New Discoveries: The Marriage Certificate of Eugene O'Neill and Carlotta Monterey (July 22, 1929) / Sean O'Casey, Letter to Eugene O'Neill (November 25, 1936)

This essay introduces two discoveries in the realm of O'Neill history: the 1929 marriage certificate of Eugene O'Neill and Carlotta Monterey, and a letter from the internationally acclaimed Irish playwright Sean O'Casey to O'Neill on the occasion of the latter's receipt of the 1936 Nobel Prize for Literature. The marriage certificate's details have been previously made available to the scholarly community in the Louis Sheaffer archives at Connecticut College, but never before has a copy of the document been published. The O'Casey letter is a new discovery. There is no published mention of the letter, which remained undiscovered until mid-March 2019, when I found it quite by accident in a file of the O'Neill Papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. The letter had been placed in the wrong file, which probably explains why it had gone unnoticed by O'Neill biographers and scholars.

The storied marriage of Gene and Carlotta began on July 22, 1929, a Monday, at 10:45 in the morning, at the conclusion of their civil wedding ceremony when they signed the certificate before two witnesses and the officier de l'état civil at the 1st arrondissement Mairie in Paris. By the time of the wedding, they had been outside of the United States, traveling and residing abroad together for about a year and a half. They had eloped on February 10, 1928, boarding the SS Berengaria in New York, which took them across the Atlantic to London and eventually to France. They checked in to the Hotel du Rhin on the Place Vendôme on February 26, 1928, a favorite spot of Carlotta's in Paris.¹ For O'Neill, other than brief moments ashore, mainly along the docks of Southampton, Cherbourg, and Liverpool during his seafaring days, this was his first sojourn to Europe. They quickly headed down to the southwest of France to take up residence for a few months in Biarritz, where they enjoyed the coast and from which they made a few brief forays to the French Riviera and Spain (WD, 1.54‒58). Fulfilling a long-sought dream of O'Neill's, they then traveled to Asia.

The trip tested the new couple's relationship, as O'Neill hit Carlotta after a night of heavy drinking in Shanghai. She summarily left him. A week later they resolved the situation, but on their voyage back to Europe, he went off on a two-day drinking binge with a fellow passenger. She left again, and he proceeded to pursue her across the Red Sea. Their exchange of telegrams, ship to ship, finally resolved the fight; and they met up at Port Said, resolving to maintain a peaceful, nonviolent, and sober relationship.²

They then tried their hand at French Riviera life, when they rented a villa in Cap D'Ail, a small seaside village just beside the Principality of Monaco, on the Cote d'Azur. By 1929 it already had a reputation as a high-class resort town frequented by celebrities, including the French founders of film, the Lumière brothers, and the Russian-born stage and screen star Sacha Guitry.³ At the Villa Les Mimosas, a stone's throw from the beautiful Mediterranean, O'Neill put the final touches on his play Dynamo—the only one of his plays performed during his lifetime for which he did not attend rehearsals—while Carlotta took to hiring cooks and house cleaners, creating a stable environment for O'Neill to work in. In his new work room, he soon settled on the title for his next play: Mourning Becomes Electra (WD, 1.70).

Perhaps it was the unseasonably cold and inclement weather, or maybe the proximity to Monte Carlo and its beckoning casinos (O'Neill revealed to his lawyer Harry Weinberger a few months later that he had developed a bad gambling habit while he was in Asia), or it might have been the hubbub of a tourist-oriented...