Oona O'Neill
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Oona O'Neill (May 14, 1925 – September 7, 1991) was the daughter of Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Eugene O'Neill, and his second wife, writer Agnes Boulton.
Oona - the Irish form of her mother's name, Agnes - was born while her parents were living in Bermuda, and during a period of heavy drinking by Eugene O'Neill.
Two years old when her father left the family to pursue a relationship with actress Carlotta Monterey (who became his third wife), Oona and her brother, Shane (born in 1919), saw the playwright infrequently afterward.
Growing up, Oona spent her summers in the Boulton family's rambling Victorian house in West Point Pleasant, which overlooks the New Jersey shoreline. The rest of the year she lived in Manhattan with her mother, where she attended the Brearley School.
In 1942, at the age of seventeen, she was named "Debutante of the Year" (asked by a reporter whether she considered herself to be "lace curtain" Irish or "shanty" Irish, she replied, "Shanty Irish!").
At about the same time, Oona decided to pursue an acting career (rather than attend Vassar College), and subsequently got a part in a stock company stage production of "Pal Joey".
She had romantic relationships with satirical cartoonist Peter Arno, and with the then 22-year-old author J. D. Salinger. To Salinger's disappointment the relationship ended when she met British-born actor/director/producer Charlie Chaplin, after having been suggested for a role in his never-completed film "Shadow and Substance".
Chaplin later wrote that he was immediately smitten by Oona's "luminous beauty" and "sequestered charm", and despite a thirty-six-year age difference, they were married in Carpinteria, California, on June 16, 1943, when he was fifty-four and she was eighteen. According to author Jane Scovell (Oona: Living in the Shadows. A Biography of Oona O'Neill Chaplin), Salinger sent her "a scathing, scatological letter describing in disgusting detail his version of the Chaplins' wedding night."
For his part, Eugene O'Neill was so incensed at the union (he had refused to give his consent so that Oona could marry Chaplin before her eighteenth birthday), that he cut her out of his life, refusing all attempts by her at a reconciliation. According to Scovell, playwright Clifford Odets "saw something vindictive in O'Neill's behaviour and thought that O'Neill could not forgive Oona perhaps because HE had abandoned her..." (when she was a child).
Chaplin and Oona maintained a very close, loving, and clearly co-dependent relationship for the next 35 years. Chaplin was her father's age, and there was clearly a paternal "father-figure" aspect to her relationship with him. For her part, she provided Chaplin with unquestioned loyalty and support, just as his public popularity was eroding, and later as his health failed in his final years.
While attending the London premiere of his film Limelight in September 1952, Chaplin was accused of "Communist sympathies" and barred re-entry into the United States. Because of the tax laws in England, the family (which by then included four children), was forced to relocate to Switzerland. (But not before Oona had bravely returned to the United States by herself to close their California house, and to surreptitiously collect all of Chaplin's assets from safe deposit boxes – even as the FBI was questioning the members of their staff. She later admitted to sewing $1,000 bills into the lining of her mink coat, thereby saving the Chaplin fortune.)
Chaplin and Oona had eight children: three sons, Michael (born in 1946), Eugene (born in 1953), and Christoper (born in 1962, when Chaplin was seventy-three), and five daughters, actress Geraldine Chaplin (born in 1944), Josie (born in 1946), Vicky (born in 1951), Jane (born in 1957), and Annie (born in 1959). Despite the size of their family, the temperamental Chaplin always insisted on being put first in Oona's life, and he was – often to the detriment of their children.
In March, 1975 – three years after briefly returning to the United States to receive a special Academy Award – Chaplin was knighted, and Oona become Lady Chaplin. He died on Christmas Day, 1977, at the age of eighty-eight.
In the years immediately following Chaplin's death, Oona lived in New York and attempted to create a life of her own. But after years of being continually on call to a demanding husband (her tasks were once described as being akin to those of a "duty nurse"), Oona – who had given up the promise of an acting career at the age of eighteen - returned to Switzerland and became more and more reclusive. She increasingly sought oblivion in the O'Neill "family curse" of alcoholism, and died of pancreatic cancer on September 7, 1991, at the age of 66.
In 2006, Chaplin's granddaughter Kiera Chaplin (daughter of Eugene Chaplin) visited Tao House, where her maternal grandfather lived. She has announced that she would like to play her grandmother in a film.
The same year, Jane Chaplin announced she had written a memoir about her life called "Seventeen Minutes with my Father". She says the book will not be easy on her mother. She is currently looking for an agent.
References
- Chaplin, Patrice: Hidden Star (written by her ex-daughter-in-law)
- Saroyan, Aram: Trio (details the friendship between Oona O'Neill, Saroyan's mother Carol Saroyan, and Gloria Vanderbilt)
- Matthau, Carol: Among the Porcupines
- Scovell, Jane: Oona: Living in the Shadows
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