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When Eugene O’Neill came to Danville amid his rise to enduring fame as one of the country’s most renowned playwrights, he was seeking a fresh start across the country in a tranquil, curated, tightly controlled environment that would come to be known as the Tao House.
But as O’Neill experts are well aware – and as visitors to the national historic site that bears his name quickly come to find out – the playwright’s former home and his time in it during his later years came to be a plot point in the story of his life, rather than the start of a brand-new story.
Among those authorities is National Park Service ranger and Pleasanton resident Geraldine Finton, one of the two NPS employees who drive a shuttle van from the Museum of the San Ramon Valley to the secluded site and lead guided tours steeped in intimate knowledge about how O’Neill’s time in Danville influenced his life story … and vice versa.
“Writing plays is the only way he can make sense of the world around him, so he’s constantly, constantly writing,” Finton said during one of those tours on a July afternoon. “People like his plays – that’s great – but even if they don’t, he still has to write.”
As O’Neill settled into his home in the Danville hills in 1937 at the peak of his career in search of the ideal setting in which he could write his ultimate masterpieces, his material turned all the more personal the more he sought to make sense of the person he was spending the most time with – himself, for 10 to 14 hours daily, in the highly personalized study that is preserved on the Tao House’s upper floor more than 80 years later.
“In this room, he is forcing himself to dig up all of the memories of his past that he has spent his whole life trying to push down and forget, because he knows he’s at the end when he’s about to lose his ability to write,” Finton said.
Those hours of writing over the course of six years in Danville led to the posthumously produced “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” which came to be one of O’Neill’s most defining works – despite his wishes – written as a day in his own family’s life defined by opioid addiction, alcoholism, his own chronic health condition, the family’s collective grief over the early death of its middle child, and its collective resentment of how its patriarch’s tight pursestrings have impacted these events.
“Everyone in his family is in their own little prison blaming themselves, blaming each other, feeling guilty, feeling angry at everyone else,” Finton said. “They’re all suffering obviously from, you know, there’s depression. There’s addiction, there’s alcoholism. There’s all kinds of undiagnosed mental illness. There’s no treatment for any of those factors.”
While O’Neill’s plan had always been to make his new home in Danville a place of refuge where he could fully dedicate himself to his work, the isolation from the outside world that defined his later career failed to isolate him from his ongoing family trauma and its impacts on his relationships with his own estranged children.
But that wasn’t for lack of effort, particularly on the part of his third wife, who was “a whole story all by herself”, according to Finton.
“Her real name is not Carlotta Monterey – if that sounds like it could be made up, it is,” the ranger said.
Born in Oakland as Hazel Tharsing, Monterey nonetheless had “big plans for herself” that were encouraged by winning a beauty contest at 17.
“‘Hazel from Oakland’ is not opening doors, but Carlotta Monterey is a name – very mysterious, very alluring,” Finton said.
Monterey’s Bay Area roots and the couple’s love for Chinese decor would come to define the name of the Tao House as well as its aesthetic, adorning the gate of the house, its foyer, staircase and O’Neill’s bedroom, anchored by a bed that had been designed as an opium couch.
The decorations that perhaps best symbolize the theme of the Tao House and the couple’s relationship are two Chinese guardian lions at the bottom of the staircase near the entrance, serving as a clear delineation between the house’s common areas for visitors and O’Neill’s private world on the second story.
“Carlotta, his wife, is the gatekeeper – you don’t see him unless you go through her first,” Finton said. “She answers all the mail, the phone calls, she manages who’s visiting and who doesn’t. And that would be totally fine, except she does not like his kids at all, and they don’t like her.”
That included his only daughter Oona, whose own show business career in Fremont’s Niles neighborhood and marriage at 18 to Charlie Chaplin – born six months after O’Neill himself – would go on to make her an enduring part of his legacy. After his move to the Tao House, O’Neill repeatedly declined his daughter’s efforts to reach out and build a relationship, or to allow her to visit.
The couple’s time at the Tao House wasn’t Monterey’s first time serving as a gatekeeper and guardian.
“She likes to give into this role where she devotes herself to a great man, a great artist, he then can create the greatest masterpieces because of her devotion,” Finton said. “Her third husband was absolutely suffocated by her. But for Eugene O’Neill, this actually works out well, because he desperately needs somebody to take care of him”
While O’Neill’s two other late-career plays written at the Tao House – “The Iceman Cometh” and “A Moon for the Misbegotten” – solidified his role as the “father of American theater” during his lifetime, it was Monterey’s intervention that brought “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” into the public eye and and earned him continued accolades following his death in 1953.
“Carlotta said he wrote this play to try and forgive himself and to try and forgive his family – mostly what he wants to do is understand his mother’s pain, so that he can forgive her and let go and hopefully move on with his life,” Finton said.
As O’Neill’s health declined in his 50s and his physical ability to write deteriorated, Finton said that he “could no longer not face” the family trauma that had haunted him throughout his life – but nonetheless, did not want it publicized.
“He sent this manuscript to his publisher with a note that it was not to be published until 25 years after his death, and never performed, ever,” Finton said.
Instead, Monterey saw to it that “Long Day’s Journey” was published and produced in 1956, garnering a Pulitzer Prize in drama and further cementing O’Neill’s role in theater history.
Solidifying the Tao House as a national historic site wouldn’t come until years later.
The couple sold the home in 1944, moving back to the East Coast where O’Neill would later succumb to a misdiagnosed genetic disease in a hotel room – a full-circle ending for the playwright who was born in a hotel room and spent his childhood on the road touring during his father’s acting career.
After spending his years in Danville reflecting on and deciphering his family’s intergenerational trauma in his final works, O’Neill was hit with additional tragedies in his retirement as he cut off all contact with his youngest son, Shane O’Neill over drug charges in 1948, then lost his oldest son, Eugene O’Neill Jr., to suicide in 1950.
“He understands that he failed his children, and he feels this tremendous regret and guilt about it, but there’s nothing he can do,” Finton said. “It’s too late. One of his sons is already dead. The other son is homeless, addicted to heroin. He doesn’t know how to even formulate the words to talk to his daughter. So he sees this pattern of his own torment that he’s carried his entire life, and now has passed on.”
While those issues plagued O’Neill in his final years, Finton noted that “his entire life has been that way.”
“The Nobel Prize and all the accolades did not take away from his own depression, his own despair among the American playwrights,” Finton said. “He is the first one to throw the raw emotion of the American dream on the stage, very unfiltered, very real. And ultimately, that’s what makes him so influential.”
Meanwhile, the Tao House changed hands multiple times after it was sold to the Carlson family upon the couple’s departure, giving way to plans for a proposed housing development in 1968 in which the site would have served as a community center, according to local historian and former mayor Beverly Lane in her book “Danville: Heart of the San Ramon Valley.”
“Outraged by this proposal, a determined trio of Danville-area women, Thalia Brewer, Darlene Blair and Lois Sizoo spearheaded a community movement to save the house and the core property,” Lane wrote.
That outrage gave way to the establishment of the Eugene O’Neill Foundation in 1974, the same year the East Bay Regional Park District purchased more than 1,000 acres of land that would become Las Trampas Regional Wilderness, and that included the Tao House site.
The foundation was given an 18-month purchase option on the site, with O’Neillian actor Jason Robards using funds from the performance of one the late playwright’s works to aid in the purchase and then-assemblymember Dan Boatwright ultimately enabling its purchase by the state. Legislation to establish a national historic site was introduced in 1975, then signed into law in 1976.
It wasn’t until nearly a decade later that the Tao House was opened to the public in 1985, with litigation from neighboring residents delaying the full opening until 1994.
As part of the agreement between the NPS and neighboring residents, the O’Neill site is accessible to the public only by shuttle, and otherwise only by a small group of people with the code to the gate to the private, bumpy road that symbolizes both the NPS designation and O’Neill’s personal life.
In spite of its seclusion and accessibility limits, the O’Neill site holds the distinction of being the Tri-Valley’s only National Park System site, something that the foundation, NPS, and other local theater and history enthusiasts are trying to make a more well-known fact.
That includes efforts underway by EONF organizers to prepare for an exhibit at the Museum of the San Ramon Valley later in the year, as well as connecting with neighboring NPS sites including the John Muir National Historic site and the Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Monument.
“It’s kind of our way to get people to understand that there’s a National Historic Site up here,” EONF President Teresa Morley said.
The annual Eugene O’Neill Festival that showcases his works at the property where his career peaked is likely the most prominent event that draws attention to the Tao House and brings in additional visitors every September.
While the Tao House holds the distinction of being the site of O’Neill’s final, dramatic works, the centerpiece of this year’s festival is set to be his lighter fare – the 1933 Broadway comedy “Ah Wilderness”, directed by Las Positas College dean and theater arts coordinator Titian Lish, one of the only O’Neill plays featuring a happy ending.
But as Morley noted, despite the lighthearted nature and popular appeal of “Ah Wilderness”, those who know O’Neill will be able to detect darker underpinnings.
Although NPS and EONF officials alike seek to encourage more visitors to the site, its seclusion also continues to make it ideal for its namesake’s intended purpose – a place to focus solely on writing in a tranquil atmosphere, away from the rest of the world.
The site serves that purpose for writers in the present day with the foundation’s artist-in-residence and day-use programs that draw playwrights and other creatives from near and far, such as actor and writer Lee Osario, who has returned to the San Ramon Valley repeatedly since his residency for productions of his play “Prisontown”.
“To be given the dedicated time to write would have been enough, to be given that time in such a beautiful and historic location would have been enough, to be fed by the wonderful staff of San Damiano – that alone would have been enough,” Osario said. “Or just to have gotten to know the incredible humans running the Foundation and the National Park, and to have made the friendships I have, any one of those things would have been a gift in and of itself.”
Osario called the confluence of those factors “an abundance of riches” that continues to provide artistic and personal nourishment years later.
“It doesn’t happen without a lot of hard work and a lot of money,” Osario said, “So, I strongly encourage anyone reading this to learn how you can support the invaluable work the Foundation is doing either by volunteering, donating, going to see a show, or all of the above.”
Tours for the Eugene O’Neill National Historic Site depart from the Museum of the San Ramon Valley in downtown Danville at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays. Reservations and more information are available at nps.gov/euon.
EONF is hosting a preview of its annual festival Tuesday (Aug. 11) at the Danville Library. More information on the event, the festival, and residency programs is available at eugeneoneill.org.
