Speaker 1: Why Ozzy Media Productions. History contains many sliding doors, fateful
Speaker 1: moments that happened that caused something else to happen, which
Speaker 1: in turn leads to something else. Moments that ripple across
Speaker 1: our lives, our communities are world. I'm Sean Braswell and
Speaker 1: This is the Thread, a podcast from Azzi Media. This
Speaker 1: premier season, we take the death of rock icon John
Speaker 1: Lennon in Night and pull on a thread that leads
Speaker 1: us back to another Lenin, the Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin.
Speaker 1: Here's a quick recap to follow our thread so far,
Speaker 1: but please listen to the previous episodes if you haven't already.
Speaker 1: John Lennon shot twice and looked back rush the Roseveld Hospital,
Speaker 1: dead on arrival. John Lennon was murdered in front of
Speaker 1: his New York City apartment building in December of nineteen
Speaker 1: e d Mark David Chapman came to New York with
Speaker 1: a sore intention of killing John Lennon. Chapman didn't flee
Speaker 1: the scene after the shooting. Instead, he took out a book.
Speaker 1: As he told CNN's Larry King years later, I took
Speaker 1: the catch in the rye out of my pocket. I paced,
Speaker 1: I tried to read it. I I just couldn't wait
Speaker 1: Larry till those police got there. I was just devastated.
Speaker 1: Chapman was obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye and
Speaker 1: its main character, Holden Caulfield, but the novel may have
Speaker 1: never existed if it's author J. D. Salinger had not
Speaker 1: fallen for a beautiful New York socialite, Una O'Neill. Una
Speaker 1: helped inspire Salinger's book, but she also broke the young
Speaker 1: writer's heart when she married Charlie Chaplin, a man old
Speaker 1: enough to be her father. If ever anyone was looking
Speaker 1: for a father, it was Una. In this episode, we
Speaker 1: continue our thread with UNA's father, Eugene O'Neil. He changed
Speaker 1: in his life when he abandoned her as a small child.
Speaker 1: He also changed the landscape of American theater forever, Oh,
Speaker 1: those dark and curious Berne. We begin this episode in
Speaker 1: the year ninety nine. The playwright Eugene O'Neill has won
Speaker 1: three Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize for Literature. He's
Speaker 1: fifty years old, and he's just getting warmed up. Over
Speaker 1: the next four years, he writes his last and best plays,
Speaker 1: the Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey and Tonight, Touch of
Speaker 1: the Poet Hughie, and a Moon for the Misbegotten, all
Speaker 1: just during this one brief for a year period. Robert Dowling,
Speaker 1: author of Eugene O'Neill, A Life and Four Acts, it
Speaker 1: was really a magnificent accomplishment. And you think about it,
Speaker 1: this is this is a guy who had already won
Speaker 1: three Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize, and now's his time.
Speaker 1: He thinks to really make a difference. But this outpouring
Speaker 1: of creativity is in part fueled by a frantic race
Speaker 1: against time. O'Neill suffered from a degenerative disease that made
Speaker 1: him shake uncontrollably. His brain worked perfectly, but by the
Speaker 1: end of his life he could barely feed himself or
Speaker 1: hold a pen. He simply couldn't write anymore, and he
Speaker 1: tried to dictate his plays on ad dictaphone, and that
Speaker 1: didn't work. This is why we still have recordings of
Speaker 1: his voice at all. It's because he read out different
Speaker 1: scenes from his late plays, like the Uneven Ticked of
Speaker 1: a Rundown crazy Clock, and so for the last ten
Speaker 1: years of his life, his brain was at absolute top,
Speaker 1: like the height of its power, but his body refused
Speaker 1: to allow him to get the dramas circulating in his
Speaker 1: head down on paper onto the stage. And it's just
Speaker 1: it's just tragic. I became drunk with the beauty and
Speaker 1: singing rhythm of it. This is Eugene O'Neil from one
Speaker 1: of those recordings. For a moment, I lost myself, actually
Speaker 1: lost my life. I was sept free and dissolved in
Speaker 1: the sea became white, sails and flags, right became beauty
Speaker 1: and rhythm, game, Moonlight and the ship my dim studs.
Speaker 1: Guy O'Neil is reciding from a long day's journey in Tonight.
Speaker 1: The play is about family, addiction, love and hate and
Speaker 1: how we handle them. His whole life went into making
Speaker 1: this dramatic masterpiece, which he requested not be published until
Speaker 1: twenty five years after his death. O'neili used drama to
Speaker 1: work through the relationships in his life with his parents, siblings,
Speaker 1: wives and children. Before O'Neill was a literary legend, he
Speaker 1: hung out at a hole in the wall bar in
Speaker 1: Greenwich Village. The young O'Neill was a brooding drunk with
Speaker 1: smoldering good looks. And dark, soulful eyes. He had already
Speaker 1: dropped out of college and abandoned his first wife and
Speaker 1: newborn son to sail the seas and search for gold
Speaker 1: in Central America, only to return with no gold and
Speaker 1: a wicked case of malaria. The struggling writer lived in
Speaker 1: Manhattan on a small allowance from his father, who was
Speaker 1: a well known actor. O'Neill called his apartment the garbage Flat.
Speaker 1: It had piles of sacks for beds and a carpet
Speaker 1: of cigarette butts. He came him to Greenwich Village the
Speaker 1: old fashioned way by sort of drinking his way in,
Speaker 1: and the hell Hole was perfect for him. O'Neill's favorite
Speaker 1: haunt was the Golden Swan Saloon, but everyone just called
Speaker 1: it the hell Hole. On any given night, you could
Speaker 1: walk into the hell Hole and find O'Neill drinking himself
Speaker 1: into a stupor, often alongside some colorful characters. The Heads
Speaker 1: and Dusters were a quite vicious street gang and Irish
Speaker 1: street gang. They were called the Dusters because they did
Speaker 1: so much cocaine. They were a really violent group, but
Speaker 1: for some reason they absolutely adored O'Neill and um he
Speaker 1: would recite to them and they loved it, and he
Speaker 1: became great friends with them. Beer was five cents of glass,
Speaker 1: and the food came through a jagged hole in the wall.
Speaker 1: But apparently, you know, the food was pretty good. O'Neill
Speaker 1: drank among the rabble, pickpockets, prostitutes and bohemians of the village.
Speaker 1: It was an enormously important time, even though he wasn't
Speaker 1: actually sitting down and writing is primarily sitting down and drinking.
Speaker 1: He wrote virtually nothing, but he did pick up the
Speaker 1: dialects and storylines and upsettings for a lot of his plays.
Speaker 1: Eugene O'Neil struggled as a playwright in New York City
Speaker 1: at the very beginning of his career. Nobody wanted his
Speaker 1: gloomy tragedies, and so in the summer of nineteen sixteen,
Speaker 1: he traveled to the artist enclave of Provincetown, Massachusetts. It's
Speaker 1: a quaint Portuguese fishing town. The quaint is the wrong word,
Speaker 1: because there were just so many artists and writers and
Speaker 1: bohemians and everybody's drinking and swimming and putting on plays,
Speaker 1: and it was the largest art colony in the world.
Speaker 1: The scene that summer revolved around an innovative theater group
Speaker 1: called the Provincetown Players. The players wanted to up in
Speaker 1: the world of American theater. Mary Dearborn, historian and biographer
Speaker 1: up tell then playwrights were thought to be sort of
Speaker 1: like tradesmen who just provided sort of copy for the
Speaker 1: artists the actors to interpret an act, but to write
Speaker 1: a play that was a work of art that was new.
Speaker 1: In other words, the Provincetown Players wanted to establish playwrights
Speaker 1: as the true stars of Broadway, and his luck would
Speaker 1: have it, an unrecognized genius, albeit one with a serious
Speaker 1: drinking problem, had just washed up on their shores, and
Speaker 1: O'Neil was shaking so hard from the d t s
Speaker 1: that he couldn't lift his coffee cup up to his mouth.
Speaker 1: Biographer Robert Dowling says O'Neil was in a sorry state.
Speaker 1: But the players were looking for good plays to put
Speaker 1: on that summer, and O'Neill had a whole box of
Speaker 1: them he was working on, and on top of the
Speaker 1: box was painted the words magic yeast, which turned out
Speaker 1: to be pretty prophetic. The Provincetown Players invited O'Neill into
Speaker 1: their circle. One of their leaders, a beautiful bohemian woman
Speaker 1: named Louise Bryant took a particular interest in him. She
Speaker 1: even let him stay for free and a rundown shack
Speaker 1: near her house. But O'Neill kept Bryant and everyone else
Speaker 1: at a distance. He put a sign above the shack
Speaker 1: door that read go to Hell. He was a very
Speaker 1: shy person, and so I think he felt very vulnerable
Speaker 1: around all these thespian like look at me types. He
Speaker 1: was not a look at me type, But what he
Speaker 1: understood was that he needed these people to help him
Speaker 1: put on his plays. Louise Bryant was the only one
Speaker 1: who could get O'Neill to stay sober long enough to write.
Speaker 1: Later that summer, O'Neill shared a new one act play,
Speaker 1: Bound East for Cardiff, was based on his time as
Speaker 1: a sailor. The players were absolutely stunned. They were just
Speaker 1: all floored by the mean in which O'Neill was able
Speaker 1: to capture the dialogue of the real sailors, to put
Speaker 1: them into such a sympathetic light. The province down players
Speaker 1: staged Boundaries for Cardiff and an old fish house at
Speaker 1: the end of a wharf. Mary Dearborn. Again, it was
Speaker 1: very romantic. I think it's the planks of the floor.
Speaker 1: You could see through to the waters of the bay.
Speaker 1: It was very dramatic looking. I mean, I don't mean
Speaker 1: to leave you drisk, but the sailor life it ain't
Speaker 1: much to cry about. Leaving one ship after another, had
Speaker 1: works more pay, had a bump, grub, and then you
Speaker 1: get in support. There's another drunk kending up in a fight.
Speaker 1: Oh your money gone, and then you just sail away again,
Speaker 1: never meeting no nice people, never getting out of sailor town,
Speaker 1: hardly in any part, traveling all around the world and
Speaker 1: see none of it, with no one to care whether
Speaker 1: you're alive or debt. The entire wharf shook with applause.
Speaker 1: The player's performance of Bound East for Cardiff at Summer
Speaker 1: is a legendary moment in American theater. The play was
Speaker 1: a full blown tragedy. It made no attempt at a
Speaker 1: Broadway style happy ending. O'Neill's innovative writing portrayed working class
Speaker 1: characters with a stark sensitivity. The same month that O'Neil
Speaker 1: made his worldwide debut as a playwright in Provincetown, he
Speaker 1: also embarked on a love affair that would change his life.
Speaker 1: From the start of the summer, there was no doubt
Speaker 1: of the electricity between Eugene O'Neill and Louise Bryant. He
Speaker 1: told a friend, when that girl touches me with the
Speaker 1: tip of her little finger, it's like a flame. It
Speaker 1: was Bryant, though, who made the first move. He passed
Speaker 1: on Neil one of her poems tecked into a book.
Speaker 1: It was extremely flirtatious. Mary dearborn again, dark eyes, you
Speaker 1: stir my soul ineffably, you scatter all my keys, dark eyes,
Speaker 1: what shall I do? It's like saying, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: do you want to pick this up? And uh? Evidently
Speaker 1: he did. He fell for her immediately. Robert Dowling again,
Speaker 1: she was a real enchantress. I guess, for lack of
Speaker 1: a better word, I mean, she really had that kind
Speaker 1: of radical, open minded, individualistic, artistic bohemian attitude, and I
Speaker 1: just don't think he had met anybody like her. Bryant
Speaker 1: brought out the best in O'Neil. Their love and his
Speaker 1: art flourished among the sand dunes of Cape Cod. The
Speaker 1: only problem was Bryant had a serious boyfriend, and he
Speaker 1: was seriously famous. Jack Reid was a rock star journalist
Speaker 1: he reported on war and revolution around the world. Briant
Speaker 1: assured her new lover that she and Reid believed in
Speaker 1: free love. Still, O'Neill looked up to Read and was
Speaker 1: terrified that he would find out about the affair, And
Speaker 1: sure enough, Read did find out, but he didn't care.
Speaker 1: He gave the lovers his blessing. Up next, O'Neill star rises,
Speaker 1: but at a heavy price. The magical summer in Provincetown
Speaker 1: eventually came to an end. Bryant grew restless and craved adventure.
Speaker 1: She left O'Neill behind and sailed off to report on
Speaker 1: war and revolution around the world. But she kept O'Neill
Speaker 1: on ice and came calling every time she was back
Speaker 1: in New York. For the next year, the love sick
Speaker 1: playwright nursed his wounds in Greenwich Village biographer Robert Dowing,
Speaker 1: O'Neill sank into another extremely depressive stage of extreme alcoholism.
Speaker 1: O'Neill was in a haze of depression, heartsickness, and drink.
Speaker 1: One night, a beautiful woman walked into the hell hole.
Speaker 1: Every eye in the place turned to greet her. Everybody,
Speaker 1: especially the Provincetown players, and especially O'Neill just gaped at her.
Speaker 1: She was, you know, kind of a more classically beautiful
Speaker 1: version of Louise Bryant. And everybody saw that the woman's
Speaker 1: name was Agnes Bolton. O'Neill was floored. After a few drinks,
Speaker 1: O'Neill walked her back to her hotel. When they parted,
Speaker 1: he looked her in the eye and declared, I want
Speaker 1: to spend every night of my life from now on
Speaker 1: with you. I mean this, every night of my life.
Speaker 1: O'Neill and Bolton got married in April. They moved to
Speaker 1: Cape Cod where they could both right and go for
Speaker 1: long walks together. Their relations to begin pretty well um
Speaker 1: their first two years together. We're pretty idyllic, and they
Speaker 1: both were writers. They both like to drink. They both
Speaker 1: adored Provincetown. O'Neill's father bought them a gorgeous house out there.
Speaker 1: Then things started to go downhill. Just as O'Neill's writing
Speaker 1: career took off, Bolton faltered under the weight of her
Speaker 1: husband's genius, his drinking, his frequent bouts of rage. His
Speaker 1: work came to dominate their marriage. Writing is my vacation
Speaker 1: from living, he once said, And he was in those days,
Speaker 1: a really mean drunk, so he hit her and then
Speaker 1: he would have this epic hangover the next day and
Speaker 1: apologize so much that she was sort of embarrassed just
Speaker 1: to be around him. Bolton got pregnant. O'Neill was reluctant
Speaker 1: to become a father again. He told her, I don't
Speaker 1: understand children. They make me uneasy and I don't know
Speaker 1: how to act with them. And his older brother, Shane O'Neill,
Speaker 1: was born in October nineteen nineteen, but Eugene consistently chose
Speaker 1: work over family. His first published play, Beyond the Horizon,
Speaker 1: was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, so he moved
Speaker 1: back to New York and left Bolton alone on Cape
Speaker 1: Cod with their infant son, and so she felt enormously isolated. Well,
Speaker 1: meanwhile O'Neill sort of whipping it up with all these
Speaker 1: Broadway big shots, and after that point, I don't think
Speaker 1: they ever really reconnected. Um. That was sort of the
Speaker 1: beginning of the end for them. And as O'Neil's star
Speaker 1: rose higher, so did his consumption of alcohol. He would
Speaker 1: go totally cold turkey, write a complete play, and then
Speaker 1: hit the bottle for two months. You know, and just
Speaker 1: be completely destitute and sometimes lost. Nobody knew where he was,
Speaker 1: and then he'd come back again. He would taper off
Speaker 1: the boots. Once he was sobered up, he would write
Speaker 1: another play, you know, and repeat. Una O'Neill was born
Speaker 1: into this turbulence. She was a very loving little girl,
Speaker 1: and he was a very very distant man. Una O'Neil
Speaker 1: biographer Jane Scoville says Una never really had a chance
Speaker 1: to win the playwrights affections. He He always said himself
Speaker 1: that his plays where his children. The kids didn't They
Speaker 1: were there, but he didn't pay much attention to them,
Speaker 1: if at all. When Una was just two years old,
Speaker 1: Eugene O'Neil abandoned their family for good. O'Neill's marriage to
Speaker 1: Bolton began in the shadow of Louise Bryant, and their family,
Speaker 1: including little Una and her brother, never escaped it. Let's
Speaker 1: go back to when O'Neil and Bolton first met at
Speaker 1: the hell Hole. That night, O'Neill declared that he wanted
Speaker 1: to spend every night for the rest of his life
Speaker 1: with her, but then he disappeared. Bolton didn't hear from
Speaker 1: him for weeks. One night she attended a party and
Speaker 1: guests who stumbles in the door Eugene O'Neill, and he's
Speaker 1: completely bombed, and he he sees Agnes Bolton, and he
Speaker 1: goes running into the kitchen with a bottle and sort
Speaker 1: of drains the bottle and then goes out into the crowd,
Speaker 1: stands up in a chair and starts dialing the clock
Speaker 1: about the fireplace backwards. O'Neill pleads with the clock to
Speaker 1: turn back the universe and give me yesterday, and everybody
Speaker 1: thought that was a wonderful performance. A lot of people
Speaker 1: were thinking maybe he meant bring me back to Louise Bryant.
Speaker 1: But O'Neill couldn't turn back the universe no matter how
Speaker 1: hard he tried. The love sick playwright continued to write
Speaker 1: to Bryant even after he married Agnes Bolton, and then
Speaker 1: in the final letter he writes so he says, it
Speaker 1: is more than probable that you have burned yourself so
Speaker 1: deep into my soul that the wound will never heal.
Speaker 1: And I stand condemned to love you forever and hate
Speaker 1: you for what you have done to my life. It's
Speaker 1: impossible to know what would have happened if Louise Bryant
Speaker 1: had stayed in New York with Eugene O'Neill, how history
Speaker 1: might have changed. There would have been no marriage to Bolton,
Speaker 1: no una to inspire J. D. Salinger, and then no
Speaker 1: Catcher in the Rye, and no phonies to motivate Mark
Speaker 1: David Chapman to murder John Lennon. But Louise Bryant did
Speaker 1: leave O'Neill. She jumped at a chance for a grand adventure,
Speaker 1: a chance to make a name for herself as a journalist.
Speaker 1: Next episode, we continue our thread with Louise Bryant, a
Speaker 1: woman from a small town and nowhere Nevada who burst
Speaker 1: onto the world stage. She witnessed revolution in the making,
Speaker 1: only to see it and her own life come tumbling
Speaker 1: down and ruin and despair he jes say. The Thread
Speaker 1: is produced by Meredith Hotner, Libby Coleman, and me Sean braswell.
Speaker 1: Our editors are Carlos Watson and samir Rao. Meredith Hotmot
Speaker 1: engineered our show with mixing and sound design from James Rowlands.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Cindy carpi In, David Boyer, Tracy Moran,
Speaker 1: Sean Culligan, sun Jeeve Tanton, cameo George and k A. L. W.
Speaker 1: This episode featured the song Dark Eyes by Gypsy Moon,
Speaker 1: a performance by Jack McClain, and archival recordings from Yale's
Speaker 1: Binikey Library. Check us out at ausi dot com, that's
Speaker 1: ozy y dot com, or on Twitter and Facebook. So
Speaker 1: learn more about the thread, visit azzi dot com, slash
Speaker 1: the thread all one word, and make sure to subscribe
Speaker 1: to the thread on Apple Podcasts. If you love surprising,
Speaker 1: engaging stories from history like this one, look no further
Speaker 1: than the flashback section of Osky. Thanks for listening. At
Speaker 1: cheat Che's Today Knee a school he pre crime