O'Neill, Carlotta (1888–1970)

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O'Neill, Carlotta (1888–1970)

American actress and third wife of playwright Eugene O'Neill . Name variations: acted under Carlotta Monterey. Born Hazel Neilson Tharsing in Oakland, California, in December 1888; died in New Jersey in 1970; daughter of Christian Neilson Tharsing (a fruit farmer) and Nellie (Gotchett) Tharsing; attended St. Gertrude's Academy, Rio Vista, California; studied abroad, 1906–11; studied at the Academy of Dramatic Arts under Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree; married John Moffat (a lawyer), in 1911 (divorced); married Melvin C. Chapman, Jr. (a law student), in 1916 (divorced 1923); married Ralph Barton (a caricaturist), in 1923 (divorced 1926); married Eugene O'Neill (1885–1953, a playwright), on July 22, 1929; children: (second marriage) Cynthia Jane Chapman.

When summarizing her 24-year marriage to eminent American playwright Eugene O'Neill following his death in 1953, Carlotta O'Neill laid to rest any romantic notions surrounding their life together. "I worked like a dog," she said. "I was his secretary. I was his nurse. I built and ran his houses. He wrote the plays, I did everything else. Gene loved me as much as he could love anyone, but the only real love he had was for writing plays. He lived completely within himself." Carlotta did preface her assessment by noting that living with O'Neill was "mentally stimulating," and thus a privilege. "My God, how many women have husbands who are very stimulating?"

Carlotta was O'Neill's third wife and a veteran of her own three failed marriages when she wed the playwright in 1929. It is a wonder she chose to marry at all, given her mother's example. Born in Oakland, California, in 1888, and christened Hazel Neilson Tharsing, she was the sole offspring of the union between Christian Neilson Tharsing, a 40-year-old fruit farmer and widower, and 18-year-old Nellie Gotchett , who, at her own mother's urging, had married Tharsing strictly for security. Nellie, who was apparently quite fertile, avoided the burden of having children by horseback riding during her early pregnancies to induce miscarriages, but Carlotta resisted her efforts. When the child was four, Nellie walked out of the marriage, leaving Carlotta with Nellie's sister Mrs. John Shay of Oakland.

Carlotta spent nine years with the Shays, although Nellie visited frequently. A thin, shy child, she also had an eye problem that was corrected with surgery and with glasses, which she abandoned after a few years. To help her vision, she adopted her doctor's suggestion of carrying her head high and thrown back, which gave her the haughty look that eventually came to define her personality. At 13, Carlotta was sent to St. Gertrude's, a Catholic academy in Rio Vista, California, where she spent three years. Her classmates recalled her as overly dramatic and mysterious, but very much a loner. After toying with the idea of becoming a nun, she settled on the theater, to which she had first been drawn during her childhood elocution lessons, which the Shays provided to help overcome her shyness. (Her commanding voice turned out to be one of her most appealing features.) To further prepare for the theater, she spent five years abroad between 1906 and 1911, taking ballet and singing lessons, and studying acting at Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's Academy of Dramatic Arts. She made her first and final appearance on the London stage in a revival of The Geisha.

Carlotta's career, barely off the ground, was temporarily halted in 1911 by her first marriage, to John Moffat, a Scottish lawyer who dabbled in the stock market. The marriage ended when he threatened to shoot her, although the couple apparently remained friends following their divorce. Carlotta picked up her career and a new surname (Monterey, from the town in California) and made her Broadway debut in a little sex farce called Taking Chances. A tour as Luana in The Bird of Paradise followed, during which she discovered that she hated touring. "I would rather not work at all," she said, "than go on the road."

In 1916, she married Melvin C. Chapman, Jr., a law student seven years her junior. (Her mother Nellie was at the time the mistress and housekeeper of Chapman's widowed father, making for complicated family interactions.) Carlotta wed Chapman in order to have a child, having been told that motherhood would improve her acting. But less than a year after giving birth to a girl named Cynthia Jane Chapman , in a replay of her own abandonment, she left the baby with her mother and returned to the stage. Carlotta did not divorce Chapman, however, until 1923, when she was preparing to marry Ralph Barton, a caricaturist. Their union was described as stormy and passionate, and they divorced in 1926, after Carlotta returned from an out-of-town tour to find him in bed with another woman. Shortly after leaving Chapman, and before marrying Barton, Carlotta became the mistress of James Speyer, a wealthy older banker who made the actress one of his main philanthropies by establishing a trust fund in her name which provided her a lifetime annual income of around $14,000. (Carlotta spent much of the money satisfying her passion for clothes and for shoes, of which at one point she supposedly had 300 pair.) She split with Speyer when she married O'Neill, but only after obtaining his blessing on the union.

Carlotta first met Eugene O'Neill in 1922, when she agreed to take over a role in his play The Hairy Ape, as a favor to director Arthur Hopkins. They met again in 1926, shortly after the end of her marriage to Barton, while she was summering in Maine with Elisabeth Marbury , who served as an agent to both of them. At that time, O'Neill, who had seemingly licked the alcoholism that dominated his early years, was married to Agnes Boulton , his second wife and the mother of two of his three children, Shane (b. 1919) and Oona O'Neill Chaplin (b. 1925). O'Neill's earlier marriage to Kathleen Jenkins , whom he had divorced in 1912, had produced his first son and namesake Eugene (b. 1910). One day, when Eugene and Agnes were guests for tea at Marbury's, Carlotta was dispatched to take the playwright to the boathouse so he could swim. A romance between the two seemed unlikely at the time, as Carlotta was harboring a bit of a grudge. On the way to the water, she scolded the playwright, calling him rude for not thanking her for going into his play "with hardly a rehearsal." Her attitude changed a short time later, however, when O'Neill emerged from the boathouse wearing a woman's swimsuit, the only one he could find to put on. "It was much too large for him, but that didn't seem to bother him—he wanted his swim. I thought to myself, He can't be so stuck on himself if he'd do something like that."

There is some controversy over who pursued whom as the courtship between Carlotta and Eugene continued during the fall when O'Neill was in New York overseeing rehearsals of Marco Millions. Louis Sheaffer, in the second of his two biographies of the playwright, O'Neill: Son and Lover, gives Carlotta the edge. At first O'Neill was flattered by the actress' attentions, but did not want to end his marriage. Increasingly, however, he was drawn to Carlotta's declarations of love and her interest in his work. Most important, he was attracted by her strength. "Agnes was uncertain of herself," said O'Neill's friend Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant , "so she couldn't help Gene any, while Carlotta always appeared perfectly at ease. She was reassuring to him."

Though O'Neill would not be free to marry Carlotta until 1929, in February 1928 he left Agnes and his family in Bermuda and sailed off to "honeymoon" with Carlotta in Europe. "To say that Carlotta and I are in love in the sense of any love I have ever experienced before is weak and inadequate," he said at the time. But O'Neill, an introspective and nervous man under the best of conditions, was under strain from the unraveling of his marriage and the separation from his children. While he and Carlotta were visiting Shanghai, he disappeared for two weeks on a prolonged drunk and ended up in a hospital where he reportedly had a mild nervous breakdown. Carlotta, devastated at what she viewed as a betrayal, left him briefly, but ultimately could not dissolve the relationship. Following a reconciliation, they rented a 45-room château, "Le Plessis," near Tours. The playwright began work on Mourning Becomes Electra, a trilogy based on the Greek legend of the House of Atreus, while Carlotta tended to upgrading his lifestyle. On July 22, 1929, shortly after Agnes had obtained a divorce, the couple married in a small ceremony in Paris. Carlotta said it seemed "the first time I'd ever really been married. The others were just legalized affairs."

During his early years with Carlotta, O'Neill produced three important plays: Strange Interlude, Mourning Becomes Electra, and Ah! Wilderness, although his greatest works would come later in his life. The playwright was always lavish in praising Carlotta's contribution to his work, crediting her with keeping the house running efficiently, so that "nary an outside worry has touched me or bogged my stride even for a moment." Indeed, Carlotta went to great lengths to insure her husband's well-being, even to the point of having the household help wear bedroom slippers so that their moving about would not generate any sounds that might interrupt his concentration. She also had a special chair made for him in England, something resembling a padded dentist's chair which had movable arm and leg supports to insure his optimum comfort. "All her thoughts were of him; she looked after him like a mother," said Lillian Gish who, with George Jean Nathan, was one of the first visitors to Le Plessis. "I've been around many couples in my time but I've never known any others so close, so devoted, as Carlotta and Gene." Sergeant, however, worried about the rather grand style in which the O'Neills were now living. "I'm not sure that handmade shoes and a château, with menus written on and placed in silver holders, were the best sort of environment for the artist in Gene," she said.

The O'Neills returned to the United States in 1931, staying in New York for a time, but eventually building an oceanside home, "Casa Genotta," in Sea Island, Georgia, where they lived for four years. Early in 1932, Carlotta had a rather strained reunion with her mother and daughter, the first in five years. According to Sheaffer, Carlotta had less feeling for Cynthia than she did for the O'Neill pet Dalmatian "Blemie," whom she once characterized as "the only one of our children who never disappointed us." Cynthia, who also saw little of her father and was now being rejected by her grandmother, felt that she did not belong to anyone. The visit ended with the O'Neills driving the girl to boarding school in Connecticut. She stayed there only a term, then returned to Nellie in California. (Mother and daughter would continue to see each other at intervals. Cynthia would marry at 17, then divorce to marry Roy Stram, with whom she had a son, Gerald Eugene. He was named partly after O'Neill, who was the closest thing to a father she ever had. For several years, beginning in 1942, Cynthia worked for O'Neill, typing his scripts and some of his correspondence, but Carlotta shut her out of their lives again in 1944.)

A decline in O'Neill's health, combined with the area's extreme living conditions, compelled the couple to leave Sea Island. They spent some time in Seattle where they thought of settling, but the dreary weather there drove them south to the San Francisco Bay area. There they eventually built yet another home, "Tao House," located in Danville. The couple resided there from 1937 to 1944, during which time O'Neill enjoyed a period of great creativity, but also one of personal hardship. His health further declined with emergency surgery for appendicitis in 1936, and the onset of increasingly intense tremors (diagnosed in 1942 as Parkinson's disease), that often made writing impossible. He also encountered problems with his younger children, who had been left with their mother and only occasionally visited him. Shane did poorly in school and seemed to lack direction, while Oona, a budding actress, eloped with 54-year-old actor-director Charlie Chaplin in 1943, at age 18, devastating her father to such a degree that he never spoke to her again. Carlotta was also ill during this period, plagued by an arthritic spine. Nonetheless, she continued to serve as mistress of the house, leaving her husband free to write his greatest plays: A Touch of the Poet (the first and only completed drama of what had been conceived as a cycle of plays about the failure of the American dream); The Iceman Cometh, Hughie, Long Day's Journey into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten.

As O'Neill's physical condition worsened, Carlotta began to feel isolated and to resent her role as caregiver and overseer of the house. "I feel imprisoned—and want to scream my way out," she wrote to Eline Winther in October 1943. "I want to go back where I belong. The East. I want to see my friends. People who are doing things." At Carlotta's urging, the O'Neills sold the house in February 1944 and briefly took an apartment at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, before moving into a six-room penthouse in New York, which Carlotta decorated to the hilt. But her joyous return to New York was short-lived. She began to object to O'Neill's reunions with his old bohemian friends, and to his contact with a string of young actresses who were eager just to be in his company. Years after his death, Carlotta described O'Neill's behavior during this period as that of "a wayward child, a delinquent." She grew jealous and certain that he no longer loved her. "He was impotent the last ten years of his life, and he hated me for it. If he'd known anything about love, this wouldn't have bothered him…. Things would be going along all right be tween us when out of the blue he would say, 'I don't know whether I hate myself more or you.'"

In January 1948, after a particularly heated battle during which O'Neill slapped her, Carlotta packed her bags and left, taking refuge in a hotel. O'Neill, after several futile attempts to fetch her back, got drunk one evening with a friend, then fell and fractured his left shoulder. Hospitalized, he conducted desperate negotiations for a reconciliation from his hospital room, while Carlotta ranted to her friends about how her husband had humiliated her and worried her into the madhouse. After weeks of back-and-forth pleas and accusations, the couple reconciled in O'Neill's hospital room. "He needs me, he can't live without me!" Carlotta declared to one of the doctors. Indeed, she was probably right. "She made herself into a necessity for Gene," said playwright Marc Connelly. "O'Neill was always a sort of submerged fellow, and the progression of his illness did not help any against this tendency…. Carlotta completed the job by practically wrapping Gene up in swaddling clothes."

Following O'Neill's recovery, the couple moved yet again to a refurbished cottage at Marblehead Neck in Massachusetts. By this time, O'Neill was both physically and financially dependent on Carlotta, who had sold her nest egg of stocks and bonds to buy the place. "Out of great sorrow, and pain, and misunderstanding, comes a new vision of deeper love and security and above all, serenity, to bind us ever closer in our old age," O'Neill wrote to his wife in a copy of The Iceman Cometh.

The suicide in 1950 of O'Neill's eldest son Eugene, Jr., a brilliant but unsettled scholar who turned to alcohol, was the next blow to the playwright. "Wracked with guilt feelings, he sealed his lips on his agony," wrote Sheaffer. With her husband now consumed by unspoken grief, as well as debilitating palsy, life in the Marblehead cottage became more and more confining and difficult for Carlotta, who out of fatigue and frustration began to deliberately provoke disputes. To relieve her growing stress, she also relied more and more upon sedatives, and, as a result of a growing sensitivity to the bromides, began to experience periods of impaired judgment and disorientation. This led to another separation, in February 1951, during which O'Neill, who was also suffering from bromide intoxication, refused to be reunited with Carlotta and, at the prodding of one of his psychiatrists, signed a petition alleging that she was insane and should be placed under guardianship. At the same time, he changed his will to eliminate her as executor. Carlotta retaliated with her own petition, accusing her husband of cruel and abusive treatment and requesting separation support. Amid much speculation concerning the future of the relationship, the O'Neills came close to a permanent separation, but were reconciled one last time, although only after the playwright agreed to change back his will and rename Carlotta as his executor and sole heir.

The O'Neills' last home together was a suite in Boston's Shelton Hotel, where they would reside for the next two years. During this time, Carlotta employed a nurse to help care for Eugene, who was now confined to the apartment. Hotel employees, familiar with Carlotta from a previous stay, found her generous if demanding. "She dressed old-fashioned," said Joan Orlando , the dining-room hostess, "mostly in black—black stockings, high-neck dresses, black hat, long black coat, and always wore sunglasses. Her cane fascinated me, a black one with a black marble head. She used it in talking, for emphasis, and whenever she approached the door would raise it imperiously."

Until the end, O'Neill continued his habit of presenting his wife with birthday, anniversary, and Christmas messages, as well as dedications, which she later published under the title Inscriptions: Eugene O'Neill to Carlotta Monterey O'Neill. Shortly after their final reconciliation, he had his attorneys draw up a document that gave Carlotta full ownership and command of all his work, evidence, according to Sheaffer, "not only of his attachment to her but of his fading interest in life and the things of this world." O'Neill died of a massive infection on November 27, 1953, about a month after his 65th birthday, with his wife at his bedside. Carlotta, according to his instructions, kept the funeral very private. "I carried out every wish of Gene's to the letter," she said, "and it was very difficult. He wished no publicity … nobody to be at the funeral … no religious representative of any creed or kind."

Following her husband's death, Carlotta faded from public scrutiny until her controversial release of the play Long Day's Journey into Night, O'Neill's intensely autobiographical work tracing his own tragic family life through the story of the dysfunctional Tyrone family. Sixteen years earlier, when the play was written, O'Neill's son, Eugene, Jr., had asked his father to withhold it for 25 years because he felt that the strongly personal nature of the work might impact his social position at Yale, where he was teaching. At the time, O'Neill agreed. Shortly after her husband's death and despite the earlier death of Eugene, Jr., Carlotta told Anne Crouse that she fully intended to keep the play locked up for the 25-year period. In 1955, Carlotta obviously had a change of heart, for she gave the publication rights to Yale University Press, which printed the text, opening a floodgate of offers to produce the work. The play, which had its world premiere at the Royal Theater in Stockholm, Sweden, in February 1956, was first performed in America on November 6, 1956. Directed by Jose Quintero, it starred Fredric March and Florence Eldridge as the elder Tyrones, and Jason Robards, Jr., and Bradford Dilman as the Tyrone sons Jamie and Edmund. The play was the dramatic sensation of the 1956–57 Broadway season, garnering O'Neill a posthumous Pulitzer Prize, his fourth. Although many close to the playwright felt that Carlotta had erred in releasing the work, Sheaffer was not so sure. "The matter can be viewed from more than one angle," he wrote: "legally, as the playwright's executrix and sole heir, she had the authority to do as she pleased; morally, her act is something else again; yet at the same time all interested in the American drama can be grateful that she released at an early date what many consider the finest American play ever written."

In 1956, Barbara Gelb , who with her husband, editor Arthur Gelb, was in the process of writing the biography O'Neill (1962), conducted several interviews with Carlotta, whom she called "very, very much the grande dame." Years later, at the request of actress Colleen Dewhurst , who was looking for a vehicle that she could tour to college campuses, Gelb wrote a one-woman melodrama about Carlotta called My Gene, which was produced in 1987. "Barbara gave Carlotta, who has always been known as a bitch, a life with another side to her," said Dewhurst, explaining that audiences would come away with a new understanding of Carlotta's strong influence over the playwright. The critics were harsh on the two-hour production, complaining that it contained more fact than drama, although Gelb said she removed 50 pages of factual material from the script during rehearsals. It is difficult to imagine what Carlotta would have said about Gelb's interpretation of her life, but she would have rejoiced at having her story told.