On March 4, 1951, Kathryne Albertoni, the O’Neills’ nurse from California, received a frantic phone call from Boston’s McLean Hospital. “Papa needs you,” a breathless Monterey pleaded. “Could you come?”382 Albertoni caught the next flight out. “Oh, Kaye,” Monterey greeted her, “you don’t know how much this means to me. The Master hates me!”383 Monterey, it soon became clear, hadn’t summoned her because “Papa” needed her. Albertoni was there to testify for or against Monterey’s sanity. She’d been institutionalized in McLean Hospital’s psychiatric ward with a diagnosis of “delirium from bromide.” While Monterey was fighting against accusations of insanity and the horrifying likelihood that she was gaslighted by her husband, O’Neill himself had been admitted to Salem Hospital, his leg fractured above the knee.
Eugene O’Neill Jr. at his father’s old desk (at which O’Neill wrote The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape, among other works) in the summer of 1950. This is probably the last photograph taken of Eugene Jr. before his suicide.
(PHOTO BY HARRY TEICHLAUT. COURTESY OF SHEAFFER-O’NEILL COLLECTION, LINDA LEAR CENTER FOR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE, NEW LONDON)
The tempest had begun a month earlier after a heated argument at Marblehead Neck at around nine o’clock on the night of February 5. O’Neill, infuriated, had rushed out of the house into a snowstorm; but realizing he badly needed a coat, he headed back to the house. On his way, he tripped on a rock on the pathway, fell to the ground, and broke his leg. Splayed out in the snow, he cried out for help, but Monterey, who often complained of his “falling all over the place because he won’t do as he’s told,” refused him aid. For over an hour, O’Neill shouted desperately to his neighbors. Without a coat and badly injured, he was certain to die of exposure. All the while Monterey taunted him from the doorway: “I hear a little man calling in the wind, I hear a little man calling in the wind, I hear a little man calling in the wind,” she repeated over and over. These were the words echoing in his head as he blacked out.384
About an hour later, help finally arrived in the form of Dr. Frederick B. Mayo, the local physician making his evening rounds. After checking to make sure O’Neill was alive, Mayo rushed inside and called an ambulance. Monterey was in hysterics, and he tried to coax her into the ambulance too; she refused, so he accompanied O’Neill without her to nearby Salem Hospital. The following night, a local police officer named John Snow was cruising the neighborhood of Marblehead Neck and discovered Monterey wandering the wintry roads in a fur coat. When Snow asked if he might escort her back home, she responded, “I’m not going back to that house, I’m never going back there. The air is full of people.” Snow called for backup and attempted to lure her into the house with soothing assurances: “The people are all gone,” he said, “there aren’t any more people in the air.” But she still refused, at which point Snow called Dr. Mayo, and they took her to the hospital. When informed that Monterey had just been admitted, O’Neill didn’t utter a word. A few weeks later, however, when he was told his wife wanted to visit him after she’d been transferred to McLean, he cried out in terror, “Oh, don’t let her near me, don’t let her come here!”385
On February 12, 1951, O’Neill directed Winfield Aronberg to modify his will once again; three days later, the attorney arrived at the hospital to draw up the new document, which O’Neill signed on March 5. He now wished to be buried in New York City. All of his literary material would go to Princeton University, aside from the unpublished Long Day’s Journey Into Night, since “I have already granted the right to publish said play as a book to Random House, Inc.” His estate was to be administered by lawyers only, and Monterey would receive $5,000 a year. Though he’d still bequeathed nothing to Shane, in this version of his will, he left Spithead, which had remained in his name after all these years as a legal convenience for him and Boulton, to Oona O’Neill Chaplin.386 By then O’Neill had in fact arrived at the conclusion that Oona was the only sensible one of his offspring, since at least she’d married into wealth.387 (The last of his grandchildren born his lifetime, her fifth, she named Eugene.)
Eugene O’Neill at Marblehead Neck, circa 1948.
(COURTESY OF THE YALE COLLECTION OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, NEW HAVEN)
O’Neill then signed a legal petition to have Monterey committed, characterizing his wife as “an insane person … incapable of taking care of herself.”388 Monterey, meanwhile, accused O’Neill of tormenting her with verbal and physical abuse: she said he’d threatened her with a belaying pin and that he’d entered her bedroom at night holding a shillelagh over her body while she pretended to be asleep. He was growling, according to her, “I’m going to smash her skull in, and all the blood will run down her face.”389 Whether any of this happened is impossible to know, but one thing is certain: throughout all of these scenes, both O’Neill and Monterey were heavily medicated on bromides.390 Taking bromides in large doses, as both of them did, can lead to delusions, hallucinations, and paranoia, all of which appeared to have manifested themselves over that terrible winter.
O’Neill’s Massachusetts lawyer, James E. Farley, filed a petition to have Monterey institutionalized at the Salem probate court on March 28, and the hearing was scheduled for April 23. Monterey’s bank account was frozen, and her daughter Cynthia Stram couldn’t help her financially; nor could she see her way to make a trip east to care for a mother who had so decisively abandoned her. When Kathryne Albertoni arrived under the impression that “Papa” needed her, a neurologist at McLean, Dr. Harry Kozol, asked Albertoni point-blank if she believed Monterey to be insane. “No,” the nurse responded, “she just drives herself hard.” Dr. Kozol then asked, “Is she bitchy?” Albertoni repeated, “She drives hard.”391 In the meantime, Dr. Merrill Moore, a Boston psychiatrist and Monterey’s ex-husband Ralph Barton’s cousin, attempted to have O’Neill institutionalized as well, but O’Neill’s doctors ignored his diagnosis. Moore then visited Monterey, told her that she should never see O’Neill again, twenty-three years was enough. (He also, according to Monterey, all but propositioned her in her hospital room in front of Dr. William H. Horowitz, another attending psychiatrist on staff at McLean.)392
That same day Monterey sent O’Neill a bouquet of roses, and he agreed to her release on March 29. When she arrived in O’Neill’s hospital room, he initially acted “high strung,” according to Albertoni, but Monterey dashed into his arms and wept on his shoulder. His eyes welled up too, though he was evidently relieved to have the nurse present.393
On April 4, Monterey wrote Kenneth Macgowan a lengthy letter updating him about her and O’Neill’s situation. She informed him that she’d been given a clean bill of mental health at McLean, but that upon hearing the news, her husband, “instead of being glad seemed to be disappointed! He wanted me to be a mental case!” Whatever happened, she felt condemned by the diagnosis: “Even when [it’s proven that] I am not a mental case, the shadow will hang over me! Gene swore he’d ruin me, & he has about done it. Being a good dramatist, & Irish, & confused is a bad mixture!”394
Saxe Commins, Bennett Cerf, Lawrence Langner, and Russel Crouse all insisted that O’Neill be removed to New York, away from Monterey—this time, they hoped, for good. He agreed to go, and they secured a temporary room for him at the Carlyle Hotel while he convalesced for a month at Doctors Hospital. Even in traction, the ailing playwright was deemed enough of a suicide risk that a nurse was ordered to lock the windows to prevent him from jumping.395
Several old friends visited him there, including Jimmy Light, whom O’Neill hadn’t seen since France. “Give me a cigarette, will you?” O’Neill asked when he walked in. Light gave him matches as well, but O’Neill’s hands were too shaky; when Light took the book of matches and tried to help him, O’Neill snatched it back again. “Thanks for nothing,” he sniped, and lit the cigarette himself. “Can you top that?” Light said later. “The guts of the man! It took him a few matches, but he finally managed to
light it himself.”396 Cerf arranged for a male nurse to care for O’Neill at the Carlyle, only for the nurse to arrive at Doctors Hospital to find that O’Neill had disappeared. Monterey had located him and persuaded him to return to Boston.
Cerf and Langner were furious with O’Neill for going back to Monterey, but Commins had a more sympathetic understanding of his friend’s codependent marriage. “After all,” he said, “Carlotta had lived with him and [his disease] for almost a quarter of a century, and when she was not in a state of acute disturbance, she could be competent and devoted and even sacrificial in her imperious and managerial way. Hers was not a radiant future, he argued to convince himself as much as me, and she’d relinquished a life of ease as a woman of conspicuous beauty in order to be at his side through all those years, for better or for worse.”397
On May 17, 1951, O’Neill took the train back to Boston to join Monterey at her new suite at the Shelton Hotel, across from Dr. Kozol’s office. He was under sedation throughout the journey and thus missed his last chance to view New London, the only place that he could truly call home. “How could you have done that to me?” Monterey demanded once he arrived in Boston. O’Neill’s face momentarily darkened, then he smiled. “Well,” he said, “it was a helluva fourth act.”398
On May 23, Monterey read over the will that he’d written at Doctors Hospital, and nearly left him on the spot. “God punish liars, traitors, + crooks!” she wrote that day, “I haven’t the strength to bear much more of Gene’s disloyalty + dishonesty—insane or sane, he always attacks me!?”399 That week O’Neill notified his legal representatives that his June 28, 1948, version was his “true will.”400
Monterey was once again his sole heir, her condition, apparently, for taking him back. It was the only existing will that forgoes any stipulation about Long Day’s Journey Into Night. On June 3, 1951, O’Neill painstakingly scrawled an inscription to Monterey in a copy of A Moon for the Misbegotten: “To Carlotta, my beloved wife, whose love I could not possibly live without, in a spirit of the humblest gratitude for her love which has forgiven my recent shameful conduct toward her.”401 But neither his reconciliation with Monterey nor the reinstituted will ever changed his desire to withhold Long Day’s Journey from the public eye. Ten days after his make-up note to Monterey, O’Neill requested all of his manuscripts from Random House, save one: “No, I do not want ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night,’” he told Bennett Cerf. “That, as you know, is to be published twenty-five years after my death—but never produced as a play.”402
In the winter of 1952, the intolerable possibility that some intrepid director might produce what he’d finished off his Cycle after his death moved O’Neill to a desperate act: he and Monterey must destroy the manuscripts. For hours, according to Monterey, they tore the pages up into little pieces, and she flung them into a fire. “It was awful,” she recalled. “It was like tearing up children.” After that, he lost any will to live. “He died when he could no longer work,” Monterey said. “He died spiritually. And it was just a matter of dragging a poor, diseased body along for a few more years until it too died.”403 All the while, O’Neill refused any comfort from the possibility of God or an afterlife. “When I’m dying,” he’d insisted, “don’t let a priest or Protestant minister or Salvation Army captain near me. Let me die in dignity. Keep it as simple and brief as possible. No fuss, no man of God there. If there is a God, I’ll see Him and we’ll talk things over.”404
On November 27, 1953, at four thirty-seven p.m., O’Neill, at sixty-five, died in his two-room suite at the Shelton Hotel with Monterey and Dr. Kozol at his bedside. It was a four-day bout of pneumonia that finally claimed his life, exacerbated by his as-yet undiagnosed neurological illness. “I knew it! I knew it!” he’d cried out between stretches of unconsciousness. “Born in a goddamn hotel room and dying in a hotel room!” “Don’t sentimentalize him,” Monterey said after he was gone. “He was not a sweet little boy searching for a mama or a young man ever so polite. He was a black Irishman, a rough tough black Irishman. … He could have that smile that made him appear so young; other times he’d be as old as an oriental. … He was a simple man. They make a lot of nonsense and mystery out of him. He was interested only in writing his plays.”405
Postscript
Journey Into Light
The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us.
—MARY TYRONE in Long Day’s Journey Into Night
O’NEILL’S AUTOPSY was performed that next morning, November 28, 1953, at Massachusetts General Hospital. “I wanted to know,” Monterey said, “what in the name of God was the matter with this man I had nursed so long.”1 Unfortunately, given the limits of medical science at the time, the findings were a disappointment. No clear indication of Parkinson’s was there, though O’Neill’s cause of death was listed on his death certificate as bronchopneumonia and a “Parkinsonian Disease.” The procedure did reveal that O’Neill had suffered from several lung-related ailments, including emphysema from smoking and fibrous adhesions caused by his tuberculosis from 1912 to 1913.2 Remarkably, despite his enormous alcohol intake over a twenty-five-year period, and then intermittently, his liver and heart were in normal condition for a man of sixty-five.
Nearly five decades later, at the turn of the millennium, a new autopsy was performed using microscopical slides of the playwright’s preserved brain tissue. The project was spearheaded by Dr. E. P. Richardson, a neurologist present at the original autopsy, and Dr. Bruce H. Price, a young associate enthralled by O’Neill and his work. Squinting down into the multiheaded microscope, Price recalled in 2010 that observing the legendary dramatist’s brain cells for the first time “was a rather surreal, reverential moment, involving that ever elusive quest to observe and capture genius by viewing brain anatomy.” Richardson and Price’s investigation again found no trace of Parkinson’s (nor of the elusive genius, for that matter), but developments in neuroscience did enable them to accurately diagnose “what in the name of God was the matter” with Monterey’s husband. The torturous “Celtic Twilight” of O’Neill’s last fifteen years was caused by a rare neurodegenerative disease: late-onset spinal cerebellar atrophy. O’Neill’s particular form of the disease was “idiopathic,” meaning that, contrary to popular assumption, there was little to no evidence that his drinking had anything to do with it.3
O’Neill’s remains were laid to rest at Boston’s Forest Hills Cemetery on December 2, 1953, with a plot beside him reserved for Monterey. The hearse containing O’Neill’s plain black coffin, draped with a white shroud, was trailed by a car carrying three mourners: Monterey, Dr. Kozol, and a nurse. Monterey had earlier seen to the replacement of “There’s a Lot to Be Said for Being Dead” on the unpretentious granite tombstone with the standard “Rest in Peace.” No friends, family, or press were notified of the burial. “Everything he wished for regarding his funeral and interment was carried out to the letter,” Monterey told the undertaker. “And his wishes will be carried out in everything.”4 Monterey respected O’Neill’s express instructions not to have a clergyman officiate. She couldn’t help bowing her head, though, to murmur the Lord’s Prayer.5
“You are the only human being I have known who never lied to me,” O’Neill wrote Monterey a month before his death. “You are the only one who never gained anything from being close to me. … You are the only one who really loved me!”6 A few days after he wrote these words, with her husband’s demise a certainty, Monterey swore that she had “but one reason to live & that is to carry out Gene’s wishes … the ‘twenty-five year box’ is the most interesting part of it—all personal except Long Day’s Journey Into Night—& not intended to be opened until twenty-five years after Gene’s death.”7 And as late as February 1954, she wrote a diary entry that clearly indicates her understanding of his posthumous wishes: “The ‘25 year box’ cannot be opened until 1978!”8 But several months later, a drama behind the drama had begun to unfold
.
In June 1954, Monterey contacted Bennett Cerf at Random House and demanded that he publish Long Day’s Journey. Cerf consulted with Saxe Commins, and together they refused to violate their pact. Commins recalled that when Cerf informed Monterey of this, “She exploded with fury and vented most of her wrath on me, accusing me of having instigated a plot against her, of having ruined all the O’Neill plays on which I had worked with him and charging me with about as many crimes as are included in the penal code.”9 They held firm, Cerf wrote, but were soon “horrified to learn that legally all the cards were in her hand; what the author wanted, and what he had asked us to do, had no validity if she wanted something else—which she did.”10
After Monterey had wrenched Long Day’s Journey from the reluctant hands of Random House, she secured its publication by Yale University Press, with the proceeds of the American and Canadian book rights to support the Eugene O’Neill Collection at Yale’s Sterling Library and the School of Drama. Next, she offered Sweden’s Royal Dramatic Theatre, which had produced more of O’Neill’s plays than any other theater in the world, the rights to produce the autobiographical tragedy. Then, Monterey informed the press that O’Neill had made a stunning “deathbed request” that the Swedish theater should produce Long Day’s Journey in Swedish translation.11
Monterey alleged that her husband’s decision to withhold the script had been meant to protect his son Eugene, but that he changed his mind after his son’s death. This was untrue. On August 4, 1941, O’Neill wrote in his work diary that Eugene had read the play that day while visiting him and was “greatly moved, which pleases me a lot.” No mention was made of Eugene’s desire for him to quash it. Furthermore, Eugene had committed suicide nearly a year before O’Neill wrote Cerf to remind him of their compact on June 15, 1951.12 On March 3, 1952, a time when his neurological illness had grown so acute that their Shelton Hotel suite was more hospice than home, O’Neill had signed a trust deed transferring the rights to his plays to Monterey, though it did not list Long Day’s Journey on its otherwise comprehensive list of scripts, presumably because of O’Neill’s well-documented decree that Random House should retain the publication rights to that particular play. Nevertheless, O’Neill had signed over to Carlotta Monterey, under these uncertain terms, the “rights, title and interest in my copyrights and literary properties.”13
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 53
