|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Eugene O' Neill's Tao House
| Article
# : |
10533 |
|
|
Section : |
LIFE
|
| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1993 |
2,232 Words |
| Author
: |
Margaret Shelgren
Margaret Shelgren has written on travel for the Christian
Science Monitor and other newspapers and magazines. |
Describing himself as one who never really felt at home, America's great playwright--be-cause of his father's stage career--had known only hotel rooms in his earliest years.
Born October 16,1888, in New York City's Barrett House (a family-style hotel in what is today's Times Square), Eugene O'Neill would rouse from a semistupor sixty-five years later. Lifting himself on his elbows, he cried, "I knew it! I knew it! Born in a hotel room and, goddamit, died in a hotel room!"
And so it happened in Boston's Hotel Shelton on November 23, 1953.
But that he was contentedly housed near San Francisco is documented at a Mediterranean-type villa built to his tastes and those of his third wife, Carlotta, a former actress. Open to view, the thirteen-acre estate known as Tao House, accessed via a private road, has hosted no more than twenty-two visitors per day. The O'Neills might have seen that number in a year, for Carlotta kept the world at bay, maintaining a peaceful seclusion in which her "Gene" created a magnificent body of work.
Tucked in the rolling hills of San Ramon Valley at Danville, fending off wilderness on three sides, the property was more than O'Neill wanted. But having fallen in love with the landscape--"the most beautiful ever"--he bought it and proceeded to build the dream house the couple conceived.
"One of the best things about this new place is that it is absolute country and yet only three quarters of an hour motor ride from Frisco--that is, after the new tunnel opens up through the Berkely hills next month," O'Neill wrote to his close friend Kenneth Macgowan on September 30, 1937.
Before year's end, the house was completed. Its master's outings to San Francisco would be curtailed, however, by declining health. Rather, his proximity to an Oakland doctor became increasingly important. When wartime gasoline rationing hindered his (then) daily trips and a scarcity of domestic helpers plagued Carlotta, the couple was obliged to move in 1944.
Tao House now ranks with the residences of Carl Sandburg, Edgar Allen Poe, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and is the West Coast's lone American writer's home designated as a national historic site. Yet three decades passed (when the place was endangered by encroaching development) before a concerned group
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
