*
I called Renée and got her and planned for dinner at her place. After dinner we had a long therapy session by candle light very New York, very intellectual, very romantic. She went through the old story again about how it would be masochistic for her to get involved with me as long as I was involved in an emotional love with Liz. In fact she told me no woman would touch me in the situation I was in. I began to fall for her and feel bad about myself. She told me I was in real bad shape but strangely enough I felt otherwise I felt at last I was beginning to live my life in a more honest way. What she told me should have made me feel depressed but it had a strange opposite effect for me. When I got home Liz was on the floor working on the script. It was good to see her. I felt warm towards her—like a real friend. I told her about my evening and she told me I played it real well. She said to be strong and hold out. I had 2 beers and went to bed. I did not feel any anger towards her. Hopeful.
*
I ended up staying up late with Willem and talking. He said he was angry about Sex and Death. He said I over dramatized my life, that I was full of a kind of hype and constantly made signals for help (the boy who cried Wolf—my mother’s story) and that I did this to manipulate people into giving me constant attention particularly women (Liz) and he felt it was not fair. He told me that he was in love with Liz and that he could relate to her as a man to a woman and he wanted to know what I wanted from Liz. I told him that I wanted to work with her and to be friends but I felt weak and unable to let go of the hope of LOVE.
*
I’m coming apart and losing my center. At least I think I remember how to get back to it and will do it (can I trust myself to do it) when I need to … I do not like all the ACTING I do and that goes on around me. It feels like so much hype and I long to get back to a more simple state. I also feel a strong need to get back to writing and find no time at all for that now. I feel too much in the public eye. I love it but it eats me up and when I am left alone, I feel like a shell that always needs to be filled up by audience.
*
… Went up to meet Renée at 9 to go out to dinner at the Mitali [an Indian restaurant Gray frequented in the East Village], which was crowded so we went to a bar on Second Ave. and talked and I even laughed some. It was good to see her. These long breaks are what help make it work and I refused to call that unreal. It is what it needs to be at this point in time. I paid for drink and dinner and we had a nice walk back to her place down under the Brooklyn Bridge and up Fulton St. It was warm and quite beautiful. She has a certain romantic way of approaching her life which I like. I think it is more than just her youth. It was a warm romantic night. The wind blew her white curtains. I felt cross-eyed with fatigue and then the old neurotic fears come back. I get afraid that I am going to jump out her window in my SLEEP AND WAKE ON THE WAY DOWN.
JULY 4, 1979
I am clearly unable to take direction from anyone but Liz and even that comes hard this is why I can’t be an actor right now.
Problems with father tempted by the idea that all I do may be a reaction against my father—I look at his life and do all I can to live my life in opposition to this makes my life inflexible and rigid
How will I make money to live?
Work in a mental hospital?
That’s the only fantasy I have left.
To be famous is to be stuck in an inflexible place.
But at least it is to be stuck with money.
Money is not everything but it is something.
I don’t know where my identity lies now. What do I call myself when people ask—
I am not a father, a husband, a lover.
Maybe a performer.
Yes, maybe I am that.
I perform things in public
And right now I am doing these talking pieces.
So right now I have to hold on to that.
You can also work on your vocabulary; begin by taping words and their meanings.
Better ask Rich about a good dictionary.
He may have one.
Begin with the word—“indulgent”
The question for therapy?
Do I want to become a professional something?
And if so a professional what?
But I still think about being a child therapist and I can’t get that fantasy out of my head understanding the child in me? I think I will apply to the clinics anyway and see what happens. One thing I did want to say about the idea and fantasy of my becoming a therapist is that I’m very able to act as a screen for people’s fear and anger. I don’t seem to get involved.
I sometimes feel like that; like I am this open conduit through which I let other energies pass. It started as an actor and the other energies were other people’s scripts.
Now it is my life that is passing through me.
AUGUST 25, 1979
Debbie got out the zip code sheets and showed me that most of our audience came from the lower east side—people in transition, I thought. People that are working their way up to the ladder to a better lifestyle. I felt a slight feeling of loss and bitterness that these people were using me as their jester. Their poor entertainer who used his neurosis—his life for entertainment, that I was stuck somewhere as the poor artist that people came to see, to live off my pain and to say “there but for the grace of … go I” a kind of unhappy Christ figure—a Woody Allen Wasp that cannot love and cannot make a lot of money because the audience that identifies with me has no money. It was a black thought and I could not face it straight on—that I was a curiosity on the outside, that I was somehow lost.
DECEMBER 20, 1979
The shark’s mouth eats at me, the reflection of white silver winter light on trees. I read about Dusty Hoffman in the SoHo News. Am I that? I could be just a well-adjusted ACTOR. Am I putting myself into the place where I will die? Who is the artist? Liz or I? I like watching what she does but who am I in it and could I function just as well somewhere else? I keep disappearing.
Gray and Dustin Hoffman acted together in Brendan Behan’s Quare Fellow at the Theatre Company of Boston in 1964, three years before the twenty-seven-year-old Hoffman would take on the iconic role of Ben Braddock in Mike Nichol’s Graduate. Later, in his monologue A Personal History of the American Theater, Gray would describe Hoffman as “very funny, he looked like a dog, a funny short little dog.” And Hoffman, according to Gray, would repeatedly say in the dressing room, “You know, Spalding, you’re strange. You know that, Gray? Spalding’s strange. Spalding, you’re strange.” Throughout his journals, Gray taunted himself with Hoffman’s more successful, more commercial acting career—and perhaps a path not taken.
DECEMBER 28, 1979
Middle of the Night
My art wants to bend around to meet my life, the arrow comes back. I was telling Renée how I started to live when I started doing theater. Now I am trying to bend it back.
the eighties
THERE IS ALWAYS a constant precarious balance between dark and light. The yin and yang. Civilization and its discontents.
Looking back on it after the fact, I realize that “Swimming to Cambodia” is an attempt to balance those poles. Like any work of art it is an attempt to become God out of a loss of contact.
An attempt to create a tiny, balanced universe. An attempt to play at being God out of a lack of contact with the real or imagined source.
And like life it is a fixed and imperfect text.
APRIL 1985
The eighties began for Gray with professional breakups. Schechner officially left the Performance Group in 1980. Gray and LeCompte took over, renaming the ensemble the Wooster Group, the title under which the company had originally been incorporated. “Liz began to do her own work—which was more formal than mine. I had a humanist impulse, and she was more radically postmodern,” Schechner noted. “The actors were gravitating toward Liz’s method. Also, they were more or less the same age, and I was a generation and a half older, I’d done it for fifteen years, so I didn’t f
eel like fighting it out.”
In 1985, Gray also stopped performing with the group in order to pursue his solo career. But even as he tried to distance himself emotionally from the Wooster Group and LeCompte, he continued to open his monologues at the Garage and live as a roommate of LeCompte and Dafoe in the Wooster Street loft. It was an eccentric arrangement in perhaps many of the ways that Gray himself was eccentric: boundaryless, contradictory, and embracing.
Even among this upheaval, however, Gray began producing his shows with increasing frequency. By late 1982, he had performed Point Judith (An Epilog), presented four new solo pieces at the Performing Garage, as well as an eight-monologue retrospective at the end of the year. Throughout, his work became more sophisticated in its self-revelation; he developed his own personal artistic stamp with his suggestive non sequiturs and sly comic timing.
Gray also challenged himself to try new work that would take him beyond the monologues. In 1981, he tried out an ad-lib piece called Interviewing the Audience while touring in Amsterdam. “I thought, I have to do something to spice up these performances,” Gray wrote of his idea. “I can’t do these old monologues anymore. So I decided to interview the Dutch audiences. At the performance, I asked audience members to write their names on little cards, and then I’d call them up [to the stage] and ask them what happened to them on the way to the theater. Either it would take off or it wouldn’t.” It did. Gray went on to refine and perform Interviewing the Audience throughout his life, making it a regular part of his repertoire.
“Interviewing the Audience was one of the works I loved most, and perhaps the one I saw most often,” the novelist Francine Prose, who met and befriended Gray in 1982, wrote, “because it was always different, and always fascinating…. He had an uncanny eye for choosing people who had something exceptional and even startling to report, and he could (correctly, it seemed to me) discover the zeitgeist of an entire city or region of the country from the kinds of stories its citizens told, and their willingness to tell them.”
Gray also began writing a novel, called The Father of Myself, in 1980, though it was never published. Six years later, however, he had begun a new novel—drawn, in part, from the work he’d done on The Father of Myself as well as from his own life—under contract from Knopf. (The Father of Myself, the novel described by Gray in his journals, was not among his papers, although there is a long poem in his archives with this same title.) “I never heard of The Father of Myself. But neither did [Gray] ever mention, ‘Oh, I’ve got another novel too,’ which would naturally of course have come up,” concluded Gary Fisketjon, who edited Gray as well as such authors as Raymond Carver and Cormac McCarthy. “I’d almost bet my life that The Father of Myself became Impossible Vacation.”
Gray worked on Impossible Vacation intermittently from 1986 to 1991, the greatest length of time he devoted to any single project; the novel was finally published in 1992. Throughout that period, Gray struggled mightily with the demands of writing fiction—the solitude (with no audience to look forward to at the end), the need to invent or bend material rather than pull it directly from life, the crippling doubts encountered when sitting down to the blank page. “My position was always, ‘Why do you care about doing this?’ ” Francine Prose recalled. “He seemed to think that fiction was a superior form to what he was doing.”
Gray also returned to traditional acting in this decade. In 1983, he was cast in his first major movie, one that would significantly alter the course of his career: Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields. Gray was taken by the politics and history portrayed in the film: the American bombing of Cambodia, beginning in 1969, and the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge. Gray himself admitted to being surprised at his own interest in the material. When Joffé first suggested that he audition, Gray said, “I’m not very political—in fact, I’ve never even voted in my life.” To which Joffé reportedly replied, “Perfect! We’re looking for the American ambassador’s aide.” Gray played the role of the aide—who is ultimately forced to flee Cambodia in anticipation of the Khmer Rouge invasion—with quiet passion. The experience of acting in The Killing Fields made a deep impression on him—and would later become the basis for his most celebrated monologue—and yet his total screen time in this film is less than three minutes.
On December 12, 1983, Gray premiered Swimming to Cambodia, Part One, at the Performing Garage. Almost two months later, he presented Swimming to Cambodia, Part Two. By the fall of 1984, he’d brought these parts together and whittled them down to one show. Swimming to Cambodia was a kaleidoscopic account of his time spent on The Killing Fields: Gray’s personal story of the Hollywood story of history. It was also in this monologue that Gray first famously claimed his search for the Perfect Moment, his hope for one simple, transcendent experience that would absorb him wholly, if fleetingly. The film version of Swimming to Cambodia, directed by Jonathan Demme, was released in 1987, catapulting Gray to a national level of recognition.
Curiously, this period in Gray’s life is largely overlooked in his journals. In fact, during this time, he wrote very little in his journals at all. There are scant entries throughout 1984 and 1985—and he rarely discusses his work with regard to Swimming to Cambodia. One can only guess why Gray, someone with such drive to document his life, wouldn’t feel compelled to narrate such a crucial turning point as this one. Perhaps in the midst of it, he couldn’t see it as such. There are comments in the later journals that would suggest this, when Gray looks back with the advantage of time and recognizes that his career shifted with the theater and film versions of Swimming to Cambodia. It’s also worth noting that this was a period of both meditation and preoccupation for Gray in terms of his work; it is possible that he was often too busy performing and crafting the show to write about it elsewhere.
In 1984, Gray also met and signed with his lifelong literary agent, Suzanne Gluck. As a student at Brown University, Gluck had seen Sex and Death and edited an excerpt from it for the school literary magazine. Four years later, when she was hired as an agent at International Creative Management, Gray was the first client she signed. “When we met, I had been an agent for about thirteen seconds,” she said. “He came into my windowless office with no books and no shelves and didn’t even think to ask me who else I represented—but I think he picked up on my passion that his work would translate brilliantly on the page. He was somebody who could experience the same boring thing as you and then spin a story from it that made you realize just how interesting it had all been.”
Gray’s career escalated further in 1986, when he premiered his monologue Terrors of Pleasure at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center. This move significantly broadened the scope of his audience. “If you want to see when he became famous, just look at whenever Lincoln Center decided to adopt him,” Eric Bogosian said. “That is the peak. As they kept putting him out there as this brand name that we should all be familiar with, I think everything changed. He made a quantum leap.”
Meanwhile, as Gray’s relationship with Shafransky deepened, they also became entwined professionally. With the success of Swimming to Cambodia, Shafransky moved into the role of Gray’s manager (later working alongside his booking agents at International Production Associates); she also served as a producer on the Demme film and directed the theatrical monologues of Monster in a Box and Gray’s Anatomy. “It wasn’t going to happen without her. They were co-creators,” recalled Bill Talen, also known as Reverend Billy, a New York City performance artist and protégé of Gray’s beginning in 1982. “She really was the one who made it happen with Jonathan Demme. They had other commitments in other directions, but she got everybody out of the way and said, ‘This is the man. This is the person we want to work with.’ She facilitated the editing of Swimming to Cambodia. That shift—Renée was all over it.” (Shafransky also wrote screenplays of her own and produced the 1983 film Variety, written by Kathy Acker and directed by Bette Gordon.)
From then on, Shafransky became the backbone t
o Gray’s career. She edited his writing, directed his monologues, and produced the film versions of his shows; their lives became a tangle of romantic yearning and professional enterprise. As their relationship haltingly moved forward, Gray’s career soared.
Sustaining this success, however, came at a steep price: Gray promised his life to his audiences. Toward the end of the seventies, he had had flashes of worry about the consequences of exploiting his intimate life and neuroses for his work. As his career gained traction in the eighties, this worry developed into a darker and more fixed sense of destiny, one that left Gray feeling trapped and afraid. This anxiety—that he had gambled his privacy for fame—would haunt him for the rest of his life.
This torment aggravated Gray’s other neurotic vulnerabilities. Throughout these years, he worried constantly that he had AIDS, which had become epidemic in the eighties—and perfectly suited his free-floating sexual guilt and intense fear of death. (His worries were not unfounded: Gray frequented gay bathhouses, had affairs with women on the road, and didn’t always practice safe sex.) He faltered under Shafransky’s demands that they marry and have a baby. He drank too much.
Perhaps in anticipation of these deepening anxieties, Gray began his first long-term therapeutic relationship in 1981, less than a week after he turned forty. He started seeing Paul Pavel, a Czechoslovakian psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor and a dynamic character in his own right. In fact, in Pavel’s obituary in The New York Times, it was noted that two of his artist patients, Gray and Art Spiegelman, presented him in their work. Throughout the eighties, Pavel holds a striking presence in the journals as he helps Gray to address and shape the complex preoccupations of his character.
The Journals of Spalding Gray Page 9