Spalding Gray’s Disappearance

New York magazine has an extensive article about the life and now the disappearance of Spalding Gray … Thank you, Emily, for sending it along. I had seen his face on the magazine stands here, but did not get around to buying the magazine.

I read it, and felt enormous empathy for this tortured individual.

Never a light-hearted soul, he was always able to take his OCD, take his pathological obsession with numbers and coincidences, his obsession with mortality – and turn it into art.

But after the car accident in Ireland in 2001 – where his skull was fractured, his hip was crushed – the art left him. He was unable to transform his pain into work. He was only left with the despair.

Spalding was never the same after the accident,” says Robby Stein, a Manhattan psychotherapist and Theo’s godfather, with whom Gray stayed for several weeks after Ireland. He was in intense physical pain. Mentally, he was worse. He could barely talk except for strange obsessive ruminations on the same few topics. Why had they gone to Ireland? Why had they moved from Sag Harbor to North Haven? Several doctors at different hospitals all diagnosed his problem as depression—not physical trauma. “They hadn’t recognized that he had a skull fracture!” fumes Stein. “It was complete mistreatment.”

In place of the amusing old neurotic tangents, an alarming bitterness crept in. “He was always saying to me, ‘Why was I the only one hurt? Why weren’t you hurt, too?’ ” Tara Newman says.

The article goes into his childhood in Rhode Island (he was from Barrington), it goes into his early days in New York, in the 60s, when experimental theatre was at its height – and not imitating itself in pale reflections, like it does now. Spalding Gray (along with Lanford Wilson, and Andre Gregory, and others) were at the foreground of that movement.

“He was the first actor I knew who was working with his persona as a meta-persona,” says Kate Valk, a Wooster Group member. “He was so interested in his own persona and exploring that.” By 1979, Gray had essentially minted a new medium to fit his talents—the autobiographical monologue.

“The monologues were Spalding’s very creative way of processing a very messy, distressing, chaotic life,” explains Shafransky, who met Spalding in 1979 when she was a film critic for the Village Voice. “He used to say that making monologues was like the fairy tale “Rumpelstiltskin,” that he was spinning garbage into gold. I’d say it was more like he was spinning sadness.

“But he really came alive in front of an audience,” she stresses. “He could have the flu, but the second he walked from the wings onto the stage, it was as if a bicycle pump had pumped him up. He got taller. His color improved. He literally, physically transformed.”

Art saves.

It really does.

My wonderful teacher Doug Moston (RIP) used to say to us in his class, “I am a big fan of sublimation for actors. What sublimation really is – is you take your pain, and you make it sublime.”

That was Spalding Gray’s gift. His saving grace. Without it, he would have been just another tortured depressive.

But his monologues gave him a window out – a way out. He could take his pain, and make it sublime.

That grace ran out, after his accident.

Life must have felt like a howling wilderness to him.

I was especially moved that the last film he saw was Tim Burton’s Big Fish. He went with his sons. Big Fish is the story of a son trying to reconcile with his big-talking tall-tale-telling father. The son cannot forgive the father – the son just wants the TRUTH. The son does not realize that the father’s “tall tales” are a version of the truth – and perhaps these tall tales were what “saved” the father from living a quiet unhappy life. There are many versions of reality. I have memories of things in my past which I am sure are the truth – but other people who were there may remember things very differently. The son has to learn that he must love the father, tall tales and all – He has to embrace the astonishing life-force that is his father.

Gray’s choice of Big Fish is crushing in its poignance. Throughout most of Tim Burton’s film, the character of the son is trying to cut through the haze of his father’s tall tales, dissecting the brilliant myths his father has spun to find the real man within. In the end, however, the son is won over by his father’s imagination. As the old man lies dying in the hospital, he challenges the son to summon his own fantasy of his father’s death—one in which the ailing man strolls down to a riverbank in his native Alabama and, before a gathering of a lifetime of friends, throws himself into the roiling water. Miraculously, the dying man then morphs into a giant fish and swims away and out of sight.

“Some friends said I shouldn’t see it, but I had to, I went last night,” says Russo. Holding back the tears again, she adds softly, “You know, Spalding cried after he saw that movie. I just think it gave him permission. I think it gave him permission to die.”

Here’s the article, a wonderful and sad tribute to this man.