Eugene O'Neill may have been thinking of a portrait of Carlotta Monterey when he described Christine and Lavinia Mannon in Mourning Becomes Electra.  The portrait, by Abram Poole, is of Carlotta in the role of Mlle. Clairon in Voltaire, in which she appeared in March 1922, just before she met O'Neill and played Mildred Douglas in The Hairy Ape.

 

O'Neill always called Mourning Becomes Electra “Carlotta's play.”  Carlotta was the dominating presence in his life throughout the years when he was planning, writing and revising the play and during the rehearsals.  He welcomed her interest in his work; he may have visualized his Electra, Lavinia Mannon, as resembling Carlotta in appearance.  Lavinia may also echo Carlotta's personal history, as well as Eugene's own family saga.

 

Voltaire, written by two young women and produced by Arthur Hopkins at the Plymouth on 20 March 1922, was a conventional historical comedy that served as a star vehicle for Arnold Daly.  Carlotta Monterey played Mlle. Clairon, a distinguished actress of the Comédie Française.  The role was not a major one, but all the reviews mention her.

 

Although Voltaire, which closed on April 1 after two weeks, failed, Carlotta succeeded in attracting the attention of the reviewers, who refer to her “beauty,” describe her as a “lovely picture,” as “pictorially ... an adornment to any play,” and as “lovely enough to have been that original Clairon whose beauty Oliver Goldsmith praised so highly.”  One refers to her “notable make-up,” and another notes that she is “perfectly made-up as to character.”[i]

 

One review in the Theatre Collection at Lincoln Center explicitly calls attention to the pictorial quality of Carlotta's appearance:

Carlotta Monterey had only to look beautiful and display some animation, but she did both very thoroughly.  As she stood in the opening on the stairway she suggested very vividly a Natier portrait.

This moment in the play seems to be the one illustrated in the portrait by Poole.  The review in Town & Country also focuses on this quality:

As Mlle. Clairon of the Comédie Française, Miss Monterey is worthy of space in the next Loan Exhibition of French Art at the Metropolitan Museum.  She is like a pastel by La Tour with a dash of Zuloaga and a soupçon of Carolus Duran—a very taking potpourri; and exceedingly elegant.  (15 April 1922: 44)

Kenneth Macgowan's review in Vogue is accompanied by a large photograph of Carlotta as Mlle. Clairon.  It shows her standing between tall French doors which she holds open with both arms extended; the caption reads: “The beauty of Carlotta Monterey had a worthy setting in `Voltaire', a picturesque romantic comedy” (15 May 1922: 55).  The costume is that in the portrait by Poole, but without the jacket, hat and muff.

 

A color photograph of the portrait was printed in Town & Country: “one of our handsomest American actresses, in the costume she carried with such a feeling for its romanticism in `Voltaire'” (15 February 1923: 28).  Carlotta had this color print framed; it is visible in an interior photograph of Tao House dated 1941 and identified as “Gene with `Rosie'—his beloved electric piano.”  Both the print and the photograph are now in the Beinecke Library at Yale.  Carlotta also had black and white photographs of the portrait; she sent one to Carl Van Vechten, inscribed “We're on our way.”[ii]  The portrait itself hung in the eighteenth century living room of Mr. and Mrs. Charles E. Mitchell in Tuxedo Park, New York; it is visible in published photographs of the house.[iii]

 

O'Neill probably did not see Voltaire.  He had been preoccupied by directing The Hairy Ape for the Provincetown Players, by the illness of his mother, who died on 28 February 1922, and by the ensuing drunkenness of his elder brother Jamie, who accompanied the coffin by train from Los Angeles to New York, where it arrived on March 9, the opening night of The Hairy Ape.  After the funeral in New York and Mrs. O'Neill's subsequent burial in New London on March 10, O'Neill himself went on a long binge.

 

After Voltaire closed on April 1, Hopkins decided to move The Hairy Ape to the Plymouth when it finished its run at the Provincetown Playhouse.  He replaced Mary Blair, who had played Mildred Douglas, with Carlotta Monterey.  She met O'Neill for the first time at a rehearsal when she was having trouble with her lines.  She found him impolite, and he was not impressed by her acting (Sheaffer, Artist 92).

 

Robert Edmond Jones, who designed the sets for The Hairy Ape, had designed the sets for Voltaire and the costumes for Arnold Daly and the actresses, so the costume Carlotta wears in the portrait is his.  In 1931 Jones designed the costumes and sets for Mourning Becomes Electra.

 

The portrait provides a visual image for both Christine and Lavinia, mother and daughter, who, like many characters in O'Neill's plays, are at once rivals and doubles.  Although Voltaire is set in the eighteenth century (1776), the costume, aside from the hat, which may be a tricorn, is so simple and unadorned that it could be mistaken for one of the Civil War era, in which Mourning Becomes Electra is set.

 

The only major area of vivid color is the strong green of the skirt, which may be satin or velvet.  Over the skirt Carlotta wears a dark green velvet jacket, the lapels of which are faced with a lighter green fabric.  Under the jacket she wears an ivory blouse with long ruffled sleeves that hang below the cuffs as she holds her hands in a muff at her waist.  (Photographs of Christine and Lavinia in Mourning Becomes Electra show similar white sleeves below darker fabric.)  A white flower, a gardenia set in green leaves, is pinned just below the low neckline of the blouse.  Carlotta's dark hair is pulled back tightly and largely concealed by an ivory hat trimmed with green braid.  Her face is starkly flat and white, with her striking, widely spaced eyes, black eyebrows and bright red mouth as the only detailed features.

 

Carlotta's expression is poised and still; the portrait could serve as an illustration for O'Neill's description of Christine Mannon on her first entrance:

a tall striking-looking woman of forty but she appears younger.  She has a fine, voluptuous figure and she moves with a flowing animal grace.  She wears a green satin dress, smartly cut and expensive, which brings out the peculiar color of her thick curly hair, partly a copper brown, partly a bronze gold, each shade distinct and yet blending with the other.  Her face is unusual, handsome rather than beautiful.  One is struck at once by the strange impression it gives in repose of being not living flesh but a wonderfully life-like pale mask, in which only the deep-set eyes, of a dark violet blue, are alive.  Her black eyebrows meet in a pronounced straight line above her strong nose.  Her chin is heavy, her mouth large and sensual, the lower lip full, the upper a thin bow, shadowed by a line of hair.  (Plays 896)

Only Carlotta's black hair, hardly visible in the portrait, conflicts with this description of Christine.  Born in December 1888, Carlotta was forty when O'Neill began writing his post-Civil War trilogy.

 

The scenario for Mourning Becomes Electra, written in May 1929, includes O'Neill's preliminary description of Christine as a

full-bosomed, heavy-limbed striking-looking woman with thick reddish-brown hair and fair skin.  Her eyes are beautiful, large and dark.  Her nose is short and a bit gross with wide, flaring nostrils; there is something majestic and impressive about her, one feels that underneath her calm, coldly self-contained almost stolid exterior she is a creature of violent repressed passions and a powerful will.  She speaks indolently in a rich contralto voice.  She is dressed extravagantly but with perfect taste.  (Floyd 187)

Perhaps thinking of the description of the eyes, Virginia Floyd, editor of Eugene O'Neill at Work, notes: “Some physical attributes given to her apply to Carlotta O'Neill and are later altered” (187).  Carlotta's face, neck and elegant carriage were her best features, for she was short and somewhat “heavy-limbed.”  She described herself as “vacillating between extremes ... the primitive, the wild and the elemental in nature and art” and the “very reverse, the exquisite and the ultra-refined” (Sheaffer, Artist 222).

 

Christine's second costume in Homecoming, the first play of the Electra trilogy, is also green: “She is dressed in a gown of green velvet that sets off her hair.  The light behind her glows along the edges of the dress and in the color of her hair” (Plays 929).  In Act One of The Hunted, the second play, Christine, presumably in black because of her husband's death, is “obviously in a terrible state of strained nerves.  Beneath the mask-like veneer of her face there are deep lines about her mouth” (955).  In Act Four of The Hunted she is described specifically as “dressed in black” (988).

 

Lavinia's costumes are the reverse of her mother's.  Her first is black: “Tall like her mother, her body is thin, flat-breasted and angular, and its unattractiveness is accentuated by her plain black dress” (897).  But after her mother's suicide, when Lavinia returns with her brother Orin from their trip to the “South Sea Islands” in the first scene of The Haunted, the third play, she “now bears a striking resemblance to her mother in every respect, even to being dressed in the green her mother had affected” (1014).  In the next scene the resemblance is emphasized:

At a first glance, one would mistake her for her mother as she appeared in the First Act of “Homecoming.”  She seems a mature woman, sure of her feminine attractiveness.  Her brown-gold hair is arranged as her mother's had been.  Her green dress is like a copy of her mother's in Act One of “Homecoming.” (1016)

Peter, Lavinia's doggedly faithful suitor, obviously attracted to her, remarks, “You've grown so like your— (checking himself awkwardly),” and later adds, “I can't get over seeing you dressed in color.  You always used to wear black” (1019-20).

 

Orin, speaking to Peter, asks, “Did you ask her why she stole Mother's colors?” (1021).  In Act Two, Orin accuses Lavinia of having been attracted to the first mate on their trip to San Francisco: “that's why you suddenly discarded mourning in Frisco and bought new clothes—in Mother's colors!” (1030).

 

Lavinia is again described as dressing like her mother in Act Two of The Haunted: “She wears a green velvet gown similar to that worn by Christine in Act Three of `Homecoming'” (1026).  Finally, in Act Four, after Orin's suicide, Lavinia enters, like her mother after her father's death, “dressed in deep mourning....  The Mannon mask-semblance of her face appears intensified now” (1046).  While the portrait of Carlotta as Mlle. Clairon prefigures O'Neill's descriptions of both Christine and Lavinia, it suggests particularly the appearance of Lavinia in the first scene of The Haunted, when she returns from her trip with Orin.

 

O'Neill had been making notes for a play based on the Oresteia for some years; as early as November 1922, he had shown Malcolm Cowley a study of sexual aberrations by Wilhelm Stekel, indicating particular interest “in an account of an only son who went insane after his mother had seduced him” (Sheaffer, Artist 121).  In the spring of 1926 he read Arthur Symons' translation of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Electra and thought of using a “Greek Tragedy plot in modern setting” (Floyd 185).

 

He began to develop the theme of Mourning Becomes Electra on a trip to the Orient with Carlotta in 1928-1929.  She had divorced her third husband, Ralph Barton, in 1926; she had an independent income from James Speyer, a banker, whose mistress she had been for some years.  In her diary for 1929 she calls Speyer “Pappa”; she notes his birthday, July 22 (the day she and O'Neill were married), his financial advice, and visits with him—for example, one in Paris on September 1 and 2.  She did not inform O'Neill of the true source of her income.

 

In an early outline of the characters for Mourning Becomes Electra, Christine (then called Clementina) had a “generous yearly income” from her father; her husband resented it, thinking her selfish in spending the money on herself instead of making it available “to further his career” (Floyd 187-188).  On 6 September 1929, responding to gossip about O'Neill's “extravagance,” Carlotta notes in her diary that she was “paying more than half” of their expenses and “also buying silver (table silver, tea & coffee services, etc. etc.), linen, china & god knows what!”  She concludes, “Gene couldn't live like this if he hadn't Carlotta!”

 

During their extended trip, O'Neill went on a stormy binge in Shanghai and spent some time in a hospital; Carlotta and he had violent quarrels, a lengthy separation, and a spectacularly demonstrative reunion at Port Said.  During the winter and spring of 1929 they rented a villa on the Riviera where he worked on the scenario.  When they moved into Le Plessis, a chateau near Tours, in June, Carlotta guarded him jealously from intruders and from friends of his second wife, Agnes, whom he had asked for a divorce.  On July 22, shortly after Agnes had finally obtained a divorce in Reno, Carlotta and O'Neill were married in Paris.

 

O'Neill's progress on Mourning Becomes Electra is fully documented in Eugene O'Neill at Work.  Working throughout the remainder of 1929, he finished the first draft on 21 February 1930.  He began the second draft on March 31 and completed it on July 11.  The third draft was completed on September 16, the fourth on October 15, the fifth, typed, on 20 February 1931, and the final, sixth, draft on March 27.  He then had the play typed in Paris and sent it off to the Theatre Guild on April 7.

 

The O'Neills returned to the United States in May and rented a house in Northport, Long Island, for the summer; in August he read the galley proofs.  Carlotta had leased an apartment on Park Avenue; so when Mourning Becomes Electra went into rehearsal on September 7, O'Neill, with Carlotta at his side, could attend regularly.  The play opened on October 26 after an extended rehearsal period because of its unusual length.

 

During this long period Carlotta protected her husband from interruptions while he worked, attended to all the details of running the household wherever they lived, and zealously censored his mail and his friendships.  In dedicating Mourning Becomes Electra to her, O'Neill uses words which echo his subject matter in the play and in Long Day's Journey Into Night, as well as his own ambiguous, passionate family.  He thanks Carlotta for her patience and silence while he worked and addresses her as “mother, and wife and mistress and friend!”  He then adds “collaborator!”  (Sheaffer, Artist 365).  This theme of multiple roles occurs constantly in O'Neill's writing; in late 1919 he had written to Agnes, his second wife, “You are the wife of all of me but mother of the best of me” (Sheaffer, Playwright 476).

 

O'Neill seemed always to be searching for an ideal love, a woman combining mistress and mother; and he must have seen Carlotta as filling these roles while he was writing Mourning Becomes Electra.  Lillian Gish, visiting the couple at Le Plessis while he was working on the play, described Carlotta as “his wife, mother, housekeeper, secretary, nurse, mistress, companion,” and another visitor, Fania Marinoff, the wife of Carl Van Vechten, echoed the words: “She was a wife, mistress, secretary, friend and nurse” (Gelb 705, 707).  The investment of Carlotta with multiple roles in O'Neill's life and the creation of Mourning Becomes Electra coincided.

 

Carlotta's diary for 1929 records the progress of the play and O'Neill's identification of it with her.  On May 11 she writes, “Gene tells me of his idea for `Mourning Becomes Electra'—& adds, `This will be your play.'”  On August 20 she notes, “Gene does good drawing of `set' for my play (Electra).”  On September 17, “Gene ... starts the dialogue of my play!”  On September 25, “Gene tells me he has ideas at last!  For my play!  A real Greek tragedy.”  On November 16 he reads Act One to her; on November 22 she comments on Act Two.

 

O'Neill had defended Michael Cape, the hero of Welded (1923), a play resembling Strindberg's The Dance of Death in its depiction of a violent love-hate relationship between a playwright and his actress wife, calling Cape “Man dimly aware of recurring experience” (Gelb 521).  The reverberant echoes of the family saga, including the themes of doubling and incest, dominate Mourning Becomes Electra.  Formal, and shaped by analogy with classical myth and drama, it is also an examination of the complex loves, hatreds and rivalries of the O'Neill family.  After all, he himself lost his father, mother and brother in the same order as Lavinia loses hers.

 

O'Neill found these afflicting patterns transformed in his relationship with Carlotta.  In May 1932, when he was at Sea Island, Georgia, waiting for their new home to be completed and Carlotta was in New York to close up their apartment there, he wrote a prose poem to her in which he addresses her as “Mistress” and “Wife” before settling on “Mother”:

Mother, you are my lost way refound, my end and my beginning, the hand I reach out for in my lonely night, from my ghost-haunted inner dark.  (Sheaffer, Artist 398)

Carlotta echoed O'Neill's motif of multiple roles; in August 1928 she remarked, “This Lover of mine is also my child” (Sheaffer, Artist 305).

 

Carlotta's role as a replacement for Ella Quinlan O'Neill was partly her own creation; she herself commented, “that's what got me in all my trouble with O'Neill—my maternal instinct came out” (Sheaffer, Artist 234).  For his part, O'Neill observed, according to Agnes, that Carlotta “had eyes like his mother's” (Sheaffer, Artist 217).  Like O'Neill's mother, Carlotta had attended a convent school and thought of becoming a nun.

 

The characters of Christine and Lavinia in Mourning Becomes Electra may echo something of this striking woman, constantly before him as he wrote the play.  The portrait by Poole and O'Neill's vision of Carlotta as a kind of new Eve to replace his mother may not, however, be the only connection between her and the play.  Growing up in California as Hazel Neilson Tharsing, Carlotta herself experienced a family saga of rejection and separation.  Her mother had many pregnancies, but succeeded in terminating all but one.  When Carlotta was four, her mother left her father and deposited her with a married sister.

 

Mrs. Tharsing then went into business, buying a series of run-down boarding houses, improving each until she could sell it at a good profit and buy another.  She also prospered through her love affairs.  Years later she was living with Melvin C. Chapman, Sr., when Carlotta married his son, her second husband, in 1916.  The elder Chapman had wanted to marry Mrs. Tharsing, but his son dissuaded him and then married Carlotta (Sheaffer, Artist 222-223).

 

Carlotta's marriage to Chapman was brief.  Within a year she had a daughter, Cynthia, but soon left both husband and child to return to the stage.  She later told Chapman that she had married him to have a child because she had been told that “she would never be a good actress until she became a mother” (Sheaffer, Artist 223).  She later left Cynthia in the care of Mrs. Tharsing, the girl's grandmother, who regularly protested against the unwelcome responsibility.  Cynthia spent most of her childhood in boarding school; she once commented, “I'd been in boarding school since I was five” (Sheaffer, Artist 394).  Carlotta, having experienced rejection and abandonment, reinflicted her own childhood unhappiness on her daughter, much as O'Neill treated his children as he had been treated, sending them off to boarding school and seldom seeing them.

 

In the later summer of 1929, Eugene O'Neill, Jr., visited his father and his new stepmother at Le Plessis.  According to Carlotta, he discreetly refrained from mentioning other members of the family: “He has mentioned no one's name since he arrived!” (Sheaffer, Artist 345).  In September, Carlotta noted in her diary, “Letter from Mother re Cyn & her education.”

 

Carlotta, like the O'Neills, seemed trapped in a repetitious pattern of familial rejection and betrayal.  Her mother, Nellie Tharsing, like Ella O'Neill, was not a parent easy to come to terms with.  Carlotta could understand the Mannons and their passions; the character of Lavinia may owe something to her emotional history as well as to her appearance and costume in the portrait by Poole.  That O'Neill chose Carlotta's real name, Hazel, for the unremarkable, pretty young ingenue who loves Orin and is swept up in the Mannons' overwhelming tragedy, suggests his awareness, perhaps his acknowledgment, of a connection between Carlotta and the subject matter of Mourning Becomes Electra, just as the portrait suggests a connection between Carlotta and the appearance of Christine and Lavinia.

 

O'Neill's use of the real name of the unconventional Carlotta for the conventional ingenue also suggests the ambiguous, polarized emotions with which he imbues the most intimate of family relations; he develops emotional contradictions which become recurring, ritualized and inescapable, equivalents of the fates of Oedipus and Electra.  Since Carlotta is wife, mistress and mother, and since she can also be considered as a model for Christine and Lavinia, giving her real name of Hazel to the inexperienced ingenue whom Orin cannot love becomes a part of this structure of contradictions.  The Abram Poole portrait of Carlotta in Voltaire thus becomes an emblem reflecting both the comparable and conflicting appearance and character of Christine and Lavinia Mannon.