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Well, by the time you were handling him, was he a little less--?

Indeed he had changed! When I first knew him at Liveright's he was still a wild man. He and a group went to a funeral of a friend, for instance, and Gene was so drunk he fell into the grave. They had to pull him out and take him to Bellevue to dry out. He lived down along the waterfront in those days. That's where he got to know all about sailors and the sea. He lived down with all these men in flop houses and they were a bunch of drunks always in trouble. They knew him at Bellevue by his first name, he was there so often.

Didn't he dry out as years went on or did he continue to drink so much?

No, he stopped, partly for health reasons and partly as he matured; instead of being a young carouser, he became a dignified gentleman and began to get honors thrust upon him. At first he avoided them. Gene never went to one of his first nights. He'd wander around the city while the play was running.

Was he so nervous?

The night “Strange Interlude” opened, he met an old sailor friend who said, “Gene O'Neill! What the hell are you doing these days?" That very minute his greatest hit was opening on Broadway!