America’s Troubled Shakespeare

Here's a quick recap to follow our thread so far, but please listen to the previous episodes if you haven't already. John Lennon shot twice and looked back rush the Roseveld Hospital, dead on arrival. John Lennon was murdered in front of his New York City apartment building in December of nineteen e d Mark David Chapman came to New York with a sore intention of killing John Lennon. Chapman didn't flee the scene after the shooting. Instead, he took out a book.

As he told CNN's Larry King years later, I took the catch in the rye out of my pocket. I paced, I tried to read it. I I just couldn't wait Larry till those police got there. I was just devastated. Chapman was obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye and its main character, Holden Caulfield, but the novel may have never existed if it's author J. D. Salinger had not

fallen for a beautiful New York socialite, Una O'Neill. Una helped inspire Salinger's book, but she also broke the young writer's heart when she married Charlie Chaplin, a man old enough to be her father. If ever anyone was looking for a father, it was Una. In this episode, we continue our thread with UNA's father, Eugene O'Neil. He changed in his life when he abandoned her as a small child. He also changed the landscape of American theater forever, Oh,

those dark and curious Berne. We begin this episode in the year ninety nine. The playwright Eugene O'Neill has won three Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize for Literature. He's fifty years old, and he's just getting warmed up. Over the next four years, he writes his last and best plays, the Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey and Tonight, Touch of the Poet Hughie, and a Moon for the Misbegotten, all

just during this one brief for a year period. Robert Dowling, author of Eugene O'Neill, A Life and Four Acts, it was really a magnificent accomplishment. And you think about it, this is this is a guy who had already won three Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize, and now's his time. He thinks to really make a difference. But this outpouring of creativity is in part fueled by a frantic race against time. O'Neill suffered from a degenerative disease that made

him shake uncontrollably. His brain worked perfectly, but by the end of his life he could barely feed himself or hold a pen. He simply couldn't write anymore, and he tried to dictate his plays on ad dictaphone, and that didn't work. This is why we still have recordings of

his voice at all. It's because he read out different scenes from his late plays, like the Uneven Ticked of a Rundown crazy Clock, and so for the last ten years of his life, his brain was at absolute top, like the height of its power, but his body refused to allow him to get the dramas circulating in his head down on paper onto the stage. And it's just it's just tragic. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it. This is Eugene O'Neil from one

of those recordings. For a moment, I lost myself, actually lost my life. I was sept free and dissolved in the sea became white, sails and flags, right became beauty and rhythm, game, Moonlight and the ship my dim studs. Guy O'Neil is reciding from a long day's journey in Tonight. The play is about family, addiction, love and hate and how we handle them. His whole life went into making this dramatic masterpiece, which he requested not be published until

twenty five years after his death. O'neili used drama to work through the relationships in his life with his parents, siblings, wives and children. Before O'Neill was a literary legend, he hung out at a hole in the wall bar in Greenwich Village. The young O'Neill was a brooding drunk with

smoldering good looks. And dark, soulful eyes. He had already dropped out of college and abandoned his first wife and newborn son to sail the seas and search for gold in Central America, only to return with no gold and a wicked case of malaria. The struggling writer lived in Manhattan on a small allowance from his father, who was a well known actor. O'Neill called his apartment the garbage Flat. It had piles of sacks for beds and a carpet

of cigarette butts. He came him to Greenwich Village the old fashioned way by sort of drinking his way in, and the hell Hole was perfect for him. O'Neill's favorite haunt was the Golden Swan Saloon, but everyone just called it the hell Hole. On any given night, you could walk into the hell Hole and find O'Neill drinking himself into a stupor, often alongside some colorful characters. The Heads and Dusters were a quite vicious street gang and Irish

street gang. They were called the Dusters because they did so much cocaine. They were a really violent group, but for some reason they absolutely adored O'Neill and um he would recite to them and they loved it, and he became great friends with them. Beer was five cents of glass, and the food came through a jagged hole in the wall. But apparently, you know, the food was pretty good. O'Neill drank among the rabble, pickpockets, prostitutes and bohemians of the village.

It was an enormously important time, even though he wasn't actually sitting down and writing is primarily sitting down and drinking. He wrote virtually nothing, but he did pick up the dialects and storylines and upsettings for a lot of his plays. Eugene O'Neil struggled as a playwright in New York City at the very beginning of his career. Nobody wanted his gloomy tragedies, and so in the summer of nineteen sixteen, he traveled to the artist enclave of Provincetown, Massachusetts. It's

a quaint Portuguese fishing town. The quaint is the wrong word, because there were just so many artists and writers and bohemians and everybody's drinking and swimming and putting on plays, and it was the largest art colony in the world. The scene that summer revolved around an innovative theater group called the Provincetown Players. The players wanted to up in

the world of American theater. Mary Dearborn, historian and biographer up tell then playwrights were thought to be sort of like tradesmen who just provided sort of copy for the artists the actors to interpret an act, but to write a play that was a work of art that was new.

In other words, the Provincetown Players wanted to establish playwrights as the true stars of Broadway, and his luck would have it, an unrecognized genius, albeit one with a serious drinking problem, had just washed up on their shores, and O'Neil was shaking so hard from the d t s that he couldn't lift his coffee cup up to his mouth. Biographer Robert Dowling says O'Neil was in a sorry state.

But the players were looking for good plays to put on that summer, and O'Neill had a whole box of them he was working on, and on top of the box was painted the words magic yeast, which turned out to be pretty prophetic. The Provincetown Players invited O'Neill into their circle. One of their leaders, a beautiful bohemian woman named Louise Bryant took a particular interest in him. She even let him stay for free and a rundown shack near her house. But O'Neill kept Bryant and everyone else

at a distance. He put a sign above the shack door that read go to Hell. He was a very shy person, and so I think he felt very vulnerable around all these thespian like look at me types. He was not a look at me type, But what he understood was that he needed these people to help him put on his plays. Louise Bryant was the only one who could get O'Neill to stay sober long enough to write. Later that summer, O'Neill shared a new one act play, Bound East for Cardiff, was based on his time as

a sailor. The players were absolutely stunned. They were just all floored by the mean in which O'Neill was able to capture the dialogue of the real sailors, to put them into such a sympathetic light. The province down players staged Boundaries for Cardiff and an old fish house at the end of a wharf. Mary Dearborn. Again, it was very romantic. I think it's the planks of the floor. You could see through to the waters of the bay.

It was very dramatic looking. I mean, I don't mean to leave you drisk, but the sailor life it ain't much to cry about. Leaving one ship after another, had works more pay, had a bump, grub, and then you get in support. There's another drunk kending up in a fight. Oh your money gone, and then you just sail away again, never meeting no nice people, never getting out of sailor town, hardly in any part, traveling all around the world and see none of it, with no one to care whether

you're alive or debt. The entire wharf shook with applause. The player's performance of Bound East for Cardiff at Summer is a legendary moment in American theater. The play was a full blown tragedy. It made no attempt at a Broadway style happy ending. O'Neill's innovative writing portrayed working class characters with a stark sensitivity. The same month that O'Neil made his worldwide debut as a playwright in Provincetown, he also embarked on a love affair that would change his life.

From the start of the summer, there was no doubt of the electricity between Eugene O'Neill and Louise Bryant. He told a friend, when that girl touches me with the tip of her little finger, it's like a flame. It was Bryant, though, who made the first move. He passed on Neil one of her poems tecked into a book. It was extremely flirtatious. Mary dearborn again, dark eyes, you stir my soul ineffably, you scatter all my keys, dark eyes, what shall I do? It's like saying, uh, you know,

do you want to pick this up? And uh? Evidently he did. He fell for her immediately. Robert Dowling again, she was a real enchantress. I guess, for lack of a better word, I mean, she really had that kind of radical, open minded, individualistic, artistic bohemian attitude, and I just don't think he had met anybody like her. Bryant brought out the best in O'Neil. Their love and his art flourished among the sand dunes of Cape Cod. The only problem was Bryant had a serious boyfriend, and he

was seriously famous. Jack Reid was a rock star journalist he reported on war and revolution around the world. Briant assured her new lover that she and Reid believed in free love. Still, O'Neill looked up to Read and was terrified that he would find out about the affair, And sure enough, Read did find out, but he didn't care. He gave the lovers his blessing. Up next, O'Neill star rises, but at a heavy price. The magical summer in Provincetown

eventually came to an end. Bryant grew restless and craved adventure. She left O'Neill behind and sailed off to report on war and revolution around the world. But she kept O'Neill on ice and came calling every time she was back in New York. For the next year, the love sick playwright nursed his wounds in Greenwich Village biographer Robert Dowing, O'Neill sank into another extremely depressive stage of extreme alcoholism. O'Neill was in a haze of depression, heartsickness, and drink.

One night, a beautiful woman walked into the hell hole. Every eye in the place turned to greet her. Everybody, especially the Provincetown players, and especially O'Neill just gaped at her. She was, you know, kind of a more classically beautiful version of Louise Bryant. And everybody saw that the woman's name was Agnes Bolton. O'Neill was floored. After a few drinks,

O'Neill walked her back to her hotel. When they parted, he looked her in the eye and declared, I want to spend every night of my life from now on with you. I mean this, every night of my life. O'Neill and Bolton got married in April. They moved to Cape Cod where they could both right and go for long walks together. Their relations to begin pretty well um their first two years together. We're pretty idyllic, and they both were writers. They both like to drink. They both

adored Provincetown. O'Neill's father bought them a gorgeous house out there. Then things started to go downhill. Just as O'Neill's writing career took off, Bolton faltered under the weight of her husband's genius, his drinking, his frequent bouts of rage. His

work came to dominate their marriage. Writing is my vacation from living, he once said, And he was in those days, a really mean drunk, so he hit her and then he would have this epic hangover the next day and apologize so much that she was sort of embarrassed just to be around him. Bolton got pregnant. O'Neill was reluctant to become a father again. He told her, I don't understand children. They make me uneasy and I don't know

how to act with them. And his older brother, Shane O'Neill, was born in October nineteen nineteen, but Eugene consistently chose work over family. His first published play, Beyond the Horizon, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, so he moved back to New York and left Bolton alone on Cape Cod with their infant son, and so she felt enormously isolated. Well, meanwhile O'Neill sort of whipping it up with all these Broadway big shots, and after that point, I don't think

they ever really reconnected. Um. That was sort of the beginning of the end for them. And as O'Neil's star rose higher, so did his consumption of alcohol. He would go totally cold turkey, write a complete play, and then hit the bottle for two months. You know, and just be completely destitute and sometimes lost. Nobody knew where he was, and then he'd come back again. He would taper off the boots. Once he was sobered up, he would write another play, you know, and repeat. Una O'Neill was born

into this turbulence. She was a very loving little girl, and he was a very very distant man. Una O'Neil biographer Jane Scoville says Una never really had a chance to win the playwrights affections. He He always said himself that his plays where his children. The kids didn't They were there, but he didn't pay much attention to them, if at all. When Una was just two years old,

Eugene O'Neil abandoned their family for good. O'Neill's marriage to Bolton began in the shadow of Louise Bryant, and their family, including little Una and her brother, never escaped it. Let's go back to when O'Neil and Bolton first met at the hell Hole. That night, O'Neill declared that he wanted to spend every night for the rest of his life with her, but then he disappeared. Bolton didn't hear from

him for weeks. One night she attended a party and guests who stumbles in the door Eugene O'Neill, and he's completely bombed, and he he sees Agnes Bolton, and he goes running into the kitchen with a bottle and sort of drains the bottle and then goes out into the crowd, stands up in a chair and starts dialing the clock about the fireplace backwards. O'Neill pleads with the clock to turn back the universe and give me yesterday, and everybody

thought that was a wonderful performance. A lot of people were thinking maybe he meant bring me back to Louise Bryant. But O'Neill couldn't turn back the universe no matter how hard he tried. The love sick playwright continued to write to Bryant even after he married Agnes Bolton, and then in the final letter he writes so he says, it is more than probable that you have burned yourself so deep into my soul that the wound will never heal. And I stand condemned to love you forever and hate

you for what you have done to my life. It's impossible to know what would have happened if Louise Bryant had stayed in New York with Eugene O'Neill, how history might have changed. There would have been no marriage to Bolton, no una to inspire J. D. Salinger, and then no Catcher in the Rye, and no phonies to motivate Mark David Chapman to murder John Lennon. But Louise Bryant did leave O'Neill. She jumped at a chance for a grand adventure, a chance to make a name for herself as a journalist.

Next episode, we continue our thread with Louise Bryant, a woman from a small town and nowhere Nevada who burst onto the world stage. She witnessed revolution in the making, only to see it and her own life come tumbling down and ruin and despair he jes say. The Thread is produced by Meredith Hotner, Libby Coleman, and me Sean braswell. Our editors are Carlos Watson and samir Rao. Meredith Hotmot engineered our show with mixing and sound design from James Rowlands.

Special thanks to Cindy carpi In, David Boyer, Tracy Moran, Sean Culligan, sun Jeeve Tanton, cameo George and k A. L. W. This episode featured the song Dark Eyes by Gypsy Moon, a performance by Jack McClain, and archival recordings from Yale's Binikey Library. Check us out at ausi dot com, that's ozy y dot com, or on Twitter and Facebook. So learn more about the thread, visit azzi dot com, slash the thread all one word, and make sure to subscribe

to the thread on Apple Podcasts. If you love surprising, engaging stories from history like this one, look no further than the flashback section of Osky. Thanks for listening. At cheat Che's Today Knee a school he pre crime