic; his monologues numerous and lengthy and must be performed with a pitch-perfect Brooklyn accent; his appearance is that of a Neanderthal, though he’s capable of projecting deep introspection (he’s often required to pose in the seated position of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker). The choice was simple: before O’Neill had written a word of the play, he’d already pegged Louis Wolheim, known to friends as “Wolly,” a close friend and associate of the celebrated actors John and Lionel Barrymore. O’Neill took one look at this hulking ex-football player, most likely for the first time at one of the Barrymores’ legendary parties, with a face that looked as if it had been pulverized with a croquet mallet and knew immediately that he’d found his leading man.8
Wolheim’s moving portrayal of Yank, like Charles Gilpin’s of Brutus Jones, catapulted the actor from near obscurity into the limelight. Wolheim was a natural for the part because, again like Gilpin with Jones, he regularly associated with people like Yank and could handily reproduce the Brooklyn workingman’s persona. The strong box office returns were attributable as much to theatergoers wishing to see Wolheim as Yank Smith as to see the acclaimed new play by Eugene O’Neill. Mary Blair, on the other hand, who’d played the leads in Before Breakfast and Diff’rent, was a dubious choice for Mildred; from the outset it was clear that the otherwise brilliant actress was the production’s weakest link. Mildred must be an anemic, artificial-looking by-product of wealth. Blair, Arthur Hopkins said, was too vibrant a personality to render this effectively.9 When the Players moved uptown, Blair was replaced by a far better choice, Carlotta Monterey, an older but stunningly beautiful performer with a natural hauteur that embodied the part. (O’Neill ignored her at their first meeting, a slight he wouldn’t live down when they met again four years later.)
One night after a performance, O’Neill, Wolheim, Light, Fitzgerald, and a few others met at the Samovar for an after party. They spoke with elation about each of their roles in the production but also about the theatrical revolution The Hairy Ape was sure to set in motion. Wolheim pronounced that Yank Smith’s lines were not just dialogue but real poetry, especially in that one scene. “What scene?” O’Neill asked. And there was Yank, conjured from the air and sprawled out on the restaurant floor, roaring out his final lines at the zoo in Brooklynese. Someone at an adjoining table snickered, and Wolheim fell silent. Then Yank was back, leaping at the offender with a roar—the Hairy Ape in the flesh, unencumbered by the stage. Just as instantly, Wolheim was “Wolly” once again and calmly returned to the table. The Players often retold this anecdote to friends and colleagues, seeing in it, they would say, “an instant of unlimited possibilities.”10
Carlotta Monterey and Louis Wolheim in the 1922 Broadway production of The Hairy Ape.
(COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)
Wolheim’s loutish stage presence belied a fact about the actor that might have surprised his uptown audiences: along with his acting ability, he was endowed with a keen intellect. An avid bibliophile, Wolheim had graduated from Cornell University, where he’d received an undergraduate degree and a Ph.D. in mathematics, and he was nearly fluent in French, German, Spanish, and Yiddish. As such, Wolheim found himself beleaguered by the same question from those who knew him about The Hairy Ape: “What does it mean?” “People are always trying to find hidden meanings,” he averred, “when the truth is knocking at their door.” “An individual throws himself headlong against an impregnable system, and in the struggle inevitably and dramatically perishes. The system carries on unchanged. … A man attacks a false god. He fights with mighty strength, with bitter fury. Again and again with despair in his rudimentary soul he throws himself on the image. At last he lies a broken mass at the feet of the god. He has beaten his life out. The god is unchanged.”11
As a dramatist, Wolheim declared, O’Neill “has no axe to grind, no propaganda to promote, no psychoanalysis complex to unravel”; but each of his characters nonetheless “express[es] a deep resentment against our present civilization.” In this way, he said, the playwright “resembles Tolstoy, but he is without the latter’s naïve religious faith. A fighting Tolstoy—that is O’Neill.” O’Neill must be welcomed, he concluded, as “the Prometheus of modern drama.” “Prometheus stole fire from the gods and bestowed it on man. For this offense the gods had him chained to a rock and an eagle tortured him with beak and talons. … The mantle of Prometheus has fallen on Eugene O’Neill.”12 A couple of years on, O’Neill made it clear that he shared Wolheim’s analogy about himself, though he replaced Prometheus’s eagle with a flock of mangling vultures:
My vultures are still flapping around, thank God, hungry and undismayed; and I am very proud of them for they are my test and my self-justification. I would feel a success and a total loss if they should ever desert me to gorge themselves fat and comforted on what the newspaper boys naively call fame. But luckily they are birds that fly from the great dark behind and inside and not from the bright lights without. Each visit they wax stranger and more pitiless—which is, naturally, a matter of boast between them and me!—and I look forward to some last visit when their wings will blot out the sky and they’ll wrench the last of my liver out; and then I predict they’ll turn out to be angels of some God or other who have given me in exchange the germ of a soul.13
O’Neill had been in no mood to celebrate The Hairy Ape’s opening night on March 9 with a “John Barleycorn party” at Christine Ell’s restaurant. He didn’t go to Macdougal Street that night at all. Back in December 1921, he’d been told that Ella and Jim O’Neill were traveling to California for six months to sort out some real estate holdings of James’s outside Los Angeles. Ella had remained socially aloof after conquering her addiction; but after James’s death, she discovered that she was adept at managing her deceased husband’s financial affairs. Also thanks to Ella, her son Jim had, remarkably, stayed on the wagon for a year and a half. O’Neill felt obligated to spend Christmas in New York with them, though he’d been in the midst of writing The Hairy Ape and grumbled about the “risk of breaking this mood
up.”14 If he made the trip, and there’s some doubt about whether he did, he kept his presence in New York a close secret. One hopes he did visit Ella, as this would have been his last opportunity to see his mother alive.
Ella was hospitalized with a stroke that February, and Jim wired O’Neill, pleading with his brother to take a train out. O’Neill replied that a specialist had warned that he’d surely have a “nervous collapse” if he undertook such a journey in his “present condition.” (O’Neill was actually in reasonable health but was in the process of directing the most ambitious play of his life.) “Be fair. … Would not help Mother or you? Also you wire she is unconscious, will not know me. Want to help in any possible way. Everything I have at your command. Wire me what and how. … My plans depend on health. Would leave immediately if able. You must accept truth. I am in terrible shape.”15
Ella O’Neill died eight days later, on February 28, 1922.
The First Man premiered at the Neighborhood Playhouse on the sleety, bitter-cold night of March 4, 1922. Earlier that same day, Jim climbed aboard the eastbound train toting ten bottles of whiskey to escort Ella’s remains back to New York.16 Jim arrived at Grand Central Station with Ella’s casket on the day of The Hairy Ape’s premiere, and he was definitively off the wagon—this time for good.
O’Neill received Jim’s wire from Los Angeles on March 4 that he and Ella’s body would arrive in New York by train five days later. He then contacted his father’s friend and longtime advance man William Connor to accompany him to the station and help make arrangements for Ella’s casket and funeral. But, at the last minute, O’Neill backed out, just as he had on the street corner while heading with Boulton and Dorothy Day to Lou Holladay’s body at the Samovar. Perhaps the horror of watching first his friend and then his father die had convinced O’Neill that he was unfit for the emotional hell that direct exposure to a loved one’s death entails. Whatever his state of mind, he phoned Connor to say he wasn’t going.
Connor received this news with disgust but reluctantly enlisted his nephew, Frank Wilder, to replace the absentee son. At Grand Central, Connor and Wilder oversaw the porters’ removal of Ella’s casket and placement on a luggage cart on the platform. Jim was nowhere to be seen, but they eventually tracked him down in his compartment, incoherent and surrounded by empty whiskey bottles. They loaded Jim into a taxi and checked him into a Times Square hotel, then Connor phoned O’Neill at his suite at the Netherland Hotel on Fifth Avenue across from Central Park. O’Neill had shamefully failed in his duty to his mother, and Connor let him know it.17
A few minutes before midnight, Boulton and Commins returned to the Netherland after attending the premiere of The Hairy Ape. According to Commins, he called O’Neill’s room from the lobby to let him know they were coming up but was told to wait downstairs. Stepping off the elevator, O’Neill looked terrible: his face was ashen gray and his lips “two lines of blue.” “A tremor shook his body and he seemed to have lost control of his hands.” He could barely speak, as if his words “scraped past a rough lump in his throat.”18 Too humiliated to admit the truth, O’Neill lied by omission, leaving the impression that he’d been to Grand Central for his mother. He asked Boulton to go up to the suite without him and left with Commins for a walk, first around the back of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and then across Central Park.
For a half hour O’Neill didn’t utter a word while Commins prattled on about The Hairy Ape’s triumphant debut: when the final curtain fell just an hour before, he said, the audience members leapt to their feet. Wolheim got a standing ovation, and the packed auditorium echoed with cries of “Author! Author!” Their shouts carried on after the lights went up; but once they’d begun to realize that O’Neill was not going to appear, they slowly headed for the exit, glancing over their shoulders in eagerness for a last-minute entrance of the ingenious creator of this remarkable new play. “For Christ’s sake, cut it!” O’Neill snapped. “I don’t give a damn.”19
Commins pressed on, bursting to relive the experience, if only for himself. He described the audience’s gasps of astonishment when actual fire burst out of Jones and Throckmorton’s furnaces in the stokehole scene, the innumerable curtain calls for the cast members, the praise he and Boulton overheard from audience members between scenes and outside on Macdougal Street after the show. “I might have been talking to myself,” he later recalled. “If he had heard anything I had been saying, it meant as little to him as the other night noises in the park.”20
“It doesn’t mean anything,” O’Neill said, though not, Commins realized, in response to what he’d been telling him about the premiere. “It doesn’t mean anything,” O’Neill repeated. Then he started talking about his family. He began incoherently, stammering with his usual stand-alone words and half-finished sentences. He talked about his mother, her convent school days in Indiana and, in Commins’s words, her “sheltered, innocent” life before joining the vagabond lifestyle of her husband, “the antithesis of everything she had ever known.” He talked about how Monte Cristo had been “the dominant factor in their lives; they were chained to it”; about how his mother endured, year after year, “the agonies of one-night stands, the shabby accommodations and the improvised food of theatrical hotels”; about how their summers in New London provided her with much-needed but unsatisfying breathing space between tours; about how his father had frittered away the family’s aggregate wealth with “wildcat mine stocks and even wilder real-estate gambles.” “Imagine!” O’Neill said of James’s role as Edmund Dantès. “He played that part more than six thousand times, no wonder it made an addict out of her.”21
The air was frigid and damp in Central Park, and Ella’s funeral had been scheduled for the next morning. Commins broke O’Neill’s trancelike state several times, urging that they return to their hotels and get to bed. “Stay with me,” O’Neill responded each time. His soliloquy then turned to Jim, or rather on Jim, and his incredible potential, squandered on booze and prostitutes and gambling—the climax of his tragic existence being the disgraceful night of drunkenness at the train station earlier that day. By then, Commins remembered, his halting speech had disappeared: “Jim could have been a fine writer, a poet and certainly a barbed satirist or a romantic actor in the best tradition or even, highest in Gene’s esteem, a clear and persuasive thinker. But no, Jim was too bedazzled by Broadway, by round-heeled women, by his autointoxication with his own boasting while his sycophants urged him on. … If only he, Gene, had Jim’s gifts, then perhaps the O’Neills might be redeemed from the father who allowed himself to be trapped by success. The old man was a Sisyphus and Monte Cristo was the stone he was condemned to push uphill into hell.”22
Back at the hotel around four in the morning, the two men exchanged an awkward embrace, and Commins left O’Neill alone in the lobby. As well as helping his friend through this difficult night, Commins had also, though neither of them could have known it at the time, listened to O’Neill sketch out the thematic contours of what would become, two decades later, Long Day’s Journey Into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten.
Ella’s funeral service was held a few hours later at St. Leo’s Church, where Ella had attended Mass when she’d stayed at the Prince George Hotel. O’Neill and Boulton were at the service, which was conducted by Father Fogarty, a classmate of O’Neill’s from St. Aloysius. His childhood nurse Sarah Sandy was there too, but he avoided her, though this was the last time they would see each other.23 Later that afternoon, O’Neill and Boulton took a train up to New London to bury his mother in the family plot with James and Edmund in St. Mary’s Cemetery. Jim, no longer the loyal presence he’d been when James passed, hadn’t shown up for any of it.
On the night of The Hairy Ape’s opening at the Shubert Brothers’ Plymouth Theatre on April 17, the first thing the rowdy crew of Hudson Dusters would have seen was their friend’s name glowing in electric lights on the marquee. This must have impressed them. That’s where the star’s name usually went, rarely if eve
r the playwright’s.24 O’Neill had invited them himself, and once they’d taken their balcony seats, they started feeling rambunctious and would soon let loose during the pivotal third scene, when Mildred encounters Yank in the stokehole.
Jones and Throckmorton’s set design for scene 3 stunningly evoked the volcanic representation of Dante’s inferno that O’Neill specifies in his stage directions: “The fiery light floods over their shoulders as they bend round for the coal. Rivulets of sooty sweat have traced maps on their backs. The enlarged muscles form bunches of high light and shadow” (CP2, 135–36). The firemen work in unison, savagely, ritualistically. Now and then a whistle sounds, signaling the men to shovel faster so the engines can pick up steam. Yank goads the workers to follow his own backbreaking pace. Mildred enters behind him, just at the moment when the whistle blows once too often, and Yank “brandishes his shovel murderously over his head in one hand, pounding on his chest gorilla-like,” and roars at the top of his lungs, “Come down outa dere, yuh yellow, brass-buttoned, Belfast bum, yuh! Come down and I’ll knock yer brains out! Yuh lousy, stinkin,’ yellow mut of a Catholic moiderin’ bastard!” (CP2, 137).
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 28
