American Experience (1988) s18e09 Episode Script

1
MAN:
Well, there is something
that people need to ponder
about Eugene O'Neill
which actually opens them up
to the whole art of writing.
What does it cost to be an artist?
What did it cost to be Eugene O'Neill?
What being Eugene O'Neill cost Eugene O'Neill
was a mother
cost him a father
cost him a happy marriage.
It cost him children.
It cost the many wives that he tried to have,
'cause he didn't know how.
He had never learned that.
Now you say that happens
to a lot of people; it does.
But not everybody can write about it.
Not everybody is really willing
to look deep within themselves to see,
What's going on?
What am I doing?
And he was capable of that, and that's hard.
That is hard to take a pencil and say,
"This is me in the deepest part of my gut.
"And this was my mother,
"and this was my father,
"and this was all the people who were close to me."
"and they were all in some respect
strivers and failures.
That's not an easy thing to say.
And what it cost them
I am not sure that our artists
are truly appreciated and
recompensed for their effort.
NARRATOR:
In the waning days of December 1937,
a brooding and increasingly
frail 49-year-old writer
named Eugene O'Neill moved
with his third wife, Carlotta,
into a remote mountainside retreat
perched high above the sparsely
populated farm country
of Danville, California,
35 miles east of San Francisco.
To most observers,
the notoriously shy and reclusive playwright
seemed to be at the very pinnacle of his career
the groundbreaking onetime
golden boy of Broadway
the most celebrated playwright
in the world by far
winner of no fewer than three Pulitzer Prizes,
and the recipient that very year
of the Nobel Prize itself,
the only American dramatist ever
to have been so honored.
And yet, as O'Neill himself
more than half sensed at the time,
by the winter of 1937, as he and Carlotta
settled into the brooding
edifice they called Tao House,
everything that mattered most in his life
seemed on the verge of slipping away.
In the months and years to come,
as his health deteriorated
and his reputation declined
and his days as a writer
seemed increasingly numbered,
memories and experiences that
had haunted him for a lifetime
would come swarming in,
bringing to a climax one of the most riveting
and moving sagas in the history
of American theater,
and leaving behind three
of the greatest tragic masterpieces
ever written by an American.
MAN:
I even caught myself hating her
"for making me hate myself so much.
"There's a limit
"to the guilt you can feel
"and the forgiveness and the pity you can take.
I mean you have to begin blaming somebody else!"
MAN:
You see, an extraordinary thing
happened with O'Neill.
I don't know where he got the confidence
to know that there was
greatness lying ahead of him.
It's as if he knew that
those great plays were there
at the end of his life to write.
Whatever preparation is needed,
O'Neill was making
all of his life
in the plays that he wrote--
some of them not even good plays.
But he knew.
He knew somewhere.
That's what's so staggering.
The thing that's amazing to me
is that after he won the Nobel Prize
he wrote his greatest work.
And basically the last thing,
the second to last thing that he wrote,
is the greatest play ever written by an American
and one of the greatest plays ever written.
And it's thrilling.
O'Neill's career is
so enviable in that way,
I mean, it is like Michelangelo.
It is like Shakespeare in the sense
that it gets better and better and better.
RICHARDS:
A long day's journey
into the unknown, into night
and we shall eventually fold up in it.
That was a play where he put
himself, he put his family
on the stage, in an effort
to try and understand them.
Now, that could be described as a cruel thing
because he exposed everybody.
Honesty and truth are hard.
Truth is clean, but it's hard,
He spoke the truth about those closest to him.
ACTOR( as Mary ):
"Let me see.
"What did I come in here to find?
"I know it's something I lost,
something I need terribly."
"I remember when I had it
I was never lonely or afraid.
"I can't have lost it forever.
I would die if I thought that.
Because then there would be no hope."
( as Tyrone ):
"Yes, maybe life
"overdid the lesson for me
"and made a dollar worth too much,
"and then the time came
when it ruined my career as a fine actor."
MAN:
It's amazing. It has drawn
universally everyone
into the family unit somehow,
or family they, they didn't have or did have,
or reminded them of things
that have happened in their family
because it's a terribly
a deep family play,
and love and hate
and how we handle these things
or if we handle them.
MAN:
Well, in his life,
O'Neill was not given the grace, opportunity,
to work things through with his brother,
with his mother, with his dad.
Is that not the case for so many of us?
In the here and now, in the tyranny of the moment,
the tragedy of time,
we so often can't finish that.
The play finishes that.
NARRATOR:
To a remarkable degree,
Eugene O'Neill's whole life
had gone into the making
of Long Day's Journey into Night
and the handful of other
autobiographical masterpieces
he pulled from himself only
at the very end of his career,
as if the truths they conveyed
and feelings they laid bare
were almost more than he could endure.
Haunted from the start
by memories of a lonely house
on the Connecticut shore,
his whole life, he later said,
would be a kind of "seeking flight,"
a restless search for meaning and identity,
reality and truth--
at once an escape from and a search for
the gorgons of his past
and the oblivion he felt at the center of his soul.
"You are the most conceited man
I've ever known,"
a friend once remarked of his habit
of continually looking
at himself in mirrors.
"No," he replied.
"I'm just trying to be sure
I'm still here."
ACTOR( as Edmund ):
"It was a great mistake,
my being born a man.
"I would have been much more successful
"as a seagull or a fish.
"As it is,
"I will always be a stranger
who never feels at home,
"who does not really want
and is not really wanted,
"who can never belong,
who must always be a little
in love with death."
RICHARDS:
His life was a turmoil
and he spent his life
trying to understand something
of that turmoil
and he saw the turmoil in others.
He saw the torture in people
because he felt it in himself.
He felt it in himself, the pulling apart.
He was being pulled apart
by the questions
that he introduced into his life.
SHAUGHNESSY:
These are the age-old questions,
I suppose,
of the theater itself: Who am I?
And where do I come from?
And what is my part in
Do I have a part in my own fate?
Or am I simply a checker
on the board being moved around?
Do I belong to anything?
To anyone?
To whom do I belong now?
To God who seems to be abandoning me?
KUSHNER:
This is somebody who suffered terribly
as a result of his complete fealty
to a vision of the truth,
to a notion that there is a depth,
that there is a profundity
that there's agreat complexes
and abysses of meaning
underneath the surface of life,
and that our job as artists and as people
is to dig and to go deep--
or to, you know, dive,
as Melville kept saying,
deeper and deeper and deeper.
And that it hurts,
and the more deeply you dive,
the more you're at risk
of being dismantled or crushed,
but that's what your job is,
and you don't flinch from it.
In O'Neill, there's this absolute,
sort of God-ordained mission,
which is to keep, you know, searching,
even if in the process you discover
that there is no God.
It's a terrifying sort of mandate,
but it also I think should be
the mandate of all artists
and, in a way, of all people.
ACTOR ( as Tyrone ):
"Whose play is it?
( clears his throat )
"A stinking old miser!
( chuckles )
"Well, maybe you're right.
"Maybe I can't help being,
although all my life
"since I had anything,
"I've thrown money over the bar
"to buy drinks for everyone in the house,
"or loaned money to sponges
I knew would never pay back.
"But of course that was in barrooms,
"when I was full of whiskey.
"I can never feel that way
"when I'm sober in my home.
"It was at home I learned
the value of a dollar
"and fear of the poorhouse.
"I've never been able to believe
in my luck since.
"But still, the more property you own,
"the safer you think you are!
"That may not be logical,
but it's the way I have to feel."
MAN:
Before O'Neill, there was
no American theater.
The American theater was Ben-Hur,
live horses on stage in a chariot race,
Little Eva going up to heaven
in Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Serious theater was Shakespeare.
Theater was
James O'Neill
in The Count of Monte Cristo
barnstorming around the country
for 35 years.
KUSHNER:
You can't help but conclude
that in somebody who was as
trapped in the family drama
as O'Neill, that there was
an absolute necessity,
given that father and that
life, to be in the theater
and to make that his, you know,
arena of contestation.
I mean, he was going to become
a worker in the theater,
because that's where he did battle
with his father and those ghosts.
NARRATOR:
He was born in a hotel room in 1888
in the heart of what would
become Times Square,
the brooding youngest son
of a celebrated actor
who would fail to fulfill the
early promise of his career,
and of his long, tormented
drug-addicted wife.
From the very start,
he would be haunted by events
that had taken place
long before his birth:
by the ghost of a dead child
and by the tragically blighted
lives of his parents,
James and Ella,
and his two older siblings,
Jamie and Edmund.
ACTOR( as Mary ):
"The past is the present, isn't it?
"It's the future, too.
"We try to lie ourselves out of that,
but life won't let us."
- Mary Tyrone.
NARRATOR:
From the very start, life had gone
as neither of his parents had expected.
His mother, Ella, a shy and
retiring ex-convent girl
who had fallen madly in love
with her future husband
practically the first time she met him,
had never been able to adjust
to the rootless life
his acting career imposed
upon the family.
His father, James, a dashing,
dark-haired Irish immigrant
who had risen from extreme poverty
to become one of the most
promising actors
of his generation,
had never been able to escape
the crippling fears his
childhood had instilled in him,
sacrificing his talent in the
end for financial security.
MAN:
His father compromised
his artistic talent.
He was capable of succeeding
America's greatest Shakespearean
actor, Edwin Booth.
Instead, he took the easier road,
and found a play,
The Count of Monte Cristo,
which was one of America's
most popular theater successes.
And the money starts rolling in.
The show is sold out every night,
so he can't give up the role.
He plays it night after night,
week after week.
He travels across the country
with the production.
He buys it outright for a paltry sum.
And every time he tries
to escape from the imprisonment
of that play to try Shakespeare,
the audience doesn't want him to do that.
They want him back in that play.
LUMET:
It's interesting to me
that a piece of cheap melodrama
should become so central to
these genuinely tragic lives.
And as James Tyrone says,
it became his suicide in a way.
He lost the ability to do Iago one night
and Othello the next with Edwin Booth,
the greatest actor of his day.
NARRATOR:
In 1884, with rising profits
from the new play,
James overcame his morbid fear
of poverty long enough
to buy a drafty cottage
on the Connecticut shore,
where the continually itinerant
family would come to rest
for a few months each year.
The only home the O'Neills ever had,
it was destined to become
a house of heartache and pain.
WOMAN:
The big tragedy and the actual
turning point for Ella O'Neill
even before Eugene was born,
was the death of her second son, Edmund.
He was two years old when Ella
decided to join James on tour
and left Jamie, who was four years older,
and Edmund with her mother,
with their grandmother.
And she was very conflicted about going.
She didn't really want
to leave her children,
but she did finally let herself
be persuaded to go
and be with him for a bit of his tour.
And no sooner had she arrived
than she had a wire
from her mother
saying that Jamie had measles.
And, almost immediately after that,
she wired that Edmund,
the baby, had measles.
And that, of course, was very dangerous
in a very young child.
So Ella instantly started back
to New York,
but before she could reach
New York, the baby had died.
And she was devastated.
She felt it was her fault.
She felt guilty for having left him,
and she believed that Jamie had
deliberately exposed the baby
to his own case of measles.
MAN:
I think the tragedy of Jamie
was that he was condemned
at the age of seven
for killing his brother,
and I don't think
she ever forgave him for it.
And that's it.
That's a jail sentence.
I don't think you return from that,
from your mother feeling that about you.
So Jamie's tragedy is, I think,
he died at the age of seven
and had to play out
the long hours of every day
of the rest of his life
as a walking corpse.
And the only respite he found
was in whores and booze.
NARRATOR:
Jamie would never recover
from the psychic damage
inflicted by the death
of his younger brother, Edmund.
Neither, in the end,
would James and Ella,
whose marriage now descended
into a domestic hell
of guilt, remorse
and bitter recrimination.
BARBARA GELB:
That was something that Ella
never recovered from.
She felt terribly guilty about that,
and she made up her mind she
would never have another child.
And so, when Eugene was conceived,
she immediately felt
that this was terrible
and that God was going to punish her
for having another child,
for presuming to have another child,
after allowing herself to lose Edmond.
And that really began
the cycle of tragedy.
And as soon as Eugene was born--
partly because she was
in a very depressed state
and partly because
it was a difficult birth--
she started taking morphine.
ARTHUR GELB:
That was the environment
in which O'Neill
was brought into the world.
He was an unwanted child.
His mother blamed him
for her morphine addiction.
And she became totally hooked on drugs.
WOMAN:
It must be very strange
to grow up in a household
where the mother simply absents herself.
and at a time maybe when you most
need to talk to her, touch her,
or have her sit quietly
in the room beside you,
She may be in the room,
but she's not there,
because she has chosen
to absent herself from you.
BARBARA GELB:
From his earliest childhood,
he used to stare out to sea.
He had no real home.
He toured with his father
and mother as an infant,
until he was seven years old
and was sent to boarding school.
So he was a very lonely child,
and the only thing that he took
any pleasure in
or consolation in was reading
and staring at the sea
in his summer home in New London.
I think that it first meant
a sense of freedom.
He would look out to sea,
and he would see the seagulls
circling, and he would think,
you know, if only he could be
a seagull himself,
totally free, unbound to anything ashore,
unbound to a difficult uncaring mother
and a rather domineering father.
NARRATOR:
With his actor father
frequently on the road
and a house filled
with unexplained absences
and unsaid things,
the dreamlike unrealities
of life and of the theater
would be strangely intermingled
in his experience.
And, of course, Ella getting
more and more deeply involved
with her morphine addiction.
There was an English nurse,
named Sarah Sandy,
who took care of Eugene.
And if she hadn't been there for Eugene,
no one would have been.
And James was very much
occupied with his career,
as always, and he wasn't even aware
that Ella was taking morphine,
until some druggist said,
"Do you know that this is
addictive, this medicine?"
It was then when he first
realized that she was addicted.
NARRATOR:
Shielded from the truth
of his mother's condition
by his father and brother
and Sarah Sandy,
he was often frightened
by her mysterious withdrawals
and irrational behavior
and frequently feared for her sanity.
Told of her deep remorse
over the death
of his older brother Edmund,
he often prayed for
her recovery, to no avail.
For Ella herself,
the darkest times came when,
in her grief and delirium,
her faith fell away entirely
and she felt that God had abandoned her.
If only I could find my faith
so that I could pray again.
Hail Mary, full of grace,
the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women,
and blessed is the fruit
of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners,
now and and
( sighing anxiously )
NARRATOR:
Two days after his seventh birthday,
he was sent away
to a rigid Catholic
boarding school in the Bronx,
where, in the years to come,
his own faith would begin to waver.
BARBARA GELB:
He was bitterly unhappy about
being sent to boarding school,
more because he was taken away
from Sarah Sandy
than even from his mother.
He stayed there until he was 13.
He was very lonely
and he mainly withdrew into reading.
That was the only pleasure
he had in his life.
NARRATOR:
The turning point of his childhood
came with the revelation
of Ella's affliction.
Returning home from prep school
one afternoon
in the spring of 1901,
he surprised his mother
with a needle in her hand,
in the family's temporary
Upper West Side apartment.
Two years later, in the summer
of 1903, his father and brother
were forced to reveal
the full truth of her condition
following a garish
nighttime episode in which Ella,
desperate for morphine,
ran out of the house in her dressing gown
and tried to drown herself
in the Thames River.
The impact of the revelation
was cataclysmic,
shattering what remained
of his religious beliefs
and unleashing, in a blow,
all the bleak phantoms of his childhood,
along with a tidal wave
of conflict within the family.
One Sunday morning late that same summer,
he informed his father he would
no longer be attending church.
( angry shouting )
James tried to force him to go,
and the two nearly came to blows.
But he stood his ground
and his father finally
marched off to church alone.
O'Neill was not yet 15.
His seeking flight had begun.
SHAUGHNESSY:
Eugene lost faith.
He left the church at 15 years old.
He never came back.
It would do nobody any service whatsoever
to try to reclaim him for the church.
He was an apostate.
But, as he said time and time again,
"Once a Catholic, always a Catholic."
Those are deep roots
and deep scars, if you want.
NARRATOR:
Years later, in a poignant
diagram he made
during a brief, aborted attempt
at psychoanalysis,
he tried to sum up
the nightmarish character
of his childhood
and the impact it had had on him.
O'NEILL ( dramatized ):
World of reality practically unrealized.
Nightmares.
Terror of the dark.
Seven years old.
Complete break.
School.
Resentment and hatred of father
as cause of break with mother.
Reality faced and fled from in fear.
Life of fantasy and religion in school.
Inability to belong to reality.
Discovery of mother's inadequacy.
Resentment against father.
Hatred and defiance of father.
- Eugene O'Neill.
NARRATOR:
For the rest of his life,
trapped between the shadowy
terrors of the outer world
and a disturbing sense
of inner unreality,
he would never be able
to escape the conviction,
instilled in him in childhood,
that he had been born with
something dead inside him.
Well, but you look at him,
and he looks like a ghost.
He looks like a ghost
haunting his own life.
The same life that destroyed his mother
destroyed him in a different way.
He didn't belong anywhere.
So, I think he dreamed of
places where people belonged--
why that cottage at New London
meant so much to him,
because it was as close to home
as they ever had.
NARRATOR:
The first phase of his seeking flight
would be a desperate,
headlong rush into oblivion.
For the next ten years,
he would run from
the bleak wreckage of the past,
wandering aimlessly, drinking recklessly
and angrily courting oblivion
and self-destruction,
desperately looking
for a purpose to his life
and for some place to fit in.
Graduating from prep school in 1906
with no plans for the future
other than vague dreams
of going to sea and becoming a poet,
he enrolled at Princeton,
but was thrown out before
the end of his first year
for drinking too much
and cutting classes.
At 21, driven by fierce gusts of emotion
he could neither control nor understand,
he would marry, then abruptly abandon,
a young woman named Kathleen Jenkins,
fleeing the responsibilities
of fatherhood and marriage
to the jungles of Honduras,
then to South America
aboard a ship called the Charles Racine.
He would see his bewildered
wife and child only once
after taking to sea.
He wouldn't see his son again--
whom she had bravely named
Eugene Jr. until the boy was eleven.
BARBARA GELB:
Once he did go to sea,
he felt total release
and a sense of complete
freedom, being away from land,
being away from everything
that was pressured
and what he considered hypocritical.
Sailors he found to be totally unassuming
and warm and friendly
and not demanding of anything from him.
And he was able to really relax
and feel that he could
be himself on the sea.
And then it became
a kind of a mystical calling;
all his life after that,
he tried to live near the sea.
When he was away from the sea,
he really missed it terribly.
NARRATOR:
Lying on the bowsprit
of the Charles Racine
one night on his way to Argentina,
he would have an experience
that would haunt him
for the rest of his life,
a rapturous blurring of the boundaries
between himself and the world around him
that brought with it a transcendent,
heartbreakingly brief sense of belonging
and connection to something larger.
But if his days at sea
were some of the brightest he ever had,
the ensuing months
he spent in Buenos Aires
would be some of the darkest.
ARTHUR GELB:
And he drank himself into insensibility.
How he survived that period,
only God knows.
He barely, barely had
the physical stamina
to return by ship.
He found a berth on a cargo ship,
and he barely was able
to get on that ship
and get himself back to New York.
When he comes back, what does he do?
He goes to a saloon
called Jimmy the Priest's
on the foot of Fulton Street,
and he lives there as a derelict,
he drinks rotgut whiskey--
you know, five cents a shot--
and he lives upstairs
with other derelicts,
and he has no ambition
to do anything at this point.
NARRATOR:
On a freezing night
in the winter of 1912,
filled with shame and self-disgust
and a sense of utter hopelessness,
he returned to his filthy cell
at Jimmy the Priest's,
swallowed a bottle of Veronal
tablets and lay down to die.
At a bottom-of-the-sea bar
at the foot of Manhattan--
which, 30 years later,
would become the setting of
one of his greatest plays--
he had come to the end of the road.
He was 23 years old.
KUSHNER:
That bar, which is
so profoundly important
in O'Neill's life--
I mean, it's the place where
he became a writer, really,
I mean, at the end
of the youthful journeys on the sea,
and the suicide attempt--
that's where he hit the bottom,
where he arrived at
his own O'Neillian moment
and emerged either alive or not alive,
depending on, you know,
how you want to look at it.
And in some ways, clearly,
he felt not alive;
I mean that that's the point
at which the O'Neills
finally got what they deserved,
which was this dead child.
thank God for American theater
and for world literature,
the child didn't actually die
and went on to write plays.
But there's a moment of a kind
of a soul death in that bar
that he then resurrects
in that completely,
just deeply frightening play.
NARRATOR:
It was the beginning of a kind
of rebirth, he later said.
Admitted to a sanitarium later that year
with a case of tuberculosis--
retribution, he believed,
for the brutally punishing life
he had led--
he began to look inward,
to confront the bleak realities
he had been running from for years,
and to see a way forward.
He would become a playwright,
but the plays he would write
would be unlike any
his father had ever acted in.
Mining the pain and conflict he
felt deep in himself and others,
he would overturn
the shallow commercial
conventions of Broadway
and create an entirely
new kind of American drama,
one that was ruthlessly honest--
true to life--
and deeply, exhilaratingly tragic.
"I want to be an artist
or nothing," he declared,
not long after returning to New
London in the summer of 1913.
Escaping now not into the
oblivion of drink and death
but into the phantom mirror world of art,
he would spend the next 30 years
relentlessly plumbing
the depths of his own experience,
endlessly searching for a poetic language
capable of conveying his deeply
tragic sense of existence.
American theater would never be the same.
O'NEILL ( dramatized ):
What I am after is to get an
audience to leave the theater
with an exultant feeling
from seeing somebody
on the stage facing life,
fighting against the eternal odds,
not conquering but perhaps
inevitably being conquered.
The individual life is made significant
just by the struggle.
GUARE:
The shape of O'Neill's life
is very simple.
He wrote.
He was a young boy, a young man,
who lived in a theatrical world.
Then he couldn't fit in,
went away to sea, came back,
drank and drank and drank and drank,
and then after 1916,
Bound East for Cardiff
at the Provincetown Playhouse,
the date when O'Neill is born.
From then on he just writes.
He writes to the exclusion
of having a life.
O'Neill's trajectory is just a
man who is consumed by writing.
NARRATOR:
Over the next six years,
in one of the most tumultuous
professional and personal apprenticeships
in the history of American theater,
O'Neill would teach himself
how to write plays,
see his first work produced on stage,
marry and start a family of his own
with a pretty young writer
named Agnes Boulton,
then scale the ramparts
of Broadway itself
and take mainstream
American theater by storm.
America didn't have
a playwright of consequence
up until the time O'Neill came along.
I mean, O'Neill was essentially
America's first serious playwright.
In the teens and in the early '20s,
O'Neill was really trying to
get at the same kind of issues
as the great modernists,
like Ibsen and Strindberg and Chekhov.
Whether or not he was achieving
these aims was less important
than the fact
that he was attempting them,
and a lot of people thought
he was achieving them.
NARRATOR:
On February 3, 1920,
O'Neill's first full-length
play, Beyond the Horizon,
opened on Broadway
and changed forever the course
of American theater.
The first true American tragedy--
the uncompromisingly bleak drama
about the blighted dreams of two brothers
in love with the same woman--
received rave reviews,
brought its author $6,000
and at the end of the season,
won the Pulitzer Prize in drama.
O'Neill knew he had arrived,
and so did his father, James,
who had sat with Ella in
the balcony on opening night
with tears streaming down his cheeks.
O'Neill had fought with his father almost up to
the day that he died, but toward the end
he and his father were reconciled,
especially after Beyond the
Horizon was produced in 1920.
His father did realize
that his son was talented.
He was very impressed with the fact
that it got wonderful reviews
and that he was now
an accepted playwright.
NARRATOR:
A week after the play opened,
his father suffered a crippling stroke,
then learned he had inoperable
cancer of the intestine,
and four months later,
went home to New London to die.
On his deathbed,
he revealed the full extent
of the bitter regret he felt at
having betrayed his own talent,
and his last words left a deep
impression on his younger son.
"I'm going to a better
sort of life," he gasped.
"This sort of life, here--
all froth, no good, rottenness."
O'NEILL ( dramatized ):
That's what caused me
to make up my mind
that they would never get me.
I determined then and there
that I would never sell out.
His dying words are written
indelibly, seared on my brain,
a warning from the Beyond
to remain true to the best that is in me
though the heavens fall.
NARRATOR:
Two years later, his mother, Ella,
having finally recovered
from her long addiction,
died of a stroke
while on a trip to California.
Not long after, in the fall
of 1923, his brother, Jamie,
nearly blind and in the
terminal stages of alcoholism,
died at the age of 45,
his life the most cruelly blighted
of the four tragic O'Neills.
"Within the last four years,"
O'Neill wrote to a friend,
"I have lost my father,
my mother and my only brother."
Now he was alone with their ghosts.
One way or another,
they would continue to haunt him
for the rest of his days.
ARTHUR GELB:
First thing you have to understand
is that O'Neill is someone
who can't get his ideas
down on paper fast enough.
They're always percolating in his mind.
Not one idea, but a dozen ideas.
He is constantly trying
to understand himself.
He can't understand himself
because a lot of his ideas
are unconscious,
they come in dreams.
O'Neill dreamt
all of Desire Under the Elms
and Ah! Wilderness.
He dreamt fragments
of dozens of other plays.
NARRATOR:
Following the success
of Beyond the Horizon,
O'Neill's career would take off
with a speed and intensity
unparalleled in the annals
of American theater.
Over the next 14 years,
he would write 18 new plays,
see 21 of his works produced
on and off Broadway,
win two more Pulitzer Prizes
and become the most celebrated
and critically acclaimed
playwright of his generation.
KUSHNER:
I mean, he was a hugely famous writer.
He filled a cultural space
that needed to be filled.
We had a couple of great novelists.
We had Melville, Hawthorne, Henry James,
and O'Neill came along at a point
when we needed a great playwright.
And he knew that, I mean, it was
a created persona as well.
I mean, he posed for all those
gorgeous pictures of himself,
and, you know, he was an actor's son
and he really knew how to look
haunted and, you know, driven.
BARBARA GELB:
The fact that he was able to,
on his own terms,
overturn the very frivolous Broadway
that he came into in early 1920,
and that he was able to make producers
accept him on his own terms,
was a remarkable thing for the time.
And he never tried to repeat
his early successes.
He always wanted
to try something different.
Often, he fell on his face in trying,
but each time he was reaching
for something bigger
and beyond what he had already done,
for something even more important
and more revealing of life.
KUSHNER:
I think that there's
a necessity to experiment
when you're involved
in something as protean
as actually, literally
inventing American theater.
NARRATOR:
In The Emperor Jones,
he would use expressionist scenery
and the sound of throbbing drums
to highlight the disintegration
of his main character,
a black man haunted by 300 years
of American racism and the past.
In The Hairy Ape, he would use
savagely stylized dialogue and masks
to evoke the inner life of working men
ground to dust by the forces
of industrialization.
In Anna Christie, which would
bring him a second Pulitzer,
he would explore the deeply
conflicted hopes and fears
of a one-time prostitute,
the father who abandoned her
and the strapping Irish sailor
she falls in love with.
ACTOR ( as Matt Burke ):
"And me to listen to that talk
"from a woman like you and be frightened
"to close her mouth with a slap!
"Oh, God help me.
"I'm a yellow coward
for all men to spit at.
"But I'll not be getting out
of this 'til I've had me word.
And let you look out now
how you'd drive me"
GUARE:
That's where O'Neill wanted to take us.
He wanted to take us to that place
where the interior life of the characters
was ripped open and revealed.
And in this limitless America,
this land without a horizon,
what do we do faced with
the desolate boundaries
that we feel within us?
NARRATOR:
To a striking degree,
the painful inner turmoil
his characters faced
mirrored conflicts in his
own life, past and present.
In 1924, with strains in their
marriage already on the rise,
he and Agnes moved with
five-year-old Shane to Bermuda,
where in 1925, a second child,
Oona, was born,
and where the conflict
between them intensified.
Drinking too much
and ill-equipped for
the family life he craved,
he often felt as he had
after the birth of Shane--
"homesick for homelesness
and irresposibility", he said,
and filled with regret
that he had gone "in for playwriting,
mating and begetting" children.
Agnes, in turn, increasingly
resented the maintenance
his personality required,
and always more social than he,
had little sympathy with his
increasingly desperate struggle
to give up drinking.
ARTHUR GELB:
O'Neill stopped cold when he was forty.
He had to stop cold because
psychiatrists told him
that his brain would turn
to the white of an egg,
and he knew that without writing
he would die.
NARRATOR:
Quitting, however, left him feeling
even more strangely unsettled inside,
and he compensated by retreating
even more deeply into his work.
He became increasingly obsessed
with masks
and with what they seemed
to convey of the unnamed,
undisclosed forces
beneath the surface of life,
conscious at times that his work itself
was a kind of mask
behind which he was hiding.
Haunted more than ever by
the loss of his religious faith,
he looked increasingly
for something to replace it,
restlessly searching in play after play
for the "force behind," he said.
"Fate, God, our biological
past-- whatever one calls it--
mystery, certainly."
Ransacking the literature
of three millennia,
in works of increasing length,
complexity and ambition,
he would push the boundaries
of American theater to the very limit,
haunted as he drove himself forward,
by the nagging suspicion
that he'd still not created
the masterworks of which he was capable.
BRUSTEIN:
No one understood better
his own limitations than O'Neill.
Now, the fear of being what Freud called
"a pseudo-genius," you know,
someone who has all the desires
to be a writer and a great genius writer
and all the ambition and all
the feelings and what have you,
but just can't make it
That's terrifying.
And imagine living with that day by day
and not knowing
whether you have it or not,
and not knowing
in spite of all the praise
that has been lavished on you,
whether you really are worthy
of any of that praise.
I'm sure he must have felt that.
O'NEILL ( dramatized ):
One's outer life passes in a solitude
haunted by the masks of others.
One's inner life passes in a solitude
hounded by the masks of oneself.
- Eugene O'Neill.
KUSHNER:
I think that if you look
at this obsession
that he has with illusions and dreams,
and, uh, the way
that he ties this
into the national question of America
as a kind of a hollow dream,
or a dream that will never be fulfilled,
a sort of very, very tragic
and dark vision
of what this country is,
what this country does
to people's dreams
The whole obsession
with masks in the '20s,
I mean, the idea of life
as a kind of a failing theater
really makes it absolutely imperative
that he work in the theater
and that he write plays,
because the theater
is a perfect metaphor for him,
for a central question of life,
which is the artifice of it,
the way that we construct realities
to protect ourselves,
to make it possible for us to survive,
and the horrible effort it requires
to keep those realities intact
and to enlist other people
into our own little plays,
and how finally one loses
the vigor and ruthlessness
necessary to keep your dreams
the dominant reality
that surrounds you every waking minute.
And as those dreams fall apart,
you realize that you've lived a lie,
and you can't find a better way
of expressing that
than onstage because
you're, of course, watching
a constantly decomposing dream
that cannot remain intact,
that has all these holes in it
that the audience is aware of,
that frighten and electrify.
And I think it makes the theater
the perfect medium for somebody
who's as heartbroken,
about disillusionment,
who really, finally on some level
can't reconcile himself to the fact
that there's no salvation,
that there's no redemption,
that there's no life after death,
that everything that made life possible,
uh, bearable, is really kind
of finally a lie.
And I think that the theater is a perfect medium
for somebody who's as grief-stricken
about that as O'Neill was.
NARRATOR:
In the winter of 1928, Strange Interlude,
his longest and most ambitious
undertaking yet,
opened on Broadway.
A nine-act, five-hour
boldly sexual novel in play form,
it would prove to be his most
successful play to date,
bringing him more than a quarter
of a million dollars
in royalties, and at the end
of the season,
a third Pulitzer Prize.
By then, however,
O'Neill himself had long since
taken flight again.
On February 10, 1928,
he set sail for Europe
aboard the steamship Berengaria.
Behind him was his life with Agnes,
and his children, Shane and Oona,
to whom he had not even said good-bye.
With him was a woman
he had fallen passionately
in love with two years earlier,
who would alter the course
of his entire existence,
and eventually help bring
his seeking flight to an end.
Her name was Carlotta Monterey.
For the next 25 years,
the drama of his life
would be inextricably bound up
with her complex personality.
Her ultimate impact
on the fate of his career
would be incalculable.
MONTEREY ( on recording ):
When I married Mr. O'Neill,
I knew nothing about him
except that he was a dramatist.
I'd played in a play he had.
And he kept saying to me
He didn't say, "I love you.
I think you're wonderful.
I think you're grand."
He kept saying to me, "I need you.
I need you. I need you."
And sometimes it was a bit frightening.
I'd been brought up in England.
Nobody ever sort of gritted their teeth
and said they'd needed me.
And he did need me I discovered.
And he never was in good health.
He always had a cold
NARRATOR:
She had made herself up in many ways,
right from the beginning, like a character
in a play or novel of her own invention.
Though she always claimed otherwise,
she had not, in fact,
been brought up in England
under genteel circumstances,
nor in fact was her real name
Carlotta Monterey.
ARTHUR GELB:
Her real name was Hazel Tharsing.
She was a very elegant woman
and quite beautiful in an exotic way,
and she created drama for herself.
BARBARA GELB:
She grew up poor in Oakland, California.
Her father abandoned her family.
Her mother ran a boardinghouse.
And she was quite
an accomplished seductress
by the time she met Eugene.
Heads turned
whenever she walked into a room.
She was absolutely beautiful,
beautiful actress.
Not very talented,
but she got parts
because of her great beauty.
NARRATOR:
They had met once before in 1922,
during the Broadway production
of The Hairy Ape,
in which she had played the role
of Mildred,
but it was a chance encounter
on a lake in Maine
four years later
that had kindled their romance.
He was, it turned out,
exactly what she was looking for.
She was exactly what he needed.
Years after he was gone,
she would return in her mind
to her earliest memories of him.
MONTEREY ( on recording ):
He asked if he could come to tea.
I hardly knew the man.
And he sat down, and he began to talk
about his early life--
that he'd had no home,
that he had no mother in the real sense,
no father in the real sense.
BARBARA GELB:
And she started working on him
at that point.
And she persuaded him
that he was living
the wrong kind of life.
"This is not the life you need.
You're a distinguished playwright."
He should be protected;
he should have, uh, serenity.
He should be surrounded by beauty.
He shouldn't have
to smell diapers and lamb stew.
And he was completely seduced by her.
He always wanted to have someone
who would take care of him.
And he finally did find
that kind of a woman
in Carlotta, who was
not interested in children
and who was prepared to devote her life
to being his protectress and nurse
and mother and secretary,
and that was the woman
he ultimately ended up with.
NARRATOR:
Though their battles could be epic,
and at the very end
they would inflict almost
unbearable pain on each other,
for much of their 24-year marriage,
they would do everything in their power
to give each other what they wanted,
which, in the end,
could be simply stated.
He wanted beauty,
serenity and protection.
She wanted to be the wife of a great genius.
And so they ran away together.
BARBARA GELB:
It was, you know,
a very stormy beginning,
and they almost broke up.
They went off to Europe,
and they began traveling around France.
But he was very torn--
I mean, he was not totally
without a conscience--
about Agnes and the two children.
And they had terrible battles,
and she left him a couple of times.
But, for some reason,
they did manage to stick.
From that point on,
when they rented the house in France
and he settled down to write
Mourning Becomes Electra,
it was a very serene
and very happy relationship
for the next several years.
NARRATOR:
It was during his sojourn
with Carlotta in France--
sustained as never before
by his relationship with a woman--
that something in him began to shift.
More and more, he was growing impatient
with experimentation for its own sake.
"The limits began to narrow,"
one man later said.
"The artistic aim was no longer
to find God,
but to know what lay within himself."
As his imagination began
to contract and turn inward,
he challenged himself to go deeper
and to find a truer instrument
with which to express himself.
"O for a language to write drama in,"
he wrote to a friend in 1929.
"For a speech that is dramatic
and isn't just conversation!
But where to find that language?"
That spring, he set to work
on Mourning Becomes Elektra,
a sprawling nine-act trilogy
based on the Oresteia,
the first and greatest
of the ancient Greek tragedies,
which he had chosen to retell,
he said, because,
"It has greater possibilities
of revealing
"all the deep hidden relationships
in the family than any other."
Increasingly now, he was being
drawn back towards memory,
family and the past.
Six months after the play's
triumphant Broadway opening
in October 1931,
he and Carlotta retreated
to Sea Island, Georgia,
where he awoke one morning
with the "idea for a nostalgic comedy"
running through his head.
"Fully formed and ready
to write," he remembered.
It was Ah, Wilderness!
An imaginary portrait
of his New London boyhood,
viewed through wistfully
rose-colored glasses,
it represented a longing,
"for a youth I never had,"
he later said.
"Showing the way I would have
liked my boyhood to have been."
He completed a first draft of the play
in a record six weeks.
GUARE:
O'Neill needed to write Ah, Wilderness!
He was heading back
towards his, unconsciously,
where he wanted to go,
going back to that house in Connecticut.
That I think he had to create
a dream version of it--
the happy version of it, the life lie.
NARRATOR:
And still, his inward retreat continued.
For years, he had been growing
increasingly impatient
with what he called
the "show shop" of Broadway.
In January 1934,
following the savage critical reception
of his next play, Days without End--
a solemn, overlong meditation
on his lost religious faith--
he vowed to distance himself
from the commercial theater entirely
and withhold all
future production of his work.
He would not have another play
on Broadway
for nearly 12 years.
BARBARA GELB:
He was very angry and very resentful,
and he felt that this great
laudatory group of people,
who came to see everything he wrote
and loved everything he wrote,
suddenly turned on him, and so,
he felt, well, "I'll teach them a lesson.
"I'll just withdraw,
and I won't write anything
more for Broadway."
NARRATOR:
Warned by his doctor that he was
"teetering on the verge
of a nervous breakdown,"
he returned to Sea Island
and threw himself into a new project--
the most ambitious
and ultimately ill-fated
of his career: a massive cycle of plays,
chronicling 150 years
in the life of an Irish American family,
doomed to strangle on its own greed.
He called it A Tale of
Possessors Self-Dispossessed,
and for the next five years,
he would devote every ounce
of energy he had to the
constantly expanding project.
"The only thing he wanted,"
Carlotta recalled,
"was to write, write, write,
and never go near a theater."
But they would soon be on the run again.
In the fall of 1936,
worn down by the brutally
hot Georgian summers
and worried by the steadily
increasing tremor in his hands,
he and Carlotta set out
for the Pacific Northwest,
looking for a new home.
They had just come to rest
in early November,
in a rented house
overlooking Puget Sound,
when their seclusion was shattered
by the news that O'Neill
had won the Nobel Prize.
He was too weary
to take much joy in it, however,
and, in the end, too ill
to travel to Stockholm
for the ceremony, and by mid-December,
he and Carlotta were on the move again,
heading south for California,
where, on the day after Christmas 1936,
his health collapsed completely
and he was rushed to a hospital
in Oakland,
suffering from appendicitis
and a host of other ailments.
He was still there ten weeks later,
when, on February 17, 1937,
the Swedish Consul General
officially awarded him the Nobel Prize
in a private ceremony
in his hospital room
that lasted less than five minutes.
BARBARA GELB:
And he almost died at one point,
and he and Carlotta
almost gave up thinking
that they could ever
live anywhere anymore.
And finally he did recover,
and they did find this very isolated
and beautiful place
in the mountains in California.
As he had planned it, he was
going to settle down there,
and that was the last place
he would ever live,
would finish writing
whatever he was going to write,
until he died,
and that was where he would be,
with Carlotta.
But I think that he did not really expect
what happened to him at that point.
BRUSTEIN:
If he died after Ah, Wilderness!,
we would have thought, "Very interesting,
but too bad he never made it
as a great playwright."
But something then happened.
He went into hibernation
and did not show his face to the world
and began writing works
that he may not ever
have intended the world to see.
And he had what was then diagnosed
as Parkinson's disease,
and it was causing his hand
to shake badly
and made the very act of
writing difficult and painful.
And there he was, you know,
a sick man in a shuttered room writing.
And that image is very poignant,
because he emerged with those
plays in his hands
from that room, and those plays
were masterpieces.
NARRATOR:
And so they came at last to Tao House,
the isolated, landlocked haven
they had built for themselves
from the ground up
on a mountainside in California.
They moved into the house
at the end of 1937,
ensconcing his beloved
player piano, Rosie,
on the ground floor, in a snug parlor
at the foot of the stairs
with views of Mount Diablo.
Upstairs, in the silent,
thick-walled study
of his new home, he arranged
the scores of outlines,
scenarios and drafts he had
already created for the cycle,
along with the dozens of notebooks
he had been filling with play ideas
since he had begun writing at 24.
And then he set to work.
For the next 18 months,
he labored over the gargantuan project,
drafting one play, outlining another,
doubling back to research a third.
But the more progress he made,
the longer and more complex
the nightmarishly difficult project grew
and the further the endpoint receded.
O'NEILL ( dramatized ):
That's the devil of this job,
the constant driving on while seeming,
in the light of final completion,
to be making no progress.
NARRATOR:
All the while it was becoming
increasingly clear
that his body was simply failing him.
For years, he been showing signs
of premature old age,
but now a litany of woes
descended on him,
including insomnia,
night sweats, prostate pain
and low blood pressure.
He often had trouble swallowing,
but even more disturbing were
the steadily worsening tremors
that made it increasingly
difficult to write
and that sometimes caused him
to lose control of his arms
and legs completely.
Unable to set down his thoughts
with any other instrument but a pencil,
his handwriting now grew
smaller and smaller
as he struggled to control the tremor
until he was squeezing more
than a thousand words at a time
onto a single sheet of paper.
Carlotta had to use a magnifying
glass to transcribe it.
By the spring of 1939,
he had outlined ten
of the eleven plays of the cycle
and written scenarios
or multiple drafts of eight,
nearly a million words in all.
But something inside him
had reached the breaking point,
and on June 5, 1939, he made
a fateful entry in his diary.
Afraid he would soon be forced
to give up writing altogether,
he felt "a sudden necessity," he said,
"to write plays I'd wanted
to write for a long time
that I knew could be finished."
KUSHNER:
I think a bell goes off in his head
that it's going to kill him
and it's too much for him to do.
He's not going to be able to finish it.
And he makes a decision at that point
to abandon the whole cycle and
to go back to his childhood,
to go back to the seminal
moments in his life
and to create these three
or four titanic works.
NARRATOR:
In the end, something in him had to finish dying
for his writing to be reborn.
In the silence of his study at Tao House,
confronted by the specter
of his own failing body
and the hopelessness
of finishing the cycle,
his imagination fell back
helplessly into the past,
and he returned in his mind
to his own most powerful
memories and experiences,
to the shabby bar he had almost died in
at the foot of Manhattan in 1912
and to his family's
desolate cottage by the sea
that same year.
On June 6, 1939, the day
after reaching his decision
to abandon the cycle,
he conceived the idea
for his two greatest plays
simultaneously.
O'NEILL ( dramatized ):
Read over notes on various
ideas for single plays,
decide to do outlines
of two that seem to appeal most and see:
the Jimmy the Priest hellhole idea
and the New London family one.
NARRATOR:
It was the beginning of what would become
The Iceman Cometh and
Long Day's Journey into Night.
Conceived when he was more than 50,
the two plays would be
completely unlike anything
that had come before-- in tone,
style, diction, structure,
depth and tragic power.
Perhaps no great writer
in the history of literature
had ever taken so long to discover
where his deepest talents lay.
GUARE:
I've had the feeling
that all the fat is burned away.
He no longer has the need to experiment.
He no longer has to find out about masks.
He no longer has to find out
about inner monologues.
He no longer has to find out
about two actors playing the same part
to show the split in modern man.
The last plays are just man living
with his dreams, with his anguish,
with his nightmares.
The last plays are just saying,
"What do I do with the agony
that I carry around with me?"
ACTOR ( as Hickey ):
"It kept piling up, like I said,
"so it got so I thought
about it all the time.
"I hated myself more and more,
"thinking of all the wrong I'd done
"to the sweetest woman in the world
"who loved me so much.
"I got so I'd curse myself for a lousy bastard
"every time I saw myself in the mirror.
"I felt such such pity
for her, it drove me crazy.
"You wouldn't believe a guy like me,
"knocked around so much,
could feel such pity.
"It got so, every night,
"I'd wind up hiding my face in her lap,
"bawling and begging her forgiveness.
"And, of course, she'd always comfort me
"and say, 'Never mind, Teddy.
"I know you won't ever again.'
"Christ, I loved her so
"but I began to hate that pipe dream.
"I began to be afraid
I was going bug house,
"because sometimes I couldn't forgive her
"for forgiving me.
"I even caught myself hating her
"for making me hate myself so much.
"There's a limit to the guilt
you can feel
"and the forgiveness
and the pity you can take!
"I mean, you have to begin
blaming somebody else!
"I mean, it got so sometimes
she'd kiss me
it was like she did it
on purpose to humiliate me."
NARRATOR:
He turned first to The Iceman Cometh,
not to his own family yet,
but to the family of outcasts
with whom he had identified so completely
in his early 20s.
Completing a rough outline
in just two weeks
and the entire four-hour play
itself in less than six months,
he knew from the start
it was the finest play
he had ever written--
the truest, the deepest and the bleakest.
"The Iceman," O'Neill wrote,
"is a denial of any other
experience of faith in my plays.
In writing it, I felt I had locked myself in
with my memories."
Taking as its theme
the impossibility of salvation
in a world without God,
the play presented a vision of existence
stripped of even the remotest possibility
of any kind of redemption
or life beyond the here and now,
the hope for which still
falteringly flickers,
if only because life
would be intolerable without it.
BRUSTEIN:
The vision of The Iceman Cometh
is essentially a nihilistic vision.
It's the vision of King Lear.
Those two plays are twin plays.
At the end of King Lear,
King Lear looks into the abyss of nothingness
that mere humans cannot look at
without turning to stone.
That's what O'Neill does
in The Iceman Cometh.
He looks into an abyss
of life without illusion,
without what he calls pipe
dreams, and that is death.
To have life without illusion is
to be in a state of paralysis,
is to die, in effect.
That's what he says,
and that's a terrifying insight.
It's a very truthful insight.
NARRATOR:
Set in a seedy rotgut saloon
like the one he had nearly
died in 30 years before,
which O'Neill depicted
as a broken-down microcosm of the world,
the action of the play revolved
around the self-deluding
denizens of Harry Hope's bar,
each of whom clings to one
tattered illusion or another,
each of which is exposed
in the course of the play
as utterly futile
and yet utterly necessary
to his existence.
BRUSTEIN:
He is dealing with a single theme,
namely the influence of
pipe dreams on one's existence.
But he has to deal with it
in every possible ramification.
Political pipe dreams,
religious pipe dreams,
social pipe dreams,
romantic pipe dreams--
every illusion is absolutely annihilated.
In order to do this, he has to develop
a kind of centrifugal pattern or form
and seem to be repeating himself
and going around and around,
and around and around,
but what he is actually doing
is getting concentric circles
that get narrower and narrower
and narrower
until they hit a nuclear center and explode.
NARRATOR:
At the center of the play
stands the apocalyptic,
unforgettable figure of Theodore Hickey,
a fast-talking traveling salesman
with a terrifying secret
and an abyss of unpurged guilt.
In O'Neill's dark allegory--
at once surprisingly tender,
uproariously comic
and devastatingly bleak--
the 12 drink-sodden apostles
in Harry Hope's saloon
await the arrival
of their ironic messiah,
Hickey, the iceman,
who when he comes brings death,
not life with him into the bar,
trying to persuade them
to give up their pipe dreams
and live without guilt or illusion.
GUARE:
And Hickey comes in and tells everyone
that he's discovered the truth.
He's discovered you have
to take away all illusions.
Man has to live illusion-free.
And they all, for a moment,
face up to the truth
and decide to move on,
then they see he's mad,
then they all sink back
into their dreams.
The play becomes a plea
for the life lie that we have
to get through our lives,
that life is so intolerable
that if we don't create
some sort of illusion
in which we live we cannot survive.
NARRATOR:
In the long, tormented
confession scene that forms
the play's terrible climax,
Hickey reveals the dark secret
he has been carrying within him,
and that he, too,
unable to live with the truth
of his own existence,
still clings to one last
horrifying illusion.
PACINO( as Hickey ):
"That last night, I'd driven myself crazy
"trying to figure some way out for her.
"I went in the bedroom.
"I was gonna tell her it was the end.
"But I couldn't do that to her.
"She was sound asleep."
"I thought, God
if she'd only never wake up,
she'd never know."
"And then it came to me.
"The one only possible way out
"for her sake.
"I remembered I'd given her a gun
"for protection while I was away,
"and it was in the bureau drawer.
She'd never feel any pain"
"Never wake up from her dream."
"So I"
"So I killed her."
"And then, I saw
"I'd always known
that was the only possible way
"to give her peace and free her
"from the misery of loving me.
"I saw it meant peace for me, too,
"knowing she was at peace.
"I felt as though a ton of guilt
"was lifted off my mind.
I remember I stood by the bed
and suddenly I had to laugh."
"I couldn't help it."
"I knew Evelyn would forgive me."
"I remember I heard myself
speaking to her
"as if it was something
I always wanted to say.
"Well, you know what you can do
with your pipe dream now,
you damn bitch!"
"No I never
"No, that's a lie.
"I never said that.
"Oh, good God, I couldn't have said that.
"If I did, I'd gone insane.
Why, I loved Evelyn"
"better than anything in life.
"Boys, you're all my old pals.
"You've known old Hickey for years.
"You know I'd never
"You've known me
longer than anyone, Harry.
"You know I must have been insane,
"or I wouldn't have said that.
Don't you, Governor?"
Harry, you've known Hickey
longer than anyone.
You know I must have gone
insane, don't you, Governor?
Of course, Hickey's pipe dream
is so deeply embedded in his soul
that he killed his wife
because he loved his wife,
when in fact the truth is he hated her.
It's the thing that he must believe
to continue to maintain his sanity.
I've been crazy ever since.
PACINO:
And in The Iceman,
the entire bar is revived
because the dream is still there.
The reality: he was insane.
Hickey was insane when he did that.
Yeah, he's a nut.
He had to be.
And so everything revives
and life comes back.
And the stories we tell
each other is part of that.
And when you bow out of that,
when you leave the dream,
it's an abyss it's nothing.
NER:
The thing that makes the
tragedy so powerful and true
is that you're not allowed
to escape what's horrible.
You're not allowed any kind of denial.
It's annihilating.
And on one level,
I don't think you leave the theater
feeling in any way uplifted.
And then, on the other hand,
you are brought
to the absolute worst place
that a human being can go,
and you have survived.
You've come out of this nightmare alive.
And as I said, the stage is now
sort of purged of this horror.
You know, it's catharsis.
It's what Aristotle was talking about.
And it leaves open the possibility now
something new will come
at the end, you know,
after the bombs fall
and the landscape is clean.
It's the nothing
that gives birth to something.
NARRATOR:
Unlike The Iceman Cometh,
which poured from him
with relative ease in a six-month period,
the next play he wrote
would be an agony to write,
take nearly two years
and almost kill him.
On June 21, 1939, as he
completed the final outline
for The Iceman, Carlotta made
a fateful entry in her daybook.
READER:
"Gene talks to me for hours
about a play-- in his mind--
"of his mother, his father, his brother
"and himself-- in his
early 20s-- in New London.
"Autobiography.
"A hot, close, sleepless night--
an ache in our hearts
for things we can't escape."
NARRATOR:
The play was, of course,
Long Day's Journey into Night.
After nearly four decades of wandering
from the oblivion of his
childhood, he had come home.
KUSHNER:
O'Neill's decision finally
to reduce his ambition
from writing this kind
of great national epic
ends with trying to find
the national epic
in really what's finally,
you know, one story,
and that's the story of
Long Day's Journey into Night--
which, of course, becomes
a play that I think contains
every theme of any significance
in American life and American democracy.
LEONARD:
I think he writes everybody
without judgment,
including himself.
He writes himself without judgment
and, strangely,
from a distance of some kind.
The emotional, naked bravery of
Long Day's Journey into Night
is to me unprecedented,
even in English theater.
Maybe the Greeks are the closest.
ROBERT FALLS:
It's one of those rare,
unique pieces of art
that by being so completely,
obsessively about one family
in every bit of minutia,
it becomes about all families.
But I don't think
he could have written
that play a minute earlier.
Something had to evolve in him
to be able to understand
all of them in the house.
CARLOTTA ( on recording ):
And he explained to me then
that he had to write this play.
He had to write it because it
was a thing that haunted him.
And he had to forgive
whatever caused this
in them and in himself.
It was the most strange
experience to watch that man
being tortured every day
by his own writing
ACTOR ( as Carlotta ):
He would come out of his study
at the end of a day
gaunt and sometimes weeping.
His eyes would be all red,
and he looked ten years older
than when he went in in the morning.
- Carlotta.
BARBARA GELB:
And he would tell her what
a terribly wrenching experience
it was for him to face,
to confront his dead
and to finally, he said, to forgive them.
I'm not sure that it is really
that forgiving a play,
but it certainly is
an understanding and compassionate play
to a great degree.
It probably was the most
horrendous emotional experience
of his life, writing that.
NARRATOR:
Summarizing the story
in a letter to a friend,
he wrote that it was "not concerned with
"the present world's crisis,
as the title might indicate,
"but the story of one day,
8:00 a.m. to midnight,
"in the life of a family of four--
"father, mother and two sons--
back in 1912.
"A day in which things occur which evoke
"the whole past of the family
"and reveal every aspect
of its interrelationships.
"A deeply tragic play,
"but without any violent dramatic action.
"At the final curtain,
there they still are,
"trapped within each other by the past,
"each guilty
and at the same time innocent,
"scorning, loving, pitying each other,
"understanding and yet
not understanding at all,
forgiving but still doomed
never to be able to forget."
KUSHNER:
It's this thing in Proust.
Proust says that there are
events that are so big
that they can't be contained
in the present moment
and they have to be seen
as both spilling into the past
and into the future as well.
And that's what the great
moments in O'Neill really are.
Memory engulfs, and the terror
of what's to come,
infused by a sense of what you've learned
and what's happened,
overwhelms the future.
LEO( as Edmund):
"The fog was where I wanted to be.
"Halfway down the path,
you can't see this house.
You'd never know it was here."
"Everything looked and sounded unreal.
"It was like walking
on the bottom of the sea.
"As if I had drowned long ago.
"As if I was a ghost
belonging to the fog,
"and the fog was the ghost of the sea.
"It felt damned peaceful
to be nothing more
than a ghost within a ghost."
NARRATOR:
As he returned in his mind
to the cottage in New London,
where his own most painful memories lay,
his imagination contracted
to the space of a single room
and to the duration of a single day,
as if the larger world no longer mattered
and the action itself were unfolding
in the theater of his own mind.
LEONARD:
There are no tricks.
The only theatrical adjustment
is that Eugene calls himself Edmund.
And the fact
that the theatrical adjustment
was to give himself
his dead brother's name
says more about him than maybe
anything else in the play.
I mean, talk about being
a little in love with death.
Wanting to be wanting
to disappear into the fog.
NARRATOR:
Beginning hopefully,
with daybreak burning off
the last remnants of fog,
the play descended implacably
into the dark abyss
of family life,
illuminating the searing traumas
and deeply conflicted feelings
that have bound it together
and torn it apart,
relentlessly revealing each
of the four main characters:
O'Neill's proud
but miserly actor father, James;
his doomed older brother, Jamie,
filled with self-loathing
and a lacerating rage
and hopelessly alcoholic;
O'Neill himself, as he was at 24,
embodied in the consumptive
younger brother, Edmund;
and his long-tormented mother Mary,
who, in the course of the play,
is pulled back
into the fog of her addiction,
unleashing all the pent-up guilt
and pain in the family.
ACTOR( as Jamie ):
"What are you trying to do,
accuse me?
"Don't play the wise guy with me.
"I've learned more of life
than you'll ever know.
"Just because you've read a lot
of highbrow junk,
"don't think you can fool me!
"You're only an overgrown kid,
Mama's baby and Papa's pet!
The family white hope!"
LUMET:
Over and over again,
the moments of self-hatred.
"Mama's baby, Papa's pet,"
you know, when Jamie is attacking Edmund.
Those periods of self-hatred
are so blinding,
because out of those terrible moments
come these bursts of revelation
about all our behavior,
about us, about who we are
and what we are and the way we are
and what we do to each other.
And O'Neill does that 50 times in a play.
He illuminates life for you
like with a lightning flash.
NEESON( as Jamie ):
"Think it over when you're away
from me in the sanatorium.
"Make up your mind
you've got to tie a can to me.
"Get me out of your life,
think of me as dead.
"Tell people, 'I had a brother,
but he's dead!'
"Only don't forget me.
"Remember, I warned you, for your sake.
"Give me credit.
"Greater love hath no man than this,
that he saveth his brother from himself."
NARRATOR:
Of all the revelations in the play,
none would be more powerful
than his father's confession
of the harrowing remorse he felt
at having wasted his artistic talent.
( as Tyrone ):
"Yes, maybe life
overdid the lesson for me
"and made a dollar worth too much.
"And then the time came
when it ruined my career
"as a fine actor.
Now, I've never admitted this
to anyone before, lad"
"but tonight I'm so heartsick,
"I feel at the end of everything.
"So what's the use of fake pride
and pretense?
( sobbing ):
"That goddamned play"
"that I bought for a song
"and made such a great success
in-- a great money success--
"it ruined me with its
promise of an easy fortune.
"I didn't want to do anything else,
"and when I finally woke up
to the fact I'd become a slave
"to the damned thing
and did try other plays,
"then it was too late.
"They identified me with that one part.
"They didn't want to see me
in anything else,
"and they were right, too!
"I'd lost that great talent I had
"through years of easy repetition,
"never learning a new part,
never really working hard!
"At $35,000 to $40,000
net profit a season
"it was like snapping your fingers.
"It was too great a temptation.
"But before I bought the damned play,
"I was considered one of
the three or four young actors
with the greatest artistic promise in America.
"I had worked like hell.
"I had left a good job as a machinist
"to take super parts
because I loved the theater!
"I was wild with ambition.
"I read all the plays
that were ever written!
"I studied Shakespeare
like you study the Bible!
"I educated myself.
"I got rid of an Irish brogue
you could cut with a knife.
"I loved Shakespeare.
"I would have acted in any
of his plays for nothing,
"for the joy of being alive
"in his great poetry.
"And I acted well in him.
"I was inspired by him.
"I could have been
a great Shakespearean actor,
"if I had kept on.
"I know that!
"In 1874, when Edwin Booth
came to the theater in Chicago
"where I was leading man,
"I played Cassius to his Brutus
one night,
"Brutus to his Cassius the next,
"and Othello to his Iago, and so on.
"And the first night I played Othello,
"he said to our manager,
"'That young man is playing Othello
better than I ever did.'"
"That, from Booth,
the greatest actor of his day
"or any other.
"And it was true!
( laughing ):
"And I was only 27 years old!
"As I look back on it now,
"that night was the high spot
of my career.
"I had life where I wanted it!
"And after a time
( chuckles )
"I kept on upward with ambition high.
"I married your mother.
"Ask her what I was like in those days.
"Her love was an added incentive
to ambition.
"But a few years later,
"my good bad luck made me find
the big moneymaker.
"Oh, it wasn't that in my eyes at first.
"It was a great romantic part
"I knew I could play
better than anyone else.
"But it was a great box office
success from the start,
"and then life had me
where it wanted me--
"at about $35,000 to $40,000
net profit a season!
A fortune in those days
even in these."
( sighs )
"What the hell was it, I wonder
"that I wanted to buy?
That was worth"
"Well, no matter."
( picks up cards )
"A late day for regrets."
NARRATOR:
He labored over the play
every morning, many afternoons
and sometimes in the evenings,
off and on for the better part
of two years,
frequently distracted by news
of the war in Europe
and by his own worsening health.
Often, he wept as he wrote.
He slept fitfully,
in a room adjoining his study,
in a carved teak bed converted
from a Chinese opium table,
which Carlotta had bought for him
to accommodate his now
wraithlike six-foot frame.
Occasionally in the night,
he would go to her room
and talk of the play
and of the suffering he endured
while writing it,
of his belief that the sins of the father
would be laid upon the sons,
and of his overwhelming need
to forgive his family
and himself for all
they had done to each other.
CARLOTTA ( dramatized ):
At times, I thought he'd go mad.
It was terrifying to watch his suffering.
It nearly killed him to write this play.
After his day's 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.
GUARE:
At the end, it's the family together,
no outsiders, no audience,
no hangers-on.
Even the servants are off.
It's just them and they're quiet.
And the horror of the situation
has at least interrupted
the constant battle,
the never-ending battle
of moment to moment
just fighting for your territory.
It's as she comes down in her madness,
and her beauty silences them,
and they have to let her speak.
NARRATOR:
By the end of the play,
Mary has sunk back completely
into the delirium of her addiction,
far beyond the reach of the three men,
returning in her mind
to her days in the convent,
the last place she had ever felt safe in,
before the death of her child
and the loss of her faith
and the onset of her addiction.
SHAUGHNESSY:
In my opinion,
the greatest characterization
in that play
is of Ella, or Mary, as she's called.
They all need her,
and she needs them, too,
but she's willing to go away from them
if that can give her some peace
and respite.
They need her.
At one point in the play,
under the influence of the drugs,
she comes to them trailing her
wedding gown, don't you know,
and they are all sitting
silent, stunned and amazed,
tragic figures at the end of the play.
Where is Mother?
Where is my beautiful wife?
Where is she?
No one owns anybody else in this world
or in the next.
CALDWELL ( as Mary ):
"Let me see.
"What did I come in here to find?
"It's terrible
how absent-minded I've become.
I'm always dreaming and forgetting."
"I know it's something I lost
"something I need terribly.
"I remember when I had it,
I was never lonely or afraid.
"I can't have lost it forever.
"I would die if I thought that.
Because then, there would be no hope."
"I had a talk with Mother Elizabeth.
"She's so sweet and good.
"A saint on earth.
I love her dearly.
"Because she always understands,
"even before you say a word.
"Her kind blue eyes
look right into your heart.
"All the same, I don't think
"she was so understanding this time.
"I told her I wanted to be a nun.
"I explained how sure I was
of my vocation,
"that I had prayed to the
Blessed Virgin to make me sure
"and to find me worthy.
"But Mother Elizabeth told me
"I must be more sure than that even.
"That I must prove it wasn't
simply my imagination.
"She said if I was so sure,
"then I wouldn't mind
putting myself to a test
"by going home after I graduated
"and living as other girls lived--
"going out to parties
and dances and enjoying myself.
"And then, after a year or two,
if I still felt sure,
I could come back to see her
and we would talk it over."
"I never dreamed Holy Mother
would give me such advice.
"I was really shocked.
"I said, of course, I would do
anything she suggested
but that I knew it was
simply a waste of time."
"After I left, I felt all mixed up,
"so I went to the shrine and
prayed to the Blessed Virgin
"and found peace again,
"because I knew she heard my prayer
"and would always love me
and see no harm ever came to me
as long as I never lost my faith in her."
"That was the winter of senior year.
"Then in the spring
something happened to me.
"Yes
I remember."
"I fell in love with James Tyrone
and was so happy for a time."
MAN:
He's taken that family of his,
and he didn't compromise
on the truth at all.
It is a totally creative thing.
There is not a second in it
in which you could ever feel
that it was calculated simply to be
a successful selling play.
It just has something inside
both the spirit
and the heart of the play
that is the deadly truth,
and it'll be there forever.
NARRATOR:
He completed the drama in March 1941,
marking the occasion with
a simple entry in his diary.
"Like this play better
than any I have ever written.
"Does most with the least.
A quiet play,
and a great one, I believe."
One night at Tao House,
reciting from memory
the final lines of the play
to a group of close friends
visiting from New York,
he came to the end and stood
for a long time at the window,
gazing out at Mount Diablo,
struggling to contain his emotion.
After a long pause, he spoke.
"I think that is the greatest
scene I have ever written,"
he said.
He also knew that he did not want
his autobiographical masterpiece
publicly presented,
at least during his lifetime.
"There are good reasons
in the play itself,"
he wrote to a friend
not long after completing it,
"which is why I'm keeping
this one very much to myself,
as you will appreciate when you read it.
In the end, he had
the unpublished manuscript
sealed with red wax and placed in a vault
at Random House in New York,
with explicit instructions
that it not be published
until 25 years after his death
and that it never be performed.
BARBARA GELB:
I guess it cost him his life.
Tennessee Williams said
that "O'Neill gave birth
to the American theater
and died for it."
And that's a kind of a
highfalutin' way of putting it,
but he did expend every bit of energy
and emotion on his plays.
Nothing really mattered to him
except his plays.
The only thing
that kept him going, really,
was the thought
that he was going to write
something even better
than he had written before,
that he, one day, would write
the absolutely greatest masterpiece.
NARRATOR:
A few weeks after completing the play,
he received the diagnosis
he had been dreading for years,
when he learned he was suffering
from an incurable neurological disorder
not unlike Parkinson's.
Over the next 18 months,
despite his worsening condition,
he would manage to finish two more plays,
each a minor masterpiece--
A Touch of the Poet
and the one-act Hughie--
then turn his attention to
the work that would be his last,
a haunting, guilt-ridden elegy
to his doomed older brother, Jamie,
called A Moon for the Misbegotten,
a play he would come to loathe, he said,
but that would eventually
be ranked among his very finest.
He finished it in the summer of 1943
and two months later
was forced by illness
to give up writing altogether.
Though he would live ten more years
and never completely extinguish the hope
that he might be able to write again,
his artistic career was over.
He was not yet 55.
READER:
"Tough game-- take sedatives
and feel a dull dope,
"don't take, and feel as if
maggots were crawling
all over inside your skin."
"The worst part is the inner shakes,
"which are so much harder
to take than the outer.
"When you feel it inside,
all over your body,
until even your brain
seems to do the shimmy."
RICHARDS:
He did not die, I do not
believe, a contented writer.
He hadn't completed the work
that he considered to be
his reason for writing.
I think he still had that compulsion,
whether he was capable of it or not,
of getting up and sitting down
with the 12 pencils
and trying to go further
into the understanding
of these human beings
who were his family,
and thus humankind.
The belief in art is what's so moving to me.
The redemptive quality of art.
That this life of misery
I mean, we know what happened
with the children,
what happened with his wives,
what happened to him physically.
What are we talking about?
We're talking about hell.
And
if there would ever have been
a way of asking him,
I don't doubt for a minute
that he would have said
it's been worth it.
NARRATOR:
On the afternoon of November 27, 1953,
he died in a hotel room along
the Charles River in Boston
with Carlotta at his side,
raising himself slightly at the end
and whispering in a barely audible voice,
"Born in a hotel room and, goddamn it,
died in a hotel room."
He was 65 years old.
By then, his life's work
and literary reputation
had already started
to sink into obscurity.
The plays with which he had made his name
in the 1920s and '30s
had long since come to seem
irrelevant or overrated.
Of the five great works
he had wrenched from himself
at Tao House,
three had never been performed at all,
two had failed to find an audience,
and the greatest of them all,
Long Day's Journey into Night,
had, at O'Neill's own request,
been consigned to theatrical oblivion.
And then something remarkable happened.
WHITEHEAD:
You see, Carlotta, after he died,
she suddenly had some big figuring to do.
And the figuring was,
"How am I going to make Gene
"into the most important
and significant writer
in the history of our time?"
And she was very much afraid
that he was going to be
passed by by time,
and she was absolutely determined
that wouldn't happen.
NARRATOR:
In the spring of 1955,
less than 18 months
after her husband's death,
Carlotta put into motion plans to have
Long Day's Journey into Night
published and performed--
over the strenuous objections
of his longtime publisher,
Bennett Cerf of Random House.
Yes, of course she betrayed him.
But, on the other hand,
I think he expected her to.
He gave her everything;
he made her his executrix.
He had cut his children out of his will.
He gave her all his plays and everything.
And he knew her character,
he knew exactly
what kind of person she was,
and, I think, he had a fairly good idea
that the minute he was gone,
she would publish
Long Day's Journey into Night.
NARRATOR:
On the night of November 7, 1956,
the curtain rose on
the first American production
of Long Day's Journey into Night.
When the lights dimmed to black
and the final curtain fell,
most members of the audience were in tears.
ROBARDS:
At the end,
the curtain came down,
we came out to take our calls
Silence.
Silence.
And then it went.
Then it-- boom.
Tremendous applause,
everybody got on their feet.
And the thing of it was,
we were standing there,
we were taking a couple, three
I don't know how many calls
we were doing, you lose track.
And then the audience
started to come to the stage.
This is what I've never
had happen before-- or since.
They came down to the stage.
They were all looking up,
and we were standing there
looking down into faces
of people that we knew or didn't know.
It was absolutely incredible.
NARRATOR:
In the end, Long Day's Journey
into Night would prove to be
the unforgettable theatrical
event of the season,
reviving O'Neill's faltering reputation
and bringing him posthumously an
unprecedented fourth Pulitzer.
SHAUGHNESSY:
This is a great playwright--
if just this one play.
His life was a tragedy that made it
worth making tragedies from, I guess.
Is it confessional?
Not in the self-pitying way
that so many pieces of work are, I think.
And when they transcend
those selfish limitations,
then, maybe they become classics.
Something worth a great deal forever.
"Monuments," as Yeats
called them, "of the ages."
Un-aging monuments of intellect and art.
( seagulls cawing )
ACTOR ( as Edmund, recorded ):
"You've just told me some high spots
"in your memories.
"Want to hear mine?
"They're all connected with the sea.
"Here's one.
"When I was out
on the Squarehead square rigger
"bound for Buenos Aires.
"Full moon in the Trades.
The old hooker driving 14 knots"
NARRATOR:
In the climactic fourth act
of Long Day's Journey into Night,
in one of the most beautiful
and quietly moving passages
O'Neill ever wrote,
Edmund struggles to put
into words the ephemeral sense
of connection with something larger
that had sometimes come over him
while at sea.
"I was on the Squarehead square rigger
"bound for Buenos Aires.
"Full moon in the Trades.
The old hooker driving 14 knots."
"I lay on the bowsprit,
facing astern"
"the water foaming into spume under me,
"the masts
"with every sail white in the moonlight,
towering high above me"
"I became drunk with the beauty
"and singing rhythm of it,
"and for a moment I lost myself,
"actually lost my life.
"I was set free!
"I dissolved in the sea,
"became white sails
"and flying spray,
"became beauty and rhythm,
"became moonlight and the ship
"and the high, dim-starred sky!
"I belonged,
"without past or future,
within peace and unity and a wild joy"
"within something greater
than my own life,
"or the life of Man,
"to Life itself!
"To God,
"if you want to put it that way.
"And several other times in my life,
"when I was swimming far out,
or lying alone on a beach,
"I have had the same experience.
"Became the sun,
"the hot sand,
"green seaweed anchored
to a rock, swaying in the tide.
"Like a saint's vision of beatitude.
"Like the veil of things
"as they seem drawn back
by an unseen hand.
"And for a second you see,
"and seeing the secret,
you are the secret.
For a second there is meaning!"
"Then the hand lets the veil fall
"and you are alone,
"lost in the fog again
and you stumble on towards
nowhere for no good reason."
"It was a great mistake,
my being born a man.
"I would have been much more successful
"as a seagull or a fish.
"As it is,
"I will always be a stranger
"who never feels at home,
"who does not really want
and is not really wanted
"who can never belong"
"who must always be a little
in love with death."
BRUSTEIN:
Well, there's that beautiful moment
in Long Day's Journey
when Edmund begins to reflect
on the time when he was at sea,
and he found God,
or what he thought was God,
in the quiet and the silence
and the coming together
of all the elements.
And his father sits and wonders
at this and says, uh
"You've, uh
There's a touch of the poet in you."
And he says, "No, I'm not a poet.
I don't even have the makings."
"No.
"I couldn't touch what I tried
to tell you just now.
"I just
stammered."
"That's the best I'll ever do."
"it will be faithful realism at least.
"Stammering is the native eloquence
of us fog people."
It is so painfully honest
in the way that O'Neill begins
to admit his own defects
as a writer, recognizes
that he's not eloquent,
that he doesn't have the gift
of the poet,
he only has "the makings," as he says.
In recognizing that,
O'Neill becomes a real poet
at last and not a stutterer,
not a stammerer
as he says he is in that play.
He begins to soar,
and it's impossible to see that play
without being profoundly moved by it
and also moved by the eloquence of it.
KUSHNER:
He is our Shakespeare.
He sets the standard-- the highest
that an American playwright has reached,
I think, with Journey, and, in a way,
with the whole body of work.
Because that body of work
does say something about the world to us.
If it touches any sinew in us,
and you follow that,
the following
of it changes your own life,
and it never leaves your life.
Every show you ever see
and every event in your life
is finally conditioned
by something that was in him.
SHAUGHNESSY:
O'Neill is alive.
As long as there are people
who love the theater
and who love honesty
and who love great acting
and great words, that will
take care of itself, I think.
ROBARDS:
That's the eternal triangle:
the writer, the audience
and the actor, where they join.
And here's the thing.
When you go in there
to a three-hour-
and-45-minute performance,
or a four-45 or five hours
like in The Iceman,
and if it's going right
it seems like about two minutes.
You break time and space and time.
Ralph Richardson said,
"Every time we go on the stage,
we break time,
"if we do it right,
"we break space,
and it's our time to dream.
We dream.
We have to be able to dream."