The spirits live on
O’Neill’s fave dives are long gone, but on the stage . . .
The most depressing place in American drama may well be Harry Hope’s Saloon, where “The Iceman Cometh,” Eugene O’Neill’s descent into dipsomania, takes place.
“It’s the No Chance Saloon,” one character says of this lower Manhattan dive. “It’s Bedrock Bar, the End of the Line Café . . . the last harbor. No one here has to worry about where they’re going next, because there is no farther they can go.”
Harry’s is populated with various drunks. Now and then, they catch a glimpse of what they once were at the bottom of a whiskey glass. They wince, then refill their glasses.
Harry’s is back in business at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, where a revival of “The Iceman Cometh,” starring Denzel Washington, is in previews. The production, directed by George C. Wolfe, opens April 26.
Washington plays Theodore Hickman — “Hickey” — a slick, charming hardware salesman who swings by Harry’s whenever he’s in town. But this time something’s different. Hickey is on the wagon. He’s also murdered his wife.
O’Neill wrote “Iceman” in five months in 1939. He dug deep into his past — “locking myself in with my memories,” he said — to create Harry’s and its barflies.
The play is set in 1912, which, as O’Neill biographers Arthur and Barbara Gelb write, “was the year he hit rock bottom.”
O’Neill, then 24, had fled his overbearing father, a famous actor, and his morphine-addicted mother. (She started taking the drug to ease the pain of O’Neill’s birth, something that tormented him throughout his life.) He’d gone to Argentina as a sailor on a cargo ship and had been homeless in Buenos Aires. He returned to New York with nothing to do but drink in the saloons that lined the Hudson River waterfront.
His dive of choice was Jimmy-the-Priest’s at 252 Fulton St. Jimmy wasn’t a priest. He was a barkeep named James J. Condon. He was tough and mean, but had a soft spot for anyone down on their luck.
Condon opened at noon, served good soup, cheap whiskey and cheaper schooners of beer to regulars, many of whom, like the characters in “Iceman,” lived above the bar. O’Neill was a tenant, too, paying three dollars a month for his room. His drinking buddies, he would later say, were “the best friends I ever had,” adding: “I learned at Jimmy-the-Priest’s not to sit in judgment on people.”
The saloon wasn’t all doom and gloom, and neither is “Iceman.” Drunks can be funny. O’Neil may hhave picked up the title of his play from an old joke:
A man calls upstairs to his wife, “Has the iceman come yet?”
“No,” she replies, “but he’s breathing hard.”
Even so, the jokes couldn’t keep O’Neill’s depression at bay. In the spring of 1912, he tried to kill himself in his room above Jimmy’s by taking Veronal with whiskey.
James Findlater Byth, a Broadway press agent and regular at the bar, found O’Neill passed out in his room and revived him. O’Neill modeled the drunken ex-journalist James (“Jimmy Tomorrow”) Cameron in “Iceman” on him.
Byth saved O’Neill’s life, but he couldn’t save himself. In 1913, Byth jumped to his death from the roof of Jimmy-the-Priest’s.
The tenement building that housed the bar survived until 1965, when it was torn down to make way for the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
After his suicide attempt, O’Neill moved to New London, Conn., and got a job at a newspaper. He nearly died again, this time from tuberculosis. When he recovered, he decided to make something of his life and began writing plays. The Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village produced two off them, and in 19155 O’Neil was back in New York haunting another saloon that would also serve as a model for Harry Hope’s.
The Golden Swan Café was at Sixth Avenue and West Fourth Street. A golden swan hung over the doorway, but few people called it that: The locals named it the Hell Hole, and it, too, was a place where broken men came to drink and die.
An ex-boxer named Thomas Wallace owned the saloon and was the inspiration for Harry Hope. Like Hope, Wallace seldom left the bar. He quarreled with his customers but with affection. Life brought him a raft of losers and he looked after them as best he could.
Whenever O’Neill could sneak away from rehearsals for his earlier plays, he’d head to the Hell Hole, get smashed and recite the poem “The Hound of Heaven” to writers, sailors, truck drivers, gangsters and prostitutes, some of whom became characters in “Iceman.” Sometimes he’d pass out from drinking. When he failed to turn up for rehearsals, the call went out, “Someone’s got to go and rake Gene out of the Hell Hole!”
The Golden Swan was demolished in 1928, just before construction began on the Sixth Avenue subway. Where the bar once stood is now a pocket-size park called the Golden Swan Garden. The park is an oasis of peace, something that eluded O’Neill and the troubled souls of “The Iceman Cometh.”