Eugene O’Neill’s Final Harbor Danville from 1937-1944

When American playwright Eugene O’Neill and his wife Carlotta lived in the western hills of Danville, it was the epitome of rural California living. As O’Neill wrote in letters to friends: It is absolute country…without a taint of suburbia…yet only three-quarters of an hour motor ride from Frisco. We have a beautiful site in the hills of the San Ramon Valley with one of the most beautiful views I’ve ever seen. This is the final home and harbor for me. I love California. Moreover, the climate is one I know I can work and keep healthy in. Eugene O’Neill needed a place to write which offered a quiet environment, good weather and access to doctors. While visiting Seattle in 1936, he had received the Nobel Prize for Literature and had been so lionized (and besieged by reporters) that he and Carlotta fled to the San Francisco Bay Area where she had grown up. They decided to settle in the bucolic San Ramon Valley. The O’Neills purchased 158 acres of the former Bryant Ranch in Danville, using the Nobel Prize award of $40,000 in addition to other funds. Their new home was named Tao House and was located in Las Trampas hills, with a clear view of Mount Diablo. With its moderate weather, isolation and proximity to Oakland and San Francisco, the location met the O’Neills’ needs perfectly. The Broadway Low Level Tunnel to Oakland and the Bay Bridge had just been completed.

The San Ramon Valley in 1937 was emerging from the depression. Like many rural communities, ranches and farms had been lost to foreclosure and expectations had diminished. The Bay and Golden Gate Bridges and the Oakland hills tunnel had just opened. There were 2,120 people in the valley in 1940 and Danville was the largest community. Ranches stretched out from the Danville highway producing primarily walnuts and pears. San Ramon Valley High School was the only public high school and was located not far from Tao House. Danville had a restaurant, fire station, beauty shop, hardware store, blacksmith, Legion Hall, dentist, two churches, bank, meat market, five and dime store, pool hall, lumber company, bar, drug store with a soda fountain, two grocery stores and several gas stations. The Southern Pacific railroad still provided freight service. Viola Root ran the telephone switch board from an office on Hartz Avenue, located between Acree’s Market and Elliott’s Bar in Danville and served 340 telephone customers in 1940. The Danville Presbyterian Church’s annual ice cream social was a major community event. Each summer 150 children from the San Francisco Protestant Orphanage enlivened the valley as they came to Camp Swain (today’s Hap Magee Ranch Park) between Danville and Alamo. In the early years the O’Neills had few contacts with local residents. Carlotta dealt with the workmen who built their house and conferred with Sunset Nursery about landscaping. She preferred shopping in San Francisco. Tao House was known to the local residents, of course. They were familiar with the playwright’s fame and couldn’t miss the large white house and chauffeur-driven Chrysler. Sometimes music from Rosie, their player piano wafted across the valley.

Their driver, bodyguard and “man of all work,” Herbert Freeman, picked up the mail, dry cleaning and groceries from town. On occasion he also retrieved the O’Neills’ wandering Dalmatian, Blemie, from Danville. Neither O’Neill drove, so Freeman took them to doctor appointments, Cal football games and San Francisco. A full complement of help for the house would have been Freeman, a cook, gardener and three other servants. Carlotta protected O’Neill from intrusions so that he could write. This isolation enabled O’Neill to create six plays at Tao House: A Moon for the Misbegotten, The Iceman Cometh, Hughie, A Touch of the Poet, More Stately Mansions and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. When he was well enough, he worked steadily on other plays, including an ambitious planned cycle of eleven plays called A Tale of Possessors, Self-dispossessed. World War II brought dramatic changes, including rationing and 24-hour air watch stations in Alamo and San Ramon. Freeman joined the Marines and servants were unavailable. Although local residents such as Curtis Haskell, Edwin Olsson and Charlie Roberts helped drive them and assisted in other ways, the O’Neills felt marooned. They sold Tao House in 1944 and moved to a hotel in San Francisco.

Carlotta later recalled: “We stayed at Tao House for six whole years, longer than we lived anywhere else…it was a beautiful place and I hated to leave.” Tao House and Carlotta’s protection enabled O’Neill to write his final, most significant works. After leaving Danville he never wrote another play. Beverly Lane, 2005