Spalding Gray, Master of the Theatrical Monologue
SPALDING GRAY, the actor, playwright and master of the monologue, was born in 1941 and raised in Barrington, Rhode Island, the oldest of three sons. The family was almost comically WASP. The three brothers were named Spalding Gray, Channing Gray and Rockwell Gray. If there was humor in the house, it had to be very dry. Voices were not to be raised.
The Grays were also Christian Scientists, mixing the teachings of Jesus Christ with those of Mary Baker Eddy. As Spalding absorbed Christian Science, he felt his family was noble in honoring Christ’s miracles — but standing on dangerous ground by ascribing faith-healing powers to anyone of deep Christian understanding. Christian Science seemed to believe that evil, sickness and death were all distortions. It was supposed to comfort its believers — but Spalding worried that if faith healing was the Gray family’s most powerful medicine, then danger could only be survived in small doses.
He was close to his mother, who was unstable. Under the staid, placid surfaces of the Gray household, a demon lived in his mother, denying her happiness, threatening her life. And in her pain, she adored her older son and relied upon his stories, and his rich vein of humor.
So even as a boy, Spalding told stories. He was profoundly affected by things which those around him barely noticed. He was proud of this sensitivity, but it left him vulnerable to swings of emotion, to feelings of guilt and waste. Gifted and ambitious, he didn’t easily accept being beaten, and from small defeats learned to weave stories that brought him laughter and sympathy.
He was a poetry major at Emerson College, and by the time he graduated in 1963, he knew he was neurotic and was determined to treat it with humor and performance. He’d say: “I’m a hard-core Freudian existentialist. I look like an aide to the U.S. Ambassador, but I feel like Woody Allen.” As Spalding Gray learned how to perform, his vulnerability and great sensitivity meant that there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of stories available to him, crowding his mind.
He loved to travel, to gather new stories, but also feared traveling. He used to say “Everything is contingent, and there is also chaos.” And also: “The spirit cannot move faster than a camel.”
As an actor, it was fitting that he ended up in small theater in New York. He let other actors focus on the seedy little intrigues that shaped which actors were cast in which roles. Spalding was different; he savored the relationship with the audience. He loved the way the two sides of the stage, actors and audience, share something ineffable, never to be repeated in exactly that way again.
Spalding also stared out at the whole city of New York. It fascinated and delighted him. He once said, “The fact that New York continues in the face of all the chaos, of the crime, of the madness, you just think that it would just pop and vanish, just explode.” And he admired the way New Yorkers coped with the excesses of their city. While he was chasing success and meaning in the theater, he felt every walker in the city was contending for something, defending some kind of personal title, and making their own sense of things. Each New Yorker, he said, “has a whole lexicon of personal logic in the way that they decipher and do what has to be done to enjoy, to stay alive, take pleasure in this place…”
In 1967, Spalding was a 25-year-old actor on vacation in Mexico, when he learned that his mother, shortly after moving into a home she didn’t care about, had killed herself at age 52. It weighed on him for years, and felt like a warning. Mrs. Gray was buried quickly, as if her suicide was shameful. Spalding missed the funeral.
He began keeping journals that year.
India, Mexico, Thailand — he was always going to that new country, always hoping this time it would be different, THIS foreign trip would leave him with a magical sense of well-being. But it never happened. As he reflected on why, he decided to plow his doubt and fear into theatrical monologues. With manic energy, he began doing it. Gray’s monologues are excavations of the self, turning over his neuroses, mining and sifting them. The persona he created in performance was more appealing than the private man. He became a collage artist, cutting and pasting bits of memory that were sympathetic, leaving out the bitter, manipulative parts of himself, and surrounding his hypochondria with humor.
Spalding’s fans, people who had seen him perform, felt they could analyze him, and knew what his trouble was. “Woody Allen” was a stage name for Allen Konigsberg, so when Allen Konigsberg heard fans call out “Woody! Woody!” he knew they didn’t know him, only his show biz alter ego. But Spalding Gray never took a stage name — so the line between his true self and his stage persona was always a blurry one.
He began performances quietly, choosing his words slowly and with care. But, after a few minutes, it became a cascade of thoughts thrown together, his voice rising, his tempo accelerating.
He married a woman named Renee Shafransky, and was hard on her. Renee got at the heart of Spalding one day when they were arguing. She said “You’re confessional, but not honest.” That hurt but, to Spalding, all good insights were welcome in time. He made stories out of them, and telling stories was a great comfort because “telling, you’re always in control; you’re like God.”
He loved to make his therapist laugh. He sometimes thought how much this was costing him, what a large piece of the sessions were spent waiting for the therapist to stop laughing. There may have been too much laughter in those sessions, and too little analysis. But for Spalding, to make people laugh was the ultimate high, far better than intellect. He’d say “I’m having boundary problems with my accountant,“ and people in his audience would start to giggle and hearing that made him feel like a good lover. Performing on stage was like sex, like skiing, or swimming — a numbing release from anxiety, a stay of the chaos.
From therapy, he brought this great honesty about where he was frail and frightened. From his dramatic background, he brought performance skills. He could polish a dramatic bit, then break in at random with gritty, improvised material. Life lacks a dramatic structure, and creative life dredged from the subconscious suffers from a lack of formal structure. It depends on lightness and storytelling rhythms, of which Spalding Gray, in mid-life, had become a master.
In 1984, Spalding got a minor role as the American consul in the film “The Killing Fields,” which was shot in Cambodia. He was cast for his cautious looks and WASP accent. From the experience of filming his scenes in “The Killing Fields,” he wrote a monologue-play in 1985, “Swimming to Cambodia,” which was neurotic and daring, and became a popular movie in 1987, directed by Jonathan Demme. Spalding won a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Book Award.
For a storyteller, he was by now a wild success. It seemed that all his major monologues might now be filmed — and three more of them were. Spalding Gray had suddenly become a minor celebrity, “known” by millions of people whom he didn’t know.
He did the talk shows and was amused and dismayed that the questions were softballs, and everything was rehearsed. He’d have his few minutes in front of a national TV audience, then get whisked off the set. He’d ask himself: “What just happened?” When people told him, “I saw you on the Tonight Show,” he’d reply, “It’s a form I don’t know how to work in.”
His monologue “Monster in a Box” became a film, with a sound track by Laurie Anderson. It’s about how hard it is to write a good novel. Novelists in movies tend to be shown in a few scenes, typing away. But writing is not cinematic, and what’s so maddening about it, and so wildly satisfying, are elusive to put on film. Spalding Gray managed to describe it.
In 1993, Steven Soderbergh cast Spalding as a suicidal character in Soderbergh’s film “King of the Hill.” When they filmed a scene where Spalding’s character slits his wrists, it was a two-hour process to put the makeup on his wrists, and five hours more to set up the blood. Spalding was horrified at how messy it was, and thought again, ‘What a stupid, piggish thing it is to kill yourself and leave the people you love such a mess to clean up.’
When they finished filming the scene for “King of the Hill.” he was quietly pleased that his wrists still looked as if they’d just been slit. So he walked back to his hotel, and went to the front desk for some reaction. The desk clerk was grossed out — but knew Spalding was in town making a movie, and realized it was just make-up. Not having gotten the shocked reaction he wanted, Spalding went on to a drugstore. He was pleased to see a woman filling prescriptions there who vaguely reminded him of his dead mother. He made his voice obnoxious and vulnerable and said: “Do you have anything for my wounds?” Pathetically, he held up his wrists.
“My God, what did you do?”
This was more like it. “I cut my wrists.”
“Well, we have Mercurochrome.” And there was, to Spalding, a pleasingly frantic note in her voice — and in the way she ran off to find the Mercurochrome. He savored the neat way he’d manipulated the druggist. Then, when she returned, he announced that he was an actor who’d been putting her on — and felt a sudden, vicious self-loathing.
He divorced Renee, and remarried. His new wife was Kathie Russo, and they had a child together. Spalding had never been embarrassed to adore beauty, as some men are. Now he looked at his child and said “I understand, once I had a baby in my arms, why some people have the need to keep having them.”
So Spalding added parental love to his recurring themes without surrendering the dark fantasy that he, too, would kill himself at 52 — and that his mother would be there waiting for him, on the other side of the grave.
When he had to leave his beloved Sag Harbor, New York and move to North Haven, Connecticut, he felt depressed. An unwanted move like this had triggered his mother’s suicide. So Spalding went to the doctor to get a prescription for the depression. The chatty receptionist there asked him: “Spalding, what have you been up to?”
“I moved from Sag Harbor to North Haven.”
She replied, “If I had to live in North Haven, I’d kill myself.” That didn’t help.
And for Spalding, success was not necessarily good; contentment became a looming threat. Things might become too comfortable, too bland and easy, and then he wouldn’t recognize his life. Would he then run out of material? He fretted.
He needn’t have; in 2001, he went to Ireland to celebrate his 60th birthday, and there — driving home with Kathie after dinner, in County Westmeath, near the town of Moate — two roads merged, and his car crashed into another one. Spalding was not wearing a seat belt. His skull was fractured, the frontal lobe of his brain was damaged, and one hip badly broken — but he got all the material he needed for a new monologue, “Life Interrupted.”
In “Life Interrupted,” he told us about sharing an ambulance (“like a WWII bread truck”) with the guy who hit him. Like a good WASP, Spalding thought there should have been separate ambulances for the two drivers, so they wouldn’t have to deal with each other. But County Westmeath was a rural area, not rich enough for a second ambulance. Spalding told us how it felt to be rattling along the road in such pain and shock that he forgot to vent his rage, or didn’t know how, and the regret he felt later that he hadn’t gotten furious. (“I am so unconfrontational.”)
He also gave us the hospital: the transvestite with green fingernails who came to his bed with tea and toast; the survey-taker (“Do you want the hospital to be smoke-free?”) and the wonderful nurse, whom Spalding asked, “Are you afraid of death?” The nurse quietly replied no, she had no fear of death “because the only sin is hurting someone, and I’ve never hurt anyone, so I’m not afraid.”
The accident had left him with only half of himself. His journal entries took on a desperate tinge. The terrorism of 9/11 gave him a long series of nightmares. In pain, profoundly depressed, and still haunted by the final choice his mother had made, on a winter night in 2004, at the age of 62, Spalding Gray jumped to his death from the Staten Island Ferry. Nobody saw him jump but that’s how it figures. His body was recovered from the East River, and friends and family laid him to rest in Oakland Cemetery, in Sag Harbor.
He used to say that the worst thing about death would be that you couldn’t talk anymore. After the suicide, Spalding’s brother, Rockwell, chided himself for not realizing how dire things were for his older brother, because their last evening together had been full of long silences in front of a crackling fire, and long silences were not Spalding Gray at all.
His friends and family accepted his death by drowning as a deliberate act, and wasted no part of remembrance insisting that his fall into the water might have been an accident. They were at least glad for Spalding and for themselves that he’d had 10 years longer in the world than his mother had.
Kathie Russo told people not to grieve too much about the way it ended. She said Spalding felt he’d been given permission to go by the last line of a film he’d just seen — Tim Burton’s “Big Fish.” The film ended with this: “A man tells a story over and over so many times, he becomes the story. In that way, he is immortal.”
The family collected his journals; they filled 5,000 pages. Some of the pages muttered, some screamed, but few had that warm, familiar persona, talking about pain in order to keep it at a distance.
Spalding Gray remained a bit of a mystery. His friends and relatives were never quite sure what to make of him in life — but now that his life was over, they were grateful for his example, grateful that he’d shown the world the potential of theatrical monologue. They missed the man with his flannel work shirts and uncombed gray hair, wandering around, muttering.