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This is to certify that the

dissertation entitled

CARLOTTA MONTEREY:
A MODERN OPPORTUNIST

presented by

AI LEEN O'CONNOR CRONIN

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6’01 cJCIRC/DateDuopGS—pJS

CARLOTTA MONTEREY:
A MODERN OPPORTUNIST

By
AILEEN O’CONNOR CRONIN

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
DEPARTMENT AMERICAN STUDIES

2002

ABSTRACT

CARLOTTA MONTEREY:
A MODERN OPPORTUNIST

By
AILEEN O'CONNOR CRONIN

Carlotta Monterey was born in 1888 and died in 1970. Her life illuminates
important social and intellectual currents in late nineteenth and early twentieth
century America. One can trace the emergence of modern America from the
Victorian era through this prism. She was involved in the theater and other
creative pursuits, which gives a further glimpse into the arts and social circles of
the major creative personalities of the day. Married four times her last two
husbands were artistic geniuses. She collaborated with both Ralph Barton,
noted New Yorker caricaturist and Eugene O'Neill, prize winning American
playwright in their personal and professional lives. Carlotta’s diaries give first
hand accounts of the experiences of a strong willed woman who attempted to
live authentically in a time quite different than the present for that of a woman.
Carlotta had more intelligence, influence and significance than heretofore
realized, and in her person one can better understand the social and intellectual

history of America.

Dedicated To My Beloved Husband George
And My Three Sons

George, Kean and Patrick

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply indebted to Professor Robert A. Martin of Michigan State
University for his contributions to this project. It was in a seminar in American
Drama that l was first introduced to Carlotta Monterey and have been intrigued
ever since. He gave unstinting encouragement and introduced me to many
noted O'Neillians who were helpful in this work.

Professor Jackson Bryer is one of the major helpful persons in the writing of
this manuscript. He guided me to various centers for O'Neill studies and
introduced me to personalities who actually knew Carlotta. He also hosted my
entire family at his beautiful Cape Cod home one summer during a study trip.

Professor Joyce Ramsay was a true friend and again without her constant
encouragement and help I would have not gotten through the many many doors
a work like this needs. She never gave up and I am deeply appreciative.

Professor Joyce Ladenson was most gracious and most helpful in the last
stages of the endeavor. Once again without her assistance this would not have
reached completion.

I am grateful to my female friends who never gave up on me and
encouraged me over the years to continue the project, especially to Julie Frias
who would say: I always knew you could do it.

Special thanks and love to my mother, Aileen O'Connor who led by
example.

For years of unquestioned support and dedication, cheerful sacrifice and

iv

invaluable help, I am deeply grateful to my husband, George Bader Cronin and

our three sons, George, Kean and Patrick.

PREFACE

My curiosity about Carlotta Monterey began ten years ago when I first
encountered the intriguing and flamboyant Carlotta in an American Drama
Seminar at Michigan State University. I was immediately impressed by her
accomplishments, her relationships, and by the sheer force of her personality. I
decided then that she would make an excellent research subject. My
investigation of Carlotta Monterey began modestly as a term paper; ultimately, it
developed into a decadeulong project, culminating in a biographical dissertation
for the American Studies program at Michigan State. The initial study focused
on Carlotta's life as the controlling wife and sawy widow of the playwright,
Eugene O'Neill. In addition to being his collaborator, she altered the canon of
American Drama by rearranging the chronology of O'Neill's play A Long Day's
Journey into Night. After his death, Carlotta had the play produced twenty-five
years before his explicit instructions. Her decision in defiance of her late
husband's wishes evoked considerable criticism, and Carlotta seemed to feel a
need to justify her actions by claiming that O'Neill had decided to delay
publishing in deference to a request from his eldest son. While the claim is
probably spurious, Carlotta's actions had a decisive effect. The production of
J9u_rr_1§y in 1956 served to bolster O'Neill's waning popularity, awarding the
playwright a posthumous Broadway sensation and his fourth Pulitzer Prize
(Sheaffer 634-635).

As I delved farther into Carlotta's life, it became clear that she had

vi

distinguished herself as far more than O'Neill's surviving spouse. Carlotta was
not content to be an enabler of male genius; she fought for personal autonomy
as she struggled to arbitrate the terms of partnership. Even within the context of
her relationships, she emerges as an independent creative force who played an
active role in determining her legacy. Carlotta was ambitious, shrewd, sexually
liberated and disciplined; her multidimensional character poses a commanding
presence as seen in her childhood, chosen career, multiple marriages, and
finally as O'Neill's assertive executrix.

Carlotta was born in 1888 and her life unfolded as major political and social
forces reshaped the cultural landscape of the United States and Europe. Her
father immigrated to California as the inventions of the Industrial Age
transformed the American economy, marking a "turbulent transition from
conditions of an agrarian society to those of modern urban life" (Hofstadter 70).
The family moved to San Francisco, a city that eagerly grasped the spirit of
freedom and creativity that would signify the modern age. San Francisco was
the birthplace of Isadora Duncan, who envisioned “the dancer of the future: the
free spirit, who will inhabit the body of the new women" (Duncan 63). Carlotta
came of age as many young girls began to see themselves as "new women."
Many modernist women sought liberation in the intellect. One of the most
notable and influential was Gertrude Stein, who cultivated the genius of a legion
of men (among them Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway, Cecil Beaton, Virgil
Thompson, and Richard Wright) along with her own unique literary brilliance. " 'A
rose is a rose is a rose,‘ she wrote, with the "philosophic kick of a nursery

vii

Wittgenstein" (Pierpont 34). As Claudia Roth Pierpont observes, "She was host,
sponsor, critic, instigator, frequently foe, and sometimes friend again of some of
the century's finest provocateurs, and it was often hard to tell whether her life
was a party or a revolution" (35).

If Stein's life was a revolution, it was in her openly lesbian lifestyle as well
as her artistic astuteness. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were formally
"married" in the summer of 1910 (Pierpont 41). They were scarcely alone as
"the love that dare not speak its name, " in the late 19th century when Oscar
Wilde was imprisoned for sodomy (although female homosexuality was never
illegal under British law) became more vociferous in the early twentieth century.
Like Stein and Toklas, Elisabeth "Bessy" Marbury and "Ella "Elsie" de Wolfe
lived together for many years, although they were far more discreet about the
precise nature of their relationship. Eugene O'Neill would become a client of
Marbury's American Play Company. As described by Louis Sheaffer in QM
Son and lerkht:

The company was headed by Elizabeth Marbury, among the first
career women, who had launched herself in the 1890s as the
American representative of various British and Continental
playwrights. A person of culture and fastidious tastes, though built
on rude beer-barrel proportions, Miss Marbury was at home in
society and artistic circles on both sides of the Atlantic, maintaining
offices in London and Paris as well as in New York. She was to
play a fateful role in O'Neill's life in the mid-1920s by reintroducing

viii

him to an actress, Carlotta Monterey, who had appeared in one of
his Broadway productions (448).

The prosperous 1920s, the Jazz Age, transformed the character of the
United States and Europe; in fact, Europeans of all social classes looked to the
New World as the symbol of the modern age. Charles Lindbergh crossed the
Atlantic against what seemed like improbable odds and immediately became a
"symbol of the 'high courage and dash of young America,’ as a representative of
America's unrestrained energy" (Eksteins 268). Jazz music embodied that
energy and had the remarkable power to transcend lines of race and social
class. Traditional notions of gender and sexuality were continually being
shattered as "repression" became a stigmatized vestige of the old social order.
Historian Modris Eksteins astutely observes that:

The twenties, as a result, witnessed a hedonism and narcissism of
remarkable proportions. Freudian psychology was eagerly grasped
as a justification for this denial of repression, and it became
thoroughly unfashionable to be "repressed." The senses and
instincts were indulged, and self-interest became, more than ever
before, the motivation for behavior (256).

The driving force in the dynamics of hedonism was the "disequilibrium" that
emerged in a world that had survived the Great War. "Old authority and
traditional values no longer had credibility. Yet no new values had emerged in
their stead" (Eksteins 256). While those who had profited from the old order may
have lamented the loss of their status and security, groups that had been

ix

disenfranchised by virtue of race, class, gender or even artistic sensibility,
eagerly sought to shape new values that would replace the old.

F reud's position as the arbiter of liberation was actually
paradoxical. Women and homosexual men were amongst the most fervent
enthusiasts of the new order, yet Freud saw only the most traditional role for
women; women who sought expression beyond the circumscribed role of wife
and mother were, according to Freudian theory, "neurotic," as were men who
found erotic attraction in other men. Perhaps few at the time actually delved into
Freud's newly translated works. In the hectic and hedonistic postwar prosperity,
"denial of repression" held far greater attraction than the murky realm of what
Freud considered neurotic impulses. Freudian theory became the "new fashion,"
but the artists and intellectuals who embraced it often repudiated its influence.
The Surrealists were particularly receptive—to the new theory, yet were adamant
in rejecting that aspect of Freudianism that demanded analysis and therapy.
Rene Magritte summed up the philosophy: "Under all circumstances we will
refuse to explain precisely what will not be understood" (Belton 26).

Robert Belton traces the symbolism used by the male Surrealists to the
publication of Freud's Totem and Tm published in 1914 "when most of
Western civilization was preoccupied with the war to end all wars" (25). In this
treatise, Freud "posited a primordial, universally occurring series of events,"
which began with a powerful male leader with exclusive possession of the
women of his tribe, who is eventually murdered by his sons. Consumed by
collective guilt, the sons endowed a totem with the qualities of the murdered

X

father. The totem was usually an animal, consumed and eaten at year's end so
the tribesmen might assume the lost father's power, absolve their guilt, and
commemorate their own act of liberation all at once. At all other times of the
year, disturbing the totem was taboo. Freud insisted that, "the beginnings of
religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus complex" (Belton 25).
So too did all neurosis.

Contemporary critics agree with Belton that, "Of course, the primordial
totemic banquet was not at all universal" (25). Marianne Krull, for example,
notes that, "It is striking how often Freud in his theoretical writings keeps
generalizing his own, quite specific experiences, implying that they are valid for
all human beings" (112). Many of F reud's contemporaries also dismissed the
idea as "implausible" that his theories were universal. However, in Belton's
words, Freudian theory became the "new fashion."

Eugene O'Neill denied the influence of Freud on his work. In mg
ALIS; Sheaffer reported that in response to Freudian interpretations of flange
Interlude, O'Neill stated, "I feel that, although [Strange Interlude] is undoubtedly
full of psychoanalytic ideas . . . any artist who was a good psychologist could
have written 'S.l.' without ever having heard of Freud, Jung, Adler & Co." (244) .
Several years later, he changed the story slightly, asserting that, "I most certainly
did not get my idea for Nina's compulsion from a dream mentioned by Freud in A
General Introduction to Psychggnalysis," while conceding that Jung's Psychology
of the Uncons_cio_u_s_ may have had some influence (244-245). At the same time,
he declared:

xi

But the "unconscious" influence stuff strikes me as always
extremely suspicious! It is so darned easy to prove! I would say
that what has influenced my plays the most is my knowledge of the
drama of all timeuparticularly Greek tragedynand not any books on
psychology (245).

In O'Neill's personal life, Carlotta Monterey had a substantial influence.
Her own role in the cultural revolution of the first half of the twentieth century
was, like Freud's influence, paradoxical. Freud himself might have approved of
the fact that, after meeting the playwright, "Monterey had agreed to give up her
career to become the next Mrs. Eugene O'Neill" (Strum 279). However, Carlotta
relinquished her career but never her independence. In essence, her life was
symbolic of the conflict that was inevitable in a world where "Old authority and
traditional values no longer had credibility. Yet no new values had emerged in
their stead" (Eksteins 256).

The most extensive exploration of Carlotta's life appears in Sheaffer's
O'Neill: Son and Artist. Their home life and entertainment of guests, and
Carlotta's role in O'Neill's career, is portrayed in narratives in Conversations with
Eugene O'Neill. notably those of Ward Morehouse and Croswell Bowen. Actress
Ilka Chase, who had appeared in a play with Carlotta and who had observed her
with O'Neill, thought, "Carlotta wanted to possess her men and be everything to
them . . . She had a sense of mission and wanted to help him achieve himself"
(Lewis 397). Charlie Chaplin, who married O'Neill's daughter Oona, thought
Carlotta wanted "to be all sufficient to a man of genius, while she herself shone

xii

in his reflected glory" (297). In relating these observations, Alfred Allan Lewis
concluded that, "Superficially worldly, Carlotta was the most old-fashioned of
women" (397). In contrast to O'Neill's first wife Agnes, who "spent much of her
married life fighting O'Neill's devouring presence to try to preserve an identity of
her own," Lewis believed that Carlotta "wanted to find her identity in a sexual
partner' (397).

A comprehensive exploration of Carlotta Monterey suggests that, similar to
the critics who conveniently found a Freudian basis for O'Neill's plays or the
paintings of the Surrealists, characterizing Carlotta as "the most old-fashioned of
women" because of her dedication to O'Neill's career fails to capture the
multitude of dynamic forces that shape a human character, whether in literature,
in art, or in life. Carlotta was simultaneously a participant and observer in the
cultural drama that enfolded in the twentieth century. Dr. Donald Gallup, curator
of the Collection of American Literature at Yale for thirty-three years, and
Carlotta's confidante, was in contact with her until her death in 1970. A gracious
host who provided encouragement for my project, he believes there is a need for
a more extensive look at Carlotta Monterey, both as individual and as a

collaborator. Arthur and Barbara Gelb, co-authors of O'Neill, agree that Carlotta

 

merits a work of her own. Indeed, Barbara Gelb authored My Gene, a one act,
one-woman play which starred Colleen Dewhurst as Carlotta.

To date, Louis Sheaffer provides the most comprehensive and most
reverent treatment of Carlotta. Much of Carlotta's early life is chronicled in
Sheaffer's papers, which he bequeathed to Connecticut College upon his death

xiii

in 1993. The collection is a treasure of photographs, letters, newspaper
clippings, and notes written by Sheaffer. The Billy Rose Theater Collection at
Lincoln Center offered a wealth of information about Carlotta on Broadway, in
scrapbooks filled with memorabilia of her acting career. For the years Carlotta
spent with cartoonist Ralph Barton, my chief source was Bruce Kellner‘s M
La_st[_)_endv Relph anon: American Artist 1891-1931. The Daybooks of Carl
Van Vechten, 1923-1930, in the Manuscript Division of the New York Public
Library, also afforded intimate glimpses into Carlotta's life with Barton and as an
actress on Broadway. My research also encompassed the letters and
cablegrams included in O'Neill papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library at Yale University, to whom Carlotta willed her papers.
Carlotta's diaries, stored at the Beinecke were particularly helpful in
reconstructing the O'Neill years.

The papers of Saxe Commins, O'Neill's editor at Liveright and
subsequently at Random House, are housed at Princeton University, and sealed
by his widow who kindly allowed me access to the materials. Other than
Professor Jackson Bryer of Department of English at the University of Maryland,
and noted O'Neill scholar, l was the only person privy to their contents previous
to her death. I was also fortunate to hear first hand accounts about Carlotta from
Dorothy Commins, Saxe's widow, a candid and articulate women in her mid-
nineties. Commins was not a fan of Carlotta; she blamed the estrangement of
Saxe and O'Neill on Carlotta's interference. According to Commins, Carlotta
"bewitched" O'Neill. More favorable toward Carlotta was José Quintero, director

xiv

of many of O'Neill's plays. Quintero was fond of Carlotta, and related stories that
offered further insight into her character.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once stated, "biography is the falsest of the arts"
(Milford xi). It is indeed difficult to capture the essence of another, especially one
who lived in a radically different time and place. Nancy Milford spoke of her own

experience in approaching Zelda, the biography of Fitzgerald's wife: "I had

 

somewhat innocently-4f a passionate curiosity about another's life is ever
innocent-entered into something I neither could nor would put down for six
years, and in that quest the direction of my life was changed" (xiii). When
Carlotta entered my imagination, she had a similar impact. Carlotta was a

compelling figure whose biography becomes her.

WORKS CITED

Belton, Robert J. The Beribboned Bomb: The Image of Woman in Surrealist Art.
Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1995.

Duncan, Isadora. The Art of the Dance, ed. Sheldon Cheney. New York:
Theatre Arts books, 192911969.

Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great War ang the Birth of the Modern
Age. New York: Doubleday, 1989.

Estrin, Mark W., ed. Conyersations with Eugene O'Neill. Jackson: University of
Mississippi Press, 1990.

 

 

Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform: From Bman to F .D.R. New York:
Vintage Books, 1955.

Krull, Marianne. Freud end his Father, trans. A. J. Pomerans. New York:
W.W. Norton, 1979.

 

Lewis, Alfred Allan. Ladies and Not-So-Gentle Women. New York: Viking,
2000.

Milford, Nancy. Zelda. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.

Pierpont, Claudia Roth. Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World. New
York: Vintage Books, 2000.

Sheaffer, Louis. O'Neill: Son end Plevwright. Boston: Little, Brown and Co.,
1968.

Sheaffer, Louis. O'Neill: Son end A_r_ttet. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973.

Strum, Rebecca W. Elisabeth Marbug, 1856-1933: Her life and Work. New
York University, Unpublished doctoral dissertation, 1989.

xvi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1 ...... - .............................................. 1
BEGINNINGS 1668 -'- 1907

CHAPTER 2 ................................................... 14
TRANSITIONS 1907 - 1920

CHAPTER 3 .................................................. 32
NEW YORK 1920.- 1925

CHAPTER 4 ................................................... 44
INTERIM 1925 - 1931

CHAPTER 5 ................................................... 77

RELOCATIONS 1931-1936

CHAPTER 6 .................................................. 102
TAO HOUSE 1936 - 1944
CHAPTER 7 ................................................. 113

MARBLEHEAD NECK 1944 - 1953

CHAPTER 8 .................................................. 121
THE LEGACY 1953 - 1970

EPILOGUE ................................................... 129

xvii

Chapter One
Beginnings

1868 - 1907

Carlotta Monterey (Hazel Neilson Tharsing) was born in San Francisco on
December 28, 1888. San Francisco at the time was a cultural Mecca, attracting
an impressive array of talent from abroad. Sarah Bernhardt performed with the
Comedie Francais, the London Lyceum Company of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving
performed classic and modern plays, and Italian and German opera companies
brought the great traditions of Europe to the West Coast of the New World
(Serroff 21). Amongst the young San Franciscans introduced to the culture of
Europe was Isadora Duncan, born ten years before Carlotta. Duncan' envisioned
a new art form and a new woman who would embody the spirit of American
independence. Upon reading the "prophetic love for America" expressed by
Walt Whitman in the lines, "I hear America singing," Duncan had "the Vision of
America dancing":

This music would have a rhythm as great as the undulation, the
swing or curves of the Rocky Mountains. It would have nothing to
do with the sensual tilting of the Jazz rhythm: it would be the
vibration of the American soul striving upward through labour to the
Harmonious life. No more would this dance that I visioned have
any vestige of the Fox Trot or the Charleston-rather it would be the
living leap of the child springing toward the heights, toward its

1

future accomplishment, toward a new great vision of life that would
express America (Duncan 47).

The revolutionary dancer who exhorted women (and men) to free
themselves of physical, emotional, and intellectual restraints was only
shortsighted in failing to realize the power of the "sensual tilting of the Jazz
rhythm." Ultimately, both jazz and modern dance would emerge as distinctive
American art forms. Also uniquely American was the drama of Eugene O'Neill.
According to John Patrick Diggins, "Eugene O'Neill had a unique perspective on
American history," in which "modern economics evolved from an evangelical zeal
to save as well as sell; hence religion could scarcely subdue the amoral behavior
of the market or even ofier deep conviction rather than spiritual comfort; in his
play Days without End, religion is a refuge of humanity's 'spiritual cowardice' "
(Diggins 70). The sentiment is redolent of Karl Marx's declaration that "religion is
the opiate of masses;" indeed, socialism was extremely popular with the
intelligentsia in the first decades of the twentieth century. O'Neill was an
anarchist, rejecting even the idealism of socialism as an antidote to what he saw
as pervasive greed and materialism. As viewed by Diggins:

Echoing Thoreau's sardonic strictures, O'Neill saw the gold rush of
1849 as the moment in history in which America revealed its desire
to grasp and claim and its eager willingness to shake dirt as a
gambler shakes dice. As did Shakespeare, O'Neill looked to the
family to tell the story of a country's history, and he was as
passionately caught up in the fate of America as Shakespeare was

2

in the destiny of England and equally troubled by the themes of
ambition, power, and success (71).

The era into which Carlotta Monterey was born, nearly three decades
before she would meet the nihilistic master playwright, seemed to embody all
that O'Neill believed was wrong with America. Mark Twain had dubbed the last
years of the nineteenth century, "T he Gilded Age" the title of his own novel
published in 1873. In Twain's astute and cynical view, the acquisition of wealth
had become the American dream of the Industrial Age to the detriment of
intellectual and moral pursuits. Twain may have viewed himself as a victim of
the Industrial Age. Despite his overwhelming popularity, "he was regarded in
many quarters as an imprudent if gifted writer for boys" (Douglas 160). To Ann
Douglas, the disregard for the intellectual capabilities of Mark Twain, along with
contemporaries like Herman Melville and Walt Whitman (who had inspired
Isadora), reflected a lack of awareness by Americans of their own cultural
heritage: "America was apparently still too involved in its explosive gestation
process to do its own cultural thinking or recognize those in their midst who had
already done so" (Douglas 160). Ironically, one admirer of Twain's was Sigmund
Freud, who included Mark Twain as the lone American on a list of his ten favorite
authors.

Industrial Age America was the milieu into which the Tharsing family
emigrated from Denmark. In 1868, Hazel's father, Christian Neilson Taasinge,
joined the millions of Europeans who saw the newly developing country as a land

of unprecedented opportunity. Boatloads of new arrivals were quarantined at

3

Staten Island until they were finally allowed to pass through customs. The
registration process was complicated by the language barriers between the
immigrants and the customs officials, and in their zeal to simplify their task (and
get the immigrants through customs as fast as possible), the customs officers
often Americanized the spellings of names. Thus, the Dutch Taasinge became
Tharsing, although it would hardly matter to Christian's adventurous daughter
who saw nothing glamorous about being Hazel Neilson Tharsing. As a fledgling
actress, Hazel sought a more alluring identity, Carlotta was chosen because it
was "suitable to her Latin appearance," and Monterey "came from the town in
California" (Sheaffer 222). O'Neill saw the gold rush of 1849 as a pivotal
moment in American history, and his future wife took her name from the land
where it took place.

Christian Tharsing settled in Alameda County, California, where he became
a landscape gardener and fruit farmer (Sheaffer 218). The technological boom
that took place in the United States both before and after the Civil War included
agricultural inventions that assisted Tharsing, and others like him who saw crop
cultivation as an investment, to explore entrepreneurial as well as agrarian
ventures. During the 1870s, Tharsing bought 160 acres of land in Stanislaus
County and planted an orchard that he successfully farmed for eight years. As
railroads became a mainstay of American life, he shipped boxcars of green fruit
to eastern markets. He practiced new fertilization and irrigation methods,
experimented with hybridization with Luther Burbank, and invented the process
of bleaching dried apricots, peaches, and pears. The burly Tharsing had once

4

traveled the world as a Danish seaman; now he was a gentleman farmer who
embodied the American entrepreneurial spirit.

Massive improvements in transportation and communications during the
last half of the nineteenth century were the forces driving the new American
commerce. In Culture as History: The Trerlsformetion of A_mericen Societv in the
Twentieth Centurv. Warren Susman declared that the communications revolution
played a key "role in creating a new social order" (xxi). The emerging middle
class was "of special significance because the culture of abundance was
originally the culture of this new class":

Any study of the culture of abundance begins with the obvious
cultural consequences of the new communications. It is not simply
that these inventions made abundance available to many and
made possible increasingly effective distribution. Consciousness
itself was altered; the very perception of time and space was
radically changed (xx).
Railroads became the basis of the new industrial economy. Tharsing took full
advantage of the rails, with their "effective distribution," and his business became
more diversified. It was all part of an agrarian revolution characterized by the
"dominant tendency to urge the farmer to think of himself as a businessman and
to emulate the businessman in his methods of management and marketing"
(Hofstadter 126). Historically and geographically, Tharsing was perfectly placed;
taking full advantage of the available new technologies, he produced and
marketed his goods with considerable acumen and ingenuity.

5

The prosperous Tharsing was a 40-year-old childless widower when he met
18-year-old Nellie Gotchett. Nellie was of Dutch and French extraction and the
second youngest of eight children. Nellie's strong-willed mother was in a
perennial search for upward mobility; she encouraged her daughter to marry
Tharsing for security. It was not a happy union. As described by Sheaffer,
"security was all she found, for little if any affection developed on either side"
(218). Unfortunately, "Nellie was, however, as fertile as the California earth, and
Chris had to do little more than look at her before she became pregnant"
(Sheaffer 218). Nellie's remedy for this situation was to induce a series of
miscarriages through horseback riding. Her riding attire, which consisted of
men's jeans, had already made her the neighborhood scandal, and Nellie was
determined to escape the domesticity in which she felt trapped. Only one
pregnancy eluded her efforts. Hazel Neilson Tharsing was born shortly after
Christmas 1888.

Donald Gallup, long time friend, and author of Pigeons on the Granite:
Memories of a Yale Librarian, agreed that the Tharsing marriage was not a
happy one. When Hazel "was about five or six, her parents decided upon a
divorce" (Gallup 296). Following the divorce, Nellie left for San F rancisco, and
asked her sister, Mrs. John Shay of Oakland, to care for Hazel. Shay agreed
and Hazel lived with her until she was thirteen. Nellie would come to visit
sporadically, but was not an early presence in her daughter's life. According to
Sheaffer's description of Nellie, "Although unexceptional-Iooking, she made the
most of herself by dressing with smart simplicity and attracted men with her

6

vitality, her zest for living" (219-220). Once transformed into Carlotta, her more
attractive daughter would follow a similar path.

Early photographs of Hazel, as seen in the Sheaffer collection at
Connecticut College, show a lovely little girl with black hair and dark eyes that
would become her trademark. VVlth a Clara Bow-like mouth, slightly pouty, she
learned to pose for the camera at an early age. Hazel had serious problems with
her eyesight. At five years old, she had her first major eye operation. She
refused to wear glasses publicly. To compensate for poor vision, she would hold
"her head back, and her chin up, a position that gave her a rather arrogant air
and that possibly, as a result of the impression she made on people figured to
some extent in the formation of her personality" (Sheaffer 220). Hazel's poor
vision also provided a vehicle for propensity for dramatization. Between 1902
and 1905, Hazel attended Saint Gertrude's, a Catholic boarding school in Rio
Vista, California. According to Gallup she was an exceptionally bright student,
disciplined and aloof and at the top of her class. She was also a budding actress
both onstage and off. Hazel liked to unnerve her classmates by describing in
graphic detail an eye operation she had undergone. "The doctor according to
her account, removed an eyeball, placed it on he cheek before doing some
scraping and cutting in the socket, and then returned the eye to its place"
(Sheaffer 220). Whether the delicate surgery took place as described is highly
questionable. A schoolmate recalled that, "Hazel always made a mystery of
things" (Sheaffer 220).

At seventeen, Hazel sailed abroad at her father's bidding and spent the next

7

five years studying in Europe. This began her lifelong love affair with the
continent. According to both Sheaffer and Gallup, she immersed herself in the
culture. She took conversational French and ballet classes in Paris and singing
and acting courses in London, including studies at Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's
Academy of Dramatic Arts, which was later to become the Royal Academy.
What seems to have been an idyllic period in Hazel's life was abruptly
interrupted 1907 by an unsolicited intrusion from her mother.

During Hazel's early childhood and adolescence Nellie had been removed
both emotionally and geographically. When Nellie moved to San Francisco after
receiving a settlement from Tharsing in the divorce proceedings, she was able to
invest in her future. In the beginning she purchased dilapidated residences,
fixed them up, and sold them at a profit. She also rented commercial properties,
doing quite well in realizing equity and cash flow. All the while Nellie ran a
successful boarding house in which she catered to her customers as a
domestic. In her multiple roles as domestic, decorator, and developer, Nellie's
existence paralleled her former husband's as farmer and entrepreneur. Both had
careers that were rooted in traditional class and social roles, yet the rapidly
changing environment of the late nineteenth century enabled them to move
beyond a circumscribed social sphere. In running a boarding house, Nellie
adhered to socially acceptable class and gender roles. She profited from the
"details of home and work and community, of preparing food, keeping warm,
passing time after work and keeping busy" (T rachtenberg 161). She prospered
in a time that "high culture—the culture of the intellectual, the artist, the writer, the

8

thinker—made little direct impression on popular life" (161). In her work as cook,
housekeeper and landlady, ministering to the needs of her boarders and suitors,
Nellie appeared to conform to Robert H. Wrebe's description of the "traditional
image of women as tender mothers, angels of mercy" (Wlebe 122). At the same
time, Nellie's succession of lovers, foisting her daughter on relatives while she
lived an independent lifestyle, and her acumen in the real estate market were not
among the traditional feminine virtues.

In her analysis of the separate spheres allotted men and women in the
United States and the criticism this duality evoked among feminists and their
supporters in the nineteenth century, Linda K. Kerber attributed the gradual entry
of women into the public sphere to a rather unlikely source for a feminist scholar:
capitalism. In addition to creating a world in which the old order was rapidly
disintegrating and very little seemed to be stable:

The capitalist revolution also had deeply unsettling implications for
women. As patriarchy eroded, social reality involved unattached
individuals, freely negotiating with each other in an expansive
market. The patriarchal variant of separate spheres was not
congruent with capitalist social relations; capitalism required that
men and women's economic relations be renegotiated.

Capitalism had the potential to enhance the position of women by
loosening patriarchal control of property and removing factors that
shielded property from the economic pressures of the marketplace

(Kerber 185).

By the mid-nineteenth century, married women's property acts gave married
women the right to hold and control their own earnings and property. However,
as Kerber observes, "The statutes created a vast new group of property—holding
but unenfranchised citizens; married women's property acts unintentionally but
inexorably created an internally contradictory situation that was ultimately
resolved by the vote" (185-186). As a single and formally untrained woman,
Nellie was severely limited in the wages she could earn as part of the labor force.
As a capitalist without a husband's attempts to keep her at home she thrived.
Sheaffer noted that "Nellie also profited from her love affairs" (218). She
enjoyed a series of lovers and, "Her lovers—only in succession, never
concurrently, for Nellie was too practical to be promiscuous—were usually men of
some means; one of her longest affairs was with the leading undertaker of
Sacramento" (Sheaffer 220).

Nellie's approach to her daughter might be construed as "capitalist" as well:
She came to see her daughter as a commodity. Unbeknownst to Hazel, Nellie
submitted a picture of her only child to the sponsors of the Miss California beauty
contest in 1907. Nellie obviously chose the right photograph; Hazel was chosen
to represent the Golden State in the Miss America contest. Apprised of the
upcoming pageant, Hazel briefly returned home to compete in the national finals.
She was named first runner-up.

When Hazel was first notified that she had been named Miss California, she
sent the San Francisco C_afl a cablegram from London on May 4, 1907:

Many thanks for the honor conferred on me. I think you could

10

easily have found more beautiful girls right at home. Of course, I
feel tremendously flattered. Thank the Judges for me. I was
surprised when I got my mother's cablegram about my winning.
Mother thinks I am better looking than I am. I will send the
photographs you ask for. Be sure to let the Sisters at Rio Vista
Convent know about this. They will be pleased.

For a brief moment, Hazel thought of becoming a nun. Interestingly, she
shared this short-lived aspiration with O'Neill's mother, who had also attended
convent school. Hazel confessed that:

l was attracted by the color of it-the music, the rituals, the nuns'
dress-it was theater to me. But the mother superior was wise.
She told me, when l was about to graduate, to spend a year at
home, and if I still felt the same, to come back to them" (Sheaffer
221).

Instead, Hazel found theatre in the pageantry of a beauty contest.
Immediately following the Miss America contest, Hazel returned to Europe
accompanied by her mother. She would find even more theatre in Europe. On
May 29, 1913, a momentous event occurred on a Paris stage that according to
many culture critics marked the birth of the modern age. It was the opening night

performance of Le Sacre du Printemee. Many luminaries tried to describe the

 

event, from composer Igor Stravinsky and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, to Carl
Van Vechten and Gertrude Stein. As astutely noted by historian Modris
Eksteins, "Their accounts conflict on significant details. But one thing they all

11

agree on: the event provoked a seismic response" (10).

12

WORKS CITED

Diggins, John Patrick, "The Secret of the Soul: Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman
Com_meth." Raritan (Summer 1999): 63-76.

Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honeety: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920's. New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995.

 

Duncan, Isadora. The A_rt of the Dence. ed. Sheldon Cheney. New York: Theatre
Arts Books, 1929/1969.

Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Greet War end the 3th of the Modern
Age. New York: Doubleday, 1989.

Gallup, Donald. Egeone on the Grenite. New Haven: Yale University Press.
1988.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F .D.R. New York:
Vintage Books, 1955.

Kerber, Linda K. "Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The
Rhetoric of Women's History," Historv of Women in the United States v.4
Domestic Ideology and Domestic Work Part I. ed. Nancy F. Cott: 173-203.
Munich: K.G. Saur, 1992.

 

Seroff, Victor. The Real Isadora. New York: Dial Press, 1971.
Sheaffer, Louis. O'Neill: Son fild A_rtiet. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973.

Susman, Warren. Culture As History: The Tra_n_sformetion of A_mericen Society in
the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.

Trachtenberg, Alan. The Ineotporation of America: Culture and Society in the
Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.

Wlebe, Robert H. The Seerch For Order. 1877-1920. New York: Hill and Wang,
1967.

13

Chapter Two
Transitions

1907-1920

Upon her return to the continent Hazel added fencing to her lessons in
singing, acting, and elocution. While abroad, she met her first husband, John
Moffat: "John Moffat was then in Parliament, and someone had told him that he
too should take up fencing and speech lessons" (Gallup 296). A native of
Glasgow, Scotland, Moffat was fifteen years older than Hazel. He was a lawyer
with interests in the Gold Coast Amalgamated Mining Company of South Africa,
one of the richest companies in the world (although before meeting Hazel, Moffat
had lost a fortune by speculating in mining stocks). As a descendent of the
Coates thread family, "Moffat's mother was a member of the two millionaire
families" (Gallup 297). Moffat hoped to recoup his losses with the help of his
family's prodigious funds (Sheaffer 221).

John invited Hazel to Scotland where the Moffats had "a large estate, with
forty gardeners" (Gallup 296). Her experiences with the Moffat family included
such traditionally aristocratic activities as fox hunting, polo, golf, tennis, and
lavish parties. Hazel saw her participation as an opportunity to hone her social
graces and heighten her aesthetic sense. In this milieu, she "met extraordinary
people then . . . and would be seated next to famous men and became an expert
conversationalist" (Gallup 296). At Moffat's prodding, Hazel enrolled in Mme.
Yeatman's Finishing School on Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris. Mme. Yeatman's

14

was attended by an international array of affluent and influential young women
on the international scene, offering Hazel even more opportunity to learn
cosmopolitan manners and charm.

Hazel attended Mme. Yeatman's for only a term and a half. She and John
Moffat returned to New York, where they married on March 31, 1911. After the
marriage they returned once again to Europe, spending the next year traveling
abroad. When asked why she wanted to marry, Hazel's response was, "I like
Jack" (Gallup 298). She also admitted to liking his position and money.
However, Moffat's income was far more variable than Hazel had expected from a
Coates thread scion, and Hazel was not willing to withstand financial adversity.
Shortly before their separation, the couple returned to Oakland, California,
"where they finally became dependent on Nellie Tharsing after Moffat was cut
off, by World War I, from his funds in England" (Sheaffer 221). They divorced in
1914, the year the United States entered the Great War. The divorce was
ostensibly amicable but Moffat was despondent. In the divorce trial Hazel
testified that her husband had threatened to kill himself by jumping from their fifth
floor window in a London hotel. She also stated that on another occasion, he
had threatened to shoot her. Moffat made several attempts at reconciliation, but
Hazel remained unmoved. He was not the only ex-husband to remain in love
with her, and toward the end of their lives, the two had an "affectionate
correspondence" (Sheaffer 222).

In her one-act play, My Gene, Barbara Gelb summed up Hazel's
thoughts about her first marriage: I married at 20 a very wealthy

15

Scotsman, and we lived in Europe for several years. As a young
bride I had the best of everything—clothes, servants, admiration.
When I divorced John, he said, 'I want you to be happy and to have
your independence' (Gelb 22).

Following the divorce, Hazel attended acting classes at the University of
California at Berkeley. Once again she aspired to a stage career, and within
months she moved to New York, where Hazel Neilson Tharsing Moffat was
transformed into Carlotta Monterey. The transition to a new persona
necessitated altering certain significant facts of her background, which presented
no problem for the aspiring star. Carlotta had an uncanny ability for re-inventing
herself and an acute awareness of the conflicting forces of her personality. A
school friend had called her "a girl of strong emotions," and in her first interview
as an actress, Carlotta agreed, confessing that:

It seems that I am always vacillating between extremes, and never
choose a compromising and restful middle course. There are times
when I feel within me a calling for the primitive, the wild and the
elemental in nature and in art. Then at times I crave the very
reverse, the exquisite and the ultrarefined . . . It is not pleasant to
be a living pendulum swinging between two natures (Sheaffer 222).
The interview headlined, "A Girl of Extremes," appeared in the New York
M on April 18, 1915, following Carlotta's debut in a "sex farce" entitled

Taking Changs. The critic for the See appeared less interested in Carlotta's

emotions or her acting. He reported that she appeared in "an almost negligible

16

negligee in the last act and made a seductive picture" (Sheaffer 222).

In negotiating her first stage role, Carlotta displayed the legacy of her
entrepreneurial parents. First, she hired an agent. Through him she met Lee
Shubert who auditioned her and promptly cast her in mm. Shubert
originally offered the newcomer $250.00 a week, but Carlotta managed to charm
Shubert and negotiate the terms of her contract. In Shubert's words, the final
deal was: "I'll pay you $350 a week for a three-month run; if the run is longer
than that, $450 a weekuwith a contract for two or three years" (Gallup 299).

Taking Chances premiered at the 39th street Theater in March 1915 where
it ran for 85 performances. Carlotta's negligee notwithstanding, the reviews were
tepid. Carlotta played opposite Lou Tellegen, another newcomer, who Carlotta
found very attractive. The two novice actors began an affair that lasted until
Tellegen married someone else. An undated theatrical scrapbook item headed
"Broadway Beau", at the Billy Rose Theatrical Collection in Lincoln Center,
suggests that Carlotta was planning a lawsuit in "solace for a lacerated heart."
She claimed to have letters spanning two years that would figure heavily in the
case. Nothing came of Carlotta's threats, which may have been little more than
a theatrical ploy.

Carlotta's less than auspicious debut with Chancee was followed by _'l_'h_e
Bird of Paradise. Laurette Taylor and Lenore Ulric had won acclaim for the role
of Luana, but Carlotta failed to live up to their legend (Sheaffer 222). Only the
San Francisco Bulletin hailed the return of their native daughter with headlines
proclaiming: "San Francisco Girl Returns as Star in Beautiful Play/Takes Lead in

17

the Bird of Paradise/Stage Name Hides Identity of Beautiful Girl of this City."
The role did little to bolster Carlotta's career, though it did play a role in her
second marriage.

Melvin C. Chapman, Jr., was a 20 year old law student from Oakland;
whereas Moffat had been fifteen years older than Carlotta, Melvin was seven
years younger. Their relationship was somewhat complicated and a touch
bizarre. Melvin was the son of Nellie's long-time lover, and as a law clerk in his
father's firm, he had worked on Carlotta's divorce case from John Moffat.
Chapman Senior had wanted to marry Nellie, but his son found her too "bossy"
and gave his father the ultimatum of choosing between marriage to Nellie and
keeping his son's affections. Melvin Junior had no objection to the continuation of
the liaison outside of marriage, nor had his father any objection to Junior courting
Carlotta. According to Melvin Junior, "Nellie persuaded me to do it, but I was
already infatuated and thought I loved her" (Sheaffer 223). Carlotta simply
wanted a child. Lou Tellegen"'had advised her that she would never be a good
actress until she became a mother" (Sheaffer 223). Carlotta took his advice to
head.

The couple was married on October 12, 1916; their daughter, Cynthia Jane,
was born 10 months later. Carlotta was as iII suited to motherhood as her own
mother had been. Within a year she left Chapman. Cynthia was given to Nellie
to bring up. Ironically, Carlotta left her own daughter with a relative just as young
Hazel had been left with her aunt, only this time, designated caregiver was the
mother who had rejected her. In an interview for the San Francisco Celt, Nellie

18

told readers, "[My daughter's] love for art destroyed her love for home and
family" (Sheaffer 223). Chapman sued for divorce in 1923, at Carlotta's request,
when she wanted to marry cartoonist Ralph Barton.

As World War I drew to a close, Carlotta was back on the stage, optimistic
about revitalizing (or more accurately, realizing) her career. The Modern Age
had taken a firm hold on the social and intellectual climate of Europe and the
United States. To Modris Eksteins, it began that fateful night when the cream of
Paris society turned the premier of Le Secre du Printemfi into a cultural brawl.
In Gertrude Stein's account, the audience was so raucous the music could not
be heard. In Carl Van Vechten's account, the patron behind him was so excited
by the pagan ritual, "he began to beat rhythmically on the top of my head with his
fists." Overcome with emotion himself, Van Vechten "did not feel the blows for
some time. They were perfectly eynehrgnizfi with the beat of the music
[emphasis added)". Eksteins points out the contradiction: "In this account the
music obviously, could be heard" (14). Van Vechten elaborated that the
ballerina who danced the role of the chosen maiden "executed her strange
dance of religious hysteria on a stage dimmed by the blazing light in the
auditorium, seemingly to the accompaniment of the disjointed ravings of a mob
of angry men and women" (13).

As perceived by Eksteins, the critical feature of the riotous evening was
that, "The audience was as much a part of the famous performance as the corps
de ballet" 13). The milestone event provides an excellent marker for exploring
the way in which Carlotta Monterey fashioned her life, from her choice of exotic

19

name to her choice of Eugene O'Neill as husband:
That boisterous evening rightly stands as a symbol of its era and
as a landmark of this century. From the setting in the newly
constructed, ultramodem Theatre des Champs-Elysees, in Paris,
through the ideas and intentions of the leading protagonists, to the
tumultuous response of the audience, that opening night of Le
S_ar_:_Le_ represents a milestone in the development of "modernism,"
modernism as above all a culture of the sensational event, through
which art and life both become a matter of energy and are fused
as one. (Eksteins 16).

Eksteins shares with many historians the belief that the Armistice of 1918
brought a spirit of promise and great hope to the world. In his memoir, Ille
Awakening Twenties, Gotham Manson documented the prevailing ebullience:
"Flooding the beings of many young men and young women was the sudden
feeling that the opportunity to rebel and to fulfill themselves had indeed come.
Youth was being given back to us" (5). As the railroad and telegraph had broken
down geographic barriers in the sprawling agrarian society a generation earlier,
improvements in railroad and bus service, the advent of the radio, and the new
cinema which rapidly became as popular in rural as urban areas, broke down
cultural barriers. Even in the heartland, which had traditionally been the
mainstay of traditional values, young people (and often their elders) were
listening to jazz, dancing the Charleston, and exulting in a climate of "liberation"
(Eksteins 258) .

20

VVithll‘l this climate of optimism, Carlotta was determined to resume her
career. Her return to the stage, however, was disappointing, characterized by
roles in weak vehicles and discouraging reviews. According to Sheaffer, she did
manage to sign a five-year contract with Chamberlain and Layman Brown, a
highly reputable theatrical talent agency. All that resulted was a series of
second-rate character parts. All Night Long was essentially a vaudeville skit; it
opened on June 19, 1918, and closed after only four performances. This
inauspicious return was followed by Mr. Bgnum. which opened on September 9,
1918 at the Criterion Theater, with Carlotta atop a black stallion. She had slightly
better luck in Be Calm Camilla, which introduced her to producer Arthur Hopkins

and set designer Robert Edmund Jones. These established luminaries helped

 

focus the limelight on Camilla, and in turn on Carlotta. She received decent
reviews for her role of Celia Brook, although she was better acclaimed for her

sex appeal than her acting. Camilla opened at the Booth Theater on October 31,

 

and ran for 84 performances.

Although steadily employed, Carlotta was increasingly disenchanted with
the course of her career. She deemed 1919 -1920 a "heartbreaking season." In
an undated letter among her papers at the Billy Rose Theatrical Collection, she
revealed to Lee Shubert the depth of her discouragement:

I'm getting older every day and can act just as well as these others.
Then, w_hy won't you help me? I admit I have no written contract-4
don't mt one! But I'd rather go hungry than be humiliated any
longer by playing such rotten parts--when I know I can do better

21

things if given a chance.

This "heartbreaking season" included A_Steeglesefljgm, directed by
Shubert, which ran for 71 performances after opening at the Bijou Theater on
February 18, 1919. Carlotta had planned to tour with the production, but plans
for touring foundered and Carlotta was temporarily sidelined with an emergency
appendectomy. Her next vehicle was ironically titled W. M
Yerk Times simply listed her character, Olive Gresham, without even a mention
of her name.

As her career faltered, Carlotta began to reinvent herself once again and
seek other venues of marketability. Her personal redesign was unfolding in the
midst of a culture that was rapidly reinventing itself. The theatre itself was
changing. In literature, there was a decisive shift against rhetoric. To the writers
and culture critics of the era, "Slogans, glorified statements, magniloquent claims
of virtue and victory idealized and sentimentalized the War and in the process
ruined the language" (Watkins 46). During this time, "Ezra Pound defined the
good writer as one who 'uses the smallest number of words' " (Watkins 48).
Pound, along with contemporaries TS. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway irrevocably
altered the course of American literature. Eugene O'Neill would alter the course
of American drama.

No writer detached language from rhetoric as radically as Gertrude Stein.
Stein had originally studied psychology with Vlfilliam James at Harvard, then in a
dramatic twist left her native America to join her brother on the Left Bank of Paris
in 1903. As recounted by Claudia Roth Pierpont, "It was at that moment, when

22

modern art was being born, that the Steins began to buy the best and most
shocking paintings; before long, the best and most unshockable people were
stopping by to view their riotous thick-hung walls—and were staying for dinner"
(33). Gertrude was on the cutting edge in language as well as art: "Before
James Joyce—as she volubly insisted all her life-before Dada or Surrealism,
before Bloomsbury or the We, Gertrude Stein was inscrutable, and,
above all, dauntingly unreadable" (Pierpont 34). Stein's first writing effort was a
novel she had been working on when she went to join her brother in Paris. She
never tried to publish the manuscript and probably never had the intent. It was
the story of a love triangle that had been tormenting her when she decided to
emigrate. Pierpont observes that she made no apologies for its content:
"although not explicitly erotic, it was plainly open about the fact that all three
members of its sexual triangle were women. No explanations, no apologies, no
wells of loneliness" (38). Pierpont credits its author for "the Jamesian acuity of
its psychological portraits" (39). She might have developed the genre, but Stein
preferred a world of "obvious, superficial, clean simplicity" to expressions of
murky passions. Although Stein herself attributed it to a "puritanic horror" of
passion, it was far more consistent with the dawn of the modern age.

In 1922, Ernest Hemingway told Shenivood Anderson that "Geitrude Stein
and me are just like brothers" (Pierpont 43). With Stein as his mentor,
Hemingway developed his characteristic terse writing style. At a time when
Freudian interpretations abounded in literature and art, Hemingway, by means of
Stein's influence, had adapted the psychological tenets of William James. In

23

James's theory, emotions were not a response to an event, the traditional order
was wrong: "the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry,
angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike,
or tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful" (Crunden 43). The somewhat
simplistic theory had a much more profound impact on literature than it did on
psychology. It fit perfectly with a philosophy that abhorred rhetoric: "The tired
adjectives of external descriptions could disappear and in their place a writer
could substitute images of motor behavior that suggested emotions but never
actually said an individual was sad, terrified, or lonely" (43). The idea traveled to
Paris through Gertrude Stein, and through Hemingway, came full circle back to
the New World. Inevitably, "such notions changed the ways Americans thought,
talked, and wrote" (Crunden 43).

Unlike Stein, Virginia Woolf deplored Hemingway, in particular, his
"exaggeration of male characteristics" (Pierpont 43). According to Pierpont,
"Woolf suggested that any woman who wrote in a terse, short-winded style was
probably trying to write like a man" (44). Woolf is typically included in feminist
anthologies, notably for the philosophy she expressed in A Rgom of One's Own.
In her classic work, Woolf insisted that it was the duty of women to chronicle
their experiences from their own perspective, asserting that, "it remains obvious,
even in the writing of Proust, that a man is terribly hampered partial in his
knowledge of women, as a woman in her knowledge of men" (Woolf 125). Only
when women claimed space for telling their stories would an accurate story be
told.

24

At the same time, Woolf was writing in an era when the focal point was
language rather than content. Woolf considered Stein's "contortions" of the
English language a "generational misfortune," claiming that "those who struggled
toward the liberation of languageulike herself and Stein and Eliot and Joyce--
were found to fail as often as they succeeded" (Pierpont 38). However, the
difference between Woolf and Stein is not in language but in philosophy: "But at
the heart of their difference is the fact that Woolf didn't see why a woman should
want to do anything like a man; feminine generosity was life itself, and the
necessary source of male achievement. One could hardly get further from
Stein's perception of the sexes' division of propeities" (Pierpont 44). Stein
herself fostered male genius at the same time as she nurtured her own. She
had a "room of one's own" in her prestigious Paris salon.

Salons had originated in Europe, but they were flourishing in America at the
dawn of the Jazz Age. Mabel Dodge was amongst the arbiters of modernism,
and she was celebrated as a denizen of Greenwich Village and Provincetown.
Eugene O'Neill was her associate in both bohemian venues. They inhabited a
world where artistic innovation blended with a seemingly endless series of sexual
(and often bisexual) alliances. Christine Stansell sums up the philosophy of the
milieu inhabited by Dodge, O'Neill, Alfred Steiglitz, Emma Goldman, and the
coterie of artistic, social, and political rebels who shaped the culture of the
modern age: "The bohemians believed they stood at the beginning of an are
through American time" (338). In retrospect, they were correct.

Mabel Dodge and Emma Goldman were two of the most radical voices in

25

the political realm. Many women were actively working to transform the society
that deprived them from entering the public sphere. Advances in women's
higher education in the 18703 produced a literate generation acutely aware of
the injustices that pervaded the purportedly democratic society. Many eagerly
joined the Progressive social reform movement, whose most illustrious member
was Jane Addams, founder of modern social work. The Progressive movement,
like every reform movement, had its "extremists." As chronicled by Karen
Manners Smith:
Most reformers were content to work within the exiting social and
legal systems, but a handful of rebels made it their missions in life
to defy society's most basic conventions and to challenge time-
honored assumptions about women and women's roles. This small
group of writers, artists, philosophers, and radicals proposed
sweeping social changes that most turn-of-the-century Americans
regarded as threatening and outrageous, if not downright
revolutionary (398).

Included in Smith's list of revolutionaries are Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, and Isadora Duncan. Their scandalous
activities coincided with the emergence of the first wave of feminism to sweep
the United States. The first group to call themselves "feminists" organized in
Greenwich Village in the 1910s. Their members included writers, journalists,
professionals, social workers, and labor leaders, and they chose to name their
group "Heterodoxy" to underscore the unorthodox character of their ideas.

26

Heterodoxy is an appropriate title for what was an unquestionably diverse group.
Their members encompassed a wide array of political leanings, ethnic and
national backgrounds, and social and political interests. A host of renowned
speakers addressed the group including Margaret Sanger, Helen Keller, Amy
Lowell, Emma Goldman, and an international roster of advocates for peace and
reform (Schwaiz 19). The topics ranged from the Russian Revolution to infant
mortality and education at home. Judith Schwarz notes that, "In fact, it seems
that few topics affecting women throughout the world were overlook " (19).
When asked what Heterodoxy talked about, member Inez Haynes Irwin
responded: "It talked about everything."

According to Schwarz, the Great War played a key role in winning the vote
for women. Ultimately, it was less the heroic actions or speeches of radical
groups of women "that finally won women the vote as much as it was the role of
women workers during the war, plus the 'mounting crescendo of suffrage work
under the leadership of the National Suffrage Association' " (Schwarz 46). In the
political as well as the social and economic spheres, the "war to end all wars"
had generated a spirit of optimism and renewal. As viewed by Nancy F. Cott in
The Grounding of Modern Feminism:

As 1919 began, despite curtailment of civil liberties there was
eagerness and optimism in the air about use of the state in creating
a new democratic order. From all corners—politicians, professional
associations, churches, research agencies-came proposals for
new social order, for a "second Reconstruction." The position of

27

labor appeared strong at the culmination of a decade of workers'
collective protests. The National War Labor Board, pressed by the
WTUL (Women's Trade Union League], unprecedented efforts to
equalize women's pay. The bastions of the male workplace and
the polling place seemed simultaneously to be falling (62—63).

The beginnings of a new social order were apparent to European
observers. Frenchman Lucien Romier declared in 1927:

The United States seems to be today the only great county whose
citizens declare incessantly their love for the society to which they
belong, work together enthusiastically for its betterment, and, in a
world made pessimistic to the core by social problems, reveal
themselves to be optimists on social issue (Eksteins 268).

Along with other observers of the time, Romier cited the independence of
American women, their lack of fear toward men and their rejection of patriarchy
as "eminently modern and liberating" (Eksteins 269). In direct opposition to this
view was Sigmund Freud. Gertrude Stein, according to Ann Douglas "was aware
of him as her greatest adversary" (134). In fact she and her brother Leo parted
when he decided to enter psychoanalysis and embrace the Freudian credo.
Douglas has an intriguing perspective on the duality of Stein and Freud:

As Jews, Freud and Stein were both self-conscious outsiders to the
world of late-Victorian culture in which they were reared, yet Freud
was the culmination of its patriarchal impulse as surely as Stein
was the culmination of its equally powerful matriarchal thrust. What

28

Freud loathed above all else in American culture was its
"dominating women"; in his view, they treated American men as
wolves do sheep and constituted an "anti-cultural phenomenon"
(1 34).

Romier and Freud observed the same phenomenon, yet to one it was
"eminently modern and liberating," while to the other it was anti-cultural. Freud
hated American popular culture, which he decried as "feminine," yet by all
accounts, he played a key role in creating the mass culture and hedonism he
deplored. Carlotta seems to have vacillated between allying herself with the
"patriarchal impulse" or the "matriarchal thrust." It was around the time of

Romier's writing that Carlotta Monterey met the playwright Eugene O'Neill.

29

WORKS CITED

Cott, Nancy F. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1987.

Crunden, Robert M. American Salons: Encounters with European Modernism
1885-1917. New York: Oxford University Press. 1993.

Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhafian in the 19295. New York:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.

Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great War end the Birth of the Modern
Age. New York: Doubleday, 1989.

Gallup, Donald. Pigeons on the Granite. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1988.

Gelb, Barbara. My Gene. New York: Unpublished play, 1988.
Monterey, Carlotta. Theatrical Scrapbooks of Carlotta Monterey and Crane

Wilbur. Chamberlain and Layman Brown Agency. Locke Collection. New
York: Billy Rose Theatrical Collection, Lincoln Center.

Manson, Gotham. The Awakening Twenties: A Memoir-Histom of Literau Period.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985.

Pierpont, Claudia Roth. Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the Worlg. New
York: Vintage Books, 2000.

Schwarz, Judith. Radical Feminists of Heteroggxy: Greenwich Village 1912-
1940. Norwich, VT: New Victoria Publishers, 1986.

Sheaffer, Louis. O'Nej_ll: Son end Alist. Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1973.
Smith, Karen Manners. "New Paths to Power 1890-1920," No Smell Courege: A

Histom of Women in the United States, ed. Nancy F. Cott: 353-412. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000.

Stansell, Christine. American Modems: Bohemian New Yprk ang the Creation of
a New Centuty. New York: Henry Holt, 2000.

Watkins, Floyd C. "T he Use of Concrete Words and Images in American
Modernism," American Modernism, ed. Scott Barbour: 44-50. San Diego:

30

Greenhaven Press, 2000.

Woolf, Virginia. "From A Room of One's Own (1929)." Feminist Theorv: A
Reader, Wendy Kolmar and Frances Bartkowski, eds.: 123-126. London:
Mayfield Publishing, 2000.

 

 

31

Chapter Three
New York

1920-1925

Amidst the radically shifting cultural landscape, Carlotta chose a rather
conventional path. Perhaps she recognized that her acting talent was modest in
comparison to her talent for cultivating the affections of men. In the early 19203,
she met James Speyer, an elderly Wall Street banker, widowed and childless.
He was a dominant figure in the founding of the Museum of the City of New York
and served as its finance chairman. A descendent of a wealthy, cultured Jewish
family, he became a longtime companion of Carlotta's. Their relationship was to
precede and succeed her third marriage. Speyer provided a trust fund for
Carlotta, a lifetime annuity of $14,000 a year, a generous sum at the time.
Neither one wanted to marry, and in an undated letter found in her papers at the
Billy Rose Theatrical Collection, Carlotta was enthusiastic over the
companionable agreement:

Mr. Speyer and I are great friends. He's My years older than I
am! But the only man I have ever really respected. He is a gerl_irtg-
-the kindest-most unselfish, most charitable man I have ever met-
and clevernand has a keen sense of humor-and above allngeitle!
I adore him-but no marriage! Ours is a beautiful and most
thoroughly satisfying friendship of course his being a millionaire
and I am an exactress-these damned foul society reporters pl_eet_l l

32

suppose they must earn their hirings.

In an age when advertising was in its infancy, Carlotta looked to Madison
Avenue and supplemented her annuity with modeling assignments. With her
dark good looks, Carlotta was very photogenic, and actually better suited to the
frozen still of a camera lens than to a director's cue. Far more successful as
model than actress, Carlotta appeared in the leading womens' magazines, such
as \_/pgee_, Vanity Fair, and W, as well as in the tabloids and
dailies which abounded in the twenties. Carlotta's papers at the Billy Rose
Theater Collection are replete with clippings and scrapbooks filled with photos
from modeling shoots. Carlotta also modeled for fashion catalogues, in
particular, the prestigious Best & Compeny.

Feminine fashion underwent a radical change in the early 1920's, even
beyond Isadora Duncan's exhortation for women to shed their corsets and wear
natural dress. The garment district on Seventh Avenue quickly adopted Henry
Ford's new mass-production techniques. During World War I, the clothing
business standardized the sizes of men's uniforms; women's off the rack
clothing followed suit. According to Ann Douglas standardization had a dramatic
effect on the made-to-measure method. Earlier in the twentieth century there
were no fashionable, ready-to-wear stock sizes. However, "by the end of the
war, full-scale mass-production techniques were being applied to civilian clothing
and the United States had taken the lead in the world's clothing market" (188).
There was a major shift in merchandising and marketing as "not just clothing
production but fashion design was shifting its headquarters from Europe to New

33

York" (Douglas 189). Seventh Avenue joined with Madison Avenue as

advertising merged with couture. In essence, it was a merger of media and

materialism:
The acceleration of precise information conveyed via telegraphs,
cameras, telephones, big daily newspapers, adveitising, movies,
radios (and later television)-in short, the phenomenon of media
and photo-media that palpably speed up not just our work but our
minds, our very consciousness, the acceleration of culturenwas
an American obsession, if not an American monopoly (Douglas
190) .

Like her father, Carlotta had a knack for placing herself in the midst of
industrial change. She was now involved in the predominant industries of the
day: entertainment, fashion and advertisement. Her work as actress and model
synthesized in January of 1922 by virtue of the play ginger. Once again
Carlotta received tepid reviews, but was rewarded with a magazine layout. In the
January issue of Vanmt' Fair, her face stared haughtily from a photograph
captioned, "Carlotta Monterey plays a lady of unhappy morals in Cepger, an
unhappy melodrama with a happy ending." With a jab at the mediocre fare on
the current stage, the article headlined: "Our Somewhat Tragic Stage—If You
Don't Know What To Do \Mth Your Play, Make It A Tragedy With A Happy
Ending." Carlotta followed one mediocre play with two others, Belle and V_ott_a£e.
All three plays were directed by Arthur Hopkins who had previously worked with
Carlotta in Be Calm. Camilla. Although the plays were little more than

34

disastrous, through Hopkins' influence, Carlotta got a tremendous break.

Arthur Hopkins was instrumental in casting Carlotta in the most prestigious
role of her career, The fliry Ape, by Eugene O'Neill. It originally opened at the
Provincetown Playhouse on March 9,1922, with Mary Blair as the pivotal
character Mildred Douglas. Blair had played the part in Provincetown, but
Hopkins felt that she lacked the glamour and intrigue necessary for a successful
Broadway run: "He insisted on replacing Mary Blair in the role of Mildred
Douglas with a beautiful actress whom he admires. She was Carlotta Monterey"
(Gelb and Gelb 501).

Hopkins' instincts proved correct. Carlotta received favorable reviews.
According to The Globe review on April 19, 1922: "Carlotta Monterey is simpler
and clearer than Mary Blair, as the artificial lady of the promenade deck." Good
reviews coupled with an appearance in a controversial play by a promising
playwright enhanced her reputation. Just as, _Ape was attracting attention,
Carlotta broke into the inner circle of the Provincetown Theater Group and
moved into the company of the new intellectuals.

Like the women of Heterodoxy, many artists, intellectuals, and musicians
found their refuge in Greenwich Village. There was nothing mysterious about its
allure. While noting that, "In its picturesque decrepitude, part slum, part shabby-
genteel, the Village was curiously isolated from the roaring modern city that
surrounded it," Lloyd Morris succinctly sums up the charm of the Village: "Life in
the Village was simple and cheap. It was a place where people were free to 'be
themselves' " (302).

35

Similar to the Impressionists and Surrealists in Europe, "It was the painters
who first proclaimed a revolution in the arts" (Morris 302). Photographer Alfred
Steiglitz displayed the works of a new generation of painters, and observers
flocked to see "the craziest painters in America." In her sculpture studio on West
Eighth Street, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney exhibited the works of unknown
young artists, already determined to establish a museum dedicated solely to
American art. Eight revolutionary painters distinguished themselves by their
depictions of the seamy side of American life and became known as "the Ashcan
School." The work of Gertrude Stein's friends, Picasso and Matisse, along with
those of other radical Europeans such as Duchamp, Leger, and Brancusi, were
introduced to American audiences, who were baffled by the peculiar lines of
cubism, futurism, and post-impressionism. The radical new styles of painting
made their debut in New York at the International Exhibition of Modern Art, which
opened at the Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory on Park Avenue in Winter 1913. The
response was not quite as jarring as the premier of Le Seere du Printemps, but
according to Lloyd Morris, it was not far off the mark:

The famous tenor Enrico Caruso went to the armory, delightedly
drew caricatures of cubist art and scattered them to a boisterous
crowd. From early morning until late at night the exhibition was
jammed with visitors, puzzled or exasperated or enthusiastic.
Whatever their emotions, nearly all of them emerged in a
belligerent mood. Even those who denounced the show most
bitterly acknowledged that it was dynamite (304).

36

All of the arts were in the process of being freed from academic constraints.
It Is doubtful that Caruso's talents as a cartoonist equaled his prodigious vocal
gifts, but caricature as a creative art form, would come into its own in the 1920s.
Comic strips had become extremely popular, as "Popeye and Krazy Kat and
others were transforming the already combustible American language into a
series of linguistic explosions" (Douglas 451). John Held, Jr., known for his
angular figures, the "most famous illustrator of the Jazz Age." Traditionally
considered a secondary or "low brow" art form, caricature was like jazz:
innovative, original, and packed with spontaneous energy.

Caricature was Ralph Barton's chosen medium. Bruce Kellner, who
chronicled Barton's life, notes that The Heiry A33 brought Ralph and Carlotta
together: "Ralph Barton surely saw her in the production on Broadway, probably
several times, for he was immediately smitten with her when they met on the
May 7"" (95). Barton had attended several productions of Ape, more taken by
Carlotta's charm than the play. lnfatuated by the actress, he implored his friends
to provide him a formal introduction. They finally met on May 7, 1922, at
Nicholas Muray's Greenwich Village studio. Muray was known for his dynamic
gatherings of New York's elite. It was Barton's business associate, Gerald
Kelley, who actually introduced the pair. Kelley (who held an influential position
with the Metropolitan Museum of Art) had helped Barton in the past by
sponsoring, gratis, Barton's first art exhibit, in 1914, at the Broun Gallery on Fifth
Avenue. Now he did Barton a social favor. Barton was instantly mesmerized.
Carlotta's exotic features provided an artistic as well as a sexual attraction.

37

Barton was commonly regarded as a Lothario. He wrote his mother that from the
day they first met "an amazing understanding has existed between us. We have
been together almost constantly" (Kellner 95).

According to Kellner, a scant three months before Barton's fateful
introduction to Carlotta, he was commissioned to create an intermission curtain
caricaturing well-known show business personalities for the Broadway
extravaganza Chauve Souris. He developed the concept of depicting a typical
Broadway first night audience. Row upon row of the faces of every imaginable
celebrity of New York and Hollywood peered out at the audience. The work was
mounted on canvas and covered the entire proscenium of the Forty-Ninth Street
Theater.

Barton's work was a tremendous sensation. The caricatures of one
hundred thirty five celebrities overshadowed the show. People actually went to
the play to "see" the intermission. John Barrymore, George M. Cohan, Lillian
Gish, AI Jolson, Dorothy Parker, Eugene O'Neill, and Herbert Hoover, were only
a few of the diverse group of notables caricatured on the curtain. As the
lampooned audience stared back at the live one, it had a powerful impact. The
audience applauded and cheered vociferously, no doubt gratified to see the rich
and famous and powerful made slightly ridiculous. The project took Barton only
one month to complete. He could not begin to accommodate the siege of
commissions he received from his inspired portrayal of the foibles of the elite.

When Barton met Carlotta he was still married to Anne Minnerly, a model
for fashion magazines and artists. She was his second wife and the mother of

38

one of his two young daughters. She sued for divorce and eventually married
e.e cummings. Carlotta was also nominally married to Melvin Chapman, Jr., who
sued for divorce at Carlotta's request in 1923 (Sheaffer 223). Barton and
Carlotta lived together for almost three years before they were married on March
17, 1925.

Ralph Barton suffered from what is known today as bipolar depression, but
is more aptly described by its original name: manic-depressive. Carlotta was
briefly able to allay his anxiety, however, she was only a temporary buffer against
his depression. He worked in creative spurts and maddening dry periods.
Carlotta tried to encourage him, sometimes managing to nag him into a fairly
recognizable routine. Adding to Barton's angst were his insecurities about his
talent and chosen medium. He feared his art was lightweight, nothing more than
a throwaway art form. Unfortunately, he failed to realize that caricature had been
exalted in the modernist cultural climate. Rather than indulging in a second-rate
form of expression, he was in excellent postwar company in depicting the realism
and humanism of existence. What Sinclair Lewis was exposing in Main §tffit
Shenivood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio, F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great
fitsby, and Theodore Dreiser in An American Tragedy. Barton was capturing in
his satirical drawings.

Barton achieved his greatest success in conjunction with the work of author
Anita Loos. Loos' classic work, Gentlemen Prefer Blendes, had been illustrated
by Ralph Barton. The story that has since become a cultural icon began as a
modest series of articles in Hatper's Bezaar. The saga of Lorelei Lee was a

39

gentle spoof of the twenties and its resident vacuous flappers and it became an
immediate hit.

According to Loos, W was inspired by "the
dumbest blond of all, a girl who had bewitched one of the keenest minds of our
era--H.L. Mencken" (3). Lorelei Lee was packed into monthly installments, and
for the first time ever, men were reading Hatper's Bazaar. Loos recounted that,
"James Joyce, who had begun to lose his eyesight, saved his reading for Lorelei
Lee. And George Santayana, when asked what was the best book of philosophy
written by an American, answered Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (8). By the end of
1925, the story was published in hard cover; it sold out immediately, as did a
second printing of sixty-seven thousand copies. Barton received a five-percent
royalty, which netted him over fifty thousand dollars before the close of the year.
He had surpassed John Held Jr. as the highest paid illustrator in America.

Barton's personal life was not quite as successful. Carl Van Vechten,

dance and music critic for The New York Times and noted Jazz Age

 

Renaissance man, was a close friend of both Ralph and Carlotta. His Daybooks
describe the disintegration of their marriage, as well as bizarre examples of their
tempestuous relationship. Carlotta's exhibitionism was not restricted to the
stage. On September 29th, shortly before the couple divorced, Van Vechten
recorded:
6:30-Dinner with R. Barton and Carlotta Monterey. Marincff goes
to theatre. I stay there and after the Bartons have talked for 3
hours about whether they will live together any more they take off

40

their clothes and give a remarkable performance. Ralph goes
down on Carlotta and she expires in ecstasy. They do '69' etc. I
leave about 12:30.

In November 1925, Carlotta arrived early from an out of town audition and
found Ralph with another woman. She immediately packed her bags and moved
to the Madison Hotel, relating, "I forgave him. But I just couldn't forget it, and so
we broke up" (Kellner 130). He pleaded with her to reconsider. Aline Fruhauf, a
fellow artist and mutual friend of the couple tried to engineer a reconciliation. On
one such occasion Aline met with a frazzled but resolved Carlotta:

Her black hair was long again at that time, sweeping almost her-
entire back. She was dressed in a black kimono. Frustration and
disappointment were mixed and she told Aline there was nothing to
be done; the marriage was over. 'I just hope to God he's happy!’
she said, pacing the floor and weeping (Fruhauf 132).

Carlotta survived the breakup with characteristic resilience. Barton, the
manic-depressive, did not. On May 19, 1931, Barton shot himself in his
penthouse apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street. He had meticulously
arranged his surroundings, written a note which he headed "OBIT," and left a
copy of Gray's Anatpmy on his bed, opened to show illustrations of the human
heart. In his "OBIT," Barton expressed that everyone who knew him would "have
a different hypothesis to offer to explain why I did it," adding that they would
invariably be wrong. Barton attributed his suicide to his "melancholia," and
worsening manic depressive symptoms, which "has prevented my getting

41

anything like the full value out of my talent, and the past three years has made

work a torture to do at all" (Sheaffer 374). In one passage, he confessed:
In particular, my remorse is bitter over my failure to appreciate my
beautiful lost angel, Carlotta, the only woman I ever loved and
whom I respect and admire above the rest of the human race. She
is the one person who could have saved me had I been savable.
She did her best. No one ever had a more devoted or more
understanding wife (Sheaffer 374).

When she heard the news of Barton's suicide, Carlotta seemed shocked to
find herself in the midst of the "OBIT." According to Carl Van Vechten, "She
couldn't understand why he'd dragged her into it. Barton, she insisted, hadn't
loved her in years." Van Vechten "thought it a clear case of ego, of his wanting
all possible attention at his death. He resented her marrying someone more
famous than himself and wanted to upset them" (Sheaffer 374). Carlotta was
visibly upset; O'Neill was "more than normally taciturn" (374). Barton had laid
out thirty-five dollars for his maid, which appeared to be all the cash he had left.
By 1931, times had changed drastically from the optimism and glitter of the Jazz
Age. In recounting the wake of Barton's suicide, Van Vechten added, "Don't
forget, too, that the Great Depression was on—people weren't in the mood for his
sophisticated art. The market for his stuff had shrunk, and he could see only
lean times ahead, so he decided to go out in a splash of publicity" (Sheaffer
375). If the mood was no longer right for Barton's witty caricatures, it was perfect
for O'Neill's somber plays.

42

WORKS CITED

Douglas, Ann. Terri_ble Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920's. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.

F ruhauf, Aline. Making Faces: Memoirs of e Caricaturist, ed. Erwin Volmer.
Washington, DC: Seven Locks Press, 1933.

 

Gelb, Arthur and Barbara Gelb. O'Neill. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

Kellner, Bruce. The Last Dandy Ralph Barton: American Artist 1891-1931.
Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991.

Loos, Anita. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925.

Morris, Lloyd. lncredj_bI_e New York: High Life and Low Life frpm 1850-1950.
Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996.

Sheaffer, Louis. O'Neill: Son end Am. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973.

Van Vechten, Carl. Daybooks. 1923-1930. Carl Van Vechten Collection. New
York: Public Library Manuscript Division.

43

Chapter Four
Interim

1925-1931

Three times divorced, tired of the stage and life on the road, Carlotta was
thirty-eight years old, and keenly aware that her theatrical career would never
award her a major triumph. She decided to take a brief vacation from New York
and summered in Belgrade Lakes, Maine at the home of Elisabeth Marbury in
1 925.

Bessy Marbury was an internationally known theatrical broker, with offices
in America and in Europe. She liked Carlotta's company and according to
Sheaffer, wanted to adopt Carlotta as her sole heir. By that time, Marbury was a
gargantuan woman in her seventies. Her long-time companion Elsie de Wolfe,
had fashioned her own career as an interior decorator, serving an upscale
clientele. Marbury was concerned about Carlotta's post divorce depression. She
urged her to socialize, advising her, "You're always sitting at home. Why not
meet interesting people?" (Gallup 200). Carlotta complied.

Marbury boasted an intriguing and brilliant coterie. Amongst her most
famous clients were Oscar Wilde, Somerset Maugham, George Bernard Shaw,
James Barrie and, of course, Eugene O'Neill. O'Neill had been dissatisfied with
his previous representation, and signed a contract with Marbury's American Play
Company. At Marbury's prompting, O'Neill also was staying at Loon Lodge in the
Belgrade Lakes, with an entourage that included his wife, Agnes and their

44

sizable extended family. They represented only a small portion of Marbury's
summer salon of imported guests.

Marbury and de Wolfe represented a lifestyle that had become acceptable,
if not fashionable, in sophisticated circles. The denial of repression that
characterized the postwar period ushered in a trend toward sexual
experimentation, including homosexuality and bisexuality. Until the early
twentieth century, intense relationships between women had been viewed as
"romantic friendships," based on "the Victorian insistence that women were not
naturally sexual" (Faderrnan 31). Two women living together were viewed as
"devoted companions," rather than sexual paitners. This traditional assumption
changed radically with the popularization of Freud; by the 19203, two women
living together were assumed to be sexually involved.

Virtually all aspects of modernism have been traced to the World War I era
in some way. Whether the significant factor is presumed to be the dissonance of
Stravinsky; the natural movements of Isadora Duncan; the stylized paintings of
the Cubists and Surrealists; the psychological theories of James, Freud and
Jung; the Bolshevik Revolution; or the Great War itself, there is no doubt that
seismic events in the 19103 created shock waves that transformed the new
century. The inevitable result was that, "By the 19203, young American
intellectuals, bohemians, and generic nonconfonnists were determined to rout
with a vengeance the last vestiges of Victorianism in the country" (Fadennan 64).

Lillian Fademian disagrees with culture critics who trace the development of
a lesbian or bisexual subculture in the United States directly to World War I. In

45

Europe, the war probably did have a direct impact. In her landmark novel, me

Well of Loneliness Radclyffe Hall tells how many English lesbians supported the

 

war-effort through jobs such as ambulance driving, where they met other women
who shared their social and sexual interests. American women were much less
directly involved in the war. However, the war had an indirect impact on the
trend toward sexual experimentation: "In the midst of women's Freudian
enlightenment about the putative power of sexual drives, two million men were
sent overseas and many more were called away from home for the war effort. It
has been speculated that women turning to each other faute de mieux, found
they liked sex with other women just fine" (Faderrnan 64).

Radclyffe Hall was forced to wage a legal battle in England over The Well of
Loneliness (ironically argued in the same courtroom where Oscar Wilde was
convicted of sodomy). The novel was published in the United States in 1928,
and immediately "became a huge succes de scandale" (Faderrnan 65). In
America, even Hemingway portrayed characters who might be (or were)
lesbians. The "boyish" Brett Ashley in The Son Also Rises (1926) is thought to
be based on Djuna Barnes, who made no secret of her sexual orientation.
Writing in the Ladies Almanack in 1928, Barnes declared, "In my day l was a
Pioneer and a Menace" (Faderrnan 62). Hemingway was more explicit in A
Farewell to Arms (1929), where Catherine Barkley's nurse friend Fergie is in love
with her. Similarly, in the short story, "The Sea Change," a woman tries to
explain her sexual involvement with another woman to a male friend. Sherwood
Anderson also portrayed American women "experimenting" with lesbianism in his

46

novels Poor White (1920) and W (1925).

On Broadway, love between women was praised by critics, applauded by
audiences, and vilified by proponents of the existing social order. In October
1926, The Captive, a "much praised 'highbrow' French import" by Edouard
Bourdet opened to critical acclaim and standing-room-only houses. Emily Wortis
Leider wryly notes that the star of The Captive, Helen Menken (married to
upcoming actor Humphrey Bogart), "played her role in exceedingly white
makeup, to heighten her character's unnaturalness" (156). A former president of
the Colonial Dames of America labeled the lesbian-themed play "an affront to
American womanhood" (156).

On February 9, 1927, the headlines of the New York Herald Tribune
proclaimed: THREE SHOWS HALTED, ACTORS ARRESTED IN CLEAN-UP OF
STAGE (Leider 155). The targets of the Broadway clean up were The Captive,
The Virgin Men (a "lightweight comedy" about the attempted seduction of a Yale
undergraduate, which was saved from closing by the scandal), and a play
irreverently entitled m, starring a former vaudevillian named Mae West. The
tremendous impact the star of Sex had on American culture could only have
happened in the wake of modernism. Of all performers, West was the most
outspoken (and outrageous) in repudiating repression; like the modernist writers,
she understood the power of gesture and word, and above all, she embodied
Modris Ekstein's assertion that modernism had irretrievably blurred the lines
between life and art. When George Davis proclaimed West "the greatest female
- impersonator of all time," she confessed that she was indignant at first, but later

47

decided, "I guess he meant it as a compliment and I can kind of see what he
meant, I guess, I lived like a man, in some ways-decided what I wanted and went
after it" (Leider 159).

For many women, living "like a man" and going after what they wanted
meant flaunting their defiance of heterosexuality as well as other social
conventions. Faderman reports that:

By 1922, as Gertrude Stein's "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene"
indicates, such women were already calling themselves "gay" as
homosexual men were. But whether they identified as "gay" or
were "just exploring," those who wanted to experience the public
manifestations of lesbianism looked for recently emerged enclaves
in America. The era saw the emergence of little areas of
sophistication or places where a laissez-faire "morality" was
encouraged, such as Harlem and Greenwich Village, which
seemed to provide an arena in which like-minded cohorts could
pretend, at least, that the 19203 was a decade of true sexual
rebellion and freedom (67).

Born on June 19, 1856, Elisabeth Marbury could have been grandmother to
the "flaming youth" who represented the Jazz Age in the popular mind. Alfred
Allan Lewis emphasizes that, Bessy Marbury and Elsie de Wolfe "belonged to
that generation of women who were born and became adults during the reign of
Victoria" (xii). Indeed, in 1885, when the Criminal Law Amendment Act decreed
consensual sex between male adults an illegal act, one of Queen Victoria's

48

ministers remarked that there was no reference to acts of "gross indecency"
between adult females. Her Majesty is said to have answered curtly, "No woman
would do that" (Lewis 180). It was during this time that Marbury and de Wolfe
set up housekeeping together in 1887. The two women were known as "the
bachelorettes," a term devoid of sexual connotation. To their own peers, they
were "devoted companions"; to subsequent generations, "they would become a
sapphic legend" (Lewis xiii). Unlike Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Marbury
and de Wolfe never flaunted the sexual nature of their relationship, nor did they
confess the details of their intimate life to friends. To Lewis, the exact nature of
their relationship is unimportant. The important thing is that, "Elisabeth and Elsie
loved each other and, for more than thirty years, had a rare camaraderie in which
they commingled on every level that was significant to them" (xiii).

In aggressively pursuing a career as a theatrical agent, Marbury
unquestionably defied the expectations of her Victorian upbringing. Oscar Wilde
was one of her most successful clients and he had helped de Wolfe in her first
career as an actress, and later, in fashioning her exquisite taste as a decorator.
Both women gave Wilde scant mention in their memoirs, and Lewis proposes
that both had been somewhat traumatized by the circumstances of his downfall.
At the time, Marbury made it clear that her sympathies were with Wilde. When
George Alexander closed his production of The lmportang of Being Eemest,
Marbury unleashed her scorn on the actor-manager for his cowardice: "He
lacked the courage to continue, for like many others he was afraid of public
opinion and dared not be classed with the few friends who stood loyally by Wilde

49

even in his darkest moments" (Lewis 182). At the same time, Lewis notes that
no matter how strong her moral convictions, Marbury was foremost a
businesswoman: "Personal disapproval was not a bar to her doing business,
any more than it would have been for a Morgan, Frohman, Vanderbilt, or any
other male entrepreneur" (182). While expressing her contempt for Alexander,
she was negotiating with him to produce MW.

Like her male counterparts, Marbury kept her professional dealings distinct
from her personal feelings, as the incident with Alexander shows. However,
some of the attitudes she expressed publicly clearly reveal contradictions
between the lifestyle she chose and the one she was brought up to value.
Initially, she opposed suffrage for women. When the vote was won, she was
nominated as a New York State Democratic National Committeewoman in 1920.
A woman's group fought albeit unsuccessfully to have her replaced (Strum 26).
At the height of her career she expressed the extremely traditional view that,
"There is only one real success for a woman. That is to marry happily and have
children and a home" (Strum 26-27). Whether she was expressing a real or
imagined personal longing or simply did not identify with the concept of "woman"
is a matter of conjecture. Marbury is consistently described as having a sharp,
intellectual, "masculine" mind and a deceptively matronly appearance. As
described by Strum:

She was . . . "grandmotherly" in an era when masculine women
were flaunting their masculinity a la Gertrude Stein and Willa
Cather. Elisabeth Marbury dressed conservatively, after the

50

women's fashion of the time, in dark high-necked, long-sleeved
dresses and little hats (28).

If Marbury differed from Stein in her dress and demeanor and rejection of
overt gender transgression, the two shared an affinity for surrounding
themselves with the brilliant minds of the day. As an agent, Marbury considered
it her duty to serve the best interests of her clients, however, her relationship to
O'Neill suggests that her cultivation of her clientele extended beyond
professional bounds. Having O'Neill as a guest was a plum for any ambitious
hostess or host. By the mid-19203, name was synonymous with the latest
theatrical fare. Gorham Munson recalls:

To the theater Eugene O'Neill was bringing new life. My generation
saluted The Emperor Jones as a minor classic in modern drama,
and we ranked The Heirv Ag as a powerful fable of alienation. In
1924 we were positive that Desire Under the Elms was the work of
an arrived playwright who could be ranked with such playwrights as
Hauptmann, Sudermann, Strindberg, Andreyev. The American
theater, we knew, was at last grown up (291-292).

Marbury had invited the O'Neills to tea and extended an invitation to
Carlotta to sip tea, pour, and help with conversation. Marbury complained that
the O'Neills were very difficult to entertain. "He never opens his mouth, and his
wife never shuts hers" (Gelb 12). Carlotta recalled a dreadful occasion where
Agnes had been particularly annoying. Agnes was a free spirit and former
habitué of Greenwich Village; a true 1920's bohemian, she felt that no topic was

51

taboo and presumed that her conversation partners shared her philosophy. The
moment they met, Agnes exclaimed: "Oh, yge are Carlotta Monterey! I've been
we_nti_ng to meet you" (Gelb 12). She then proceeded to qUiz Carlotta
relentlessly, about her sex life. Carlotta was aware "there had been a good deal
of rather unpleasant publicity in the newspapers about my divorce from Ralph
Barton," and saw Agnes' behavior as, "Really, such bad taste" (Gelb 12).
Carlotta had actually met Eugene once before, on opening night of The
Haim Ape. He had paid her little attention, and she still remembered the slight.
Carlotta had not been his choice to play Mildred Douglas, and he barely
acknowledged her. At this second introduction she reminded him of his bad
manners:
You're the rudest man I've ever met. When I went into that play of
yours, I didn't want to. I had just finished one thing and wanted to
go out to California and see my mother and daughter. But Hoppy
(Arthur Hopkins) kept after me, so I did it, with hardly a rehearsal,
and you never had the decency to thank me (Sheaffer 216).
O'Neill hastened to explain away his seemingly abrupt manner. When they
first met, he was understandably preoccupied. His mother had died February 28,
1922, and her body reached New York on the same evening Ape opened. His
brother, Jamie, was responsible for tending to her remains. According to Saxe
Commins, O'Neill's editor and friend, "they found Jim in a drunken stupor,
incoherent, almost unconscious, and with difficulty they located the mother's
coffin" (Commins 22). Carlotta became more sympathetic as O'Neill related his

52

story. The year 1922 had been a difficult one for him. He had met, for the first
time, Eugene Jr., the son from his brief first marriage to Kathleen Jenkins. His
second marriage to Agnes Boulton was foundering, and his brother was
deliberately drinking himself to death.

Carlotta was charmed by O'Neill's candor and guileless charm. Marbury
asked Carlotta to take him down to the bathhouse for a swim, an incident
Carlotta remembered with great humor. Her icy demeanor began to melt. In her
words: 'Well, he went to the bathhouse and the only suit he could find was a
woman's. Oh, my, it was the most ridiculous thing; it was much too large for
him, but that didn't seem to bother him-he wanted his swim. I thought to myself,
he can't be so stuck on himself if he'd do something like that" (Sheaffer 216).

On this meeting, Carlotta had made a distinct impression. O'Neill, wrote in
his Work Diaty on July 15th, in the boxed configuration he saved for noteworthy
occasions: "Met Carlotta Monterey 1st time since a moment's introduction at
"Hairy Ape" rehearsals!" And again, on July 23rd, squared off, "See Carlotta
again!"

Although Carlotta insisted to Van Vechten that Barton had not loved her for
some time, he was still sending her impassioned correspondence at the time she
met O'Neill at Belgrade Lakes. He inundated her with letters and telegrams,
pleading for reconciliation. In May, Carlotta received two telegrams:

MISS YOU CRUELLY LIFE A MESS WITHOUT YOU RALPH
COULD ANYTHING INDUCE YOU FORGET FORGIVE REJOIN

53

ME HERE NEXT BOAT MISS YOU NEED YOU LOVE YOU
RALPH
Then on May 28th 1926, Barton wrote a full-length letter with the same
supplicating tone:
I think I made a hideous mistake in letting you get away from me. I
am horribly afraid that the old nonsense about there being one
woman in the world for each man is not, after all, nonsense. I am
beginning to cringe under the thought that I need desperately what
was fine between us and that I can never find it again. This is what
you said would happen and I believe you were right. If it turns out
that you were, I don't think I want to live any more . . . I am not
worthy generally . . . My life in every way a mess without you. I
wish to heaven I had you back, hopeless as it seems. I can't write
anymore. I love you and I am certain that you love me and I wish
you would come here to met at once, forget, everything. Every
sane person we know would be delighted. As for me, I think I will
shoot myself with a French pistol. I don't like it at all without you.
Ralph.
Although Carlotta assumed the facade of a blithe spirit, she was unsettled.
She may have toyed with the idea of reconciliation at some point. Her letters
were destroyed and Barton's disturbed state of mind makes it difficult to discern
the real from his imaginings. A brief note found in his unpublished letters does
suggest that Carlotta may have had second thoughts:

54

l have read over six letters of yours and destroyed them. They tore
me to pieces, but I am going to bed happy. Our separation was as
you say a 'cheap, Greenwich Village act' Good night, my old lady.
You are wrapped all round me. I love you. Ralph

Barton continued to foster hopes as of his letter to Carlotta on July 14:
Dear Old Lady:
I wish you had obeyed that impulse but perhaps it will be better to
do it not so impulsively. The next time will be the marriageuwe
have had our love affair.

The day she received this declaration, Carlotta met O'Neill once again.
Psychotherapy at the time was primitive in its knowledge of bipolar depression,
and Carlotta was probably ignorant of the fragility of Barton's mental condition
and of the danger of encouraging what would inevitably be false hopes. A
telegram sent on July 19'" suggests that Carlotta had evoked some sense of
optimism about their relationship:

LIFE NOT MESS LIFE BEAUTIFUL SHADE YOUR EYES FROM A
SECOND ACT FOOTLIGHTS AND HAVE LOOK AT IT WILL YOU
MARRY ME RALPH

Again on July 29th, Barton wrote a heartbreaking letter, revealing his
misplaced optimism, which Carlotta, no doubt, encouraged:

What an imbecile I was—but what a good husband I shall make you
after this! We are coming together again-we have never been
apart. Then you will feel what I am trying to say now. It will be far

55

better than it ever could have been before.

This was Barton's last letter to Carlotta for almost five years. She sent him
a telegram the same day telling him it would never be. On July 28th, Barton's
final telegram to her read: "ALRIGHT, BUT WE WILL NEVER BE HAPPY
APART WRITING LOVE RALPH."

Carlotta ultimately replaced Ralph Barton with an equally needy lover,
Eugene O'Neill. In Robert M. Crunden's description, O'Neill may not have had a
diagnosable psychiatric disorder like Barton, but he was hardly a paragon of
emotional health:

Of all the alienated outcasts who made up the ranks of American
modernism, no one was so extreme a case as O'Neill; he was also
the most important figure for whom Roman Catholicism provided
cultural roots and a frame of reference against which a person
could rebel . . . O'Neill seemed to have been born into a world
fraught with religious, sexual, and social friction, one where he had
no fixed place (401).

O'Neill's father had been a "hard-drinking, sexually rapacious Irish
immigrant actor," and his mother a "genteel lace-curtain Irish-American wife,
who, feeling betrayed and declassed by the life she had inadvertently chosen . . .
took refuge in morphine" (Crunden 401). For years, O'Neill was unable to
comprehend "why this person, on whom he was so dependent, behaved in such
a disoriented way" (401). Rather than attempt to bring up her son in an unstable
environment, Ella O'Neill sent him to two Catholic boarding schools, a period the

56

playwright would later recall as his "rigid Christian exile". During his boarding
school years, O'Neill responded to his surroundings as many introspective young
people would do: he withdrew. As he matured, he grew increasingly alienated,
"and his alienation fed directly into the originality of his art, just as it had done for
Pound, Stein, and the rest" (Crunden 402).

One of the consequences of O'Neill's alienation from his classmates as
boarding school was that even in adulthood, he had difficulty relating to children
(Crunden 402). The living arrangements in Maine exacerbated his lack of ease
around children and made it almost impossible for the playwright to work. The
household was rife with noise and distraction. In addition to his own two
toddlers, he housed Eugene Jr., and Barbara Burton, Agnes' daughter from a
previous marriage. Not surprisingly, he blamed them for ongoing frustrations,
declaring, "I could do with less progeny about, for I was never cut out seemingly,
for pater families and children in squads, even when indubitably my own, tend to
get my goat" (Sheaffer 213). At Marbury's suggestion, O'Neill built a one-room
Iean-to a good distance from the lodge. In relative solitude, his work could
progress undisturbed, but the summer was still ruffling his nerves. Commenting
on the situation, Florence Reed, a friend, recalled: "Agnes' house always
seemed to smell of diapers and lamb stew, and there was always a lot of noise
from the kids. It drove O'Neill almost out of his mind" (Gelb and Gelb 617).

O'Neill's marriage was a great source of conflict, and the conflict reflected
the old order against the modern age, the "patriarchal impulse" against the
"equally powerful matriarchal thrust" as symbolized by Freud and Stein. A

57

Provincetown acquaintance, Eben Given, characterized O'Neill's relationship with

Agnes:
Agnes thought she was as much entitled to live her sort of life as
O'Neill was to live his; O'Neill considered this outrageous. He
wanted to be coddled, waited upon, and obeyed; he believed the
importance of his work entitled him to such deference. More than
anything else, he wanted Agnes to find her exclusive reason for
existence in him and his work. He was shattered at each new
indication that Agnes was not as single-minded as he wished her to
be (Gelb and Gelb 517).

At the same time, O'Neill's rejection of children and his desire to be the
exclusive focus of a woman's life does not conform to the patriarchal notion of
the traditional family. Part of a Long Story, Agnes's poignant memoir of her
courtship and marriage to O'Neill, ends with a telling account of the birth of their
son, Shane. Agnes wondered as Eugene pulled up a chair, and said hesitantly:
"It'll be u_s_ still . . . from now on Us Alone . . . but the three of us . . . A sort of Holy
Trinity, eh Shane?" (Boulton 331). Shortly, thereafter, Shane's crib was
banished to the basement to muffle his intrusive cries.

Carlotta Monterey represented a sharp contrast to Agnes Boulton O'Neill.
Whereas Agnes was described as "slovenly," Carlotta was impeccable.

Florence Reed, who owned a beachfront house not far from the O'Neill
compound, observed Carlotta and her penchant for order: "She was miraculously
immaculate, and a wonderful housekeeper. There was nobody like her" (Gelb

58

and Gelb 616). She had obviously inherited her mother's meticulous sensibility.
O'Neill was attracted to Carlotta's sense of style and decorum, and in Miss
Marbury's guest, he saw an antidote for his domestic woes. Carlotta saw a
vulnerability in the playwright that others took for sardonic self-assurance.
Instinctively, she capitalized on his dependency and initial infatuation. If O'Neill
wanted a woman who would "find her exclusive reason for existence in him and
his work," Carlotta wanted to be the exclusive focus of a successful man, and
she set herself to the task of ensuring that O'Neill found her essential to him.

The summer people of Belgrade Lakes were well aware of the romantic
intrigue being played out in their midst. Florence Reed and her husband
Malcolm Vlfilliams attended several Informal gatherings that summer, a few
including both Eugene and Carlotta. To Williams, O'Neill was "absolutely the
most withdrawn person I've ever known. People would drop by while he was
sitting on the porch, and held remain in the corner, wet bathing suit, teacup
shakingnyou couldn't make him one of us" (Sheaffer 229). One day while O'Neill
was visiting the couple, Carlotta stopped by with some friends. After they left,
Vlfilliams remarked that Carlotta had pointedly tried to draw out the reticent
playwright. Williams also noted that Carlotta had left a scarf behind. When his
wife told him that she would have their maid return it the next day, Williams
astutely replied: "Don't bother, she won't thank you for it. She'll be back for it
herself tomorrow, when Gene is here" (Sheaffer 229).

Carlotta awarded O'Neill the undivided attention he craved. In a letter to
Agnes dated December 29, 1927, O'Neill wrote, "Excuse me for speaking so

59

much about my plays. I realize it's tactless on my part. It's quite evident to me
that you're not interested since you never mention them" (Commins xvii). With
Carlotta, there would never be need for such apology. Like her neighbors,
Agnes was not oblivious to the attraction between Eugene and Carlotta,
however, she was initially unconcerned:
Nothing was happening between them. I didn't worry about her
because she didn't seem smart enough for him. I remember her
telling us that she had read all of De Maupassant and how much
she loved his stories—Gene and I just looked at one another. It
seemed to me he was more amused by her than anything else. But
I suddenly remember something he said-l guess this was after he
began to have some feeling about her, He said that she had eyes
like his mother's (Sheaffer 217).

With a child's insight, Agnes' daughter, who had been eleven years old in
the summer of 1926, sensed what her mother did not. Years later, Barbara
Burton remembered her feelings:

I recall that at the end of the summer in Maine my mother gave me
a five dollar gold piece and a box of candy and that I felt something
sad about our parting which was beyond the sadness of saying
goodbye. Looking back now I realize that the summer was
probably the beginning of the end, so far as my mother's marriage
to O'Neill was concerned. I recall a handsome, dark-haired woman
coming to swim there once and that she wore a boyish, white,

60

wool-knit bathing suit, with no overskirt, such as bathing suits
usually had at the time. I felt there was something very glamorous
about this woman, who, in retrospect, I know as Carlotta Monterey
(Gelb and Gelb 617).

The summer romance continued on into the fall, when Carlotta moved back
to New York and O'Neill visited her there. His emotional need evolved into an
all-consuming desire, a hallmark of his successful relationships:

All of his important friendshipsuas with Kenneth Macgowan and
George Jean Nathan-as well as his marriage to Carlotta Monterey
were based partly on a dependence, an unspoken request to be
looked after and cared for. However outgoing he sometimes
appeared, when he had been writing, he was not always aware of
those around him (Commins xiv).

Another associate, Elizabeth Sergeant, felt that "Carlotta would bring more
order into Gene's life, would make things easier for him. He had to live in a
special, very isolated way, he had to work every day, and Carlotta, I thought
would do her utmost to help him" (Sheaffer 282).

Carlotta had plans for a trip to Baden-Baden, late in September 1926.
Carlotta's actions frequently had dual motives, and the visit to the famous spa
was more than therapeutic: it was a shrewd tactical move. Carlotta had a
definite plan in mind. As reported by Barbara Gelb "Staying out of touch for a
few months worked wonders! By November, he was mine. We spent Christmas
and New Year's together. By then he was in rehearsal for Strange lnterlgde"

61

(21 ).

Carlotta often went with O'Neill to public rehearsals for M. At the
time of the opening, they were finalizing plans for plans for an "escape." The
couple had decided to sail for England and not return until they were married.
On the day of departure, Carlotta boarded the ship early so as not to arouse
suspicion. Waiting impatiently for Eugene, she began to be concerned. There
had already been several blasts of the ship's whistle. When he finally arrived, all
he said was "Hello, here I am." He proceeded to look out a porthole, and with
tears streaming down his face he confessed, "It's a terrible thing, to leave behind
so many you love, everything that means anything to you." "Well," Carlotta said
to herself, "You've let yourself in for it this time. I could have strangled him!"
(Sheaffer 292).

O'Neill's actions prior to his divorce from Agnes show that Carlotta was not
the only schemer in the pair. O'Neill was perennially unsure of his success and
his marriage to Agnes was fraught with arguments over money. Sheaffer
astutely acknowledges that, "Carlotta's annuity seems, indeed, to have been no
small part of her attraction for him" (299). If Agnes refused to grant him a
divorce, O'Neill told critic Kenneth Macgowan confidently that he could
"eventually starve her into it" (299). The ploy would take some time but
ultimately would work:

It would, of course, entail sacrifices. I'd have to keep my plays to

myself for a few years . . . As far as finances go, I can hold out

indefinitely. I've gathered a stake together over here, but quite
62

outside of that Carlotta has enough income to keep us both in very
decent comfort over here [Bermuda] where living is cheap
(Sheaffer 299).
At the time, O'Neill had no premonition that W would net him a
very substantial sum of money.
If O'Neill was insecure about his professional success, Carlotta was unsure
of her success in securing the playwright for herself. Upon their departure for a
trip abroad in February 1928, Carlotta recorded her anguish in her diary:
We leave New York on the Berengaria (in the afternoon) for
England.--Papa brings me flowers and comes to see me off—I have
my personal maid with me-in a large cabin with a private bath.
Harrison Tweed on the boat, too. Am nervous, afraid (of what I
don't know) and feel terribly alone! As the boat is leaving Gene
arrives looking as I feel! He looks out the porthole at the part of
New York he used to know so well in his youth. ls emotionally
disturbed as l amufinally, he takes me in his arms, holds me very
close—says, 'I love you'-kisses me on the forehead and leaves.
Her entry the following day hardly suggests that her apprehension was
relieved:
Gene and I meet for luncheon, tea and dinner. Are both nervous
and 'shaky'I—But, are very glad to be out of New York-the ship is
rolling-cold and damp—to me everything has an unreal quality—not

too pleasant! God help us both!

63

Carlotta reveals in her journal a pastiche of euphoria, guilt, depression,
loneliness, anger, love, and hate for both partners and in particular for Carlotta,
extreme anxiety. She was acutely aware that her status as O'Neill's "live-in
lover" was precarious. She compensated for her insecurities with meticulous (if
not maniacal) attention to herself and the object of her adulation. Once firmly
established as O'Neill's mistress, she was convinced that she alone could bring
out a human side of Eugene that most people could not. She wrote on February
24,1928:

Gene, at times, like a child, so astonished being gusto; and not
asked for anything in return. From his reaction to common
gracious courtesy I don't think he has experienced much general
treatment in his life. It is good for him—shows him there are other
sides of the picture—and that being polite, kind and unselfish does
not mean you cannot love deeply—and suffer the tonnents of the
damned for the beloved!

In addition to being the key to O'Neill's emotional life, Carlotta wanted to be
central in the creative process as well. She saw herself as an integral part, a
true collaborator in the O'Neillian oeuvre. O'Neill's private thoughts were made
public in the Selected Letters of Eugene O'Neill. As he was finishing first draft of
Interlude in 1927, Carlotta asked if she was featured in the work. His answer
was characteristically ambiguous:

No, there is nothing of us in it—at least, it was all planned out even
before we met at Belgrade . . . This whole play is I, my experience,

64

you might say, but the characters in it individually more closely
resemble in any, many men I have known. There is a lot of you in
the woman, I think (come to think of it) and yet she is wholly unlike
you. And there you are (Bogard and Bryer 235).

Carlotta may have been responsible for a more sympathetic feeling toward
his female characters: O'Neill now posits "that the woman is the God-force, and
in finding her, the man can achieve a sense of belonging he can obtain nowhere
else in life . . . her possessive greed for his love provides his means of
belonging" (Bogard 300). Although "possessive greed" does not sound like a
compliment, Commins recognized that even his friendships with men like
Kenneth Macgowan and George Jean Nathan were characterized by a type of
dependence on people he saw as needing him. In the play, Nina Leeds
represents the source of life and well being for the men. The men are attracted
to her and find comfort in her, much as O'Neill had turned to Carlotta. In a letter
to Carlotta, O'Neill echoed this idea: was as "if your presence became suddenly
apparent and I could hear your voice saying that everything will come out as we
wish it—And now I am full of faith again" (Bogard and Bryer 217).

Carlotta renewed a sense of faith in the Catholic rebel as his divorce from
Agnes turned out to be protracted and rancorous. Agnes refused to file for
months. The couple had signed a prenuptial agreement with an "escape clause"
if either person fell out of love. However, with two children and a shaky financial
future, Agnes was far less liberated than she had been in her heyday in
Greenwich Village. Edgy about the slow resolution and given the Black Irish

65

moods he had inherited from his father, O'Neill was not always the best
companion. His guilt and depression deepened, while Carlotta perpetually
attempted to lighten his mood. In this state, they toured London, Paris, the Loire,
Touraine, Biarritz, eventually renting a villa at Guethray.

At Villa Marguerite Carlotta and Eugene played at housekeeping. Fearful of
scandal and the prying eyes of the press, O'Neill sent his address to only his
closest friends. For O'Neill the master playwright, the situation with Carlotta was
a potential bombshell. Carlotta herself was livid and Agnes was the source of
her wrath. In a letter to Commins, on August 9,1928, she railed:

I listen to tales of debts, confusions, and indecisions and really I
can't understand such half wittedness! My parents would have had
me locked up for weak mindedness had I ever seemed so
uncertain of my desires and ways and means!-Oh-well,-someday
there will be mnand Gene and I will be able to take each other
by the hand and go out into the sunlight and forget the 'miasma' of
the past! (Commins 36-37).

Carlotta had not yet succeeded in her goal of dissolving the marriage
completely but she did succeed in surpassing her predecessor in the goal of
making O'Neill happy. In a letter to Kenneth Macgowan dated February 27,
1928, O'Neill was ebullient:

I won't bore you be telling you again how happy and alive I am.
Carlotta is marvelous. I really feel as I had never been in love

before. Even in the matter of sex where I have had, God knows,

66

sufficient experience hither & yon in the past. I have come to the
conclusion that I never even dreamed of what it could be in the way
of physical & spiritual expression before. This is a true revelation

to me! (Bogard and Bryer 173).

Although O'Neill undoubtedly had "sufficient experience" in sexual realm,

Sheaffer, in O'Neill: Son e_nd Playwright, suggests that O'Neill's obsession with

"fallen women" in his plays derives from a "traumatic" sexual initiation combined

with a Catholic upbringing in a uniquely dysfunctional home. His brother Jamie

once claimed that, "Gene learned sin more easily than other people. I made it

easy for him" (101). However, despite his uninhibited pursuit of sexual pleasure,

O'Neill was a product of his Catholic indoctrination, and a family in which his

"lace curtain" Irish mother retreated from sexuality (indeed all feeling) in drugs.

Corwin Willson, O'Neill's classmate at Harvard recalled that Gene invariably

told stories of varied experiences with "sexually aggressive nymphomaniacs" and

prostitutes:

But what was significant about those exciting experiences of
Gene's was his own passive role in them. It is my belief that
Gene's abundance of early experiences with women in ways that
psychically were without beauty and were actually degrading
colored his entire attitude. His attitude toward women much
resembled the indignant cry of the man who complained, "She
gave me the clap." He never discussed homosexuality with me but
he sure was hipped on what over-amorous women can do to a

67

rather passive man (Alexander 85).

O'Neill confided in Carlotta about his degrading sexual initiation. Jamie
decided it was time his brother "became a man" and took him to a seedy brothel.
The memory was still painful, Carlotta related:

The girls were such terrible creatures they forced whiskey down his
throat, with Jamie helping them, and they tore off his clothes—he
was fighting them. He wasn't ready for that. He was reading a lot
of poetry in those days. But later he made himself at home in
them, the whorehouses (Sheaffer. . . Playwright 101).

O'Neill's introduction to sex emerges in Strange Interlude, as writer Charlie
Marsden reminisces about a suspiciously similar event that he undertook at
sixteen on a dare from his friends. Doris Alexander attributes the dichotomy
between love and sex that repeatedly occurs in O'Neill's plays to his early
experiences, carnal and familial: "For Eugene, sex (particularly as represented
by a prostitute) became a symbol of the revolt from love—the pure love he had
felt for his mother—and of a spiritual violation, a rape" (86). Because "he
associates love with the mother--with the pgre love for the motheruso his women
often have to undergo a kind of spiritual identification with the mother before his
heroes can accept their love" (86). Carlotta's professed dedication to O'Neill,
and her willingness to make him the focal point of her life as Agnes would not,
represents an idealized form of maternal love that O'Neill could never have
received from a mother who took refuge in drugs.

O'Neill's mother had been numbed by narcotics and inhibitions whereas

68

Carlotta by her own admission was a creature of extremes. O'Neill himself was a
contradiction. Doris Alexander views the rebellious persona O'Neill assumed in
his youth as driven by dual needs for freedom and revenge: "freedom from the
anxiety that had corroded his love for his parents after his exile to Mount Saint
\fincenturevenge for all the suffering his love had caused him" (87). His own
personality, by all accounts, expressed the duality of good and evil that
characterized his plays. Agnes described the Mephistophelean side as "a
strange being who was not the real Gene at all." Carlotta described a "peculiar
mixture" that could be gentle and childlike, but could instantly transform itself and
become "vicious, like a rattlesnake" (Alexander 89).

On a cruise to the Orient in the autumn of 1928, both sides of O'Neill came
out in full power. First plagued by illness, there followed a calamitous drinking
spree in Shanghai; after an argument, O'Neill hit Carlotta and called her a whore.
She checked out of their hotel and he checked into the hospital. Mortified, he
begged her to forgive him but his contrition was followed by a drinking binge.
O'Neill's behavior exemplified Alexander's depiction of a person who consciously
or unconsciously engages in guilt-provoking behavior and then indulges in guilt.
Carlotta responded by leaving him surprised and miserable and alone in his
stateroom on the SS Coblenz. On New Year's Day 1929 she booked passage on
the SS President Monroe. O'Neill besieged her with telegraphed messages:

I AM HALF MAD WITH UTTER LONELINESS WITHOUT

FRIENDS, PLANS OR HOPES . . . I LOVE YOU . . . THE

DOCTOR HAS MY PROMISE AND WILL KEEP IT. . . OF
69

COURSE I WANT YOU AND NEED YOU AS MUCH AS I LOVE
YOU . . . FORGET THE PAST AND START BUILDING SOLIDLY
FOR THE FUTURE . . . (Bogard and Bryer 320-322).

They were reunited in Port Said. Second Officer George W Stedman,

aboard the Monroe recalled it as quite a dramatic reconciliation:

 

Their reunion was a combination of name-calling, insults, jumping
down, screeching, hair-pulling, stamping feet, wrestling and finally
winding up in a passionate embrace smothering each other with
kisses and hugs. From then on they were like a couple of lovebirds
(Sheaffer 322).

They finally decided to settle in Touraine, where they found a forty-five-
room chateau named "Le Plessis." Carlotta reflected her mother's legacy in
describing her search, discovery, and sentiments about Le Plessis in her April
17, 1929 journal entry:

Looking for just that right chateau . . . some too grand, some too
run down—My man must have a clean kitchen for his fooduand he
must be warm and comfortable and loved—so he can M! We
see Le Plessis just right! Lovely stone walls, romantic tourettes, no
electricity, no baths (as Americans know them), no heat, but
fireplaces, only 'one' toilet so called 'modem')-(lt proved to be
otherwise) for 45 rooms! Being a Tory, a romantic woman-l Lev—ed
this place. And strangely enough, so did Gene.

They moved into Le Plessis in early June. According to Sheaffer, Carlotta

70

loved the continental life and its aura of Old World aristocracy. She had the
outward trappings of respectability but she was still not married to O'Neill. She
mused in her diary in July 1929: "Monogrammed china arrives from Paris—and
we're not even married! Is the lady too impatient?!" Shortly before their actual
marriage she was still worried: "Gene talks to me very sweetly, and very
seriously of our marriage—it is to be for each other until death! T_ha_i_i_k_Gg_d_. . . I
tremble when I hear thisucan that mean—filly, that this 18 months of
humiliation, embarrassment and heart-ache is over!" On July 3rd, in the
customary boxed-in style, O'Neill's answer appeared in his own journal: "Cable
that Reno granted divorce yesterday! At last, thank God! Cheers!"

On July 22, 1929, Carlotta got her wish to become the wife of the great
playwright Eugene O'Neill. She never forgot the experience that preceded it: "I
was crucified for eighteen months nursing him body, soul and mindubeing called
a harlot and other names-by the so-called friends of Gene's—while they were
sympathizing with the 'dear little woman' who had been left behind" (Bogard and
Bryer 196). The next day, after a rainy drive from Paris back to Le Plessis,
Carlotta underlined in diary, "Mr. and Mrs. Eugene O'Neill At Home."

Visitors to the O'Neill home during this period vividly recalled Carlotta's
positive effect on the somber artist. Dr. Alvin L. Barach, who had treated Eugene
in New York, observed that:

Carlotta laughed a great deal and obviously enjoyed herself. . .
When the conversation would take a serious turn she would excuse
herself . . . It seemed clear that she didn't share O'Neill's interest in

71

the big questions. She was gay and lighthearted, and I thought

O'Neill loved in her the gaiety he lacked or had repressed in himself

(Sheaffer 359).

Barach's first glimpse of her in driving up to Le Plessis was: "Carlotta, in a
gold Grecian-style dress, draped against a post of the driveway" (Sheaffer 359).
Other visitors saw a more prosaic side of the famous couple. Ward Morehouse,
lamenting the maze of transportation routes he had to take to get to the house,
reported in the New York Su_n on May 14, 1930, that the playwright had no
intention of permanently settling in France. When he finally found them, "They
were standing at the doorway, he was clad in a heavy sweater and she was trim
and smart in Parisian sports clothes, when the chauffeur whirled through the
driveway in Carlotta's magnificent French car." O'Neill extended his hand,
grinning, and assured him that, "we're coming back. And I may even get there
for rehearsals" (Estrin 107).
They were basking in the success of Strange Interlude when Cm, a

play O'Neill completed during the long, drawn-out conflict with Agnes, proved a
failure. The peculiar symbiosis that marked the relationship of O'Neill and
Carlotta emerged in a formal apology he wrote her on December 4, 1929:

You are my life! And you must feel that even my work is a part of

you too since it is the expression of the I who am you! If I am

worried about it, over-anxious, it is because I do so want to justify

myself in your eyes, to make you proud of me, to make you see

how much you have done for me! I feel Mew, in a sense,

72

wronged us-not because critics panned it, that means nothing,
they have panned some of my best stuff, but because I felt myself
it was a step back, not a step forward, and so did not represent
what you are to me (Hallfrnann 185).

While Cmme was disastrous, O'Neill's next play would vindicate his
talent. As early as April 1926, O'Neill wrote in his Work Diary: "Germ idea use
Greek Tragedy plot in modern settingnmade note." Ultimately, the Greek theme
evolved into Mourning Becomes Electre. Three years later, O'Neill confided the
idea to Carlotta; "This will be your play!"

Amazingly, O'Neill never mentioned the stock market crash in his working
diary. The theatre district in New York was dubbed the "Groaning Forties" as
shows closed nightly and theaters, nightclubs, speakeasies, and fell in the
aftermath of "Black Tuesday" (Leider 200). According to Travis Bogard, in
Contour In Tm, "O'Neill had a tendency to look at life without reference to a
society, to tell his story only in terms of personality" (Bogard 306). In contrast,
ever practical—Carlotta was very aware of the financial crisis.

Stephen Black has written a combination biographical/analytical work:
EgLene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy, and he studied the relationship
between O'Neill and Carlotta. It would be almost predictable that she would only
mention the Crash, but would take steps to mitigate financial damage. According
to Black: "Carlotta's diary refers several times to the stock market crash in late
October. Thanks to advice from Carlotta and Speyer, O'Neill made conservative
investments and came through the storm in fairly good shape" (Black 367).

73

O'Neill finished the final draft of Mourning Becomes Electra on April 9,
1931, and mailed it off to the Theatre Guild. Three weeks later, he and Carlotta
followed, ending their lives as expatriates as O'Neill had assured Ward

Morehouse they would.

74

WORKS CITED

Alexander, Doris. The Tempering of Eugene O'Neill. New York: Harcourt,
Brace, and World, 1962.

Barton, Ralph. Unpublished Letters. New Haven: Beinecke Library, Yale
University.

Black, Stephen A. flgene O'Nefl Beyond Mourning and Tragedy. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1999.

Bogard, Travis and Jackson Bryer. Selected Letters of Eugene C'Neill. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

Boulton, Agnes. Part of a Long Story. New York: Doubleday, 1958.

Commins, Dorothy. Love and Admiration ang Respect: The O'NeMommins
Correspondence. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1986.

Crunden, Robert M. American Salons: Encounters with European Modernism
1885—1917. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Estrin, Mark W., ed. Conversations with Eugene O'Neil_l. Jackson: University of
Mississippi Press, 1990.

Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers. Penguin Books, 1991.

Gallup, Donald. _Fflgeons on the Grenite. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1988.

Gelb, Barbara. My Gene. New York: Unpublished play, 1988.
Gelb, Arthur and Barbara Gelb. O'Neill. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

Halfinann, Ulrich. Eugene O'Neill: Comments on the Drama and the Theater.
Gunter Narr Verlag Tubingen, 1987.

Leider, Emily Wortis. Becoming Mae West. New York: Farrar, Straus, and
Geroux, 1977.

 

Lewis, Alfred Allan. Ladies and Not-So-Gentle Women. New York: Viking,
2000.

75

Monterey, Carlotta. Unpublished Diaries. New Haven: New Haven: Beinecke
Library, Yale University.

Munson, Gorham. The Awakening Twenties:w A Memoir-Histoty of Literaw
Period. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985.

O'Neill, Eugene. Work Diaw. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.

Sheaffer, Louis. O'Neill: Son and Playwright. Boston: Little Brown, and Co.,
1968.

Sheaffer, Louis. O'Neill: Son and Artist. Boston: Little Brown, and Co., 1973.

 

Strum, Rebecca W. Elisabeth Merbury. 1856-1933: Her Life end Work. New
York University, Unpublished doctoral dissertation, 1989.

76

Chapter Five
Relocations

1931 -1936

O'Neill had told Ward Morehouse, as they stood outside the chateau, "l
have not had any idea of living over here permanently. Nothing like that. No
nonsense such as renouncing America" (Estrin 107). He had pointedly used the
singular "I." Carlotta did not share his enthusiasm for returning to their
homeland. On May 8, 1931, the day before she sailed for the States, she
complained: "It seems we are always leaving some place and saying good-
byes." She had tried to cure O'Neill's wanderlust by creating a perfect
environment for his work, but he had never intended to stay abroad. By the end
of May 29, she was extremely dissatisfied with the move, writing, "I am at loose
ends-the tempo of living here is so different than it is in France! I feel a
stranger! Gene tries to pet me out of my mood" Again, on June 19, she
grumbled: "I wish he could relax a few months and forget moving for 2 or 3
months!"

Carlotta tried to find realization in her role as Mrs Eugene O'Neill, and by
her own accounts, she did. In a letter to Kenneth Macgowan, written in the early
1930's, she told him:

I am wife, mistress, housekeeper, secretary, friend 8. nurse so have
no time to worry about my personality being submerged or my
career being ruined. We were interested & amazed at the number

77

of women in New York, who are eating their hearts out to pe some
one-to be talked about-to be alluring! They are rotten wives &
bad mistresses & poor unhappy wretches (Bogard and Bryer 209).

Avowing her dedication, she assured him: "Being the type of old
fashioned female who thinks marriage really means something (if not get out of
it!) my great joy & work & thoughts are all here—(Bogard/Bryer 209).

Early in life, Carlotta had described herself as a person of extremes. At
the time, she was determined to pursue an acting career; now she was assuming
the role that would lead Alfred Allan Lewis to say, "Superficially worldly, Carlotta
was the most old-fashioned of women" (397). One may speculate whether
Carlotta was really expressing her "great joy" to Macgowan, or attempting to
reassure herself that she made the right choice. During the 19203, Jungian
psychiatrist and feminist Beatrice M. Hinkle sympathized with the "rotten wives &
bad mistresses & poor unhappy wretches" struggling to "be some one" in an

essay published in the Nation. Although she conceded that on the surface such

 

women might seem to be motivated by dissatisfaction in their personal lives, it
was a more positive choice than submerging themselves in the demands of
family life:
These modern women are engaged in a real creative effort even
though it may not be realized, for behind their stridency and revolt
lies the great inner meaning of woman's struggle with the forces of
convention and inertia. This is nothing less than the psychological
development of themselves as individuals, in contra-distinction to

78

the collective destiny that has exclusively dominated their lives
(Showalter 141).

Hinkle acknowledged that these women may not have fulfilled their life
goals (although she noted that few men or women ever achieve full self-
realization), but saw their attitude as "part of a great rolling tide which is to bring
birth to a new woman. This new woman will possess an individuality which will
enable her to stand by the side of man, strong and secure within herself"
(Showalter 141). Hinkle's meaning was that the new woman would not have to
fight for her individual will nor would she show the antagonism toward men that
many early feminists had. Carlotta may have believed, or tried to convince
herself, that she was so "strong and secure within herself" that making O'Neill
the focal point of her life would not negate her own sense of self. And in a
society where most women did not have careers, being the wife of a celebrity did
endow her with a distinctive status. However, Carlotta's personal revelations
suggest the assertion that she had "no time to wony about my personality being
submerged or my career being ruined" was not entirely true.

If Carlotta was happy to be thought of in relation to famous men, it was
definitely not in the headline that blared from the New Yorkfles on May 20,
1931: "Artist in Note Mourns Loss of Third Wife, Carlotta Monterey, Now Wed to
Eugene O'Neill." Ralph Barton had shot himself two days after the O'Neills
returned to New York.

O'Neill and Carlotta originally planned to reside in New York, and Carlotta
took out a three year lease on a sumptuous eight room duplex at 1095 Park

79

Avenue, immediately delving into her usual routine of renovation. At the same
time, they rented a house, Beacon Farm, in Northport, Long Island. Including Le
Plessis, they had leases on three separate residences. Carlotta was rapidly
becoming aware that her dreams of permanence were no more than illusion.
Mourning Becomes Electra opened in New York on October 26, 1931. It
received immediate critical acclaim and ran for five months and 150
performances, a good run for a serious play at a time when the Great
Depression left Broadway houses dark or shuttered. Carlotta had a special
interest in the play, which O'Neill had dedicated to her. He also inscribed his
finished manuscripts with a paean to Carlotta:
Your love, sustaining and comforting, as warm, secure sanctuary
for the man after the author's despairing solitude and inevitable
defeats, a victory of Iove-in-Iife-mother and wife and mistress and
friend! And Collaborator, Collaborator, I love you! (Gelb and Gelb
735).
This sentiment marks a radical change in O'Neill's attitude. Years earlier
he had complained to his friend, critic George Jean Nathan:
I wonder why the hell it is that people . . . always believe that every
artist's wife collaborated in his work and he couldn't have done it
without her companionship when more often he is driven to work to
escape from her? I'll be damned if! don't think it's the fool authors
themselves who are responsible for this myth, what with their
propitiatory dedications to their fraus stuck in the front of nearly

80

every book one comes across. (Maufort 123).

Carlotta reveled in O'Neill's apparent change of heart. He repeatedly
dedicated his work to Carlotta. She eventually compiled a book, Ipserjpflqrfi,
which includes O'Neill's numerous, loving, and often, wrenching "propitiatory
dedications." In fact, the inscriptions engraved in their wedding bands affirm
their affinity. On plain gold rings were etched the lines for O'Neill's play Cages
Laughed: "I am your laughter" was imprinted on Carlotta's band "and you are
mine" cut into Eugene's (Scheaffer 332). Perhaps because he was
characteristically somber, O'Neill considered laughter a spiritual, metaphysical
link with the material world.

The success of Mourning Becomes Electra left the O'Neills exhausted.
Ilka Chase had recommended the remote southern retreat of Sea Island,
Georgia for a brief getaway. The rustic landscape reminded them of Le Plessis
and they immediately bought a magnificent ocean front plot. In a especially
dedicated copy of Mourning Becomes Electra, Eugene wrote: "To Ilka Chase
who found our Blessed Isles for us, with the profoundest gratitude" (Gelb and
Gelb 759).

Carlotta surpassed her mother in her ability to visualize how
a new piece of property should take shape. In her approach to the Sea Island
home: "Carlotta had a mental image of what she wanted to build down to the last
towel rack before one brick of Sea Island house was put into place" (Gelb and
Gelb 760). She noted in her journal on November 28, 1931:

Tell Abreau what I want! and he, being Spanish, loved it—austere

81

Spanish housenthick brick walls painted white outside and inside --
cloisters-Gothic shaped doors, arches, tiled roof and floors
(imported old tiles), etc., etc. It was also of paramount importance
that it be a secluded dwelling: We discuss the necessity of a
garden wall! With my European training I must have privacy!

The "garden wall" was actually an impenetrable eight-foot brick structure,
which encircled the estate, endowing it with a fortress-like appearance. The
result was an oddly eclectic structure reflecting feudal and monastic influences.
To Carlotta, it was the ideal home for the great playwright: "O'Neill should have a
home that is simple in every way but perfect—the perfection hidden beneath the
simplicity! An artist's home!" In O'Neill's diary, he wrote that she was
"overjoyed about the house," and "working on it harder than any laborer up
there" (126).

Carlotta made a distinct impression on the locals. She would often dress
completely in white, including white gloves, with a wide-brimmed sun hat and a
veil over her face. Meticulously groomed, she was a curious mix of Tough
Taskmaster and Southern Belle. In both her attire and decor, she was attentive
to the most minute details.

In New York, Carlotta longed for O'Neill, writing "Miss Gene I am
desolate." Her husband expressed his sentiments in an extremely revealing
letter that should please the Freudian interpreters of his work:

Mistress, I desire you, you are my passion, and my life-
drunkenness, and my ecstasy, and the wine of joy to me! Wife,

82

you are my love, and my happiness, the word behind my word, and
the half of my heart! Mother, you are my lost way refound, my end
and my beginning, the hand I reach out for in my lonely night, from
my ghost-haunted inner dark, and on your soft breasts there is a
peace for me that is beyond death! (Gelb and Gelb 760).

As Doris Alexander observed, O'Neill "associates love with his mother"
(86). Perhaps he considered Carlotta's devotion so pure she underwent the
"kind of spiritual identification" Alexander insists is essential "before his heroes
can accept their love" (86) . To read the line, "Mother, you are my lost way
refound, my end and my beginning," is like eavesdropping on someone's
innermost psyche. Critically, it is not surprising to read when one is familiar with
his work or his childhood. O'Neill was forever in search of the love and security
he never received from his addicted mother.

Entries in O'Neill's journal clearly show that he needed Carlotta: "Carlotta
returns! So damned happy!" On June 22, he exclaimed, 'We moved into our
new home! (Wonderful feeling that this is house we have built—never built one
before)" It was officially christened on June 27'“: 'We decided on the name for
the house—'Casa Genotta' combination of Gene and Carlotta." Carlotta was
extremely proud of the work she put into Casa Genotta, and O'Neill's ecstatic
response. She obviously felt great accomplishment when she wrote, "I worked
very hard designing, getting built, and furnishing this house. Then there was the
garden to make—on a sand dune! It is really what I most wanted. A simple,
comfortable very personel home! Gene has every comfort and also those things

83

to please the eye (I hope!)" (Bryer 209).

Life at Casa Genotta consisted of long work hours punctuated by solitary
swims in the ocean, some gardening and walks along the sand dunes and
deserted beaches. Having felt a bit landlocked at Le Plessis, the island
reawakened O'Neill's love affair with the sea. Carlotta capitalized on his nautical
leanings in the design of their new home, particularly in his study. Always the
most important room in their numerous homes, the studio was a sailor's delight,
built like the master cabin of an old sailing vessel.

Casa Genotta was featured in the January 1934 issue of Better Homes
and Gardens. The highlight was O'Neill's nautical study and the title was "O'Neill
Goes Mildly Pirate." The article shows a caricature of a diminutive peg-legged
pirate in full tuxedo dress. Suggesting that O'Neill, under Carlotta's influence,
was not quite the stark, unremitting realist his drama suggests, the feature
portrayed a more romantic, even whimsical side to the reputedly brooding artist:
"He might even enjoy the role of gentleman pirate. One is sure of this when he
sees 'Casa Genotta' the house he has built on Sea Island off the Georgia coast"
(1 9). The real character of the O'Neills was allegedly revealed by their chosen
surroundings: "Sometimes the houses that people build are as revealing an
indication of personality as their faces and gestures. We build what we are-or
what we like to think we are" (19).

The sailor's study was as much a caricature as Barton's drawings. O'Neill
obviously delighted in the joke (even if on him), and he did, in fact, seem far
more light-hearted than the withdrawn, taciturn figure who sought solitude at the

84

lean-to on Miss Marbury's property. He told friends, "I get a kick out of this place
I never got out of a home before. So does Carlotta. We have a creative sense
about it—of having made it out of nothing, of helping it to grow. You never get the
full benefit out of that when you buy a place" (Roberts 148).

Of course, Casa Genotta afforded O'Neill the privacy and Cloister-like
atmosphere he needed to write. Society still bored and drained him:

Mingling with people and life . . . far from giving anything to an
artist, simply takes things away from him, damned valuable things.
If he hasn't everything in himself, he is no good. The life outside
him can steal from him but it can‘t contribute a thing to him, unless
he is a rank second-rater (Estrin 139).

Carlotta seems to be the key to the inner peace O'Neill experienced for
the first time in his life. When asked by George Jean Nathan in 1932, what he
would like more than anything else out of life, Carlotta was implicit in his
response:

I'll tell you what I want and it's the God's truth. I just want what I've
now at last and for the first time in my life got! Life has certainly
changed for me in the last year or so and for the first time in God
knows how long I feel as if it had something to give me as a living
being quite outside of the life in my work. The last time I saw you I
told you I was happy. A rash statement, but I now make it again
with a tenfold emphasis. And, believe me, it has stood tests that
would have wrecked it if it wasn't the genuine article. I feel younger

85

and more pepped up with the old zest for living and working than I
have ever felt since I started working; I may seem to slop over a bit,
but you don't know into what a bog of tedium and life-sickness I
was sinking. I was living on my work as a fellow does on his nerves
sometimes, and sooner or later my work would have certainly been
sapped of its life because you can't keep on that way forever, even
if you put up the strongest of bluffs to yourself and the world in
general. Now I feel as if I'd tapped a new life and could rush up all
the reserves of energy in the world to back up my work. Honestly,
it's a sort of miracle to me, I'd become so resigned to the worst, so
be a little indulgent and don't mind my unloading a little of the pop-
eyed wonder of it at you! (Estrin 133).

Unfortunately for Carlotta, O'Neill's contentment at their seaside retreat
was short-lived. By October he was becoming "depressed," and on November
12, Carlotta expressed her frustration about O'Neill's change in mood:

He talks to me about being unhappy herel?! Mother of God, he
has the ocean to swim—the beach to walk on—the ocean to fish in--
male companionship to do these things with—he Is protected from
disturbance in his work--and he insisted I make a home here!

Carlotta's shock at O'Neill's failure to find satisfaction in their idyllic home
emanated from an assumption that if she could create the perfect environment
for her husband, she would hold the same exclusive place in his psyche that he
held in hers. Dorothy Commins thought that:

86

No doubt she felt a certain vanity at being Mrs. Eugene O'Neill, the
wife of America's greatest playwright, but she does not appear to
have capitalized on her position. Instead, she entered the silence
with him. Her withdrawal to France, thence to Casa Genotta in
Georgia was as complete as his (Commins xviii).

During this time, O'Neill was grappling with a very troublesome play.
Carlotta was very much on his mind as he worked on draft after draft of Qews
Without End. When he first wrote the scenario in Bermuda in 1927, he quickly
shelved it because he feared its highly personal, confessional quality:

It's a funny coincidence. I had the idea all mapped out before I left
Bermuda and before there was any suggestion of a smash in my
domestic life (with Agnes). It was quite objective. And yet now it
would appear as most subjective and autobiographical because of
the turn events have taken. A strange business! Maybe something
inside me was doing a brilliant clairvoyant job (Sheaffer 402).

m Without End was the second play of a planned trilogy (gluing was
the first) with the working title "Myths for the God-forsaken." Written between
1931 and 1933, the play tells of an ostensibly deeply committed couple in a
"perfect" marriage, until the husband commits a single act of adultery and is
consumed with guilt. "Just as W_e_ld_e_d spoke of marital disharmony, and was a
direct comment on O'Neill's marriage to Agnes, st reflected not only discord

and uneasy recollection, but also included the other woman" (Ranald 445).

87

O'Neill saw Days as his "ode" to Carlotta, celebrating their enduring love
and perfect happiness. It was dedicated to her, as was Mourning Beeomes

Electra, however, this play was not a success. Selena Royale who played the

 

role of the wife in D_ays knew how disappointed O'Neill was in the commercial
and artistic failure." She related, "I think it was his poem to Carlotta, and he was
very badly shaken by the reception" (Gelb and Gelb 783). Royale also felt that
Carlotta regarded pm as "Gene's hymn of love for her" (Sheaffer 426).

O'Neill dedicated the play to Carlotta, using the lines refer to marriage as
a sacrament in Act II: "If every other marriage on earth were rotten and a lie, our
love could make ours into a true sacrament." He added: "And ours has hasn't it,
Darling One!" (Ranald 162). He had rejected the sacrament of the Catholic
church and instead sought redemption in Carlotta. Croswell Bowen observed
that the play seemed to indicate that O'Neill saw Carlotta as a key to the spiritual
certainty he craved: "Closer examination of the play in relation to O'Neill's
personal life indicates that he may have been seeking a solution to his own
spiritual doubts. In many ways the plot and its characters suggest himself and

Carlotta—just as Welded reflected himself and Agnes" (Bowen 231).

 

While wrestling with the play, O'Neill had several talks with Father John
Ford, a Catholic priest, who served as his consultant. He would often place
urgent telephone calls to Fr. Ford, scheduling appointments, only to cancel
them. Richard Skinner, drama critic for the magazine, Commonweel, affirmed
that Carlotta shared in his spiritual quest: "It may interest you to know that his
wife is working very hard to bring about his definite return to the Catholic church,

88

as she feels that that is his one salvation. As you know, he was born a Catholic
but lost his faith rather early in life" (Bowen 232).

Like many people who reject the dogma of formal religion, O'Neill
struggled to find spirituality. The notion of lost faith monopolized his thoughts in
the search for a viable substitute. Simple answers eluded him. Asked later in
life if he had returned to the faith, O'Neill replied, "Unfortunately, no"
(Shaughnessy 26). By his own admission, however, theological questions
permeate his work. He insisted that, "Most modern plays are concerned with the
relation between man and man, but that does not interest me at all. I am
interested in the relation between man and God" (Krutch xvii).

O'Neill's work on D_aws hit a complete impasse. He wrote to George
Nathan on August 27, 1932, "I've hit a dead spot in the play and am not feeling
like a writer at all. This happened before I began expanding the notes, so that's
not to blame. One of those blind alleys, that's all" (Roberts 137).

Implausibly, O'Neill had a sudden urge to visit Pequot Street, New
London, Connecticut, where he had lived as a child. Carlotta tried to dissuade
him from confronting the ghosts of his past, but in the end she relented and
accompanied him. New London had changed considerably from the town of his
boyhood, and the house seemed to have disappeared. Finally, he saw a familiar
looking place surrounded by new construction, which Carlotta remembers as
resembling a little birdcage. The cottage seemed as forlorn as his memories and
O'Neill immediately regretted the visit. However, the misguided trip inspired the
playwright's next great success, Ah Wilderness! He later recalled, "Only once

89

before has a plot idea (Desire Under the Elrm) come to me so easily. I wrote it

more easily than I have written any other of my works. Ah Wildemess! is direct

 

autobiography in many respects, it was somewhat the story of 'the childhood I
would have liked to have' " (Bogard 358).
While he was working on the play, Carlotta was the only person
who knew anything about it. She understood the need for caution:
"This is the kind of play Gene has never before done . . . and must
be the deadest of dead secrets-4t may be done someday under a
nom de plume" (Sheaffer 406).
Richard Dana Skinner, author of a book on O'Neill called A Poet's Quest,

said of Ah Wildernesslz

 

This appealing and innocent and tender little comedy of
adolescence is really much more important than it seems in the
poet's unconscious scheme of things. It marked an end to that
terrible fear which had made every symbol of youth appear like
some hideous monster. It was unquestionably the beginning of a
third and entirely new period in O'Neill's creative life, the period of
full manhood of the soul (Estrin 218).

Croswell Bowen, author of the essay on O'Neill entitled "The Black
Irishman" suggests it was Carlotta who mitigated this "terrible fear": "Perhaps
Carlotta Monterey had become a mother to him, the 'mother' he had hailed in the
inscription to Mcumigg BecomeswEle_c_tte. Perhaps she had shown him that
things would be all right. Perhaps she brought a new youth to him, who was just

90

44" (Estrin 218). In keeping with Virginia Floyd’s analysis, if Carlotta had,
through spiritual transformation, become his mother, then he was free to be the
hero who could accept her love. Floyd attributes O'Neill's inspiration for All
V\filderness! to the introspection that had taken place the previous year while
working on the family background for the hero for Qeys, the "Play of Catholic
Boyhood" (Floyd 160).

O'Neill completed Ah Wilderness! within weeks. The first draft was

finished on September 27th, and Ah Wilderness! opened at the Guild Theatre

 

on October 2, 1933. Running for 289 performances, it yielded $75,000, a good
sum at a time when Broadway was emerging from the Depression. O'Neill had
debated over which play should debut first, _D_ays or _Mfiemessl, and decided on
VIfildernessl, as he was still deeply uneasy about his "Catholic" play. He sensed
that the drama would be "well hated by the prejudiced," and would arouse "much
bitter argument" (Bowen 237). O'Neill was on the mark in presenting his comedy
first. Days VIfithout End was produced later by the Theatre Guild in December
27, 1933. It closed after only 57 performances.

Phillip Moeller, who had directed several of O'Neill's plays, worked with
him on Days Without End. Carlotta and O'Neill had dinner with Moeller the night
before the play opened in Boston. The next morning, New Year's Day 1934, he
recorded his impression of the evening. Prefacing his comments, "A few notes
of a conversation with Gene and Carlotta, after dining last night, which may be of
interest to someone writing G's definitive biography fifty years hence," he wrote:

It is obvious from what was said that Days Without End is more pg
91

play than his. They both, definitely, acknowledge this. She says G.
was and is still a Catholic and that she hopes he will return
definitely to the faith and that she would gladly go with him,
whenever he is ready, but he must not be forced . . . I told him the
play was difficult to do because of the closeness to himself in it and
his personal sentiments. It was then they both agreed it was more
her play than his . . . Madame was, again, amply rich in banalities-
but her striving to hold it all together is somehow appealing and
irritating at the same time . . . And the tragedy of the situation is
that Carlotta doesn't realize that he hasn't really got what she wants
to bring him. Psychologically, the relationship is tremendously
fraught with possibilities. Will supemal ease and superficial
comfort win out and will his writing, and the important element of it,

survive? (Gelb and Gelb 779).

O'Neill was still attempting to write the third play in his "God-damn" trilogy,

which included the ill-fated Dynamo and Ceys Without Eng. For his inspiration,

he turned to 19th century New York society, finally entitling his end piece fie

Life of Bessie Bowen. According to an article in Vogue, at the time, Carlotta had

a hand in the work: "Mrs. O'Neill is an assiduous and perspicacious collaborator

in her husband's professional career". The piece affirmed Carlotta's powerful

influence and included a full-page color portrait of the couple.

Bessie Bowen was based on the life of a female industrialist from New

York named Kate Gleason. She was an extremely successful Irish woman who

92

used her business sense to control the men in her life, much as Nina Leeds and
Christine Mannon used their sexuality. As O'Neill considered Carlotta his "Life-
Force," so were Bessie, Nina and Christine, the maternal substitute for the "God-
forsaken." The women were the center of all activity, and endowed with
formidable sexuality (or occupational sawy). They were the objects of the

love/hate energy that characterized all O'Neill's male characters. Bessie was

 

finally put aside after much inconclusive drafting, although her demise inspired a
much greater project that would carry through the O'Neills' remaining days at
Casa Genotta.

In late 1934, O'Neill changed the Life of Bessie Bowen to The Cereer of
Bessie Bowlan: "fresh slant on thisunew title." By New Year's Eve, he was
extremely frustrated with Bessie. He felt that she should be part of something on
a larger scale. The first day of 1935 O'Neill mentioned the cycle that would
preoccupy him for years to come: "Grand ideas for this Opus Magnus if can ever
do ituwonderful character's!" B_ess_ie was to be the focus of the seventh play in a
massive cycle of American history entitled Tale of Possessors, Self-Disposed, an
inter-generational study tracing the effect of parents on their children and
grandchildren, with greed as the central theme. The title was inspired by the
question asked by Jesus Christ: "What does it profit man to gain the whole world
at the expense of his immortal soul?"

In A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions, O’Neill vented his
obsession with the pathology of the family. The original aim of the cycle was to
chronicle two American families, the WASP Harfords, and the Irish Melodys,

93

from the 1800s through the 19303. flat was set in 1828, and its successor,
Mansions, followed from the years 1837 to 1842. Ostensibly concerned with
tracing the path of American history, as seen in the context of an
intergenerational study, O'Neill inevitably zeroed in on the topic he was
obsessed: the vicious cycle of dysfunctional families. Although it was never
realized as part of the cycle, Mm was an important work in the progression
of O'Neill's style. The expression of secret thoughts is reminiscent of m
Interlude; the myth of the family is exploded much the same as in Mourning
Becomes Electra; and the oblique autobiographical elements presage Long Days
Journey Into Night. A Touch of the Poet anticipates O'Neill's last plays.
Domestic relations take center stage in his compulsion to dramatize the painful
experiences of family life. "The Mother" looms large in all human decisions.
Anger at the family and guilt at that anger become antiphon and response, as
recrimination and reconciliation occur with a dizzying effect. Affection in a
relationship cannot exist without hostility. O'Neill was a devotee of Nietzsche,
who concluded that Hell was "other people." O'Neill embodied the concept in his
plays.

In both fit and Mansions the female figure is omnipresent as Wife,
Daughter, Mother, and Grandmother, the impressive (and repressive)
incarnations of the female principle. The culmination of the story in P_oe1 is
played out in Mansions. Simon is the philosophical poet turned businessman.
His mother, Deborah, and his wife, Sara, struggle for possession of soul, as
Simon is torn between his intellectual, patrician mother and his earthy pragmatic

94

wife. The identities and roles of the women often blur, and Wife, Mother, and
Mistress become interchangeable, as the three terms were used interchangeably
in O'Neill's letters to Carlotta.

O'Neill thought that Carlotta could have played the role of Deborah
Harford. In fact, Carlotta could have portrayed many of his female roles. Doris
Alexander notes this explicitly:

Eugene used his mother's beautiful copper-gold hair as the
dominant characteristic of the mother image that all the men in
Mourning Becomes Electra seek to recover. Significantly, at the
time he wrote this play, he himself had found a woman strikingly
like his mother, with her beautiful dark eyes, and even more
important, a woman who could envelop him in the protective love
he had felt about him when he was a little boy in his mother's arm:
this was his third wife, Carlotta Monterey (20).

Carlotta was showcased in his dramas, as the thinly veiled synthesis of
mother, wife, and mistress. ln O'Neill’s later tragedies, his notion of "woman"
was central, and her life force was becoming increasingly more sinister and, in
some cases, damning.

Work on the cycle was draining O'Neill, and Carlotta was not happy about
the way it consumed his energy. She cautioned him that if he continued to delve
into the Harford's family tree, he would run into Adam and Eve: "The Main thing
worrying me is—now that Gene has started on plays that give him some scope for
his ideas—his next will be a history of the human race" (Sheaffer 443). Her

95

overriding concern was for his health, which was showing signs of deterioration,
mentally and physically. The mental strain provoked special anxiety; she was
terrified that she would lose him to his "old ways" from which she felt she had
redeemed him. In Carlotta's last diary entry of 1934, she summed up the closing
year: "A strange year—one filled with worries—and anxieties of all sorts—Gene not
well . . . resting and fussing about finances--worrisome—But-—l have Gene! Thank
God!"

O'Neill worked throughout 1935 on the Cycle, remaining on Island during
the summer months. He was determined to make significant progress on the
saga and he threw himself completely into his work. Carlotta felt shut out. While
she tried to cope with the situation, her sense of the isolation was getting the
best of her. She felt O'Neill was oblivious, writing "he has never known the depth
of my loneliness or apartness here" (Sheaffer 457). However, the notation
shows that Carlotta was not as sensitive to her tormented husband as she
professed. O'Neill had always felt isolated and apart. As Robert Crunden
observed, the "alienated outcast" O'Neill seemed to have been born into a world
beset by various conflicts, "where he had no fixed place" (400). It is more likely
that even his soul mate Carlotta could never have known the depth of his
loneliness or isolation.

Carlotta may have felt lonely, but she spent her days entertaining a bevy
of welcomed and unwelcomed guests. In the latter category were her
stepchildren, her own daughter, new son-in-law, and Nellie. Amongst those she
welcomed were Somerset Maugham, Saxe Commins, Theresa Helbum, Carl

96

Van Vechen, and Sophus Winther. Lawrence Langner and his wife also visited,
accompanied by Carlotta's old friend, actress Fania Marinoff. Langner
commented that Carlotta was "one of those rare women who was born beautiful
and will remain so all her life," adding an observation so often repeated it may
have been said from a template, "Gene has privacy for his work, and to this she
dedicated herself with almost fanatic fervor." Of his own wife, Langner said,
"Arrnina always returned from the O'Neill's with a feeling of inferiority, and would
say, in despair, 'I'll never run a household as smoothly successfully as Carlotta' "
(Bowen 237).

In reality, things were not running smoothly. O'Neill was consumed with
his saga and Carlotta was bored, lonely, desperate for companionship, and
exhausted by the weather. Although she fiercely denied it, Carlotta, like Gene,
was afflicted with wanderlust. Carl Van Vechten astutely recognized that,
"Carlotta loved to build homes. But after she had everything exactly as she
wanted and running smoothly, she lost interest, she became bored, she didn't
have enough to do. It wasn't only Gene who used to get restless" (Sheaffer
456)

On Christmas Eve, 1935, Carlotta found that her fears about O'Neill
relapsing into his old ways were realized:

Busy all day with the final distribution of presents. Receive
telegrams and packages. Boll to dinner. After dinner give servants
their presents then open ours! We have a bottle of champagne to
drink to Christmas! Boll and Gene are very gay, play Roise, sing

97

and dance! I notice Gene keeps going upstairs — finally I go up to
see if he is ill-l find him drinking out of a bottle of whiskey! I nearly
wept. This is what I had suspected for weeks! He should never
have had any beer or wine—it only leads to whiskey and whiskey
leads to the usual excess sickness and God knows what! When he
sees me he laughs and goes downstairs with the bottle. He and
Boll finish the night drinking.

For the next few days, Carlotta was "doctoring Gene," who had not only
returned to drinking but "had also recommenced smoking!" On New Year's Eve,
she silently asked 'Whither are we going darling? Which way? Try to remember
how deeply I love you and always will—no matter what!" A few weeks later,
O'Neill had deteriorated, as Carlotta reported, "I rise my usual hour--Gene
drinking out of the bottle even before his coffee (I am frantic with fear and
heartache) and he looks dreadful . . . Draper comes to hotel and takes him to the
Doctors Hospital to get the whiskey out of him."

VWth Carlotta's help, O'Neill was able to pull himself together enough to
produce a first draft of A Touch of the Poet in early spring 1936. He decided to
spend another summer at Sea Island to work on the next play of the Cycle, And
Give Me Death. However, the move was a mistake; the sultry, exceptionally hot
summer exacerbated his blackening mood. He complained that, "Carlotta and l
are neck and neck toward the Olympic and World's sweating record! We just
continually drop and drip" (Sheaffer 454). By late summer, they had enough of
the South. They received a fortuitous invitation from Washington University

98

professor Sophus Vlfinther and his wife to spend some time with them in the
Northwest. Carlotta and Gene eagerly left for Seattle.

They found themselves situated in a rented English-style house on
Magnolia Bluff overlooking Puget Sound. O'Neill's study had a magnificent view
of the Olympic Mountains and the Sea. Geographically and emotionally it was a
long way from Casa Genotta, which had turned from dream house to nightmare.
Months later when they sold the house it was up to Carlotta alone to dismantle
the Georgian property, arrange for shipping and storage, and tend to all the
arrangements. At the time, the labor seemed trivial in comparison to the
essential tasks of tending her ailing playwright. They left Sea Island for the last

time on October 4, 1936.

99

WORKS CITED

Alexander, Doris. The Temeering of Eggene O’Neill. New York: Harcourt, Brace
and World, 1962.

Barton, Ralph. Unpublished Letters. New Haven: Beinecke Library, Yale
University.

Better Homes and Gardens, January 1934.

Bogard, Travis. Contour in Time. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Bogard, Travis and Jackson Bryer. Seleged Letters ef Eugene O’Neill. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

Bowen, Croswell. The Curse of the Misbegotten. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959.

Bryer, Jackson. The Theetre We Worked For. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1982.

Crunden, Robert M. American Salons: Encounters with European Medernism
1885-1917. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Estrin, Mark W., ed. Convereetions with Eugene O’Neill. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1990.

Floyd, Virginia. Eugene O’Neill At Work. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing
Co., 1981.

Gelb, Arthur and Barbara Gelb. O’Neill. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

 

Kellner, Bruce. The Last Dandy Raleh Barton: American Artist 1891-1931.
Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991.

Krutch, Joseph Wood. “Introduction,” Nine Plays by Eugene O’Neill. New York:
Random House, 1932.

Lewis, Alfred Allan. Ladies and Not-So-Gentle Women. New York: Viking, 2000.

Maufort, Marc. Eugene O’Neill end The EmeLgence of American Drama. Atlanta:
Costerus New Series, 1989.

Monterey, Carlotta. Unpublished Diaries. New Haven: Beinecke Library, Yale
University.

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O’Neill, Eugene. Work Diary. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.

Ranald, Margaret Loftus. The Eugene O’Neill Companion. Connecticut:
Greenwood Press, 1984.

Roberts, Arthur. ALEveLGene. London: Associated University Press, 1987.

Shaughnessy, Edward L. Eugene O’Neill in Ireland: The Critical Reception. New
York: Greenwood, 1988.

Sheaffer, Louis. O’Neill Son em Artist. Boston: Little Brown, and Co., 1973.

Showalter, Elaine. These Modern Women: Autobiographical Essays from the
Twenties. New York: Feminist Press, 1989.

101

Chapter Six
Tao House

1936-1944

The O'Neills captured headlines when they arrived in Seattle on

November 3, 1936. The Seattle Times reported, "The dramatist, an erect, trim

 

figure with graying hair and his beautiful brunette wife, both of who had come
across the continent without being identified, stepped from the Empire Building
at the King Street Station in Seattle to be greeted by Dr. Sophus Keith WInther of
the University of Washington English Department." A week later, they were
besieged by the press when O'Neill was awarded—the Nobel Prize in literature.
The couple had come to the Northwest seeking seclusion, and they were
inundated by telephone calls and telegrams as well-wishers from all over the
country attempted to offer congratulations. There was no downgrading the
significance of the prize, but they left Seattle quickly, surreptitiously fleeing to
California for the holidays.

In California, Carlotta booked a suite at the Fairrnont Hotel overlooking the
Golden Gate Bridge. She spent the next few days scouring the neighboring
counties for a home to rent and as usual, contemplated the prospect of building.
However, Carlotta's architectural venture was cut short when, shortly before
Christmas, O'Neill complained of severe stomach pains. He was rushed to the
hospital, where he underwent an emergency appendectomy. The emergency
procedure turned into a prolonged hospital stay during which he almost died from

102

post-operative complications. Carlotta dropped everything to tend to his
recuperation. She rang in the New Year with an optimistic diary entry: "Hope this
New Year gives us less worry & tensions & good health! Please God."
Impatient and overly protective, Carlotta demanded an adjoining private
hospital room, with a "No Visitor" sign posted prominently on her door. She was
tending O'Neill, battling depression, and feeling increasingly overwhelmed and
discouraged. By Sheaffer's account, it was only O'Neill's health that worried her.
Carlotta was extremely jealous and she was especially wary of the attractive
young nurses fawning over her ailing spouse. She placed the blame for their
present situation squarely on O'Neill:
He wanted a place by the sea where the water wouldn't be warm in
the summer or cold in the winter, and it would be sunny year
around. He was looking for Paradise, that's what he wanted. I was
continually picking homes because Mr. O'Neill, not being weII-l am
told that many ill people are the same—feel the weather, the climate
is to blame: it is too damp or too dry, or it's too this or too that . . .
so we would sell and go to the next place and make a home
(Sheaffer 456).

O'Neill's health really was very precarious. His diary entry for January 12th

makes it clear that attractive nurses were not the paramount threat:
Merritt Hospital (Oakland) Dr. Rienle treatment (for prostate)-temp
up to 102-chill--caffeine, adrenaline, codeine, morphine, atropine!--
they give me the works! Carlotta 8 nurses up all night--Dr Dukes at

103

4 am. bad sinking spell with everyone worried but I feel too sick
and ratty to give a damn whether I croak or not (O'Neill 277).

In early March, Carlotta checked O'Neill out of Merritt Hospital. Both he
and Carlotta worried that he might never work again. She predicted that 1937
would be a year full of illness, worry and upheaval. She decided that it was up to
her to get back to work, and shortly after she was designing and building a
home. On April 22, 1937 diary entry she recorded:

Gene and I go out to the Wood's house (where we will go to live
June 1st while we are building our new house). Gene & I both love
the Bryant property between Walnut Creek 8. Danvillenabout 2500
feet up on the hills looking across the San Ramon Valley to Mt.
Diablo. It is more than we wanted (158 acres) and more
expensive! Beautiful view & lovely rolling hills. While their new
home was under construction they rented a twenty-two acre estate
in the San Francisco Bay area.

Carlotta planned to build a Chinese inspired mansion. The problem with
her exotic project was that, "I wanted to build a Chinese house, but I didn't have
the money, so I built a sort of pseudo-Chinese house" (Gelb and Gelb 824).
Wlth the eye of a surrealist, she juxtaposed the Far East and the American
West. The house was essentially a two-story modified California Spanish style
structure with oriental interior and exterior accents. It was located 35 miles from
San Francisco, etched into the side of a mountain some 2,800 feet up, with a
superb view of Mount Diablo and the entire San Ramon Valley. It was

104

accessible only by a narrow winding road punctuated with three "Keep Out"
signs, and at $150,000 (at a time when O'Neill's future was dubious) it was their
most expensive project. O'Neill proudly wrote to a friend, "Carlotta is in a frenzy
of creative activity over the new house. I needn't tell you, who knows her
capability in this regard, that this means it is going be some house! And the site
is the most beautiful view I have ever come across" (Gelb and Gelb 823).

Carlotta's flamboyance was captured in a bold assertive color scheme
within and outside of the house. Constructed of white concrete blocks designed
to replicate adobe, it was in O'Neill's words: "Carlotta's masterpiece", and his
"final harbour" (Bogard 20). Red Chinese lacquer work doors and shutters,
capped with a roof of pitch-black tile were mirrored in the azure blue of the
Olympic swimming pool. Inside, the ceilings repeated the deep blue of the pool,
accented by marine blue mirrors in the dining room. Most of the rooms had
access to the outdoors through upper balconies, and the first floor boasted '
terraces, and a walled-in garden.

The O'Neills christened their new home "Tao House", which loosely
translated means "the right way to live". Mai-mai-Sze, a Chinese friend,
commented, " I don't think it was particularly apt but I thought, what does it
matter, if it amuses them. The O'Neills have a na‘lve, romantic idea of China—the
wisdom, the pageantry and so forth were superficially conceived and
romanticized by them" (Gelb and.Gelb 825). Ironically, on her return to the state
of her birth, Carlotta had unwittingly adopted the California approach to
architecture and design. The early film stars and moguls had looked to the

105

castles and estates of Europe for style, and the result was a uniquely American

blend of Old World aristocracy and nouveau riche.

O'Neill resumed a rigorous writing schedule, beginning his work promptly

at 8:30 am, Carlotta no longer joined him for lunch but instead had a maid

deliver a lunch tray to his study so as not to interrupt the momentum of his work.

They shared dinner together, after which they would read, listen to music and

discuss daily events.

As O'Neill adjusted to his new surroundings, Tao House began to appear

in his work:

How influential Tao House was on his writing can only be guessed.
One or two things at least are fanciful. In the scene in the walled
garden of More Stately Mansions, O'Neill requires a summer house
with a doorway painted a Chinese lacquer red, the color he had
seen on the doors of his home. In the play, the summer house,
placed trimly in the walled garden, is not unlike the small box room
in the Tao House garden which nestles against the high garden
wall and is approached by small neat paths, as is required in the
plan. One thinks as well of the mirrors that continually appear in
the Cycle plays: Con Melody's tavern mirror before which he
postures in shoddy magnificence and the large mirror in Simon
Hartford's office before which he Simon and Sara make love. As in
the tavern and the office, the mirrors of Tao House reflected the life
he lived there. Before he came to California, O'Neill wrote that life

106

is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors. To a degree Tao House

realized that image (Bogard 25).

As O'Neill worked on Mansions during 1938, Carlotta oversaw final details

of the house. She recapped the year in her diary entry December 31":

Tao House under construction . . . When midnight strikes Gene
takes me in his arms & tells me how much he loves me & if I love
him as he loves me we together can take anything! I'll stick no
matter what! Then I weep, like a fool, hanging on to him! God

knows what! But I do know I love this mad Irishman!

While Travis Bogard noted the real and spiritual presence of Tao House in

O'Neill's drama, Martha Bower observed a similar effect for Carlotta. According

to Bower, "Documentation, taken from the O'Neill biographies, and observations

of the Cycle women through the pre-writing, make a strong case for Carlotta's

being the model for Sara Melody" (19). Bower traces Carlotta throughout the

entire Cycle:

The Cycle was an innovation for O'Neill-one different from
heroines of most male writers in modern and contemporary
American literature. There has been some speculation as to the
source of O'Neill's forceful woman hero, who was closer to the
typical modern male frontier type than to the traditional female
heroine. Models for Sara, Leda and Lou can be found in few works
of American drama and fiction authored by males. Historical
sources for O'Neill's cycle women can be found in biographies of

107

Madame Stephen Jumel, Kate Gleasonand Carlotta O'Neill (338).
Carlotta's marriage to O'Neill is mirrored in various husband and wife
relationships as well. Bower noted, "characteristics that Simon and Sara, Ernie
and Lou share with the O'Neill couple" (19). Even more compelling is that
Deborah preflgures Mary Tyrone, as O'Neill dropped the Cycle plays, and turned
more introspective in mm Journey Into Night. According to Bower,
"O'Neill continues to drop clues which connect his mother with Abigail (Deborah)"
172):
Mary's character bears strong resemblance to Deborah Hartford's
in Mansions: O'Neill was actively revising Mansions, especially the
mother/son scenes with Simon and Deborah when he was in the
initial stages of creating Mary Tyrone and her relationship to her
sons. The physical similarities and the destructive qualities that
inform both characterizations are obvious. Mary controls her sons
by keeping them on the end of a tether and connects them to the
‘spare room’ . . . Whereas Deborah actively sets out to manipulate
Sara and Simon and their children, Mary's manipulation is subtle
and indirect (Bower 265-266).
There is a "striking resemblance of Elizabeth Bowlan to Mary Tyrone to
Deborah Harfor " (Bower 287-88). One can also add, to Carlotta as well.
Carlotta accompanied O'Neill as he moved from the Cycle to his late great
tragedies. Just as she was the model for specific characters in the Cycle, their
marriage resembled the Tyrones. The parallel was not lost on Carlotta, who

108

protested, "You used our marriage, our feelings for each other. You were
inventing your mother, giving her mannerisms, my quirks even my arthritis. I saw
so much of myself in your portrait of Mary Tyrone. That role I really could have
played" (Gelb 12).

O'Neill worked on the Cycle plays for four and a half years, constantly
revising and editing. On June 5, 1939, he recorded in his work diary that he was
"fed up" with his Cycle plays. He added that it "will do me good to lay on shelf
and forget it for a while-do a play which has nothing to do with it." It is highly
probable that Carlotta encouraged him to put Cycle aside, as she grew more
disenchanted with the lack of a finished product. In deciding on his next project,
he turned to his "Hell Hole" days, as a young man in New London. He had jotted
down notes, and these notes contained the conceptions of two of his greatest
tragedies: The lcemen Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night. The sequel
to Journey. A Moon For The Misbegotten was his final contribution to American
drama.

O'Neill understood that the deepest dramatic conflicts occur between
family members. His mother, father and brother became the key to self-
acceptance and awareness. Carlotta did not relish her role in his Proustian
exercise. She hated his bohemian past and had great disdain for his family.
With O'Neill delving into his youth, Tao House was not "the right way to live" as
Carlotta envisioned it.

Just as Iceman developed from the germ of the "hell hole" idea, his

"young man in London" was the inspiration for A Long Day's Journey Into Night.
109

 

O'Neill was reluctant to share ideas for his play with anyone but Carlotta, but
Carlotta was a reluctant confidante. As the drafts came in, she recalled that "the
play upset me so I wept most of the time" (Sheaffer 517). In addition, "It nearly
killed him to write this play . . . After his days stint he would be physically and
mentally exhausted. Night after night I had to hold him tight in my arms so he
could relax and sleep . . . thus the play was written" (Sheaffer 507). Describing

both Iceman and Journey, she acknowledged, "The thing is he was writing about

 

something that came from his very guts . . . he had to write this play" (Sheaffer
507).

Having expurgated his family in Long Day's Journey, O'Neill remained
torn. He felt that he had treated his brother, Jamie, too roughly in Mgm, and had
denied him the final absolution that was necessary for the playwright's own
peace of mind. For a penitent to gain absolution, he must express genuine
sorrow and regret. Jamie remained hardened and unrepentant throughout the
long dark night of his soul in Jeum_ey. He required further expiation. His sins are
requited by Josie, the ultimate mistress/motherlMagdaIene/Madonnalmother
confessor. He is finally "sort of at peace with myself and this lousy Iife-as if all
my sins had been forgiven" (O'Neill 942). Josie utters the final words of the
O'Neill canon, the "requiescat in pace" of Irish Catholic faith that had been so
illusive: "May you rest forever in forgiveness and peace." Martha Bower
remarked that, "The strong, dominant, big handsome woman of the Cycle was
resurrected in Josie Hogan . . . O'Neill laid her to rest once and for with that play"
(345). "May you rest forever in forgiveness and peace," was O'Neill's final

110

benediction.

Carlotta passionately hated his last play, Moon for the Miefiggmep. She
insisted it did not need to be written, and she despised O'Neill's brother and what
he did to the memory of his mother following her death. To Carlotta, the work
was ghastly, and she felt that it actually hastened Eugene's demise.

As O'Neill's writing career neared its end, Carlotta was finally tired of
being nursemaid, secretary, and houseboy. The writing that had consumed
O'Neill allotted them time apart and served as a focal point for their interactions.
With no distractions to keep them apart, they argued constantly. On December
31, 1939, Carlotta emphatically declared, "It has been a meet unpleasant year!"

Finances were part of the problem and Carlotta decided to sell the
California property. Tao house was sold in January 1944, and at the end of
February, they moved to a suite of rooms in a hotel on San Francisco's Nob Hill.
Carlotta lamented the loss of the uniquely eclectic home, stating, 'We stayed at
Tao House for six years, longer than we lived anywhere else. Of course, there
were many hardships, but it was a beautiful place and I hated to leave" (Gelb
and Gelb 853). As with Casa Genotta, Tao House was sold for a substantial
loss. Carlotta had inherited her mother's flair for design and decoration, but did

not always profit from the sale of her real estate.

111

WORKS CITED

Bogard, Travis. From the Silence of Tao House. Tao House, California: The
Eugene O’Neill Foundation, 1993.

Bower, Martha E. Gilman. The Making of Eugene O’Neill’e Cvcle Plays: An
Analysis of O’Neill’s Writing Process and Gender Role Revers_al.
Unpublished doctoral dissertation, 1991.

Bryer, Jackson. The Theetre We Worked For. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1982.

Gelb, Arthur and Barbara. O’Neill. New York: Harper and Row, 1960.
Gelb, Barbara. My Gene. New York: Unpublished play, 1988.

Monterey, Carlotta. Unpublishfi Diariee. New Haven: Beinecke Library, Yale
University.

O’Neill, Eugene. Work Diam. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981 .
O’Neill, Eugene. Complete Plays: 1932-1943. New York: Viking, 1988.
Sheaffer, Louis. O’Neill: Son and Artist. New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 1973.

Sheaffer, Louis. Louis Sheeffer Papers. The Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection. New
London: Charles E. Shain Library, Connecticut College.

 

112

Chapter Seven
Marblehead Neck

1944 -1953

The O'Neills lived in San Francisco until October 17, 1945, when they
moved to New York. They rented a two-room suite at the Barclay Hotel until
Carlotta secured a penthouse apartment at Eighty-Fourth Street and Madison
Avenue. As usual, she began decorating the new living space, adorning it with
mirrored walls, elaborate furnishings and oriental motifs. The terrace overlooked
Central Park, with an immediate view of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The
apartment was lavish, but it was the scene of loud and bitter arguments that
were becoming legendary. After one especially vicious quarrel, Carlotta left,
vowing not to return. O'Neill was despondent and called his friends for
consolation. O'Neill's friends hated Carlotta, and after he broke his arm in a fall,
they tried to convince him to leave her. He refused. Carlotta returned, and the
couple reconciled. Deciding to move to Boston, they booked rooms at the Ritz-
Carlton.

Marblehead Neck, located twenty-five miles outside the city, was a
summer resort favored by well-heeled Bostonians. Carlotta purchased a tiny
gray-shingled cottage perched on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. She
bought the property for $25,000, which ultimately rose to $90,000 with

renovations.

113

Carlotta described both her mood and their new residence:
We came to New England (that l have always loved) and l have
been doing my best to make a home. Am afraid I have lost my
resiliency to this and that, but the home will be finished in another
week or so. It is the smallest house I have ever seen! (Which we
both wanted) and cost the most! (Commins 228).

The Marblehead cottage was Carlotta’s least favorite home. It was
especially bleak in the winter when most of the surroundings were shuttered and
abandoned. Vlfith her customary flair Carlotta attempted to transfigure the
colorless bungalow. She added an oceanfront glassed-in porch, renovated the
kitchen (with added adjoining maids quarters), and completely insulated the
entire six room, fifty-year-old house with double layered windows. She then
proceeded to transform the interior. Signature Chinese red doors, reminiscent of
Tao House, opened into a veritable rainbow of color: Pink walls, blue tiled floors
vividly died draperies were reflected in mirrors. The two-story frame house
included four small rooms on the second floor, their respective bedrooms and
studies. It was a costly project, rivaling Casa Genotta and Tao House, and
exacerbated by skyrocketing building costs, and the cost of overtime labor to
speed the project so the prospective tenants could move in.

After having spurned friends, family, even business associates, the
O'Neills finally got the complete solitude they professed to want. The result was
disastrous; with no one to turn to, they turned on each other. O'Neill had claimed
that he wanted to be an artist or nothing, and now nothing was exactly what he

114

had left. There was no genius remaining for Carlotta, the reputed dragon lady, to
protect. O’Neill gazed out at the sea for hours, while Carlotta was reduced to
playing nursemaid. He was embarrassed by his palsy, which he wanted no one
but Carlotta to see. O'Neill had become like his own character, Larry Slade, in
The lcemen Cometh. at the end a tired, disillusioned, worn out Irishman who had
exhausted his options. Reviewers agreed that "when the curtain falls, nothing is
left for Larry but to die," and one critic wryly offered Larry an alternative: "Larry
could write plays" (Cargill 65). O'Neill could no longer even do that.

The couple's simmering hostilities and extreme self-dissatisfaction finally
erupted into violence. Love and hate were the simultaneous passions of
O'Neill's characters, and Carlotta finally realized that they characterized his
feelings toward her: "Not that Gene, in spite of all his dedications and little notes
swearing love and begging for forgiveness, didn't also hate me" (Quintero 64).
On the evening of February 5, 1951, after a particularly nasty quarrel, O’Neill fled
the depressing confines of their oceanfront home, taking refuge in the night air.
He left in a hurry, leaving his cane and his coat behind. It was a blustery winter
night and he stumbled and fell in a snow bank. He tried to get up but he had
broken one of his legs. From inside the house, Carlotta heard his cries. As she
opened the door, she saw O’Neill lying injured and helpless. Instead of coming
to his aid as she had so many times in the past, she ignored his plight with the
taunt, "How the mighty have fallen! Where's your greatness now little man?"
(Dardis 235). The door closed behind her. O'Neill lay in the snow bank until he
was discovered by passers-by. He was hospitalized in Salem until March 30,

115

then transferred to Doctors Hospital in New York, where he remained for a
month.

While O’Neill recuperated in a hospital bed, Carlotta was on the verge of a
nervous breakdown. O'Neill had his revenge for being left in pain in the snow; he
had her committed to a mental hospital. On March 28, he signed a petition
alleging that his wife was an "insane person . . . incapable of taking care of
herself and requested that some suitable person be appointed her guardian"
(Sheaffer 644). Carlotta was even more agitated, especially when she learned
that O'Neill had struck her a double insult. Sheaffer relates that, "Carlotta’s
bitterness over the position was intensified when she learned that O'Neill had
changed his will to eliminate her as the executrix" (647).

As O'Neill declared Carlotta mentally unfit and wrote her out of his will,
she filed suit for a legal separation. Carlotta was vituperative in her feelings
toward O'Neill:

O'Neill has failed his children & wives. He lo_ath_e_s women, except
when he needs them. When he no longer needs themnout they
go! But with Nietzsche and Strindberg as his gods one can
understand all this. (Sheaffer 644) .

During this period of separation, O'Neill's friends once again banded
together in a protective web, shielding their comrade from the allegedly crazed
Carlotta. A group of his cronies formed a conspiracy to ban Carlotta from
O’Neill's life for good. The venture was ultimately unsuccessful, and it would
personally aggrieve some of O'Neill's inner circle for the rest of their lives. Once

116

Carlotta regained control she severed all ties with everyone who had plotted
against her. Lawrence Langner, an old friend from O’Neill's Provincetown days,
was particularly determined to save his friend from Carlotta. To Sheaffer,
Langner and the others were well intentioned but misguided:
But what he and the others never realized, apparently was that
Carlotta, in both a good and a dark sense, was virtually an ideal
mate for Eugene O'Neill . . . He unconsciously welcomed the
anguish he suffered at times through Carlotta. She gave him
opportunities to do penance for his sin of having been born
(Sheaffer 647).
Although in the wake of O'Neill's accident, it appeared that O'Neill had resolved
never to see his wife again, "In time their strange love-hate relationship resumed:
they were surely ’welded’ as few couples have ever been" (Dardis 255).

Carlotta had returned to Marblehead Neck to pick up the pieces of their
final domestic debacle. Most of her assets had been frozen during their
separation. Meantime, O'Neill had abandoned thoughts of a separation, and
resolved to reconcile with Carlotta. On May 17th, he left for Boston and for
Carlotta. Referring to the situation later, Carlotta asked him, "How could you
have done that to me?" Sheaffer reports that, "His face started to get dark, then
suddenly he smiled, 'Well, it was a helluva fourth act.’ 'Yes', I said, 'it wee a
helluva fourth act, and l was the one who suffered.’ " (Sheaffer 659).

Following their well-publicized separation and reconciliation, the O'Neills
decided to move to the Hotel Shelton. While not as dramatic as their reunion

117

scene on the high seas twenty years earlier, they were nonetheless back
together, and Carlotta was once again at the helm. Sheaffer reports that, "He
was returning under Carlotta's terms, one of her chief stipulations being that he
would again change his will and rename her as his executrix and sole heir" (653).
Before O’Neill had been at the Shelton two weeks, he did exactly that.

In the winters of 1952 and 1953, as if to make a final break with his life as
an artist, O'Neill and Carlotta destroyed the unfinished manuscripts form his
Cycle Plays. He explained to Carlotta that, "He didn't want to leave any
unfinished plays and he said, 'it isn't that I don't trust you, Carlotta, but you might
drop dead or get run over or something and I don't want anybody else finishing
up a play of mine' " (Cargill 94). As Carlotta described it, ’We tore them up, bit
by bit, together. I helped him because his hands—he had this terrible tremor, he
could tear just a few pages at a time. It was awful, it was like tearing up children"
(Cargill 94-95).

The plays were destroyed and O'Neill died in November the same year.
Carlotta offered her own grim post-mortem: "He could not work for the ten years
before his death, at 65, in 1953. He died when he could no longer work. He
died spiritually. And it was just a matter of dragging a poor, diseased body along
for a few years until it too died" (Cargill 93).

Carlotta had controlled O'Neill during his life and she was determined to
control his legacy. She engineered the revision and final editing of his will and is
credited with the final testament: "I make these provisions, in recognition of the
loyalty and care afforded me by my said wife" (Sheaffer 663). The will was read

118

on Christmas Eve 1953. It was the perfect Christmas present for Carlotta. She

was the one who survived.

119

WORKS CITED

Cargill, Oscar, N., Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher, eds. O’Neill and His
Plays: Four Decades of Criticism. New York: New York University Press,
1961.

Commins, Dorothy, ed. Love end Admi_retion end Respect: The O’Neill-Commins
Correspondence. Durham: Duke University Press, 1986.

Dardis, Tom. The Thirsg Muse. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1989.

Quintero, Jose. If You Don’t Dance They Beat You. Boston: Little, Brown and
Co., 1973.

Sheaffer, Louis. O’Neill: Son and Artist. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973.

120

Chapter Eight
The Legacy
1 953 -1 970

Carlotta relished her new role in managing O'Neill's estate. She
proclaimed that, "I have but one reason to live and that is to carry out Gene's
wishes. I have my Eugene O'Neill collection to put in order' (Sheaffer 635).
However, she interpreted his will in her own way, and there was considerable
speculation over whether she carried out Gene's wishes or her own. One of her
most criticized decisions dealt with the production of A Long Day's Journey Into
Njgm. When O'Neill wrote the play he stipulated that it not be published until
twenty-five years after his death. Two years after he died, Carlotta was
entertaining thoughts of having it published and even produced. She saw no
reason for the long wait; in fact, O'Neill often referred to the play as their nest
egg. As bookkeeper, Carlotta worried about money constantly. After the
Marblehead Neck disaster, the couple was $17,000 in debt. Attempting to put
her mind at ease, "he comforted her by saying that Long Day's Journey was their
'ace in the hole' " (Gallup 287).

In the spring of 1955 Carlotta notified publisher Bennett Cerf of her
decision. He was aghast, thinking her a shrill opportunist. Random House
immediately consulted their attorneys, and to their shock, they learned that the
law was on Carlotta's side. She had been named the sole heir in O'Neill's will,
and as sole heir, her power superceded the wishes of the deceased.

121

Bennett Cerf finally agreed to publish the manuscript if Carlotta would
print a public statement, both on the dust jacket and in the book, explaining that
she was overriding her husband's wishes. She was incensed. There were other
publishing houses. Carlotta switched her affiliation to Yale University Press and
had the play published. Her enemies were quick to criticize her actions.
According to Dorothy Commins, one of Carlotta's most eloquent detractors:

Random House was horrified and washed their hands of the entire
project. Bennett Cerf particularly would not compromise his
principles as a publisher by violating a dead man’s wishes
(Commins 240).

Her critics were livid but Carlotta was pleased. She began to think
seriously about a full scale Broadway production. One of Carlotta's shrewdest
moves was to engage the talents of director Jose Quintero. They first met in the
winter of 1956 while she was living at The Lowell Hotel in New York. Through
Carlotta’s agent, Jane Rubin, Quintero had sought information on the status of
O'Neill’s work. Rubin called back two days later to tell him that Mrs. O’Neill
wished to meet him.

Quintero was an ardent admirer of O'Neill's work. He was relatively
unknown at the time, and Leigh Connell, a partner in Circle in the Square, where
Quintero was working, approached him with the prospect, "José, you should do
an O'Neill play" (Quintero 150). He thought the play he should do was fire
lcemgi Cometh. adding that "not one of his plays has been performed in the last
ten years" (150). Quintero promptly borrowed a copy of the play from Connell

122

and stayed up all night reading. He was dazzled by what he read.

The first time that Carlotta and Quintero met, she greeted him at the door,
then ushered him into her bedroom and sat him upon her bed. She then
proceeded to model a series of twenty hats, asking him which one he liked best.
There were all stunning black hats. Quintero selected one that featured a long
trail of chiffon, which she artfully draped around her, neck, forehead and finally,
cascaded down her back. "That's the most beautiful one of the all”, he told her.
Carlotta answered, "This is the one I wore when l buried him” (Quintero 155).
He had obviously passed Carlotta’s test, and it won him the rights to produce
The lcemen Cometh. She told him, "You came to get rights for the play. You
can have them. I trust you. I like you. I hope it turns out well this time, not only
for O'Neill but for you also." (Quintero 157).

Quintero took his time in casting the play and recruited a brilliant
company. The success of the Circle in the Square revival of The Iceman

Cometh finally led to the stage production of Journey.

 

The O'Neill revival marked the beginning of a close friendship and
professional relationship between Jose Quintero and Carlotta Monterey.
Quintero was admittedly taken by her, and indebted to the boost she gave his
career. He recalls:

She was 68, and one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen,
with the radiant bearing that one attributes to reclusive royalty.
From our first meeting, my relationship with Carlotta Monterey
O’Neill was marked by a tantalizing sense of unreality, though it

123

profoundly influenced my entire professional life. (Quintero 63).

"Unreality" was an understatement in reference to Carlotta. Quintero
quickly became accustomed to Carlotta's bizarre behavior. According to her,
O’Neill would often visit her, and presence haunted and frightened her. José
would hold her hand during these visitations. He admits he never actually saw
the apparition, but he never doubted for that Carlotta did: "I could not see him,
but that didn’t matter. She did. It was her reality I was existing in, not mine"
(Quintero 204). He did however address O'Neill at Carlotta’s behest. She would
beg the intervention of Quintero when O'Neill would revile, taunt and torment her.
She maintained that he would follow her from room to room and heckle her
relentlessly. Once again questions concerning the will arose, perhaps revealing
her unresolved feelings of guilt. In describing this apparition Carlotta said that:

He sits at the edge of my bed, or at the end of the coach, there,
and asks me if I mind if he indulges in a bit of speculation,
regarding something about which only I have the definite answer.
Would you, Carlotta have taken me back if I had come to Boston
without gift of a new will?’ (Quintero 66).

Driven nearly mad by the specter, Carlotta retorted, "Wno in their right
mind, would take back a bundle of shaking misery without demanding some
shred of reward?" (Quintero 66). Still, she revealed her sense of guilt when she
implored Quintero, "Tell him how hard I have been working all these years. Tell
him about I_ce_mer1 and how I helped make it a success. The failure of that play
almost killed the poor bastard. Tell him, please!" (Quintero 204).

124

Still mulling over the fate of L_opg_Dey'e._leu_rm, Carlotta made a
decision, and telephoned Quintero exceedingly early one morning. She began
the conversation by asking, "Have I awakened you?" He become used to
Carlotta calling at odd hours and assured her that he had been up for hours.
She continued, "Going out of my mind, still working for O'Neill, and that is why
you must come up to my apartment as soon as you can. I think I have a surprise
for you" (Quintero 203). The first thing she asked him when he arrived was what
did he know about Long Day's Journey Into Niget? Quintero told her he had
read it, thought it a masterpiece and recalled that O'Neill did not want it
performed until many years after his death. He also added ”that every producer
and director in New York would give their soul and their bank accounts to do it"
(Quintero 206). Carlotta told him that she had decided to produce the play in the
United States and she wanted him to direct it. Quintero was speechless. He
excused himself promising that he would do it "exactly as O'Neill wrote it, without
cutting a line." He fled the apartment and "vomited as soon as I reached the
sidewalk” (Quintero 206).

Mney opened in New York on November 7, 1956 with a stellar cast.
Florence Eldridge and Frederick March played the elder Tyrones. Jason
Robards, Jr. was Jamie, and Bradford Dillman was Edmund. The play was the
highlight of the 1956-1957 Broadway season (Sheaffer 634). The published
version appeared on February 20, 1956, and proved the biggest seller of all time
for Yale University Press. The book sold more than forty-five thousand
hardcover copies and more than eight hundred thousand paperbacks (Gallup

125

290). It is doubtful, however, that Bennett Cerf thought his decision was wrong.

With the publication and production of Jeremy, O'Neill's drama was
released from its theatrical limbo. Even Dorothy Commins, who had criticized
Carlotta's decision, admitted that "The play was accepted, as it so richly merited,
not as a rattling of skeletons in a family closet, but as a work of art dealing with a
universal rather than a personal experience" (Commins 242).

She declared 1956 the year of the O'Neill renaissance, "restoring him to
the position he had abdicated after the production of Qeys Without End in 1934--
that of America's greatest playwright" (Commins xx-xxi).

Carlotta received substantial royalties from both production and
publication. Upon her death in 1970, she bequeathed the royalties from her
husband's plays to Yale for the purpose of establishing Eugene O'Neill
scholarships and furthering the Eugene O'Neill Collection. Yale was named
beneficiary of all O'Neill's papers in her 1964 will.

Carlotta survived her husband by seventeen years. She lived at the posh
Ritz Carlton and made a career of navigating the maze of legal red tape that
surrounded O'Neill's estate. This was no easy feat, as described by the Gelbs:
"The estate is hedged by a tangle of copyright laws, awash with producers,
publishers, university trustees, deans and curators and it is guarded by Scylla
and Charybdis of two law firms" (Gelb and Gelb 1). O'Neill continued to
monopolize her thoughts:

I lay down exhausted every bone & muscle in my body aches-
weak-Dr. phones--tells me I have been doing too muchnone can

126

not do at 74 what one did at 40—50 -60! I worked gym} O'Neill for 26
years. He died-& I have been working fer him for 10 years. I am
stifl working for him—there is no one else!
Inseparable in life, Gene and Carlotta are eternally united. On November
28, 1970, Carlotta's ashes were placed beside Eugene Gladstone O'Neill's in

Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston. Requiscat in pace.

127

WORKS CITED

Commins, Dorothy, ed. Love end Admiretion flld Respect: The O’Neill-Commins
Correspondence. Durham: Duke University Press, 1986.

Gallup, Donald. Pigeons on the Granite. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1988.

Gelb, Arthur and Barbara. O’Neill. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

 

Monterey, Carlotta. Unpublished Diaries. New Haven: Beinecke Library, Yale
University.

Quintero, Jose. If You Don’t Dance They Beat You. Boston: Little, Brown and
Co., 1973.

Sheaffer, Louis. O’Nei_ll: Son and AM. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973.

128

Epilogue

The life of Carlotta Monterey exemplifies Modris Eksteins' description of
the modern age as an era where "Old authority and traditional values no longer
had credibility. Yet no new values had emerged in their stead" (256). Born at
the end of Victorian era and coming of age as fellow San Franciscan Isadora
Duncan exalted freedom of body and spirit, Carlotta sought self-expression both
in the unconventional world of the theatre and in the conventional role of wife
and mentor to the playwright who revolutionized and defined American drama.

Alfred Allan Lewis' assertion that, "Superficially worldly, Carlotta was the
most old-fashioned of women" (397), is in itself superficial, a gross
oversimplification of the complex (and often contradictory) personality of the
woman born Hazel Neilson Tharsing, who transformed herself into Carlotta
Monterey. At the same time, Carlotta did give up her stage career to devote
herself to the genius Eugene O’Neill. In her early life, she had ambitiously
pursued a career, demonstrating the shrewd business sense of the elder
Tharsings in negotiating the terms of her contract with Lee Shubert, and
exploiting her photogenic qualities as a model in the promising new advertising
industry. Her first husbands were chosen for their apparent (if illusory) financial
security, as her mother had carefully chosen her lovers, and she decided to have
a child for the rather unorthodox reason that her costar and former lover, Lou
Tellegin, told her that she would never be a good actress until she experienced
motherhood. Carlotta subsequently rejected the child (ironically, leaving the child

129

with her mother as her mother had left her with an aunt), and ultimately she
abandoned her acting career for a man who was no more suited to parenthood
than she was, despite the fact that he already had a family. Old-fashioned
women typically want to have families and choose men who share their
traditional view of a home. They are also usually careful to choose men who are
not already married; O'Neill was married to Agnes when Carlotta decided she
would make him a better mate.

Carlotta's life was one of many paradoxes, and one of the most significant
is the fact that she chose to abandon the stage after her one theatrical triumph:
the role of Mildred Douglas in O'Neill's play, The Heiry Ape. After a series of
tepid reviews, generally highlighting her physical attractiveness over her acting,
she received good reviews in a demanding dramatic role. The ultimate result
was that she turned her back on the prospect of future stage triumphs to devote
herself to the playwright who had not wanted her in the role at all. The question
is, did she really believe it was her duty to submerge her ambition for O’Neill's
benefit, as she claimed, or did she have other motives for her decision to place
the playwright's career over her own?

Perhaps Ilka Chase inadvertently hit upon the answer: "Carlotta wanted to
possess her men and be everything to them. She had a sense of mission and
wanted to help him achieve himself" (Lewis 397). Carlotta's impeccable and
meticulous taste as she went about redesigning and decorating her various
homes indicates that she was a perfectionist. The quality of her brief acting
career suggests that she fell far short of the talent of a Sarah Bernhardt or Ellen

130

Terry. With her talent for interior design she might have followed Elsie de Wolfe
in turning from actress to interior decorator. However, de Wolfe was supported
in her professional efforts by her long-term companion Bessy Marbury, who
fostered de Wolfe's career as she served her impressive clientele of literary
talent. Through Marbury, Carlotta was introduced to a man who held the
traditional notion that his wife should subordinate her own interests to serve his.
Yet underlying this seemingly old-fashioned arrangement is a pervasive sense
that it was not traditional gender roles that governed the arrangement but
Carlotta's quest for perfection and O'Neill's belief that it was genius rather than
gender that should earn him a partner's single-minded support.

O'Neill alone possessed genius; Carlotta could only achieve perfection by
possessing him. Alternately, O'Neill yearned for the love and support he could
never receive from his drug-addicted mother. By providing it, Carlotta could
possess O'Neill and "be everything" to him. Their relationship was one of mutual
codependence. By all accounts they fought frequently; in personality, the
tempestuous Carlotta probably overshadowed the withdrawn Gene. Unlike Elsie
de Wolfe, who was encouraged to be independent by a lesbian partner, Carlotta
was allowed by social conventions to shine in O'Neill's reflected glory, as Charlie
Chaplin observed. Once secure in possessing O'Neill she believed she had the
right to criticize Agnes for not serving him well enough. She would fulfill the
"sense of mission" she chose for herself.

Throughout her life, Carlotta's behavior straddled the old authority and the
emerging new modern values. In this respect, she was somewhat like her

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mother, Nellie, who defied convention by her divorce, her rejection of
motherhood, and her pursuit of the entrepreneurial spirit that swept through
America in the Industrial Age. At the same time, Nellie was a boarding house
matron catering to the domestic concerns of her boarders in keeping with the
boundaries of class and gender. Nellie's business ventures, both conventional
and enterprising were probably dictated by practical concerns: labor force
employment would never have awarded her the income she enjoyed from her
entrepreneurial endeavors. Similarly, Carlotta could not have independently
earned the financial and social status awarded her by her relationship with
O'Neill. Carlotta was blatantly ambitious and self-serving. Like O’Neill, she
desired the love she never had as a child. While O'Neill's ambitions were fueled
by his prodigious talent, Carlotta's ambitions were fueled by a desire for extrinsic
rewards. In her elevation of material over intrinsic rewards she differed
dramatically from contemporaries such as Isadora Duncan, Margaret Sanger,
Emma Goldman, and even Gertrude Stein, whose success as a writer might
have been more assured had she stuck to Jamesian novels rather than venture
into radical experimentation with words. In short, Carlotta Monterey was a
product of both the Industrial Age and the Modern Age. O’Neill was a commodity
of her entrepreneurial spirit in much the same way she was a commodity to
Nellie, who preferred to promote her as a beauty queen rather than nurture her
as a child.

By all accounts, Carlotta had tremendous allure. Once describing herself
as a girl of extremes, she carefully cultivated an intriguing and powerful image. If

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she lacked the erudition of Mabel Dodge's circle of Greenwich Village
Provincetown intellectuals, she could easily assume the bohemian style that
assured her acceptance. Her career as an actress endowed her with artistic
credentials, and it was the prestigious Bessy Marbury who introduced her to
O'Neill. It was the height of the Jazz Age when Carlotta Monterey met Eugene
O'Neill. O'Neill exemplified the alienation of the modern age and Carlotta
embodied the hedonism and "denial of repression” that Freud had inadvertently
made the keynotes of the popular culture he publicly despised. O'Neill's plays
were routinely analyzed for their Freudian content, while like the Surrealists, he
denied that his work was inspired by the theories of Freud. Freud himself might
have approved of Carlotta giving up her career to further O'Neill’s, although he
would have looked with harsh disapproval on her multiple marriages and affairs,
and the fact that O'Neill was probably more dependent on her emotionally than
she was on him.

The events leading up to and following O'Neill's death illustrate the
strength of Carlotta’s personality, and suggest that despite her claims to the
contrary, she did resent subordinating her ego to O'Neill's. She claimed that
O’Neill died when he could no longer write; so too, it appears, did her devotion to
him. One cannot shine in the reflected glory of a has-been. Her drive to control
the terms of his will was as much the prosaic desire for financial gain as the far-
reaching desire to shape his legacy. O'Neill had insisted that A Long Day's
Journey into Night not be published until twenty-five years after his death to
protect the family he brutally portrayed. Carlotta ensured that My was not

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only published but produced on the Broadway Stage. O’Neill’s plays were the
perfect vehicle for the method actors who had begun to dominate stage and
screen during the 1950s. Jo_umey boasted a stellar cast and elevated the career
of director José Quintero, who had become Carlotta's friend. Even more
important, it fueled a revival of interest in the plays of Eugene O'Neill. Whether it
was Carlotta's astute business sense, her need to control O'Neill's legend in
order to ensure her own, or simply revenge on the husband who had tried to
declare her incompetent to deny her executrix control over his will, the timing had
been ideal. Twenty-five years into the future, J_ou_rney Would have had to survive
in a culture that thrived on disco music, and embraced hedonism while rejecting
Freud. By ignoring O'Neill's last wishes, Carlotta secured his place in American
drama, the exalted place he had occupied in the Jazz Age when American art
and culture were forever redefined. By engineering the literary and theatrical
coup (over the protests of Random House publisher Bennett Cerf), Carlotta
secured her own place in American culture, less well-defined, but as uniquely

American and twentieth century as O’Neill's.

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WORKS CITED

Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great Waiand the Bi_rth of the Modern
Age. New York: Doubleday, 1989.

Lewis, Alfred Allan. Ladies and Not-So-Gentle Women. New York: Viking, 2000.

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