from previous relationships, Eugene O'Neill Jr. and Barbara Burton, but they did not live with the family and O'Neill saw them only occasionally during her childhood. O'Neill's early childhood was spent between Bermuda —where the family spent winters and in 1926 purchased a house, Spithead (originally the home of privateer Hezekiah Frith)— and various places on the East Coast of the United States. Her parents' marriage had been for a long time strained by Eugene's alcoholism, and started to disintegrate after he had an affair with actress Carlotta Monterey while they were living in Belgrade, Maine, in the summer of 1926. He rekindled his romance with Monterey during a trip to New York in the early autumn of 1927, and after a brief return to Bermuda, separated from Agnes in November. Agnes and the children stayed in Bermuda until the following summer, when they moved to her parents' old house in West Point Pleasant, New Jersey. Agnes was granted a divorce in Reno, Nevada in July 1929, and three weeks later, Eugene married Monterey in France. After the divorce, O'Neill's childhood was mostly spent living with her mother and brother in West Point Pleasant and occasionally at Spithead, in which Agnes had a lifetime interest. Although the divorce had granted joint custody, she seldom saw her father, and mainly communicated with him through letters, which were usually answered by Monterey. O'Neill first attended a Catholic convent school, but it was deemed unsuitable for her, and she was then enrolled at the Ocean Road Public School in Point Pleasant. According to the divorce settlement, both children were to attend top boarding schools from the age of 13 and, in 1938, O'Neill was sent to study at the Warrenton Country School in Warrenton, Virginia. Agnes did not find the school satisfactory, and had her transferred to the Brearley School in New York for her sophomore year in 1940. At Brearley, O'Neill became a close friend of Carol Marcus, and through her was introduced to Gloria Vanderbilt and Truman Capote. Although she was still underage, the group often spent time at popular nightclubs, and began to appear in the society pages of magazines. During this time, O'Neill dated newspaper cartoonist Peter Arno and the then-unknown author J. D. Salinger. In April 1942, during her senior year at Brearley, she was crowned as "The Number One Debutante" of the 1942–1943 season at the Stork