Forrest, Theo, I love you. What more can I say? I—I am terrified of dying. I don’t want to be driven by ruminations and I know that you guys are fed up with it and bored with it. So, going on with the history of how we came into this place, I can remember Mom and I coming home from skiing—I don’t know where you guys were or Marissa, I don’t remember—but, when we walked into our house, she said, “What do you think?” you know, our old house, and I said, “It’s little, it’s small.” And then we came down here and this was bigger, twice the size. But not twice as nice. And at the same time, I at first sight asked how much it was and was ready to bid on it before we’d even had an engineer’s report. And that’s what I will never understand. And Kathie said to me maybe a week or two after, “I hope you’re not buying this house for me.” And I said, “No, I like the house.” And I don’t. And I didn’t then. But I said to her, “No, I like the house.”
And I just can’t face … dying. Forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and death. Forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever. Forever and ever and ever and ever and everevereverevereverever. Oh, help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me help me there’s nothing to be done, there’s nothing to be done, there’s nothing to be done. I hate this place. I hate this place. I can’t even go up to bed because I can’t stand the floors. I can’t stand the bathrooms. I can’t stand the lights in the bathroom. I can’t stand to see my face in the mirror. And I can’t stand taking off my shoes to reveal that horrible brace. And there’s nowhere to go, there’s nowhere to walk to in the neighborhood because the neighborhood is … the neighborhood is a suburban dump. And the woods with the deer and the deer and the deer and the deer and the darkness and the darkness and the deer and the darkness.
Anyway, what I’m saying is you just don’t know what condition people are in to drive them to suicide. Virginia Woolf was hearing voices, you know? And what, put her away? She doesn’t want to be put away, she’d rather drown first. So that’s the choice she makes. To try to get some relief. I think it is about getting relief. For Sylvia Plath, it was the same. I don’t think that I’m in any place to judge these people. And my mother as well.
I never knew we’d come to such a diminished state. Kathie fights to go on. She is such a fighter. She is just … she won’t give up, and I admire that in her enormously. She is a great-spirited woman. I wish that I could match that in some way. I can’t. I don’t. I’m not …
When they took me into the hospital, they said, “So what prevented you from jumping?” And I said, “It was fear.” Not thoughts of what I would miss, but just plain out-and-out fear. And that’s … that’s what has people in institutions. The people that are in institutions are the ones that are afraid. Afraid of suicide. Or can’t figure out how to do it, just aren’t clever enough.
Over the Christmas holiday, a week later, Gray’s brother, Rockwell and his wife, Madeleine, visited the family in North Haven. “He was utterly out of it. He sat by the fire in an armchair and closed his eyes. He ate dinner with us, but it was like being with a ghost,” Rockwell said. “I felt I’d really lost him … ‘What am I supposed to do now?’ Kathie asked me. ‘Am I supposed to let him go on this way talking about suicide?’ ”
At the end of December, Gray and Ken Kobland made a plan to see each other in the city. “We went over to his loft and had a beer,” Kobland recalled. “He was saying what he always was saying, you know, that he just wanted to end it and he can’t stand it, he has no life. And I was—I wasn’t bored, I was hopeless. I said, ‘I don’t know what I can do, Spald, for you anymore. But please don’t because you’ll hurt me. Please think of us. I mean sacrifice yourself, just stay around and be an idiot.’ But it was like asking him to torture himself … I don’t remember the talk as much as I remember the image. He was standing over by the bookcase. I was at the table with a beer. And there was no point in talking about anything anymore. There was nothing else to say. So I just gave him a little hug and left. And he was a statue.”
Shortly afterward, Robby Stein and Gray saw each other in Sag Harbor. “He asked me if he could meet me for lunch, so we met and he said, ‘You know I’m going to do this,’ ” Stein said. “He never used the word ‘suicide’ with me, it was always the act itself: ‘I’m going to jump off a bridge; I’m going to jump off a ferry.’ He was very, very calm this time … I said, ‘I understand, Spalding, how you feel, but as hard as it is for you, it is going to be harder for everyone else.’ He said, ‘Just promise that you’ll take care of the boys.’ ”
The following morning, Gray traveled to Manhattan to meet with a psychopharmacologist whom Sacks had recommended. He told him he was looking forward to an upcoming ski trip. (As a gift, Russo had made reservations for him at a ski clinic in Aspen, Colorado.) In the afternoon, Gray met with Theresa Smalec, a New York University graduate student who was writing her thesis on Ron Vawter. Later, she wrote an essay about this interview in which she described finding Gray in his loft “lying on the couch, very still.” He remained in that position throughout the interview.
That evening, Russo, Theo, and Marissa arrived to join him at the loft. (Forrest was staying with friends on Shelter Island.) Gray was not there, but he’d left a message on the answering machine saying that he was out for a drink. Later, Russo found out that he was actually riding the Staten Island Ferry back and forth. When Gray returned home, he took the kids to Bubby’s, a restaurant in lower Manhattan. Russo went to a business dinner. This particular weekend, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters was holding its international booking conference at the Hilton in midtown Manhattan. Russo had to attend this event throughout the weekend.
After dinner, Gray put the kids in a cab and said that he was going to walk home, even though it was ten degrees below zero outside. Once again, he went to the Staten Island Ferry. When Russo returned home that night, Gray was already there, asleep.
“My mother used a trope very regularly: ‘That which I have greatly feared has come upon me.’ It was a form of some biblical phrase. Behind it was ‘You’ve got to avoid being afraid. You will get what you worried about. If you worry about illness, you’ll become ill.’ I see that as woven into those later stages [of Spalding’s life],” Gray’s older brother, Rockwell, said. “Of course, the whole thrust of Christian Science is that it is in your hands. If you want to know the truth, you can be saved. But if you don’t, you’re just going to bring trouble on yourself. It was a very angry notion, and I think that Spalding was working out some adult form of that.”
On January 10, 2004, at six in the morning, Gray left for the ski clinic in Aspen. “I walked him down and helped him with his bags,” Russo remembered. “Before he got in the car, he gave me a kiss and said, ‘Thanks for the trip, honey.’ I said, ‘You never call me “honey.” ’ ” He smiled.
Gray went to the airport and discovered his flight was canceled. When he was offered an alternative flight with another airline, he didn’t take it. He called Russo and said his flight was not taking off but that he would leave the following day. That evening, while Russo was at a theater showcase at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, Gray took Marissa and Theo to see Tim Burton’s Big Fish, a film about a son trying to re-create his father’s life as his father is dying. The film ends with this line: “A man tells a story over and over so many times he becomes the story…. In that way, he is immortal.” Gray had gone to see the movie without knowing it would cut so close to the bone; they’d chosen the film because Theo had seen a preview with a parachute scene that had intrigued him. Gray cried throughout.
When they returned to the loft after the movie, Gray picked up the phone and, speaking to the dial tone, pretended to make a plan to meet his friend Larry Josephson for a drink. He left without his wallet or his keys. When Russo called from a taxi on her way home at midnight, Marissa told her of Gray’s pla
ns. Russo immediately called Josephson, who said he’d never spoken to Gray. When she arrived home, Theo reported to his mother that Gray had called him about 8:30 pm—later, the police discovered this phone call was made from the Staten Island Ferry terminal—to say that he loved him and would be home soon. Despite the frequent letters in the past detailing Gray’s intentions to end his life, Russo could find only a blank legal pad with the imprint of “Dear Kathie” pressed into the page from a note he’d started and torn out. The police embarked on a two-month search for Gray, during which Russo received reports of sightings of him all over the country—in Grand Central, at a Hallmark store in Florida, walking in Venice Beach. Finally, on March 7, 2004, Gray’s body was found on the waterfront near the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Perhaps, on that freezing night in January, Gray gambled with fate and lost. “I think Spald was experimenting with how far he could step over the line … Just as before—how far could he go without losing it? How far could he go with affairs? How far could he go with what he could tell his audience? With his fears? What if I dropped the baby? I think he tried to go too far and he lost his balance and control,” Kobland said. “At that point, it’s too late. He made himself available for suicide. He experimented with it, and he accidentally completed it.”
Or perhaps Gray created his fate by telling a story.
I BEGAN TO REALIZE I was acting as though the world were going to end and this was helping lead to its destruction. The only positive act would be to leave a record. To leave a chronicle of feelings, acts, reflections, something outside of me, something that might be useful in the unexpected future.
1970
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I AM DEEPLY grateful to the Estate of Spalding Gray. I’d like to thank Kathleen Russo, in particular, who first offered me the opportunity—and the privilege—of reading the journals of her late husband. I admire her courage and determination.
At Knopf, Robin Desser not only brought passion and insight to the project but always offered wise and steady counsel. Sarah Rothbard and Anke Steinecke were also strong and dedicated forces in bringing this book into being. I would also like to thank Ingrid Sterner, Carol Carson, Victoria Pearson, and Maggie Hinders for their careful attention and excellent work.
I am so thankful to those who shared their time and reflections with me: Channing Gray, Rockwell Gray, Ken Kobland, Elizabeth LeCompte, Clay Hapaz, Willem Dafoe, Richard Schechner, Eric Bogosian, Suzanne Gluck, Robby Stein, Francine Prose, Howie Michels, Jonathan Demme (and Shane Bissett for helping to connect us), Gary Fisketjon, Steven Soderbergh, John Perry Barlow, Bill Talen, Toby Mattox, Tara Newman, and Peter Whybrow.
My gratitude to literary agents Suzanne Gluck and Kim Witherspoon for leading the way. To Jan Constantine at The Authors Guild for her good advice. To Glenn Horowitz for generously inviting me to work in his offices while the journals were there. To David Olson for helping to document the illustrations. To Helen Adair for her guidance at the Harry Ransom Center and to Jean Cannon for her stellar research assistance. To Ron Jenkins for his thoughts on the history of solo performance. To Andy Young for keeping the facts straight. To Maury Sullivan and her family for hosting me in Austin, Texas, and Connie Casey and Harold Varmus for offering me a quiet writing retreat in Chatham, New York. To Rozália Szabó for keeping our children—and us—such good company throughout. As always, my heartfelt gratitude to my beloved friends and family, most especially to my husband, Jesse Drucker, and our two children, Hank and Eve, for so joyfully carrying me through.
Above all, I am indebted to Spalding Gray.
Spalding Gray, second from right, at five years old, hamming it up with his older brother, Rockwell, third from right, and two neighborhood kids in Barrington, Rhode Island.
Gray, at age one, in Narragansett, Rhode Island.
Gray’s mother, Margaret Elizabeth Horton, 1955.
A fourteen-year-old Gray, center, with the ball between his feet, at Fryeburg Academy, a boarding school in Maine where Gray first discovered his love of acting—and the audience.
Gray in high school, undated.
Gray’s professional head shot from 1968.
The Albany Times-Union review of Gray’s first performance at the Caffe Lena, where he met Elizabeth LeCompte.
(photo credit 1)
Gray, far left, with his brothers, Rockwell, center, and Channing; this photo is dated “late ’60s.”
(photo credit 2)
Gray with then-girlfriend LeCompte.
(photo credit 3)
Gray and LeCompte in their Upper East Side Manhattan apartment, with a bathtub in the kitchen, 1968.
(photo credit 4)
Gray as Hoss in Sam Shepard’s Tooth of Crime, directed by Richard Schechner, with LeCompte playing the role of Keeper, 1972.
Gray in Sakonnet Point, the first piece in the trilogy Three Places in Rhode Island, with actress Libby Howes, 1975.
(photo credit 5)
Gray with Wooster Group members Willem Dafoe (left) and Ron Vawter, rehearsing Point Judith (An Epilog), 1980.
(photo credit 6)
Gray at The Performing Garage, 1978.
(photo credit 7)
Gray performing in Amsterdam.
(photo credit 8)
Gray performs his breakthrough monologue, Swimming to Cambodia, based on his experience as an actor in The Killing Fields.
(photo credit 9)
Gray on the set of Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields. In a helicopter with fellow cast member Craig T. Nelson
Gray on the set of Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields. With children in Thailand
Gray on the set of Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields. Dressed as his character in the film, the assistant to the American ambassador in Cambodia.
Scenes from Swimming to Cambodia. The photo sent out as an invitation to the 1985 book party for the publication of Swimming to Cambodia.
(photo credit 12)
Scenes from Swimming to Cambodia. On stage at The Performing Garage
(photo credit 13)
Scenes from Swimming to Cambodia. Renée Shafransky with Gray on set for Jonathan Demme’s 1987 film.
(photo credit 10)
Gray with Shafransky in an undated photo booth session.
Gray with Shafransky in his downtown Manhattan loft, 1986.
(photo credit 11)
Al Hirschfeld’s caricature of Gray drawn for the opening of Gray’s Anatomy at Lincoln Center, 1993. This was displayed along with other drawings from the Hirschfeld collection on the wall at Sardi’s restaurant in New York City.
(photo credit 14)
Gray teaching a storytelling workshop.
Gray with his family: From left, seven-year-old Forrest (with a candy cane in his hand), Marissa, thirteen years old, and Theo, two, lying on Gray. Russo is reclining above them on the sofa in the living room of their first house in Sag Harbor, New York, 1999.
(photo credit 16)
Gray and Russo at Sagaponack beach in Long Island, New York, 1999.
(photo credit 15)
Gray with son Forrest, eleven months old, and stepdaughter, Marissa, seven years old, in Newport, Rhode Island, 1993.
Gray with Russo at the Sedgewood house in Carmel, New York, 2003.
Gray with Theo in Menemsha, in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, August 2002, slightly more than a year after his car accident in Ireland.
Annie Leibovitz took this photograph of Gray for Vanity Fair magazine in 1987.
(photo credit 17)
PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS
Unless otherwise noted, all photographs are courtesy of the estate of Spalding Gray. We have tried to identify copyright holders for the photos from Spalding Gray’s personal collection; in case of an oversight and upon notification to the publisher, corrections will be made in subsequent printings.
INSERT I
1. Times-Union, Albany, NY
2. Sharon Walker Boyd
3. Clem Fiori
&n
bsp; 4, 5. Ken Kobland
6, 7. Nancy Campbell
8. Bob van Dantzig
INSERT II
9, 10, 11. Ken Regan / Camera 5
12, 13. Nancy Campbell
14. © Al Hirschfeld. Reproduced by an arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the Margo Feiden Galleries Ltd., New York. www.alhirschfeld.com
15. Ken Regan
16. Nicole Bengiveno / The New York Times / Redux
17. © Annie Leibovitz, 2011
INDEX
Aaron, Joyce, 1.1, 3.1
Achs, Phil, 3.1
Acker, Kathy, 3.1
actors, acting, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.1
Aggie (lover), 3.1
The Journals of Spalding Gray Page 34