Eugene O'Neill by Robert M. Dowling

Author:Robert M. Dowling
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300210590
Publisher: Yale University Press

Still, Boulton recognized that her compulsive husband had neither the time nor the emotional wherewithal for extramarital affairs—not of a sexual nature, she felt certain, at least not yet.160

“Dirty day!” O’Neill groaned on February 21, 1925. “Wild cable from Madden.” Their production of Desire Under the Elms was about “to be indicted. Can’t believe.” “‘D’ played to 13,500 last week, fancy that! Helped by scandal, damn it! M. [Richard Madden, his agent] says ‘situation favorable’—jury trial Wednesday likely. Damned nonsense! … Wire from Kenneth saying no indictment, that ‘D’ has been referred to play jury. This is good news. Old [District Attorney Joab] Banton seems to be beaten again, the bloody ass! … Much talk of Banton’s calling me ‘damned fool.’ Ha-ha! Business booming. It’s an ill wind! But it attracts wrong audience, damn it!”161

The play’s moral “distresses,” reported the Herald Tribune, “range from unholy lust to infanticide, and they include drinking, cursing, vengeance, and something approaching incest.” Once it moved uptown, District Attorney Banton again played right into the Triumvirate’s hands. The play was “too thoroughly bad,” said Banton, who charged the theater group with promoting “salacity and indecency.”162 As a public relations ploy, Macgowan was the one who suggested they invite a “citizens’ play-jury” to sit in on a performance, which they did on March 13. The play was duly exonerated, but the word was already out among New York’s theatergoing public. The Triumvirate looked on in delight as thousands ignored the scathing reviews, of which there were quite a few, and stampeded the box office. Gross ticket sales shot up from $10,000 or $12,000, which O’Neill already considered a “miracle,” to an astonishing $16,000 a week.163

“The Desire censorship mess has been amusing, what?” he wrote George Jean Nathan after Banton’s rancorous attacks. “It has a background of real melodramatic plot—the revenge of Banton’s enraged Southern Nordic sensibilities on the author of All God’s Chillun.” Similarly, while paying off his dentist in New York, Dr. J. O. Lief, O’Neill noted the same delicious irony: “But don’t thank me, thank that so-amiable District Attorney!” “Seriously though,” he went on to Lief, “his press-agent work is bad in the long run. It attracts the low-minded, looking for smut, and they are highly disappointed or else laugh wherever they imagine double-meanings. Banton is a vindictive Southern jackass. This was all an attempted revenge on me for ‘All God’s Chillun’ which he tried so hard—and unsuccessfully!—to stop last season.”164

Law enforcement officials fought the production in cities across the United States, and the furor spread across the Atlantic to Great Britain. (The Lord Chamberlain succeeded in delaying the play’s London premiere until 1940). Upon hearing that the entire cast of the touring company had been arrested in Los Angeles, O’Neill wrote the novelist Upton Sinclair, “I hear they have ‘pinched’ my play ‘Desire Under the Elms’ in your Holy City, Los Angeles. Well, well, and so many of the pioneers are said to have come from New England! Boston has also barred it.”165

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