Dorothy Day and Eugene O'Neill
Just now re-reading Bill Miller's biography of Dorothy I came to the discussion of Dorothy's relationship with Eugene O'Neill, where he talks of Dorothy as being one of the models for the character of Josie in "Moon for the Misbegotten." I think Christine Ell was the principal model for that character but probably Dorothy was another. In 1973 I took Dorothy to see the legendary performance on Broadway starring Jason Robards and Coleen Dewhurst; it was overpowering. After-wards, Dorothy and I went to a nearby diner for coffee and during our conversation she said that she thought it was a "religious play." I held my tongue but I thought to myself: "Yes, it's all about guilt, remorse and shame, the very things that religion has always trafficked in." Both O'Neill and his brother Jamie, on whom the character Robards played was based, were serious alcoholics. Dorothy, in spite of some "prodigious" drinking at the Hell Hole, was not. She once said to me, regarding her drinking, "When you stay up all night you have to have something to keep you going" and she resented Malcolm Cowley's remark in "Exiles' Return" that she "could drink them" (the gangsters) "under the table" at the Hell Hole. When O'Neill was dying in the Sheaton Hotel in Boston in 1953 Dorothy asked Cardinal Cushing to go to his bedside but he had died. As some Communist friend said of her in the old days: "Dorothy was always religious." ---Robert Steed