The Gelbs’ Lifelong Journey with O’Neill

When Arthur and Barbara Gelb began their epic journey to write the first full-scale biography of Eugene O’Neill, Arthur was thirty-two and Barbara thirty He was the assistant drama critic at the New York Times, having worked his way up from the mailroom, and she was a published writer and stepdaughter of playwright S. N. Behrman. Both had been avid theatergoers since childhood. They had attended the last O’Neill Broadway production before his death: The Iceman Cometh in 1946. In 1956, just three years after O’Neill’s death, the New York Times’s chief drama critic Brooks Atkinson suggested they take on an assignment from Harper and Brothers, one that he felt he couldn’t begin at his age. Atkinson convinced the publishers that the Gelbs needed to work as a team because the Times didn’t give leaves of absence to their employees, so Arthur would need Barbara’s assistance. O’Neill had suffered a humiliating Broadway failure with the play Days Without End in 1934, followed by the not-well-received original production of Iceman. His earlier successes were almost never revived at this point, and by the mid-1950s he had become almost a nonentity in American theater. However, despite his expressed wishes to not have it released until twenty-five years after his death, Long Day’s Journey Into Night was produced on Broadway in 1956, preceded by a triumphant new off-Broadway production of Iceman, and once again O’Neill was being called the country’s greatest playwright; thus, the publishers felt it was time for a biography. To help convince them that Arthur and Barbara were the right team for the project, Atkinson even promised Harper that he would “smooth the way with O’Neill’s widow,” Carlotta Monterey O’Neill, who was known to be a “woman of mercurial moods,” as Barbara puts it.¹ Atkinson had become friends with both O’Neill and Carlotta over the years, having written many intelligent and thoughtful reviews of O’Neill’s work.

When I told Barbara I was going to give this short introduction to their work in a collection about “representations of O’Neill,” she kindly sent me the preface to their third and final biography of O’Neill, By Women Possessed, which will be released in November 2016. She writes, “I know it’s hard to believe—in light of the ocean of information we now have about O’Neill—that, in those days, so little was known of his personal life.” After having attended the opening night of the original production of Long Day’s Journey, Barbara writes: “For one thing, we were dying to know . . . how much of Long Day’s Journey actually was based on O’Neill’s own life. Was his mother really a morphine addict? Was his actor-father the heavy-drinking, intermittently unfeeling skinflint portrayed in the play? Were O’Neill and his brother truly locked into the virulent sibling rivalry depicted?” She points out that, despite what research has now shown us, at that time “only his most intimate friends were aware that the plays also sprang from O’Neill’s own spectacularly dysfunctional family history—a history that, as we now know, included betrayal, adultery, unresolved Oedipal yearning, violent alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, bipolarity, and doomed spiritual striving—among other bedevilments.” Barbara writes that as they took on the project, “Arthur and I had no inkling that our own lives were about to become obsessively and permanently entangled with the tormented, enigmatic O’Neill.”²

After their exhaustive 964-page biography came out in 1962, they continued to revise and update it several times over the next dozen years, during which time Arthur was promoted at the Times to metropolitan editor and eventually to managing editor. Barbara wrote a biography of John Reed and Louise Bryant and, in 1987, at the request of Colleen Dewhurst, My Gene, a one-woman play about the widowed Carlotta. Originally intended to be a collection of quotations from the Gelbs’ interviews with Carlotta and sections of relevant O’Neill plays for...