Barton left $35 and a letter of apology to Mary Jefferson along with a typed suicide note headed in red ink “obit.” The note cites his reason for ending his life as “melancholia,” which he’d suffered since childhood and had worsened as an adult into a “manic depressive insanity.” “I did it,” the note read, “because I am fed up with inventing devices for getting through twenty-four hours a day and with bridging over a few months periodically with some beautiful interest, such as a new gal who annoyed me to the point where I forgot my own troubles.” “No one thing is responsible for this and no one person—except myself. If the gossips insist on something more definite and thrilling as a reason, let them choose my pending appointment with the dentist or the fact that I happened to be painfully short of cash at the moment.”120 If Barton’s aim was to fend off “the gossips,” however, he made a poor show of it.
Contradicting his own claim that “no one person” was responsible, Barton singled out Carlotta Monterey as the root cause of his despair: “In particular, my remorse is bitter over my failure to appreciate my beautiful lost angel, Carlotta, the only woman I ever loved and whom I respect and admire above all the rest of the human race. She is the one person who could have saved me had I been savable. She did her best. No one ever had a more devoted or more understanding wife. I do hope that she will understand what my malady was and forgive me a little.” He’d told his brother, the actor Homer Barton, that he’d gone on a “friendly visit” to visit Monterey and O’Neill at the Madison, after which “the realization that he had lost her broke his heart.” The suicide note was signed with seven X’s and the line, “I kiss my dear children—and Carlotta.”121
On the morning of his suicide, the O’Neills received a telephone call from New Yorker editor Harold Ross, Barton’s employer. “Mrs. O’Neill,” he said, “we want you to know that Ralph Barton has died and left a note about you.”122 Monterey was dumbfounded. Why would Barton, whom she hadn’t been with for over five years, kill himself out of the blue, leaving behind a pledge of everlasting love for her? At lunch the O’Neills went over the details of the incident with Carl Van Vechten and Fania Marinoff. Van Vechten assured Monterey and O’Neill that Barton had merely introduced her into his note to enhance the dramatic impact his stagy departure. “He resented her marrying someone more famous than himself,” Van Vechten explained. More to the point, he’d run out of money to sustain his high-flying lifestyle; in the depths of the Great Depression, Barton was no longer appreciated for his sophisticated, offbeat caricatures, which now seemed mere relics of a bygone age. “The market for his stuff had shrunk,” Van Vechten said, “and he could see only lean times ahead, so he decided to go out in a splash of publicity.”123
Although the O’Neills successfully avoided the press on the afternoon the suicide was announced, the Theatre Guild had already scheduled a press conference for the following day—right in the center of the media conflagration. O’Neill knew he shouldn’t forestall the inevitable, so he decided not to cancel the conference, but did change the ground rules: only one reporter was allowed to ask questions, an assignment that went to the Daily News’s John Chapman, while the others took notes; Chapman’s line of inquiry, O’Neill insisted, was to adhere strictly to Mourning Becomes Electra—no questions related to the Barton suicide would be permitted.
At the interview, Chapman said, O’Neill “was pallid and shaking and sweating when he faced his lone inquisitor, and so was I.”124 “Do you feel that you’ve derived any benefit from living abroad,” Chapman asked him, had he “been able to see America any more clearly, for example?” “I feel that is the greatest benefit I have derived from living abroad,” O’Neill agreed. “It has enabled me to see America more clearly—also to appreciate it more. … Most people who travel abroad get the sort of snobbish idea that they are coming in contact with something superior. I don’t feel that way. I have talked with a great many people in the theater over there—I don’t mean the critics, but the people who are working in it. They feel that it is flat, tired out. They feel that we have something dynamic, and that if we can get their cultural background the rebirth of the theater is not going to happen over there—in Europe—but here. So do I.”125
When the questioning turned to Mourning Becomes Electra, O’Neill responded that without the benefit of soliloquies or masks he’d “tried to get the idea of Fate into it. Not exactly the Greek idea, but Fate more from the point of view of modern psychology.” “My personal interest in the theater is to see just how much can be done with it—not only for my sake, but for everybody’s sake. The more it is pushed out, the more can be done with it. That is why I am interested in seeing how this play is received.” Chapman asked him whether he really cared about its reception. “Of course I care,” O’Neill shot back, raising his voice for the first time. “I’ve been working like a Trappist monk for a year and a half.”126
After ninety minutes or so, Chapman noticed that O’Neill had begun to look like “a man repressing himself with a mighty effort. He flushed intermittently and his earnest eyes flashed. Once he seemed on the point of breaking into a rage. That was when reporters pressed him for news of his wife’s whereabouts.” O’Neill denied having ever met Barton himself, but the questioning over Monterey’s current location became intolerable. Now visibly unhinged, O’Neill shouted, “This isn’t fair!” at which point a Guild member called him out of the room. The playwright reappeared briefly to thank the journalists, then exited the building up and down its fire escapes and across the rooftops.127
In early June, O’Neill and Monterey checked out of the Madison and moved to Northport, Long Island, where they rented a cottage for the summer. The beachfront property they found on Long Island’s North Shore was close enough to New York to commute to meetings with the Theatre Guild and for friends and family to visit, yet far enough away from the city’s nonstop distractions for O’Neill to plan for his upcoming production and revise the galleys for the book publication of Mourning Becomes Electra.128 Their isolation at Plessis had nonetheless convinced even this taciturn playwright that he and Monterey needed to socialize more, so they leased a duplex penthouse at 1095 Park Avenue once he’d completed his Electra revisions.
The couple chose not, despite their close relationship to Eugene Jr., now twenty-one years old, to attend Eugene’s wedding on June 15 to a girl from Queens named Elizabeth “Betty” Green. The ceremony was to take place in nearby Long Island City, and O’Neill no doubt wished to avoid a demoralizing reunion with Kathleen Jenkins; but this explanation is incomplete. He and Monterey had expressed only admiration and respect for Jenkins to Eugene and Jenkins herself. More to the point, given his history with Jenkins and Boulton, O’Neill had little faith in rash marital unions, especially when families got involved: “Even in the case of marriage,” he’d told Eugene after denying him a visit to Plessis with Betty Green in 1930, “you might have only to go back to your Mother and me. If families had been kept out of it we might have had a chance. I must confess, with the guy I was then, the chance was slim and she was probably well rid of me—but you never can tell how much family interference and prejudices had to do with it.”129 (Eugene Jr. and Betty Green would divorce, childless, six years later.)
Rehearsals started for Mourning Becomes Electra in early September. This time, with Dynamo’s failure still fresh in his mind, O’Neill had a firm hand in the casting, set design, and script changes. Philip Moeller, who once again directed, would ask him, “Don’t you think we ought to cut that line?” or “Don’t you think we need a line or two here?” After a short silence, O’Neill would curtly respond, “No.”130 “I don’t feel that Lavinia could ever sit down and smack her lips over a good slice of roast beef,” actress Alice Brady asked him of her character Lavinia Mannon. “Could she?” That’s right, he said, she couldn’t. And that was the end of it.131
“Few people realize the shock a playwright gets when he sees his work acted,” O’Neill lamented about these rehearsals. “I saw a
different work from the one I thought I had written.” “After you’ve finished a play and it goes into rehearsal,” he said, echoing his chat with Jimmy Light six years before, “it begins to go from you. No matter how good the production is, or how able the actors, something is lost—your own vision of the play, the way you saw it in your imagination.”132
After an uncommonly long rehearsal time because of the play’s length (starting the first of fourteen scenes at four o’clock and lasting, with intermission at six for dinner, five and a half hours), Mourning Becomes Electra premiered at the Guild Theatre on October 26, 1931. Along with the usual suspects, Commins, Macgowan, Weinberger, and Madden, other notables in the audience included the satiric wordsmith Dorothy Parker, the recent Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Elmer Rice, and the vaudeville impresario Martin Beck. When the curtain fell for the last time, the audience members leapt to their feet and erupted into boisterous cries of “Author, author!” As usual, no appearance was forthcoming. “While there was time to ransack most of the town for the author,” wrote one reporter in attendance that night, “he could not be found.”133
Mourning Becomes Electra ran for 150 performances in New York and, surpassing the laurels heaped on Strange Interlude, brought O’Neill the highest critical acclaim he would receive. “There is no niggling reservation or hedging about this one,” John Anderson raved in the New York Evening Journal. “It is O’Neill’s masterpiece, if the word has any meaning left, and it bears the mark of true and enduring greatness.”134 John Mason Brown of the New York Post concurred: Mourning Becomes Electra, he said, “towers above the scrubby output of our present-day theatre as the Empire State Building soars above the skyline of Manhattan.” Brooks Atkinson, in his New York Times review, announced that the trilogy was “Mr. O’Neill’s masterpiece. … In sustained thought and workmanship it is his finest tragedy,” and George Jean Nathan began his review with “the simple fact first. In ‘Mourning Becomes Electra’ Eugene O’Neill has written one of the most important plays in the history of American Drama, most of the other few most important plays, incidentally, having also been written by him.”135
O’Neill could always count on detractors, of course. Elizabeth Jordan, in a febrile notice for the Catholic weekly America, was one of the few left unimpressed: “The dead, the dying, the insane, the abnormal, filled the stage before us,” she wrote. “To a cheery start-off of two murders [O’Neill] had added two suicides and tossed in a heavy seasoning of vengeance, insanity, adultery and incest.” That O’Neill relinquished any veneer of catharsis was evident when a playgoer seated next to Jordan placed her wet handkerchief on her breast and remarked weakly to her escort, “I think I should have been happier if I had never seen this play.” Theresa Helburn overheard someone in the lobby say, “Gosh, isn’t it good to get back out into the depression again!” But these predictable reactions were the exception, not the rule. “Although most of us have been brought up to bow and genuflect before the majesty of Greek tragedy,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in his Times review, “it has remained for Mr. O’Neill to show us why.”136
That November 1931, O’Neill reconnected with his son Shane, who’d just turned twelve and had started attending Lawrenceville Academy, in New Jersey, and his daughter, Oona, now a bashful six-year-old. The reunion, their first in three years, was awkward and brief. First they had lunch at O’Neill’s Park Avenue apartment and then took a tour around Central Park in his new Cadillac, during which Oona vomited her dinner of beef kidneys into her appalled stepmother’s lap. “GOOD GOD CHILD!” Monterey roared. “Why didn’t you SAY SOMETHING?! We could have stopped the car. You must have known you felt sick! The new car! Poor Shane!” “It’s not her fault, she felt sick,” she tried to calm herself, “but why didn’t she say something!”137
Also that fall, O’Neill made the acquaintance of his mother-in-law, Nellie Tharsing, and Cynthia Chapman, Monterey’s teenage daughter from her second marriage. Tharsing had raised Cynthia for over a decade, but she hoped now to end her (rather longer than expected) tenure as surrogate mother. But Monterey was no more interested in motherhood than Tharsing, so Cynthia was sent away to a Connecticut boarding school. O’Neill took a great paternal interest in Cynthia, far more so than any he displayed with his own children. In time, he even felt close enough to send her progress reports on his writing and poke fun at her mother’s “super-efficient home management,” as seen from his eyes and those of their Dalmatian, Blemie: “Your Mama is sure a demon housekeeper! I expect any day that she’s going to grab me absent-mindedly and have me varnished, vacuum-cleaned, and polished with floor wax before I have a chance to resist! Every time Blemie sees an ad for Sapolio or Dutch Cleanser he shudders with dread!”138
In mid-November, after several grueling months of rewrites and rehearsals, O’Neill and Monterey availed themselves of a vacation and drove southward through Charleston, South Carolina, on to Savannah and then Brunswick, Georgia. From there they ferried across to Sea Island, a remote paradisiacal outpost among the “Golden Isles” off the Georgia coast. It took only a few days’ rest at a fashionable new resort, the Cloisters, before they’d contacted the Sea Island Company’s real estate agent George Boll. Soon they bought a lush expanse of seaside property, on the far side of the island from the Cloisters, at the rock-bottom Depression-era price of $12,600. When the stock market dropped again just weeks after the sale, and their new neighbors were hit hard, O’Neill and Monterey bought another lot adjoining their property for $5,000. Boll then introduced them to the Georgian architect Francis Louis Abreu, whom they hired to construct a grand but tasteful villa in the then fashionable Mediterranean style.
George Jean Nathan had to laugh. Whatever idyllic locale O’Neill happened upon in his travels, his crow call would arrive in the mail: it was “ideal,” “the place for me,” “the best ever.” Provincetown: “ideal, quiet and the only place I could ever work.” Bermuda: “I’ve gotten more work done that in the corresponding season up North in many years.” Belgrade Lakes: “A place to think and work if ever there was one! Ideal for me.” London: “I’ve been happier here since I left New York than ever in my life before.” Guéthary: “I’ve felt a deep sense of peace here, a real enjoyment in just living from day to day, that I’ve never known before.” Saigon: “This is the place! There is nothing more beautiful and interesting in the world. It is grand!” Touraine: “This is the place for me! … Here is the ideal place to live and work!” Granada: “What a place to live and work in!” New York: “Why I ever left here, damned if I know. There’s life and vitality here. It’s the place for ideas! This is the spot for me and my work.” And now, perhaps his most unlikely retreat yet, Sea Island, Georgia: “The best place to live and work I’ve ever found!”139
O’Neill’s latest writer’s paradise was unique, at least, insofar as he was going to have his home custom built this time; and he and Monterey hunkered down in New York during the bitterly cold winter of 1931–32 while the first phases of its construction got under way. Early that May, they returned to oversee the final stages of building and landscaping, the specifications of which Monterey had painstakingly directed by mail from New York. They also hired two full-time servants, a Georgian man-of-all-work named Herbert Freeman, who would live in an apartment above the garage, and a cook, Vera Massey. The villa had two wings separated by a terracotta courtyard and connected to the main entranceway of the house, with separate suites for O’Neill and Monterey on the second floor. “The Great Room,” below Monterey’s side, was designed to approximate a medieval theater, while O’Neill’s wing was built to resemble the stern leveling of an eighteenth-century galleon. His office on the second floor was where the captain’s quarters would be. It had an iron spiral staircase winding up to a lookout, like at Peaked Hill, with a wide vista of the Atlantic Ocean. On June 22 they moved in, and five days later they christened the villa “Casa Genotta,” a portmanteau of their union: “The House of Gene + Carlotta.”
Architectural drawing
of Casa Genotta, 1931. Carlotta Monterey referred to its architectural design as “bastard Spanish peasant style.”
(COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)
House & Garden published a feature-length spread on Casa Genotta describing its architectural design as “a combination of the early Majorcan peasant house of the 16th Century tinctured with a flavor of the 15th Century monastery found in such houses in Sierra de Cordova as the estate of the Marquesa del Merito.” For the benefit of guests, Monterey boiled this down to more concise terminology: “bastard Spanish peasant style.”140 The interior was decorated with austerity; but several personal flourishes indicated that you were in the sanctified residence of O’Neill and Monterey. Japanese Noh masks glared at visitors as they stepped through the front entrance; the guestroom door on the ground floor had been imported from a Mexican brothel, with iron bars and a slot through which money had passed. For Monterey, the walls were adorned with Catholic iconography, making the general atmosphere inside more chapel than brothel-like. Gothic niches were cut into the walls to accommodate statuettes of Jesus and Mary. Even the medicine cabinet above Monterey’s bathroom sink was cut in the shape of a gothic niche; its door was a mirror, where her own face replaced the Holy Mother’s.
On July 1, 1931, during a visit to New York, O’Neill and Monterey took the long drive out to New London. O’Neill idled his Cadillac on Pequot Avenue in front of Monte Cristo Cottage, though Monterey had advised against it. “Don’t do it, darling,” she pleaded, “don’t ever try to go back.” But he did, and the homestead struck him as much smaller than he remembered. It was definitely shabbier, in complete disrepair, actually, and the rear of the house had been demolished. Seeing it for the first time, Monterey later averred, “I was thunderstruck when I saw this quaint little birdcage of a house sitting there.” “I shouldn’t have come,” O’Neill said. “Well, never mind, you have come now,” she replied, “let’s get out of here.” “Yes,” he agreed, “let’s get away.”141
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 44
