Jersey Shore Magazine

j e r s e y s h o r e • S p r i n g 2 0 1 9 13 continued on page 14 win four Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize consisted of morning work on new plays including Chris Christopherson (an early version of Anna Christie) and The Straw, checking the mails to monitor the progress of rehearsals for The Moon of the Caribbees in New York, long walks along the sand roads with and without Agnes, and reading at night. O'Neill picked the dining room of the Old House to write in. He set up his manuscripts and notes on a large table in front of the fireplace. He complained that the maintenance needed on the many coal stoves, the noise of the windmill, and the family cat distracted him. Work did not go smoothly, and he spent New Years Eve 1918 reading magazines and drinking heavily. No rapport developed between Eugene O'Neill and the citizens of Point Pleasant. He came into a sit- uation in which his wife's family, although having owned the Old House for twenty-six years, had made few local friends. The Boultons never attempted a social life with what they called "the natives," and the locals, in turn, considered the Boultons city people and "eccentric artists," according to O'Neill biogra- pher Crosswell Bowen in The Curse of the Misbegotten. The playwright's long solitary walks and his habit of getting exercise by bouncing a tennis ball against the side of an old barn for many hours at a time made him seem strange. Agnes later wrote of one neighbor telling her, "Those walks—those long walks! It ain't natural, a man walk- ing like that. I thought you had to go along to take care of him. I've passed him looking so quiet, you could tell he wasn't drinking, so I calculated he must have been taking drugs." He was not. One morning O'Neill discovered their dog with its throat slashed from ear to ear on their front lawn. The mystery of the dog's killing was never solved. On a warm day in December, the O'Neill's walked down a sand road he had not seen before and came across a run-down house. The fence was down. The yard was strewn with trash, including old stoves, broken chairs, and pots and pans. Dirty but healthy-looking babies were in the yard. A red-faced man was stretched on a hammock. A woman was hang- ing quilts on a line. And there were three young girls, all blond, beautiful, and pregnant, sitting or walking in the yard. The playwright was fascinated. He asked Agnes who they were and where they came from. She explained they just showed up one day and took over an abandoned house. The mother occasionally washed others laundry to earn money. The man did nothing but sit and drink cheap whiskey. There had been seven daughters, "all fresh-faced, inno- cent-looking, healthy, and blond—but each girl in turn became pregnant, usually having to leave school for this reason. No one knew how this hap- pened, for they talked to no one, this family," Agnes explained. After the babies joined the group, the girls just seemed to vanish. After supper that night the drama- tist was even more silent than usual. Later in the evening he told Agnes "I've thought of a one-act play—a peach! I'm going to outline it now and go ahead with it tomorrow." He finished within a few days and called it Honor Among the Bradleys. The Point Pleasant area lost its chance for literary immortality when O'Neill, after consulting drama critic George Jean Nathan, a friend, tore up the play. Nathan was amused by the characters, but he and O'Neill concluded that, in O'Neill's words, it was a "very false and feeble piece of work." Honor Among the Bradleys remains listed as one of the drama- tist's lost plays. Eugene O'Neill never again lived in Point Pleasant following that winter of 1918-19. He and Agnes Boulton were divorced in 1929. Agnes lived for many more years in the Old House, raising their two children, Shane, who was conceived during the couple's winter here, and Oona, who would go on to international notoriety. Agnes was remarried to a Hollywood pro- ducer and continued her own writing career. She returned to the Old House in the 1950s and, according to an account by one relative, kept ninety pet cats and a swimming pool full of cat food at the Herbertsville Road home. She died in Point Pleasant on November 25, 1968. Shane attended St. Peter School in Point Pleasant Beach before going to boarding school. During parts of his troubled adult life, he lived in the Old House. Estranged from his father, Shane worked at menial jobs and on local fishing boats, and was often poverty stricken. With a 1948 conviction for heroin addiction on his record and the local reputation of the Boulton and O'Neill families, he was warily watched by the local population as he, like his father, took solitary walks. On June 22, 1977, Shane jumped from the fourth-floor Brooklyn apartment of a woman friend with who he had been having an argument. He was taken to Coney Island Hospital and died the next day. He was 57 years old. Daughter Oona, beautiful and intelligent, had a relationship with the author J.D. Salinger, when she was a teenager and before he was well known. On at least one occasion Salinger traveled to Point Pleasant to visit. In 1943, at age eighteen, Oona, the daughter of America's greatest Alice Boughton Agnes Boulton

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