Eugene O'Neill : RIP: Author & Journalist Barbara Gelb dies at 91

RIP: Author & Journalist Barbara Gelb dies at 91

Barbara Gelb, Author, Playwright and Journalist, Dies at 91

By JOSEPH BERGER
FEB. 9, 2017

Barbara Gelb, an author and journalist who, with her husband, Arthur Gelb, produced the first full-scale biography of the playwright Eugene O’Neill, the b68 n followed it decades later with two volumes that reconsidered his life, died on Thursday at her home in Manhattan. She was 91.

Her death was confirmed by her son, Peter, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera.

For much of their long careers — Mr. Gelb was the culture editor and then managing editor of The New York Times — the Gelbs were consumed by O’Neill, who was regarded by many critics as the greatest American playwright. In works like “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and “The Iceman Cometh,” O’Neill, a Nobel Prize recipient, introduced a piercing brand of realism and tragedy to an American theater that had been largely awash in melodrama.

Yet his reputation had been in eclipse when he died in 1953 at 65. Only after productions of his masterpieces were mounted again in the mid-1950s did a publisher recruit the Gelbs for a biography. They spent six years researching and writing the work, then much of the rest of their careers revisiting O’Neill’s life.

In an interview on Thursday, Peter Gelb said that his mother did most of the writing while his father did most of the editing. “They were completely different personalities,” he said. “My father was wildly ebullient while my mother was very reserved with a caustic wit. So they had this yin-yang of opposite personalities that somehow remarkably complemented each other.”
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The original biography, “O’Neill,” which they started when they were in their early 30s, clocked in at 964 pages, but was energetically paced and chock-full of interviews with O’Neill’s ex-wives, friends from his boyhood and seaman days, and the real people on whom his dramatic characters were based. The book, published in 1962, became a best seller.

Decades later, however, after learning of newly discovered diaries and family histories and mining some interviews they had conducted that had been embargoed until the death of O’Neill’s troubled widow, Carlotta Monterey, the Gelbs decided that “O’Neill” did not do their subject justice.

So, well into their 70s, they undertook two new volumes that clarified some psychological mysteries, dealt more charitably with O’Neill’s parents and judged O’Neill’s drinking and other self-destructive excesses more harshly.

The first, “O’Neill: Life With Monte Cristo,” which appeared in 2000, shone a more revealing light on the playwright’s formative years with a mother addicted to morphine and a father with a successful acting career who squandered his talents by repeatedly playing the Count of Monte Cristo.

The Gelbs then wrote almost all of a second volume, “By Women Possessed: A Life of Eugene O’Neill,” which focuses on four women crucial to the playwright’s development. But before the 700-page draft was fully polish 5b4 ed, Mr. Gelb died, on May 20, 2014. His wife completed the book and G. P. Putnam published it in 2016.

In the preface, she wrote about seeing the book through to completion without her husband.

“Semi-emerging, some months later, from a grief-stricken languor,” she wrote, “I found myself, alone and tearful, tweaking those last pages (which, in the event, we’d already rewritten half a dozen times). Arthur was looking over my shoulder. I nervously changed a semicolon to a period, hoping he’d approve.”

In addition to her son, Peter, she is survived by another son, Michael; a brother, Harold Stone, a former associate director of the drama division at the Juilliard School; a half brother, David Behrman, a composer; and four grandchildren.

Mr. Gelb had achieved near-legendary status at The Times while

Mrs. Gelb started out there and eventually established a reputation as a freelance reporter, writing profiles of such literary and entertainment figures as Joseph Heller, George C. Scott, Mike Nichols and Richard Burton, topical articles on subjects including crime and Soviet dissidents, book reviews, and travel and lifestyle articles, many of them in The Times and The New York Times Magazine.

She was the author of “So Short a Time: A Biography of John Reed and Louise Bryant” (1973), in which she chronicled the love triangle in Greenwich Village involving O’Neill and th 16d0 e politically radical journalists Reed and Bryant. Two other books centered on the New York City Police Department: “Varnished Brass: The Decade After Serpico” (1983) and “On the Track of Murder” (1975).

Never far from O’Neill, she also wrote a one-woman play about Carlotta Monterey, “My Gene,” which starred Colleen Dewhurst in a production at the Public Theater in New York in 1987.

She was born Barbara Stone on Feb. 6, 1926, into a Manhattan family of some prestige. Her father, Harold Stone, was heir to a fortune built from a five-and-dime store chain. Mr. Gelb, in his memoir, “City Room,” described Mr. Stone as a “dashingly handsome playboy.” Her mother was Elza Heifetz, a Russian immigrant and sister of the violinist Jascha Heifetz.

Barbara’s parents divorced when she was 9, and her mother married S. N. Behrman, a writer at The New Yorker, a screenwriter and a playwright of drawing-room comedies. Barbara was sent to boarding school, Mr. Gelb wrote, “because her stepfather — for whom she had great affection and admiration — required an atmosphere free of domestic disturbance for his writing.” She entered Swarthmore at 16, but, preoccupied with theatrical and literary activities, she dropped out and took a job as a copy girl for The Times’s editorial board.

At the time, Arthur had been working as a copy boy at The Times and, fiercely ambitious, had persuaded editors to let him begin a house organ called Timesweek. One day he spotted Barbara in the newsroom. Taken by this “pretty, funny and entrancing girl,” he wrote, and as a stage-struck young man intrigued by her connection to S. N. Behrman, he asked her to profile an editorial writer.

Their romance blossomed among the jazz clubs and coffeehouses of Greenwich Village. She introduced Arthur, whose parents were immigrant Bronx shopkeepers, to her mother’s sophisticated Upper East Side world, where dinner guests might include the conductor Arturo Toscanini.

Barbara lost her job at The Times to a returning veteran of World War II and became a freelance writer. She and Mr. Gelb married in June 1946 in the Behrman apartment and, because of a postwar housing shortage, moved into his parents’ apartment for six months.

They collaborated on their first book, “Bellevue Is My Home” (1956), a portrait of that hospital, with Dr. Salvatore R. Cutolo, a longtime administrator there.

Mr. Gelb was a second-string drama critic in 1956 when the publishing house Harper, after a well-received production of “Long Day’s Journey,” asked Brooks Atkinson, the chief theater critic of The Times, to write an O’Neill biography. Mr. Atkinson declined but suggested Mr. Gelb for the job; among other virtues, he said, Mr. Gelb could have his wife’s help.

Starting off on a $5,000 advance, the Gelbs interviewed more than 400 people, exhausted themselves with long hours, and found themselves $30,000 in debt. But they were fortunate to obtain an extensive, revealing interview with O’Neill’s widow.

With the biography garnering strong reviews, Harper asked the Gelbs to write a second biography, proposing one of Reed. Mr. Gelb, starting a new position, begged off, but Mrs. Gelb picked up the project 10 years later, focusing on the Reed-Bryant-O’Neill relationship.

With the publication of Mrs. Gelb’s book “So Short a Time,” Warren Beatty asked her to be a consultant on a film he was developing about Reed. After a contract was drawn up, however, Mr. Beatty changed his mind, Mr. Gelb wrote in his memoir.

Later, Mrs. Gelb read that Mr. Beatty was making a film about the love triangle, which was released as “Reds” in 1981, directed by Mr. Beatty and starring him and Diane Keaton. Mrs. Gelb sued and the case ended in an out-of-court settlement.

Afterward, when friends complimented her on a stone-marten fur she was wearing, she casually informed them, “Warren Beatty bought it for me.”

Jaclyn Peiser contributed reporting.
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