Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts
Page 37
After Monterey’s divorce from Ralph Barton had been finalized that spring, she’d been invited for the summer to Bess Marbury’s residence on Upper Long Pond, about a mile from Loon Lodge. Making up in ambition what she might have lacked in talent, Monterey considered time spent with the illustrious theatrical agent a professional coup that might get her back on the stage. Marbury was a portly seventy-year-old woman with a list of renowned clientele, past and present, including Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. (The talk of Broadway had it that Marbury preferred the company of her own sex. According to Boulton, O’Neill at first thought that Monterey was Marbury’s lover; when Boulton said she didn’t think so, he responded, “You’re so naïve.”)242 Marbury’s household was thus a step up for a second-tier actress like Monterey. Nevertheless, she’d resolved to welcome “the Great O’Neill” with a stony silence.
Agnes Boulton stepped out of the Packard with O’Neill and straightaway inquired about Monterey’s sex life. “I have no sex life,” Monterey replied, offended. “I’ve just been divorced.” “Oh, but you must have a lover! Don’t you have a lover?” No.
Boulton and Marbury dominated the conversation that afternoon, with O’Neill and Monterey deathly silent. After a time, Marbury took note of the awkwardness between them and instructed Monterey to accompany the playwright to the boathouse and find him a swimsuit. Monterey herself had an intense phobia of water from the time that her father, Christian Tharsing, had thrown her headlong into the glacially cold Pacific in a bungled attempt at teaching her to swim. Her hauteur softened a bit when she beheld O’Neill emerge from the bathhouse clad in an ill-fitting woman’s suit, then lunge, unselfconsciously, into Long Pond. Her icy demeanor thawed yet more after O’Neill apologized about their “moment’s introduction” at the Plymouth Theatre in 1922; he’d been overwhelmed with grief, he explained, over his mother’s recent death.243 Monterey may not have shared his love of water, but they both—O’Neill feeling as lost without alcohol’s “phantoms and obsessions” as Monterey did after her recent divorce from Ralph Barton—felt very alone.
Shane O’Neill, Eugene O’Neill, and Carlotta Monterey at Belgrade Lakes, Maine, in the summer of 1926.
(COURTESY OF THE YALE COLLECTION OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, NEW HAVEN)
O’Neill’s favorite activity that summer was paddling his canoe over to the majestic home of the actress Florence Reed and her husband, Malcolm Williams, a half mile north along Great Pond’s edge from Loon Lodge. Their property included a wide lakefront lawn and dock area where he could relax, sip tea, and enjoy hours of genial conversation, uninterrupted by shouting children, the smell of cooking, and other domestic annoyances. He was desperate for male companionship, and he and Malcolm Williams swiftly became friends. When Monterey was visiting their home with Bess Marbury and discovered O’Neill there, she “accidentally” left her scarf behind. Reed was about to ask her maid to return it, when Williams said, “Don’t bother, she won’t thank you for it. She’ll be back for it herself tomorrow, when Gene’s here.”244
Monterey soon visited him and his family at Loon Lodge and occasionally went canoeing with O’Neill. Reed remembered that the O’Neills’ lodge smelled of “diapers and lamb stew,” to the disgust of Monterey, who always made it a point to keep her living spaces, including Bess Marbury’s that summer, utterly immaculate.245 Boulton ignored such trifles on the whole and recalled more generally of Monterey’s advances on her husband, “I didn’t worry about him because she didn’t seem smart enough for him. It seemed to me he was more amused by her than anything else.” But then again, she added musingly, O’Neill did say that Monterey had eyes just like his mother’s.246
O’Neill, to combat his post-alcohol doldrums, took advantage of every diversion that drew tourists to Belgrade Lakes each summer by the thousands—swimming, boating, fishing, and aimlessly driving through the countryside. “The Lakes are fine,” he wrote Macgowan, “and we have a good camp, good rowboat & canoe and fish abound. … Eugene is here & Barbara so we’re a fat family.” He took swims several times a day, often across from Loon Lodge to Abena Point and back. Eugene Jr., who was then sixteen, and Barbara Burton, eleven, were there for July and much of August. During this time Barbara plunged “madly in love” with her stepfather’s good-looking namesake, “so dashing and handsome and full of exuberance.”247
Eugene, Barbara, and Shane held competitions to see how many perch they could catch; the withdrawn six-year-old Shane, happy to sit alone and wait patiently for a bite, usually won. Eugene, now an honor student at the prestigious Horace Mann School in the Bronx, dreamed of attending Yale. While at Loon Lodge, he befriended an equally well-read boy of his age named Frank Meyer, who was surprised to find himself discussing life and literature with the likes of Eugene O’Neill. “I found him very kind and gentle,” Meyer recalled. “What I especially liked was that he talked to you as an equal, none of that talking down because you were a kid.” At one point, he said, “we talked about Freud. I remember in particular our discussing puns and slips of the tongue in connection with the unconscious.”248
Shane and Oona’s clamoring needs, on the other hand, though they were no different from other children their age, had become nearly intolerable to O’Neill. “Perhaps I could do with less progeny about,” O’Neill said, “for I was never cut out, seemingly, for a pater familias and children in squads, even when indubitably my own, tend to ‘get my goat.’”249 To offer her husband a semblance of privacy, Boulton arranged for local builders to construct a makeshift shack close to the water’s edge.250 After several morning hours of frustratingly slow progress on Strange Interlude, he’d emerge from his shack and, unable to face the racket in the main house, plunge into Great Pond for a long swim. Only afterward could he relax and enjoy lunch with his family.
Harold de Polo rented a cottage in Maine about a hundred miles away at Lake Kezar, and O’Neill invited him over in early September to teach him bass fishing. “Come on along, kid,” he wrote his old friend, “and show me something about bass.” O’Neill, de Polo, and Boulton went night fishing off an island across from Loon Lodge, and O’Neill was a determined student, ignoring the sparkling northern lights that left Boulton and de Polo entranced. Time spent with O’Neill always reminded de Polo of a popular cartoon: two British youths are looking at Mont Blanc in the Swiss Alps. “Not bad,” one mumbles. “Don’t be so demmed enthusiastic,” the other yawns. “Purty?” de Polo asked, quoting from Desire Under the Elms. “Ay-eh,” O’Neill responded, also from the script, then he struck a bass. “How about it,” de Polo asked, “ain’t it the grandest sport in the world? … Ain’t it got all the thrills—” “Yeah,” O’Neill said and cast his rod again.251
De Polo was still drinking a good deal but admired his friend’s resolve to quit. He later remembered that instead of bourbon, their usual, they drank glasses of milk while warming up at the fireplace and ate can after can of “exceptionally sweet figs in syrup which Gene seemed very much to like.” When the O’Neills agreed to try their luck fishing at Lake Kezar, de Polo phoned Helen and told her to stock up on figs. During the O’Neills’ visit, while they sat around the fireplace and the two men tucked into their milk and figs, Boulton burst out laughing: “Two old topers drinking milk and eating figs in sweet syrup! My God, what would the boys in the Hell-Hole say?”252 O’Neill smiled wanly, then reached behind him for a copy of The Great God Brown, signed it, handed it to his friend, and told him to read it out loud, which he did: “To Harold de Polo—My friend of ‘those days’ and these—‘The Donkeyman—I done my share o’ drinkin’ in my time. (Regretfully) Then was good times, those days! Can’t hold up under drink no more. Doctor told me I’d got to stop or die. (He spits contentedly) So I stops!’ Gene—The Moon of the Caribbees.”253
Strange Interlude had proved “damn difficult” to get through in spite of O’Neill’s abstinence. During the first few weeks, all he could do was revise the second scene over and
over; after a while, however, he admitted that although it was “coming forth more slowly than usual,” he was confident it was progressing well.254 By August he’d completed five acts, but again felt “sour … on life generally.” Then the Triumvirate decided to call it quits, and he needed a producer. “Seriously, I honestly am getting awfully fed up with the eternal show-shop from which nothing ever seems to emerge except more show-shop,” he complained to George Jean Nathan over the trouble of drumming up a financial backer. David Belasco had, for a time, optioned Marco Millions and promised the whopping sum of $200,000 for its production costs (including a research trip for Bobby Jones to study Chinese set designs firsthand); but he eventually passed on the play, as did Arthur Hopkins and several other producers after him. Macgowan proposed that they join forces with the Actors’ Theater company to offset Marco’s expenses, but O’Neill argued that signing with such a “show-shop” outfit would be demeaning after what they’d accomplished: “It cheapens us both and it cheapens the plays in the minds of cheap people.” “It’s a most humiliating game for an artist,” he said. “Novelists have the best of it.”255
On October 13, 1926, while Boulton stayed behind in Maine to decamp from Loon Lodge, O’Neill took an overnight train back to New York—and back to the beautiful Carlotta Monterey.
The Soliloquy Is Dead! Long Live—What?
To celebrate his thirty-eighth birthday, O’Neill was invited as an honored guest to the Yale-Dartmouth football game, which he attended with George Pierce Baker and Kenneth Macgowan. In New York, he dropped in on Paul Robeson backstage at the Comedy Theatre, where Robeson was starring in Black Boy, a play based loosely on Jack Johnson that closed after only three weeks. Robeson admitted to O’Neill that he was as fed up with acting in dramas as O’Neill had been with writing them and decided to exclusively pursue a career as a singer. O’Neill also met with prospective producers for Marco Millions and Lazarus Laughed, conducted several sessions with Dr. Hamilton, and attended rehearsals for the Triumvirate’s final production as a team—a revival of Beyond the Horizon, in conjunction with the Actors’ Theater, on November 20. Boulton arrived for a ten-day “honeymoon,” but then left him to his devices.256 Most of his energy after his wife’s departure was spent wooing and decisively falling in love with Monterey.
“He came up on three afternoons,” she recalled. “I hardly knew the man … and he paid no more attention to me than if I were that chair, and he began to talk about his early life—that he had no real home, that he had no mother in the real sense, no father in the real sense, no one to treat him as a child should be treated … those three afternoons I sat and listened to this man—at first I was a little worried, and then I was deeply unhappy.”257 It’s true that O’Neill and Monterey had met on only six occasions at Belgrade Lakes.258 What isn’t entirely true is that she “hardly knew the man” when they reunited in New York, as several pictures of them in Maine make clear. Indeed, O’Neill’s work diary indicates that rather than “three afternoons” at her apartment, as the ever-decorous Monterey wished posterity to believe, they met every chance they had through late October and November. They shared meals together, went shopping at Abercrombie & Fitch and Macy’s, attended the Philharmonic, and even, on November 22, had their portraits taken by the celebrated photographer Nickolas Muray. During his last five days in New York, they were inseparable. O’Neill was with her at her flat at 20 East Sixty-Seventh Street until two thirty on the morning he sailed back to Bermuda.259
Boulton had traveled with the children to Connecticut from Belgrade Lakes to look in on Brook Farm and visit her family. From there, she departed for Bermuda, only crossing her husband’s path once during a few days’ visit from him at Brook Farm, which they’d put up for sale to cover the cost of buying and renovating Spithead. Again O’Neill felt abandoned, and he soon blamed Boulton’s disregard for his relationship with Monterey: “It was partly your never sending me any word,” he wrote to her that spring after having confessed, and bitterly argued over, his love affair. “When you went to Bermuda and left me alone in New York that helped me to forget myself.”260
Back in Bermuda, Boulton rented a small house near Spithead called Belmere, which the family inhabited for the entire winter because of endless snags with Spithead’s renovations. Boulton wanted a new kitchen and O’Neill wanted a tennis court; the enormous water tank in the side yard, constructed by the privateer to hold seven thousand gallons of water to supply his ships, required an electric pump for indoor plumbing. A section of the stone wharf had been pulverized by a devastating hurricane that summer with winds up to 114 miles per hour and now also needed repair. Boulton hadn’t expected the work to be completed by the time she arrived, but she’d expected that something would have been done. The colossal project was overseen by Frederick Hill, the architect of James and Ella O’Neill’s longtime residence, the Prince George Hotel in New York. That October Boulton had written O’Neill from Loon Lodge complaining that Hill was too cryptic in his responses to her: “Another futile letter from Hill—too stupid. No info. at all. He is an ass.” After such insults were trained at him personally, Frederick Hill offered to resign from the job but, lacking an alternative, they kept him on.261
O’Neill arrived in Bermuda in late November, thinking of little but Monterey. He wrote her long, passionate letters pledging his devotion, but not to her alone. “As soon as I reached here I told Agnes exactly how I felt about leaving you,” he told her. “I said I loved you. I also said, and with equal truth, that I loved her. Does this sound idiotic to you? I hope not! I hope you will understand. … It is possible to love like that.” (Carlotta, at this point ambivalent about their future, pleaded with O’Neill to destroy their letters, insisting that anyone who saved their mail “ought to be shot,” yet she judiciously saved his to her.)262
In December 1926, O’Neill dedicated himself to preparing Marco Millions for his publisher Horace Liveright and readying Lazarus Laughed for the stage, “cutting loose ends, concentrating, clarifying.”263 (Lazarus required a cast of 120 and would cost $50,000 or more; Macgowan warned that such an undertaking “doesn’t slip onto the American stage very quickly or easily.”)264 O’Neill celebrated his one-year anniversary of sobriety, December 31, by sending off Marco and arranging for the anarchist Alexander Berkman, then in exile in Russia, to translate Lazarus for a Moscow production. He could finally resume work on Strange Interlude, “in which,” he told Berkman, “I attempt to do in a play all that can be done in a novel.”265
O’Neill labored over the sprawling nine-act script through the winter, completing a first draft in early March. Including the three months at Loon Lodge, the play had taken no fewer than three hundred creative workdays to complete. “It does all I hoped it would do, I think,” he told George Jean Nathan, “and seems to me a successful adventure along a new technique that offers limitless new possibilities.” Jimmy Light again visited Bermuda that summer, but this time O’Neill explained the play to his discerning friend. In Light’s concluding paragraph of “The Parade of Masks,” he writes, “O’Neill neither gave up writing plays nor did he write a novel. He did, however, write ‘Strange Interlude.’ In this play, he again used the mask but this time not the physical mask. In this play he used the novelist’s prerogative of inner revelation. The means by which he accomplished both artistic ends was the soliloquy used forthrightly and continuously as no other playwright before him has dared to use it. By the insight furnished by the soliloquies we as audience, can project the emotions, the true not the apparent ones onto the face of the characters as he presents a facade to the rest of the world. It is the mask returned, making possible two levels of dramatic action.”266
Just after finishing Strange Interlude, O’Neill roughly sketched out an autobiographical series with the working title “The Sea-Mother’s Son,” an idea he would return to years later. The autograph manuscript of this work was discovered among Boulton’s papers after her death in 1968, and it was most likely written on Mar
ch 8, 1927.267 The working title became “The Sea Mother’s Son: The Story of the Birth of a Soul.”268 Again his idea was to blur the genre lines between the novel and the play: as he wrote George Jean Nathan the following year, “This [Grand Opus] is to be neither play nor novel although there will be many plays in it and it will have greater scope than any novel I know of. Its form will be altogether its own and my own.”269
His original notes from 1927 read, in part: “M—Lonely life—spoiled before marriage (husband friend of father’s—father his great admirer—drinking companions)—fashionable convent girl—religious & naive—talent for music—physical beauty—ostracism after marriage due to husband’s profession—lonely life after marriage—no contact with husband’s friends—husband man’s man—heavy drinker—out with men until small hours every night—slept late—little time with her—stingy about money due to his childhood experience with grinding poverty after his father deserted family to return to Ireland to spend last days.”270 By 1935, he returned to the idea and envisioned nine plays, “a notion I had years ago for a combination autobiographical novel in play form for publication in book, not production on stage.”271