CAALAMED-L Archives

From: mt view <>
Subject: A Chaplin returns to Tao House, in Danville
Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2006 11:18:55 -0800 (PST)

From today's Contra Costa Times





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Posted on Sat, Mar. 04, 2006

Tao House a connection to remarkable genealogy
Woman visits Danville estate of great-grandfather Eugene O'Neill, Nobel prize-winning playwright
By Pat Craig
CONTRA COSTA TIMES

The young blond woman pauses in the foyer of her great-grandfather's house, silently studying a photo of the gaunt, mustachioed man staring out from the black-and-white enlargement. The man stands by a staircase flanked by walls decorated with Asian ceremonial masks.
Kiera Chaplin looks at the photograph, then at her own, identical, surroundings -- the masks, the deep-blue ceiling, the brown, multihued floor tiles are all still there. It is as if the 65 years between the Life Magazine photo of Eugene O'Neill and her visit to Tao House hadn't really passed.
For Chaplin, a 23-year-old actress and model, the visit to O'Neill's Danville estate was the first tangible connection with her Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winning great-grandfather. The visit completed a circle that began more than 60 years ago when, in this same house, O'Neill disowned his 18-year-old daughter, Oona, because she was going to marry silent movie star Charlie Chaplin, who at 54, was only a year younger than the playwright.
Although Oona died when Kiera Chaplin was 10, her grandmother is the only physical link between the young woman and Tao House.
"That's her," said a delighted Chaplin, pausing to admire a picture of her grandmother in the house. "I know that picture, I've seen it before."
Oona was Kiera's grandmother, Chaplin was her grandfather, and, throughout her life, O'Neill was little more than a great-grandfatherly shadow, living primarily on the bookshelves of her father, Eugene, at the family home in Switzerland.
"Oona named her son after Eugene, she kept trying to make contact with him in letters," says Chaplin, standing in a small, bay-windowed sitting room, where O'Neill liked to tickle Rosie, the piano that once graced the parlor of a New Orleans bawdy house. "I had heard about him, of course. I knew he was a big playwright and that he and Oona had problems. I knew he was very depressive and had problems with alcohol for awhile. He was kind of a cold man."
Indeed, he was. His battle with Oona went on, primarily in letters (she lived with her mother, one of O'Neill's two ex-wives), since the girl was 16. The relationship blew apart in 1943, when Oona turned 18 and married Chaplin, who always had a fondness for younger women. Their marriage was successful, despite the differences in age; it lasted until Chaplin died in 1977.
O'Neill's rage went beyond private letters, actually becoming immortalized in his play, "A Touch of the Poet," according to O'Neill biographers Barbara and Arthur Gelb. The Gelbs, like Chaplin, were invited to Tao House Wednesday, as part of the festivities surrounding the premiere of a PBS O'Neill documentary, which was to be screened that night in San Ramon. The film will be aired on PBS on March 27.
"This was actually a major discovery we made after seeing a recent production of 'Touch of the Poet,'" said Arthur Gelb.
"The play," his wife added, "is about a very prideful father with a daughter who is very ambitious and wanted to make an advantageous marriage. This was just after Oona had married Charlie Chaplin. And in the dialogue between the father and daughter in the play, O'Neill was able to translate his viciousness toward Oona."
The fact is, O'Neill was very much the absentee father, so he had little right to demand his daughter do exactly what he wanted her to do, said Barbara Gelb.
But, in his most successful plays, O'Neill was able to mine the depths of the human condition, with autobiographical stories, dredged from his memory behind the foot-thick adobe walls of Tao House.
It was also from the plays Kiera Chaplin became aware of her great-grandfather.
"I remember seeing them one time when I was very young, and my father telling me, 'Oh, that's your great-grandfather,'" she said. "Then, I remember talking a little bit with my dad about him. But he wouldn't let me read the plays, probably because I was pretty young and wouldn't understand them."
She was 15 when she began reading the Tao House plays, such as "Long Day's Journey Into Night," but even then, they didn't strike her with any emotional wallop.
"I thought they were interesting, but it wasn't until much later that I realized just what they are," Chaplin said. "It was amazing in that play, how he was able to explain his whole life in the period of one day. He was able to put in so much emotion and true feeling."
Chaplin, who is working on a film career of her own, says she doesn't often reflect on the amazing DNA that must course through her.
"I always kind of realized the part with Charlie Chaplin; I knew more about him," she said. "But then with O'Neill as well, my God, when I do think about it, I think it's pretty incredible."
Because she is living in Los Angeles, where she pursues her career and is chairwoman of Limelight Films, a company that deals in some of Charlie Chaplin's works, Kiera Chaplin finds her grandfather's memory popping up frequently.
"You can't deny it, you can't run away from it, no matter what," she says. "You are going to get compared, even though I don't try to be like him. People are curious about meeting me, and I guess the connection has let me jump up a step, but people are looking at you and you have to be 100 times better, and when you do move that extra step, you have to be ready."
Chaplin said she has a good sense of humor, but she is nothing like her grandfather in terms of being hilariously outgoing.
She is quiet for a moment as she thinks about her remarkable genealogy.
"You know, they were complete opposites; Eugene on the dark side and Charlie on the funny side," she said. "But both were intense about what they were doing; both were perfectionists, so, in that sense, they were the same."


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