We have lost Gray, but there is still more for him to tell us.
Nell Casey
June 2011
EDITOR’S NOTE
WHILE I WAS working on this book, the entirety of Spalding Gray’s notebooks, videos, and audiotapes were housed in many cardboard boxes in the New York City office of Glenn Horowitz, a rare-book dealer who specializes in selling literary archives to scholarly institutions. (Gray’s papers have since been acquired by the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin and currently reside there.) These boxes were neatly labeled—“Journals 1970s and 1980s,” “Journals 1990–1995 and Misc. Personal Material,” “Notebooks and Performance Notes,” and the like—but it seemed at each visit I made, another cardboard box would materialize with sketches Gray had doodled, audiotapes of therapy sessions, short stories, videotapes of performances, and scraps of paper with fascinating one- to two-line glimpses into the performer’s mind. Gray apparently wrote notes on every bit of ephemera that passed through his hands: hotel stationery, an Amtrak napkin, a Breast Cancer Coalition pamphlet. Every time I entered Horowitz’s office, it felt as if I’d fallen down a rabbit hole into Gray’s phantasmagoric vision of life.
Once, in the summer of 2009, when Gray’s widow, Kathleen Russo, was packing up the last of his personal papers for the archive, I stood by in amazement as she rifled through the remaining fragments of Gray’s life. “This is interesting,” she would say, and then hand over a cryptic drawing he’d done as a young man or a letter his therapist had written to him. The papers piled up on a table before me, and as I began to root through them—unfolding wrinkled pages, opening long-forgotten, tattered notepads—a Tampax insert fell into my lap. Somehow, it had made its way from Gray’s home into his papers and had been earnestly tucked away in his archives. This was, it seemed to me, not only a fitting tribute to Gray’s career of ushering private life into public view but also an excellent symbol for the intimate chaos of this project.
Gray’s notebooks—he wrote in a variety of diaries, from marble composition books to spiral notebooks to date books (every page filled to the brim with notes running straight through the “Earnings & Withholding Tax” page)—range from 1967, when he was a twenty-five-year-old doing regional theater in Texas, to the days just before his death, at age sixty-two, in 2004. All told, Gray left behind more than five thousand pages of his private writing. While most of these books contain his day-to-day musings—alternately written in tilting cursive or loose capital letters—there are also notebooks he used specifically for his monologues. These typically contain a list of plot points, targets Gray wanted to hit while telling a story, with changes and adjustments made in red pen. On occasion, Gray also tried out ideas here before committing to them. One such book, for example, is labeled “Mourning, Noon and Night” with the u in “Mourning” crossed out, offering a glimpse of the kind of revelatory fine-tuning he did with this monologue before he first performed it in 1999. There are also occasional intrusions of daily life: a babysitter’s number is scribbled across the top of one page and, on the bottom of another, a list of things Gray wanted to remember from a trip he’d taken into New York City from his home in Sag Harbor, Long Island.
Conversely, the “regular” diaries often include the first version of stories before they were transformed for a monologue, perhaps before even Gray knew that he would offer these details to an audience. Because the “performance notebooks” were more skeletal—they are largely made up of outlines and lists—I primarily drew from the day-to-day journals for this book. On the rare occasion that I did use something from the performance journals—when I found something that added an interesting glimpse into Gray’s artistic process—I made note of it.
In addition to giving me access to everything stored at Horowitz’s office, Russo offered many other crucial elements from Gray’s life such as letters and faxes he’d sent or saved, drawings, family photographs, publicity stills, reviews and press clippings for his shows, medical and psychiatric paperwork from the last years of his life, and an audiotape he recorded—the last one he ever made—a month prior to his death. I mostly used these materials to help me better understand Gray and to fully represent his life through his journals. When I did include material in the book other than the journals—quoting from a note on scrap paper or a letter exchange—the source is identified. Toward the end of his life, when Gray was physically and mentally compromised and did not write in his journals as frequently or as coherently, I relied more heavily on supplementary materials such as hospital records, letters from this time, and Gray’s last audio recording. When psychiatric records were not available, Russo provided me with names of hospitals and dates drawn from a timeline she kept at the end of Gray’s life. I also conducted many interviews with Gray’s family members, friends, and colleagues. I quote from these conversations throughout but do so more extensively in conjuring Gray’s last years.
My greatest challenge as an editor was to cull the entries and shape a history from the vast array of fascinating personal documentation Gray left behind. I read everything available to me and then set about trying to portray the story of Gray’s life while also abiding the gaps and idiosyncrasies of the journals. With the exception of 1977–1979, when Gray seemed to write every day, the diaries have varying breaks in time, though he didn’t tend to let more than a few weeks lapse before returning. There are a few intervals, nonetheless, when Gray disappeared for longer. The most striking example of this is from 1984: In the year when Gray was first touring Swimming to Cambodia and his solo career began its steep ascent, he left behind few entries, with almost no mention of his work.
Throughout his journals, Gray sometimes drew boxes around certain words and arrows pointing from one passage to another. He occasionally used other modes of emphasis: underlining words or sentences or using question marks to indicate his loss of words to describe something. In the hope of reproducing the feeling of the original journals, I have left these intact where possible.
For the sake of a coherent account, I have included my own narration in italics throughout the book, mainly at the start of each decade and at the end of Gray’s life, when his writing became more diffuse. There are also brief clarifications, in italics and brackets either beneath the date or within the entry, that aim to orient the reader when Gray refers to an event, person, or story that requires further explanation. At times, I note when something from the journals later found its way into one of Gray’s monologues or when there is an interesting discrepancy between how he told a story in the journal and how he presented it later in a monologue. But I did not note every instance in which a piece of his life made its way into his art.
The narrative provided throughout is meant to place the entries in the broader context of Gray’s life, though this is not a definitive biography, which has yet to be written. This book is devoted solely to Gray’s point of view; I asked for others to provide not counter-perspectives but rather a more complete sense of the story.
There are certain insights—such as his feelings about his growing fame during that seminal year of 1984—that left this earth along with Gray and remain mysterious. Along these lines, LeCompte told me she possessed two of Gray’s journals from their time together as a couple, but later said she was not able to find them. Thankfully, for the most part, Gray left behind such a large trove of his reflections—in interviews, monologues, recordings—I was able to find clues and passages to draw from in order to fill in the blanks. (Russo also gave me access to transcripts of everything in Gray’s archive. A small number of entries in the book are drawn from these.) At times, I quote Gray himself; this material was gathered from the journals, letters, television interviews, and newspaper and magazine clippings as well as Gray’s monologues or other forms of his writing, both published and not.
I have not noted where there are missing passages—either between entries or within them—as I found trying to mark these lapses with ellipses riddled the page with a bewi
ldering code of disclosure. The ellipses that appear in the entries belong to Gray.
One of the great pleasures of reading journals is to see the untidy origins both of the author’s reflections and of his writing habits. As such, I felt a keen responsibility to keep these journals as close to their original form as possible. Gray, however, was dyslexic and made frequent misspellings and grammatical errors. Where there seemed to be a significant struggle for him to get a word right—such as a 1968 entry in which he wrote “now things are really difficult (great fears about alchhol alcha drinking I keep wanting to drink)”—or where the misuse of a word seemed to represent the way in which dyslexia actually heightened Gray’s originality, I did not fix it. Similarly, I occasionally kept Gray’s peculiar grammar and quirks of punctuation when they seemed to make their own statement about his creativity. That said, where the mistakes were plainly mistakes, I made corrections; there were so many misspelled words throughout these pages that leaving them would have served as a distraction for the reader. If a word within an entry was not legible, I signified this with a blank line.
Gray also had a habit of crossing through his words and starting again, refashioning a thought midstream, as well as suddenly writing in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, as if he’d just realized how short and urgent life really was. He also used erratic indentations throughout certain entries, perhaps to heighten their poetic impact. These all seemed to be conscious decisions on his part and helped to reveal something of his feelings and intentions as he wrote—I left them as they were.
Gray did not always date his journals. Where no date appears before an entry in the book, there was no date to be found in the diaries. Undated entries have been placed in correct chronological order to the best of my knowledge. Otherwise, I have, for consistency’s sake, given the date—in as complete a form as possible—on the upper-left-hand side of each entry. I also kept Gray’s own descriptions of the date when they offered further—and occasionally revealing—description, as in “April One April Fools Day. I’m the fool,” which he wrote in 1995. Gray also sometimes wrote in his journals twice in the same day. Under these circumstances, the two entries appear with the same date.
As one would expect from a journal, Gray frequently referred to people, institutions, and events by one name only and without description beyond the immediate entry. I was often able to track down full names and/or their roles in Gray’s life and offer this information. When it was not possible to do so, however, I simply left the name with no further explanation. I also corrected the spelling of certain names. It is worth noting Gray misspelled even Kathie Russo’s name—alternating between “Kathy” and “Kathie”—throughout the time they were together.
In a few places, I’ve changed the names of people in order to protect their privacy. In these cases, the name appears with an asterisk by it at its first mention.
Upon Gray’s death, his legacy became Russo’s responsibility, and the decision to publish these journals was hers alone. I am not sure, in relation to this project, that she always relished this role—acting as curator for Gray’s eternal memory—but I think she felt it was an alternately consoling and necessary one to take on. This book not only allowed her to remain in the presence of Gray but also gave her a chance to participate in a work, the chronicling of her husband’s life, that might have otherwise been taken up without her permission. She struggled at times with the decisions that went into making this book but was admirably willing to allow for the rawness of character that a person’s journals invariably expose. Russo also endured seeing herself rendered by Gray, as flawed and criticized as any other of the intimates described here. She remained, as perhaps a wife of Spalding Gray must, unflinching. She did, nevertheless, request that certain entries be removed out of sensitivity to her family. Her children had already suffered the very public suicide of their father, and, out of respect for them and Russo, these entries were removed from the final manuscript.
Such restrictions—the finite number of pages in which to express a life, the discovery that a piece of the whole is inaccessible, the protective instincts of family members—are the particular challenges of editing journals. And yet, despite these limits, it is my hope this book captures the exceptional scope and meaning of Gray’s remarkable life.
the sixties
SOMEWHERE THERE WAS A WAR going on and back in Rhode Island, my mother was having her second nervous breakdown. Perhaps she was having it because of the war. I couldn’t stand being around her anymore. I didn’t know what to do. I’d try to read to her from the Alan Watts book Psychotherapy, East and West but it didn’t make sense to either of us. What she needed was something else no one could give. My father sent her to a psychiatrist but that didn’t help because she was a Christian Scientist and didn’t trust doctors so she wouldn’t talk to him. But she did call her Christian Science practitioner and he gave her some phrase to repeat like, “God is all loving and I’m His perfect reflection.” Then she’d hang up the phone and pace the living room while repeating that phrase over and over while tearing the hair out of the back of her head. There was a ratty bald spot there. Then, afraid that my father would catch her in that demented state and pack her off to yet another institution for more shock treatments, she’d begin to try to pull herself together by starting to make the evening meal. Mumbling to herself over the frozen peas, “Oh God, don’t let him see me this way. Oh God, help me get through another day.” I just watched it all like a very sad and confusing performance. A crazy show; I didn’t know what else to do.
UNDATED
Spalding Gray—or “Spud,” as his family called him—was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on June 5, 1941. His mother, Margaret Elizabeth “Betty” Horton, was a homemaker, though she’d attended Rhode Island School of Design to study painting before dropping out to marry. His father, Rockwell Gray Sr., was first a credit manager and later the treasurer and secretary at Brown & Sharpe, a precision tool manufacturer, in North Kingstown, Rhode Island. As portrayed by all three of the Gray brothers, he was a distant and forbidding familial figure. Spalding Gray was the middle child of three sons: Rockwell Gray (“Rocky”), the eldest, was born in 1938, and Channing Gray (“Chan”) was the youngest, born in 1947.
The family lived in a renovated nineteenth-century farmhouse in Barrington, Rhode Island, an upper-middle-class suburb of Providence, where Gray’s mother herself had grown up. There were no liquor stores, no movie theaters—it was “a lily-white town,” as described by Channing.
“It was a lovely, peaceful, safe, aesthetically appealing environment,” Gray’s older brother Rockwell recalled, “with a yacht club where we went swimming in the summer and where Spalding learned to sail even before high school.”
Gray’s father’s mother, Gram Gray, as she was called, lived with the family as well. Gray’s mother’s parents lived down the street. Gray was close to his grandparents—with the exception of his father’s father, who left when Rockwell senior was a boy—and made an effort throughout life to maintain close relationships with them; family intimacy was important to him despite his sense that it was nearly impossible to achieve.
Gray’s mother, a petite and attractive woman with a pixie haircut, was a Christian Scientist. She held the religion’s belief that people could heal themselves by prayer and the belief that illness was “error,” a false construct of the material—as opposed to the spiritual—world. Throughout his childhood, Gray was rarely sent to see doctors. More often, his mother called Christian Science practitioners and asked them to pray for her son to get better. Once, when he was fourteen, Gray passed out next to a radiator in the bathroom. When he woke, he lifted his arm and saw, as he later described it, “this dripping-rare, red roast beef third degree burn.” He ran to his mother, who advised him to put some soap and gauze on it, dear, and “know the truth.”
Despite her fierce conviction that illness could be avoided by denying its reality, Gray’s mother struggled with her own emotional health, suffering her fir
st nervous breakdown when she was thirty-six years old; Gray was ten. As a boy, Gray would hear her, as he told it in a CBS television interview in 1999, “shrieking, crying out to Jesus, in distress, like she was being attacked.” Gray’s father never spoke of his wife’s episodes—he was conservative by nature, and there was little professional or cultural knowledge of mental illness in America at the time. “No one would say ‘Is that your mother?’ ” Gray said, describing his experience of listening to his mother’s screams coming from elsewhere in the house. “It was like a ghost.”
Over the years, Gray’s mother spent time in various psychiatric institutions. After her first breakdown in 1951, she was sent for several weeks, as Rockwell remembered it, to a Christian Science home in New Jersey to recover. Later, when Gray was fourteen years old, his mother told him that Jesus had come down on a shaft of sunlight into the living room and touched her hands and she felt better.
After a second major breakdown, fifteen years later, she went to Butler Hospital, a private institution in Providence, where she received electroconvulsive therapy. “After she had her shock treatments—I think she went a couple of times—she would come back feeling better,” Channing, the only son who lived at home during this period, said. “I remember one time when she came back saying how great it was to be alive again. But it was only a few weeks before she went back into a depression.”
Still, there was always great affection between Gray and his mother. Betty may have been a religious fanatic with a turbulent emotional life, but she was also the life of the party, “a cutup and a hot tamale,” as her son Rockwell described her. She could be funny, ebullient, outrageous.
And she understood her middle son’s particular talent. “Spalding began to elaborate very colorful stories quite early,” Gray’s older brother explained. “The grown-ups pooh-poohed it: ‘Oh, Spuddy, he’s always making up stories.’ My father always treated it like silly business. But my mother was interested because she had a rebel streak herself.” Gray frequently spoke of the intensity of his relationship with his mother in his monologues and in interviews. “Mom and I dated right up through college,” he often joked about their attachment to each other.
The Journals of Spalding Gray Page 2