Barbara Gelb, 91, playwright and biographer of Eugene O'Neill . By
Joseph Berger New York Times . Barbara Gelb, an author and journalist
who, with her husband, Arthur Gelb, produced the first full-scale
biography of the playwright Eugene O'Neill, then followed it decades
later with two volumes that reconsidered his life, died Thursday at her
home in Manhattan. She was 91. Her death was confirmed by her son,
Peter, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. For much of their
long careers - Arthur Gelb was the culture editor and then managing
editor of The New York Times - the Gelbs were consumed by O'Neill, who
was regarded by many critics as the greatest American playwright. In
works like "Long Day's Journey Into Night" and "The Iceman Cometh,"
O'Neill, a Nobel Prize recipient, introduced a piercing brand of
realism and tragedy to an American theater that had been largely awash
in melodrama. Yet his reputation had been in eclipse when he died in
1953 at 65. Only after productions of his masterpieces were mounted
again in the mid-1950s did a publisher recruit the Gelbs for a
biography. They spent six years researching and writing the work, then
much of the rest of their careers revisiting O'Neill's life. In an
interview Thursday, Peter Gelb said his mother did most of the writing
while his father did most of the editing. "They were completely
different personalities," he said. "My father was wildly ebullient
while my mother was very reserved with a caustic wit. So they had this
yin-yang of opposite personalities that somehow remarkably complemented
each other. The original biography, "O'Neill," which they started when
they were in their early 30s, clocked in at 964 pages but was
energetically paced and chock-full of interviews with O'Neill's
ex-wives, friends from his boyhood and seaman days, and the real people
on whom his dramatic characters were based. The book, published in
1962, became a best-seller. Decades later, however, after learning of
newly discovered diaries and family histories and mining some
interviews they had conducted that had been embargoed until the death
of O'Neill's troubled widow, Carlotta Monterey, the Gelbs decided that
"O'Neill" did not do their subject justice. So, well into their 70s,
they undertook two new volumes that clarified some psychological
mysteries, dealt more charitably with O'Neill's parents, and judged
O'Neill's drinking and other self-destructive excesses more harshly.
The first, "O'Neill: Life With Monte Cristo," which appeared in 2000,
shone a more revealing light on the playwright's formative years with a
mother addicted to morphine and a father with a successful acting
career who squandered his talents by repeatedly playing the Count of
Monte Cristo. The Gelbs then wrote almost all of a second volume, "By
Women Possessed: A Life of Eugene O'Neill," which focuses on four women
crucial to the playwright's development. But before the 700-page draft
was fully polished, Arthur Gelb died, on May 20, 2014. His wife
completed the book, and G.P. Putnam published it in 2016. In addition
to her son, Peter, she leaves another son, Michael; a brother, Harold
Stone, a former associate director of the drama division at the
Juilliard School; a half brother, David Behrman, a composer; and four
grandchildren. Arthur Gelb had achieved near-legendary status at The
Times while Barbara Gelb started out there and eventually established a
reputation as a freelance reporter, writing profiles of such literary
and entertainment figures as Joseph Heller, George C. Scott, Mike
Nichols, and Richard Burton; topical articles on subjects including
crime and Soviet dissidents; book reviews; and travel and lifestyle
articles, many of them in The Times and The New York Times Magazine.
She was the author of "So Short a Time: A Biography of John Reed and
Louise Bryant" (1973), in which she chronicled the love triangle in
Greenwich Village involving O'Neill and the politically radical
journalists Reed and Bryant. Two other books centered on the New York
City Police Department: "Varnished Brass: The Decade After Serpico"
(1983) and "On the Track of Murder" (1975). Never far from O'Neill, she
also wrote a one-woman play about Carlotta Monterey, "My Gene," which
starred Colleen Dewhurst in a production at the Public Theater in New
York in 1987. She was born Barbara Stone on Feb. 6, 1926, into a
Manhattan family of some prestige. Her father, Harold Stone, was heir
to a fortune built from a five-and-dime store chain. Arthur Gelb, in
his memoir, "City Room," described Stone as a "dashingly handsome
playboy. Her mother was Elza Heifetz, a Russian immigrant and sister of
the violinist Jascha Heifetz. Barbara's parents divorced when she was
9, and her mother married S.N. Behrman, a writer at The New Yorker, a
screenwriter and a playwright of drawing-room comedies. Barbara was
sent to boarding school, Arthur Gelb wrote, "because her stepfather -
for whom she had great affection and admiration - required an
atmosphere free of domestic disturbance for his writing. She entered
Swarthmore at 16, but, preoc'cup'ied with theatrical and literary
activities, she dropped out and took a job as a copy girl for The
Times' editorial board.
