From 1986 to 1987, Gray was an artist in residence at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. He set out to find interesting people on the streets that he could interview onstage at the Taper. The challenge: none of them could be affiliated with the film industry. Like Interviewing the Audience, this project relied on Gray’s creating an immediately genuine relationship with the people he found. The theater hired an assistant, a young woman who went by the nickname K.O., to drive Gray around the city seeking out entertaining interviewees. “We’re going to senior citizens centers, golden-age drop-in centers, high schools. We’re driving down to Long Beach to look for Cambodian refugees. We’re driving over to Venice Beach to talk with homeless living in lean-tos,” Gray recounted in Monster in a Box. “Nothing, nothing, nothing. No one.” Gray finally managed to find forty people to interview—three Valley Girls, a woman who believed she’d been picked up by a spaceship on the Ventura Freeway, and a waitress who handed her film script to Gray while they were onstage, among them. The show was called L.A.: The Other.
JANUARY 8, 1987
Well I’m back at it. One of these uneventful trips out [to Los Angeles]. I talked too much to the woman next to me. That old assertion of age. Also drank too much and fell asleep as I was not in the greatest of moods for K.O., I drove my rented car back to the tacky old Highland Gardens and then K.O. and I went right off to that Mexican place down on Sunset which I like. Nice people. K.O. seems to be doing her job well. I think she is kind of intuitive as a stage manager. Also I like the way she talked. She’s like a Sam Shepard character when she talked about going water skiing she said the day was better than a June Bride. Then she told me stories about how she would drive the speedboat around at the amusement park to sink all the trash from the fireworks. She likes to set off fire works. I went to bed early after a call to Renée and was kept awake by this INFERNAL HELICOPTER!
JANUARY 9, 1987
I think it was a good start. We drove to Watts and made “contact” with this wonderful old Black woman named Maggie who went on about the history of Watts and soul food, the food throughout by the plantation owners. She talked about how black people talk with their eyes and at that point I wanted my eyes to be a video camera doing close-up because no audience could really see her dance and in that spontaneous mood talking about Caucasians and black history.
JANUARY 10, 1987
I pulled an all nighter. Went to Bill Talen’s show, went out after, tried to be generous. Got out the coke and smoke, also Champagne. Went dancing. Did some more drinking and back for more coke. I think I was in my bathtub at 6:30 drinking beers. NO MEMORY OF WHAT WAS SAID.
JANUARY 20, 1987
Once Renée said I forgive you, your body. I was thinking, God how generous of her.
Now on this bed, I was not dissecting. Her body came together into one working whole when love was involved. There was no place for scrutiny. I knew later, it would come again perhaps on the beach when I tried to shape her and cut her with my eye again making her into the perfect woman.
In February 1987, Gray sold the house he’d bought in Phoenicia—the calamitous house he’d depicted in Terrors of Pleasure—for forty-one thousand dollars. Soon thereafter, he bought a country house in Carmel, New York, on the other side of the Hudson River from Phoenicia. In the journals, Gray often refers to this house as Sedgewood because it is part of a larger, cooperative property named the Sedgewood Club.
MARCH 18, 1987
[Los Angeles]
I’m having problems with Renée. I can’t seem to bear her getting dependent on me. I saw a man on the street with a woman in a wheelchair and I got scared. Would I be able to do that with her? What I mean is that I don’t seem to be very capable of “deep love” for another or for Renée. It seems to be that I go the deepest with self-love and this is a bit frightening but it still feels good to get close to Renée physically. The touch of her body is still a comfort.
Jonathan Demme’s film of Swimming to Cambodia opened in New York City in March 1987. “Before I’d seen Spalding perform, I was horrified at the idea of being trapped in a room with just one person speaking at a desk. I didn’t want to see him, even though everyone kept telling me how much I’d love him. When I finally did go to one of his shows—I think I first saw him in 47 Beds—I was instantly won over,” Jonathan Demme recalled. “With Swimming to Cambodia, I knew the film would be remarkable because the piece was so remarkable. And any fear I’d had about one man at a desk onstage—I knew we’d have an advantage because we had the ability to do close-ups and cut-aways and sound.” Demme shot two consecutive performances of Gray before a live audience at the Performing Garage in New York in November 1986. “Renee raised the money for the film—and she raised enough for us to be able to do it really really right,” Demme said. “It was a very low budget film, but we were able to get John Bailey as our cinematographer, Carol Littleton as our editor, and Philip Stockton as our sound editor.” For the most part, Demme preserved the look and feel of the stage show—with the addition of the camera work and lighting as well as the occasional sound effect (such as, at Stockton’s suggestion, fluttering helicopter blades). In addition, Laurie Anderson, a friend of both Demme and Gray, wrote and recorded an original soundtrack for the film.
MARCH 19, 1987
This was one of those hysterical phone days. All these calls coming through and news about the good reviews [of the film of Swimming to Cambodia] in U.S.A. TODAY. Renée got so upset about not being in New York for the success of the film that she decided to fly back on Thursday. I made her go for a walk to try to calm her down …
The movie of Swimming to Cambodia was indeed well received critically. “Mr. Gray’s feature-length monologue brings people, places and things so vibrantly to life,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times, “that they’re very nearly visible on the screen.” Roger Ebert praised him in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Like a good preacher, some of [Gray’s] power comes from the sheer virtuosity of his speech.” Rita Kempley of The Washington Post was also impressed (though may have offended Gray with her physical description of him): “Gray’s characters are every bit as comically effective as Lily Tomlin’s, but they’re coming from this nondescript white guy who never gets out of his chair. Armed with nothing but a glass of water, a couple of grade-school geography class maps and a pointer, he sits at a battered, wooden desk like a teacher. Even his hair is the color of an erased blackboard. With comic sugar and unforgettable imagery, he teaches us about ‘the worst auto-homo-genocide in modern history,’ the ‘redneck’ Khmer Rouge’s slaughter of 2 million fellow Cambodians.”
And yet not all critics took to the film. Pauline Kael, in her review in The New Yorker, wrote: “He’s an actor who has discovered strong material, and he builds the tension—his words come faster, his voice gets louder. He thinks like an actor; he doesn’t know that heating up his piddling stage act by an account of the Cambodian misery is about the most squalid thing anyone could do.”
JUNE 3, 1987
This was not a productive day for me. More obsession about AIDS and looking at the bites on all my fat (FAT PEOPLE HAVE MORE FEELING IN THEIR FLESH) I tried to write in the morning but it didn’t work with this L.A. project hanging over me. This much I’ve learned. I am one of those creative people who can only do one thing at a time. As I read in the Jung book: “Ill-timed interpreting interferes with the spontaneity of the creative processes.”
JUNE 12, 1987
As for “SWIMMING,” what the studio people don’t understand is that I am not acting. What I’m talking about was a real issue to me or for me at some real point in time.
JUNE 14, 1987
There is in me (like with mom) this horrid regret mechanism. I will make regrets up just to have them. Like this morning, after breakfast, I was regretting the fact that I didn’t smoke more marijuana with Liz. After good sex and late breakfast, I did some writing. It’s a bit confused going from the story to the analysis of the story. I like to think of it as post
-modern. I like to think of it as Moby Dick.
JUNE 16, 1987
I’M WRITING “IMPOSSIBLE VACATION”
A CHRONICLE OF PERSONAL GUILT
I want to be the best at what I do.
I would like to do one thing well.
The monologues.
JUNE 19, 1987
Go to AFI [American Film Institute] to look at TERRORS tape and what a horror. It is neither interesting nor funny. [Thomas Schlamme directed Terrors of Pleasure for an HBO comedy special.] It’s badly directed and depressing for me because this means now that I have one more thing to deal with. I mean that type needs a lot of work and Renée I know or I hope will help me out. Renée went off to a meeting and I walked back to the house to return phone calls and sort of hangout in that lazy limbo that I tend to fall into here.
Upon the success of the movie of Swimming to Cambodia, Gray began to get more film offers as an actor. Soon after the movie was released, Robert Mulligan, the director of To Kill a Mockingbird, cast Gray as a new age Jewish grief counselor in his 1988 film, Clara’s Heart, starring Whoopi Goldberg. Immediately after Gray finished shooting Clara’s Heart, he was cast as a Jewish obstetrician in Garry Marshall’s 1988 film, Beaches, starring Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey. In addition, Columbia Pictures commissioned Gray and Shafransky to go to Nicaragua with an American fact-finding team—a group investigating America’s covert funding for the Contra war against the Sandinistas and helping Nicaraguans who had suffered as a result of U.S. involvement—as research for a film. “The script itself would be a fictional account about how once we got down there, did our thing and gave away all of our personal belongings to the Nicaraguans, our bus doesn’t show up to take us to the airport,” Gray explained in Monster in a Box. “And suddenly we, or our characters, are trapped there and become very much like the people we’ve come to observe.”
JULY 1, 1987
[Traveling from Los Angeles to New York]
Panic day. Head out for New York. Renée all upset because she may not be able to update her passport in time for Nic. [Nicaragua]. Nice overcast fog day. Neighbor’s full pink roses against that grey sky. We sat on the ground for over a half hour before take off. A long cramped flight. Me trying very slowly to read about Nic. Where is Nic? I’m so bad with historical fact books. We landed in stormy dirty rainy N.Y.C. We got back to piles of mail and a stuffy loft and all the memories about the good old days came surging back.
JULY 3, 1987
It’s taking me forever to get used to this humid air. Very scattered in the loft. Jack [LeCompte and Dafoe’s now five-year-old son] came in to tell me a great and vivid story about Thailand. The length of the fingernails, the hand positions, the Elephant and the man hawking fans. It was all very vivid and he seems to have a great sense of himself as storyteller. I mean he told me to sit down and then he went at it only to stop when Willem came in who strange to say is not as good at telling a story as Jack is. Liz is still obsessed with her identity as artist prophet. Says that she already had a vision of Willem as Christ and now he’s up for the role in the Scorsese film [Martin Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ, which Dafoe starred in as Jesus]. She wants to go on location to shoot it. Also she got sick in Thailand. It took Renée and I forever to get out of the city. We didn’t pick Halle up until 3:30 and got out about 4:00. I was afraid to swim alone but it was very peaceful and beautiful down by the pond. I took a little dip then we had a big feed meat cookout and went down to the deck for a sunset swim. I took a nice quiet lazy walk.
JULY 5, 1987
Item: SEX Received: ME Paid: RENÉE Balance: HOPE
When Renée would not get into it with me, I sort of slept. In the morning we did it. She wanted me to make her have a baby. I had a feeling I would have shoved it in and made it happen. KNOCKED HER UP … I long for the audience.
JULY 6, 1987
I HAVE LOST TRACK OF WHAT IS IMPORTANT (FOR ME?) TRYING TO KEEP A GRASP ON THINGS. I ran-walked and after breakfast I went into a full writing mode. Deep into vivid sex fantasies of Elisa. It is like going into a trance and when I come out of it I go into a panic. Like writing the book is a sort of dam that holds back present reality. Then it all pours in and I begin to obsess on Renée’s body as (perhaps a metaphor) for imperfection.
JULY 7, 1987
Rainy stinky day. Made love. Walked. I ran. After breakfast I got hooked on the hearings [the National Security Council member Oliver North’s televised testimony before the joint congressional committee created to investigate the Iran-Contra affair] and wanted to go all the more. I just sat there and listened. Whenever Renée is in the room she figures it all out (the human logic of it) faster than I do. (Like Liz used to) I have to pay attention to what I pay attention to. I fixed a big lamb stew pea soup for lunch. It kept raining and we were both getting cabin fever. Renée seems to be running away from her writing which of course makes me insecure. Me not even sure if she can write a film script. We headed off to buy a TV in that horror mall in Mahopac. On a rainy day that place can really put you out. We were almost falling asleep. We bought a Magnavox and headed for food. Ended up at the Carmel Diner. Roasted chicken. Me two scotches under the table [as described in comic detail in Monster in a Box, Gray often brought his own liquor—small airplane bottles he’d saved from his frequent traveling—to restaurants and would pour from them into his glass under the table] and then the not-so-bad train ride down … Talked with Renée and I put on this in-control mature voice about how we should split up. REMINDS ME OF WHAT I DID TO LIZ IN INDIA.
JULY 21, 1987
I’m embarrassed by the depth of confession my book requires. I sat and looked out the window and just strained for structure but nothing came but I did have good hot sex with Renée which is almost always a relief. Perhaps I’m thinking too much about the book when I should be writing it and just turning out the pages because even as I sit here now that story of going to India came back on me. I took the 1:15 down and got to Pavel early so I sat in the park and read. It was very hot. Pavel went for two hours which meant I got to tell my story of Bali and his eyes lit up also I told him about the vision of transference. Life is not the craziest mystery to me now, its death. I’m not sure how helpful Pavel can be for me. Renée says it’s too late in my life to be taken apart and put together. I’m too formed. 1984 [the year he began touring Swimming to Cambodia] was a bit of a change and it really made me appreciate Liz’s work.
JULY 24, 1987
I guess I’m about two days without a drink and I’m pretty on edge in the evening so we took these wasteland drives. We went to Danbury [Connecticut] which was real depressing. Renée said this is America and I want to use it as a study. It all reminded me of[Don DeLillo’s] White Noise. We ended up eating dinner in this huge Mall on the way home. It had skylights and a merry-go-round and I really wanted a drink and I thought I was in purgatory. Renée says PURGATORY is the place where you can’t tell differences. Renée started in on me about the issue of the baby. She seems to think that she is the only one with a will to get things done. She says the bathroom would never have been built if not for her. I wonder what it is I want under all this OTHER WILL. I wonder what would happen if I was left alone. I told Renée I was the uncle type. Late night swim under heat lightning and cherries. AND CLUB SODA TO BED EARLY.
JULY 25, 1987
Rocky called and scared me by saying that years of excessive drinking may create irreversible negative personality traits. Another humid day. Just as we are about to leave I begin to work on the book. I am going over what I wrote and some of it is not bad. At worst, it is a little defensive and preachy but it is the kind of modern male stance in the face of mortality—mine and how my LINEAGE got broken when the family got broken. I am still off the booze. It’s the cocktail hour that’s hard to get through.
JULY 26, 1987
Woke to another heavy humid day. The storm didn’t seem to help. ARI the Dutch Greek photographer called early and I put him off until I could talk to
Annie. [The photographer Annie Leibovitz shot Gray for Vanity Fair’s Hall of Fame page]. She [Leibovitz] arrived early with all her generators and assistants and went right down to the water right down that private road. Then she had to go out to buy another table in Cold Spring. Then the rain came. Then it cleared and the generator started up and people started to come down to check it out. I realized we didn’t have a leg to stand on with complaints to the Bemans about their Jacuzzi because for some reason they were home for the weekend. In the middle of the shoot, I began talking to Annie about Nici [a woman Gray met in Australia] and began to have the fantasy of falling in love all over again.
JULY 28, 1987
[Traveling back to Los Angeles, where Gray and Shafransky were to do research for their upcoming Nicaragua trip as well as shoot “Bedtime Story,” a half-hour show that they co-wrote for a PBS TV series called Trying Times. The episode is about a woman whose biological clock is ticking—literally—as she demands her husband take note of the clock protruding from her stomach. The show starred Gray, Jessica Harper, and Louie Anderson and was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg.]
We were up at about 5 AM for that early plane. The big rush for the plane where I didn’t resist THE DRINKS and had two Bloody Marys and two glasses of champagne which put me in a real tailspin. But first-class was nice and people gave us the eye. We were the only ones to look the way we did. When I cut in front of a guy in line he said, “You got some nerve. You didn’t even book first-class.” The movie was good. [David Anspaugh’s] “Hoosiers” was well-directed. The trip seems shorter in first-class. At last we got onto our Bungalow at about 2:15 … I sneaked out for vodka and discovered a yoga place next to the liquor store. What a contrast. Pavel says I’d have to give up drinking for a year to feel the positive effects. I took R. out for $35.- worth of sushi and sake and back for a swim and fruit and to bed early. I was wiped out.
The Journals of Spalding Gray Page 18