With Sex and Death, Gray was recognized as a performer in his own right with an original mind and voice. “He is one of the most candid American confessors since Frank Harris,” Mel Gussow wrote in a New York Times review, “and his impromptu memoir-as-monologue could certainly appear between hardcovers, but the reflections take on added comic dimension in performance.”
But as Gray took these first steps toward his artistic breakthrough, his personal life began to deteriorate. In 1976, while traveling on his own in India after having toured there with the Performance Group, Gray had a sudden realization that he did not know how to make a decision for himself, that he had allowed himself to become so wholly identified with his theater work he no longer knew who he was outside of it. These thoughts continued on in a downward emotional spiral as he traveled from India to Amsterdam, where he stayed with friends, physically frail and consumed by a fever. He began to obsess on his sexual compulsions. He explored his homosexual attractions, making love to a man while others watched at a gay bath club in Amsterdam.
Ten days later, LeCompte traveled to Amsterdam to meet Gray. He told her about his distraught mood and confessed to her the experience at the bathhouse. Shortly thereafter, they flew home to New York. Upon returning to Manhattan, she saw Gray through his ongoing collapse—first, by urging him to rest at home, taking him to see a psychiatrist, and, later, by leading him back to theater work. As they began to collaborate on Rumstick Road, Gray became calmer and more focused.
Gray and LeCompte’s personal relationship, however, did not weather this experience well. Questions as to whether they were well suited romantically had already arisen for both of them. The demands of Gray’s breakdown and their theatrical partnership pushed these doubts to the front. “Liz and I tried to collaborate in creating theater and that put the relationship to the big test,” Gray later explained in his 1996 monologue It’s a Slippery Slope. “I began having an affair, which helped lead to our separation, but I think we really came apart over competitive-aesthetic differences. She went on to develop what became her theater company, and I went out on the road with the form of theater I chose to develop, the autobiographic monologue.”
LeCompte also met someone else: a twenty-three-year-old actor from Wisconsin named Willem Dafoe who joined the Performance Group in 1978. And yet there was never a definitive split between Gray and LeCompte. It was more of a slow, relatively agreeable drift into friendship. In the journals, Gray observes LeCompte as she gravitates toward Dafoe romantically—at times with the chaotic sense of someone losing his center but other times with the affection and distance of a brother.
“Their relationship seemed to be mostly a professional relationship by the time I arrived,” Dafoe recalled of Gray and LeCompte during this period, “but at the same time, I remember when we did the trilogy [in 1979]—I say ‘we’ because I helped put it up—I remember The Village Voice had a big article, ‘Two Lives and a Trilogy.’ But at that point they were no longer together so there was always that kind of weirdness.”
In 1978, Dafoe moved into the Wooster Street loft with LeCompte and Gray. They put up a wall with a door in it, dividing the apartment so LeCompte and Dafoe were in the front and Gray was in the back. The door was left unlocked, and the three of them shared a bathroom.
Soon after Dafoe moved in, Gray met Renée Shafransky, a twenty-six-year-old, twelve years Gray’s junior, who worked as program director of the Collective for Living Cinema, an artist-run cooperative and theater for experimental film in downtown Manhattan. “A number of us were at these places,” Bogosian recalled. “At Artists Space, [the photographer] Cindy Sherman was sitting at the front desk, helping to run that place, and I was at the Kitchen theater with [the painter and sculptor] Robert Longo, and Renée was running the Collective.”
Throughout his life, Gray offered varying stories of how he and Shafransky met. In It’s a Slippery Slope, he remembered Shafransky blurting out, after sleeping with Gray for the first time, “Excuse me, but I think I’m going to throw up.” He recounted her uttering a similar line, though not on their first date, in his journals, but in a later television interview he recalled meeting Shafransky at Studio 54, where he was drawn to her “very open, soulful face.” In this version, she did not return his feelings. He had to track her down afterward and convince her to go on a date. There is no record of their first meeting in the journals. Gray began writing about Shafransky in the early days of their romance, with the two of them ricocheting between a strong attraction and a reluctance to get seriously involved.
FEBRUARY 21, 1970
I have this great feeling of sadness tonight and without the thought of Liz I don’t know if I could pull through it so easy. I still feel very alone and find it difficult to come close to people who lay a heavy burden of emotional upset on me. It reminds me of the huge great problem I had being with my mother…. maybe all I had to do was hold her and just be there (what else was there but to reach out and love as much as you can) but I couldn’t I guess because I was upset with her for breaking down (please don’t let me see you go mad because it makes me afraid because I ran to your arms to feel safe and now you’ve gone crazy how selfish of me)
APRIL 20, 1970
I want to see
why?
because seeing makes me feel more alive but at the same time it makes me feel that I could kill myself
all I have written in the past boils down to these questions
How much truth can a person take?
How honest will I be able to be?
JANUARY 10, 1972
how relation
relationships
become ART
how relationships become art!
JANUARY 25, 1972
Tues
Woke with a headache, hungover and very out of sorts … the double bind of drink … not wanting it but needing it.
I feel great violence coming up in me … wanting to hit Liz … to be free of her because I allow her to think for me and become me. I fear that dependence, that crutch.
FEBRUARY 1, 1972
I am the story. The exercise is the articulation of the present me!
MARCH 7, 1972
[In Marquette, Michigan, touring with the Performance Group]
We’ve done Commune and it’s snowing again. It’s very beautiful.
It was a rough show tonight. I’ve reached the end of it. Commune needs to be put on the shelf. A show based on the “times” and words of us … was topical but doesn’t hold up … it’s dated for me and it’s a drag to do.
I realize that the jig is up. This lazy in between: I’ve really got to come to terms with Liz, me, the work—who I am and what in hell am I doing with my life—without comparisons. I feel as though I’m reaching a large crisis point in my life … I can’t turn away from it.
MARCH 18, 1972
Watchung, N.J.
Stopped in Saratoga, end of our tour: had dream of fucking Mary Powers a number of times. She was accompanied by a male homosexual companion. I was so excited to fuck with her that I sort of ignored the gay guy and jumped on M. with him watching. A second time I did it alone with a green cock. very confused about my bisexual feelings. This morning Liz and I woke early after a late night. (We sat up with Flip [McCarthy, a friend who filmed many of the Performance Group’s plays] and Ken [Kobland, who also shot the Performance Group and continues to be a film and video collaborator with LeCompte] talking about the “end of the world.”) What was most disturbing was Ken’s pointing out to me that if I had feelings that I should be doing something else in the face of death then I was not living now. The old truth of that was brought home once again and then after waking early (also after a night of dreams about the very problem of these thoughts, of another existence, holding out for the “other life”), Liz accused me of not fully loving her, of dislike of women in general, and of actual desire for a man masked in the desire for young boys which I am safe from because young boys are such a taboo.
&nb
sp; If I crave a relationship with a man, I am not aware of it. I think the problem is more centered on desirous search for the young … youth! Youth! Youth! The golden boys and girls of my fantasy.
But I don’t know what to do about this problem of scrutinizing Liz and of dumping on her … it is, or seems, so deep rooted:
My fantasy
my supreme desire is to live each day in the face of death.
MAY 12, 1972
Liz said we’d love each other the rest of our lives. I thought she was right … it just hit me that she was right and it made me feel good/almost overwhelmed but I’m really at odds and ends with myself.
AUGUST 1972
I am me … I am a human being … I can live without my father’s approval (but I must tell him that I have to feel that happen). It is so hard trying to figure out how to deal with my father … just the
thought of him makes me … almost angry then confused.
I may … I will not ever be able to look deep into my father’s eyes but will that stop me from looking deep into the eyes of others?
SEPTEMBER 7, 1972
Thoughts of Richard, Liz and group being my super-ego. dream of group giving me permission to have homo relations and me trying to make up my mind (Ken?)
MARCH 16, 1973
Friday
After our first meeting on Thursday March 15th I felt a very strong, sick feeling in my stomach. And it came on me when Richard said (I’ll try to make a rough quote) “I would like us to do one more piece together before we break up.”
Who is talking about breaking up? Richard? How could he be so far into the future if it wasn’t already happening now.
The most important thing … what I felt and what I want to confess is me as the first class cynic (my manipulation of Richard? I don’t know but here goes … ) I saw myself as a cynic because somewhere in me I saw Liz and Steve and Jim [members of the Performance Group] trying to get their feelings out to Richard about how they wanted the group to live and relate and about how they wanted the work to go. I saw Richard making the gestures of taking it in but all the time I felt him to be a wounded animal just treading water until he could get his attackers off his back.
Like a wounded animal, I see him able to sit it out forever until his attackers pass and for weeks he has been under various large or small attacks. So I’m in a limbo because the group means more to me than me means to me so I get afraid to rock the boat.
Richard needs complete control. I don’t know if he wants so much as he needs it and I see Liz bucking that complete control by being a woman that knows his mind very well because he is like her in many ways. They are alike in many ways.
MAY 29, 1973
Last night Liz and I TALKED about feelings and it got really scary for me. I suddenly felt as though my life has been lived like a man from the press. I’m always telling a story to myself or someone else. I’m telling a story about my life.
At this time, LeCompte and Gray informally split off on their own and worked on Sakonnet Point. It opened at the Performing Garage on October 10, 1975. This was a crucial move forward for both LeCompte and Gray: it was the start not only of their theatrical partnership but also of their respective careers as director and solo performer.
In December 1975, when Gray was thirty-four, he traveled throughout India with a production of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children put on by the Performance Group. While there, he suffered a nervous breakdown. The following is an undated entry—though it’s clear that he is looking back on the experience—narrating the series of events that he would later come to call his “India breakdown.” He explored this in his later work—in his 1979 monologue India and After (America) and more extensively in Impossible Vacation.
My present difficulties have existed since I came back from India in June of 1976. We toured India with a production of Brecht’s Mother Courage. I was in India for five months. We performed for three of those months and then had two months free for travel or doing anything of our own choosing. This was the first time I had had any long period of free time in ten years and I had the horrible realization that I could not make choices because outside of my identity as an actor in our group I had little touchdown with who I was as a person. My whole life had become a theatre and when I was without it I was completely lost in a painful way. Nothing had any meaning for me and I seemed without a will. I saw that I had given up my will to the group. I had let the director and other more strong willed members make all the decisions … This whole situation became more and more complicated and I began to feel that I could not go back to acting. That acting was not good for me because it was too passive a situation to pile on top of my already passive personality. It was in India that I decided that I must begin to do my own work and that this work would be based on my life. I would use myself as material. I was able to hold on to that idea but I was unable to act quick enough. I was unable to will myself to leave India. At last I made an arbitrary date to leave. The departure was very painful. Elizabeth Le Compte (the woman I have lived with for 12 years and also member of the company) was with me and she stayed behind to study yoga for a few weeks. I planned to meet her back in the United States.
I had to switch planes in Amsterdam and I felt I would not go in to town but just go right on through. When the plane landed I was exhausted and decided to go into town to stay overnight with friends. Then a number of things began to happen that broke me down even more than in India. India had already taken its toll on me but Amsterdam put me over the edge. On the way to my friend’s house I came down with a high fever and chills. At that time I was unaware of my weakened condition and the fact that I had lost twenty pounds in India. When I got to my friend’s house I went right to bed for three days. Then I was weak but had the strength to go out on the town. I began to drink beer and smoke a lot of cigarettes. I was not treating myself well and felt like I was on a kind of self-destruct spiral. I could not will myself to leave Amsterdam and spent days and nights wandering the streets obsessed with Bali and Greece … I could not make up my mind. America or Bali or Greece. I started to get overwrought and just plain crazy. I began to look for “signs” that I would try to interpret. An example of a sign: I SAW a man from Indonesia on the street and I ASKED him when he came to Amsterdam and he said 1941 and I’d try to read that. I’d try to figure it out and make a map or structure out of it. Like: “let’s see 1941 was the year that I was born and that means if I go to Bali that I’ll be reborn.” Then I’d think I was crazy. Don’t go anywhere.
Then during this period I went to a homosexual bath club in Amsterdam and was “picked up” by this German photographer who was vacationing in Amsterdam. He was very aggressive and he made love to me like I was this beautiful woman. He took time with me with all this incredible foreplay so by the time he began to fuck me I was wide open and had this very intense climax. It was not a very private place and people were watching. This seemed to bother him but it did not bother me. In fact, it made it … intensified it for me. When he finished he acted real cool and just sort of got up and left. I felt somewhat lost. I mean I think I was on the other side for the first time. I was experiencing what many women feel when men use them sexually. This did not help my state of mind. In fact, it rapidly complicated things. It was not my first homosexual experience but I had never experienced one like it before. I had never experienced such a complete giving over before.
So, I had been in Amsterdam a week and I had an open ticket back to America and each day I would call and book a seat on a plane. I would call in the morning and then call in the afternoon to cancel. Then I found out that Liz was coming to Amsterdam. Her yoga class had not worked out for her and she was on her way back to America. She did not know I was still in Amsterdam and she called the place that I was staying at to find out if she could spend the night there. I was so happy she called and rushed to meet her at the airport bus station. As soon as she got off the bus I thought how ugly she is. She smiled at me and
I thought she was ugly. I wanted to run but instead I stayed and beat her down with my “madness.” Looking back on it I’m not clear whether I built this madness up to drop on her like a bomb. I was out of control.
I acted crazy or was crazy. I didn’t know the difference really. I told her about the homosexual experience. Her advice to me was to go back to America with her and try to work things out there. I decided to do this but by the time I got to the airport I was a nervous wreck. I began to breakdown and went to the ticket woman just before I was to board the plane and asked if I could get my luggage off the plane and she said, “Yes.” And I said skip it. I know I was crazy so I wasn’t crazy (yet). For much of the flight Liz did not even know I was on the plane. I sat in the back and did not speak to her. The flight seemed an hour long. It was the first time I’d been on a plane without worrying about crashing. I really did not care if it crashed. My will was nonexistent. I was letting myself be thrown from situation to situation.
This condition got worse in New York. I could not sleep and I was very hyper. I would wake up early and roll on the floor and moan. I never stopped moving for the whole day. I felt this constant energy coming up from the base of my spine. I could not concentrate. My friends tried to help me out by finding therapists for me. I went to a psych friend and he said that I was having a major nervous breakdown and that I had to ask my father for money in order to go into immediate analysis. He sent me to a psychiatrist who said the same thing to me. He said I was psychotic and would have to come to him two or three times a week. This frightened me but I would not ask my father for money. Somehow I knew that would be a sign that I was really insane.
The Journals of Spalding Gray Page 6