Only Oona

Tamatha Cain

Description

Eugene O'Neill's only daughter.

Café Society's only shining star.

Charlie Chaplin's only true love.

Abandoned by her father as a young child and left to her own devices as a teenager in Manhattan, Oona O'Neill made her own luck. Days spent at an Upper East Side all-girls school were followed by nights on the town with friends Gloria Vanderbilt, Carol Marcus, and Truman Capote. She became an inspiration for Capote's character Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's and boyfriend J.D. Salinger's Sally Hayes in Catcher in the Rye.

Beyond her famous parents, wealthy friends, and stories in the society pages was a brilliant and savvy young woman determined to make something of herself on her own terms. From Bermuda to Florida, New Jersey to Manhattan, and Hollywood to Switzerland, experience the singular life and fascinating times of the enigmatic young woman who would become Lady Oona O'Neill Chaplin.

"There have been so many books about my father Charlie Chaplin. My mother deserves her story to be told. And what better way than through this, Tamatha Cain's book!"
--Jane Chaplin, filmmaker, Daughter of Charlie Chaplin and Oona O'Neill Chaplin

"Tamatha Cain is a born novelist and is having a lot of fun with her mythic subject, Oona O’Neill Chaplin, in Only Oona. Lucky reader!"

-Aram Saroyan, American poet, novelist, and playwright

They were spending entirely too much time at Hamburg Heaven. The place truly smelled like heaven, if heaven had a grill and fryer. While they waited for their food, they blotted their red lipstick in preparation for the wonderful greasiness ahead.

“This is better than a hand up my shirt.” Carol said through an unladylike mouthful of hamburger. She swallowed. “Or up my skirt.”

“What does that say about the choices you’ve been making?” Oona said, pointing a hot French fry at Carol and then dipping it in her milkshake.

She pointed at the red logo on her plate and read it out loud: “‘Only the Best Steers May Enter.’”

“Ooh…that’s terrible!” Oona said, swallowing the fry. Her eyebrows drew together. “True though.”

They ate in silence, relishing every bite, then Carol got out her giant compact.

“Truman thinks you are absolutely divine,” Carol said, wiping a drop of ketchup from her chin.

“He’s a doll, and I rather love him, too,” Oona said. “Where is he tonight?”

“Who knows? That boy somehow always finds the fun.”

“Maybe he brings the fun,” Oona said. She dabbed her fingers on a napkin and picked up another fry.

Truman Capote was an enigmatic type of friend. He made her feel both free and cautious at the same time. It was probably all the questions about Daddy. It wasn’t his fault. It was never any of her friends’ faults. They asked questions any girl with a father should be able to answer, even if Truman’s questions did go beyond the normal getting-to-know-you kind.

When she’d attended Warrenton School, the school before Brearley, her best friends had been a pair of sisters, daughters of one of her mother’s writer friends, a fellow divorcé. It seemed so long ago already! The mother and daughters spent part of the summer as Agnes’s guests in Bermuda, and Mother got an earful about how unimpressive Warrenton School was. The girls were learning to speak French entirely wrong, plus the students were expected to serve as hostesses for the school’s big annual hunting event, which meant they couldn’t go home for Thanksgiving. The mother planned to transfer her girls to Brearley in Manhattan, so Agnes followed suit. And now here Oona was, sitting at Hamburg Heaven with Carol Marcus. Carol socialized with society people. Gloria Vanderbilt, the girl whose face was in the papers practically every other week, was just another one of Carol’s friends. Life was so funny sometimes, how it wound around itself and dropped you places you never knew existed, at least not for girls like her.

Sometimes, in her mind, she was still on a boat in the middle of the pond, at Warrenton. She and those girls had rowed out on an early autumn day and let the boat drift around, as they took turns reading passages from plays to each other. And then, of course, the topic turned to Oona’s playwright father. 

Sujets

• Romance historique
• Fiction
• Romance
• General
• Historical fiction
• General officer
• Biography
• Historical
• Biographical

Informations

• Publié par: Orange Blossom Publishing
• Date de parution: 03 janvier 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781949935592
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table o f Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Ber muda, 1928
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Poin t Pleasant
Chapter 7
Berm uda, 1928
Key West, 1931
Point Pleasant
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
C hapter 10
C hapter 11
C hapter 12
C hapter 13
C hapter 14
C hapter 15
C hapter 16
C hapter 17
C hapter 18
C hapter 19
C hapter 20
Ber muda, 1929
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
C hapter 25
C hapter 26
C hapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
C hapter 30
C hapter 31
Chapter 32
C hapter 33
Chapter 34
C hapter 35
Chapter 36
Ber muda, 1929
Switzer land, 1952
Chapter 37
Afterward
Bios
Selected Bi bliography
Ackno wledgments
Book Club D iscussion





© 2023 Tama tha Cain
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photo copying,
recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, in part,
in any form, without the permission of the pu blisher.
Orange Blossom Pu blishing
Maitland, Florida
www.orangeblossomb ooks.com
info@orangeblossomb ooks.com
First Edition: Janu ary 2023
Library of Congress Control Num ber: XXX
Edited by: Arielle Haughee
Formatted by: Aut umn Skye
Cover design: San ja Mosic
Print ISBN: 978-1-949 935-58-5
eBook ISBN: 978-1-949 935-59-2
Printed in th e U.S.A.


“Time is the bes t author. It writes the perfec t ending.”
- “Cordero” (Charlie Chaplin), Limelight


Prologue
Bermuda, Apri l 28, 1927
On the day Eugene O’Neill consented to pose for a family photo with his wife Agnes and their two young children, a tempest was brewing. Forecast winds blew ahead to buffet the sun-darkened cheeks of Bermuda, where the O’Neills lived in a storied old home called Spithead, precariously perched at the water’s edge. An expectant horizon promised a full moon, but the golden hour now offered a wash of idyllic perfection. For now, the surface was calm, and the naïve shoreline below the home of the family O’Neill shrugged off the harbinger waves tapping blatant warnings on its gol den back.
No storm could ever reach them here.
The playwright looked most distinguished in the new clothes he ’d brought back from his latest trip to Manhattan. He settled on a bench at the bottom of the lawn, crossed his wiry legs, and watched as his wife Agnes made her way downhill along the path. His eyes narrowed, and his lips pursed. He could really use a cigarette.
Agnes paused. After nearly a decade of marriage, that look of his was still a mystery, the line between discernment and condescension being a fine one, like a delicate thread of spi der silk.
She wondered when her husband found the time to shop for new clothes—a natty blazer and fine linen trousers. The style was so different from the casual bohemian chic they’d shared since their Greenwich Village days. Not that she minded the new look. It perfectly suited the idea she had in mind for their family photos—which was to show friends and family that the O’Neills were moving up in the world, chugging up the social register on their own steam.
Agnes held the hand of their young son Shane, adorable in his crisp new short pants and handsome cardigan. The boy was the image of his father, the same hang-dog expression around the mouth, the same woeful eyes, capped with a mop of sun-bleached hair. Eugene’s chest swelled involuntarily, though his face remained unmoved. Emotions rarely rose as far as his face. They got sidetracked before they ever got that far, transmuted somewhere around the solar plexus—where his own childhood pulsed incessantly—and stewed for a while before being shunted to his hands and onto the pages of his plays.
Mrs. Clark, the perpetually cross-faced but doting nanny, whom the children called “Gaga,” ambled behind the mother and son, keeping an eye on their backs rather than on the small figure toddling determinedly beside her. The child clutched the nanny’s finger as she knew was the rule and stomped along the gravel path in her white Mary Janes. Eugene cocked his head to one side, then the other, to see around his wif e and son.
Oona.
On those occasions when Eugene was obliged to take notice of his daughter, he sometimes remembered with some amusement his reaction at learning Agnes was once again, most unfortunately, pregnant.
“I think I may be expecting again,” Agnes had said, placing a protective hand on her lo wer belly.
He had lowered his head, defeated.
“All right then,” he’d muttered. “But I hope if another must come, at least let it b e a girl.”
These children. They struck a chord in him that refused to resolve. Like the discordant buzz of a blue note on one of his favorite jazz records, so was the confounding state of fatherhood. What was he meant to do with all these children? He who never wanted children in the first place, but feared tempting God by wishing them away once they existed.
Before all this—this marriage, the overwhelming success of his plays, these children, this house—he and Agnes had each left the relative financial stability of their childhoods for la vie Boheme, eschewing comfort for the virtue of scratchy hand-woven fabrics and a cold-water walkup flat, favoring the underbelly of society and nights in a bar called The Hell Hole over the conventional lives they found insufferably dull. The squalor had fed their imaginations. They’d trusted the self-imposed struggle would help them both to become grea t writers.
Agnes hadn’t minded, not really, setting aside her literary dreams. She’d written countless pulpy stories for a lurid magazine in order to support Eugene’s dream—to make the American theater a new and glorious creation.
The perverse thing was that they’d worked their way back up, to the conventional level, even surpassed it at times, depending on how Eugene’s writing was going. While Agnes was expecting for the second time, the couple hung their chance at future happiness on the child being a girl. In an act of positive thinking, Agnes had written to fellow writers, Mary Colum, the wife of Irish poet Padraic Colum, to ask if they might suggest the perfect Irish name for an O ’Neill daughter, and they replied with “Oona,” the Irish version of “Agnes,” though Eugene argued it was James Stephens who convinced him of the name. Even in naming a child he did not want, he had to have the l ast word.
Oona.
Standing beside his chair, Agnes had watched the news of another pregnancy hit him, watched him uncross his lanky legs and lean forward, resting his elbows on his knees without dropping a single ash from the end of his cigarette. His back hunched in his particular brand of scrawny elegance, and Agnes had heard his mumbled imperative prayed to the universe: At least let it be a girl. From her vantage point above him, she could not see his eyes, but she knew they would be half-closed. This was how he shut out unpleasant topics, those unwanted distractions he simply could not, or would not, be prevailed upon to face. At the news of another child, he had assumed the position which had become so familiar in their nine years of marriage. He did not want any children, let alone more children. Agnes knew this. But hadn’t he wooed her years ago by declaring he wanted to spend every night of his life with her? Surely he’d imagined she might have children somewhere within that life, despite their vow against it. When she’d broken the news, he’ d taken it at first with the sad resolve of a malnourished ox, about to buckle under the yoke across his shoulders. But then all at once, the bright spot had occurre d to him.
At least let it be a girl.
At least.
The child hadn’t asked to be here at all. Perhaps he had somehow willed this daughter into existence despite himself, like some hapless Greek god. He’d known deep down he shouldn’t be a father. And yet he’d married two women now who, despite their early promises to the contrary, had both proven themselves treacherous and fertile as th e Amazon.
He bowed his head and thought of Carlotta. If not for all this—this wife, this home, these blasted lovely children—he would be with her now. She wanted him, had left her husband, waited for him, free and willing and unbelievably beautiful, back in New York. Suddenly he longed to leave this Bermudan paradise and inhale the poisonous Manhattan air once more. This had all been one long mistake.
“Careful you don’t tramp that rain puddle there now, child,” Mrs. Clark snapped. “Those socks don’t stay white b y magic.”
Little Oona’s brows drew together under her fringe of sunny brown hair with a seriousness beyond her not-quite-two years. “ Gaga!” she said, and let go of the nanny’s hand. She stopped just short of the puddle and Gaga was forced to stop, too, as Oona straightened her arms and legs, splaying her chubby hands for balance.
Agnes noticed Eugene’s face stiffen, and she stopped and turned. Oona had dug in her heels at the edge of the sparkling puddle, and now jigged from one foot to the other, straining her pillowy knees to avoid stepping forward into the water. Her head tilted down and her eyes closed half-way, just like her Daddy, as if shielding herself from the impending catastrophe of ruining her socks and new shoes while also looking just enough to find he r footing.
All the while, her sweet smile remained serene and u nbothered.
“Extraordinary,” Eugene thought. A near-miss like that would surely draw peals of petulant squawking from an average little girl. The sound of screeching children was entirely intolerable, but he’d braced h