The Journals of Spalding Gray

by Spalding Gray; Nell Casey

  Through Gray’s literary agent, Suzanne Gluck, Russo had met Peter Whybrow, director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, who sent a letter as well. “I agree that Mr. Jones [Gray had checked into the hospital under the pseudonym Edward Jones] has been in the grip of a severe melancholia for several months,” he wrote. “His psychic self-flagellation surrounding the family’s house purchase, his loss of weight, the contraction of his intellectual facility, all reflect this severe melancholic state which by history appears to be super imposed upon a bipolar mood disorder.” Whybrow suggested that Gray be allowed to leave the hospital and engage in cognitive therapy, which he believed would help “break up the ruminative thinking.”

  OCTOBER 20, 2002

  [Written at Payne Whitney]

  THE SIN

  TO SELL A HOUSE

  YOU LOVE

  FOR MERE PROFIT???

  HOUSE OF FAMOUS

  WRITER

  When we left and had the accident, accident Oh my God of course

  NO ONE WAS HOME TO PROTECT

  The house. Oh my God help me! I am seeing too much into it. Help me! I’m having too much insight! Help me

  “When good ghosts turn bad, and then turn good” Forrest said that was the title

  THE SIGN KEPT DISAPPEARING and I know it was the ghosts

  That’s the triumphant story yes!

  Walk away from $700,000 yes, yes!

  Help me please. This is not the story I want to tell. No, No, No!

  When Gray was released from Payne Whitney at the end of January, Robby Stein took him away for a weekend retreat at Francine Prose and Howie Michels’s country house in Krumville, New York (the same property where Gray and Shafransky had once rented a cabin), along with their friend Donald Lipski.

  “Spalding seemed to be in free fall—sliding down an actual slippery slope toward suicide,” Michels described it. “It was as if this house had become a symbol of his state of mind before the accident … That weekend, you could watch him play a kind of morbid movie in his head in which he could walk slowly through the old house. He could hear the creaking floors, touch the banisters, and look out the windows. He did this every time he got too close to the realities of what would happen to his children, his career, and the joys of life that used to exist for him.”

  Gray had also begun to believe supernatural forces were at work: he was convinced the realtor he had used was a witch and there were ghosts in the old house that had compelled him to sell it in order to drive him to suicide so that he might join their spirit world.

  “We tried to break apart some of the more psychotic thinking that was organizing him, the whole issue around the house or his helplessness,” Stein recalled. “We would both verbally and physically challenge him, push him, try to bring him back into the world. It was almost like a 1960s encounter group. Get him involved. Cook dinner with him. Resist him falling out. After maybe a day, he all of a sudden said that he wanted to make pea soup, which was his favorite thing—it felt like a kind of breakthrough. We all got in the car in the middle of the night trying to find the ingredients for split pea soup. He made the soup, we all ate it, and it was delicious. You didn’t get a feeling that he was well, but you got a feeling … I don’t know if I’m projecting hopefulness on it, but I think we all felt that there was some possibility that could be built on.”

  A little less than a month after Gray had been released from Payne Whitney, he performed It’s a Slippery Slope in Boulder and Steamboat Springs, Colorado. The family went with him. The performances were surprisingly good, according to Russo; he received a standing ovation at one of the shows. “Spalding was having a great time with the kids. He even got into the pool with them at the hotel. He was engaging with them in a way I hadn’t seen in a long time. I had a sense that he was getting better,” she said. “To be clear: he was never happy again after the accident, but there were degrees of depression. On this trip, he only seemed to be mildly depressed.”

  Gray traveled from Colorado to Houston, Texas, to do Interviewing the Audience for a sold-out performance in a thousand-seat theater at the Society for the Performing Arts on March 21, 2003.

  “This very scruffy-looking man came in the stage door,” recalled Toby Mattox, then the executive director of the Society for the Performing Arts, “and I thought he was a homeless man from the street because he was rumpled and his hair was askew and he had that scar on his forehead. He really looked unkempt.” Gray and Mattox had known each other since 1992, when Gray began performing at the Houston theater. That evening, when Gray was onstage, “he was not the bright, on-top-of-things artist that he had always been. He stumbled in his words, he lost track of what was happening, he even started a confrontation with one or two of the audience members,” said Mattox. “I think he was saying unkind things about George Bush [and the U.S. invasion of Iraq] and you know this is Bush country in Texas, by and large … People started talking back to him, and he got heated. In fact, it was so confrontational that people got up and left. I would say ten or twelve people left. I went out into the lobby to get their names and numbers, and they demanded their money back … It was so sad to see that he had deteriorated to that extent. Those people in the audience were his fans, and all of a sudden he had turned many of them against him.”

  MARCH 2003

  Oh god where has the year gone?

  All I have left to keep me afloat is FANTASY of the old house. And yes I’ve gone a little mad and procrastinate. I’m not happy man and it’s driving Kathie crazy. I’m not trying to do it on purpose … I’ve become my damn own worst enemy. I can’t stand this person I’ve created for myself and canceling the good man and I wearing the sweat shirt and DESTINY comes to mind. Destiny and how I used to scoff at it scoff it off. I didn’t want to move why did I move? Oh help, I’m going in circles again.

  MARCH 2003

  Monday

  Its one long farewell that’s all I can write in my mind, it keeps going farewell to all of you. It’s so hot here today. The house and the loss of it has my pain so tight. Farewell to everyone. This is the way it should … has to be. My handwriting is so awful. Farewell. It’s so hot and I can’t stop the house from loving me if only, if only. I can’t go back. I’m dying. I feel it. I’m not strong enough to go on living not strong enough. Never was but Kathie, it’s better for you if I do take my life. You are so good at making things work out. Today, I miss our old guest bedroom so much it affects my heart. Heartache. I can feel it in me that room. Almost taste that room. Oh God.

  In April 2003, Gray went to Sagg Main Beach in Sagaponack, New York, taking his journal along with him. While there, with a crowd of onlookers on the beach, Gray waded into the ocean fully clothed. (A woman who witnessed the event found Gray’s diary in the sand and returned it to him later.) Someone contacted the police, and they picked Gray up. “They brought him to the house,” Russo said. “He was dripping wet. We talked, and they said, ‘He seems okay, we’re not going to take him away’ … They didn’t feel it was a full-fledged suicide attempt. But after that, he made numerous attempts to take his life.” He also began leaving suicide notes on the kitchen table only to return home again, unable to go through with the act.

  In one such letter, Gray wrote: “This was the most courageous way out for me. It has taken courage to face death and you, in time, will understand how there could be no other way. I don’t want to be the lonely old man I find myself becoming. I grow older each day. I feel the lonely old man came into me. I can’t wish, ski, swim, walk, make love. All my power and pleasures are gone. All that gave pleasures and meaning in my life are gone. I can’t get to you kids. I feel cut off by the house and how much I hate it.”

  In June 2003, at the recommendation of Whybrow, Gray checked into the psychiatric hospital at UCLA for nearly two weeks. There, doctors determined that he was suffering from both bipolar disorder and brain damage, which was due to either the head injury he sustained in the car accid
ent or the surgery following it, and that a temporary assisted-living environment might be necessary until he responded favorably to treatment. It was also recommended that Gray continue “pharmacological intervention” as well as cognitive behavioral therapy, that he quit drinking, attend rehabilitation sessions at a traumatic brain injury center, and be monitored for “recurrent suicidal ideation.”

  The following month, Russo met with Oliver Sacks, the well-known neurologist and author, whom Lipski knew through a friend. Sacks agreed to take Gray on as a patient. They saw each other for five months, until December 2003.

  AUGUST 13, 2003

  I can’t believe I did this to myself so much so that at this distance it feels like it never happened. Kathie said unless I change now that she has had it with me, need to have sex this morning but all I could think of was my old house. What a life.

  Wake this morning in innocent forgetfulness then it marked down on me.—Our home was gone.

  Gray wrote the following obituary for himself in his journals; he was drafting it for the television and radio host Larry King for a collection called Remember Me When I’m Gone: The Rich and Famous Write Their Own Epitaphs and Obituaries.

  “He didn’t get the irony,” Russo said. “He was too deep into his depression to see how strange it was that he had been asked to write his own obituary.”

  SPALDING GRAY 1941.

  He was a good and devoted father and a legal husband but most of all he was known for his autobiographical monologues in which he would sit on stage at a table with a glass of water and tell true stories from his life. He could capture the details ______ of his ______ and slightly eccentric life in a way that caused audiences to laugh and relate.

  Also known as the talking man, he was an American original and will be deeply missed.

  On September 9, 2003, Gray went to Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for a second hip operation, an attempt to regenerate nerve growth. According to Russo, she was to pick Gray up on the following Saturday, but the night before, she received a phone call from a nurse at Lenox Hill to let her know that Gray had left his crutches behind. “I asked her what she was talking about,” Russo recalled, “and she said he’d called a car service and left. There had been strict instructions for them not to let him leave without me, but they let him go.” When Gray left the hospital, he told the nurse he was going to take a bus back to North Haven. Russo called the Hampton Jitney office and was told that there was a reservation under “Gray” for a 7:00 pm bus. Hoping this was her husband’s reservation, Russo waited at the station, but he never arrived. (Gray did not have a cell phone.) She checked the messages at the loft in Manhattan and heard Gray’s voice. “I’m sorry, I’m going to do it,” he said, crying. “I’m going to jump from the Staten Island Ferry.” Russo left immediately. “I was screaming in the car,” she remembered. Russo drove to Tara Newman’s house, where she’d been for dinner prior to driving to the bus station. Lipski was also there. He listened to Gray’s message and called the police. An hour later, the police responded, saying they’d found Gray sitting on the ferry, riding it back and forth. Russo asked them to take Gray to the nearest hospital, informing them that he’d left her a phone message threatening suicide. The police took Gray to St. Vincent’s Hospital on Staten Island. Gray stayed there for a week, while Russo talked to Sacks about what to do next. Sacks suggested that Russo check Gray into the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in West Orange, New Jersey, which provides services for those suffering from brain injuries, among other physical traumas. Russo had Gray admitted to Kessler; he stayed there for nearly three weeks, until October 4.

  SEPTEMBER 21, 2003

  [Written at the Kessler Institute]

  SUNDAY

  Kathie,

  I told you yesterday that I could no longer live a joyless life. I don’t want to drag you down anymore. You’ll never know how much I love you and the children. Please forgive me.

  Love,

  Spalding

  When Gray and Russo first saw each other in the hospital after the car accident in Ireland, they had vowed they would get married. Now with Gray’s numerous suicide attempts, “I didn’t know if he was going to live or die,” Russo explained. “I felt like the end was imminent, and I wanted to have that experience with him, no matter what the circumstances were, since we had been through so much together as a couple. That surprised me because I hadn’t seen the importance of marriage prior to the accident.”

  Their friend John Perry Barlow, a Universal Life minister, officiated at the ceremony in Gray’s hospital room at Kessler. Gray sat on the bed with Russo next to him, holding his hand. “It was not a particularly romantic setting,” Russo said, “but it felt right.”

  During this time, Gray also wrote and mailed a letter to each of his three children, telling them individually what he loved about them. He expressed his desire to come back home and be their father again. But on the day he left Kessler, as he and Russo sped down the Long Island Expressway, Gray admitted he’d tried to slit his wrists in the hospital. “What are you trying to do to me?” Russo yelled, pulling the car over. “You don’t tell the doctor this, and now you want me to take you home?” Gray sat silently, staring ahead.

  Less than two weeks later, Gray was performing again. He did two shows of Life Interrupted, on October 15 and 16, at a downtown Manhattan theater, P.S. 122. Later that week, however, he jumped into the water from the Sag Harbor bridge; he was rescued by a man who swam out after him and brought him back to shore. The police took Gray to Stony Brook University Medical Center, with Russo’s consent. Gray was released after one night of observation.

  In November and December, he continued to perform Life Interrupted twice a week at P.S. 122. “It seemed with the last monologue, he had gone over to the other side,” Bogosian recalled of this performance. “It wasn’t going to be fixable, no matter how much you looked at it or thought about it or dialogued about it or monologued about it or told jokes about it, it still was an unsolvable problem and there was no answer.”

  “I think, in the end, when he felt he could no longer do it—that he couldn’t save himself with another monologue about this disaster,” Kobland said, “he was lost.”

  Only you can decide

  What is important to you

  Lucky numbers 3, 8, 12, 23, 32, 42

  [Gray occasionally taped messages from Chinese fortune cookies in his journal.]

  Beginning on December 18, Gray carried a tape recorder with him everywhere he went for several days. Sometimes, he plainly described the details of their day—dropping off Forrest at school, visiting a possible new house to buy, talking about the upcoming holiday. Other times, he recorded conversations between him and his family. “At first, I thought he was documenting something, maybe gathering material for a new monologue. At least it was different. It was more interesting than sitting in his chair every day,” Russo said. “I thought it was a positive sign.” The following is an excerpt from this recording. The events lurch between the everyday and the dramatic frequently. At one point, Gray goes to bed, finding Russo there reading Rick Moody’s memoir The Black Veil. They discuss Gray’s mood, his inability to read long books anymore, whether Russo had read to Theo when she put him to bed. (She had.) Finally, Gray makes an out-of-the-blue comment that this is his last tape.

  “Fuck you,” Russo says, suddenly fierce. Gray backs down a bit, stammers.

  “The last tape you’ll ever, ever make in your life?” she asks in a gentler tone.

  “No, no,” Gray says, laughing a little. “I’ve run out of things to say.”

  After his death, Russo found this recording in Gray’s desk drawer with a label that read “My Last Tape.”

  So it all started with Kathie and I—we were skiing in Colorado, and she said, “I saw this house for sale. It’s outside of the town. It would make a wonderful family compound, and we could put a pool in the back.” At any rate, when she told me this, I was seized with this imm
ediate compulsion to try to get this, if it was a good deal, if they’d lower the price, whatever. I don’t know what that came out of, you know, when I look back on it. Because I had no intentions of moving, I didn’t want to move. I was happy where I was. I was honestly happy where I was. And we got back, and we had been staying at a lot of bed-and-breakfasts, and we got back. I feel like I’ve told this story to so many therapists. I think in the past two years I’ve had … oh, at least ten therapists. Maybe more. Including the psychopharmacologists. Which I’ve had three.

  I’m talking to the boys now: you guys, Forrest and Theo … what happened to your grandmother Gray, my mom, was that she too moved out of a house that she loved ’cause it was right on Narragansett Bay and she used to love to walk along that bay, that shoreline. And when my father sold the house and they moved across the bay into the woods which is where we are also, in the woods, she flipped out. And they tried to buy the house back. And they couldn’t—they wouldn’t sell it back to them. And they said, I’m sure, that, you know, Mrs. Gray—my mom—has other problems about the house, it must be symbolic of something, that same old Freudian rap, you know, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, sometimes a house is just a house. She missed the house. It wasn’t symbolic of something, she really missed walking along the sea. I miss walking in the village, I miss the cemetery, I miss hundreds of things. But boys, listen: when you get to that point, where you have been driven so crazy by something, like for me, when I think about the house, it’s not me thinking about it, it’s thinking me. In other words: some people live in houses that are haunted. In this case, the house is haunting me. I left it, I don’t know why. And now it’s haunting me to the extreme.