By Women Possessed

  ALSO BY ARTHUR GELB AND BARBARA GELB

  Bellevue Is My Home

  O’Neill

  O’Neill: Life with Monte Cristo

  BY ARTHUR GELB

  City Room

  One More Victim: The Life and Death of a Jewish Nazi (with A. M. Rosenthal)

  BY BARBARA GELB

  So Short a Time

  On the Track of Murder

  Varnished Brass

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers since 1838

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2016 by Arthur and Barbara Gelb

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  A full list of photo credits appears here. The author has made reasonable efforts to correctly credit and/or obtain permissions, where needed, for the photographs included in this book. Any errors or oversight in this regard are inadvertant.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780698170681

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Gelb, Arthur, 1924–2014. | Gelb, Barbara.

  Title: By women possessed : a life of Eugene O’Neill / Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb.

  Description: New York : G. P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2016. | “A Marian Wood book.” | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016008421 | ISBN 9780399159114 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: O’Neill, Eugene, 1888–1953. | O’Neill, Eugene, 1888–1953—Relations with women. | Dramatists, American—20th century—Biography.

  BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Entertainment & Performing Arts. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / General.

  Classification: LCC PS3529.N5 Z6527 2016 | DDC 812/.52–dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016008421

  p. cm.

  Version_1

  For our sons, Michael and Peter

  our grandchildren, Daniel, Sarah, David, Matthew

  and our great-granddaughters, Hannah and Emma,

  with love forever and a day

  This is Daddy’s bed time secret. Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue!

  —The Great God Brown, Act IV, Scene 1

  CONTENTS

  Also by Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  PART I

  UPHEAVAL

  PART II

  ABOUT AGNES

  PART III

  MISTRESS, SECRETARY, WIFE, AND MOTHER

  PART IV

  “TIME’S WINGED CHARIOT”

  PART V

  UNRAVELING

  Epilogue

  Photos

  Acknowledgments

  Select Bibliography

  Key to Abbreviations in Endnotes

  Endnotes

  Photo Credits

  Index

  PREFACE

  Arthur Gelb, my husband and collaborator of sixty-eight years, did not live to see the publication of By Women Possessed. He died on May 20, 2014, just as we were wearily polishing the last few pages of our seven-hundred-page final draft. Together, we’d been wrestling with the book’s research and writing for almost a decade.

  Semi-emerging some months later from a grief-stricken languor, I found myself, alone and tearful, tweaking those last pages (which, in the event, we’d already rewritten half a dozen times). Arthur’s ghost was looking over my shoulder. I nervously changed a semicolon to a period, hoping he’d approve. This was, after all, his book as much as mine.

  As for this preface, he’ll just have to trust me on my own. I hope he’ll be okay with it.

  • • •

  IT’S HARD TO believe it was more than half a century ago that Arthur and I had the audacity to tackle the writing of the first full-scale biography of Eugene O’Neill. I was thirty and Arthur was thirty-two. The year was 1956, three years after O’Neill’s death at sixty-five. His last new play on Broadway—after a silence of twelve years—had been The Iceman Cometh, in 1946. The play was ahead of its time, the production was flawed, and it didn’t have an impressive run.

  Arthur and I had both been avid theatergoers since childhood, and he had recently been appointed as an assistant drama critic (covering Off-Broadway) for The New York Times. We were too young to have seen any of the original productions of O’Neill’s earlier plays, but we had read many of them. We well knew that O’Neill had once been a blazing, larger-than-life presence on the American stage—that, in fact, during the 1920s and ’30s, he was the acknowledged architect of a grown-up American theater, a literary theater—paving the way for such later innovators as Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Edward Albee.

  But after a humiliating Broadway failure (Days Without End) in 1934, O’Neill had retreated into silence. His earlier successes were rarely revived during the ensuing decade, and by the mid-1950s, he was an all-but-forgotten man.

  The picture changed dramatically when Long Day’s Journey Into Night exploded on Broadway on November 7, 1956, having been preceded six months earlier by a brilliant revival of The Iceman Cometh. O’Neill, once again, was being hailed as his country’s greatest playwright, and the publishing world suddenly got the message that it was time for an O’Neill biography.

  Harper & Brothers, one of the most respected publishing houses of the day, wanted Brooks Atkinson to take on the job—surely an appropriate choice. Atkinson was the powerfully influential drama critic of The New York Times. He had written many thoughtful reviews of O’Neill’s plays and had eventually formed a warm friendship with both the dramatist and his wife.

  But Atkinson demurred. At sixty-two, he said he was too old to take on so demanding a subject while also continuing as a critic for the Times.

  And that’s when Arthur and I came into the picture.

  Atkinson managed to persuade Harper’s editor in chief to give us the assignment in his stead. He introduced Arthur to the editor as his colleague and protégé in the Times’s drama department, praising him as a knowledgeable theater reporter and critic.

  And he explained that since the Times did not give reporters leaves of absence to write books, Arthur would need the assistance of his wife, Barbara, with whom he had collaborated on numerous magazine articles and a recent well-reviewed book about Bellevue Hospital.

  Atkinson also pointed out that as the stepdaughter of the playwright S. N. Behrman, a contemporary of O’Neill’s, I had the advantage of having grown up with a theater background.

  What probably clinched the argument was Atkinson’s promise that he, himself, would smooth our way with O’Neill’s widow, the former stage actress and once-renowned beauty Carlotta Monterey. He said Monterey was a vital repository of information, but she was a woman of mercurial moods. She could be contentious, and he foresaw that she would require diplomatic handling.

  The upshot was that Harper’s offered Arthur and me the assignment—at a considerably lower royalty than they’d offered Atkinson, of course—and we accepted.

  How could we not?

  For o
ne thing, we were dying to know—along with many other theatergoers—how much of Long Day’s Journey actually was based on O’Neill’s own life.

  Was his mother really a morphine addict?

  Was his actor-father the heavy-drinking, intermittently unfeeling skinflint portrayed in the play?

  Were O’Neill and his brother truly locked into the virulent sibling rivalry depicted in Long Day’s Journey Into Night?

  I know it’s hard to believe—in light of the ocean of information we now have about O’Neill—that, in those days, so little was known of his personal life.

  It’s true that he’d given several long magazine interviews during his lifetime, and also (reluctantly) authorized a short, dry biography by the critic Barrett H. Clark, but the interviews dealt mostly with his work philosophy and with his early seafaring and derelict days, of which he was inordinately proud.

  It also was generally known that he’d left his second wife, Agnes Boulton—the mother of his two children, Shane and Oona—to marry the thrice-divorced Carlotta Monterey. And in 1943 there had been the well-publicized scandal—in the midst of World War II—of his daughter Oona’s marriage, at eighteen, to the womanizing Charlie Chaplin, who was O’Neill’s own age.

  As for his plays, devotees were, of course, aware that many of them were inspired by the tragedies of the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare, along with biblical lore.

  But only his most intimate friends were aware that the plays also sprang from O’Neill’s own spectacularly dysfunctional family history—a history that, as we now know, included betrayal, adultery, unresolved oedipal yearning, violent alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, bipolarity, and doomed spiritual striving among other bedevilments.

  • • •

  ARTHUR AND I had no inkling that our own lives were about to become obsessively and permanently entangled with the tormented, enigmatic O’Neill. And not only Arthur and me, but—to some degree—the two little boys we were raising.

  We had converted the living room of our two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan into an office. It would be awash, for the next six years, in notebooks crammed with interview notes, copies of letters, and cartons of photographs. Our boys were used to hearing Arthur and me in endless discussions about our research. They had begun to feel possessive about O’Neill; indeed, they regarded him as a member of the family.

  The younger of the two, Peter, who grew up to be the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, already fancied himself a cultural expert at the age of four.

  One day, I took Peter and his six-year-old brother, Michael, to the Shakespeare Garden in Central Park and pointed out Shakespeare’s bust, explaining that he was commemorated here as the world’s greatest playwright.

  To Michael’s and my amazement, Peter indignantly demanded, “Oh yeah? What about Gene O’Neill?”

  • • •

  IN 1962, after publishing O’Neill, our 964-page biography (which we updated and revised several times during the next dozen years), Arthur and I went on to other interests: he, at the Times, climbing from investigative reporter and theater critic to metropolitan editor—where he also supervised the paper’s cultural coverage—and ultimately to managing editor. During that period, he cowrote (with Times executive editor A. M. Rosenthal), One More Victim: The Life and Death of a Jewish Nazi (1967) and also coedited several news-related books based on Times reporting.

  After his age-mandated retirement from the newsroom, Arthur headed the New York Times Foundation and, later, the paper’s college scholarship program. He also found time to write a memoir of his newspapering years, called City Room (2003).

  And I continued to write magazine articles and books, including the biography So Short a Time (1973), about John Reed and his wife, Louise Bryant, who had been among the fellow founders, with O’Neill himself, of the Provincetown Players, in 1916. Shifting gears somewhat radically, I spent the next couple of years with an elite New York City Police Department homicide squad. The resulting book was On the Track of Murder (1976) and I followed that with one about the politics of New York City’s police hierarchy, Varnished Brass (1983).

  A bit later, encouraged by Colleen Dewhurst, I wrote My Gene, a one-woman play about the widowed—and slightly mad—Carlotta Monterey O’Neill, which was produced at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in 1987. But even when O’Neill was only marginally in our lives, Arthur and I lectured about him and wrote program notes and articles related to revivals of his plays.

  • • •

  WE BOTH TURNED our full attention back to O’Neill in the late 1990s, when a trove of new material revealing the background of the O’Neill family was unearthed in Ireland. We had previously written of how O’Neill’s actor-father, James O’Neill, threw away a promising career as a Shakespearian actor (and presumed successor to Edwin Booth) in order to grow rich touring in his ever-popular vehicle, The Count of Monte Cristo. It was a decision he would come to regret, ultimately condemning himself as a failure.

  The newly revealed data from Ireland enlarged our understanding of James O’Neill and the major influence he had on his son’s plays; and this data was the impetus for our writing Life with Monte Cristo (2000).

  Next, we cowrote, with Ric Burns, his documentary O’Neill, which was aired by PBS in 2006. During our research for the documentary, we were astonished by how much new information (apart from James O’Neill’s early history) had emerged since the last time we’d updated our original biography. We felt an irresistible urge to acquire the lowdown. And, while we were at it, we thought we’d take one more look—a deeper and more nuanced look—at the haunted dramatist by whom we had for so long been possessed.

  We had, in fact, grown to believe that in our earlier writing we hadn’t delved deeply enough into the impact Ella O’Neill had on her son’s life and work—considerably greater than her husband’s, when we came to think of it. We felt we’d really be remiss if we failed to reassess the evidence of O’Neill’s unabashed, lifelong yearning for a loving, all-embracing mother, as so graphically expressed in both his life and his plays.

  • • •

  THIS TIME AROUND, Arthur and I were approaching our eighties, and we did not plan to do the kind of exhaustive research we’d done in our thirties. But we did examine much of the relevant new material that was out there. We also searched back through our original file notes, recalling that among the more than four hundred people we’d interviewed for our 1962 O’Neill, there were several who had agreed to talk to us with the proviso that certain of their comments be withheld until after Carlotta O’Neill’s death. Well, she’d outlived her husband by seventeen years, but she was long gone now.

  In By Women Possessed, we’ve tried to interweave these long-withheld items of lore with the newly revealed chunks of information. After all these years of living in O’Neill’s head, we hope we’ve managed to cast a newly insightful perspective on the O’Neill family dynamic.

  • • •

  WHEN, AS AN ADOLESCENT, Eugene O’Neill realized that his mother, Ella Quinlan O’Neill, blamed her morphine addiction on his birth and confessed that she wished him unborn, she betrayed him in a way he could never forgive or forget.

  His love-hatred of his mother was one of the many conflicts between O’Neill’s two selves. He himself was aware of the sharp contradictions in his character. But they were out of his control. He was the ultimate example of a god with feet of clay.

  He could, when he chose, display the most exquisite manners and could charm both friends and lovers—many of whom were devoted to him to the end of his life. They included his theater colleagues, the doctors who strove to alleviate his various illnesses, and the old, disreputable cohorts of his past, to whom he gave endless handouts.

  But he also had a violent and destructive temper—especially when he was on a drinking binge. At those times, he didn’t hesitate to manhandle his lovers—as both Agnes Boulton and Carlo
tta Monterey have vividly described.

  As for his drinking, in this new book we have corrected a long-held belief that O’Neill gave up drink in his late thirties, after submitting to a sort of abridged psychoanalysis. In fact, he had a number of relapses, several of them prolonged. We became convinced, also, that—in spite of O’Neill’s oft-quoted denial that he never attempted to write when drunk—he wrote much if not all of The Great God Brown while under the influence of alcohol.

  Perhaps even more of a character flaw than O’Neill’s convoluted relations with women was his unconscionable neglect of his two children with his second wife, Agnes. Once he was divorced from their mother, he rarely condescended to see his son, Shane, or his daughter, Oona. His justification was his work. He was unable to tolerate any distraction from his writing. He grudgingly paid for their support, and at the same time he regularly complained of the way Agnes was raising them. Whenever word reached him that either of his children was behaving in a manner of which he disapproved, he would fire off bitter, denunciatory letters to them.

  Shane was a shy, oversensitive, insecure boy who bounced from school to school, married young and irresponsibly, and drifted into drugs. Oona, encouraged by her mother, sought a life of debutante glamour, infuriating O’Neill by trading on his name. When, seeking the father she’d never had, she married Chaplin at eighteen, O’Neill disinherited her.

  But, whatever O’Neill’s personal failings, there is no denying that, as an artist, he stood tall. He possessed a work ethic and a professional integrity that we rarely encounter these days. An idealist and a visionary, he bravely endured his years of struggle, demanding to be accepted on his own terms as a dramatist. And—though he raged inwardly—he mostly took it in stride when a play into which he had poured his heart and soul was deemed a critical failure.

  He never wrote with an eye on the box office. He never deigned to shape a character for a particular star. (And while happy to cast one if deemed suitable, the star’s performance rarely met O’Neill’s expectations, nor did he hesitate to say so.) He always spoke truth as he saw it: in his greatest plays, it is a universal truth that promises to resound for generations to come.