“Born in a goddamn hotel room and dying in a hotel room.” These often-quoted, deathbed words of Eugene O'Neill perfectly capture a pathetic irony of America's most accomplished playwright—the homelessness of a many-mansioned celebrity author. He does not mention that both hotel rooms in question were first-class residential suites, the first with a view of Times Square, the last looking on the Charles River in Boston. He occupied many rooms in between, but with the exception of a few, notably the one upstairs from Jimmie the Priest's, they were all decent accommodations. We need not picture our Nobel Prize–winning playwright coping with thin towels and a Gideon Bible at some EconoLodge or Dew Drop Inn, and even the most rustic of houses in which he lived, at Peaked Hill Bar, came to him with exquisite tableware left behind by its former owner, Mabel Dodge, and a luminous interior paint job...
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