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03/16/2017 12:01 AMArthur and Barbara Gelb spent a lifetime examining Eugene O’Neill, arguably America’s greatest playwright, whose boyhood was shaped in New London and for whom Connecticut was an integral part of his plays and life.
Beginning in the 1950s—O’Neill died in 1953 at the age of 65—the Gelbs interviewed O’Neill’s widow, friends, family, associates, and intimates for O’Neill, their first biography of America’s only playwright to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
As more letters, documents, and details emerged over the decades, the couple pursued the new information in their subsequent books about the playwright who was awarded a record four Pulitzer Prizes: O’Neill: Life with Monte Cristo in 2000 and the recently published By Women Possessed: A Life of Eugene O’Neill.
Arthur Gelb died in 2014 at the age of 90, shortly before the final biography’s completion, but Barbara Gelb, his wife of 68 years, continued the work until her death on Feb. 9 at age 91, and the result is a fascinating study of the playwright, focusing on his relationship with the women of his life: his mother Ella (whom he evoked as Mary Tyrone in his play Long Day’s Journey Into Night), his obsession with writer and free-spirit Louis Bryant, O’Neill’s first wife Kathleen Jenkins, his second wife Agnes Boulton, and most famously, his third and final wife, Carlotta Monterey. (The Yale School of Drama’s Carlotta Festival held every May that features the work of Yale School of Drama playwrights is named after O’Neill’s widow.)
What made the Gelbs take another go-round with O’Neill? The availability of Monterey’s extensive and detailed diaries, Gelb said in an interview shortly before she passed. Much of the extensive material on O’Neill is housed at Yale’s Beinecke Library.
“We thought at first, ‘Maybe we want to revise the O’Neill book [in light of the diaries]?’ But the material was so vast we felt we had to do a new book emphasizing Carlotta. But we didn’t realize at first that we were biting off more than we could chew. It took a long time to get the material together and sequence their lives.”
Plus, said Gelb, “she was not always truthful—but we got to know pretty well when she was lying.”
The book details O’Neill’s love-hate relationship with the women in his life, beginning with his mother who blamed her morphine addiction on his birth.
“Of course it started with his mother who haunted his life totally. When she told him finally that she wished he never had been born, he felt so totally betrayed he never was able to have a smooth relationship with any woman. He almost invited the other women in his life betray him, being so possessed by the memory of his mother. He was basically a very haunted, unhappy man and was desperately looking for a mother—which was the problem with all his relationships with women.”
Not much better were the relationships with his three children from his first two marriages, two of whom—Eugene O’Neill Jr., a classicist scholar at Yale, and Shane O’Neill—committed suicide. The third was a daughter, Oona O’Neill, who O’Neill disowned when at 18 she married Charlie Chaplin, 54.
One of the questions is, could he have been a great artist and at the same time have been a loving nurturing father, too?
“Who can tell?” said Gelb. “There have been great artists who have been good family men but I would say the great preponderance of artists aren’t interested in anything but themselves and their work. Their personal lives have to be sacrificed for the work.”
Is there is more material that was not used?
“I think we took the juice out of most of it,” she said, adding future biographers will have their own ways of looking at O’Neill.
After the three biographies, does she feels she completely knows everything there is to know about O’Neill?
“You never really know a person thoroughly, do you? But I think we did a balanced job. But O’Neill would have hated it.”
Frank Rizzo is a freelance journalist who lives in New Haven and New York City. He has been writing about theater and the arts in Connecticut for nearly 40 years.