Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  O’Neill and Monterey ferried to France in March; but they were spotted during a stopover in Paris and so, with reporters from the International Herald nipping at their heels, they abandoned plans to tour the celebrated hub of modern culture, rented a touring car, and motored out of town. First they meandered through the château district of the Loire Valley, stopping at “Chambord, Amboise, Loches, etc.—the most beautiful and dramatic places I have ever seen,” he reported back. They then headed southward down the Atlantic coast in search of a villa to rent for an indefinite stay. This they ultimately found in Guéthary, a historic whaling village like New London that overlooked the Basque coast on the border of Spain. O’Neill felt at home there, especially once he heard that Basques “come from the same stock as the original Black Irish to which I obviously belong.”4 For a summer residence, they rented the Villa Marguerite, an old beachfront property just outside the village. And from there O’Neill initiated his negotiations for his divorce from Agnes Boulton.

  Boulton indicated that she wished their marriage to dissolve quietly. And she’d made a solemn vow at the hotel to grant him freedom. “I wish you happiness,” she wrote him from Bermuda, if with a wistful, slightly ominous tone: “Think of me sometimes when you see the Europe I so longed, once, for us to see together.” O’Neill mostly trusted Boulton as “fine and sound at bottom”; but he worried about advice she might gather from the “Philadelphia Social Register bunch,” a faction she’d befriended in Bermuda that O’Neill considered “about as far removed from fundamental human beingism as one could get—and [Boulton] is easily swayed by the rich and the social.” To ward off such threats, he promised her she could stay indefinitely at Spithead and that he’d provide anything for the children, including his stepchild Barbara—within reason, of course.5

  Meanwhile, more than five thousand miles away from his villa at Guéthary, O’Neill’s play Lazarus Laughed premiered on April 4, 1928, at the Pasadena Community Playhouse in California. O’Neill had subtitled the work “A Play Performed for an Imaginative Theatre,” but given its outlandish set design and casting demands, even beyond Marco Millions, his chronicler Barrett Clark remarked that he “might more appropriately have said an Imaginary Theater.”6

  The Pasadena Playhouse enlisted a cast of 16 speaking roles plus 159 amateur actors doubling in over 400 roles as Lazarus’s guests, orthodox Jews, Nazarenes, followers of Lazarus, Greeks, Roman soldiers, Roman legionnaires, Roman senators, a crowd of Roman courtiers, a chorus of children, a chorus of senile old men, and even a dying lion. For more than six weeks they designed over 400 costumes and 325 masks depicting various ages, sexes, classes, religions, and races, each with matching wigs and headdresses, thanks to students and faculty of stagecraft from the University of California, Los Angeles.7 Tickets sold out twenty-eight nights in a row, then the company moved on to the Hollywood Music Box theater. Under the expert direction of Gilmor Brown, this West Coast production was a stupendously bold achievement—not simply for O’Neill but for the possibilities of community art theater in the United States as a whole.

  The title Lazarus Laughed signals a mood reversal from O’Neill’s early poem of despair “The Bridegroom Weeps!” It conflates the Gospel of Matthew, “At midnight there was a great cry made, behold, the bridegroom cometh!” with the Gospel of John, when “Jesus wept” upon first being told that he’d arrived too late to save his follower Lazarus from death, and then miraculously rose him from the grave. In the Bible, the “bridegroom” is Jesus Christ, offering salvation and humankind’s triumph over death. But O’Neill’s experimental mask play takes up where the Bible leaves off, speculating on Lazarus’s future after Christ’s miracle. (Lazarus Laughed therefore represents, as Kenneth Macgowan pointed out even before it had found a producer, “the first time in all his score of plays Eugene O’Neill puts a Jew upon the stage as the central figure.”)8 Lazarus becomes a figure of worship himself by preaching life over death—“yes” over “no”—across the Roman Empire. When questioned about the afterlife, Lazarus responds, “O Curious Greedy Ones, is not one world in which you know not how to live enough for you?” (CP2, 546).

  O’Neill had known early on that the play’s biggest stumbling block, even more than its necessarily enormous cast size, was finding an actor to pull off Lazarus’s celestial laugh. Lazarus’s laugh has the power to relieve the fear of death, having a spellbinding effect on the masked characters on the stage (Lazarus is the only character who does not wear a mask) but also on the audience itself. After seeing Paul Robeson sing spirituals at a dinner party in New York the previous September, O’Neill seriously considered casting him as Lazarus, in white face. “Don’t laugh,” he’d written Boulton. “White folks make up to play negroes and there’s no reason why the reverse shouldn’t be practiced. He’s the only actor who can do the laughter, that’s the important point. It would be good showmanship, too—no end to the publicity it would attract.”9

  Luckily the members of the California regional group didn’t find it necessary to resort to this. They knew exactly the right man for the part: Irving Pichel. Critics were unanimously moved by Pichel’s performance, many of them awestruck: “The laughter,” wrote George C. Warren for the New York Times, “which at one time runs without cessation for four minutes, calls for absolute repose and poise, and Pichel’s splendid and resonant voice carried him to a triumph.” The Los Angeles Times was equally impressed, congratulating the actor for conjuring “the Dionysian laughter of the eternal cosmos.” “Long I expect to be haunted by that laughter,” the Pasadena Evening Post marveled over Pichel, “and to think I see, as it reverberates in memory, the glowing countenance of Lazarus, and the luminous garments in which, with face uncovered, he moved in a world of masks.”10 O’Neill had always admired the man’s “brains, ability and imagination,” and back in 1923 he’d hoped to recruit him for the Experimental Theatre, Inc. At one point he’d told Pichel he was going to try to make it for opening night, and local newspapers reported he would attend the performance but lose himself among the audience and conceal his identity. “O’Neill had been expected, but was not present, report asserting he was in the South of France,” wrote a well-informed newsman, blowing O’Neill’s cover, “and there was a feeling of disappointment because of his nonappearance, but the splendor of the production, the vital and thrilling performance, and the poetic beauty of the play itself made up for his absence.”11

  Yet the “power & the glory” of victory evaded O’Neill once again, as his elation over Lazarus’s triumph was offset by a consternating letter from Boulton. Earlier that year, on January 27, Boulton had found out that she was pregnant and wrote O’Neill in April claiming the unborn child was conceived that day at the Hotel Wentworth. O’Neill refused to believe it, and he was right not to. In her first letter about this “indiscretion,” the dates of her pregnancy didn’t add up, since they’d been together on January 14, the day she left for Bermuda; O’Neill was thus armed with “proof positive of adultery in your own handwriting.” “You have the unscrupulous effrontery to attempt to lay this thing at my door! You must have changed, by God, and hardly for the better spiritually—when you can do such a thing!”12 Boulton soon recognized the futility of protesting further and traveled to New York that May to have an abortion at the home of Mary Blair.

  Since her days as a leading lady for O’Neill’s plays, Blair had become Boulton’s intimate confidante. After Boulton arrived at her apartment, the actress stormed back and forth in front of her shaken guest. “He will never write another play—I spit!” she said, and spat on her floor. Blair had just been divorced from Edmund Wilson, and was a dedicated supporter of women through such trying times. Boulton remembered back in March 1922, for instance, when Blair was playing Mildred in The Hairy Ape, she’d met F. Scott Fitzgerald’s then twenty-one-year-old wife, Zelda, at Blair’s flat. Boulton and Zelda went to Pennsylvania Station together, and while they were passing a flask back and forth, the chic young woman dropped unconscious o
n the station floor. She’d just had an abortion that morning.13 (Fitzgerald noted bitterly in his ledger for that month, “Zelda and her abortionist.” In a letter to him outlining the events leading up to her first institutionalization, Zelda listed “pills and Dr. Lackin.”)14

  Boulton’s unborn child was likely fathered by a dock builder at Spithead named John Johnson (or possibly Johnston), whom Gaga had caught with Boulton in flagrante delicto that fall. This breach of privacy was the last straw for Boulton, and she sent the nursemaid packing back to Provincetown. From there Gaga wrote several letters to O’Neill, evidently informing him of Boulton’s love affair and that her mistress had been drinking heavily and had “gone to pieces.” (In a letter to Boulton, O’Neill quoted his anonymous informant as saying, “Such a shame for my poor dear little children.”) Gaga pleaded with him to convince Boulton to reinstate her. He then wrote Boulton, who’d figured out Gaga’s duplicity, contending that she “can’t hold her idiotic gossip against her when it’s a case of wounding an old woman who has been a good friend to us, if there ever was one. … It’s on my conscience and I feel like hell about it.” Boulton did rehire Gaga that summer after moving back to the Old House in West Point Pleasant; but Gaga died the following year on July 6, 1929.15

  “I’ve taken a motor trip—invitation—to Prague since I last saw you,” O’Neill lied in a letter to Boulton, trying to get her off his scent.” “I’m going to stick on and do some work here—not in the city but in a remote suburb in a home on the river—a quiet lovely spot.” He told the same story to Harold de Polo, while at the same time calling him “an old friend in whom one can really trust through the good breaks and the bad,” since he knew de Polo had remained close with Boulton. He informed Shane that he’d been in Germany on the Baltic Sea, where he’d arranged for postcards to be sent.16

  Only members of a trusted group, Harry Weinberger, Kenneth Macgowan, Saxe Commins, and a few Theatre Guild members, were notified of his true location. “Don’t let anyone know the above address,” he wrote Commins from Guéthary. “I have left here a long time ago as far as anyone knows. But it will be a favor if you will advertize it that you have heard from me from Berlin or Vienna or Prague or any other town provided it isn’t France. … The fair Aggie’s broken heart was transformed over night into a gaping money greed.” The whole affair, he said, was the kind of legalized blackmail “one might expect from a chorus girl wife.” “But what the hell?” O’Neill wrote Macgowan with finality. “She is so damn dead for me now that it doesn’t matter—and she realizes this and it infuriates her more than anything else because she knows now that her power to hurt is gone.”17

  O’Neill’s agent Richard Madden warned his client that if Boulton went public about his affair with Monterey, it would blow up in the tabloids on the scale of Charlie Chaplin’s disgracing scandals. “He’s a damn fool,” O’Neill wrote Weinberger, regarding Chaplin as a base comparison. “Chaplin’s wife had charged him with ruining young girls, with every form of perversion—and he was guilty as everyone knows. There was every form of dirt to it.”18 (Oona O’Neill, Chaplin’s future wife, had not yet celebrated her third birthday.) O’Neill preferred the story of Sinclair Lewis, who’d also fled to Europe and whose divorce “came off without scandal and with dignity” because he and Grace Hegger announced their divorce, and the story died.19

  For leverage, O’Neill hired a law firm in London to investigate Boulton’s alleged marriage to a James Burton; the firm found no record of this, so he next instructed Weinberger to investigate who Barbara Burton’s father might have been and whether Boulton was guilty of bigamy.20 He was pleading with Boulton to go to Reno, as Sinclair Lewis’s ex-wife had done, where women could establish residency in three months then be granted an unfussy divorce. What was then known as a “Reno divorce” could be done with charges of “desertion,” whereas in Connecticut a divorce would necessitate proving “intolerable cruelty.”21 (Presumably it would have been in neither party’s interest for O’Neill to reveal the final judgment on his divorce from Kathleen Jenkins, if O’Neill had even read it, indicating that his marriage to Boulton had never been lawful in the first place.)22 “Speaking of my own end of it,” O’Neill wrote de Polo, “as long as I could embark on a brain-drowning drunk once in a while the things one can’t forget didn’t pile up on me to any unbearable extent. I swallowed them with old J.B. [John Barleycorn] for a chaser of memory. But when I reformed they began to pile up into obtrusive prison walls.”23

  In May 1928, O’Neill’s prison walls crashed down around him and Monterey when a journalist and former shack mate of Terry Carlin’s in Provincetown, Louis Kalonyme (a.k.a. Louis Kantor) stopped in to visit O’Neill at the Villa Marguerite. The instant Monterey overheard O’Neill laughing loudly with Kalonyme behind closed doors, she knew he’d been drinking—for the first time in over two years. She then packed her bags and got as far as the train station before turning around. Back at the villa she found the men passed out, with black coffee splashed “all over the blue satin walls of the salon.”24 “So, this is genius—this is love!” she thought. “God help us!”25

  “Remember to forget that incident in May!” O’Neill wrote Kalonyme later. “It had no meaning and was really a damned good thing in its effect on my future, by the way of a final K.O. to an old mistake. But how A[gnes] & Co. would love to get hold of it!”26

  O’Neill’s next project, Dynamo, gushed out of him that summer at the Villa Marguerite. The previous fall, on September 31, 1927, O’Neill had traveled up from New York to General Electric’s hydroelectric plant in Stevenson, Connecticut. He’d arranged for a private tour of the facility, during which he was, he said, “taken all over and shown everything from roof to cellar. Quite an experience!”27 (By 1928, when O’Neill had begun sketching out scenarios for Dynamo, Mike Gold had contacted him about resuscitating the radical journal the Masses, which became the New Masses, but for a time he considered calling it Dynamo, O’Neill’s likely inspiration for the title.)28 O’Neill’s notes in his work diary read: “Play of Dynamos—the despairing philosopher—poet who falls in love with balance equilibrium of energy—his personification of it—his final marriage with it—the consummation ending with his destruction.”29 He wanted the philosopher-poet’s struggle to evoke in audiences “the general theme of American life in back of the play, America being the land of the mother complex.”30 He wrote Mike Gold in mid-August that Dynamo was, like so many of his plays, “another attempt at a biography of a section of the American soul.”31

  Dynamo’s protagonist Reuben Light was the latest iteration of O’Neill’s modern-day prodigal sons. After a year at college, Reuben returns to his puritanical New England home with a messianic desire to replace the Christian God of his pastor father, the Reverend Hutchins Light, with the modern god of electricity. Reuben’s mother has died, heightening his desperation to have his new God reveal to him some tangible form of enlightenment. He attempts to find this at an actual dynamo nearby and imagines he’ll become the next savior of the human race. Reuben feels that he betrayed his mother by having sexual relations with his girlfriend Ada Fife, thus preventing the miracle he’d hoped for. In desperation, he kills Ada, then grabs hold of live carbon brushes at the humming dynamo, renounces his quest, and electrocutes himself to reunite with his mother.

  In mid-August 1928, O’Neill sent off a handwritten manuscript of Dynamo to Saxe Commins to type up for the Theatre Guild. Commins had given up his dental practice by this time and decided to spend the year in France with his wife, Dorothy Berliner, an accomplished concert pianist whom he’d married the year before. O’Neill included instructions on which he scrawled, “Suggestions, Instructions, Advice, along with sundry snooty remarks and animadversions as to the modern theatre.” This treatise, never published in its entirety, stresses the importance of getting the sound effects right so the generator wouldn’t sound “obviously like a vacuum cleaner”; it also includes O’Neill’s thoughts on modernizing stage effects i
n modern theater writ large: “Looking back on my plays,” he wrote, “in which significant mechanical sound and not music is called for … I can say none of them has ever really been thoroughly done in the modern theatre although they were written for it. Someday I hope they will be—and people are due to be surprised by the added dramatic value—modern values, they will take on.”32 He also suggested, in a separate letter to the Guild’s Theresa Helburn, that for the dynamo’s hum the Guild should hire a General Electric specialist to consult on “the continual metallic nasal purr of the generators—if you’ve ever spent a short time in a power house you know how essentially symbolic and mysterious and moving this sound [is] (which is like no other sound but itself).”33