Casting an actress for the role of Josie Hogan hadn’t been easy. Lawrence Langner knew that Josie’s character demanded “exactly the kind of woman who, when she comes to see you and asks whether she should attempt a career in the theatre—you look embarrassed and reply, ‘Well, I’m afraid you’re rather a big girl—how are we to find a man tall enough to play opposite you?’”352 When O’Neill interviewed Mary Welch, he instantly saw that she wasn’t the giantess like Christine Ell that he’d envisioned, but concluded that she was sufficiently Irish (100 percent) to carry off the role. On the night of the Columbus premiere, O’Neill sent her a dozen roses with a note that read, “Again my absolute confidence, Eugene O’Neill.” “I can think of nothing finer to say to an actress on opening night,” Welch recalled of the gift.353
“Theatrically,” a local Ohioan joked of opening night, “America discovered Columbus tonight.”354 “This was a big event for Columbus,” the Columbus Citizen affirmed. “It was our first white tie, tails and tiara affair at the legitimate theater since before the war. … Yet this was a case where a competent cast that never obviously muffed a line or missed a stage cue wasted their time and long hours of ‘line memorizing’ on an unimportant play written by O’Neill, who is today still considered America’s greatest dramatist.”355 One critic quipped, “The play consists of four acts. That is three too many.” “Let’s call it ‘A Moon to Be Forgotten,’” said another.356 More than a few reviewers favorably compared the play’s realism to Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road (1932); but the juxtapositions of whiskey drinking and Christian symbolism, shanty Irishness and anticapitalism, attempted rape and tainted motherhood succeeded in affronting nearly everyone. The Columbus Register thought the play “vile, irreverent, vulgar, immoral, and profane. … Among things offensive in the show were the ridicule of Catholic doctrinal practices, suggestive scenes, immoral expressions, and a profuse usage of vulgarity and profanity.”357 The Pittsburgh Press’s drama critic remonstrated, “I was ashamed to have my mother’s old ears assaulted by the profanity and vulgarity of this play.”358
In Detroit, the production’s next stop after Columbus and Cleveland, the police censor shut it down after only two nights. “Lady, I don’t care what kind of prize he’s won,” the censor answered the Guild producer Armina Marshall’s objection that O’Neill was a Nobel Prize winner, “he can’t put on a dirty show in my town.” He charged that A Moon for the Misbegotten used the words prostitute and mother in the same sentence.359 It was, he said, “a slander on American motherhood.”360 (This allegation was highly ironic, given that the main character, Jim Tyrone, recoils in disgust whenever that same connection is made. One draft even has Jim thanking Josie for not using his mother’s name “in the same breath with the blonde whore on the train.”)361 If the show was to go on, the censor commanded, O’Neill must edit out several sentences and any profanity—bastard, louse, tart, tramp, and so on. O’Neill grudgingly agreed.
Back in the “Mad Twenties,” with plays like Desire Under the Elms and Strange Interlude, such scandalous material had swept throngs of carnal-minded audiences into theaters alongside O’Neill’s more intellectual, modernist theatrical base, and thus ensured a hit. Not in the forties. A Moon for the Misbegotten, after its final stop of St. Louis, wouldn’t see a revival for another decade. (It’s now one of his most commonly revived plays.) For a writer at the height of his intellectual powers, who’d dedicated his art to experimenting with anticlimax and the vagaries of ironic fate, O’Neill was at last confronted with his own anticlimactic final curtain, as a playwright if not yet as a man.
“There’s a Lot to Be Said for Being Dead”
An incident at O’Neill and Monterey’s penthouse on the night of January 17, 1948, gave Saxe Commins yet another shocking glimpse at Monterey’s deteriorating mental state. The phone rang on the evening of his visit and Monterey answered it as usual, but then her body went rigid. “It’s one of your friends,” she said, handing the phone to her husband. “I won’t talk to her.” It was his old Provincetown ally Fitzie Fitzgerald asking for a loan. Ignoring Monterey’s reproachful glare, O’Neill promised Fitzgerald $100. “Count on me,” he assured her, and hung up. Turning back to Monterey, whose fury had escalated, O’Neill diffidently explained that his old friend required medical attention; she likely had cancer. Fitzgerald had helped him often in the past, and it was only right to return the favor. “The lady, abandoning refinement,” Commins remembered, “heaped abuse upon contempt for the people Gene knew during his days of struggle; they were criminals, blood-suckers, thieves, bastards, scum—and bohemians.” (This last was hissed with particular venom.)362
At that point, Commins politely removed himself from the apartment. The moment the elevator door closed behind him, Monterey exploded in rage. First she smashed a glass on O’Neill’s dressing table; and then, reaching down into the shards, she picked up a damaged picture of him as a baby in Ella O’Neill’s arms, tore it to shreds, and screamed, “Your mother was a whore!” O’Neill slapped her hard, whereupon she dissolved into hysterics, dashed into her room to pack, then stormed out of the apartment, vowing never to see him again.
O’Neill telephoned Commins the next morning and related what had happened. It was his fault, he said in genuine contrition; he should have shown more compassion and restraint.363 In fact, O’Neill had been drinking again, at least for a couple of weeks; it began with wine at first, but Monterey—who noted in her diary on January 2 that he “seems to be in a fog—and loathes me!”—was worried it would “lead to serious drinking as in times past.”364
With Monterey gone, O’Neill required a new caretaker, so he and Commins contacted Walter “Ice” Casey, O’Neill’s friend from his New London days. Casey was working, like O’Neill’s character Erie Smith in Hughie, as a desk clerk at a shabby Manhattan hotel and was more than happy to help. On Casey’s second day there, he and Commins spotted a pair of private detectives standing watch on the street outside the building and incautiously signaling each other with handkerchiefs. O’Neill then hired his own detective, who soon informed him that Monterey had checked into a Midtown hotel under an alias. “For the love of God, forgive and come back,” he wrote her, culling his next entreaty from Mammy Saunders’s threat to her grandson in The Dreamy Kid: “You are all I have in life. I am sick and I will surely die without you. You do not want to murder me, I know, and a curse will be on you for your remaining days.”365
Over a week after the disturbing incident at the O’Neills’, at six a.m. on January 29, 1948, Commins received a telephone call from Casey. He and O’Neill had been drinking the night before, and O’Neill, unsteady from a combination of alcohol and bromides, slipped in the bathroom after Casey had gone to bed, tripped over a stool, and fractured his arm. Casey was passed out cold, so O’Neill banged on the bathroom floor and shouted, unsuccessfully, to rouse the downstairs neighbors. Eventually, he blacked out.366 A few hours later, Casey regained consciousness and frantically called O’Neill’s attending physician, Dr. Shirley C. Fisk. When the two arrived at Doctors Hospital, Fisk informed Casey that “alcohol, even a little, would be potent on top of the bromides and other medications” O’Neill had been consuming daily to steady his tremors.367
Monterey made a brief but disquieting appearance at Doctors Hospital. With the excuse of arthritis to be admitted herself, she took a room on the floor below O’Neill’s and for several days, with the aid of Herbert Freeman, monitored her husband and kept close tabs on his visitations.368 It’s unclear whether they talked themselves; but soon thereafter, O’Neill made an urgent request from his hospital bed that Commins secure his manuscripts from his penthouse and lock them in the Random House safe. If Monterey’s state of mind was disturbed enough to destroy the only picture he had of him as a child in his mother’s arms, his two cartons of manuscripts could well meet a similar fate. Commins immediately notified Casey, who delivered the boxes to Commins’s office, after which he carefully labeled their contents and stor
ed them in the safe. Then, on February 26, Commins’s telephone rang. It was Monterey: “Have you given those scripts to Dodds of Princeton or whatever his name is?”
“What scripts?”
“The ones Gene has been lying about. You know what a God-damned liar he is.”
“I won’t listen to that, Carlotta. Gene is not a liar; he has never lied, and you know it.”
“He has always been a liar. Did you take those scripts out of the desk?”
“You can’t talk that way to me. I did not take any scripts out of the desk.”
“I’ve got enough on you to send you to jail after all you’ve said about me.”
“Carlotta, I’ve never mentioned your name to anyone. You ought to know that. I’ve always treated you with respect and I deserve a little from you.”
“Respect, hell. God-damn you, I’ll show you. I’ll have you in jail where you’ve belonged for years.”
“There followed,” Commins reported afterwards, “a cascade of curses. The veneer of the lady had been rubbed off and the mind and the language of the show girl were exposed. The tirade devolved into a dizzying volley of obscenities.” Among other insulting epithets, she called him a “Jew bastard” and declared that Hitler should have killed off more of his “kind.”369 After this, she slammed down the receiver, and Commins, by then reduced to tears, grabbed a sheet of paper, transcribed their exchange word for word, and delivered the evidence to O’Neill that evening. “Try to understand,” O’Neill said to him. “She’s sick, terribly sick. Don’t you leave me too.” Commins, still shaken but pacified for the time being, promised he wouldn’t.370
Another hard-won truce took place between O’Neill and Monterey that April, at which point they chose to leave New York and the nightmares of the previous year and retire for good somewhere near Boston along the Massachusetts coastline. As well as having access to the sea, they would also be able to avail themselves of Boston’s superior medical care. From a suite at the Ritz-Carlton, they orchestrated the purchase of a seaside cottage in Marblehead, twenty miles north of Boston. The total cost, after major renovations, came to more than $85,000, funded principally by Monterey’s trust. At the tip of Marblehead Neck, the house, built in 1880, sat perched above the shoreline on Point O’Rocks Lane. Its modest gray-shingled New England frame and long sloping eaves evoked fond memories for O’Neill of the Pink House, his family’s home in New London before Monte Cristo Cottage. “It’s like coming home, in a way,” he wrote Kenneth Macgowan once they’d settled in, “and I feel happier than in many years.”371
The previous year, 1947, O’Neill had signed several new drafts of his will, again leaving ownership of his literary estate to Monterey or, in the event of her death, Eugene, Jr. But now half of the remainder of his estate was bequeathed to Eugene, Monterey’s daughter, Cynthia Stram, and a trust to continue paying Agnes Boulton’s alimony. The other half was left to Monterey. (In the case of her death, this time, the money would go to Eugene and Cynthia and endow an annual “Eugene O’Neill Prize” to be administered by Yale University’s School of Drama.) Nothing was provided for Oona, or even Shane, this time, “since they have amply benefited from the payments made to their mother” from her alimony and the Spithead property. On his tombstone, he specified, was to be carved an inscription under his name: “THERE’S A LOT TO BE SAID FOR BEING DEAD.”
That summer of 1947, O’Neill and Monterey had gone over the will together. She made only a few minor alterations; significantly, one directive of O’Neill’s remained untouched: that Long Day’s Journey Into Night not be produced in any format, radio, television, film, or stage, and not be published by Random House until twenty-five years after his death. But on June 28, 1948, in a new bid to regain Monterey’s trust after their contretemps in New York, O’Neill once again revised his will, this time leaving a fifth of his estate to Eugene and the remainder to Monterey. He included no reference, which he had in all of his prior wills, as to the intended fate of Long Day’s Journey.372
From his new office at Marblehead Neck that fall, the ailing O’Neill, though he’d publicly joined the Euthanasia Society of America that year, wrote several friends that he planned to resume writing as soon as he was able. (Those he reached out to with this new optimism, including Saxe Commins, Dudley Nichols, and Charles Kennedy, had all been summarily banned by Monterey from calling or visiting them at Marblehead Neck.) But by early 1949, he’d lost hope again and resigned himself to the fact that he would never write another play; his straw of hopeless hope had sunk into the abyss. “As for writing a new play,” he admitted to George Jean Nathan, “that pipe-dream seems as remote and unattainable as memorizing the Encyclopedia Britannica. … It is not only a matter of hand, but of mind—I just feel there is nothing more I want to say.”373
Meanwhile, with O’Neill now lacking any future source of income, his two sons appeared incapable of providing for themselves and both were asking for money. Shane O’Neill had by this time descended into chronic drug and alcohol abuse and had repeatedly attempted suicide. He’d married a woman named Catherine Givens in 1944 and a year later she gave birth to Eugene O’Neill III. The baby, O’Neill’s first grandchild and namesake to both him and his oldest son, died three months later, most likely of sudden infant death syndrome. Within three years, Shane was convicted of heroin possession and received a two-year suspended sentence. Shane confessed to a friend that he’d surrendered himself to pursuing the clear-cut path heroin provided him to his grave. Until then, he said, the drug “gives you something to live for. You have a goal in life—getting the stuff and earning enough money to pay for it. I know people who make fifteen, twenty, twenty-five thousand dollars a year just so they can earn enough to keep using H.”374
O’Neill’s stalwart lawyer Harry Weinberger had died in early 1944, a devastating blow for O’Neill, and he needed to brief his new lawyer, Winfield E. Aronberg, on Shane’s perpetual legal scrapes and financial difficulties: “He cannot ever expect money from me. He has his interest in Spithead and he must make all appeals to his mother. And he might try going to work for a change. Or his wife might.”375 Shane and Catherine Givens were divorced in the early 1960s, having raised four children together.376 Despite his reputation as an uncommonly kind person, regarded by some as almost Christlike and beloved by his children, Shane was never able to shake off his bedeviling addictions or ancestral demons—what Eugene Jr. had called the “but” that invariably followed compliments about his younger brother. In 1977, Shane ended his own life by jumping from the fourth-floor window of a friend’s Brooklyn apartment.
Shane O’Neill in 1957.
(COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)
For his part, Eugene Jr. was now drinking as much as his father ever had. He’d quit his position teaching classics at Yale University long before, then wound his way through part-time academic jobs—Princeton, Fairleigh Dickinson, the New School for Social Research. He eventually found work as a literary personality on radio and television and was billed as a “classical scholar of frightening erudition who likes virtually nothing written since the birth of Christ.” But one night Eugene was scheduled to appear on a television panel with the famously dapper movie star Adolphe Menjou, then considered “the best-dressed man” in America. Eugene deliberately arrived to the studio as “the worst-dressed”; he was also visibly drunk and thus summarily blackballed from any future television work.377
In the summer of 1950, Eugene needed money to renew his mortgage on a mountaintop property he’d bought in Woodstock, New York; but his father refused him any financial assistance. Aronberg had been told that like Shane, Eugene “must make up his mind that he will get nothing from me and that it is necessary to find some job, and remain on that job, to plan for his future.” Still, O’Neill never lost faith in his firstborn, as he had in Shane; it was Eugene who’d lost faith in himself. All of Eugene’s vitriol was directed, no
t at his father, but at Monterey. “His hatred of Carlotta was almost maniacal,” Commins recalled after meeting him on September 21, 1950. “It was she, he insisted, who was the cause of his desperation.” (By this time, the feeling was mutual: when Eugene left after visits to Marblehead Neck, Monterey would burn the sheets he’d slept in.)378
On September 25, 1950, four days after his conference with Commins, Eugene stripped naked and, in the way of the Romans, slashed his wrist and ankles and submerged himself in a warm bath so the gashes wouldn’t coagulate. His body was found near the front door of his house by his closest friend Frank Meyer’s wife. Police evidence disclosed the agonizing details of his final moments: blood on the telephone indicated he’d changed his mind and tried to call for help; but he hadn’t paid his bills and the phone company had cut the line. In the bathroom upstairs, a suicide note was tucked beneath an empty bottle of whiskey: “Never let it be said of an O’Neill that he failed to empty the bottle. Ave atque vale [Hail and farewell]!”379
Winfield Aronberg was given the unenviable task of informing his client by telephone. “Hello, Carlotta,” he said when she picked up. “This is Bill Aronberg. I have terrible news for you. Try to be brave and break this gently to Gene. Young Gene has just committed suicide.” “How dare you invade our privacy!” she shouted, and hung up.380 Kathleen Jenkins was the only family member at the funeral, paid for by Eugene’s brothers in Yale’s elite secret society, Skull and Bones. O’Neill sent a floral arrangement of white chrysanthemums that blanketed the casket; the card attached read simply, “Father.”381
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 52
