“Saw E. O’Neill . . . Yes!”: Lynn Riggs to Barrett H. Clark, August 14, 1928

Abstract

While on a Guggenheim Fellowship in France from July 1928 to April 1929, Lynn Riggs (1899–1954) wrote his most famous play, Green Grow the Lilacs, and began his most significant work focused on Indigenous people, The Cherokee Night. Riggs had already established his reputation by bringing to the stage the voices of the people of his own Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory, which had become part of Oklahoma in 1907. One of his earlier “Oklahoma plays,” either A Lantern to See By or Sump’n Like Wings, had attracted the attention of Kenneth Macgowan and Eugene O’Neill, who called it “a real good piece of work.”1 Lantern and Sump’n struggled to find an audience, but in 1931 Green Grow the Lilacs would run for sixty-four performances at Broadway’s Guild Theatre, followed by a successful tour of the Midwest. The Theatre Guild later pitched the play to Rodgers and Hammerstein, who adapted it into Oklahoma! (1943). The Cherokee Night is now Riggs’s most-read play. His time in France was well spent.O’Neill, too, was in France during much of 1928 and 1929, in the company of Carlotta Monterey, whom he married in Paris on July 29, 1929. Prior to the wedding, from late March to late September 1928, the couple lived at the Villa Marguerite in Guéthary, twelve kilometers south of Biarritz on the Basque Atlantic coastline. O’Neill devoted much of that summer to revising Dynamo, which he completed on August 18.2 He seems to have interrupted his work to drive up to Biarritz on August 13, presumably at the wheel of “the Fast Blond,” a Renault roadster of which he was then enamored. (Carlotta called it “the Canary.”) Presumably the O’Neills were house-hunting: in a letter dated August 9, Carlotta told George Jean Nathan that the couple planned a move to “more modern” accommodations in Biarritz.3 On the day in question, Riggs spotted O’Neill exiting a patisserie, duly laden, one hopes, with gateaux Basques and other delights. A postcard written the next day to Riggs’s and O’Neill’s common acquaintance Barrett H. Clark tells the story with exuberance and concision (fig. 1):The card, first noticed by Phyllis Cole Braunlich, was posted from Ciboure, across the river Nivelle from St. Jean-de-Luz, where Riggs was vacationing.4Riggs evidently did not approach O’Neill, though the two playwrights had several common acquaintances. Riggs knew Ida Rauh and Mabel Dodge, in addition to Clark and Macgowan. Rauh had produced Riggs’s one-act Knives from Syria in Santa Fe (1925); she and he were sufficiently close that he would spend the summers of 1929 and 1930 at her house in Provincetown, when Susan Glaspell was also in town. Furthermore—and as the tone of the postcard suggests—Riggs was among O’Neill’s fans. Riggs acknowledged O’Neill’s stature in a letter to Clark dated August, 1927:Two months later, Riggs himself essayed the comparison in another letter to Clark, in which he said his play The Lonesome West had elicited an attentiveness from “people, not too friendly, and they sit up as people sat up (for not at all identical, but similar reasons) at The Great God Brown.”6 He may have been starstruck: although he would soon establish friendships with celebrities such as Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Franchot Tone, his orbit in the late 1920s was short on A-listers of that sort, if long on prominent artists and intellectuals like Witter Bynner, Alice Corbin Henderson, Mary Hunter Austin, Spud Johnson, and Haniel Long.Riggs appears never to have met O’Neill. This postcard, therefore, documents the closest the two dramatists ever found themselves, albeit without O’Neill’s knowledge. Riggs would remain an admirer; for example, he wrote enthusiastically to Clark on November 15, 1933, about attending the Hollywood opening of The Emperor Jones.7 And, regrettably for Riggs, the comparisons to O’Neill would continue: in his review of Riggs’s The Cream in the Well in the January 21, 1941, edition of the New York Times, Brooks Atkinson dismisses Riggs’s effort as analogous to Desire Under the Elms and Mourning Becomes Electra, but “lacking tangible meaning.” One hopes for Riggs’s sake that Macgowan had shared O’Neill’s praise of his work. The memory of it would have smoothed the sharp edges of Atkinson’s unflattering comparison.