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In 1907, he flunked out of Princeton (he now holds an honorary degree of Litt. D. from Yale). In a mood of youthful truculence, he prospected for gold in Honduras, married his first wife (whom he later divorced), repeatedly went to sea taking any job he could get, finally wound up as an able-bodied seaman. For O'Neill the discovery of the sea was almost a religious experience. Later in Manhattan, he bummed around at a saloon called Jimmy the Priest's (Jimmy was the prototype of the saloon keeper in The Iceman Cometh). Later he acted in his father's stock company.
In 1912, O'Neill entered a tuberculosis sanatorium, spent his time there reading Ibsen and Strindberg. Cured, he took a course (paid for by O'Neill Sr.) at Professor George Pierce Baker's famed playwriting laboratory at Harvard. Next summer, the Provincetown Players, a little group of earnest amateurs, put on O'Neill's Bound East for Cardiff.
The O'Neill career had begun. Before The Iceman Cometh, it had yielded such theater milestones as The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, Desire under the Elms, The Great God Brown, Strange Interlude, Mourning becomes Electro, and Ah, Wilderness!
When, at the crest of his fame, Eugene O'Neill forsook profitable playwriting for the delights of uncommercial creation, he committed himself to a predicament that many writers eagerly dream of. The idea worked well for a while. Then it stopped working well. Then it stopped working at all.
O'Neill had no reason to worry about money. His plays had netted him some $2,000,000; he could hope for a steadier income only if he had also written the Bible and a cookbook. His third marriage, with lovely Actress Carlotta Monterey, who had played opposite Louis Wolheim in O'Neill's The Hairy Ape (see cut), was an eminently happy one. After an all but mythically swift rise to fame, with 37 plays, he was still relatively young. In experience, he was a brilliant, confident professional, at the height of his hopes and powers. He was a hard, resourceful worker, who loved his work. He had a backlog of themes, better, in his opinion, than any he had ever dramatized before. They would keep him busy and happy for years to come. He was ready to get down to the most serious work of his life.
Bright Prospects. But there was no particular hurry. On a 160-acre tract of deep country near Oakland, Calif., O'Neill and his wife spent their first years of liberty designing and building a big house as beautiful as their prospects. They christened it Tao House. * In 1935, O'Neill began to block out his massive cycle of plays. Every day he worked from about 8 in the morning until about 1 :30, writing as a rule quite freely and surely, in his elegant, complex, microscopic hand. Carlotta, often with the help of a magnifying glass, typed up each day's work as it came along.
With six servants to care for their establishment, the O'Neills lived with the guarded, exquisite frugality possible to the rich: quietly idling, reading or playing records in the evenings, occasionally entertaining one or another of their few close friends, less often putting up people like Publisher Bennett Cerf, never giving parties. It was a fertile, happy life, for people who knew how to use it, and in their early middle age the O'Neills knew very well how to use it.