O’Neill was at first content with his stay at Loon Lodge, but by early August, after a month at the retreat, he began to brood and his writing darkened. His new play was giving him kicks and fits, and he wanted to blame his wife Agnes, his toddler children, and even his son Eugene and Agnes’s daughter Barbara from a previous marriage, who had also come to stay for awhile. The older children were eventually shipped away from the lake ahead of schedule.

At the same time, another play, Lazarus Laughed, was finding a cool reaction from the literary critics in New York, and he feared that for the first time in years he may not have any plays on the boards the coming fall.

Loon Lodge

O’Neill was all the while resisting the urge to drink and needed to find a distraction from the normalcy of the lodge. Yes, above all, Eugene O’Neill hated normalcy; in fact, since his youth, he had never known such a thing. His "Strange Interlude" in Maine was now not at all conducive to his creativity, he decided. In fact, Maine was spooking him. Something had to give. And it did.

Miss Carlotta Monterey, nee Hazel Tharsing, recently divorced, and once a bit actor in one of O’Neill’s plays, came to nearby Long Pond as the summer guest of Miss Elizabeth Marbury, real estate mogul and partner of O’Neill’s literary agent Richard Madden. Carlotta was a fetching sight, especially when she appeared in a risqué bathing suit.

One day Eugene and Agnes O’Neill visited Miss Marbury, and Carlotta was asked to show Eugene the bathhouse so he could change for a swim. Although she admitted she at first felt indifference toward the playwright, a spark was soon ignited. They would often meet by “accident” at the large house of the actress Florence Reed on Great Pond, about a half mile from Loon Lodge. This budding relationship appears to have been strictly platonic at this time; Agnes and Miss Marbury assumed that Carlotta was simply trying to impress a famous playwright.

Eugene O’Neill was impressed all right, going as far as to admit that Carlotta had eyes like his late mother’s. By early September he was back on track with Strange Interlude and believed he would be able to finish it before their stay in Maine was over. Eugene and family started taking frequent trips by car around the Maine countryside, often accompanied by guides like Ervin Bean.

Eugene also began to entertain the idea of establishing an O’Neill repertory theater that could support itself. This did not come to fruition, but a theater in New York was named for him, albeit, a few years after his death.

By the time summer had officially ended, Eugene O’Neill had a decent draft completed of Strange Interlude. The O’Neills left Loon Lodge on October 10, 1926, and returned to their winter residence in Connecticut. Eugene, completely refreshed and more ambitious than ever, also was rumored to have the address of Carlotta’s Manhattan home safely tucked away.

For more than a year Eugene O’Neill spent time in the family residence in Bermuda and made frequent trips to New York to oversee rehearsals of Strange Interlude. He also started seeing Carlotta Monterey and realized that his feelings for her were stronger than the ties that bound him to Agnes and his two children. He eventually left on a steamer, with Carlotta, bound for Europe, where they would spend the next several months. They leased an ancient chateau near Tours, France.

Agnes hoped for a reconciliation, but it never came. A divorce was granted to her on July 3, 1929, on the grounds of desertion, and Eugene and Carlotta were married three weeks later in Paris. In the meantime, Strange Interlude had opened on Broadway in January 1928. It was one of the most popular plays of the 1920s and would garner Eugene his third Pulitzer Prize. The summer in Maine had given him another prestigious award, substantial monetary benefits, long-lasting sobriety, and a new wife. Of course he also lost a wife and family in the process.

Eugene O’Neill spent the 1930s completing numerous plays, including Mourning Becomes Electra, Ah, Wilderness!, Days without End, and a play set in an Irish saloon like he knew in his youth, The Iceman Cometh.

He also began work on his most famous play, Long Day’s Journey into Night, completed in 1941. The writing of the play took a great emotional toll on Eugene. It was about his family, but thinly disguised as a play about a family named Tyrone. There was James Tyrone, a stingy, aging matinee actor; Ella, his wife, a morphine addict; Jamie, an alcoholic; and “Edmund Tyrone,” a drifter wasting away from consumption.

The play was dedicated to Carlotta, on their 12th wedding anniversary. Eugene said, in part, “Dearest: I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood. A sadly inappropriate gift, it would seem, for a day celebrating happiness. But you will understand. I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead [father] at last and write this play – write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.”

The play was an ode to his long-gone family, for sure, but also an ode to all that was, or could have been, an ode to himself both as a lost 24-year-old and years later as a world-famous dramatist. The play was produced in 1956, three years after his death, and received incredible acclaim. O’Neill’s career was still operating well into the 1960s as countless critics and readers discovered or rediscovered him. We continue to discover him, 50 years after his death.

It can be argued that Eugene O’Neill outlived the curse of his family, but not actually. By the late 1940s he had uncontrollable shaking in his hands, either from Parkinson’s disease or from years of hard drinking.

But as recently as 1998 an article appeared about a group of doctors who concluded that he suffered from a lifelong, congenital tremor. Whatever the tremor was, it finally forced him to stop writing altogether by the time he was 57, with "A Moon for the Misbegotten" the last play he got to see grace the stage.

O’Neill’s daughter Oona, debutante of the year (1942) at the Stork Club in New York, went to Hollywood as an aspiring actress and met Charles Chaplin.

Chaplin’s political and personal life had ended his career, and he was 36 years older than Oona when they married. This so disturbed Eugene that he never spoke to his daughter again. But she had a happy marriage with Chaplin, had eight children, and died in 1991.

Eugene’s son, Eugene Jr., after receiving his doctorate and teaching the classics at Yale, turned to alcohol and committed suicide in 1950. The playwright was devastated. His son Shane also turned to alcohol and drugs, bounced from one job to another, and at 57 threw himself out of a Brooklyn apartment window.

In 1948 Eugene and Carlotta renovated a cottage at Marblehead Neck in Massachusetts and in 1951 moved to a suite in the Shelton Hotel in Boston. Eugene donated many of his manuscripts and papers to Yale. He died in the hotel on November 27, 1953, at the age of 65.

Before his death he must have often recalled that summer in Maine that literally changed his life and, arguably, the literary world forever. Eugene Gladstone O’Neill, drifter, seaman, playwright, man of dreams and nightmares, found eternal sleep in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston.

©2003 Portland Magazine

Colin Sargent, Editor & Publisher

editor@portlandmonthly.com

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