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The Gelbs' Lifelong Journey with O'Neill

2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.37.2.0175

2161-4318

Jeffery Kennedy,

Theatre and Performance Studies

When Arthur and Barbara Gelb began their epic journey to write the first full-scale biography of Eugene O'Neill, Arthur was thirty-two and Barbara thirty. He was the assistant drama critic at the New York Times, having worked his way up from the mailroom, and she was a published writer and stepdaughter of playwright S. N. Behrman. Both had been avid theatergoers since childhood. They had attended the last O'Neill Broadway production before his death: The Iceman Cometh in 1946. In 1956, just three years after O'Neill's death, the New York Times's chief drama critic Brooks Atkinson suggested they take on an assignment from Harper and Brothers, one that he felt he couldn't begin at his age. Atkinson convinced the publishers that the Gelbs needed to work as a team because the Times didn't give leaves of absence to their employees, so Arthur would need Barbara's assistance. O'Neill had suffered a humiliating Broadway failure with the play Days Without End in 1934, followed by the not-well-received original production of Iceman. His earlier successes were almost never revived at this point, and by the mid-1950s he had become almost a nonentity in American theater. However, despite his expressed wishes to not have it released until twenty-five years after his death, Long Day's Journey Into Night was produced on Broadway in 1956, preceded by a triumphant new off-Broadway production of Iceman, and once again O'Neill was being called the country's greatest playwright; thus, the publishers felt it was time for a biography. To help convince them that Arthur and Barbara were the right team for the project, Atkinson even promised Harper that he would “smooth the way with O'Neill's widow,” Carlotta Monterey O'Neill, who was known to be a “woman of mercurial moods,” as Barbara puts it.1 Atkinson had become friends with both O'Neill and Carlotta over the years, having written many intelligent and thoughtful reviews of O'Neill's work.When I told Barbara I was going to give this short introduction to their work in a collection about “representations of O'Neill,” she kindly sent me the preface to their third and final biography of O'Neill, By Women Possessed, which will be released in November 2016. She writes, “I know it's hard to believe—in light of the ocean of information we now have about O'Neill—that, in those days, so little was known of his personal life.” After having attended the opening night of the original production of Long Day's Journey, Barbara writes: “For one thing, we were dying to know … how much of Long Day's Journey actually was based on O'Neill's own life. Was his mother really a morphine addict? Was his actor-father the heavy-drinking, intermittently unfeeling skinflint portrayed in the play? Were O'Neill and his brother truly locked into the virulent sibling rivalry depicted?” She points out that, despite what research has now shown us, at that time “only his most intimate friends were aware that the plays also sprang from O'Neill's own spectacularly dysfunctional family history—a history that, as we now know, included betrayal, adultery, unresolved Oedipal yearning, violent alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, bipolarity, and doomed spiritual striving—among other bedevilments.” Barbara writes that as they took on the project, “Arthur and I had no inkling that our own lives were about to become obsessively and permanently entangled with the tormented, enigmatic O'Neill.”2After their exhaustive 964-page biography came out in 1962, they continued to revise and update it several times over the next dozen years, during which time Arthur was promoted at the Times to metropolitan editor and eventually to managing editor. Barbara wrote a biography of John Reed and Louise Bryant and, in 1987, at the request of Colleen Dewhurst, My Gene, a one-woman play about the widowed Carlotta. Originally intended to be a collection of quotations from the Gelbs' interviews with Carlotta and sections of relevant O'Neill plays for Dewhurst to perform for colleges and dramatic organizations, it ended up a two-act play, produced at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in 1987. With Carlotta's death in 1970, Barbara felt she finally had the opportunity to tell the “real” story of Carlotta in a way they had not been able to in their biography for fear of lawsuits. Director Mike Nichols suggested a superstructure that was finally used, such that the audience would be confronted with the question, “Is she crazy, or isn't she?” Barbara set the play in Carlotta's room in the psychiatric unit of St. Luke's Hospital during the last two years of her life. Sheila Garvey wrote in 1987 that the challenge was to “present neither the villainess limned by Mrs. O'Neill's detractors nor the apotheosized idol of her admirers, but the real woman in all her enigmatic complexity.”3 Some critics vilified My Gene at its opening for its seeming lack of dramatic structure, others because of Dewhurst's difficulty in remembering the lengthy monologue or connecting to her enigmatic character. The most venomous of critics speculated that the play had only been produced because of Arthur's position at the Times. Barbara and the company understood that all of these responses might be expressed, but they kept improving the piece, and those who saw the production after six weeks of development at the Public saw a much different work, more confident, with a tour-de-force performance by Dewhurst, who continued to nurture her interpretation for some time.The Gelbs turned their full attention back to O'Neill in the late 1990s, when a great amount of new material that revealed the background of the O'Neill family was discovered in Ireland. This new information changed their understanding of James O'Neill and the major influence he'd had on his son's plays. The result was Life with Monte Cristo, published in 2000. Next the Gelbs cowrote, with Ric Burns, the documentary O'Neill, which was aired by PBS in 2006 to much acclaim. The film features cherished new performances of O'Neill monologues by their friends Jason Robards and Zoe Caldwell, who had helped them through the years understand O'Neill from a performer's point of view, as well as stellar performances by Al Pacino, Christopher Plummer, and others. Of the process of completing the documentary, Barbara writes: We were astonished by how much new information (apart from James O'Neill's early history) had emerged since the last time we'd updated our original biography. We felt an irresistible urge to acquire the lowdown. And, while we were at it, we thought we'd take one more look—a deeper and more nuanced look…. We had, in fact, grown to believe that in our earlier writing we hadn't delved deeply enough into the impact Ella O'Neill had on her son's life and work—considerably greater than her husband's, when we came to think of it. We felt we'd really be remiss if we failed to re-assess the evidence of O'Neill's unabashed, lifelong yearning for a loving, all-embracing mother, as so graphically expressed in both his life and his plays.4In By Women Possessed the authors have integrated new information and their fresh reassessments into what they had already known and written: “After all these years of living in O'Neill's head, we hope we've managed to cast a newly insightful perspective on the O'Neill family dynamic.” When they began the work on this newest volume, by then in their eighties, they searched back through their original notes, realizing that among the more than 400 people they'd interviewed for the 1962 biography, several had agreed to talk to them only with the promise that certain of their comments be withheld until after Carlotta's death. “Well, she'd outlived her husband by seventeen years, but she was long gone now,” Barbara writes. Beyond a more fully realized portrait of Carlotta, and the influence of O'Neill's love-hate relationship with his mother, Arthur and Barbara realized that the evolution of their own lengthy marriage gave them new insight into O'Neill's marriages, particularly with Carlotta. Their new volume also corrects a long-held belief that O'Neill had given up drinking for good in his late thirties after experiencing a sort of compressed psychoanalysis. They reveal that in fact he had a number of relapses, several for extended periods of time. “We became convinced,” she writes, “that—in spite of O'Neill's oft-quoted denial that he ever attempted to write when drunk—he wrote much if not all of The Great God Brown while under the influence of alcohol.”5 I don't want to give away too much of the interesting new material in this soon-to-be-released volume, but needless to say, for me it points up the Gelbs' unwavering commitment to the truth and openness to new insight in their portrayal of O'Neill over the last sixty years.At ninety years of age, Arthur suffered a slight stroke that, “eerily, left him with some of the same symptoms suffered by the debilitated, sixty-four-year-old O'Neill: severe tremor of the hand, difficulty walking, an episode or two of anxiety and depression.” However, Barbara writes, Arthur's mind was as sharp as ever, and he was determined to finish polishing those last few pages of that final chapter. But he was rapidly losing ground, and soon he had to give in to his increasing physical frailty. He told me that, much as he wanted to be around to celebrate the publication of By Women Possessed, he knew he wasn't going to make it. Surely O'Neill was awaiting him. Arthur chuckled weakly as he recalled the Black Irishman's mocking suggestion for his epitaph: “There's something to be said, for being dead.” Arthur keenly felt the irony of his situation. “O'Neill is having the last laugh,” he said.6On a personal note, Arthur and Barbara became dear friends to me in the last years of his life, friendships I continue to cherish. I smile recalling the phone calls from Arthur, often during an intermission in the director's box at the Metropolitan Opera (of which their son Peter is general manager) with an idea that he just had to tell me about. I can still see Arthur's eyes lighting up when I would share with him a writing dilemma I was having and, suddenly seeming more thirty than ninety, he would begin to help me solve it. One quickly understood how he became the managing editor of the Times, his creative genius for knowing how to get into a story always ready to be shared. I miss that look every day.