Nestled in the foothills of the San Ramon Valley near San Francisco, a concrete block residence sits prominently amidst the landscape. At one time the site provided this country’s only Nobel Prize-winning playwright a sanctuary in which to create masterpieces of American drama.
Built in 1937, the home today serves as a memorial to Eugene O’Neill’s contribution to this country’s cultural heritage. Named Tao House by O’Neill and his wife Carlotta, it was their home for six years. Of all the places O’Neill called home during his restless life, Tao House was the one that held him the longest.
Sinclair Lewis was in Stockholm that December of 1930, addressing the Swedish Academy as the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. American authors were much on his mind. Lewis wanted to champion those Americans whose merits he thought entitled them to the award he had won. Among them was Eugene O’Neill. Said Lewis: “And had you chosen Mr. Eugene O’Neill, who has done nothing much in American drama save to transform it utterly… from a false world of neat and competent trickery to a world of splendor, fear and greatness, you would have been reminded that he has seen life as not to be neatly arranged in the study of a scholar but as a terrifying, magnificent, and often quite horrible thing akin to the tor- nado, earthquake, or devastating fire. In his 65 years of life, Eugene O’Neill produced a body of drama so intense and various that he holds without contest the title ‘Greatest American Dramatist.
On October 16, 1888, in a New York City hotel, located appropriately on the corner of Broadway and 43rd Street, the area that became the heart of the theater district, Ella Quinlan O’Neill, a first- generation Irish American and wife of actor James O’Neill, gave birth to a son, Eugene. The father hurried to her bedside after a performance of The Count of Monte Cristo, secured the services of an inexpensive physician, and then rushed to rejoin his thespian colleagues on tour.
Because the birth was a difficult one for Mrs. O’Neill, her physician prescribed morphine. It worked well; in fact, it worked too well. Eugene O’Neill’s eventual realization that his father’s considerable talent had been cheapened by repeated performances of The Count of Monte Cristo, and his discovery that his mother was addicted to the morphine that had been prescribed for her painful recovery from his birth emotionally devastated him.
O’Neill began traveling at a young age, first to Honduras on a gold prospecting expedition, then to South America, and from there to England. In 1912 he entered a sanitarium to be treated for tuberculosis. While recovering, he began writing plays.
In 1914, O’Neill enrolled in Professor George Pierce Baker’s playwriting class at Harvard. After gaining invaluable experience in that theatrical laboratory, O’Neill joined an experimental troupe, the Provincetown Players, who staged one-act plays in a former fishhouse on Cape Cod.
O’Neill’s mood-piece, Bound East for Cardiff, was both the first production of an O’Neill-written play and the Players’ first success: at summer’s end they moved to a Greenwich Village play- house, where O’Neill’s works remained the prime attraction.
In 1920, O’Neill received the first of four Pulitzer Prizes, for the tragedy Beyond the Horizon. The next year, the tragic-comic Anna Christie won him a second Pulitzer. In 1936 O’Neill became the first (and still the only) American dramatist to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Social and intellectual discontent were at the core of O’Neill’s writing. Such discontent urged him on to ever more perceptive understanding of the subtleties of human conduct. His great themes were struggle, disappointment and death. His characters were not merely in conflict with one another; they were at war with the agents controlling their destiny, and these agents were not indifferent to them. This link between mortals and forces shaping their lives was the mighty concern that gave majesty to O’Neill’s plays. O’Neill dealt with men and women, not as conventions of the stage, nor as they should be, but exactly as he saw them, far too often creatures blindly driven by forces they have not the character to withstand. In writing nearly 30 long plays and a dozen short ones, as well as many unproduced works, O’Neill almost exhausted the stage’s nonverbal resources through his use of masks, music, dance, pantomime, unusual scenic devices, and novel sound effects.
If O’Neill wrote tragedies, he lived them too. His own life was, in many ways, more tragic than the most tragic of his plays. Included in O’Neill’s life was the suicide of his son, an estrangement from his daughter, his long struggle with a devastating neuromuscular disease, the loneliness of his last years, and an ultimate inability to write at all.
Those tragedies would have crushed less hardy spirits; however, O’Neill had something of the titan in him. It was this spirit that gave strength to his plays and which most distinguished his work.
Probably the greatest of O’Neill’s plays were the last, written after he had bid farewell to Broadway and to his second wife, writer Agnes Boulton, their 11-year marriage ending in 1929. That same year he married former actress Carlotta Monterey, whom O’Neill once described as “mother, wife, mistress, friend, and collaborator.”
In early 1937, O’Neill and Carlotta were living in a San Francisco hotel. “No roots, no home,” Carlotta wrote as they searched for a place to live. Drawn to the privacy and climate of the San Ramon Valley, the two purchased a ranch near Danville. With his Nobel Prize stipend, O’Neill and Carlotta were able to build what the playwright called his “final harbor.”
The new home was christened Tao House. O’Neill’s interest in Eastern thought and Carlotta’s passion for Oriental decor inspired the name. Taoism is one of the great religious traditions of China. “Tao” is a term given to the primal reality that gives birth to the visible world. O’Neill was aware of Taoist concepts, some of which paralleled his own dramatic ideas.
The house was located a mere 35 miles from San Francisco; however, there was no hint of its proximity to what San Franciscans fondly refer to as The City. A white patio faced a mountain range, whose highest peak, Mount Diablo, was often wrapped in mist.
The O’Neills moved into their new home in late October, 1937, while carpenters and painters were still working. Designed by Carlotta, who explained: “I wanted to build a Chinese house, but didn’t have the money, so I built a sort of pseudo-Chinese house instead,” the structure was built of white concrete blocks, designed to resemble adobe. The roof was black
tile, the doors and shutters were painted red, and the ceilings were a deep blue. Carlotta collected most of the furniture, some of which was authentic Chinese and some of it copies. “I left the white blocks rough and unpainted on the inside,” she once commented, “and put my Chinese furniture against the rough stones, which made a beautiful effect.” “We really have an ideal home,” O’Neill wrote a friend, “with one of the finest views I have ever seen-pure country with no taint of suburbia, and yet we are only 50 minutes’ drive from the heart of San Francisco…” Access to the grounds was by a private road guarded by electric gates that opened at the push of a button from inside the house. Carlotta zealously guarded the playwright’s privacy in an upstairs study, where he wrote some of his most well-received plays.
However, O’Neill eventually was devastated by a rare disease that caused progressive deterioration of brain cells. The chief symptom was a violent palsy which made it increasingly difficult for O’Neill to grasp a pencil. As the disease worsened, O’Neill’s proximity to an Oakland, California physician became important. When wartime gasoline rationing interfered with his trips and a scarcity of domestic helpers plagued Carlotta, the couple decided to move. The Christmas of 1943 was the last the O’Neills spent at Tao House. With deep regret, Carlotta arranged to sell most of her Chinese furnishings. She packed her own and O’Neill’s books, together with a few of their most cherished possessions, and shipped them to their suite in the Huntington Hotel on San Francisco’s Nob Hill.
The two left Tao House in February of 1944; the move terminated an illustrious career. Never again would O’Neill experience the satisfactions his hillside retreat had afforded.
The dramatist spent his last two years in Boston’s Shelton Hotel, his pen stilled by disease. Shortly before the end, O’Neill uttered the words: “Born in a hotel room and Goddamn it, dying in a hotel room!” He is buried in Boston’s Forest Hills Cemetery.
Three decades passed, during which O’Neill’s estate was endangered by encroaching development, before a concerned group established the Eugene O’Neill Foundation to preserve a part of America’s cultural heritage. Authorized for addition to the National Park System in 1976, Tao House has been restored to its 1937- 1944 appearance.
Access to the estate is via a private road. Individuals may not visit the site on their own. Ranger-led tours are available Wednesday through Sunday at 10 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. Reservations can be made by writing or calling the Site.
A tour takes visitors through the main residence and into the beautifully landscaped grounds. A Visitor Center has displays about Eugene and Carlotta O’Neill. Visitors enter the jasmine-scented courtyard through a black gate. A brick walkway makes four turns before reaching the front door, thereby conforming to an ancient Chinese belief that evil spirits travel only in straight lines.
One of the rooms, known as “Rosie’s Room,” was built especially for O’Neill’s pea-green player piano that reportedly came from a New Orleans bordello. The playwright’s study is an inner sanctum so isolated one has to pass through three doors and a closet to reach it. Tao House is the West
Coast’s only American writer’s home that has been designated a National Historic Site. “We stayed at Tao House for six years, longer than we lived any- where else,” Carlotta once commented. “Of course, there were many hardships, but it was a beautiful place and we hated to leave.” Eugene O’Neill struggled not only with literary and theatrical problems but with numerous personal matters- contradictions in himself and conflicts in his life. The guilt-ridden apostate used drama as a confessional. His chief aim was neither popular success nor literary immortality but his own salvation. Through his writings, the dramatist sought to ease his inner turmoil, to justify himself to himself, not to the world.
No modern playwright in any country has been so tormented and inspired by such a persistent sense of the tragic as was O’Neill. To visit the National Historic Site is to gain some understanding of his torment, as well as what inspired him. The Site is located in Danville, off I-680. For more information, write the Superintendent, Eugene O’Neill National Historic Site, P.O. Box 280, Danville, CA 94526; or call (510) 838- 0249.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the March/April 1996 issue of Irish America. ⬥
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