The Journals of Spalding Gray

by Spalding Gray; Nell Casey

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2011 by Spalding Gray, Ltd.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gray, Spalding, 1941–2004.

  The journals of Spalding Gray / edited by Nell Casey.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  eISBN 978-0-307-70052-0

  1. Gray, Spalding, 1941–2004—Diaries. 2. Dramatists, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Screenwriters—United States—Biography. 4. Actors—United States—Biography. I. Casey, Nell, 1971– II. Title.

  PS3557.R333Z46 2011

  812'.54—dc22 2011010257

  Cover photograph by Paula Court

  Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

  First Edition

  v3.1

  I HAD BEEN brought up to look forward to heaven then began to think of heaven as history, that I would lie old and forever in the arms of someone while they accounted my life. That no matter what the pain, it would all have distance when it was recounted at another time. Told as a story in front of a fire through a very long night, left with a slight memory of it in the morning. This was in a way what I came to see as hope. Hope was a fantasy of the future and now with age the future has shrunk and so has the investment of hope in that future. What was there left to do but to report to myself the condition of the world that is out there, as I saw it. What was there left to do but to ask you to listen?

  SPALDING GRAY

  (1941–2004)

  CONTENTS

  cover

  title page

  copyright page

  epigraph

  introduction

  editor’s note

  the sixties

  the seventies

  the eighties

  the nineties

  2000–2004

  acknowledgments

  photograph inserts

  photograph credits

  index

  a note about the author

  also by spalding gray

  INTRODUCTION

  A WOODEN DESK, a glass of water, a notebook, and a microphone—this was the stage setting for a Spalding Gray performance. Gray, with his long patrician face and habitual plaid shirt, sat alone before an audience for the first time in 1979 and, in his distinct New England accent, told stories from his life. It was an ancient notion—the history of confessional storytelling is made up of a group as various as Saint Augustine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sylvia Plath, and Richard Pryor. Yet Gray’s work transformed the theater world, creating an autobiographical genre that has since been so widely replicated it is hard to imagine the daring it took to come first. Until Gray appeared as himself, the monologue implied a performer inhabiting another character or characters while roaming the stage, such as the theatrical portraits Ruth Draper premiered in 1920 or Lily Tomlin in her 1977 Broadway show, Appearing Nitely. Gray, on the other hand, absented his body, always sitting calmly at his desk, speaking nakedly about himself: the formative wounds of his childhood, his repressed WASP upbringing, his tangled romantic life, and the intriguingly neurotic way in which he viewed the world.

  Despite his natural ability to tell a story, it took some time for him to discover the monologue as his form. Throughout college and his early twenties, Gray acted in traditional theater but soon found that he did not want, as he once wrote in his journal, to “go on the stage every night and fake emotions.” (And yet he was not ready to be himself either. “I wanted to be a not-be,” he later remarked of his acting at this time, “all the glorious imitation of life.”) After moving to New York City in 1967, at twenty-six years old, Gray became passionately involved in avant-garde theater, where he took on roles that hewed closer to his own personality.

  He also began to cast a wide net for inspiration; he devoured all forms of theater and literature. He studied the works of an eclectic range of playwrights and writers and philosophers—Eugene O’Neill, Virginia Woolf, Jerzy Grotowski, Robert Lowell, André Gide, and Ram Dass, among them—all of whom offered him a more incisive sense of himself and therefore a new way to conceive of his own story.

  In 1970, he became, along with his girlfriend at the time, Elizabeth LeCompte, a member of the experimental theater troupe the Performance Group; later, they co-founded the theater company the Wooster Group. In 1975, in collaboration with LeCompte, Gray began developing a trilogy of ensemble plays, exploring his childhood and family, called Three Places in Rhode Island. In the second piece,Rumstick Road, he stepped forward momentarily and addressed the audience as himself, thus beginning his career—and his particular cross to bear—in offering his life as art.

  Gray premiered his first solo show, Sex and Death to the Age 14, in 1979. And he was off: he presented six monologues in quick succession over the next three years. These monologues—and the ones that followed—were a strenuous exercise in memory. From the start, Gray worked only from an outline for his shows. He tape-recorded his performances in order to play them back and edit the story in his mind; he would alter the piece to make it, as he explained in a 1999 interview, “more dramatic and funny by juxtaposing a little hyperbole here and playing with it a little bit there.” As a result, he began an ongoing creative relationship with his audience—tweaking his stories based on their reaction, what he called a “dialogue”—that he would rely on for the rest of his career. “I start wide open and want it to come down to something set organically,” Gray explained. “I never memorize my lines. I’m trying to corral them every time. It’s like bushwhacking—I hack my way up the hill each night until eventually I make a clear path for myself.”

  In 1983, Gray debuted an early version of his one-man show Swimming to Cambodia, an artful blend of personal and political history, telling stories from his life and from his experience acting in the Roland Joffé filmThe Killing Fields while also narrating the Cambodian genocide that the movie depicted.

  Swimming was Gray’s watershed monologue. The piece was met with near-fanatical critical praise and, in 1987, was made into a well-received film directed by Jonathan Demme. Consequently, Gray was invited to perform his next solo show, Terrors of Pleasure, largely about the disastrous experience of buying his first house, at Lincoln Center in New York City. With this move, he further broadened his audience, extending it from his cult downtown following to the well-heeled theatergoers of uptown Manhattan. He made appearances on Late Night with David Letterman and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Three more of his monologues—Terrors of Pleasure, Monster in a Box, andGray’s Anatomy—were turned into independent films, directed by Thomas Schlamme, Nick Broomfield, and Steven Soderbergh, respectively. He wrote a novel,Impossible Vacation, published by Knopf in 1992. He began appearing in Hollywood movies—Garry Marshall’s Beaches, which starred Bette Midler, and John Boorman’s Beyond Rangoon, among them—though never as a leading man, typically as a side character spun off of the persona of his solo shows. He even played a recurring role as a therapist inThe Nanny, a television sitcom starring Fran Drescher, starting in 1997. All the while, Gray continued to present his monologues at Lincoln Center as well as tour them in the United States and abroad. Throughout his twenty-five-year solo career, from 1979 to 2004, Gray pulled off the fine trick of portraying both the beautiful and the terrible aspects of his life while simultaneously allowing his audience to feel understood. He had, after all, j
ust spoken the difficult truths for them. Gray had become our preeminent theatrical confessor.

  The details of Gray’s death are now nearly as well-known as his oft-performed life: He was in a serious car accident in Ireland in 2001 that left him with a broken hip, a limp, and a titanium plate in his head; he struggled with brain trauma and severe depression afterward; he was institutionalized several times for psychiatric care; and finally his dramatic life came to its surpassingly dramatic end. On January 10, 2004, Gray threw himself, it is believed, from the Staten Island Ferry into the dark, freezing water of New York Harbor. The feeling of public devastation that rose up after his death came in no small part from the fact that the decision to end his life—and the act itself—were so private. Gray, by virtue of the ongoing autobiography of his monologues, had promised to tell his audience everything. His story was our story. But his public narrative, despite his seemingly having always whispered it in our ears, was masterfully composed.

  These journals—which begin when Gray was twenty-five years old and end just before his death at sixty-two—illustrate a teeming under life that the performer only hinted at onstage. Gray was not only surprisingly capable of keeping parts of his life to himself; he was able to skim these parts, shaving just the top layer of a secret and offering it up as a convincing whole. “The well told partial truth to deflect the private raw truth,” Gray himself observed about his monologues in his journal.

  This is not to say that Gray wasn’t compelled to publicly confess. He was. This need—as well as the release and redemption he felt in confiding to an adoring audience—was possibly the greatest driving force of his life. But as his career evolved, as he grew older, as his interests and desires and relationships became ever more complex, his aim to continually tell his story became more difficult. Gray could not reveal everything, not only because he knew the best stories were lively distillations, but also out of the fear that too bold a truth might alienate his followers. He craved the love of his audience—and his audience wanted only a representative of Spalding Gray, a spokesperson for truth.

  This dynamic made Gray increasingly introspective, ever aware of his public, even as he was simply going through the day. The audience became the witness without whom he felt as if he didn’t exist. “The description of a memory makes a new reality,” he wrote in an undated journal entry. “Am I more real in front of an audience?” In 1991, he wrote simply: “THERE IS NOTHING PRIVATE LEFT.” As long as he considered everyone and everything as material for his story, there was little room for “real,” or unself-conscious, life.

  These journals make up the rough draft of Gray’s adult life, the version he sought and often felt he lost once it was crafted and brought to light in his monologues. Here is the raw material—the wrenching emotional breakdown he suffered in 1976 following a trip to India, his time in Thailand making The Killing Fields, his jittery first marriage—that Gray later reproduced with swift, literary hindsight in his performances. These pages show how the monologuist intuitively shaped his narrative, as well as the character of “Spalding Gray,” with a penetrating eye and a soothing bit of self-deprecation, for his audience. In the journals, he frequently comes across in a more extreme way, his anguish and needs not tempered by his perceptive charm.

  And yet the themes of Gray’s life as they appear here are consistent with those of his monologues. His story, and this book, begin and end with suicide: that of Gray’s mother, Elizabeth Horton, and of Gray himself. From early on, Gray writes with eloquent precision about the ways in which depression and suicide felt like an inheritance to him. He articulates the obsessions and vulnerabilities that he suffered, and fought, as a result of his mother locking herself in the family car one night in 1967 and gassing herself to death.

  By his own analysis, Gray was always looking to satisfy the longing that his mother’s outsized personality, and tragic end, had instilled in him. He traced many of his problems back to her, reasoning that she, and his distant father too, had left a part of him arrested as a needy, self-indulgent boy throughout adulthood.

  “The new fear was that mom had not only killed herself,” Gray once wrote on a scrap of paper, “but had also laid the groundwork to kill me.” He drew the parallels often between his mother and himself, emphasizing not only their similar emotional fragilities but also their vivaciousness. He frequently cites their shared love of the ocean. (Water, in general, has a constant and eerily foreshadowing presence in these journals.) He mythologized her life, particularly at the end of his own, obsessing about the ways in which he had replicated her circumstances for himself. Gray felt that his mother, more than anyone else, was written into his genes.

  When he later became romantically involved, Gray constantly thrashed and bucked within the confines of commitment. This pattern plays out with the three women involved in the major relationships of his life: Elizabeth LeCompte, Renée Shafransky, and Kathleen Russo.

  Gray writes searchingly about these women, each one overlapping with the last, each becoming involved in his work in a crucial way. LeCompte was one of his most influential theater directors as well as the first person to suggest that Gray speak to the audience directly. Together, Gray and LeCompte developed a revolutionary model of theater with the Wooster Group, whose work not only broadened the scope of theatrical imagination but also endures as a powerful cultural force today. Shafransky was his muse, appearing as a character in his monologues throughout the eighties and nineties, as he rose to fame. She also became Gray’s first wife—and the backbone to his successful career, eventually assuming the role of manager, producer, and director for many of his professional endeavors. Russo, who gave birth to Gray’s first child while he was married to Shafransky, became his second wife and had another son with him. She was the subject of his last monologues, in particular Morning, Noon, and Night, a tribute to the unexpected pleasure he found in his late-blooming family life and his relationship with his stepdaughter, Marissa, and two sons, Forrest and Theo Gray.

  These journals account for Gray’s artistic history as it shapes—and reshapes—itself around each of these women. A portrait emerges of a restless performer, with hungrily self-destructive instincts offstage, whose talent and ambition were focused by the commanding women in his life. Gray chronicles his long attachment to alcohol, torturous and beloved, and the way he used it as a magic carpet ride out of the strained reality of intimate life. He also expresses guilt about his selfish impulses and his inability to see past them. “I lay sick in bed and told Renée that I felt I used her as a nurse to get famous,” he wrote in 1991. “Just used her to keep me afloat.” But in the free fall of loss and regret after their breakup, a more appreciative Gray emerges: “The image that constantly tears my heart, the image that rips at me is of Renée on her red bike with the fender rattling and her in her brown shorts and we are riding together down to the ocean to take our morning walk and I am there but not there. A kind of be here then sort of guy and she is looking back at me with love in her gaze and I respond.”

  Still, even while in these long-term relationships, Gray maintained a fluid sense of his sexuality. He analyzed—and upended—every role assigned to him sexually. He speaks of feeling like a woman after sleeping with an aggressive man in a gay bath club in Amsterdam, describes the lure of the young as he grows older, details the scrutiny with which he fought off intimacy, criticizing every woman he loved for a particular physical aspect. But Gray was never able to fully integrate his shifting sexuality into his stage persona. His only public mention, for example, of his involvement with a man was in his 1981 monologue 47 Beds—and he denounced it to comedic effect. After he became famous, he continued to experiment with men on occasion, but he did not explore homosexuality in his work, except for a fictionalized account of his assignation with the man in the Amsterdam bathhouse in the autobiographical Impossible Vacation.

  If these journals unveil the shadow story—the plot that hovered outside his monologues—then the question emerges, wo
uld Gray have wanted them published? He never stated explicitly to Russo that they should be made public after his death, although he did once suggest it to her in 1991, after reading a review of The Journals of John Cheever inThe New York Times Book Review.

  It is possible that Gray kept this record as a promise, or a hope, that it would someday be read. He refers more than once to “you” in these journals, speaking specifically to a reader—whoever that might be. There was a time when the “you” might have been Shafransky: Gray occasionally worried she would read his journals—he said as much in his 1996 monologue, It’s a Slippery Slope, and also wrote about this privately. Yet he continued to address “you”—the unnamed reader—long after his relationship with Shafransky had ended. In 1990, he offered this explanation for why he should confess in a diary: “What am I doing? I guess I’m telling it to myself or to you, the reader.” Five years later, he plainly asked: “WILL YOU READ THIS?” In 2000, four years before his death, Gray came as close to saying that the journals were meant for the public as he ever did: “Back in N. Y. C. for an interesting meeting with [film director] Peter Greenaway where he asked me who I wrote for when I did a journal … my audience of course. It is not enjoyable or easy for me to have a non-narrated private experience and I’ve always known that.”

  Still, publishing these journals poses a question that echoes Gray’s own moral quandary: What is worth revealing? It seems, throughout his career, that Gray wanted both to be known and not, to seek the truth and to create it. And yet this book is an endeavor made in the spirit of his mission. More than once in these journals, Gray quotes a line from the book of Job, spoken by the messengers delivering the news that Job’s children and servants and animals have died: “I alone have escaped to tell you.”