“Gimme a Viskey, ginger ale on the side…and don’t be stingy baby.”
By Geoff Rose
Those words were not uttered by your favourite bar room cowboy or your friendly Private Eye, but, by the Swedish Sphinx, better known as the legendary Gretta Garbo, who caused a sensation when she spoke on camera for the first time, in the 1930s film “Anna Christie”, which was an adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize winning play by a future Nobel Prize-winner, and the only American playwright to ever achieve that honour, a writer with a very strong Kilkenny connection, Eugene Gladstone O’ Neill.
His father James O’ Neill was born in Tinneranny in South Kilkenny in the Barony of Ida, near Rosbercon, and his birth and heritage is claimed by Kilkenny people worldwide.
James O Neill was born on November 15 1849, and although rich in agriculture, Kilkenny suffered greatly during the potato Famine, and like many an Irish family, the O’Neills, emigrated to the United States when James was 5 years old.
James had a very basic education, but for an ambitious Irish Catholic in America, a country still openly hostile, to both Irish people, and his devout beliefs, he succeeded where others failed. The Theatre offered one of the few opportunities for success and work on a regular basis. He made his professional stage debut as an actor in The Colleen Bawn by the Dublin playwright Dion Boucicault in Cincinnati.
After a spell acting in New York, James moved to San Francisco, where his portrayal of Christ in a Passion Play won widespread praise from the critics of the day. For all his wealth and fame, James O’Neill’s personal life was not without its problems. He married Mary –Ellen Quinlan in 1875, and in time they had two sons, Jamie, and later Eugene, who was born in a New York hotel, the Barrett House, a residential hotel, on 43rd Street and Broadway, right in the heart of Times Square, on October 16th 1888.
Eugene spent his early childhood, travelling with his parents, in hotel rooms, on trains, and backstage, and was educated in boarding schools, he spent his summers in a modest family summer home in New London, Connecticut. In 1911 he saw the Abbey Theatre Players, who were on tour in the United States, and was very taken by John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea, and T.C. Murrays Birthright. His Broadway debut came in 1920 with Beyond the Horizon and gained him the first of 4 Pulitzer Prizes, the others were for Anna Christie, Strange Interlude and Long Day’s Journey into Night.
Between 1920 and 1943 he wrote 20 full-length plays as well as a number of shorter plays.
Like his father 40 years earlier, Eugene O’Neill soon became a household name throughout the USA. His success, and his life, was ravaged by alcoholism and depression, which led to many difficult situations throughout his personal and writing life. He was given to long brooding silences and was capable of destructive drinking bouts. One of his drinking haunts was known as ‘The Hell Hole’ and it was there that he met and fell in love with Agnes Boulton.
His father James dies, and some time later, his mother suffers a stroke and also dies. Eugene does not attend her removal or her funeral, and when a family friend attempts to persuade Eugene to meet the train carrying his mothers remains, O’Neill just shakes his head and walks away. But, it was during rehearsals for his play The Hairy Ape that he met an actress named Carlotta Monterey. She was born Hazel Tharsing, and was darkly beautiful in a way that suited her assumed name, she was imperious of manner, highly-strung and given to passionate self-dramatisation. Carlotta had been married 3 times, and was at present the mistress to an elderly Banker, who paid her 14,000 dollars a year, which continued even after their relationship ended.
Charlie Chaplin had said of her, “that she longed to control the destiny of a great man, to devote herself to his work, and live in his shadow.” When the pair eloped to Europe it caused a scandal, he was by now America’s leading playwright, and his constant experimenting, changed the course of world theatre, forever. In 1931, now married, he and Carlotta returned home to the United States and for most of the rest of their lives together, lived in elegant homes at Sea Island, Georgia, and Tao House in California.
O’Neill’s position as one of the nation’s leading playwrights was confirmed in 1936 when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, an honour which added to his membership of the American Academy of Letters and the Irish Academy of Letters. After a self imposed exile from the stage, he refused to allow any of his 9 plays to be produced until 1946. He emerged with perhaps his most popular play The Iceman Cometh, telling of the pipedreams of a group of barflies. The production enjoyed considerable success in both New York and London.
In 1943, O’Neill’s daughter, Oona, abandoned her career at the tender age of 17, and married the 57-year-old, 3 times divorced film actor and comedian Charlie Chaplin, against her parents’ wishes. Carlotta said that her name must never again be mentioned in their home. The Chaplin’s marriage defied all the gossip, and endured, by being both long and happy, and in time their daughter Geraldine developed into a fine stage actress and dancer, and later a film star of international standing.
Eugene and Carlotta had a very tempestuous marriage, and years later after winning the Nobel Prize, he developed Parkinson’s disease which left him unable to write. In his last years his hands shook so badly he was unable to hold a pencil, and yet it was towards the end that he wrote his autobiographical masterpiece Long Day’s Journey into Night, writing “This play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood…. with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all four Tyrone’s.”
He requested that it should not be performed for 25 years, until after his death. It was while talking to his son Eugene junior, on March 11th 1946, shortly before his death, that O’Neill pondered on his identity and said “one thing that explains more than anything else about me, is the fact that I am Irish, and strangely enough, it is something that all writers who have attempted to explain me, and my work, have overlooked,” he said. This assertion has been somewhat forgotten by many, but it is a fact that will not be ignored or forgotten in Kilkenny, where James O’Neill was born almost 173 years ago, and whose son Eugene went on to become one of the greatest playwrights of this or any century, and whose work and reputation continues to grow, on the stages and theatres of the world.
Eugene O’Neill died in 1953 in his final home, the Hotel Shelton in Boston, seeing no one except his doctor, a nurse, and Carlotta, his third wife. His final words were “born in a Goddamn hotel room, and goddamnit, dying in a hotel room.”
Geoff Rose is a member of Lake Productions, Kilkenny and the Local History Group at Rothe House Kilkenny.
With thanks to Thomas Kavanagh, The Eugene O’Neill International Festival of theatre, New Ross for help with photos.
