Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  On September 2, 1946, O’Neill convened a press conference to promote The Iceman Cometh, his first public appearance since 1931. It was his first new production in twelve years, and a horde of reporters and critics eagerly descended upon the Theatre Guild’s headquarters at Fifty-Third Street. They assembled in Lawrence Langner’s stately oak-paneled office, chatting distractedly and perusing the Guild’s promotional materials while they anticipated O’Neill’s pending arrival.

  When the long-absent theater giant finally stepped into the room, the members of the press corps rose from their seats in hushed silence. O’Neill looked awful. His trembling hands were racked with palsy, and his gaunt, sallow face hung loosely over an emaciated, though impeccably tailored frame. He still possessed his celebrated Irish good looks but appeared closer to seventy than his actual fifty-eight years. O’Neill’s speech and mannerisms struck the journalists as strangely incongruent too—part Victorian gentleman, part Bowery bum.323

  O’Neill started off by apologizing for his tendency to mumble. “Even my own family complains about it,” he said, then steeled himself for the inquisition.324 Instead, the reporters just sat there gawking at him, too intimidated to speak. After a dozen years of absence, O’Neill appeared to the group of scribes like a specter from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Broadway Past. O’Neill then muttered how nice it was to be back in a city where theater meant something to people. There was more awkward silence. Rosamond Gilder of Theatre Arts Monthly spoke up and replied that it was nice to have him back. Then another reporter asked, apropos of nothing, about O’Neill’s having been born in New York. “While I was away they tore down the old Cadillac Hotel where I was born,” came his laconic reply. “That was a dirty trick.”325

  More fitful seat shifting and paper rustling ensued, until finally someone asked about his intentions with his planned Cycle A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed, not understanding that The Iceman Cometh wasn’t a Cycle play. O’Neill, untroubled by the mistake, suddenly became animated: in the postwar year of triumphal American patriotism, he declared, shocking everyone present, “I’m going on the theory that the United States, instead of being the most successful country in the world, is the greatest failure. It’s the greatest failure because it was given everything, more than any other country. Through moving as rapidly as it has, it hasn’t acquired any real roots. Its main idea is that everlasting game of trying to possess your own soul by the possession of something outside of it, thereby losing your own soul and the thing outside of it, too. America is the prime example of this because it happened so quickly and with such immense resources. This was really said in the Bible much better. We are the greatest example of ‘For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’”326

  “I hope to resume writing as soon as I can,” O’Neill continued, “but the war has thrown me completely off base and I have to get back to it again. I have to get back to a sense of writing being worthwhile. In fact, I’d have to pretend.” The conference lasted about ninety minutes, and when it was over one reporter confessed, “I was going to ask some questions … but I was too scared.”327 The writer James Agee, who’d also been present, mused that after attending opening night of The Iceman Cometh, this experience of meeting the stately dramatist in person had been “much more affecting and revealing than the play with which he broke his long silence as an artist.”328

  That spring of 1946, after the death of the American playwright Edward Sheldon, O’Neill and Monterey moved out of their hotel suite into Sheldon’s majestic penthouse overlooking Central Park at 35 East Eighty-Fourth Street. It was a fitting transfer of occupancy for the six-room apartment: not only had Sheldon also suffered terribly from a series of debilitating illnesses in his later years, but O’Neill respected him as perhaps his most gifted American predecessor. “Your Salvation Nell,” O’Neill had written Sheldon two decades earlier about his play from 1908, “along with the works of the Irish Players on their first trip over here, was what first opened my eyes to the existence of a real theatre as opposed to the usual—and to me, then, hateful—theatre of my father, in whose atmosphere I had been brought up.”329

  O’Neill’s usual ambivalence about New York had subsided, and he was delighted to reengage the cultural nerve center of America. Monterey, on the other hand, fearful of her husband’s “old cronies,” had been dead set against living there. (She’d opted for Sea Island, where they’d been planning to return for some time.)330 Her husband began going out on nightly capers at the juke joints along what was known as “The Street,” at Fifty-Second Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, to take in the latest jazz—music that Monterey reviled as “savage … the music of Negroes.”331 At a dinner party hosted by Russel Crouse, Irving Berlin played piano until three in the morning while O’Neill happily belted out “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” He even recalled old Berlin tunes that the composer himself had long forgotten; but then O’Neill would start caterwauling through an old favorite, and Berlin played along. Another night at Bennett and Phyllis Cerf’s house, O’Neill sang bawdy sea chanteys while folk singer Burl Ives accompanied him on guitar. “I will not be party to these goings-on,” Monterey carped. “We’re going right home, Gene.” “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he responded. “You go home without me.” “When she was gone,” Cerf said, “it was as though Gene had been released from prison. … Carlotta didn’t want him to have a good time; she wanted to own him. They loved each other—but the way she had of showing him! When Gene would go into one of his Irish furies, he would hurl things at Carlotta. He once threw a wall mirror at her, and if it had hit her, it might have killed her. There were two sides to the story—there always are.”332

  O’Neill originally hoped to direct The Iceman Cometh himself, but he was now far too sick for that. Yet he felt his play was in good hands with the Guild’s alternative, Eddie Dowling, who’d just directed and starred in Tennessee Williams’s breakout play The Glass Menagerie in 1944 and acted in William Saroyan’s 1939 Pulitzer Prize–winning barroom drama The Time of Your Life. Dowling regularly accompanied O’Neill to the Martin Beck Theatre, where the production was to be staged, during which the pair of lapsed Irish Catholics talked frequently about religion. When the director introduced O’Neill to the cast members, they were as shy, at first, as O’Neill. But Dowling said they “warmed up to him after the first ten minutes; they knew he belongs in the theater.” In fact, the cast grew dependent on O’Neill’s reassuring presence at rehearsals and missed him on the days that he didn’t appear.333

  O’Neill took a hand in nearly every aspect of the production, and one morning during auditions, an amusing, previously unreported episode took place between two legends of American theater: O’Neill was hiding behind a folding screen while Eddie Dowling and the Guild’s coproducer Margaret Webster auditioned an up-and-coming young actor. They were looking for someone to play Tom Parritt, the traitor of the anarchist movement who commits suicide in the final scene.

  “How do you feel about playing [Parritt]?” Dowling started.

  “I dunno,” the actor replied, with an affectation of indifference that needled the director. Dowling then asked him what he thought of the play. “What did you think of it?” came the insolent reply. “Tell me its virtues.” The actor was actually bluffing. The night before he’d fallen asleep before reading the first act and had no idea what the play was about.

  Dowling spoke for a while about the merits of the work but his entreaties were clearly falling on deaf ears. “This is the greatest playwright in the world,” Dowling protested. “If I were an actor being auditioned for the part, I’d certainly be eager to be in it.”

  “Oh, yeah?” he replied with disdain. “The guy is nuts.”

  “Do you like the play?” Dowling asked, incredulous.

  “Na-a-a-h,” the actor responded, visibly bored.

  “I think I’m wasting your time, and you’re wasting mine,” Dowling said, and dismis
sed the twenty-two-year-old Marlon Brando from the building.334

  After Brando had slumped out of view, Dowling, now fully incensed, pushed aside the screen hiding O’Neill. “Eddie,” O’Neill said, grinning, “he’s got something.”335

  “[O’Neill] was a very beautiful man,” remembered Marcella Markham, who played the prostitute Cora in The Iceman Cometh. “[He was] terribly handsome and very gentle. And he loved actors, just adored actors. I find that everybody makes him out these days [the 1980s] to have been a serious, ponderous man—he wasn’t.”336 Ruth Gilbert, who played another prostitute, Pearl (and had been Muriel McComber in Ah, Wilderness!), agreed with Markham: “Sweetness—the greatest sweetness I’ve ever found in a human being; that’s Mr. O’Neill’s outstanding quality.”337

  Before Dowling was exposed to O’Neill’s charming side during auditions and rehearsals, however, what struck him most about the playwright when they first met in California was his near-myopic preoccupation with the war. “Kill, kill, kill,” O’Neill kept repeating. “Kill or be killed.”338 This didn’t go away when he’d arrived to work on Iceman. From O’Neill’s perspective, despair over the false promises of human history was precisely what his tragedy was about.

  When asked by the New York Times what significance the bums at Harry Hope’s saloon might have for contemporary America, O’Neill responded that Iceman “is a play about pipe dreams. And the philosophy is that there is always one dream left, one final dream, no matter how low you have fallen, down there at the bottom of the bottle. I know, because I saw it.” “It will take man a million years to grow up and obtain a soul,” he concluded; in the meantime, all we have are our pipe dreams.339 Larry Slade, the anarchist based on Terry Carlin, intimates this in the opening scene: “To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober” (CP3, 569–70).

  One afternoon at a rehearsal, O’Neill, perched atop a stool at the stage bar, waved over the PM journalist Croswell Bowen. Fondling a prop whiskey glass, the playwright began to ruminate on his disgust over the current wave of American arrogance: “Of course,” he warned, “America is due for a retribution. There ought to be a page in the history books of the United States of America of all the unprovoked, criminal, unjust crimes committed and sanctioned by our government since the beginning of our history—and before that, too.” “This American Dream stuff gives me a pain,” he went on, growing increasingly agitated. “Telling the world about our American Dream! I don’t know what they mean. If it exists, as we tell the whole world, why don’t we make it work in one small hamlet in the United States? … If it’s the constitution that they mean, ugh, then it’s a lot of words. If we taught history and told the truth, we’d teach school children that the United States has followed the same greedy rut as every other country. We would tell who’s guilty. The list of the guilty ones responsible would include some of our great national heroes. Their portraits should be taken out and burned.” He went on to express glowing admiration for the American Indians who defeated Custer and his battalion at the Battle of Little Big Horn, then slammed his fist down on the stage bar. “The big business leaders in this country! Why do we produce such stupendous, colossal egomaniacs? They go on doing the most monstrous things, always using the excuse that if we don’t the other person will. It’s impossible to satirize them, if you wanted to.”340

  Among the ranks of the “black Irishmen” in American letters—F. Scott Fitzgerald, James T. Farrell, John O’Hara—Bowen came to believe after this meeting that O’Neill was “the blackest one of all.” In a follow-up interview with Captain Tom Dorsey, who’d known O’Neill in New London, Dorsey defined “black Irish” (though a slippery term at best) as “an Irishman who has lost his Faith and who spends his life searching for the meaning of life, for a philosophy in which he can believe again as fervently as he once believed in the simple answers of the Catholic Catechism. A Black Irishman is a brooding, solitary man—and often a drinking man too—with wild words on the tip of his tongue.” No wonder The Iceman Cometh was about pipe dreams, Bowen realized before going on to write a book about O’Neill: pipe dreams were “a Black Irishman’s name for Faith.”341 The two world wars had in fact nullified any lingering desire in O’Neill for an alternative faith. “The Iceman,” he told Bowen, “is a denial of any other experience of faith in my plays. In writing it, I felt I had locked myself in with my memories.”342

  The Iceman Cometh’s premiere at the Martin Beck Theatre took in $600,000 at the box office for tickets sold through January. It was a Broadway record. Drama critics from Australia, South Africa, Italy, Greece, England, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark all congregated in the back of the theater and stood through the over-four-hour performance. From the street it looked more like a Hollywood premiere than a Broadway opening. Every celebrity in New York was there, even baseball legend Babe Ruth. O’Neill, of course, remained at home. When asked what he’d do opening night, he responded, “If I weren’t in temperance, I’d get stinko.”343

  Instead, Bobby Jones, who’d designed the barroom set, communed with him through the night, and O’Neill left strict instructions with the Guild not to pester him with reviews the next day.344 Staying home was expected; but refusal to read the notices was unheard of since the Fountain debacle in 1925. And also as with The Fountain, O’Neill’s abstention was probably a wise choice.

  The Iceman Cometh was an ill-timed production, opening as it did amid the patriotic fervor that had gripped postwar America, a time when overall confidence in national institutions had soared to historic heights. The play frustrated and bored most audiences and received respectful but lackluster reviews, with a smattering of both pans and raves. “‘The Iceman Cometh,’ for all its long-windedness, has power and intensity,” Ward Morehouse conceded in the New York Sun, capturing the general response: “If not O’Neill’s finest play, it is certainly one of stature and importance. The Theatre Guild has performed a public service in bringing it to the stage and in bringing him back to combat duty.” It was too long, most said, but unlike young Brando, theater critics hadn’t been afforded the luxury of sleeping through it. “Someone really ought to buy him a watch,” griped John Mason Brown in the Saturday Review of Literature.345

  The Theatre Guild’s 1946 premiere of The Iceman Cometh, during what O’Neill called the “play’s climactic scene, [Hickey’s] long confessional.”

  (COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)

  O’Neill’s experiment with repetition in Iceman was especially lost on audiences. The play’s director in 1956, José Quintero, would succeed, in part, where its first production failed because of his appreciation for O’Neill’s dialogic rhythm: “[The play] resembles a complex musical form,” Quintero said, “with themes repeating themselves with slight variation, as melodies do in a symphony.” Quintero found that directing the play had, paradoxically, taught him “the meaning of precision in drama.”346 Theodore “Hickey” Hickman’s speech at the end of act 4, the longest monologue O’Neill ever wrote, was its instrumental climax. Back when the Guild was preparing Dynamo, O’Neill also remarked on the musical quality of the work, “Bobby Jones once said that the difference between my plays and other contemporary work was that I always wrote primarily by the ear for the ear, that most of my plays, even down to the rhythm of the dialogue, had the definite structural quality of a musical composition. This hits the nail on the head. It is not that I consciously strive after this but that, willy-nilly, my stuff takes that form.”347

  Confronted on one too many occasions after The Iceman Cometh’s premiere, however, O’Neill was worn thin by the unrelenting accusation of repetition and offered a more terse response: “Have you ever been stinking drunk in your life?” he demanded. The critic admitted he hadn’t. “
If you had been,” O’Neill said, “you’d know that a drunk says the same thing over and over again.”348

  Without question the most stinging critique of The Iceman Cometh was an ad hominem attack by the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy. Likening the four-and-a-half-hour play to “some stern piece of hardware … ugly, durable, mysteriously utilitarian,” McCarthy considered Iceman proof positive that O’Neill was simply a bad writer: “The return of a playwright who—to be frank—cannot write is a solemn and sentimental occasion.” She went on to compare O’Neill to other major American authors such as Dreiser, Lewis, and James T. Farrell, “whose choice of vocation was a kind of triumphant catastrophe. … In their last acts and chapters, they arrive not at despair but at a strange, blank nihilism.” This kind of nihilism, unwelcome in postwar America, as the Nation’s Joseph Wood Krutch indicated in his review of the play, “was more modish twenty years ago than it is today.”349

  The following year, 1947, A Moon for the Misbegotten, the last play O’Neill ever wrote, would also be the last new play of his produced in his lifetime. Monterey made no secret of the fact that she despised it. A four-act play about Jim O’Neill was pointless, she insisted, after Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and the recounting of Jim’s actual drunken behavior, especially on the train from California with the prostitute and his mother’s coffin in the car ahead, had made her physically ill when she read it.350 O’Neill later admitted that he “had come to loathe” it too.351 After many entreaties, however, the Theatre Guild inveigled him to permit a trial run in the Midwest, and A Moon for the Misbegotten premiered in Columbus, Ohio, on February 20, 1947.