Archive obit: Eugene O'Neill (Nov.27, 1953)
deb...@comcast.net
He Also Took Pulitzer Award for Drama Three Times--Ill for Several
Years
Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES
Boston, Nov. 27--Eugene O'Neill, noted American playwright whose
prolific talents had brought to him both Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes,
died today of bronchial pneumonia. His age was 65.
The announcement of the death was made by Dr. Harry L. Kozol of Boston.
Mr. O'Neill had been ill for several years with Parkinson's disease, a
form of palsy that made writing virtually impossible.
The writer had been in and out of various hospitals in eastern
Massachusetts in recent years, but had sought to keep the visits
unpublicized.
Mr. O'Neill died in a Boston apartment where he had been living
recently. His third wife, Carlotta Monterey, and Dr. Kozol were at the
bedside.
He also leaves a daughter, Oona O'Neill, who resides with her husband,
Charles Chaplain, the actor, in Lucerne, Switzerland, and London. The
funeral will be private.
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was generally regarded as the foremost
American playwright, his achievements in the theatre overwhelming those
of his ablest contemporaries. Whatever judgment posterity may make, the
history of the stage will have to find an important niche for him, for
he came upon the scene at an opportune moment and remained active long
after the American theatre had come of age.
In the words of Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times, Mr. O'Neill
broke a number of old molds, shook up the drama as well as audiences
and helped to transform the theatre into an art seriously related to
life. The genius of Mr. O'Neill lay in raw boldness, in the elemental
strength of his attack upon outworn concepts of destiny.
The playwright received the Pulitzer Prize on three occasions and was
the second citizen of this country to win the Nobel Prize for
Literature.
The author of some thirty-eight plays, most of them grim dramas in
which murder, disease, suicide and insanity are recurring themes, Mr.
O'Neill was in recent years too wracked by illness to write and lived a
secluded life in a little house by the sea with his third wife, a
former actress.
But the decline of his fortunes saw no loss of public interest in his
works. His plays continued to be produced to acclaim here and abroad
and the fall of 1951 saw a real O'Neill "revival" on Broadway. The
American National Theatre and Academy scheduled his "Desire Under the
Elms" to launch its new season and the Craftsmen, a small dramatic
group, produced the same play at the Barbizon-Plaza Theatre. In
addition, the New York City Theatre Company played "Anna Christie" as
the second offering of its winter season.
A revival of "Ah, Wilderness!," the playwright's nostalgic comedy of
first love, found its way to the television screen when the Celanese
Theatre offered it, with Thomas Mitchell in the role originated by the
late George M. Cohan.
Had International Audience
Actually, no modern playwright except the late George Bernard Shaw had
been more widely produced than Mr. O'Neill. He was as well known in
Stockholm, Buenos Aires, Vienna, Mexico City, Calcutta and Budapest as
in New York.
There was as much color and excitement in his early life as there was
in his plays. Indeed, much of his success was attributable to the fact
that he had lived in and seen the very world from which he drew his
dramatic material.
As a young man he spent his days as a common sailor and his nights in
dives that lined the water's edge. Out of these experiences came such
plays as "The Hairy Ape," "Anna Christie" and "Beyond the Horizon," all
of which have had a lasting life in the theatre.
Mr. O'Neill was born on Oct. 16, 1888, in a third-floor room of the
Barrett House, a family hotel that used to stand at Forty-third Street
and Broadway. His father was the James O'Neill who starred for so many
years in "The Count of Monte Cristo." His mother was the former Ellen
Quinlan, who was born in New Haven but was reared in the Middle West.
The first seven years of Eugene's life were spent trouping up and down
the country with his actor-father and housewife-mother.
The boy's days as a theatrical camp follower ended at his eighth
birthday, when he was enrolled in a Roman Catholic boarding school on
the Hudson. In 1902, when he was 13, he entered Betts Academy in
Stamford, Conn., considered at the time one of the leading boys'
schools in New England.
He was graduated in 1906 and went to Princeton. After ten months at the
university, he was expelled for heaving a brick through a window of the
local stationmaster's house. It marked the end of his formal education.
The youth got a job as a secretary in a New York supply company
business but quit after a few months to go to Honduras with a young
mining engineer named Stevens. The two spent several months exploring
the country's endless jungles and tried their hand at prospecting for
gold. The venture ended after Mr. O'Neill became ill with fever and was
shipped home by a kindly consul.
Worked for His Father
For a time the young man worked as an assistant stage manager for his
father, who was touring in a play called "The White Sister." But he
soon succumbed to the lure of far-off places and shipped as an ordinary
seaman on a Norwegian freighter bound for Buenos Aires. This began his
acquaintance with the forecastle that was to stand him in good dramatic
stead later on.
In Buenos Aires he took such jobs as came his way. Tiring of that, he
shipped again, this time for Portuguese East Africa. From there he
sailed right back to Buenos Aires, then worked his way to New York on
an American ship.
In New York he lived at a waterfront dive known as "Jimmy the
Priest's," and incidentally acquired the locale for "Anna Christie."
For a time he joined his father's troupe as an actor of bit parts.
Later he turned up at his father's summer place in New London, Conn. In
August, 1912, he went to work as a reporter on The New London
Telegraph. His newspaper career lasted for four months, because, as he
readily admitted, he was more interested in writing verse, swimming and
sunbathing than in gathering news.
Just before Christmas in 1912 he developed a mild case of tuberculosis
and was sent to the Gaylord Farm Sanitarium at Wallingford, Conn. He
spent five months there and was to say later that it was while at the
sanitarium that his mind got a chance to "establish itself, to digest
and to evaluate the impressions of many past years in which one
experience had crowded on another with never a second's reflection."
At Gaylord, too, he began to read Strindberg. "It was reading his
plays," Mr. O'Neill later recalled, "that, above all else, first gave
me the vision of what modern drama could be, and first inspired me with
the urge to write for the theatre myself."
After his discharge from the sanitarium he boarded with a private
family in New London for fifteen months. During this period he wrote
eleven one-act plays and two long ones. He tore up all but six of the
one-acters. His father paid to have five of the six short plays printed
in a volume called "Thirst," published in 1914 and now a collector's
item.
Studied at Harvard
The elder O'Neill also paid a year's tuition for his son at Prof.
George Baker's famous playwriting course at Harvard. The year over, Mr.
O'Neill returned to New York and settled down in a Greenwich Village
rooming house. The young man proceeded to soak up more "local color" at
various Village dives, among them a saloon known as "The Working Girls'
Home," where John Masefield, the British poet, was for a time a
bartender.
Mr. O'Neill lived in the Village until 1916, when he moved to
Provincetown, Mass., and fell in with a group conducting a summer
theatrical stock company known as the Wharf Theatre. He hauled out a
sizable collection of unproduced and unpublished plays and one of them,
a one-acter called "Bound East for Cardiff," was put into rehearsal. It
marked Mr. O'Neill's debut as a dramatist.
The Wharf Theatre did not go out of business at summer's end but set up
shop in New York and called itself the Provincetown Players, a name
that was to become famous. The company produced more of Mr. O'Neill's
plays and the budding playwright began to be talked about in theatrical
circles farther afield. At about the same time, as well, three of his
one-act plays, "The Long Voyage Home," "Ile" and "The Moon of the
Carribbees," were published in the magazine Smart Set.
In 1918 Mr. O'Neill went to Cape Cod to live, occupying a former Coast
Guard station on a lonely spit of land three miles from Provincetown.
He started working on longer plays and, in 1920, had his first big year
when he won the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes for "Beyond the
Horizon." The play marked Mr. O'Neill's first appearance on Broadway.
The other prize winners were "Anna Christie" in 1922 and "Strange
Interlude" in 1928.
Ranked as Money Maker
"Beyond the Horizon" established Mr. O'Neill not only as a ranking
playwright but as a money maker. The play ran for 111 performances and
grossed $117,071. Mr. O'Neill needed the royalties badly; he had to use
the $1,000 Pulitzer Prize money to pay off some debts.
The Theatre Guild began producing his plays with "Marco Millions" in
1927 and staged all his plays thereafter. At least three of the plays,
"Mourning becomes Electra," "Strange Interlude" and "The Iceman
Cometh," marked a new departure--they ran from four to five hours in
length, requiring odd curtain and intermission times.
Mr. O'Neill's dramas ranged from simple realism to the most abstruse
symbolism but one play-- "Ah, Wilderness!"--was more in the tradition
of straight entertainment and was interspersed with sentiment usually
lacking in his introspective analyses of human emotions. The play ran
for 289 performances.
Mr. O'Neill did not always meet with approval. At times, even, he was
the object of bitter denunciation, especially from persons who believed
his works smacked of immorality. By his choice of themes he several
times stirred up storms that swept his plays into the courts.
"All God's Chillun Got Wings," which figured in the headlines for
weeks, was fought by New York authorities on the ground that it might
lead to race riots. "Desire Under the Elms" kicked up a big fuss in New
York and almost was closed in the face of mounting protests. It never
did open in Boston. The play was permitted to go on in Los Angeles, but
after a few performances the police arrested everybody in the cast.
"The Hairy Ape," which starred Louis Wolheim in the role of Yank, a
powerful, primitive stoker, was one of the dramatist's most popular
works. The play ran for ten weeks, went on the road for a long tour and
later was popular abroad.
"Electra" Highly Rated
Many critics felt that "Mourning Becomes Electra," which opened on Oct.
26, 1931, and had fourteen acts, was Mr. O'Neill's greatest
masterpiece. Mr. Atkinson called it "heroically thought out and
magnificently wrought in style and structure." John Mason Brown said
that it was "an achievement which restores the theatre to its highest
state" and Joseph Wood Krutch observed that "it may turn out to be the
only permanent contribution yet made by the twentieth century to
dramatic literature."
After "Days Without End" was produced in 1934--a play that received
scant praise and lasted only fifty-seven performances--Mr. O'Neill was
not represented on Broadway again until 1946, when "The Iceman Cometh"
was staged.
In the intervening years, he settled in California and began the most
ambitious project of his life- -a cycle of nine related plays dealing
with the rise and fall of an American family from 1775 to 1932. The
venture never came off. In 1936, he won the Nobel Prize but could not
go to Stockholm to receive it because of an appendicitis operation.
In a letter to the prize committee, Mr. O'Neill said:
"This highest of distinctions is all the more grateful to me because I
feel so deeply that it is not only my work which is being honored but
the work of all my colleagues in America--that the Nobel Prize is a
symbol of the coming of age of the American theatre.
"For my plays are merely, through luck of time and circumstance, the
most widely known examples of the work done by American playwrights in
the year since the World War--work that has finally made modern
American drama, in its finest aspects, an achievement of which
Americans can be justly proud."
Play About His Family
After "The Iceman Cometh," Mr. O'Neill wrote a play called "Long Day's
Journey Into Night," which will not be produced until twenty-five years
after his death. He refused to talk about it but he had shown the
manuscript to a few friends, and it was reported that the play deals
with his own family life.
Mr. O'Neill was stricken with Parkinson's Disease, a palsy, about 1947.
The disease caused his hands to jerk convulsively, making it impossible
for him to write in longhand. He tried to compose a play by dictation
but discovered he could not work that way. Despite the infirmity, he
remained in good spirits and displayed evidences of his wit when
friends dropped in.
The dramatist married the former Kathleen Jenkins in 1909, who bore him
a son, Eugene O'Neill Jr. The son, who became a noted Greek scholar,
committed suicide at Woodstock, N.Y., on Sept. 25, 1950. The first
marriage ended in divorce in 1912, and six years later, Mr. O'Neill
married the former Agnes Boulton. They were divorced in 1929. A son
Shane, and Oona were born to this marriage. Mr. O'Neill married Miss
Monterey on July 22, 1929.