The Journals of Spalding Gray

by Spalding Gray; Nell Casey

  JULY 4, 2000

  Last night, I sat down and watched the tape of OUR TOWN and with all those years distance on it, I could see that I did a good job. Steady, slow and simple. Frank Rich was wrong!

  JULY 29, 2000

  [Brewster, New York]

  The sun came out for a few minutes around 5:30 and I took Theo down for a swim. He can swim very well underwater. I pushed him on the swing for a long time and looked out at the lake saying my own silent farewell to another summer. How sad. And it was so, so short this time. It was for me a very beautiful moment, me pushing the swing from Theo’s left so that I could see his face as he talked to me. Dragonflies darting over the lake all dancing in the reflection of the sun on the lake. We were almost the only ones down there and it did feel like a very early end to summer. Theo and I walked back together. Once again, he talked about angels playing FRISBEE and on the swing he asked me, “Who is Mother Nature’s mommy?” Walking up the hill with me, he cried out, “Dad, I love myself!” “Very good,” I said. “That’s very good.”

  I have found that I like the fact that I have been writing everyday. I have been writing as though I was writing against a deadline and as I write now, I feel that good writing could help you to write your way out of almost anything, to spring you from the trap of not being.

  To write well is to have POWER, GREAT POWER.

  AUGUST 1, 2000

  [First rehearsal for The Best Man]

  It all felt a little unreal coming into the city after this much time out. First fight with taxi dispatcher and then some guy, who had observed it said, “Going to put that in your next monologue?”

  We all met at 11:00 but did not do the read through until 3:30. I was very nervous but it went better than I thought it would and I liked the play more than I remembered … much more. I also like a lot of my scene. I think now that I can do it as in, BE CAPABLE but will I be able to hold up? That I didn’t know. I did get tired today and every time the sky began to get bright outside, I would get distracted.

  I have good first impressions of Gore [Vidal]. He’s very ERUDITE and well read. I also like that my character looks at his K-9 teeth and that he is a politician from Rhode Island.

  AUGUST 22, 2000

  Tue.

  I do not know how I am going to do it. I do not know how I will remember those lines each night, TO SAY EACH WORD RIGHT? Can you imagine it?

  But memory turned me on and made me gleam. And it is also a body memory—in my upper back from lifting Theo up so that he could HOLD ON TO THE cable ride but the memory of him on that RAFT in his green suit, old before his time with a faded tattoo, saying, “Come on Dad, jump in, jump!” This little man, I can already see his age. His character in his mouth, in his teeth, and the way he directs those little asides to me. It’s like he’s already been here before and doesn’t know that he knows it.

  AUGUST 2000

  SUNDAY 10:00 AM

  I do have more than a perverse imp in my head. Just as I am relaxing a bit with my lines, the voices come, “You are no good. You are stiff and fake. You have AIDS. You are going to SHAME YOUR FAMILY!”

  I am also starting to think a lot about my own work and how LUCKY I HAVE BEEN TO HAVE HAD IT and how I so very much want to do another GOOD and CONNECTED monologue.

  Morning, Noon, and Night was so connected for me. I cry now at the loss of it AND THE LOSS OF THAT TIME IN MY LIFE.

  And then, I think why didn’t I do 8 shows of MN&N, and then I knew—I did not want THE SHOW OF THE FAMILY

  TO REPLACE THE FAMILY.

  SEPTEMBER 7, 2000

  THURSDAY

  My life has been stolen from me by the play, the great Vampire. And Oh yes, how I long for my own work and the emotional connections I would feel when talking about Forrest but am I blind? Are those … were those only solipsistic, narcissistic states and I know that is a ludicrous fantasy. All I know is that they were transformative states that took me into another place. But when I am real tired and doing two shows those voices came to me on stage just before I have to say a crucial line.

  “Eat pussy, snort a line, you can’t do it, you’re no good!”

  Yes, my fear is that I will not be able TO MAINTAIN THE REALITY OF THE PLAY. That I will not care enough to do it. Oh yes I have the fantasy of being fucked but I’m not attracted to men or is it Roy* I want to want to fuck me. It is so very much that I want my ass to be an object of desire and I know that is a ludicrous fantasy and one I can hardly discuss with anyone even Martha but at least I am now willing for myself. It’s only when the fantasy extends itself out or needs to be realized that there becomes a problem.

  SEPTEMBER 10, 2000

  SUNDAY

  From the inside it often feels embarrassingly artificial particularly when I’m posing and “REACTING” and waiting for my Q’s but I also understand IT IS A PLAY and the audience claps for the entrance and exit of cartoon PERSONALITIES and that’s why I think Chris [Noth] gets longer applause, he is recognized as Mr. Big [on the television show Sex and the City] so he has a presence that goes beyond the play. Occasionally I will hear someone yell out “YEA SPALDING!” and that’s nice.

  SEPTEMBER 13, 2000

  I WAS HURT, that LYNN REDGRAVE did not say “Good show” she said, “good to see you Spalding.”

  WHAT A STUPID POPULARITY CONTEST LIFE IS! And HOW DID I get in this show?

  Ben Brantley’s review of The Best Man ran in The New York Times on September 18, 2000: “The casting is sometimes wonderfully apt, especially in the surprising case of Mr. Gray, best known as a self-searching monologist, as a Brahminlike presidential candidate a la Adlai Stevenson,” he wrote. But Brantley also criticized the play more generally as lacking the “rousing, melodramatic vigor” it needed to keep it from seeming flat and dated.

  SEPTEMBER 30, 2000

  Saturday

  MONO

  “WORK OUT YOUR OWN SALVATION WITH DILIGENCE” and also Freud; “every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved.” And that will most likely last a lifetime. For me, it has been THE FAMILY.

  OCTOBER 8, 2000

  THE UNOBSERVED LIFE DOESN’T FEEL LIKE LIVING. Once I no longer felt God watching, I began TO WATCH MYSELF

  OCTOBER 12, 2000

  Interviewing the audience is my SOCRATIC piece. It feels like the farthest I can go in making the public private and the private public.

  NOVEMBER 4, 2000

  SAT.

  DREAMS OF THEO

  In this dream I was shopping for RED WINE. And in this store the wine was all displayed in decanters and I had a sense they were all dessert wines, and too sweet. I went to talk to the wine woman, the shop tender and ended up having an erotic brush with her thigh. I remember the feeling of the contact and then I looked up to see that Theo—who was never visually in the dream—was gone. All I saw was a crowd of strangers and it was that old panic of loss again. That old; I cannot live without this child and even as I write this I know I am losing THAT CHILD, no so-called INNER CHILD could replace.

  NOVEMBER 15, 2000

  WEDS.

  I am, for some reason, able to have a more subterranean life with Kathie than with Liz or Renée so I don’t feel the same need for these SLEAZY ONE NIGHT STANDS

  My subterranean ID finds an outlet with Kathie

  NOVEMBER 24, 2000

  DAY AFTER THANKSGIVING FRI.

  We … Kathie and I took the boys to the big rocks in Central Park and then on to the Merry Go Round. The boys took a second ride alone and I thought what a great metaphor for the WHEEL OF LIFE AND DEATH. It’s the great circle I anticipate the boys coming—ANTICIPATION—then I see them and they wave arriving in my gaze and then they are gone.

  DECEMBER 16, 2000

  Sat.

  DREAM Kathie and I were being led to a very DIVEY bed and breakfast rooming house in an alley. Next scene, Kathie wakes up late real late (3:00) and in my old jealous and angry WAY saying, “What’s wrong with you? Are you sic
k?” She has on old lady straw hat like Joan used to wear in Commune. Next scene, I am up on a high wooden walk way and in the yard below—its like a dirt corral like behind a ship and there are three young men getting all hot and bothered by Kathie who is dancing like a VIXEN in an open pit that looks like a fresh grave and Kathie has on these shorts and she is doing her vixen dance and I am up above getting all turned on by it and by the fact that the other men are turned on. I am getting a big erection in front of them all. Next scene, I am arguing with Kathie for being so seductive and then not coming in to bed with me and I am shouting at her and almost hit her. There is all this rage. Next scene, I am in bed waiting for her and I have this big erection and I have a tube down it and I am sucking up the sperm from deep in the base of my cock and it tastes good like sweet NOURISHING custard or cream.

  DECEMBER 27, 2000

  I watched TV until 1:00 AM. Starting with Ron Howard interview with C. Rose. And I had to face as I sipped my scotch on the rocks—that I am not, and never was, AMBITIOUS. It’s a late day for my onstage fantasies that had I gone with CAA [Creative Artists Agency, a powerful talent agency that courted Gray in 1987] I could have been my own vision of MALKOVICH. Ron Howard kept using that word for a quality he obviously has, AMBITION.

  JANUARY 2, 2001

  While some others pray, I narrate and then I save it.

  JANUARY 6, 2001

  I am sitting in front of the fire with Theo. We have been listening and dancing to some very subversive music, Sargeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was snowing earlier in the evening and I couldn’t wait to take Theo for a walk in the snow and maybe even go sledding but when I open the door to look out, it is raining a disgusting, slushy early spring-like rain. And I start ranting again. I start to talk about how it shouldn’t be this way. How it’s too warm for this time of year. How I remember the snow as a child in Rhode Island. I am suddenly in a foul mood and say, “Oh no Theo we can’t go for a walk it’s raining.” And Theo replies brightly, “Let’s go dad! I like to drink raindrops.” Once again, one of my blessed children has delivered me from my bourgeois grumps, as I hold the small wet hand of my future generation.

  FEBRUARY 9, 2001

  [On tour with Morning, Noon, and Night in Aspen, Colorado]

  Enforced day off from skiing. Oh God, I can hardly turn my back on these mountains. It’s one of those perfect brilliant manic days. NEW SNOW & SUN! I can hardly think straight with those mountains reflected in the mirror as I write. Yesterday in that melancholy last run in fog and grayness I was the last one up to ELK CAMP and coming down SANDY trail, I stopped and tried to be still. It’s not easy to stand still on skis because they are so built to go. But I stood there having that perpetual internal monologue. And I thought what I need a break from is that nonstop CHATTER narrative and I stood there long enough for it to stop and suddenly I had a split second moment of BARE AWARENESS where I saw only trees and they presented themselves and I got this whole tingle through my body from head to toe and then I felt it all just drop down into my balls and I felt this enormous SEXUAL CENTERING and I said, “I promise to give the narrator a rest.”

  Even though Gray had devoted a large portion of his monologue Morning, Noon, and Night to his love of his Victorian green clapboard house in Sag Harbor, he and Russo began looking for a new home in or near Sag Harbor. Russo had suggested that the children needed more space, and Gray, despite feeling doubts, got caught up in the fervor of bidding on and buying a bigger place. In January 2001, Gray and Russo bought a new house in North Haven that, while only one and a half miles away, was no longer in the village of Sag Harbor. Soon thereafter, in the period between buying the new house and actually living in it, Gray began to write about his love for their Sag Harbor house and his regrets about selling it.

  MARCH 8, 2001

  And with this FANTASY of A MOVE all the panic holding on stuff begins; that I will never be able to walk Forrest home from school again.

  MARCH 11, 2001

  Should I have OPTED, insisted on staying here? How can I get caught in the flow toward the big house, THE GIANT HOME, THE LAST SEA CAPTAIN.

  But here I am a little bit drunk with THE BOYS; the place I seem to always want to be without TV.

  I am getting drunk, oh yes and the boys are dancing for me, dancing to MOBY under the portrait of George Washington and in front of the fire. It is so beautiful the way they dance together and Theo does this great creative back up for FORREST.

  MARCH 20, 2001

  FIRST NIGHT OF SPRING

  What is it? I keep wondering as I walk that makes this all feel so familiar.

  IN SHORT, I have never seen so many houses that I would like to live in … that would give me great pleasure to live in.

  OUR HOUSE AND OUR HOME AND THE FAMILY IS OUR CENTER HERE

  When I’m not working I get lost and then I begin to drift. Kathie wants us to move to a new bigger house to contain my spirit.

  I looked into Kathie’s old sad gray eyes before we made love. I looked into her eyes.

  MARCH 23, 2001

  Early fantastic spring light and big wind woke me up at 6:10 AM and oh wow! The view out each window and the way the rose light hit the top of the Lowell house. OH I WAS UP & HORNY!

  I am running from window to window like a maniac. I feel like Emily in OUR TOWN when she comes back for her birthday and she gets SO ATTACHED; so very, very attached. I cry when I think of that scene. Like just now I could see the bay from Marissa’s window and I saw THE BAY! Yes, for the first time in years and also how I inhabit this house in the most idealistic way whenever I perform the monologue.

  MARCH 29, 2001

  Did I see her? YES. Today. Renée in that blue Volvo and she didn’t see me but I caught her in that bewildered vulnerable look. The same eyes I saw across the Studio 54 dance floor in 1979.

  [Shafransky moved to Sag Harbor in 2001 and began a therapy practice there.]

  MAY 13, 2001

  MOTHER’S DAY

  Nice sail and after dinner walk downtown. Forrest talked to me constantly about (like old days) and yes, how I will miss these walks to get ice cream; these philosophical walks but he started in on THE CREATION and how no one can know what happened because they were not there and this causes you to think about it and all this THINKING causes the feeling that YOU BOTH KNOW AND NOT KNOW.

  Also, yesterday at the beach, Forrest told Theo, Step in this water and you will be connected to all the oceans in the world.

  MAY 21, 2001

  Had the big CHAMPAGNE celebration last night at the new house. Robby somewhat less than enthusiastic but the new trees looked so good and the way that one cherry tree was planted right in the middle of those two dining room windows so you could see it from the hall by the front door framed in the window and those curtains. It looked like Chekhov.

  On June 20, 2001, Gray took a trip with Russo and their three children, as well as their friends Barbara Leary (Timothy Leary’s ex-wife) and her boyfriend, Kim Esteve; Tara Newman and her son Teddy Conklin; Carolyn Beegan and her boyfriend, Jake O’Boyle; and Gray’s niece Amanda, to Ireland to celebrate Gray’s sixtieth birthday. They’d been invited to the estate of John Scanlon, a high-powered publicist who worked with Monica Lewinsky in the aftermath of her affair with Bill Clinton. Scanlon also owned a house in Sag Harbor—he knew Gray from his performances and socialized with him on occasion in the Hamptons. More than once, Scanlon had offered his Ireland manor in the farm region of county Westmeath to Gray and Russo, explaining that he had many writer friends who used it as a retreat.

  One evening, several months before Gray turned sixty, Russo was having drinks with Newman and Beegan, and they came up with a plan to take a group vacation at Scanlon’s house to celebrate Gray’s upcoming birthday. Russo surprised Gray with the trip a couple of weeks before they were to leave. Exhausted from touring with It’s a Slippery Slope and Morning, Noon, and Night, he was initially reluctant. But the next day, when Russo suggested that she go with
the kids and Gray stay in Sag Harbor, he said he didn’t want to be alone and worried he’d regret not going. So they went as a family.

  Scanlon died of a heart attack a month before Gray and the others were to visit his house in Ireland. But Scanlon’s wife—now widow—told the group to go anyway. “John would’ve loved it,” she said.

  On their second day in Ireland, Gray and Russo went with Leary, Esteve, and Newman to one of Scanlon’s favorite nearby restaurants for dinner. Afterward, it was decided that Russo, who’d only had one drink—a Bellini—would drive home. When they got into the car, Russo said, “Buckle up.” No one in the backseat, including Gray, paid attention. “Yes, Mom,” Russo remembered one of them saying. Just one mile from Scanlon’s house, their car was struck by a veterinarian’s van while waiting to turn on a small country road.

  “Our car spun around three times, that’s how hard he hit,” Gray would later describe it in his 2003 monologue about the accident, Life Interrupted, “and he drove the engine right into the front seat of the car, where Kathie burned her arm. Somehow she got out. I thought Kim, who was next to her, was dead. His forehead was down on the dashboard. Tara Newman was yelling, ‘The car’s going to explode. Everyone get out!’ I don’t remember getting out, but the next I knew I was lying in the road next to Kathie, and she’s saying, ‘I’m dying! I’m dying!’ and I’m saying, solipsist that I am, ‘But I can’t straighten out my leg!’ ”

  Gray and Russo were taken to a local hospital. Leary and Esteve also went to the hospital but were released soon after—they were shaken but had not suffered serious injuries. Newman went straight back to the Scanlon estate after the accident to tell the others what had happened. Gray fractured his hip, which would leave him with a drop foot, a limp on his right side, and permanently in need of a leg brace in order to walk; he also suffered an orbital fracture—the orbit includes the eye and surrounding bones. Later, in surgery, hundreds of shards of bone were found lodged in his brain. Russo, meanwhile, got fifteen stitches in the back of her head where Gray had hit her with his own head when he flew forward in the accident. She had also bruised the tissues surrounding her heart. The hospital kept her for observation; they were concerned about the possibility of internal bleeding.