The Great God Brown opened at the Greenwich Village Theatre on January 23, 1926, and the Triumvirate took preemptive action on what they were certain would be a hard-nosed critical response to the enigmatic play: on the day of the premiere, they rushed the script to a team of transcribers, then forwarded the newly typed pages to key reviewers so they’d have a copy in hand while mulling over their critiques; additionally, they chose a Saturday night for the opening to allow the reviewers all day Sunday without the usual pressure of a tight deadline. Many scenes in Brown equally confounded the actors; and even their metteur en scène, Bobby Jones, betrayed a lack of comprehension about O’Neill’s intent with the play. Leona Hogarth, who played Margaret Anthony, complained that Jones had failed to make the roles “intelligible” to his cast, saying that “there was so much talk of overtones and subtle meanings that the cast was tied up tight as knots.” The scene where Dion and William’s masks change hands, Hogarth said, “was always obscure and the more Jones tried to explain it the more clouded it grew.”212
In the days that followed Brown’s premiere, the inevitable public confusion led O’Neill to “put himself on the dock” once again and print an explanation: the play, he wrote, represents a “mystical pattern which manifests itself as an overtone … dimly behind and beyond the words.” “[William] Brown,” he continued, “is the visionless demi-god of our new materialistic myth—a Success—building his life of exterior things, inwardly empty and resourceless, an uncreative creature of superficial preordained social grooves, a by-product forced aside into slack waters by the deep main current of life-desire. … Brown has always envied the creative life force in Dion—what he himself lacks.”213 Immediately after its release, O’Neill wondered if he should write “an explanation regarding this explanation.” But it wasn’t necessary. The consensus was that O’Neill had overreached with this oddity, but brilliantly. The Post regarded Brown as “a superb failure. … He has poured into it more than the stage can hold. His imagination has soared on wax wings too near the sun of dramatic illusion and, though he comes tumbling from the skies, it is a brilliant and thrilling fall, since he has dared greater heights than any other.” Brooks Atkinson, the Times’s new critic, agreed but added that O’Neill “puts a responsibility upon his audience too great and far too flattering.”214
O’Neill was heartened by the notices on the whole, but it irked him that so many critics designated him as “high brow,” an elitist label he loathed. “I write from the back wall of the theatre,” he protested. “I’m not high brow.” But for all the masks and expressionism, symbolism and philosophy, theology and psychology, The Great God Brown was a tremendous popular success and moved uptown, first to the Garrick Theatre, and then to the Klaw Theatre, for a total of eight months in New York—an incredible run for an experimental play. “I shall always regard this as the one miracle that ever happened in New York theatre!” O’Neill said, as he looked back in wonder nearly two decades later.215 Indeed, a rumor circulated around Broadway that two shopgirls were overheard commenting on Brown in the lobby: the first turned to her companion and said, “Gee, it’s awful artistic, ain’t it?” The other replied, “Yes, but it’s good all the same.”216
Leona Hogarth and Robert Keith as Margaret and Dion Anthony in the Triumvirate’s 1926 premiere of The Great God Brown.
(COURTESY OF THE MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK.)
“Old Doc” at Loon Lodge
The O’Neills again left “dull as hell” Brook Farm behind them and returned to Bermuda in February of 1926. The first home they rented was a stately eighteenth-century manor called Bellevue, a hilarious irony, O’Neill thought, given its namesake, the world-renowned psychiatric hospital in New York, where he felt he and his family really belonged.217 Located in blissful isolation on the south shore of Paget East, the newly constructed mansion featured wraparound columned porches on both levels and lush tropical grounds that sloped down to Grape Bay beach. The O’Neills wanted to lease it for several years, but that fell through, and they soon found a waterfront property for sale named Spithead in Warwick Parish. Spithead, a fortress-like pink stone sanctuary with a panoramic view of Hamilton Harbour and twenty-five acres of land, was built around 1780 by the British privateer Hezekiah Frith. The current owner hadn’t been to the house since before the war, and the neglect showed. Its stone wharf was crumbling, and the ceilings between floors were cracked and rotted through. But after obtaining the Bermudan government’s permission, the O’Neills made an offer of about $17,000, which was duly accepted.218
O’Neill returned to writing for the first time in months, invigorated with a renewed hope to push through Lazarus Laughed, which he completed at Bellevue that spring. Strange Interlude was next. (Other ideas had begun knocking around in his head as well; one of these, another mask play, which he never finished, was to be a condemnation of America’s mob mentality with a protagonist named Mob, “a Jones but white.”)219 He also received the proofs of Barrett Clark’s biography.
At first, the prospect of Clark writing the earliest chronicle of his life had thrilled him, but the final product was dispiriting. The book was sketchy and incomplete, and yet at the same time too long. Clark read his plays well, but he seemed incapable of writing “a more concise and interest-catching” tale about his life. Worst of all, O’Neill didn’t see the least resemblance between himself and the man described: “It isn’t I. And the truth would make such a much more interesting—and incredible!—legend. That is what makes me melancholy. But I see no hope for this except someday to shame the devil myself, if I ever can muster the requisite interest—and nerve—simultaneously!”220
Spithead, O’Neill’s home in Bermuda.
(COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)
By June the island climate had again lifted his spirits. “It’s getting pretty hot down here now but the bathing is the most wonderful you can imagine,” he wrote his father-in-law Teddy Boulton, who was then convalescing from an advanced case of tuberculosis at Shelton (the public-funded sanatorium where O’Neill was briefly treated in December 1912). “The water is so warm and the air so soft that you can sport around in the water and on the beach in the moonlight as pleasurably as in sunlight. Shane is in the water all the time and Oona wades about in it.” “I’ve found Bermuda hits me better than any spot heretofore,” he wrote Hart Crane. “I can relax … get rid of nerves, be more free myself—and still keep from losing the needful pep.”221
Once he’d turned his complete attention to Strange Interlude, O’Neill started to problem-solve yet again over what must be done to compensate for demise of the soliloquy. He was especially inspired by Theodore Dreiser’s recent An American Tragedy (1925), America’s most talked-about literary event of the year; Dreiser’s epic novel revolved, O’Neill said, around an “unexceptional man,” whereas he would compose a “novel in dramatic form of an exceptional woman.”222 This idea would make for a play of “revolutionary” length—perhaps the longest play in modern memory—which would approach in dramatic form “a novel’s comprehensiveness.”223 Having accepted, since his evening with Jimmy Light, that fiction was not his métier, O’Neill still groped for a theatrical equivalent for the novelist’s access to inner thoughts. This would ultimately come through best, in the years to come, by making his characters drunk, high on drugs, or very hungover—the “in vino veritas” that informs the inner voices of his late plays A Touch of the Poet, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey, Hughie, and A Moon for the Misbegotten.224 But other methods were tried first.
With Spithead undergoing renovations, O’Neill knew that he would require an anonymous summer retreat to write Strange Interlude and, just as important, retain his hard-won sobriety. Provincetown was out of the question. Carlin, Harry Kemp, Frank Shay, and other hardcore inebriates were still there and swilling more rotgut than ever. “Not that I’m afraid anymore,” he told Macgowan, “but it’s
no use making it harder for oneself.”225 On the recommendation of Richard Madden’s partner, the theatrical agent Elizabeth “Bess” Marbury, the O’Neills settled on Belgrade Lakes, Maine, and on June 15, they sailed back to New York, then headed north to New England.
On June 23 in New Haven, Connecticut, at Yale University’s commencement ceremony, “Gene” O’Neill, the college dropout, became Dr. Eugene Gladstone O’Neill. He’d been awarded an honorary doctorate of literature. “Old Doc,” he mused. “O’Neill, the Yale grad.” (The honor, he joked, was likely a gesture of retroactive gratitude from the hallowed university for his decision to attend Princeton and Harvard instead of Yale.)226 Yale’s press release for the event stated that O’Neill had been chosen for his role “as a creative contributor of new and moving forms to one of the oldest of arts, as the first American playwright to receive both wide and serious recognition upon the stage of Europe.”227 But O’Neill also knew what, or more precisely who, was the motivating force behind the pick.
The year before, 1925, his old playwriting professor George Pierce Baker had left Harvard to head Yale’s Department of Theatre, and one of his first acts in office was to lobby for O’Neill to be granted the award. “Eugene O’Neill today,” Baker asserted in the Yale Review, “is the best known in other countries of all our dramatists. Vienna, Prague, Dresden, Berlin, Paris, London, Rome—all capitals of Europe have seen his finest plays.”228 (O’Neill was convinced at the time that his soaring popularity across the Atlantic was largely because the Europeans believed he was actually from Ireland.)229 “Coming from Yale,” O’Neill had replied to the university’s offer in May, “I appreciate that this [degree] is a true honor … and hope that this recognition of my work really should have a genuine significance for all those who are trying, as I am, to do original, imaginative work for the theater.”230
O’Neill was seated near a fellow honoree, the secretary of the treasury and billionaire industrialist Andrew W. Mellon. O’Neill glanced over at Mellon and saw, he said, “the epitome of the cold banker. You couldn’t read anything there. What a cold face, what cold piercing eyes!” In his introductory remarks, Professor William Lyon Phelps pronounced that O’Neill was “the only American dramatist who has produced a deep impression on European drama and European thought. … He has redeemed the American theater from commonplaceness and triviality.” When O’Neill rose from his seat to accept the award, he looked across the lawn in astonishment as the newly minted graduates exploded into a “tremendous ovation.”231
After the post-ceremony formalities, O’Neill drove his family in their Packard touring car along the Connecticut coastline fifty miles northeast to New London. While there he watched the long-venerated Harvard-Yale regatta on the Thames and rooted for the blue-shirted oarsmen of his new alma mater. In a thrilling win, Yale’s varsity eight-man crew crossed the line ahead of Harvard’s crimson-shirted heavyweights by a boat length (a hairsbreadth distance over the brutal four-mile course). O’Neill had covered “Boat Day” back in 1912 when he was a reporter for the Telegraph, but he decided then that the venerated regatta, the longest-running rowing race in the nation, would be the ideal setting for the final scene of Strange Interlude.
O’Neill left Boulton at the hotel with the children and steered the Packard, “very slowly and reminiscently,” he wrote Jessica Rippin afterward, down to 325 Pequot Avenue. Grimly looking up the hill at the dilapidated Monte Cristo Cottage, he kept driving. The Rippin house looked dark, so he continued on for the mile or so to Ocean Beach. This too was a pitiful sight. The town had decided to imitate the flash of Coney Island, and the “atrocities committed at the beach,” as far as he was concerned, had cheapened the beloved haunt of his youth.232
On July 1, O’Neill maneuvered the Packard through the pines, farmland, and blueberry hills of inland Maine and down into the village of Belgrade Lakes. Their first stop was a real estate office and general store run by Ervin Bean (brother of clothing magnate L. L. Bean) and a local named Ken Bartlett to inquire about a summer residence. Few of the Belgrade locals had ever heard of Eugene O’Neill; if they had, Bartlett said later, “It wouldn’t have mattered anyway.” The O’Neills considered the first cottages Bean showed them “dumps” and much too small for the family’s extended stay.233 Finally Bean located a suitable rental on Rupus Lane, less than a mile down the road from the village. A two-story rustic log cabin, spacious inside but perpetually dark from the surrounding pines, Loon Lodge, as it’s still known, occupies a shadowy lot on the western shore of Great Pond. Loon Lodge, O’Neill, joked, perfect: “This, after living in ‘Bellevue’ all winter, makes me suspect that God is becoming a symbolist or something!” But after a week, despite the cabin’s ironic association with madness, “I remain not only sane but also sober.”234
Sobriety was as trying as ever. Each time O’Neill went on the wagon, he rediscovered the chief reason he ever really drank in the first place: the effects of alcohol, even during the worst of his almighty hangovers, simply made him feel less alone. Drunkenness had been his closest companion for over twenty years, he told Macgowan, and although he didn’t “feel any desire to drink whatever,” his clear-headedness deepened his feeling of isolation: “I rather feel the void left by those companionable or (even when most horrible) intensely dramatic phantoms and obsessions, which, with caressing claws in my heart and brain, used to lead me for weeks at a time, otherwise lonely, down the ever-changing vistas of that No-Mans-Land lying between the D.T.s and Reality as we suppose it. But I reckon that, having now been ‘on the wagon’ for a longer time—a good deal—than ever before since I started drinking at 15, I have a vague feeling of maladjustment to this ‘cleaner, greener land’ somewhere inside me. … One feels so normal with so little to be normal about. One misses playing solitaire with one’s scales.”235
O’Neill’s cavernous feelings of self-alienation weren’t lost on the two New York reporters granted permission to drive up and interview him. David Karsner, the Call columnist who’d championed the politics of The Hairy Ape, interviewed him that summer for a Herald Tribune feature story in which Karsner admitted that, while they talked on the wide porch overlooking Great Pond, the “playwright … did not disturb me at all, but the man disturbed me much. It was what gave those eyes of his their burning luster and what contributed to his intense, almost jerky exterior that mattered.”236 Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, who interviewed him for her New Republic profile, concluded her piece, “When O’Neill steps lightly along some pagan shore with Shane, he walks a little behind, a tall figure, in a bathing-suit, with limbs burnt to a pagan blackness; and on his face the look, not of a ‘father,’ but of some trusting elder child who has grown up into a strange world.” Sergeant further considered the effect this personality had on his work: “Always thus hiding, always thus revealing himself, this Irish-American mystic, with his strange duality of being, has made his plays a projection of his struggles with the unmanageable universe. Their power and their tension of his taut spirit, which are ever trying, like a pair of acrobats, to transcend themselves. Even the plays that fail to convince have a way of piercing the spectator in the ribs with some blade of vital truth. Those who are looking for diversion in the theatre cannot endure O’Neill’s stark and desperate revelations.”237 (That March and April 1927, Shepley would spend six weeks at Spithead recovering from an automobile accident; this was just after her article appeared, and O’Neill told her it was “the best thing ever done about me. The others have been pretty dull and lame. Yours is the only one!”)238
“You don’t like me, do you?” O’Neill remarked that July 15 to the shadowy-eyed woman accompanying him down to Bess Marbury’s bathhouse. “You’re the rudest man I’ve ever met,” came an icy reply from the actress Carlotta Monterey. “When I went into that play of yours [The Hairy Ape], I didn’t want to. I had just finished one thing and wanted to go out to California and see my mother and daughter. But Hoppy [Arthur Hopkins] kept after me, so I did, with hardly a rehearsal, and
you never had the decency to thank me.” (Monterey had every reason to feel this way; O’Neill, after being introduced to her by Jimmy Light, turned to him and said, “What a dumb bitch she is.”)239 Only a couple of months younger than O’Neill, Monterey was no longer the ingénue of eighteen when she’d become 1907’s Miss California and a Miss America runner-up. But her great beauty made an impression at Belgrade Lakes, especially in her bathing suit. (Boulton’s daughter Barbara recalled her wearing a “boyish white wool bathing suit with no overskirt such as suits usually had,” which revealed far more of her anatomy than just her legs.)240
The previous spring, Monterey, née Hazel Neilson Tharsing (a change from her Danish name to accentuate her Spanish-style allure), had married and then promptly divorced the man-about-town New Yorker caricaturist Ralph Barton. She believed that Barton, her third husband, was a drunkard who’d wasted his talent cavorting with celebrities and hosting all-night parties. Her first husband, the Scottish lawyer and California mining speculator John Moffat, was nine years older than she; her second, the law student Melvin C. Chapman, was seven years younger. Moffat lost access to his fortune when World War I shut down the banks in England, and Monterey claimed that he’d almost fired a gun at her and once threatened to commit suicide by jumping from their hotel window. Chapman she’d only married, she informed him soon after their breakup, to get pregnant. They did have a child, Cynthia Jane Chapman, in 1917, but Monterey left her in California in the care of her mother, Nellie Tharsing, and moved to New York to pursue her career on the stage. Meanwhile, Monterey conducted a long-standing affair with a hoary Wall Street banker named James Speyer. Speyer, whom she referred to as “Papa,” worshiped Monterey, and though their relationship had apparently ceased being sexual, he ensured her financial security with a trust that would supply her with a $14,000 annuity for the rest of her life.241
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 36
