Forrest really had an aversion to SANTA early on. “SANTA CLOCK SCARE ME.” That was pre-Marissa.
When we, LENNY, M. and ME, drove up, it was raining and as we got higher up, the rain turned to snow. What a great homecoming for me. This nice white carpet of snow. It was just enough to change the whole yard. It is beautiful and I am sitting here getting drunk again. It is so beautiful outside.
THE CHILDREN ARE EVERYTHING FOR ME.
FEBRUARY 14, 1999
Sunday,
Valentine’s Day
After BIG Valentine feed and funny card from Kathie I walked down to pond and heard the ice settle. WHAT A SOUND, and the STARS! And that tree down by THE BELL’S dock, how the branches went LIKE ROOTS INTO THE SKY—like roots into the ground.
BY THE LAKE TWO REALIZATIONS
(1) THAT I LOVED KATHIE FOR HER SPIRIT
(2) YOU CAN GO OUT OF HERE MORE CONSCIOUS THAN YOU ARE
I DID NOT ADD TO FORREST, NOT ONLY WILL WE HAVE TO DIE BUT WE WILL ALSO HAVE TO, IF WE’RE LUCKY, IN SOME CASES, GROW OLD FIRST
A FAREWELL TO THE MONOLOGUE
A MONOLOGUE IN 2 PARTS
GOODBYE MY FRIENDS
* KEEP GOOD JOURNALS *
FEBRUARY 21, 1999
Kathie is having a hard time. She feels a breakdown coming on. She says she can no longer do anything at 100%. She is too strung-out. She says that I still do my shows at 100% and it’s true. That’s true about my work. She is now talking about quitting her job.
[In September 1993, Russo went to work for Columbia Artists Management Inc. as a special projects coordinator; she also did booking work for many of the clients there—Alvin Ailey and Twyla Tharp, among them. In 1996, she joined forces with a colleague from Columbia Artists and an independent commercial producer to begin their own New York management firm called Washington Square Arts. Russo was an employee at Washington Square Arts through 2007.]
When we all went all the way over to the river and then well into the woods to look at that house for sale, Forrest refused to get out of the car. “We already have a house,” he said.
MAY 17, 1999
DREAMS
More dreams of a wild dark sea tearing me away from my night shore walk. Me trying TO GET MY ARMS AROUND THE ROOTS OF A TREE and knowing that it would be an easy thing to do, to just wrap my arms or hands around that root—making two interconnected circles but the dark waves came in and started to carry me out as I cried out, I think to Rocky, for help.
JUNE 9, 1999
DREAM—Last night I dreamed that Forrest, Theo and I went to look at a NEW LARGER HOUSE we were supposed to move into and some CULT had taken it over. Theo and Forrest went in and I was afraid to go after them lest I get BRAINWASHED.
JUNE 10, 1999
We are innocent
when we dream.
Forrest, the most any of us can hope for is to inhabit a few graceful moments in time and to recognize them as such. I am happy to say, we have already shared some of those moments together. The rest is an unsolved mystery.
JULY 9, 1999
THEO and I swimming out to the raft together. Theo jumping off the far side of the raft and then me helping him out of the water which feels like a kind of bullhorn with each time. Kathie swimming towards us, at a distance, THINKS, as she sees us: I made Spalding Gray a happy man.
JULY 1999
FRIDAY
THEN SURPRISE; I just got a collect call from Marissa, from a pay phone outside her camp in ITHACA and it made me cry. I could tell by her tone of voice how much she missed us and the other element that made me cry was how much she sounded like Renée when she would get in that sad 13 year old arrested development place that would make my heart go out to her and annoy and bother me at the same time. I wonder if that does not happen to me with Marissa so much because Kathie is in partner with me to help absorb so much of Marissa’s need.
Kathie never gets that way with me she just says: “EAT MY SHORTS!”
JULY 21, 1999
The horror of the Kennedy plane going down [John F. Kennedy Jr., piloting a private plane with his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and her sister Lauren Bessette on board as passengers, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard on July 16, 1999], falling at a mile a minute and the way the press keeps reporting on the details makes it like a meditation on HORROR which reminds me of my RELIGION OF PARANOIA, my ritual of FEAR. Just this morning I found the seal on the milk had been broken and yet I went ahead and used it on my cereal. Then I began to imagine I’d been poisoned. I was even drinking as I held Theo in my arms. In the face of that mostly manufactured fear, LIFE SUDDENLY SEEMS SO PRECIOUS, so much like a rare gift. I think that is some of the fascination and the draw to the press reports of J.F.K. Jr. going down at that speed.
Kathie just called to tell me that they found his body.
AUGUST 4, 1999
[Martha’s Vineyard]
I’m doing it again; after that wonderful day, our first real day here, with the long bike ride and Forrest in the ocean being knocked down by waves (Marissa refusing to go in) and Theo with his bat and ball, I discover this little spot on my right arm and begin to think: death by AIDS. It’s my little punishment system for FEELING GOOD. MY SELF-REPRESSION.
It is such an OLD STORY but it’s always or often in relationship to LOVE and INTIMACY. Sometimes when I look at Theo (mostly now, but still, often with Forrest) and I just can’t stand it and then I look down at THE LITTLE SPOT on the inside of my right arm.
But we really did have a great time playing CHARADES which only Marissa could get us all to do and I was so HONORED that Forrest played me sitting in a chair at my table. I was so very touched.
SEPTEMBER 18, 1999
DREAM I am talking to a small group of people saying, as I hold one of my children in my lap, “Look even with all of this I still believe in THE LIFE ELSEWHERE.”
And one woman, a therapist type, spreads her hands about 2 feet and says, “You realize you’ve only gone about this deep.”
I said, “I KNOW.”
OCTOBER 29, 1999
On the train back from Richmond now I am reading [Mark Spilka’s 1980 book] VIRGINIA WOOLF’S QUARREL WITH GRIEVING which set me off to thinking about “Rumstick Road” and how that was my public grieving piece although Liz and I never discussed it. DIDN’T IT ALL START, in a way, WITH ME READING TO THE LIGHTHOUSE in Kashmir?
It makes me so sad to be happy.
NOVEMBER 5, 1999
TORONTO
I’ve always felt that I wanted to KNOW SOMETHING before I died, SOMETHING VERY HUMAN. And I have. I’ve come to know the love for my children.
Gray performed his monologue Morning, Noon, and Night at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center from October 31, 1999, to January 10, 2000.
NOVEMBER 22, 1999
They’re endless … the machinations of my paranoid mind are endless. Exhausted last night after a signing then a performance.
Even my show consciousness is being bombarded by inner fears that would throw me off like what if I found out I was dying? How would I do the show without that leaking through? Wanting always to confess to the audience about what’s really going on but no one really wants to hear what’s really going on.
I’ve gone through this before and it is difficult to explain to Kathie perhaps because she is so grounded in the immediate tasks of living.
NOVEMBER 27, 1999
The car ride to Brewster [Gray also sometimes referred to Sedgewood as Brewster, as this was the name of the nearest train station.] from Vermont was one of the most beautiful rides I’ve taken in a long time. Such constant, rural beauty even though my mind was so much in my intestines and I was anxious for much of the way.
Kathie wants me to be as mentally healthy as I sounded on TALK OF THE NATION talking to Melinda Penkava.
Renée would call it using people; as in I get bored with talking everyday chitchat to let’s say Robby [Stein]—then when I have an obsessively hypoc
hondriac need, I keep calling him in order to DUMP. My need to dump.
The well told PARTIAL TRUTH to deflect the private RAW TRUTH.
NOVEMBER 30, 1999
Ken [Kobland] is right about how the coming of the millennium has created an exaggerated sense of time in all our minds and for us older ones it has a “these are our last times” feeling.
Sitting in the car with Forrest just before school … he began to ask me about the millennium and when the next one would be. When I told him it would not be for another one thousand years; followed by, “I won’t be here.” Then I let it sit … I left it to him to say, “I won’t be here either.” And then for a moment we just sat there in that beautiful absurd silence and in all that beauty outside the car windows. It was that crazy, dizzy, unprotected feeling. That absurd vulnerable, totally unprotected feeling.
DECEMBER 21, 1999
I don’t think that Morning, Noon and Night is a lie or an act or a front …
I think Theo got quite high from that bottle of coke I just let him have. He stretched out his arms and spun around and said, “I like this place. I like this whole place.” As for me, I just had myself in the bathroom.
Yes, I am able to channel my anxiety in PERFORMANCE.
DECEMBER 31, 1999
LAST DAY OF THE CENTURY
Another big dinner party last night. The food and drink was fantastic. And then THEO. Just watching him dance is all I need.
Loving and loss go hand in hand for me. I can’t see Theo and love him without that sense of loss. I’m past that with Forrest now. It has to do with their innocent VULNERABILITY?
2000–2004
BUT I STILL REMEMBER how my children have been a blessing and these memories burn in my heart like a religious icon.
A) Marissa toasting me on my birthday for bringing her brother Forrest into the world.
B) Forrest waking and kissing me in all my lost agitated state on the way to MV in the Ford Escort.
C) Theo’s face at birth and the honest confusion it expressed. Kathie told me later how she had to hold him and comfort him and tell him it was alright.
Love is stronger than death, but life is stronger than love. (DARK, DARK, we all go into the DARK—ELIOT)
UNDATED FROM HIS 2000 JOURNAL
Gray was as content as he would ever be in the very beginning of this decade. His love for his family had given him an unexpected sense of appreciation and calm. Though even this proved challenging for him, as he would try to wrestle these moments to the ground in an effort to preserve happiness and would soon feel time rushing past again—the hours and days carrying life away. Thoughts of his own contentment were often accompanied by a mistrust of a mood that had so long eluded him. But a particular entry on January 21, 2000, stands out for its simple gratitude. “My cup RUNNETH over,” Gray wrote. “Everything feels like more than enough today.”
In the summer of 2000, Gray began rehearsals for a Broadway revival of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man—he played William Russell, the liberal candidate in a fictional presidential race. This re-ignited a sense of dread and anxiety. He worried about learning his lines, failing as an actor, shaming his family. Soon, he began to fret about his future work too: How could he do another monologue when he felt happy, of all things, living in the Hamptons with his family? Where was the story in that?
“I think Spalding, as narcissistic as he was, also felt that sooner or later he would be revealed and someone would find out there was nothing there,” Robby Stein theorized. “And so when he finished the monologue or the play or whatever he was doing, that was the end, because it was either he had exposed himself or exhausted the well.”
After having enthusiastically revealed his new family in Morning, Noon, and Night, Gray felt inhibited about returning to them for material. He’d become more careful about publicly unveiling his life as this now required unveiling the lives of his children as well.
“After Morning, Noon, and Night, I don’t think he was sure where the monologues were going to go. An adult who gets involved with a performer is signing on for something, but the kids didn’t sign on for this, they didn’t have a choice,” Steven Soderbergh remarked. “And I don’t think he wanted to turn it into an Ozzie and Harriet thing. If you just start doing stuff in order to tell a story—that’s cheating. So I have to believe he was really wondering, what do I do with this form now?”
JANUARY 12, 2000
Yesterday was Kathie’s and my TENTH ANNIVERSARY and today is the 10th anniversary of SEX together and it’s snowing out. OUR FIRST SNOW.
THE FAMILY IS THE STORY.
THE STORY IS THE FAMILY.
JANUARY 16, 2000
THEO’S THIRD BIRTHDAY
On the way home from the party last night, Kathie reported that the Glover House has gone into contract. She feels she can let it go. Can I? But the view of the CEMETERY now in grey winter with its patches of white snow … is so lovely.
Kathie thinks the kids love our house because it’s SUCH A NEST.
JANUARY 18, 2000
Woke at 3:40 NOT IN A SWEAT but then was so worried about falling into a sweat that I could not get back to sleep. Martha tells me that her husband also sweats if he drinks wine at night also THAT SHE HAS TINNITUS. We talked a lot about my little GUY that wants so much to regress and get into trouble. That little hungry cunt licking dog. He is all a big pant. Align yourself with Kathie, she said. Try to get over your anger for women and your need to punish them. And she’s right about that RAGE.
“Was it bigger, more important, worthier things that inclined others to a lifelong mate? Or at the heart of everyone’s marriage was there something irrational and unworthy and odd?”
ROTH
[From American Pastoral by Philip Roth]
No, I know THE GUY that Martha is talking about … it’s that panicked, paranoid hysteric that CHEWY DOG that Monster in a Box was really the apotheosis of. And I don’t want him back. I know now because I am more conscious how to avoid setting it up.
JANUARY 19, 2000
I have been feeling bad about my old work. Thinking of it as MERE HYSTERIA and then last night a woman came up to me on Second ave. all smiles she started telling me how much she loved my Russian stories in “MONSTER.”
JANUARY 21, 2000
The overwhelming love I felt for Forrest when the wind blew his hair up and just for a second I caught a glimpse of that moon face baby face I had mooned over myself as he slept by the old carousel in Watch Hill, Rhode Island. That oh so crazy summer of 1992?
My cup RUNNETH over. Everything feels like more than enough today.
JANUARY 24, 2000
Well-meaning FAN stops me on the street to tell me my monologues are too filled with laughter. TOO LIGHT. He likes the old dark days like with ‘SWIMMING.’
FEBRUARY 19, 2000
CLEVELAND
I dreamed that I was collaborating with Laurie Anderson and she was naked in bed and looked great, young body going through all these fabulously contorted sexy poses. (Was Martha being seductive when she did that thing—those moves in the chair? Like Mom in that way? As in, “He could park his skis by my bed any day,” she said once about [Gray’s childhood friend] Roger Lund) And I was sitting on the edge of the bed so very, very frustrated because the audience was watching … I was also frustrated because I could not tell ART from LIFE.
APRIL 30, 2000
Back in N. Y. C. for an interesting meeting with Peter Greenaway [a British filmmaker whose best-known film is The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover] where he asked me who I wrote for when I did a journal…. well my audience of course. It is not enjoyable or easy for me to have a non-narrated private experience and I’ve always known that.
In May 2000, Gray was cast in The Best Man. The play opened on September 17, 2000, with Gray and Chris Noth in the leading roles of competing presidential candidates. Gray played the patrician idealist, while Noth took on the self-styled, scheming politician.
MAY 25, 20
00
Back in Sag Harbor after N.Y.C. and saying “yes” to THE BEST MAN or rather, letting K. say “yes.” And the big Harper’s party last night and then Kathie and I made love for an hour just like floating on the top of all that sensual energy.
JUNE 6, 2000
A great birthday with K. Long x walk on beach. High breathing up into my chest. Splendor in the short grass, oh wow!
Kathie gave me a great, big party [for his fifty-ninth birthday]. Way too much food! I got so stoned with only three hits off of Donald’s joint. And I had this great cuddling time with Theo in my studio. I held him and told him how much I loved him. Then he started this little litany of “What do you do out here dad?” And I’d tell him one thing and he’d say, “And what else?” I think his sly little question was all about finding K. and I naked under the sleeping bag.
NO FEAR, NO PAIN, NO THINKING on the trip, just sensation of being in it and of it. Perfect balance. My painful left shoulder felt so free as I flapped it like a bird’s wing. Now this storm! And all the aches and pains and fears are back. It is as if this day is the opposite of yesterday.
The Journals of Spalding Gray Page 29