EUGENE O'NEILL NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE — The most touching tribute to a dog I ever saw is at the home of America’s only Nobel Prize-winning playwright, who also won four Pulitzers, Eugene O'Neill.
Written in the voice of his beloved Dalmatian, Silverdene Emblem O'Neill (nicknamed “Blemie”), it ponders the differences between dogs vs. humans, the afterlife, recalls highlights of his long happy life, and ends with a final request: Please get another dog.
The "Last Will & Testament of An Extremely Distinguished Dog" is inscribed on a plaque near Blemie’s grave at the Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site in the countryside in Danville, California, 30 miles east of San Francisco. Named Tao House, reflecting his (and his wife Carlotta’s) strong interest in Asian thought and art, the house is where he wrote his greatest and last plays, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Iceman Cometh and A Moon For The Misbegotten.
It's also where he lived longest.
“I have never had a home, never had a chance to establish roots,” wrote O’Neill, who grew up in hotels since his father was a stage actor. He went gold-prospecting in Honduras at 21, became a sailor and lived in a Manhattan waterfront flophouse. When the New York City-born playwright won the Nobel in 1936, he used his prize money for a down payment on 158 acres of land. Tao House was built for O’Neill and his third wife, a former actress and model (the two were living in a San Francisco hotel at the time), and they lived there from 1937-44.
Ever since a dinner companion showed me the playwright’s heartrending dog tribute on his phone, I wanted to see Tao House. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this: a Spanish Mediterranean-style white house, flanked by red shutters, with an orange tiled roof, in a serene location, surrounded by open fields and woods on three sides, with panoramic views of the San Ramon Valley and Mount Diablo, a 3,849-foot peak. Incongruously, it’s packed with Chinese art and symbolism inside and out.
“O’Neill’s quest was to establish a creative oasis, away from the hubbub and what he called the ‘show shop’ of Broadway. The nature he was surrounded by, and the security the house and Carlotta provided him, afforded him the chance to sit and deal with many of his personal demons, leading to his masterpieces,” said Hilary Grabowska, a supervisory park ranger at the historic site.
Four Chinese characters adorn the black front gate, selected to mean “the right way of life” by the O’Neills, who consulted a friend, a Chinese painter. Because Taoist philosophy, centered around existing in harmony with nature, held strong appeal for the couple, feng shui design principles were applied. So, I walked a zigzag path in the front courtyard to the front door, deliberately designed as such to foil evil spirits, who travel in a straight line.
The front door is red, because the color symbolizes luck, joy and happiness, and the main entryway’s ceilings are painted midnight blue to signify the heavens, while its dark brown floor represents the earth. Japanese Noh theater masks hang on the walls: O’Neill collected them, as well as Chinese and African American masks, and experimented with masks, Greek-drama-style, in plays like The Great God’s Brown and Lazarus Laughed. Marco Polo’s journey to China inspired his play Marco Millions. Carlotta had studied Chinese art and history since growing up in Oakland, and the couple visited Hong Kong and Shanghai.
But my thoughts kept returning to Blemie. His will mused:
Dogs are wiser than men. They do not set great store upon things. They do not waste their days hoarding property. They do not ruin their sleep worrying about how to keep the objects they have, and to obtain objects they have not. There is nothing of value I have to bequeath except my love and my loyalty.
And philosophized on the afterlife:
I believe there is a Paradise. Where one is always young and full-bladdered....Where each blissful hour is mealtime. Where in the long evenings there are a million fireplaces with logs forever burning, and one curls oneself up and blinks into the flames and nods and dreams, remembering the old brave days on earth and the love of one's Master and Mistress.
And, blind, deaf and lame, pondered death:
Dogs do not fear death as men do. We accept it as part of life, not as something alien and terrible which destroys life…even my sense of smell fails me so that a rabbit could be right under my nose and I might not know, my pride has sunk to a sick, bewildered humiliation.
He graciously suggests getting another dog:
I have never had a narrow, jealous spirit...My successor can hardly be as well loved or as well mannered or as distinguished and handsome as I was in my prime. My Master and Mistress must not ask the impossible. But he will do his best, I am sure...To him I bequeath my collar and leash and my overcoat and raincoat. He can never wear them with the distinction I did, all eyes fixed on me in admiration; but again I am sure he will do his utmost not to appear a mere gauche provincial dog.
In the house, straight ahead from the entrance, I saw a player piano, nicknamed “Rosie,” the same model as Carlotta’s birthday present to him 1933. O’Neill enjoyed these pianos, which automatically played tunes without a musician, familiar from the saloons and brothels he frequented in his youth.
Vinyl classical music and 1920s jazz records, his favorite genres, are in the blue bookcase, and photographs of his wife and parents hang on the wall. The photos are mostly of his father on stage, James O’Neill, famous for his role in The Count of Monte Cristo, but also his mother, who was addicted to morphine throughout his life. He, his father and brother were alcoholics, and he exposed his family’s traumas in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, his most autobiographical play, which he dedicated to Carlotta on their 12th wedding anniversary in 1941. He called it a “play of old sorrows, written in tears and blood.”
“The dedication demonstrates how art is healing, but you also need to be safe and secure so you can sit with difficult things,” Grabowska explained. “We’re an arts park as well as a place of healing.”
The living room on the right is furnished with a Chinese-style table, carpet, cabinet, desk and Qing Dynasty lacquerware. Chinese characters on fireplace andirons match those on the front gate. Carlotta purchased all from Gump’s, a department store in San Francisco, but when the couple sold Tao House, they sold back all the originals, except the andirons. The photo below shows how the living room looked circa 1941.
The couple enjoyed many nights reading by the fireplace, often with Blemie at their feet. Often, O’Neill recited poems out loud. Irish poet William Butler Yeats was a favorite, as O’Neill took pride in his Irish ancestry. A house with “room for eight thousand books and three hundred pairs of shoes” was Carlotta’s wish, so books line shelves.
Two Chinese guardian dog statues sit at the foot of the staircase. Similar to statues I saw in China outside temples, these so-called Temple Dogs are protector icons, here because protecting O’Neill’s solitude to work was paramount. Upstairs, O’Neill’s bedroom reflects his deep love of the sea, where he felt a sense of peace. He was a Merchant Marine in his 20s, and his early plays about the sea recall his experiences, like Bound East for Cardiff. The room is painted grey and white because those colors reminded him of fog at sea. He wore his sailor’s jersey throughout his life (after 20 years, Carlotta had it repaired as a gift). His carved teak bed, sometimes called an “opium couch,” was traditionally used without a mattress in warm climates to keep cool. The Eugene O'Neill Foundation acquired the bed in 1992 from Gump’s, decades after it was sold back.
I wondered about the series of three red doors. The first door led from his bedroom into the hallway, the second into his changing room, the third into his study. If any door was closed, it meant do-not-disturb. “Not even if the house is on fire, he is not to be disturbed,” Carlotta (who called O’Neill “the master”) once said. Zealously guarding his access to the outside world, she screened telephone calls, dealt with letters and controlled access to visitors. It worked: he wrote his most famous works here.
His study preserves the maritime theme. The ship models atop the fireplace are the types he sailed as a young man. I looked in vain for a Pulitzer or Nobel award, but see only his Merchant Marines discharge certificate above the fireplace. (He never displayed awards for his writing, my tour guide said.) I spot two desks: O’Neill typically wrote several plays at the same time. The desk facing Mount Diablo and blue chair are originals. Often, he cried as he wrote Long Day’s Journey, often called the greatest work of tragedy by a U.S. writer, and he won his fourth Pulitzer for it, awarded four years after his 1953 death. Books here are titles he owned.
In Carlotta’s suite, a photo of her in The Hairy Ape is on the wall (they met when she was an understudy for this play). Blemie slept in his custom-made bed near her. Their beloved dog was the child “that never disillusioned them,” said Carlotta, who bore no children with O’Neill, who had three children from his two earlier marriages. One, Oona, married Charlie Chaplin at age 18. (Her father was so furious at her marriage to the actor, then 53, he disowned her.)
Murals of misty mountains are in the guest room because, according to feng shui, mountains represent protection. Here, Carlotta typed his plays, which he wrote in longhand. Guests were friends like actresses Ingrid Bergman and Lillian Gish and director John Ford. Located at the far end of Tao House to protect the playwright’s privacy, the guest room had separate entrances that led to the front courtyard and backyard pool in back.
O’Neill’s plays are sometimes staged in the barn on the property. Past plays also included a play about Blemie, based on the playwright’s tribute, and works by Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and J.M. Synge. Past this bar, by Blemie’s grave, I saw people hiking a trail in the Las Trampas Wilderness Regional Preserve. Reservations are required for guided tours Wednesday-Sunday. A shuttle leaves from downtown Danville’s Museum of the San Ramon Valley, a seven-minute ride.
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