October 16, 2017 • 21 mins
Considered by many to be “America’s Shakespeare,” Eugene O’Neill revolutionized American drama. But O’Neill suffered greatly for his art, battling alcoholism and depression for decades, and many, including his daughter, suffered for it as well.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Why Ozzy Media Productions. History contains many sliding doors, fateful
moments that happened that caused something else to happen, which
in turn leads to something else. Moments that ripple across
our lives, our communities are world. I'm Sean Braswell and
(00:23):
This is the Thread, a podcast from Azzi Media. This
premier season, we take the death of rock icon John
Lennon in Night and pull on a thread that leads
us back to another Lenin, the Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin.
Here's a quick recap to follow our thread so far,
but please listen to the previous episodes if you haven't already.
(00:47):
John Lennon shot twice and looked back rush the Roseveld Hospital,
dead on arrival. John Lennon was murdered in front of
his New York City apartment building in December of nineteen
e d Mark David Chapman came to New York with
a sore intention of killing John Lennon. Chapman didn't flee
(01:07):
the scene after the shooting. Instead, he took out a book.
As he told CNN's Larry King years later, I took
the catch in the rye out of my pocket. I paced,
I tried to read it. I I just couldn't wait
Larry till those police got there. I was just devastated.
Chapman was obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye and
(01:28):
its main character, Holden Caulfield, but the novel may have
never existed if it's author J. D. Salinger had not
fallen for a beautiful New York socialite, Una O'Neill. Una
helped inspire Salinger's book, but she also broke the young
writer's heart when she married Charlie Chaplin, a man old
enough to be her father. If ever anyone was looking
(01:50):
for a father, it was Una. In this episode, we
continue our thread with UNA's father, Eugene O'Neil. He changed
in his life when he abandoned her as a small child.
He also changed the landscape of American theater forever, Oh,
those dark and curious Berne. We begin this episode in
(02:39):
the year ninety nine. The playwright Eugene O'Neill has won
three Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize for Literature. He's
fifty years old, and he's just getting warmed up. Over
the next four years, he writes his last and best plays,
the Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey and Tonight, Touch of
the Poet Hughie, and a Moon for the Misbegotten, all
(03:03):
just during this one brief for a year period. Robert Dowling,
author of Eugene O'Neill, A Life and Four Acts, it
was really a magnificent accomplishment. And you think about it,
this is this is a guy who had already won
three Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize, and now's his time.
He thinks to really make a difference. But this outpouring
(03:27):
of creativity is in part fueled by a frantic race
against time. O'Neill suffered from a degenerative disease that made
him shake uncontrollably. His brain worked perfectly, but by the
end of his life he could barely feed himself or
hold a pen. He simply couldn't write anymore, and he
tried to dictate his plays on ad dictaphone, and that
(03:49):
didn't work. This is why we still have recordings of
his voice at all. It's because he read out different
scenes from his late plays, like the Uneven Ticked of
a Rundown crazy Clock, and so for the last ten
years of his life, his brain was at absolute top,
like the height of its power, but his body refused
(04:12):
to allow him to get the dramas circulating in his
head down on paper onto the stage. And it's just
it's just tragic. I became drunk with the beauty and
singing rhythm of it. This is Eugene O'Neil from one
of those recordings. For a moment, I lost myself, actually
(04:35):
lost my life. I was sept free and dissolved in
the sea became white, sails and flags, right became beauty
and rhythm, game, Moonlight and the ship my dim studs.
Guy O'Neil is reciding from a long day's journey in Tonight.
(04:58):
The play is about family, addiction, love and hate and
how we handle them. His whole life went into making
this dramatic masterpiece, which he requested not be published until
twenty five years after his death. O'neili used drama to
work through the relationships in his life with his parents, siblings,
wives and children. Before O'Neill was a literary legend, he
(05:24):
hung out at a hole in the wall bar in
Greenwich Village. The young O'Neill was a brooding drunk with
smoldering good looks. And dark, soulful eyes. He had already
dropped out of college and abandoned his first wife and
newborn son to sail the seas and search for gold
in Central America, only to return with no gold and
a wicked case of malaria. The struggling writer lived in
(05:46):
Manhattan on a small allowance from his father, who was
a well known actor. O'Neill called his apartment the garbage Flat.
It had piles of sacks for beds and a carpet
of cigarette butts. He came him to Greenwich Village the
old fashioned way by sort of drinking his way in,
and the hell Hole was perfect for him. O'Neill's favorite
(06:07):
haunt was the Golden Swan Saloon, but everyone just called
it the hell Hole. On any given night, you could
walk into the hell Hole and find O'Neill drinking himself
into a stupor, often alongside some colorful characters. The Heads
and Dusters were a quite vicious street gang and Irish
street gang. They were called the Dusters because they did
(06:28):
so much cocaine. They were a really violent group, but
for some reason they absolutely adored O'Neill and um he
would recite to them and they loved it, and he
became great friends with them. Beer was five cents of glass,
and the food came through a jagged hole in the wall.
But apparently, you know, the food was pretty good. O'Neill
(06:51):
drank among the rabble, pickpockets, prostitutes and bohemians of the village.
It was an enormously important time, even though he wasn't
actually sitting down and writing is primarily sitting down and drinking.
He wrote virtually nothing, but he did pick up the
dialects and storylines and upsettings for a lot of his plays.
(07:13):
Eugene O'Neil struggled as a playwright in New York City
at the very beginning of his career. Nobody wanted his
gloomy tragedies, and so in the summer of nineteen sixteen,
he traveled to the artist enclave of Provincetown, Massachusetts. It's
a quaint Portuguese fishing town. The quaint is the wrong word,
because there were just so many artists and writers and
(07:34):
bohemians and everybody's drinking and swimming and putting on plays,
and it was the largest art colony in the world.
The scene that summer revolved around an innovative theater group
called the Provincetown Players. The players wanted to up in
the world of American theater. Mary Dearborn, historian and biographer
(07:59):
up tell then playwrights were thought to be sort of
like tradesmen who just provided sort of copy for the
artists the actors to interpret an act, but to write
a play that was a work of art that was new.
In other words, the Provincetown Players wanted to establish playwrights
(08:20):
as the true stars of Broadway, and his luck would
have it, an unrecognized genius, albeit one with a serious
drinking problem, had just washed up on their shores, and
O'Neil was shaking so hard from the d t s
that he couldn't lift his coffee cup up to his mouth.
Biographer Robert Dowling says O'Neil was in a sorry state.
(08:40):
But the players were looking for good plays to put
on that summer, and O'Neill had a whole box of
them he was working on, and on top of the
box was painted the words magic yeast, which turned out
to be pretty prophetic. The Provincetown Players invited O'Neill into
(09:01):
their circle. One of their leaders, a beautiful bohemian woman
named Louise Bryant took a particular interest in him. She
even let him stay for free and a rundown shack
near her house. But O'Neill kept Bryant and everyone else
at a distance. He put a sign above the shack
door that read go to Hell. He was a very
(09:21):
shy person, and so I think he felt very vulnerable
around all these thespian like look at me types. He
was not a look at me type, But what he
understood was that he needed these people to help him
put on his plays. Louise Bryant was the only one
(09:43):
who could get O'Neill to stay sober long enough to write.
Later that summer, O'Neill shared a new one act play,
Bound East for Cardiff, was based on his time as
a sailor. The players were absolutely stunned. They were just
all floored by the mean in which O'Neill was able
to capture the dialogue of the real sailors, to put
(10:07):
them into such a sympathetic light. The province down players
staged Boundaries for Cardiff and an old fish house at
the end of a wharf. Mary Dearborn. Again, it was
very romantic. I think it's the planks of the floor.
You could see through to the waters of the bay.
It was very dramatic looking. I mean, I don't mean
(10:28):
to leave you drisk, but the sailor life it ain't
much to cry about. Leaving one ship after another, had
works more pay, had a bump, grub, and then you
get in support. There's another drunk kending up in a fight.
Oh your money gone, and then you just sail away again,
(10:48):
never meeting no nice people, never getting out of sailor town,
hardly in any part, traveling all around the world and
see none of it, with no one to care whether
you're alive or debt. The entire wharf shook with applause.
(11:10):
The player's performance of Bound East for Cardiff at Summer
is a legendary moment in American theater. The play was
a full blown tragedy. It made no attempt at a
Broadway style happy ending. O'Neill's innovative writing portrayed working class
characters with a stark sensitivity. The same month that O'Neil
made his worldwide debut as a playwright in Provincetown, he
(11:31):
also embarked on a love affair that would change his life.
From the start of the summer, there was no doubt
of the electricity between Eugene O'Neill and Louise Bryant. He
told a friend, when that girl touches me with the
tip of her little finger, it's like a flame. It
was Bryant, though, who made the first move. He passed
on Neil one of her poems tecked into a book.
(11:55):
It was extremely flirtatious. Mary dearborn again, dark eyes, you
stir my soul ineffably, you scatter all my keys, dark eyes,
what shall I do? It's like saying, uh, you know,
do you want to pick this up? And uh? Evidently
(12:16):
he did. He fell for her immediately. Robert Dowling again,
she was a real enchantress. I guess, for lack of
a better word, I mean, she really had that kind
of radical, open minded, individualistic, artistic bohemian attitude, and I
(12:38):
just don't think he had met anybody like her. Bryant
brought out the best in O'Neil. Their love and his
art flourished among the sand dunes of Cape Cod. The
only problem was Bryant had a serious boyfriend, and he
was seriously famous. Jack Reid was a rock star journalist
he reported on war and revolution around the world. Briant
(12:59):
assured her new lover that she and Reid believed in
free love. Still, O'Neill looked up to Read and was
terrified that he would find out about the affair, And
sure enough, Read did find out, but he didn't care.
He gave the lovers his blessing. Up next, O'Neill star rises,
(13:19):
but at a heavy price. The magical summer in Provincetown
eventually came to an end. Bryant grew restless and craved adventure.
She left O'Neill behind and sailed off to report on
(13:40):
war and revolution around the world. But she kept O'Neill
on ice and came calling every time she was back
in New York. For the next year, the love sick
playwright nursed his wounds in Greenwich Village biographer Robert Dowing,
O'Neill sank into another extremely depressive stage of extreme alcoholism.
(14:03):
O'Neill was in a haze of depression, heartsickness, and drink.
One night, a beautiful woman walked into the hell hole.
Every eye in the place turned to greet her. Everybody,
especially the Provincetown players, and especially O'Neill just gaped at her.
She was, you know, kind of a more classically beautiful
(14:23):
version of Louise Bryant. And everybody saw that the woman's
name was Agnes Bolton. O'Neill was floored. After a few drinks,
O'Neill walked her back to her hotel. When they parted,
he looked her in the eye and declared, I want
to spend every night of my life from now on
with you. I mean this, every night of my life.
(14:51):
O'Neill and Bolton got married in April. They moved to
Cape Cod where they could both right and go for
long walks together. Their relations to begin pretty well um
their first two years together. We're pretty idyllic, and they
both were writers. They both like to drink. They both
(15:12):
adored Provincetown. O'Neill's father bought them a gorgeous house out there.
Then things started to go downhill. Just as O'Neill's writing
career took off, Bolton faltered under the weight of her
husband's genius, his drinking, his frequent bouts of rage. His
work came to dominate their marriage. Writing is my vacation
(15:35):
from living, he once said, And he was in those days,
a really mean drunk, so he hit her and then
he would have this epic hangover the next day and
apologize so much that she was sort of embarrassed just
to be around him. Bolton got pregnant. O'Neill was reluctant
to become a father again. He told her, I don't
(15:57):
understand children. They make me uneasy and I don't know
how to act with them. And his older brother, Shane O'Neill,
was born in October nineteen nineteen, but Eugene consistently chose
work over family. His first published play, Beyond the Horizon,
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, so he moved
back to New York and left Bolton alone on Cape
(16:18):
Cod with their infant son, and so she felt enormously isolated. Well,
meanwhile O'Neill sort of whipping it up with all these
Broadway big shots, and after that point, I don't think
they ever really reconnected. Um. That was sort of the
beginning of the end for them. And as O'Neil's star
rose higher, so did his consumption of alcohol. He would
(16:42):
go totally cold turkey, write a complete play, and then
hit the bottle for two months. You know, and just
be completely destitute and sometimes lost. Nobody knew where he was,
and then he'd come back again. He would taper off
the boots. Once he was sobered up, he would write
(17:02):
another play, you know, and repeat. Una O'Neill was born
into this turbulence. She was a very loving little girl,
and he was a very very distant man. Una O'Neil
biographer Jane Scoville says Una never really had a chance
to win the playwrights affections. He He always said himself
that his plays where his children. The kids didn't They
(17:26):
were there, but he didn't pay much attention to them,
if at all. When Una was just two years old,
Eugene O'Neil abandoned their family for good. O'Neill's marriage to
Bolton began in the shadow of Louise Bryant, and their family,
including little Una and her brother, never escaped it. Let's
(17:51):
go back to when O'Neil and Bolton first met at
the hell Hole. That night, O'Neill declared that he wanted
to spend every night for the rest of his life
with her, but then he disappeared. Bolton didn't hear from
him for weeks. One night she attended a party and
guests who stumbles in the door Eugene O'Neill, and he's
(18:12):
completely bombed, and he he sees Agnes Bolton, and he
goes running into the kitchen with a bottle and sort
of drains the bottle and then goes out into the crowd,
stands up in a chair and starts dialing the clock
about the fireplace backwards. O'Neill pleads with the clock to
(18:34):
turn back the universe and give me yesterday, and everybody
thought that was a wonderful performance. A lot of people
were thinking maybe he meant bring me back to Louise Bryant.
But O'Neill couldn't turn back the universe no matter how
hard he tried. The love sick playwright continued to write
to Bryant even after he married Agnes Bolton, and then
(18:56):
in the final letter he writes so he says, it
is more than probable that you have burned yourself so
deep into my soul that the wound will never heal.
And I stand condemned to love you forever and hate
you for what you have done to my life. It's
impossible to know what would have happened if Louise Bryant
had stayed in New York with Eugene O'Neill, how history
(19:19):
might have changed. There would have been no marriage to Bolton,
no una to inspire J. D. Salinger, and then no
Catcher in the Rye, and no phonies to motivate Mark
David Chapman to murder John Lennon. But Louise Bryant did
leave O'Neill. She jumped at a chance for a grand adventure,
a chance to make a name for herself as a journalist.
(19:41):
Next episode, we continue our thread with Louise Bryant, a
woman from a small town and nowhere Nevada who burst
onto the world stage. She witnessed revolution in the making,
only to see it and her own life come tumbling
down and ruin and despair he jes say. The Thread
(20:22):
is produced by Meredith Hotner, Libby Coleman, and me Sean braswell.
Our editors are Carlos Watson and samir Rao. Meredith Hotmot
engineered our show with mixing and sound design from James Rowlands.
Special thanks to Cindy carpi In, David Boyer, Tracy Moran,
Sean Culligan, sun Jeeve Tanton, cameo George and k A. L. W.
(20:44):
This episode featured the song Dark Eyes by Gypsy Moon,
a performance by Jack McClain, and archival recordings from Yale's
Binikey Library. Check us out at ausi dot com, that's
ozy y dot com, or on Twitter and Facebook. So
learn more about the thread, visit azzi dot com, slash
the thread all one word, and make sure to subscribe
(21:06):
to the thread on Apple Podcasts. If you love surprising,
engaging stories from history like this one, look no further
than the flashback section of Osky. Thanks for listening. At
cheat Che's Today Knee a school he pre crime
Why Ozzy Media Productions. History contains many sliding doors, fateful
moments that happened that caused something else to happen, which
in turn leads to something else. Moments that ripple across
our lives, our communities are world. I'm Sean Braswell and
(00:23):
This is the Thread, a podcast from Azzi Media. This
premier season, we take the death of rock icon John
Lennon in Night and pull on a thread that leads
us back to another Lenin, the Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin.
Here's a quick recap to follow our thread so far,
but please listen to the previous episodes if you haven't already.
(00:47):
John Lennon shot twice and looked back rush the Roseveld Hospital,
dead on arrival. John Lennon was murdered in front of
his New York City apartment building in December of nineteen
e d Mark David Chapman came to New York with
a sore intention of killing John Lennon. Chapman didn't flee
(01:07):
the scene after the shooting. Instead, he took out a book.
As he told CNN's Larry King years later, I took
the catch in the rye out of my pocket. I paced,
I tried to read it. I I just couldn't wait
Larry till those police got there. I was just devastated.
Chapman was obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye and
(01:28):
its main character, Holden Caulfield, but the novel may have
never existed if it's author J. D. Salinger had not
fallen for a beautiful New York socialite, Una O'Neill. Una
helped inspire Salinger's book, but she also broke the young
writer's heart when she married Charlie Chaplin, a man old
enough to be her father. If ever anyone was looking
(01:50):
for a father, it was Una. In this episode, we
continue our thread with UNA's father, Eugene O'Neil. He changed
in his life when he abandoned her as a small child.
He also changed the landscape of American theater forever, Oh,
those dark and curious Berne. We begin this episode in
(02:39):
the year ninety nine. The playwright Eugene O'Neill has won
three Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize for Literature. He's
fifty years old, and he's just getting warmed up. Over
the next four years, he writes his last and best plays,
the Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey and Tonight, Touch of
the Poet Hughie, and a Moon for the Misbegotten, all
(03:03):
just during this one brief for a year period. Robert Dowling,
author of Eugene O'Neill, A Life and Four Acts, it
was really a magnificent accomplishment. And you think about it,
this is this is a guy who had already won
three Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize, and now's his time.
He thinks to really make a difference. But this outpouring
(03:27):
of creativity is in part fueled by a frantic race
against time. O'Neill suffered from a degenerative disease that made
him shake uncontrollably. His brain worked perfectly, but by the
end of his life he could barely feed himself or
hold a pen. He simply couldn't write anymore, and he
tried to dictate his plays on ad dictaphone, and that
(03:49):
didn't work. This is why we still have recordings of
his voice at all. It's because he read out different
scenes from his late plays, like the Uneven Ticked of
a Rundown crazy Clock, and so for the last ten
years of his life, his brain was at absolute top,
like the height of its power, but his body refused
(04:12):
to allow him to get the dramas circulating in his
head down on paper onto the stage. And it's just
it's just tragic. I became drunk with the beauty and
singing rhythm of it. This is Eugene O'Neil from one
of those recordings. For a moment, I lost myself, actually
(04:35):
lost my life. I was sept free and dissolved in
the sea became white, sails and flags, right became beauty
and rhythm, game, Moonlight and the ship my dim studs.
Guy O'Neil is reciding from a long day's journey in Tonight.
(04:58):
The play is about family, addiction, love and hate and
how we handle them. His whole life went into making
this dramatic masterpiece, which he requested not be published until
twenty five years after his death. O'neili used drama to
work through the relationships in his life with his parents, siblings,
wives and children. Before O'Neill was a literary legend, he
(05:24):
hung out at a hole in the wall bar in
Greenwich Village. The young O'Neill was a brooding drunk with
smoldering good looks. And dark, soulful eyes. He had already
dropped out of college and abandoned his first wife and
newborn son to sail the seas and search for gold
in Central America, only to return with no gold and
a wicked case of malaria. The struggling writer lived in
(05:46):
Manhattan on a small allowance from his father, who was
a well known actor. O'Neill called his apartment the garbage Flat.
It had piles of sacks for beds and a carpet
of cigarette butts. He came him to Greenwich Village the
old fashioned way by sort of drinking his way in,
and the hell Hole was perfect for him. O'Neill's favorite
(06:07):
haunt was the Golden Swan Saloon, but everyone just called
it the hell Hole. On any given night, you could
walk into the hell Hole and find O'Neill drinking himself
into a stupor, often alongside some colorful characters. The Heads
and Dusters were a quite vicious street gang and Irish
street gang. They were called the Dusters because they did
(06:28):
so much cocaine. They were a really violent group, but
for some reason they absolutely adored O'Neill and um he
would recite to them and they loved it, and he
became great friends with them. Beer was five cents of glass,
and the food came through a jagged hole in the wall.
But apparently, you know, the food was pretty good. O'Neill
(06:51):
drank among the rabble, pickpockets, prostitutes and bohemians of the village.
It was an enormously important time, even though he wasn't
actually sitting down and writing is primarily sitting down and drinking.
He wrote virtually nothing, but he did pick up the
dialects and storylines and upsettings for a lot of his plays.
(07:13):
Eugene O'Neil struggled as a playwright in New York City
at the very beginning of his career. Nobody wanted his
gloomy tragedies, and so in the summer of nineteen sixteen,
he traveled to the artist enclave of Provincetown, Massachusetts. It's
a quaint Portuguese fishing town. The quaint is the wrong word,
because there were just so many artists and writers and
(07:34):
bohemians and everybody's drinking and swimming and putting on plays,
and it was the largest art colony in the world.
The scene that summer revolved around an innovative theater group
called the Provincetown Players. The players wanted to up in
the world of American theater. Mary Dearborn, historian and biographer
(07:59):
up tell then playwrights were thought to be sort of
like tradesmen who just provided sort of copy for the
artists the actors to interpret an act, but to write
a play that was a work of art that was new.
In other words, the Provincetown Players wanted to establish playwrights
(08:20):
as the true stars of Broadway, and his luck would
have it, an unrecognized genius, albeit one with a serious
drinking problem, had just washed up on their shores, and
O'Neil was shaking so hard from the d t s
that he couldn't lift his coffee cup up to his mouth.
Biographer Robert Dowling says O'Neil was in a sorry state.
(08:40):
But the players were looking for good plays to put
on that summer, and O'Neill had a whole box of
them he was working on, and on top of the
box was painted the words magic yeast, which turned out
to be pretty prophetic. The Provincetown Players invited O'Neill into
(09:01):
their circle. One of their leaders, a beautiful bohemian woman
named Louise Bryant took a particular interest in him. She
even let him stay for free and a rundown shack
near her house. But O'Neill kept Bryant and everyone else
at a distance. He put a sign above the shack
door that read go to Hell. He was a very
(09:21):
shy person, and so I think he felt very vulnerable
around all these thespian like look at me types. He
was not a look at me type, But what he
understood was that he needed these people to help him
put on his plays. Louise Bryant was the only one
(09:43):
who could get O'Neill to stay sober long enough to write.
Later that summer, O'Neill shared a new one act play,
Bound East for Cardiff, was based on his time as
a sailor. The players were absolutely stunned. They were just
all floored by the mean in which O'Neill was able
to capture the dialogue of the real sailors, to put
(10:07):
them into such a sympathetic light. The province down players
staged Boundaries for Cardiff and an old fish house at
the end of a wharf. Mary Dearborn. Again, it was
very romantic. I think it's the planks of the floor.
You could see through to the waters of the bay.
It was very dramatic looking. I mean, I don't mean
(10:28):
to leave you drisk, but the sailor life it ain't
much to cry about. Leaving one ship after another, had
works more pay, had a bump, grub, and then you
get in support. There's another drunk kending up in a fight.
Oh your money gone, and then you just sail away again,
(10:48):
never meeting no nice people, never getting out of sailor town,
hardly in any part, traveling all around the world and
see none of it, with no one to care whether
you're alive or debt. The entire wharf shook with applause.
(11:10):
The player's performance of Bound East for Cardiff at Summer
is a legendary moment in American theater. The play was
a full blown tragedy. It made no attempt at a
Broadway style happy ending. O'Neill's innovative writing portrayed working class
characters with a stark sensitivity. The same month that O'Neil
made his worldwide debut as a playwright in Provincetown, he
(11:31):
also embarked on a love affair that would change his life.
From the start of the summer, there was no doubt
of the electricity between Eugene O'Neill and Louise Bryant. He
told a friend, when that girl touches me with the
tip of her little finger, it's like a flame. It
was Bryant, though, who made the first move. He passed
on Neil one of her poems tecked into a book.
(11:55):
It was extremely flirtatious. Mary dearborn again, dark eyes, you
stir my soul ineffably, you scatter all my keys, dark eyes,
what shall I do? It's like saying, uh, you know,
do you want to pick this up? And uh? Evidently
(12:16):
he did. He fell for her immediately. Robert Dowling again,
she was a real enchantress. I guess, for lack of
a better word, I mean, she really had that kind
of radical, open minded, individualistic, artistic bohemian attitude, and I
(12:38):
just don't think he had met anybody like her. Bryant
brought out the best in O'Neil. Their love and his
art flourished among the sand dunes of Cape Cod. The
only problem was Bryant had a serious boyfriend, and he
was seriously famous. Jack Reid was a rock star journalist
he reported on war and revolution around the world. Briant
(12:59):
assured her new lover that she and Reid believed in
free love. Still, O'Neill looked up to Read and was
terrified that he would find out about the affair, And
sure enough, Read did find out, but he didn't care.
He gave the lovers his blessing. Up next, O'Neill star rises,
(13:19):
but at a heavy price. The magical summer in Provincetown
eventually came to an end. Bryant grew restless and craved adventure.
She left O'Neill behind and sailed off to report on
(13:40):
war and revolution around the world. But she kept O'Neill
on ice and came calling every time she was back
in New York. For the next year, the love sick
playwright nursed his wounds in Greenwich Village biographer Robert Dowing,
O'Neill sank into another extremely depressive stage of extreme alcoholism.
(14:03):
O'Neill was in a haze of depression, heartsickness, and drink.
One night, a beautiful woman walked into the hell hole.
Every eye in the place turned to greet her. Everybody,
especially the Provincetown players, and especially O'Neill just gaped at her.
She was, you know, kind of a more classically beautiful
(14:23):
version of Louise Bryant. And everybody saw that the woman's
name was Agnes Bolton. O'Neill was floored. After a few drinks,
O'Neill walked her back to her hotel. When they parted,
he looked her in the eye and declared, I want
to spend every night of my life from now on
with you. I mean this, every night of my life.
(14:51):
O'Neill and Bolton got married in April. They moved to
Cape Cod where they could both right and go for
long walks together. Their relations to begin pretty well um
their first two years together. We're pretty idyllic, and they
both were writers. They both like to drink. They both
(15:12):
adored Provincetown. O'Neill's father bought them a gorgeous house out there.
Then things started to go downhill. Just as O'Neill's writing
career took off, Bolton faltered under the weight of her
husband's genius, his drinking, his frequent bouts of rage. His
work came to dominate their marriage. Writing is my vacation
(15:35):
from living, he once said, And he was in those days,
a really mean drunk, so he hit her and then
he would have this epic hangover the next day and
apologize so much that she was sort of embarrassed just
to be around him. Bolton got pregnant. O'Neill was reluctant
to become a father again. He told her, I don't
(15:57):
understand children. They make me uneasy and I don't know
how to act with them. And his older brother, Shane O'Neill,
was born in October nineteen nineteen, but Eugene consistently chose
work over family. His first published play, Beyond the Horizon,
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, so he moved
back to New York and left Bolton alone on Cape
(16:18):
Cod with their infant son, and so she felt enormously isolated. Well,
meanwhile O'Neill sort of whipping it up with all these
Broadway big shots, and after that point, I don't think
they ever really reconnected. Um. That was sort of the
beginning of the end for them. And as O'Neil's star
rose higher, so did his consumption of alcohol. He would
(16:42):
go totally cold turkey, write a complete play, and then
hit the bottle for two months. You know, and just
be completely destitute and sometimes lost. Nobody knew where he was,
and then he'd come back again. He would taper off
the boots. Once he was sobered up, he would write
(17:02):
another play, you know, and repeat. Una O'Neill was born
into this turbulence. She was a very loving little girl,
and he was a very very distant man. Una O'Neil
biographer Jane Scoville says Una never really had a chance
to win the playwrights affections. He He always said himself
that his plays where his children. The kids didn't They
(17:26):
were there, but he didn't pay much attention to them,
if at all. When Una was just two years old,
Eugene O'Neil abandoned their family for good. O'Neill's marriage to
Bolton began in the shadow of Louise Bryant, and their family,
including little Una and her brother, never escaped it. Let's
(17:51):
go back to when O'Neil and Bolton first met at
the hell Hole. That night, O'Neill declared that he wanted
to spend every night for the rest of his life
with her, but then he disappeared. Bolton didn't hear from
him for weeks. One night she attended a party and
guests who stumbles in the door Eugene O'Neill, and he's
(18:12):
completely bombed, and he he sees Agnes Bolton, and he
goes running into the kitchen with a bottle and sort
of drains the bottle and then goes out into the crowd,
stands up in a chair and starts dialing the clock
about the fireplace backwards. O'Neill pleads with the clock to
(18:34):
turn back the universe and give me yesterday, and everybody
thought that was a wonderful performance. A lot of people
were thinking maybe he meant bring me back to Louise Bryant.
But O'Neill couldn't turn back the universe no matter how
hard he tried. The love sick playwright continued to write
to Bryant even after he married Agnes Bolton, and then
(18:56):
in the final letter he writes so he says, it
is more than probable that you have burned yourself so
deep into my soul that the wound will never heal.
And I stand condemned to love you forever and hate
you for what you have done to my life. It's
impossible to know what would have happened if Louise Bryant
had stayed in New York with Eugene O'Neill, how history
(19:19):
might have changed. There would have been no marriage to Bolton,
no una to inspire J. D. Salinger, and then no
Catcher in the Rye, and no phonies to motivate Mark
David Chapman to murder John Lennon. But Louise Bryant did
leave O'Neill. She jumped at a chance for a grand adventure,
a chance to make a name for herself as a journalist.
(19:41):
Next episode, we continue our thread with Louise Bryant, a
woman from a small town and nowhere Nevada who burst
onto the world stage. She witnessed revolution in the making,
only to see it and her own life come tumbling
down and ruin and despair he jes say. The Thread
(20:22):
is produced by Meredith Hotner, Libby Coleman, and me Sean braswell.
Our editors are Carlos Watson and samir Rao. Meredith Hotmot
engineered our show with mixing and sound design from James Rowlands.
Special thanks to Cindy carpi In, David Boyer, Tracy Moran,
Sean Culligan, sun Jeeve Tanton, cameo George and k A. L. W.
(20:44):
This episode featured the song Dark Eyes by Gypsy Moon,
a performance by Jack McClain, and archival recordings from Yale's
Binikey Library. Check us out at ausi dot com, that's
ozy y dot com, or on Twitter and Facebook. So
learn more about the thread, visit azzi dot com, slash
the thread all one word, and make sure to subscribe
(21:06):
to the thread on Apple Podcasts. If you love surprising,
engaging stories from history like this one, look no further
than the flashback section of Osky. Thanks for listening. At
cheat Che's Today Knee a school he pre crime
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