By Women Possessed Read online

  The former Hazel Tharsing is proud of her mixed-European heritage. Her mother, Nellie Gotchett, is a high-spirited woman of Dutch and French-Alsatian descent. In 1853, Nellie’s parents left their home in Saint Louis, traveling by covered wagon to Yuba County, where eighteen-year-old Nellie met Tharsing. Yearning to escape from her restrictive family, she married him. But he was some twenty years her senior, and the marriage was not compatible.

  Hazel’s parents divorced when she was not quite five. An only child, she was placed with her mother’s parents so that Nellie, who had a head for business, could forge an adventurous life as an independent woman. She opened the first of several boardinghouses in San Francisco (not a “bawdy” house, as some malicious rumor had it); after renovating it, she sold it at a profit and went on to the next, enabling her to contribute generously to Hazel’s upkeep. All the while, disdainful of convention, she flitted from one man to another, several of them wealthy and influential.

  When Hazel turned eight, Nellie sent her to a married sister, Mary Shay, who, with her husband, John, was raising two sons in San Francisco. Hazel was an introverted girl who loved to read but was tormented by severe myopia. An incompetent eye surgeon evidently worsened her condition to the point that in later life she had difficulty focusing her eyes, causing severe headaches.

  At fourteen, although her parents were Protestant, Hazel enrolled in a Catholic boarding school: St. Gertrude’s Convent Academy in Rio Vista, about forty miles from Oakland. The school was supervised by German nuns who praised her skills in piano and singing.

  Reminiscing decades later, Carlotta Monterey stressed a quirky aspect of her life in the convent: her sense of the theatrical, she recalled, was roused to such a degree that the Mother Superior was obliged to scold her for spending so much time in chapel genuflecting. The music, color, and drama of church ritual that cast their spell on Hazel Tharsing lingered with her as Carlotta Monterey.

  (In fact, her convent background would later embellish O’Neill’s portrait of his mother as Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Like Mary, Carlotta had wanted to be a nun; and like Mary, she had been told by the Mother Superior to go home and think it over for a year before making a decision.)

  Young Hazel, with her burgeoning tug toward self-dramatization, was growing ever more beautiful, and her thriving mother conceived a long-range plan to find her a substantial husband. Nellie’s real estate holdings had flourished, helped by her liaison with Melvin C. Chapman, a prominent attorney and former mayor of Oakland.

  When Hazel, at seventeen, graduated from the convent school, Nellie took her to London and established her in a town house in Torrington Square among a colony of proper and rich American girls studying for careers in the arts. Hazel was provided with a singing coach and enrolled in Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s Academy of Dramatic Art (which later became the Royal Academy of Art). The last thing Nellie wanted for her daughter was a stage career; but she believed the training would teach Hazel to be a well-spoken, socially graceful young lady who, aided by her beauty, might attract an upper-crust husband.

  The strategy began to work almost at once. Hazel was noticed by the London correspondent for the San Francisco Sunday Call, who wrote that wherever mother and daughter went, people stared at the daughter. One night, as they entered the dining room of the Clarendon Hotel, the reporter, Herbert Williams, noted:

  “The object of all eyes was Hazel. There was no doubt in my mind that she was really the fairest of California or the fairest woman anywhere. I had never seen anyone so radiantly beautiful.”

  Yet Hazel knew better than to carry herself like an acclaimed beauty, for the nuns had taught her modesty; that was part of her charm. In one posed photograph, dressed in a stylish evening gown, her silky dark hair arranged in an elaborate coiffure, Hazel looks demure and pensive rather than glamorous.

  Nellie engaged a chaperone for her daughter and then returned to California. Hazel was left to pursue her self-improvement. Two years later, on receiving a recent photograph of her daughter, Nellie impulsively submitted it to the Miss California Beauty Contest of 1907. Hazel, declared by the judges—two painters and a sculptor—to be “California’s most beautiful woman,” was chosen Miss California.

  When the San Francisco Call, sponsor of the contest, cabled Hazel with the news and asked for an interview, she cabled back, “Mother thinks I am better looking than I am.” She added: “Be sure to let the sisters at Rio Vista Convent know about this. They will be pleased.”

  The Call asked her to take the first steamship to New York, at the newspaper’s expense. Her mother would be waiting at the pier to accompany her to Chicago for the Miss America Pageant. Hazel won second place, and it was only a few months later, after she’d returned to London, that Nellie’s labors paid off. Nineteen-year-old Hazel accepted a proposal of marriage from John Moffat, a twenty-eight-year-old Scotsman, whose highborn and enormously wealthy family owned several grand estates in Scotland.

  Hazel and Moffat had met at the Royal Academy, where both were enrolled in a fencing class. “Well, sometime ago I met a very charming Californian girl and fell madly in love with her,” wrote Moffat to his sister, Edith. After swearing Edith to secrecy, he confided he had proposed, “but the Mother said she was too young, & has sent her to a finishing school in Paris. . . . In 18 months she leaves & if we are then both of the same mind we will be allowed to announce our engagement.”

  Hazel, continued Moffat, was “very sweet, lovable &, I should think, easily influenced by kindness.” Young and naive as he was, Moffat added, “I don’t want anyone to know about my attachment as I don’t wish to be laughed at if it falls through.”

  It did not fall through. Hazel, doubtless urged on by her mother, permitted Moffat to introduce her to his mother at one of the Moffat estates. Mrs. Moffat asked Hazel why she wanted to marry her son, and Hazel’s disingenuous reply was “I like Jack.” Moffat’s mother, nothing if not the pragmatic British aristocrat, accepted the obvious fact that the beauteous Hazel was not in love with her son.

  With perfect sangfroid, she assured Hazel that she would almost certainly find some other man to whom she was physically attracted; and that whatever she did about that would be all right, as long as the affair did not become public. If it did, she would disown her daughter-in-law; but as long as it remained a secret, she would have no objection.

  At twenty-three, Hazel accepted these terms with equanimity. She and Moffat were married in New York in 1911 and then returned to Europe. Years later she conceded they were both inexperienced sexually, that Moffat sought medical aid for what he believed was impotence, and that the marriage was platonic. Nonetheless, they carried on.

  Despite the marital problems, Carlotta in later life boasted that she had “the best things in Europe as a young bride—the best of everything—clothes, servants, admiration.” She did not exaggerate; her mother-in-law’s wedding gift was a Rolls-Royce; Moffat proffered jewels. When not traveling the Continent they lived at one or another of the family estates—one of them so vast its upkeep required forty groundskeepers.

  Moffat’s mother swept Hazel under her wing, instructing her in the rituals of the formal dinner party, the handling of servants, and even the etiquette of fox hunting. Under her mother-in-law’s tutelage, Hazel learned to suppress her shyness. Seated at dinner parties next to prominent men, she was schooled, as she once recalled, in “how to be a conversationalist.”

  The marriage broke up after three years, when the Moffats experienced a series of financial setbacks and “the best things” began to vanish. Hazel gave back the Rolls-Royce and the jewelry, and returned to America.

  “I divorced Moffat, but he forgave me,” Carlotta quipped many years later. She and Moffat continued to correspond. He addressed her as “my dear child,” and once declared, “I love Carlotta, I’ll always love Carlotta.” No question, she was a born Circe.

  Hazel
decided to pursue a stage career even though Nellie abhorred the idea of her daughter entering the Broadway arena “in the company of whores,” as she put it. Nellie said she would shoot her if she used her real name. It was then that Hazel Tharsing became Carlotta Monterey.

  In 1914, before trying for a role on Broadway, Carlotta toured the English provinces in a trivial play, The Geisha. The following year, determined to make her reputation in New York, she was in the office of Chamberlain Brown, a major talent agent, when he took a call from the Broadway mogul Lee Shubert, who was seeking “a dark-haired girl of decidedly Continental appearance.”

  Shubert hired Carlotta at $350 a week to play opposite the debonair thirty-three-year-old star Lou Tellegen in a farce called Taking Chances. (Tellegen, born in Holland as Isidor Louis Bernard Edmund van Dommelen, had been Sarah Bernhardt’s leading man in Paris and, during that time, he’d earned a reputation as a Casanova.)

  Carlotta, who appeared in the last act of Taking Chances draped in a nearly transparent negligee, drew praise as an ingénue fatale when the play opened in early March 1915. It ran for eighty-five performances, constituting a hit for that era. In a photograph for Vogue, Carlotta, exquisite in profile, is seated on a table, coyly proffering her unclad foot to a sleekly handsome Tellegen, who is gallantly slipping on her shoe.

  Inevitably, rumors circulated of a love affair between Carlotta and Tellegen. True or not, he advised her to have a child, cautioning she would never be a good actress until she had experienced motherhood. He, however, had decided to marry the internationally renowned opera diva, Geraldine Farrar.

  Carlotta was left to find someone else to father her child, but before taking that step, she joined a road tour, playing a Hawaiian princess in a maudlin trifle called The Bird of Paradise. By the time the tour reached San Francisco, Carlotta, more than ready to take a vacation from acting, quit the show and rejoined her mother in Oakland.

  Nellie Tharsing was still living with ex-mayor Chapman, and Carlotta took the opportunity to flirt with Chapman’s twenty-year-old son, Melvin Jr., whom she’d known since childhood; he was working as a housepainter while planning to attend law school. Carlotta, by now twenty-eight and mindful of Tellegen’s advice, assessed Melvin Jr.—six feet six inches and handsome, with an athletic build—as eugenically suited to father her child.

  They were married on October 12, 1916, and Carlotta discovered on their wedding night that Melvin was a virgin. She gave him the benefit of her own experience (presumably with Tellegen) and, ten months later, on August 20, 1917, the Chapmans produced a daughter, Cynthia Jane.

  Carlotta almost immediately handed off her baby to Nellie, so that she could pursue her career unencumbered—just as Nellie, two decades earlier, had handed off Carlotta to her aunt Mary Shay. Carlotta and Chapman were soon divorced.

  Motherhood did not noticeably improve Carlotta’s acting, but her beauty continued to bring her roles, and magazines pressed her to pose for photo layouts. It was in the fall of 1918—shortly before the end of World War I—that Carlotta landed a more or less literate role in a comedy called Be Calm, Camilla, one of the 126 plays that had opened on Broadway since the beginning of 1917. (The play was significant because its producer, Arthur Hopkins, and its designer, Robert Edmond Jones, both highly respected in theater circles, were soon to be associated with the as-yet-little-known O’Neill.)

  • • •

  DURING THE NEXT four years, Carlotta went on to perform in a dozen plays, most of them short-lived; almost invariably she was singled out by the critics for her seductive presence and extravagant costumes. The marquees flashed titles like The Ruined Lady, The Sacred Bath, The Other Rose, Fashions of New York, and The Sable Coat.

  In February 1922, Arthur Hopkins cast Carlotta in something called Bavu; it was a flop, but Hopkins had taken a professional liking to her and cast her as the effete society girl in O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape when he daringly moved that experimental play from downtown to Broadway’s Plymouth Theatre on April 17, 1922. It ran for 120 performances—and Carlotta at last found herself basking in a respectable play.

  Her final Broadway role was in The Man in Evening Clothes, which opened on December 5, 1924, and closed eleven days later. She had been on the stage since 1915 and—after nine years—she was only too aware of her limitations.

  It was then that Carlotta Monterey, having at last persuaded Ralph Barton to promise fidelity, decided to marry him. One afternoon in November, only eight months after their marriage, Carlotta returned to their apartment earlier than expected and surprised Barton in bed with a woman she happened to know. Staggered by Barton’s betrayal, she walked out, weeping uncontrollably.

  She had schooled herself to be in all ways his intellectual and social soul mate. She had hung on his ironic pronouncements about art and artists. She’d indulged his passion for museums and galleries—in New York as well as in London and Paris, where he was known to everyone who mattered. She’d gone out of her way to be gracious to his eminent friends, even those she disliked. Indeed, she had turned cartwheels to surround him with an esthetically serene environment in which to work and play.

  Barton pleaded for forgiveness. He begged her to come back. But Carlotta, by then snugly established in her own Upper East Side apartment, was adamant. Four months later, in March 1926, she sued Barton for divorce. It was only after she’d left him that Barton, ever careless of the women in his life, realized he had been—in his own words—“a blithering idiot.”

  Accustomed to subservience, he had not only taken Carlotta’s devotion for granted but had chafed under it—even at times lashing out at her. He had poked fun at her narrow comprehension of modern painting and seldom acknowledged her obeisance to his own art. He seemed indifferent to the care with which she had organized his household—and he rarely expressed the rapturous gratitude she expected for the sexual pleasure she lavished on him. It was, all in all, his insensitivity that finally wrecked the marriage.

  When Carlotta received her interlocutory divorce decree, she told friends she’d asked for nothing of the court but to drop the name Barton. She was not inconsolable, for she knew there would always be men in her life. She was still one of the most photographed women of her day, even though she had quit the stage. Like most of her hedonistic circle of actors, writers, and artists, she was vain of her sexual allure. The photographer Ben Pinchot recalled a session with Carlotta when she undressed in his studio to change into a costume. “What do you think of my pussy?” she asked the nonplussed photographer. (Pinchot’s opinion of Carlotta’s genitalia is unrecorded.)

  Ilka Chase, writing of Carlotta’s other personal attributes, pointed out rather unkindly that she had “large hands and feet”—implying that Carlotta, in some respects, was physically more peasant than duchess. True, she liked to eat well, and had a problem with fluctuating weight; she sternly watched her diet, determined to maintain a lissome figure; one thing she did not have to worry about was the lusciously rounded bosom any woman would have been happy to possess.

  3

  On the brink of his elopement with Carlotta, set for February 10, 1928, a week and a half after the opening of Strange Interlude, O’Neill is still trying to justify to himself the fearsome decision he has made.

  All during the late fall and early winter of the previous year, while laboring to ready Strange Interlude (and Marco Millions) for Broadway production, he has been shuttling back and forth between Bermuda and New York by steamship (a two-day voyage each way). He is still waffling between Agnes, the devil he knows, and Carlotta, the bewitching but possibly dangerous rescuing angel.

  A successful pulp-fiction writer before her marriage to O’Neill, Agnes Boulton had enthusiastically agreed to share with him a life dedicated to writing and mutual devotion. They would allow nothing ever to disturb the sanctity of their love or their work. But Agnes’s fervor for her writing was no match for O’Neill’s total creative immersion. As h
is career prospered, he found himself fretting over the disparity between their ideas of a workable partnership.

  He needed seclusion and a quiet, orderly environment in which to work, and he demanded a wife’s single-minded attention during his free time. They had vowed not to have children, but within five years there were two—and once the children were there, Agnes fretted at her husband’s evident inability to interact with them. O’Neill shrank from casual socializing, but Agnes enjoyed parties and gossip. She longed for a more relaxed marital give-and-take. He resented her for wanting it.

  For the nearly ten years of their marriage, O’Neill and Agnes have alternately adored and goaded each other.

  Now, having (however guiltily) succumbed to Carlotta, O’Neill has at last told Agnes he is leaving her.

  Because O’Neill has, for the past few months, isolated himself from most of the friends he shares with Agnes, he seeks the companionship of two new friends when he feels a compulsion to talk about Carlotta and his romantic quandary. They are Robert Rockmore, a lawyer with theater clients, and Norman Winston, a prosperous builder who had helped finance the operation of the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village, where O’Neill’s earliest plays were produced.

  Rockmore, who frequently visits O’Neill in his suite at the Wentworth Hotel, particularly recalls an afternoon in November 1927, when O’Neill answers his knock and, says Rockwell, seems “lost in a daze.”

  “What breasts! What breasts!” O’Neill rhapsodizes, by way of greeting, looking past Rockmore into the hall. According to Rockmore’s amused recollection, it took several moments before O’Neill returned to reality. Rockmore didn’t press him, but he was certain he had recognized a veiled Carlotta as she passed him in the hotel lobby on her way out.