In December 1942, Shane O’Neill signed on as a seaman in the merchant marine and served on multiple voyages across the Atlantic to England and North Africa under constant attack from German submarines. On an unknown number of occasions, he looked on as Allied vessels were torpedoed, and his own ships had been hit over half a dozen times. The memories of men burning and drowning at sea were so tormenting that he required psychological treatment after his return. But O’Neill heard little, if anything, of his son’s exploits, since all correspondence went through Monterey. “Who does she think she is—St. Peter, opening and closing the gates?” Shane’s girlfriend Margaret Stark demanded after Monterey had rebuffed a letter from her updating them on Shane’s whereabouts. “Why does your father allow such a thing to happen? You are his son. Doesn’t he have any feelings of responsibility to you? Does she open all his mail?”293
Eugene Jr. increasingly resented his tethered identity as the son of a major celebrity. In 1948, he wrote an article for Collier’s magazine, which never went to print, titled “The Last Name Is Not Junior.” The unfair and paradoxical position he describes in the piece was one his father, living in the shadow of James O’Neill, had known all too well: “Who does that conceited ass think he is anyhow?” Eugene would overhear people say about him at parties. “Even if you had the chance to make the obvious answer, ‘Only what people have done their best to make me think I am,’” he said, “you would be talking to deaf ears. … People have got you coming and going.” As for the younger son, Shane (though Eugene doesn’t name him), “he has … run away from it, and has become a really tragic figure. He looks hunted and he acts hunted. He takes jobs that are far below his natural abilities. His associates are inferior persons. He drinks too much, and you have reason to believe that he has committed petty crimes. His whole life is aimless, a complete waste. Those who know him say, ‘A nice guy, but …’ That word ‘but’ contains a world of sadness.”294
Meanwhile, their sister, Oona, according to a spate of tabloid articles, was having the time of her young life during the war years. Oona seemed able to make the most of her father’s world-famous last name, apparently with her mother’s blessings, while still cultivating her own public identity. After spending her first two years of high school at the Warrenton Country School in Virginia, Oona attended Manhattan’s elite Brearley School from 1940 to 1942. There she befriended teen socialites Gloria Vanderbilt and Carol Marcus. Together the three classmates formed a much-sought-after debutante trio. Oona dated many young men in Manhattan, including an aspiring young writer named J. D. Salinger, whose idea for a young adult novel, A Catcher in the Rye (1951), had just begun to percolate. He was “crazy about” Oona, he told a friend, and “would marry [her] tomorrow if she would have me.” His love for the debutante only deepened after he’d gone off to fight in World War II; while overseas, where he saw some of the worst fighting of the war, he sent dozens of finely crafted love letters to her, some of them ten to fifteen pages long. Though he once quipped that “little Oona’s hopelessly in love with little Oona,” Salinger never fully recovered from the heartbreak after she’d stopped replying to his letters from the front.295
In April 1942, sixteen-year-old Oona was named New York’s ultra-fashionable Stork Club’s “No. 1 Debutante” of 1942–43. The New York Post’s headline read, “Gene O’Neill Should See Daughter Now,” accompanied by a photograph of the newly minted Glamour Girl beaming and cradling a bouquet of roses, her raven hair flowing past her high forehead under a broad-rimmed hat. Under the snapshot was the caption, “Put me down as shanty Irish”—her response to a reporter who inquired whether she considered herself shanty or lace-curtain Irish. How will your father react? he asked. “I don’t think he’s going to be wild about it.” What did she think about world affairs? “It would seem very funny for me,” she demurred with girlish innocence, “to sit in the Stork Club and express my opinion of world affairs.”296 She was right on both counts. O’Neill found her behavior utterly shameful: “Riding on my name!” he fumed.297 “If she goes to Hollywood” to try her hand at acting, as she seemed ready to do, he wrote Weinberger, “it will be absolutely against my wishes. So much so, that if she does, I will never write to her or see her again as long as I live! … If Hollywood is in, then I’m out—forever!”298
That November O’Neill received a letter from Omaha, Nebraska. Oona was touring by train to the West Coast with Carol Marcus, who paid for the trip. They’d made plans to meet Marcus’s fiancé, the thirty-five-year-old playwright William Saroyan, in Sacramento, California, where he was in basic training. Oona was hoping to stop in and see her father at Tao House but hadn’t given a return address and called him from Sacramento. After answering the phone, Monterey pretended to discuss the visit with O’Neill, then told Oona her father said he didn’t want to see her. Oona drove with Carol Marcus to Tao House anyway, but Monterey refused to let her in.299 Desperate for an audience, she tried again with a follow-up letter. “All I know of what you have become since you blossomed into the night club racket,” he responded, “is derived from newspaper clippings of your interviews. From those, you appear to have developed into a vain seventeen year old nitwit, without manners, good taste, self-respect, or pride—or any awareness that you are living in a gigantic world upheaval, which affects the lives and work and ambitions and future of everyone, including you—and me.”300
The tabloid news portrayed a headless girl, O’Neill raged, a daughter heading willy-nilly toward the life of a “second-rate movie actress of the floosie—the sort who have their pictures in the papers for a couple of years and then sink back into the obscurity of their naturally silly, talentless lives. … One interview with a girl working in an airplane factory, or training to be a Red Cross nurse, is worth ten million of the glamour kind now.” (Monterey had suggested that Oona study to be a nurse when she visited them last in the summer of 1941.) On top of his anger, O’Neill gave other excuses for her not to come: the O’Neills’ loyal handyman Herbert Freeman had joined the Marines, he said, and the other drivers and domestic help had also left to join the armed services or otherwise aid the war effort, so there’s “no one to wait on you.” His tremors had gotten so bad he couldn’t get a driver’s license if he wanted to, he went on, and Monterey couldn’t drive. “So we are marooned, more or less, and, considering all the above, our answer to any prospective guest is NO.” He hoped she’d “grow out of the callow stage,” he told her, then ended his letter with gruff finality: “Au revoir.”301 Although his feelings toward her would soften in later years, this was the last communiqué Oona would ever receive from her father.
Hollywood cared little about O’Neill’s blessing or lack thereof, and welcomed his Glamour Girl daughter’s company in inverse proportion to his disdainful rejection of it. Still seventeen, Oona began dating some of the most colorful personalities then gallivanting around at Tinsel Town’s high-flying parties and swank nightclubs. One of these, the brilliant twenty-six-year-old filmmaker and actor Orson Welles, offered to read her palm at a nightclub. The Boy Genius had given up trying to seduce her as he glared down at her palm lines. She would marry a much older man, he told her in his renowned baritone voice, and soon. Moreover, astonishingly, he could name who the venerable groom would be: Charlie Chaplin.302
In a bid to steer Chaplin’s gaze in Oona’s direction, her agent, Minna Wallis, arranged for the two to meet, hoping Oona’s gleaming smile and sultry Irish looks might entice Chaplin to hire her for his next project, a film based on Paul Vincent Carroll’s play Shadow and Substance (1937). Chaplin, unimpressed by her pedigree, asked Wallis, “Can she act?” Wallis suggested they all convene at her house for dinner so he could see for himself if the young starlet had promise. When Chaplin first saw her, he wrote later, “I became aware of a luminous beauty with a sequestered charm and a gentleness that was most appealing.” Afterward, Oona ended a note to Carol Marcus with an excited postscript: “P.S. I just met Charlie Chaplin!”303
On
June 16, 1943, Oona O’Neill, just one month after her eighteenth birthday, eloped with the fifty-four-year-old filmmaker and movie star. She was his fourth wife (the third he’d married while they were still in their teens) and his last. After Chaplin was exiled from the United States in 1952 for alleged Communist sympathies, the celebrity couple went on to enjoy a contented family life in Switzerland. There they raised eight children together;four were born in Beverly Hills, before Chaplin’s exile, but O’Neill never met any of them.304 Oona wrote dozens of letters apprising him of his grandchildren’s development, but Monterey had intercepted them all. “I never mentioned it,” O’Neill’s nurse Kaye Albertoni remembered of Oona’s marriage. “Nobody mentioned it. He had absolutely nothing to do with Oona.” But contrary to the assumed narrative, that it was Oona’s marriage to a man as old as himself that ended their relationship, O’Neill told Saxe Commins, “I had severed relations before this, for many other reasons.” “She’s gone,” he said to Albertoni. “She’s gone.”305
Oona and Charlie Chaplin in their first public appearance after their marriage in 1943.
(COURTESY OF CULVER PICTURES)
Three physicians had separately diagnosed O’Neill’s incapacitating tremor as Parkinson’s disease; three others admitted frankly that they had no idea what was wrong with him. O’Neill himself believed, inaccurately it turned out, that it was his familial tremor combined with years of heavy drinking.306 Lawrence Langner presented O’Neill with a “Sound Scriber” to try recording his plays orally;but after a good faith effort, O’Neill realized he just couldn’t write by dictation.307 The tremors weren’t the only obstruction to his writing; in fact, they weren’t yet even the main problem. Rather, it was a persistent and inescapable apathy that had given way to an almost existential self-loathing. “My creative energy just balked,” he told Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant: “‘All is vanity, including your plays, past and present, and I am fed up with you and your woes, so good bye and kindly scatter my ashes down the nearest drain.’ Then it died.”308
Monterey, with the aid of Kaye Albertoni, faced her husband’s advancing illness with unwavering diligence: she monitored his steady ingestion of a dizzying array of sedatives, barbiturates, antibiotics, diuretics, opium suppositories, decongestants, and homeopathic remedies; she kept a journal in which she made copious notes about his tremors, sleep patterns, sinking spells, mood swings, headaches, and coughing fits; and she daily measured his urine, prepared him special meals, woke up with him in the middle of the night. “His wife is resplendent and has been a revelation to me,” wrote one of O’Neill’s physicians. “A beautiful girl with a brain.”309
“There is nothing to do for Parkinson’s,” the despondent Monterey wrote Theresa Helburn, “it just gets worse and worse. And now that I have fallen apart I am not so brave in facing it! There are days when my heart aches so I can hardly face him—which, of course, is the worst possible thing for him. But on the whole I manage to keep on and try to make things as pleasant as possible. With war, and all it does and will mean, I am really stuck, for the first time in my life, as to what is the best thing to do regarding a future home for Gene. He should have warmth, ocean and sand (!), doctors and good nourishment.”310
O’Neill had also become convinced that he was careening headlong toward a nervous breakdown. Often by midafternoon, he’d “crack-up—tremor ghastly—weeping.” His formerly sensuous visage had solidified into what doctors treating Parkinson’s refer to as the “mask.” And by August 1943, Monterey noted mournfully that her husband’s black Irish eyes had lost their “shine.”311
Danville’s lack of household support during World War II compelled O’Neill and Monterey to sell Tao House in February 1944. They next moved into the Huntington Hotel on San Francisco’s fashionable Nob Hill, where Monterey daily attended Mass at Grace Cathedral across the square. O’Neill refused to join her, of course. “Great and simple truth has been perverted into worldly power by organized institutions,” he said. “The church is a fraud.” At the same time, he had a recurring nightmare that he was drifting on an undulating sea; in each dream the seventh wave, always the seventh, towered high up above him, then curled and transformed into a huge cathedral that crashed down on his head.312 (The number seven in the numerological world, which O’Neill had dabbled in over the years, significantly represents the artistic truth-seeker.) That summer, while they were on a drive over the Golden Gate Bridge, O’Neill said, terrifying Monterey, “God, I wish I could drink a bottle of ‘Old Taylor.’”313
After more than a year cooped up at the Huntington, O’Neill longed for a change of scenery; anywhere, it seemed, would be better. “I’m so sick of this apartment I wish they’d give me a short stretch at Alcatraz just to enjoy the sea breezes, a change of view, and the interesting company,” he complained to George Jean Nathan.314 By then his neurological illness had become close to intolerable. “The worst part,” he wrote Elizabeth Sergeant, “is the fits of extreme melancholia that go with it. God knows I have had enough of Celtic Twilight in my make-up without needing more of the same. And this isn’t the same. It isn’t sadness. It’s an exhausted horrible apathy.”315 Still, the couple languished at their Nob Hill suite in a mutual holding pattern of solitude and infirmity, well into the summer of 1945. By then, it became undeniably apparent to O’Neill, despite his worsening health, that he’d completely fallen for a young woman named Jane Caldwell.
The daughter of Myrtle Caldwell, a classmate of Monterey’s from convent school and one of the O’Neills’ closest friends in California, Jane Caldwell wasn’t much older than his daughter, Oona. “I think she was flirting with him,” Kaye Albertoni confirmed. “She was pretty, young. And, of course he liked to play the piano [Rosie]. Oh, they danced together.” The nurse found it particularly objectionable when O’Neill and the starry-eyed Caldwell, swept off her feet by the attentions heaped upon her by a world-renowned, if enfeebled, playwright, would step into his office and close the door brazenly behind them. For her birthday, O’Neill gave Caldwell a jade-handled mirror with a note: “I must warn you that this is an enchanted, haunted mirror, for whenever you gaze in it you will see in its secret depth someone staring back at you with—well, let us say, with an emotion befitting the loveliness the surface of the mirror reflects.”316
One day, O’Neill and Caldwell took a long walk together on the beach, and O’Neill, as he had with Alice Cuthbert back in Bermuda in 1925, wrote a love poem to her about it, “To a Stolen Moment.” The last two stanzas read with a beckoning, pleading simplicity:
The magic of love was there
For me
And you
Standing there.
Blue coat, buttoned up to your chin,
So beautiful there,
With the sea and sky in your eyes,
And the sun and wind in your hair.317
Beyond a few loving inscriptions to Monterey, O’Neill’s ode to Caldwell was probably the last literary writing he ever composed (and it remains the latest work of O’Neill’s ever published).
When Monterey found out about his feelings for young Jane Caldwell, she first threatened suicide, then murder. “Don’t you ever bring her in this house again,” Monterey warned Caldwell’s mother.318 Then a terrific scene erupted after she directly confronted her husband that September: pushed to the brink, O’Neill leveled a loaded handgun at her head. She grabbed a butcher knife. He dropped the gun, grabbed her neck, and closed his fingers around it while she dug her fingernails into his hands; eventually, he let go and knocked her out with a crack to the jaw.319
By mid-October 1945, the O’Neills, incredibly, had reached another provisional truce before heading for New York to supervise the Theatre Guild’s preparations for The Iceman Cometh. Maybe he’d follow his bliss, too, he thought, and open a saloon with George Jean Nathan on Long Island. They’d been discussing that retirement plan for years. Nathan and H. L. Mencken would serve drinks, and O’Neill would work the register. They’d even agreed on
a name: the High Dive.320
Silence’s End
When Saxe and Dorothy Commins joined the O’Neills for dinner in their suite at Manhattan’s Hotel Barclay, Commins observed his friend appearing more anxious than usual. Then O’Neill revealed that 125,000 words of manuscript material for his Cycle, including the finished script of A Touch of the Poet, had gone missing. He was sure it was all there in the suite when he’d left for rehearsals that morning. Monterey denied having seen it; she also claimed that she didn’t remember it being packed in San Francisco and accused O’Neill of senility. Commins suggested that he and O’Neill search the entire suite, which they did, rifling through O’Neill’s towering jazz record collection, book shelves, the hallway compartments, the bedrooms and bathrooms, even, after Monterey’s consent, her lingerie drawer. The manuscripts were nowhere to be found. Two days later, O’Neill told Commins to forget about it. Monterey had hidden them, Commins said, to punish O’Neill for “reasons totally obscure to him.”321
By now, with O’Neill and Monterey’s marital wounds still fresh, the proprietorship of her husband’s literary legacy had become Monterey’s greatest obsession. On December 5, 1945, in an attempt to mollify her, O’Neill signed a will leaving all “letters, diaries, records, unfinished plays or fragments thereof, or first drafts of any such plays, together with my private papers of every description” to Monterey or, in the event that her death preceded his, Eugene Jr. Any manuscripts Monterey didn’t want for herself were to be endowed to Princeton University, except one: “I further direct and order and herewith bind my Executors, Trustees, heirs and all other persons, not to produce or cause to be produced upon the stage, in motion pictures, radio, television, or in any other dramatic form, my play ‘LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT.’ The right to publish said play as a book I have granted to RANDOM HOUSE, INC, on condition that it not be published until twenty-five (25) years after my death.” Both Eugene and Shane were bequeathed some money as well. Oona, who’d married into wealth anyway, was left nothing, “since she has amply benefited from the payments made to [her] mother” from Boulton’s alimony and the property in Bermuda that had remained in his name.322
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 50
