But after I left this little bomb on his phone machine I felt this little change of what? What was the feeling? It was a devilish glimmer; the projection perhaps into the future.
FEBRUARY 18, 1992
SPRINGFIELD, MISSOURI, HOLIDAY INN
Renée doesn’t want to go back to the way we were but she did such a great job packing my bag that I almost cried.
During this period, Russo told Gray that she was pregnant with his child. “I met with Kathie only one more time and that was on the street to pass her money for an abortion, and I said, ‘Get rid of it,’ ” Gray later publicly confessed in It’s a Slippery Slope. “And she said, ‘I’m still thinking.’ ”
FEBRUARY 27, 1992
KANSAS CITY MO.
So it’s over, one way or another, IT IS OVER and yet my body missed her even though just yesterday my heart went out to Renée when she was working out on that stupid big wheeled bike and her hair was blowing and I wanted her to please stay young. The sadness I feel at Renée aging.
But when the possibilities go I feel trapped and OH HOW MY LONELY body longs for her and the way I used to TAKE HER ON A TABLE. H. was so wild with that stuff. How sad for it to be over. And now when I think ahead to September I have that meaningless dread again. I’m just worried about how I’m going to live in the same city with her there all the time in my mind. The horrid laughing. The gravitational pull of LUST.
MARCH 4, 1992
HOUSTON
I don’t know if I will ever read over this. I think it would be too horrible to read over. But I can’t remember the last time I felt good—did not feel like crying. Maybe it was in the swimming pool in Houston and I thought, just for a moment I thought—THINGS WILL BE ALRIGHT. And then I thought—no, not really, because I’m going to die forever and that makes me feel absurd. Stupid ANGRY—ANGUISH.
I’m sort of alright when I’m working but when I’m not working I fall through the cracks.
All I could think of before I went on last night was—what if she has that baby? I’m getting nuts.
I LAUGHED. (WHO GIVES A SHIT) But I did laugh when I was visiting Renée in L.A. I laughed at Candid Camera. Every time someone was going to hit golf ball at the TEE some guy would make a crazy squawking sound in a tree and I don’t exactly know what I was laughing about.
MARCH 10, 1992
She [Russo] acts happy on the phone. That is what drives me wild. She doesn’t act needy. Or like she has done anything wrong.
NO GUILT.
MARCH 14, 1992
Sat.
This is the hard part for me to write. I call H. to try to talk her into it. I think Pavel is all wrong—his emotional blackmail theory. But maybe I just get taken in. But I do and did get taken in by her and told her I still liked her. I also told her that I would stand by her in the abortion as well as put her in a good hospital. But here is the strange part. When she hung up I found myself “FEELING” that I was wishing she’d have the baby. Although I think it’s the right thing—my heart is not in that goddamn abortion. Perhaps the most disturbing thing for me is when she reminded me that she had told me in Cambridge that she would not abort if she got pregnant.
MARCH 16, 1992
I have to write or call Pavel about this counter transference stuff. He’s living through me and is confused about his feelings about the issue. He gives such mixed messages and will not admit to any mistakes because I will reject him.
The two previous entries offer glimmers of Gray’s growing unhappiness with Pavel. In the months leading up to Russo giving birth, Gray felt that Pavel had misled and confused him. He complained to Russo that Pavel did not offer him boundaries—and Gray felt he, especially, needed a therapist who would offer him boundaries. Gray also was bothered by Pavel advising him to sleep with more women, rather than try to make sense of the mess he was already in. Shortly thereafter, Gray broke off his relationship with Pavel and did not see him again before Pavel’s death the following July.
MARCH 19, 1992
ABOUT THIS HALL OF MIRRORS …
“A mock feeling and a true feeling are almost indistinguishable.”
Gide
[From The Counterfeiters, a 1925 novel by the French writer André Gide]
BUDDHISM states that instead of seeing the real world the self creates a false universe of its own.
And in my case sells for top dollar
MARCH 23, 1992
The double bind hazard of my work is this the audience applauds my assholeness which is transcended by my ability to tell it. So I only fly above it all when I’m performing.
MARCH 25, 1992
SYNCHRONICITY = When I get to the Vogue shoot I was telling the publicist about the class I wanted to do called WHAT’S GOING ON?
and there was music in the background and I suddenly realized it was the [Marvin Gaye] songWhat’s Going On and my head just opened up. It made my day.
VOGUE SHOOT = THE DISTRACTION OF CELEBRITY
[Photographs were taken of Gray to run alongside a piece he contributed to Vogue about writing fiction for the first time. The article ran in conjunction with the May publication of his novel, Impossible Vacation.]
Every time I wake up, I think I’m in hell. I AM in hell. Renée tells me death would be easier and I agree. She is afraid that I will do something to myself. She doesn’t trust me. A coward.
I seem to be only able to feel Renée’s pain.
To save me from the pain of my life I began thinking about how to put it in my next monologue. Public pain.
On the flight to New York. What do I see from fear? When the plane goes bump. And I think we are going down. I blame it on our parents. Renée’s father and my mother in some dark nether world plotting to torture us and bring us down.
I’M NOT AN ARTIST.
I’M A PUBLIC NEUROTIC.
I’ve cut Renée out of being the most powerful center of my work. I have KILLED HER. When I think this I think I’m going to go insane. How do I go on living with what I’ve done?
APRIL 8, 1992
I dreamt that Dad and I were taking a tour of the Barrington Harbor and we were very close in our memory and recollection. I remember that he put my HIS hand on my hand like a lover. And all of this was being taped. The tape was in a wooden box with a microphone mounted on top of it. I had the feeling that we could not go on talking or relating unless the tape was going. The tape had to be going.
APRIL 15, 1992
Phone therapy with Paul [a therapist Gray began seeing in Los Angeles] = “make peace with the beast.” It all sounds like stories or a kind of mythology.
The beast wanted to have a baby with Kathie and the beast did it and now I’m split.
How can I talk with the beast when it has no words and is only in my body? It’s the irrational part of me that I—or the rational part of me fears will eat the rest of me and put me in the hospital.
I only have my work. Nothing more.
Oh, I have DRINK.
APRIL 17, 1992
As long as I ACT insane I know I’m not. But there is no STORY; how can I write about another nervous breakdown. Who will care? They will only say “Pass the salt.” And all life goes on around me. Without me as though I’m a dead man. Who cares about another Spalding Gray nervous breakdown and so the big fear comes again. What is left to say? And so I came to death again, Spalding Gray is a dead man.
UNDATED
Eugene, OR.
The fear is that people pay attention to me because I’m a celebrity. Without the film of “Swimming” I wouldn’t be there.
Paul wanted to know where my was and I told him that all my rage and anguish is turned in on myself. But I think too it was in my SEX drive. And the way that I make contact is through sex. Main way of body communication.
I see the sweet blue veins. How easy it would be to slice into them. With a sharp enough razor it wouldn’t HURT.
APRIL 25, 1992
In the morning the realization of what I have done staggers m
e.
APRIL 27, 1992
This morning Renée cried on the phone, “That’s my baby you gave her.” My life feels over. Renée thinks I’ve never really seen her.
I can’t see anything but my obsessions now. These feel like the John Cheever journals.
PHONE APRIL 27
Very difficult phone session with Paul. He refuses to give me advice because he says I get enraged with any parent figure and he wants me to accept him as just a person.
He thinks I have to do something for myself.
Paul says my rage is not conscious but it is doing a good job of destroying other people’s lives.
My celebrity self is the only self I have now. What killed Marilyn Monroe? Not having self.
[An echo from Swimming to Cambodia; Part One ends with these lines: “And just as I was dozing off … I had a flash. An inkling. I suddenly thought I knew what it was that killed Marilyn Monroe.”]
Gray’s novel, Impossible Vacation, was published on May 5, 1992. Despite his five-year struggle to write the book, Gray does not describe its publication, other than to mention his press tour, in the journals.
The novel, a thinly veiled account of Gray’s life, received mildly favorable reviews—particularly from critics unwilling to separate the indelible impression Gray had made as a performer from the more fleeting one he’d made as an author. “In the end, ‘Impossible Vacation’ is more a written monologue than a conventional novel: there’s a narrowness of emotional focus to the volume, and Brewster, alone, emerges as a full-fledged character, while everyone else is relegated to a walk-on role,” Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times. “At the same time, one finishes the book impressed by how readily Mr. Gray’s narrative voice transfers to the page; how easily he’s been able to translate a performance from the stage to the medium of print.”
MAY 19, 1992
The film of “Monster” is a failure in L.A. [Nick Broomfield directed the film version of Monster in a Box, which premiered in Los Angeles on May 15, 1992.] What next? The L.A. TIMES hates me and that always does me in.
[Peter Rainer’s Los Angeles Times review questioned whether Gray’s self-referential storytelling should have been indulged yet again in the film and described Gray as “transfixed by his own limpid nuttiness.”]
AUGUST 10, 1992
What is this crazy love and money thing? Whenever Renée says K. is going to cost me a lot of money, I think well, why not move in with her and get my money’s worth? What an odd way to think.
AUGUST 14, 1992
Session with Michael [a therapist Gray started seeing in New York after his falling-out with Pavel] = “What stops you from moving in with Kathie?” Whenever he asks that question, I get confused and scared. The only answer is that I’m afraid it wouldn’t work out, not that I’d lose Renée. And I wonder if maybe I feel that I’ve already lost Renée in some way and that was what I’ve been crying about.
*But he did say that I am having a hard time sorting out Renée’s EGO POSITION from her WISDOM.
She’s wise but not around Kathie. How could she be? That’s where her wisdom has to stop.
At this time, Gray filmed King of the Hill, directed by Steven Soderbergh, in which he played the supporting role of Mr. Mungo, a mysterious older man with dark sexual tendencies who eventually commits suicide. “We shot in the summer/early fall of ’92,” Soderbergh, who began his long friendship with Gray at this time, recalled, “so [the baby] was born and all that stuff was going on. But there was no indication of that. He didn’t seem unduly distressed, or if he was, he surely wasn’t showing us that. He came across as a version of the way he is when he performs. Bright and funny.” (Soderbergh later released a documentary about Gray called And Everything Is Going Fine—a compassionate and well-received tribute—in 2010.)
SEPTEMBER 4, 1992
Renée keeps asking me if there is something I am holding back from her. She wants to know why I’m so remote. I wonder if it has to do with how every time I tell someone else about K. (so far L. and S.), I somehow put K. and the memory of her back into my life. I give her life and end up missing her.
SEPTEMBER 11, 1992
THE DAY THE BABY WAS DUE.
I got up early to head off to IOWA. While I was doing yoga, Renée let out with one of her big groans and I, hoping it was about sex, went into the bed—run to see what was going on. She had had a bad dream—that she was giving birth to a freak lobster baby that was coming out of her stomach. It had claws but no head and upset as she was, she was still relieved that it was headless, so that it could be thrown in the garbage.
Then we did have sex. It was good and I left in a good mood. No tears today. Off to meet myself in IOWA but a bit of a bad feeling about how I am now making money for Kathie to spend on herself and Marissa.
SEPTEMBER 12, 1992
Surprised that I was greedy and envious of Frank Conroy [director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the time; presumably, Gray traveled there for an event related to Impossible Vacation] with his nice wife (they seem to get on well together), his five year old, his house in Nantucket, and how he loves it here, how he knows how much Marlon Brando weighs (320). But most of all, his enthusiasm that I lack so now. I seem to be feeling very bad about myself.
ABOUT FICTION—Frank said that he did not think it was the voice of God coming through you but rather it’s ALL the books you have read that have created the voices and plots that sit in the back of your head.
SEPTEMBER 18, 1992
Renée got so disappointed when Peggy [Gray and Shafransky’s couples therapist] said that therapy would most likely only make a 15% change in me. The next morning Renée came out of the bathroom and said, “Do you know what 15% is?” And when I said no she grabbed the upper part of my ankle and said from there down.
SEPTEMBER 25, 1992
I called K. and I ended up talking with her for an hour. And she said it would only cost 5,000 (ONLY) but what was strange and perhaps it had to do with a few drinks but I could not contact my rage for her. In fact, we were both very loose and open on the phone. She has not had the baby yet and is going to have induced labor if it doesn’t come soon. She thinks it’s a big boy. But she went on to say that I used to joke about moving in with her and kicking Blue Man out. [When Russo first moved to the city, two members of the Blue Man Group, the celebrated performance troupe, were her roommates.] When I said I didn’t remember that she said, “I keep a diary too, you know.” I called her selfish and she said so are you. Then a strange thing happened. She said I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to date with those two kids and I said I would be jealous. She said why and I just said I would. Because it’s true. I can’t imagine anyone else fucking her. Isn’t that odd? What is that about?
A rowdy therapy session with Michael but before I mention that I do remember that K. brought up one thing that still hurts—the way I just walked away from her when she got pregnant and left her on her own to deal with it. I do think that was a big mistake that Pavel encouraged me to do.
As for therapy, Michael is very flip with me saying things like if you’ve told everything to Pavel what do we have to talk about? And I said nothing and he said let’s get to know each other and I took a huge hit of Absolut and he said I looked like James Dean and I asked him if he had ever taken LSD and he said that was how he got into therapy. He said that the LSD always helped him see through the apparent ugliness and see a certain beauty at the center of things. I think he was saying it had made him an optimist.
Renée called this morning to ask about Ernie and got real upset that I didn’t tell her that I talked to Kathie. She saw it as a betrayal. Aren’t we in this together and how can you be friendly with her?
On September 27, 1992, Russo gave birth to a boy—Gray’s son—and named him Forrest Dylan Gray. Russo’s mother called Gray to let him know.
SEPTEMBER 28, 1992
It’s been an unpleasant weekend. Humid warm rain and I’m still sick. Now into my second week
. More talks with Renée in LA. She is now considering divorce. There is nothing happening out there for work.
Renée said that she can’t trust me. That I’m like her father. All that she is reacting to is my compulsion, my storms. The way I can’t hold on to them myself. I had to call her about how I flipped out over the blond who smiled at me on the street. Renée was very angry that I told her that. Renée said I had to learn how to suffer my own pain. Also Renée now thinks she’s an artist because Florence told her so. In the middle of a long talk on Sunday, K.’s mother cut in to say it was a very healthy baby boy.
Renée says sadist in little boy’s clothing.
Renée says why don’t you just move in with K? Everything’s in place.
OCTOBER 18, 1992
Sunday
Renée and I went to see the Dylan tribute concert. Renée got very upset when they booed. I got upset from her upset like old days with Liz. It was Renée’s face that I loved then. It was filled with a deep sensitivity and concern. It took her a long time to get back into the concert.
I smoked some dope at the concert and got a little wild dancing in the aisle. Renée said she could not love me when I looked like that. A stupid, skinny, old man. Then lots of champagne at the Odeon. Very little sleep and all of that left me oh so nervous and sad all day.
This is the longest period in my adult life that I’ve gone without sex. That sexual self, that part of me that was that seems now like some distinct other.
OCTOBER 24, 1992
Saturday
San Francisco
I talked with Renée on the phone for an hour and twenty. She saw the baby all wrapped up and Kathie in her leather jacket and sunglasses surrounded by her entourage, her people. As soon as Renée told me this I split in my feelings. I felt her rage and upset and I wanted to be walking beside Kathie. I mean—and please read this over—I had an image of me standing with Renée and with Kathie.
The Journals of Spalding Gray Page 23