OONA Living in the Shadows A Biography of Oona O'Neill Chaplin By Jane Scovell Warner. 354 pp. $25
Oona was the daughter of Eugene O'Neill, genius and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, America's foremost playwright. Nobody sits through his plays now, and they weren't any picnic then -- interminably long, mostly, extraordinarily pretentious and often drenched in Irish melancholy. But O'Neill was the One! He was the genius. Everyone believed it; nobody argued with it. Working in another genre, Charlie Chaplin was the father of comic cinema, another genius. Everybody knew it, everybody agreed to it. Harold Lloyd's "Safety Last" might have been funnier than anything Chaplin ever did, but Chaplin had been ordained the One. Reading this biography makes you think about what it might mean to be a genius, and whether it gives you an ancillary license to be a dreadful human being. It also makes you wonder what it might be like to be sidekick to a genius, what might be the advantages and disadvantages to basking in reflected glory.
When Agnes Boulton met Eugene O'Neill (in a bar aptly named the Hell Pit), he had already married once and had a son. He went ahead and married Agnes and had two more children, Shane and Oona. Then he decided he didn't like the chaos of children and the boredom of daily life, and bailed. O'Neill developed a strong hatred for his second wife (Jane Scovell's account suggests that it was because Agnes demanded substantial alimony and child support) and quickly turned that hatred on his kids. He went for years without seeing them and, in the classic karate moves of the most vicious kind of family infighting, made his neglect seem their fault, not his own.
Oona grew up as a child of a divorced mother, writing letters to her famous father that went unanswered, petitioning to visit him and his new wife. During her very few visits to the O'Neill estate, it was always her behavior, not his, that was on trial, her character that didn't pass muster.
Oona grew up to be a pretty young lady who loved parties, dancing and a little nightlife. Together with a couple of giggly, beautiful girlfriends -- Carol Marcus, who went on to marry William Saroyan and then Walter Matthau, and Gloria Vanderbilt -- she became the toast of New York cafe society while she was still in high school. Oona wanted to go on to study drama, but her father wouldn't hear of it. He was a genius; he certainly had a way with words, and used them to make his position clear: "Oona is no genius but merely a spoiled, lazy, vain little brat who has, so far, by her actions only proven that she can be a much sillier and bad mannered fool than most girls her age." He went on to suggest that the "drama school business is simply more laziness, more sly evasion, more talentless pretense, more parasitism, more prideless begging and grafting" and so on and so forth. She was only 17. He barely knew her.
The year was 1942. Oona was getting out of high school. What did women do then? One of her classmates, Anne Bernays, went on to become a brilliant satirical novelist and college professor. But Carol and Gloria and Oona went down more conventional paths. The point was -- and still is, heaven knows, for many women -- to take all their charms and beauty and youth and sweetness, parlay all that, shake it in a cosmic blender, marry as "well" as possible, and hope to God the marriage(s) worked out. "Little Gloria, Happy at Last" records Gloria Vanderbilt's rocky life; having too much money proved to be as problematic as having too little. "Trio," Aram Saroyan's beautiful homage to his mother, Carol Marcus (Saroyan) Matthau, conjures the lost lives of these three fast friends, and conveys, with vast sympathy, the vulnerability and strength of young women who gamble on marriage, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, happy, finally, just to break even.
Still in her teens, Oona married Charlie Chaplin, a scandalous rake well into his fifties who would soon be hounded out of the country for both his sexual behavior and his political beliefs. She spent decades of her adult life finally in the service of Genius. She bore eight children and created an enchanted daily life for her family. Then her husband died. She mourned, fretted, drank to excess in her last days. Then she died, too. The author writes little of her children, except to say that they gave Oona "mixed reviews." What was Oona O'Neill's life really about? It is a gentle mystery, and Jane Scovell leaves it for the reader to solve. By Carolyn See, whose reviews appear on Fridays in the Style section.
