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Spalding Gray’s Tortured Soul

Slide 1 of 3

Spalding Gray revealed his meditations about life onstage. Now his journals reveal his innermost thoughts.

Credit...Ken Regan/Camera5 for The New York Times
  • Slide 1 of 3

    Spalding Gray revealed his meditations about life onstage. Now his journals reveal his innermost thoughts.

    Credit...Ken Regan/Camera5 for The New York Times

Spalding Gray moved to New York City in 1967, shortly after his mother’s suicide, when he was 26. He lived with his girlfriend, Elizabeth LeCompte, in an apartment on Sixth Street and Avenue D, on the Lower East Side. To make ends meet, Gray occasionally worked as a stock boy, while LeCompte sold postcards at the front desk of the Guggenheim. But mostly they were finding their places in New York’s avant-garde theater world.

In 1968, they saw Richard Schechner’s critically acclaimed production of “Dionysus in ’69,” which included an onstage orgy. Gray and LeCompte were electrified by it. The following year, they would become members of Schechner’s experimental-theater troupe, the Performance Group, after the director cast Gray in his rather unusual interpretation of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” Schechner recalls coming across Gray’s head shot and seeing a young man “staring out with eyes so far apart — he wasn’t trying to look pretty, he wasn’t trying to do anything.”

The late ’60s and ’70s were a period of great artistic and personal ferment for Gray, as he struggled through a nervous breakdown and the dissolution of his relationship with LeCompte and toward the confessional monologue for which he would later become famous. Throughout his work with the Performance Group, Gray honed his sense of self as a performer. In one play, he portrayed a character named Spalding, based on how Schechner saw him — an observer commenting on the action. Later he and LeCompte began collaborating on theatrical pieces — he as actor, she as director — that explored Gray’s family history and the death of his mother. As he increasingly mined his own life for material, he simultaneously grew adept at keeping parts of himself private, shaving just the top layer of a secret and offering it up as a convincing whole. “The well-told partial truth to deflect the private raw truth,” Gray once observed about his monologues in his journal.

In his personal writings, Gray comes across in a more extreme way than in his theatrical persona, his anguish and need not tempered by his perceptive charm. He writes searchingly about his sexuality. He chronicles his relationships with the three major women in his life — first LeCompte, then Renée Shafransky and later Kathleen Russo — each one overlapping with the last, each becoming involved in his work. And it is evident that even as a young man, Gray was battling the demons that would eventually lead him to end his life in 2004 by throwing himself from the Staten Island Ferry into the water.

But these entries also show an artist discovering his powers, in the process of creating an autobiographical genre that has since been so widely replicated that it is hard to imagine the daring it took to come first. The journals make up the rough draft of Gray’s adult life — one that he would later reproduce with the swift, literary hindsight of his monologues.

APRIL 20, 1970

I want to see

why?

because seeing makes me feel more alive, but at

the same time it makes me feel that I could kill myself

all I have written in the past boils down to these

questions

How much truth can a person take?

How honest will I be able to be?

JAN. 10, 1972

how relation

relationships

become ART.

how relationships become art!

FEB. 1, 1972

I am the story. The exercise is the articulation of the present me!

MARCH 7, 1972

I realize that the jig is up. This lazy in-between: I’ve really got to come to terms with Liz, me, the work — who I am and what in hell am I doing with my life — without comparisons. I feel as though I’m reaching a large crisis point in my life . . . I can’t turn away from it.

MARCH 18, 1972

Very confused about my bisexual feelings. This morning Liz and I woke early after a late night. (We sat up with Flip [McCarthy, a friend who filmed many of the Performance Group’s plays] and Ken [Kobland, who also shot the Performance Group and is still a film and video collaborator with LeCompte] talking about the “end of the world.”) What was most disturbing was Ken’s pointing out to me that if I had feelings that I should be doing something else in the face of death then I was not living now. The old truth of that was brought home once again, and then after waking early (also after a night of dreams about the very problem of these thoughts of another existence holding out for the “other life”), Liz accused me of not fully loving her, of dislike of women in general. . . .

If I crave a relationship with a man, I am not aware of it. I think the problem is more centered on desirous search for the young . . . youth! Youth! Youth! The golden boys and girls of my fantasy.

But I don’t know what to do about this problem of scrutinizing Liz and of dumping on her . . . it is, or seems, so deep rooted:

My fantasy

my supreme desire is to live each day in the face of death.

MAY 29, 1973

Last night Liz and I TALKED about feelings, and it got really scary for me. I suddenly felt as though my life has been lived like a man from the press. I’m always telling a story to myself or someone else. I’m telling a story about my life.

In 1974, Gray and LeCompte bought a loft, a former machine shop on Wooster Street, down the block from the Performing Garage. They came to know other emerging artists — Joan Jonas, Robert Wilson, Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass, among them — while Schechner’s Performance Group garnered attention and respect as an inventive theatrical enterprise. LeCompte and Gray also informally split off on their own and worked on dramatic pieces together.

In 1976, when Gray was 34, he traveled throughout India with a production of Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” put on by the Performance Group. While there, he had a nervous breakdown. His downward emotional spiral would continue as he traveled from India to Amsterdam, where he became physically frail and consumed by a fever.

The following is from an undated entry narrating the series of events that he would later come to call his “India breakdown.”

I began to drink beer and smoke a lot of cigarettes. I was not treating myself well and felt like I was on a self-destruct spiral. I could not will myself to leave Amsterdam and spent days and nights wandering the streets obsessed with Bali and Greece. . . . I could not make up my mind. America or Bali or Greece. I started to get overwrought and just plain crazy. I began to look for “signs” that I would try to interpret. An example of a sign: I SAW a man from Indonesia on the street, and I ASKED him when he came to Amsterdam, and he said, “1941,” and I’d try to read that. I’d try to figure it out and make a map or structure out of it. Like: “Let’s see, 1941 was the year that I was born, and that means if I go to Bali, that I’ll be reborn.” Then I’d think I was crazy. Don’t go anywhere.

Then during this period, I went to a homosexual bath club in Amsterdam and was “picked up” by this German photographer. He was very aggressive, and he made love to me like I was this beautiful woman. . . . I had never experienced such a complete giving over before. . . .

Then I found out that Liz was coming to Amsterdam. . . . I was so happy she called and rushed to meet her at the airport bus station. . . . As soon as she got off the bus, I wanted to run, but instead I stayed and beat her down with my “madness.” Looking back on it, I’m not clear whether I built this madness up to drop on her like a bomb. I was out of control.

I acted crazy or was crazy. I didn’t know the difference really. I told her about the homosexual experience. Her advice to me was to go back to America with her and try to work things out there. I decided to do this, but by the time I got to the airport, I was a nervous wreck. I began to break down and went to the ticket woman just before I was to board the plane and asked if I could get my luggage off the plane, and she said, “Yes.” And I said, “Skip it.” I know I was crazy, so I wasn’t crazy (yet). For much of the flight, Liz did not even know I was on the plane. I sat in the back and did not speak to her. The flight seemed an hour long. It was the first time I’d been on a plane without worrying about crashing. I really did not care if it crashed. My will was nonexistent. I was letting myself be thrown from situation to situation.

Liz took care of me. She brought me through. I don’t know what I would have done without her. She stuck with me and was always there for me. I got into therapy once a week with a psychiatrist, and he had me on tranquilizers. The hypermanic activity soon changed to deep depression, and I slept about 18 hours a day. . . . I was diagnosed as hyperkalemic and was put on a special diet and given megavitamin therapy. That, combined with my seeing the psychiatrist, brought me back to a condition where I was able to work. It was then that I began to make “Rumstick Road” [with LeCompte]. I also began to have an affair with a young woman. Looking back on it, I see myself as being totally destructive to Liz. It seems like she brought me through all that so I could run off with another woman. It’s beyond me how I could have done this, but I did it. And this is where it gets all confusing for me; this is where I stop being able to write about this experience. I feel guilty about this betrayal. I feel I used Liz. I feel I punished her for caring for me. I punished her for loving me. I resented her for helping me.

This is the part that’s hard to write about. I have no distance on it. I’m in it now.

JUNE 25, 1976

I feel as lost and desperate as the summer in Provincetown when I got out of college, not knowing who I am and ready to grasp at anything. Should I be this or that, here is what presents itself.

1. a world traveler

2. a Zen monk

3. a lover

4. a movie star

5. a dancer

6. a maker of a group to carry out my vision

7. a suicide victim

8. God

9. a family man just in love with Liz

I’m back [in New York] and hit by the wave of sloppy materialism, all this concrete and pork chops and beer and the overstuffed Grand Union. It’s impossible for me to make any selection among the 10,000 cans and great fluorescent through [sic] of meat and meat people sexy meat people and not so easy to meet people.

So what comes into my head is wanting to sell myself. So, I’m trying out for the movies, porn movies or New York gangster movies, any kind of movies, and Liz is going to push me . . . going to manage me. I’m also trying to do my own work whatever that means sort of running around and going crazy based on some thoughts and memories of my mother’s suicide.

Over the course of three years, Gray and LeCompte created “Sakonnet Point,” “Rumstick Road” and “Nayatt School.” Together, these pieces were called “Three Places in Rhode Island” or, less formally, “The Rhode Island Trilogy.” Each play in some way reflected a piece of Gray’s life. “Sakonnet Point,” which made its debut in 1975, was, according to Gray, “a silent mood piece, which represented the child before speech.” “Rumstick Road,” which opened two years later, was an experimental exploration of Gray’s mother’s psychiatric problems. With the debut of “Nayatt School” in 1978, “the monologue form I’d been developing found its full expression,” Gray wrote in the introduction to his book “Sex and Death.”

Image
Gray with Renée Shafransky.Credit...From the estate of Spalding Gray

Gray and LeCompte’s personal relationship did not weather this experience well. Questions as to whether they were well suited romantically had already arisen for both of them. The demands of Gray’s breakdown and their theatrical partnership pushed these doubts to the front. “Liz and I tried to collaborate in creating theater, and that put the relationship to the big test,” Gray explained in his 1996 monologue “It’s a Slippery Slope.” “I began having an affair, which helped lead to our separation, but I think we really came apart over competitive aesthetic differences. She went on to develop what became her theater company [the Wooster Group], and I went out on the road with the form of theater I chose to develop, the autobiographic monologue.”

LeCompte also met someone else: a 23-year-old actor from Wisconsin named Willem Dafoe, who joined the Performance Group in 1978. And yet there was never a definitive split between Gray and LeCompte. It was more of a slow, relatively agreeable drift into friendship. In the journals, Gray observes LeCompte as she gravitates toward Dafoe romantically — at times with the chaotic sense of someone losing his center but other times with the affection and distance of a brother. In 1979, Dafoe moved into the Wooster Street loft with LeCompte and Gray. They put up a wall with a door in it, dividing the apartment so LeCompte and Dafoe were in the front and Gray was in the back. The door was left unlocked, and the three of them shared a bathroom.

The following, from Gray’s 1978 and 1979 journals, are, for the most part, undated.

FEB. 26, 1978

Sometimes I see Liz running toward me with all that light and energy and I am happy and she looks beautiful to me and then other times when I’m done, I try to bring her down.

After rehearsal, Liz invited Willem back to the loft, which made me kind of angry. I just did not feel like having him around. Liz and I went to see Irish ballet. The music was nice, but we could not stand the dancing. Flip was there, and we went to Joe Allen’s to drink eat and talk. We got home about 10:30, watched Gore Vidal on the Cavett show, had another spat about Willem and what we should do.

Willy and Liz act like a couple more, and it’s strange for me to watch but very necessary for growth in the form of knowledge. I see her treating him like a boy, like a child. . . . I miss that from her, but a big part of me doesn’t want it anymore, doesn’t trust it anymore. Liz is a mother, and she nurtures well, and then she moves on. In a way, she has nurtured me through the big crisis of birth after India. She got me on my feet for my own work — 12 years, a very long slow painful birth. Now I see that Willem needs her, and she responds to that need like any good mother. If I could see this more clearly. The most I can give her is to let her go . . . let her do this, and I also see that I have no choice. The FORCE is in motion. I put it in motion as much as she did. We are all in this changing water together. I like Willem, but it is difficult for me to listen to him talk. I like him for his natural way of existence . . . his just being there for Liz. I think he is very good for her. A big part of me wants to see it work. I want her to be happy.

The old problem of doubt back on me again. Do I really have something to say, or is it Liz who is saying it just like Richard? Am I just an actor, a vehicle through which other people’s ideas pass?

Difficult adjustment to Willem and the movies [this is in reference to Dafoe’s small uncredited role in Michael Cimino’s film “Heaven’s Gate”] — some jealousy. I want them to want me . . . fear of getting lost in some intellectual ART world — associations of Hollywood as being a working-class world — theater for the people — fears of isolating myself in this little gay, fancy SoHo world — looking at Willem as a FRESH meat-and-potatoes man. Another time of confusion for me. Willem going away brings it all up again — not so much the glamour but a theater for the people — working on the BIG American myth — repulsed by my subjectivism. I am stuck in this constant doubt. . . always reflecting and always in doubt. This doubt does not have a crack to seep into when we all work together, but now Willy has made a crack in the boat. I made plans to go on with my solo piece, “Sex and Death Up Until Age 14.”; I know I must keep working. When I don’t ­— when there is no action, I am swallowed up in fear and doubt.

Have Liz or I or both of us been working under the grand illusion that we were individually artistic in temperament and that would not dry up even if there was no group supporting us? Willy’s movie is now causing a fear and depression among us all. It makes it hard for me to work because I am constantly working under the knowledge of a sense of loss, also mad and sick fantasies that I could have been a “great actor” in the films.

Liz says Chan [Gray’s younger brother] seems well. I would not know. So often I feel so involved in myself that I don’t see others. I have to face what more seems to be the truth — that I could only love Liz to the extent that she was incorporated into ME, my work, my fears . . . all these years I’ve used her to PROP me up . . . to keep me alive, and now it’s all being shaken and threatened by her relationship with Willem. Now I must be strong and take a good look at it. I feel now like I’m re-entering that HELL that was before I met Liz. I feel like a lost child again, but before, I had my youth to go on, and now I only see loneliness and old age and then I think — let go of it all — just give up on human love and put it all into ART; and when I think that way, it all looks barren . . . I feel like I will die without Liz. The worst thought is that Liz having our baby might save us. Oh HELP on that one. I need distance? I’m just like all the rest. I’m in the WORLD THAT IS.

On April 20, 1979, when he was 37, Gray’s first solo show, “Sex and Death to the Age 14,” made its debut at the Performing Garage. The show ran for a month and a half. He took the idea of using a wooden table from “Nayatt School” but shrank it down to the size of a desk. “I sat behind that desk,” Gray wrote in the book version of the show, “with a little notebook containing an outline of all I could remember about sex and death up until I was 14 years old.” He improvised the story for his audience, tape-recording each show, and adjusted his outline afterward. The story gradually grew from 40 minutes to 1 hour 20 minutes.

It was around this time that Gray met Renée Shafransky, 26, who worked as program director of the Collective for Living Cinema, an artist-run cooperative and theater for experimental film in downtown Manhattan. Gray begins writing about Shafransky in the early days of their romance, with the two of them ricocheting between a strong attraction and a reluctance to get seriously involved.

Went over to the Garage to set up chairs for my 103 reservations [for “Sex and Death”]. It was a very full house and there were many people there that I knew and could play the show for. Yvonne Rainer [the experimental dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker] was there, and Elaine from Houston sat right in the front row with that old sad crazy face. I really felt like I talked to the audience, and that felt good — kind of like a preacher, poet, comedian, all mixed together. With reluctance, I went to meet Renée at the Collective, and when I got there, I was glad to see her. We went for drinks and we got on well together and talked a lot. She is good-looking and intelligent but only 26 years old. I would never have guessed it. We went back to her place. She lives in an office on John Street. We drank wine and talked, then we went to bed and talked some about Willem and Liz. She, like so many other people, could not understand how I could live with it. These reactions make it hard for me to live with it. . . . She said, “Oh, Spalding,” and I said, “Yes?” and she said, “I think I’m going to be sick,” and at last she threw up. We both got very little sleep. I miss Liz.

A fire truck woke me up, and I did not know where I was and for a long time, I had this kind of half-awake, repetitive dream fantasy, the siren on the truck was to be followed by a loud speaker proclaiming the FAME of Phil Glass and I, but it never came up and a voice kept saying, “What if it never comes, what if they don’t announce your fame?” and I said, “It doesn’t matter.”

I called Renée and got her and planned for dinner at her place. After dinner we had a long therapy session by candlelight, very New York, very intellectual, very romantic. She went through the old story again about how it would be masochistic for her to get involved with me as long as I was involved in an emotional love with Liz. In fact, she told me no woman would touch me in the situation I was in. I began to fall for her and feel bad about myself. She told me I was in real bad shape, but strangely enough I felt otherwise. I felt at last I was beginning to live my life in a more honest way. What she told me should have made me feel depressed, but it had a strange opposite effect for me. When I got home, Liz was on the floor working on the script. It was good to see her.

I felt warm toward her — like a real friend. I told her about my evening, and she told me I played it real well. She said to be strong and hold out. I had two beers and went to bed. I did not feel any anger toward her. Hopeful.

I ended up staying up late with Willem and talking. He said he was angry about “Sex and Death.” He said I overdramatized my life, that I was full of a kind of hype and constantly made signals for help (the boy who cried wolf — my mother’s story) and that I did this to manipulate people into giving me constant attention, particularly women (Liz) and he felt it was not fair. He told me that he was in love with Liz and that he could relate to her as a man to a woman, and he wanted to know what I wanted from Liz. I told him that I wanted to work with her and to be friends but I felt weak and unable to let go of the hope of LOVE.

I’m coming apart and losing my center. At least I think I remember how to get back to it and will do it (can I trust myself to do it) when I need to . . . I do not like all the ACTING I do and that goes on around me. It feels like so much hype and I long to get back to a more simple state. I also feel a strong need to get back to writing and find no time at all for that now. I feel too much in the public eye. I love it but it eats me up and when I am left alone, I feel like a shell that always needs to be filled up by audience.

Went up to meet Renée at 9 to go out to dinner. . . . She has a certain romantic way of approaching her life, which I like. I think it is more than just her youth. It was a warm romantic night. The wind blew her white curtains. I felt cross-eyed with fatigue, and then the old neurotic fears come back. I get afraid that I am going to jump out her window in my SLEEP AND WAKE ON THE WAY DOWN.

JULY 4, 1979

I am clearly unable to take direction from anyone but Liz and even that comes hard. This is why I can’t be an actor right now.

Problems with father tempted by the idea that all I do may be a reaction against my father — I look at his life and do all I can to live my life in opposition to this makes my life inflexible and rigid.

How will I make money to live?
Work in a mental hospital?
That’s the only fantasy I have left.

To be famous is to be stuck in an inflexible place.
But at least it is to be stuck with money.
Money is not everything but it is something.

I don’t know where my identity lies now. What do I call myself when people ask ­—
I am not a father, a husband, a lover.
Maybe a performer.
Yes, maybe I am that.
I perform things in public
And right now I am doing these talking pieces.
So right now I have to hold on to that.

You can also work on your vocabulary; begin by taping words and their meanings.

Better ask Rich about a good dictionary.
He may have one.
Begin with the word — “indulgent”

The question for therapy?
Do I want to become a professional something?
And if, so a professional what?

But I still think about being a child therapist and I can’t get that fantasy out of my head — understanding the child in me? I think I will apply to the clinics anyway and see what happens. One thing I did want to say about the idea and fantasy of my becoming a therapist is that I’m very able to act as a screen for people’s fear and anger. I don’t seem to get involved.

I sometimes feel like that; like I am this open conduit through which I let other energies pass. It started as an actor, and the other energies were other people’s scripts.

Now it is my life that is passing through me.

After finding his voice in “Sex and Death,” Gray presented six monologues in quick succession over the next three years. In 1983, he performed an early version of his one-man show “Swimming to Cambodia,” telling stories from his life and from his experience acting in the Roland Joffé film “The Killing Fields” while also narrating the Cambodian genocide. “Swimming” was Gray’s watershed monologue, and it met with near-fanatical critical praise. He soon became our pre-eminent theatrical confessor, even as he always held a part of himself back.

This article is adapted from "The Journals of Spalding Gray"; edited by Nell Casey, to be published by Knopf this month.

Editor: Lauren Kern

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 24 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Dark Prince Of Downtown. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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