Spalding Gray obituary

Writer Spalding Gray’s body
found after apparent suicide
Monologist and actor embodied American
crisis of self for over 20 years
 
No eulogy, poem, or
peer-penned literary remembrance will prove as painfully precise a memorial to
Spalding Gray as his own work.  Though most of his adult life was spent in
varying states of anxiety and dread, one especially poignant moment of pure joy
stood out in my mind as I read headlines announcing the discovery of his body,
the afternoon of March 8th, 2004.  
 
In his mid-1990s
monologue It’s a Slippery Slope-- booked in proximity to ski resorts, so
he could pursue that latter-day passion-- Gray discusses smoking pot and hitting
Buttermilk for an entire day with a small group of fans.  While barreling
down the hill, trying to get the knack of turning right, one of them calls out,
“Spalding, think of it as a white wall of death!”, to which he, en monologue,
replies, “Ooh, I know where she gets her kicks-- she wants me to do a monologue
about this and she wants to be in it!”
 
For such psychologically
reassuring moments of self-awareness and levity, it’s now fatally obvious the
degree to which Gray was consumed by doubt in recent years.  Whatever drew
audiences to him-- sympathy, Schadenfreude-- the act of sharing his bottomless,
boundless desperation was, as is often pointed out, life as therapy.  

 
Gray may or may not have held that life together using his
monologues as a framework, a way of crystallizing his existence, but after his
now widely-reported, near-fatal car accident in Ireland three years ago,
splitting headaches, constant hip pain and an assortment of medications-- both
psycho- and physiological-- drove Gray from depression to mental illness as
starkly detached as his late mother’s.  Though it’s easy to wonder if
mimicry had anything to do with recent bouts of unhinged predeterminist raving,
Gray’s last act was the inevitable finale of a life spent analyzing the suicide
of his mother, a devout Christian Scientist, at 52.  Gray addressed her
passing most directly in the thinly (and needlessly) veiled autobiography
Impossible Vacation, but mentions it in all of his full-length
monologues.  
 
After ten years of my own sympathy,
Schadenfreude and envy-- the man wrote his own ticket like no WASP before--
Terrors of Pleasure, a late-80s work Gray revived in the mid-90s, remains
a personal favorite.  Built around his purchase of a rural New York cabin
the summer after filming The Killing Fields (a process immortalized in
his most famous work, Swimming to Cambodia, later filmed by Jonathan
Demme), it is by far Gray’s most uplifting-- borderline cheerful-- tale.  

 
A collection of small observations about small things, Terrors
of Pleasure is never distracted by the unanswerable questions of death and
dying that constantly paralyzed its author; listening again to a superlative
rendition released by Audio Literature in 1996, I’m struck by its almost
childlike simplicity of scope, by its immediacy and by how much more personality
it delivers than the dramatic, storyboarded works he’s lauded for.  While
many are sure to analyze his overlooked ode to the joys of fatherhood, 1999’s
Morning, Noon and Night, the audio-book is awkwardly distracted, and not
recommended.  
 
It’s not known whether a monologue dealing
with his car accident and physical rehabilitation, the now painfully-titled
Life Interrupted (first known as The Black Spot), was ever
documented or completed following run-throughs at PS 122 in New York.
 Reportedly, these performances were hard to watch, though Gray was able to
fight back his heavy medication and catatonic depression for the last few dates,
to standing ovations each time.  
 
It’s a sad, strange cross
for Tim Burton’s Big Fish to carry, but the film’s bittersweet tale of a
long-winded patriarch relaying wild adventures from his deathbed painted a
legacy not far from Gray’s.   The nostalgic whimsy and reassuringly eternal
tone of Burton’s ode to the father-son/myth-reality complex was undoubtedly the
impetus for Gray’s decision to end his life, despite the immeasurable damage to
his family.  After taking his son to see Big Fish Gray brought him
home, then returned to his beloved coast, to board the Staten Island ferry for
the last time; as his widow Kathleen Russo tearfully relayed to the New York
Metro in February 2004, the film “gave him permission to die.”