Spalding Gray at tedstrong.com

From the Washington Times...

Vanishing Point
The Monologuist Transformed His Life Into Art, but Left the Final Chapter Unfinished
By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 5, 2004; Page C01

Spalding Gray believed he was destined to die a suicide, as his mother was. His wife fears that is the explanation for his disappearance three weeks ago. (1996 Photo Joe Tabacca -- AP)

NEW YORK -- His scent still lingers on the bedsheets in their SoHo loft. Kathie Russo hasn't changed them. She wants to remember the last time her husband, Spalding Gray, slept there.

His skis still stand in a corner of the living room. He was supposed to fly to Aspen on Jan. 10, but his flight was canceled. So he took in a movie, "Big Fish," with two of their kids, Theo and Marissa, and walked the dog, Bowie, a miniature Australian shepherd.

That evening, with Russo at a conference, Gray went back out. He boarded the Staten Island Ferry. For many years, the acclaimed 62-year-old monologuist and actor had been tormented and suicidal. And that evening, he vanished. He could be alive, out there somewhere. But those closest to him, who know his obsession with death, fear he jumped into New York Harbor.

Three weeks have passed. Russo has waited, gone mad from not knowing, suspected the worst, and waited and gone mad, about her fragile husband. Family and friends have poured out their support. ("Mom, why are all these people bringing food?" 7-year-old Theo innocently asked.)

Looking for clues or a note, police have searched Gray and Russo's three residences, including an Upstate New York cabin, and found nothing helpful, Russo says. They continue to track tips that come in, but to no avail, police sources say. Russo's parents tracked a tip themselves and went to an Upstate diner where Gray was allegedly sighted sometime after Jan. 10. But the diner's surveillance cameras showed nothing. Police checked it out too. The tip was bogus.

What happened to Spalding Gray? No one can say for sure.

Russo has had to churn forward, make life go on, if only for the three children. She is focused, task-oriented. And the task at hand is to try to shield the children, as much as possible, from what she believes to be the terrible fact (suicide) of Gray's vanishing.

She thought maybe it would be good to return to work. She made her first trip into the city from the family home in North Haven near Sag Harbor on Long Island since her husband's vanishing. She needed to visit her office, her talent agency, though she discovered it's too soon to try to work.

Now she is dragging a full laundry bag and a small ancient television down the loft stairs to load into the Volvo wagon. She and Gray had no television at North Haven, a tactic to keep the kids from getting addicted. That's no problem for 17-year-old Marissa, who is college-bound and bookish. But 11-year-old Forrest has been whining lately for a TV.

And before she hits the highway, Russo's got to stop off on Sullivan Street, a narrow snow-sloshed lane, to find a store that will have the tiny British toy soldiers Theo craves. She's not sure how this Revolutionary War fixation began. Gray used to bring the soldiers home and add to the boy's collection. Father and son, both dyslexic, spent long hours playing at history and war.

Russo, 43, would like to think she has shielded Theo and Forrest from the likelihood of their father's suicide. (Marissa is too worldly-wise for shielding. She knows, or at least suspects.) Russo does not use words about "death." The word "missing" remains accurate.

On his birthday four days after his father's disappearance, when helium balloons filled the house, Theo told Russo, "Mom, tomorrow I'm gonna let the balloons go with a note, 'Please help me find my daddy.' "
As the days dragged on, so did his questions, his mother recalls. One day came this:

"Mom, if they don't find Dad, are you gonna get another husband?"

Russo didn't know what to say. But Theo took her off the hook.

"You can only get a new one," he said, "if he buys me British soldiers."

Dancing With the Dark

All that is left of me is this horrid, lingering awareness that knows there is no longer any solid configuration of me that can touch and hold my son. It is a true horror. It's the making of a haunted ghost.... That is what I think of now as a perfect vision of hell. -- Spalding Gray, 1999.

He expressed such profound love for his children. He called Theo "my outdoor bliss kid" and Forrest "child light of my life." With Marissa, he had an edgy relationship. She was, he wrote, a "drama queen" -- as much, perhaps, as he was a drama king. From an early age, she believed the name Spalding Gray sounded like the words "splendid cafe." That is what she called him: Splendid Cafe. He had not expected kids; had not wanted them. But they transformed him, and brought him fullness. Yet, even as he wrote of the preciousness of fatherhood in his book "Morning, Noon and Night," based on his 1998 monologue of the same name, the specter of death lurked over him. He collected books about death. He dreamed about conversations with death. "The disembodied voice of death still visits me every day to remind me that I will die, and the idea of that, of not being here forever, just wipes me out," he wrote.

Death has been Gray's obsession, his fascination. It petrified him, yet he grew accustomed from an early age -- from his own mother's threats to kill herself -- to death's constant presence.

He is known as a man of some angst, of edge, maybe a little bit crazy in that colloquial showbiz kind of way, which is to say idiosyncratic. His award-winning stage monologues, including "Swimming to Cambodia" and "Gray's Anatomy," both of which became movies, are filled with anxiety. He has told stories straight from the strangeness of his life, from his own marital infidelity to a near-death experience in Ireland. He has, in a way, lived life in order to tell of life. And his gift as an artist has been the ability to tell stories that seemed literary even as they were extemporaneous, free-associated.

"Most of us didn't recognize it as mental illness at all, because he was incredibly gifted about bringing back those experiences" of his monologues, says Mark Russell, executive director of Performance Space 122, an experimental theater and cultural center in the East Village where Gray has developed work over the years. "And we're all a little bit crazy. In my business it's a necessity."

But over the years, Gray had been diagnosed as depressed or bipolar or obsessive-compulsive, depending on the doctor, Russo says. He has taken enough medication for these ailments to make his body a pharmaceutical cocktail.

Crash After the Crash

In June 2001, during a trip to Ireland that was a 60th-birthday present from Russo, Gray's life fractured both physically and mentally.

Russo, Gray's partner for 14 years, including seven as his wife, drove that night. Friends filled the rental car. Gray sat in the back seat, behind his wife. A small truck smashed into them head-on, with such force that it shoved the car's engine into the front seat.

Gray wore no seatbelt. His body whipped forward. His forehead crashed into the back of Russo's head. His eyeglasses embedded into his sinuses. His skull was cracked. Doctors would later discover damage to the frontal lobe of the brain. Russo was treated for burns from the car engine, for severe bruising within her chest caused by the car's deployed air bag, and a head injury requiring a dozen stitches.

Gray's head injury, the broken hip, the severed sciatic nerve and dropped foot left him like this: a metal plate in his skull, a metal plate in his hip, a brace to hold up his drooping foot, all of which required extensive surgery during four hospital stays, plus inpatient rehabilitation to learn how to walk again.

And once Gray learned to walk, the suicide attempts began, which led to two stays in psychiatric hospitals, one for four months. All this happened in 21/2 years. He had been seeing a shrink as often as twice a week.

The man he once was, he was no more. He felt older, says Russo, recalling how he spoke of being tired and feeling aged. That she is 20 years his junior probably did not help, she says. It would take a while before he could again ski. He could barely do physical exercise.

"I think he was beleaguered," says Rockwell Gray, Spalding's older brother by three years, a lecturer in English at Washington University in St. Louis. "He was feeling so reduced from the effects of the accident. Physical impairment weighed on him heavily."

In 2002, Spalding left a note on the kitchen table and then jumped from a Sag Harbor bridge, a fall of 25 feet into the water. A passerby rescued him and swam him to shore. She asked him later," 'How do you feel?' And he said, 'Well, I got that out of my system.'"

Two more suicidal episodes followed. At that very same bridge, a stranger had to talk Gray down from the railing. And last fall, he left a telephone message saying he would jump from the Staten Island Ferry. Russo called police. They found Gray roaming Staten Island. Russo viewed these attempts as cries for help, not real attempts to face death.

But Gray, despite his illnesses, was making progress. In September he had the most recent of his surgeries. In October, he started two months of workshop performances at PS 122 of a monologue about the accident, "Life Interrupted."

It was, at first, rocky going, says Russell. His monologue expanded from 35 minutes to 60 as Gray gained more confidence and comfort with his theatrical voice. Though patrons understood the monologue still was in development, Gray's huge reputation was such that some expected far more than he at first could deliver, says Russell. There were a few irate phone calls complaining about the quality of the performances. But Russell saw Gray blossoming anew.

"He was a man dealing with physical disabilities and obviously depression and he would be sometimes more present and animated than other times. . . . We were seeing him reemerge. It was really exciting," Russell says.

The monologue -- which has not been transcribed or published -- rails, in part, against the medical care he received in Ireland, says Russo. The key to traveling in Ireland, he says, is to have a platinum American Express card so you can get an airlift out in case you get injured.

"We were going to bring it back in April and start working on it again," says Russell. "So the world was ahead of him and we were getting great response. And actually the piece was hilarious, no matter how terrifying the situation was. That's why this was such a shock to many of us, because I just thought we had gotten him back."

A Grim Inheritance

I woke up to find my brother standing on his bed, holding his throat with both hands, blue in the face and crying for help. He kept crying "Help Help I can't breathe." . . . Then at last mom and dad calmed Rocky down and dad went back to bed and mom turned out the light and sat there in the dark beside Rocky. I just lay there listening and staring up at the only light in the room, the fluorescent decals of the moon and the stars on the ceiling. I lay there, and Rocky started in and said, "Mom, when I die will it be forever?" And mom answered him with this beautiful, calm tone of voice, so simple and slow. She just said, "Yes, dear."

When Gray turned 52, he felt he would kill himself. That was his mother's age when she took her own life. He felt, say Russo and Rockwell Gray, somehow destined to meet the same end as his mother. He monologued about it in "Slippery Slope," published as a book in 1997.

He had been close to his mother in a particular way -- close, says the brother, in terms of the "wild energy" that she had and how it "corresponded to something in him." Spalding, he says, spent a lot of time with his mother while she "was having periodic troubles, like a breakdown."

Spalding witnessed his mother at very low points, literally pulling out her hair, Russo recalls her husband telling her. Margaret Gray used to set a place for Jesus at the dinner table of the family home in Barrington, R.I. And the hauntings of suicide perhaps began quite early.

"From the age of 12, she would ask him how she should kill herself," says Russo. Gray chronicled some of this period in "Swimming to Cambodia."

On one occasion, his mother tried to drown herself in Narrangansett Bay. In 1967, when Spalding was 26, she succeeded in ending her life, succumbing to exhaust fumes in the family garage. On his own 52nd birthday, Spalding Gray went into a deep depression and had suicide fantasies, which he later monologued about.

Especially after his accident, says Rockwell, Spalding became "obsessed with the idea that somehow he was playing out a script somewhat like hers, that he would end his life. . . . I think he had worked out a myth for himself in which he had to bring his life to an end."

Somehow his sense of doom deepened when Spalding, Kathie and the children moved into a new home in September 2001 -- in fact, on the 11th. The movers arrived even as the couple saw the news of the terror attacks. Gray was already in a heavy funk that day. He did not want to move. And he never felt comfortable in the new house, though it is a large Federal-style home on two acres of land just a mile from the town of Sag Harbor, which he loved.

On one of his suicide attempts, he left a note on the kitchen table. "I can't go on in this house. I love you all," is what it said, Russo recalls. Unfortunately, Forrest caught a glimpse of it.

Gray talked, both to Russo and to his brother, of the fact that his mother moved unhappily into a new home shortly before her death. He obsessed about the signs he saw that doomed his own move.

The sellers of Gray and Russo's new home were the Wards. Gray somehow saw this as a sign that what killed his mother was the thought that she'd be locked away in some ward, and that he would thus be locked away, says Robby Stein, a close friend of 17 years, the godfather to Theo, and also a clinical psychologist.

He was so miserable away from the old house, which had new owners, that "on three different occasions he offered them twice what they paid for it," Russo says.

It only made his mental state worse that the bridge near the new house recently had been designated as the Lost at Sea Memorial Pike. This, too, seemed like a sign to Gray that he would die at sea.

His moods swung wildly. He would sometimes recede into silence for hours, for days. At Christmas, says his brother, he did not speak. He sat by the fire and would not engage with Rockwell or anyone else.
He became so paranoid that if you said it was a beautiful sunny day he'd begin to obsess about dying of ultraviolet rays, says Stein. He talked with Stein frequently about these fears.

"He felt he was being attacked by witches, that there was a cosmic and universal plot against him, that he was too weak to resist it, that he had what his mother had, that he was detrimental to his family. . . . He could not get it out of his mind, that he was being taken over and he somehow needed to end his life," Stein says.

Gray mentioned suicide to Stein the Monday before his disappearance, Stein recalls. But Gray mentioned suicide just about all the time.

Since the accident, says Stein, there's been "21/2 years of hell for this family. To see your father in and out of mental institutions. To see your father walking around not making sense."

Russo remembers how Gray cried at a performance of 11-year-old Forrest's rock band, the Wayne Stock. Forrest is a drummer and he made his father proud.

"I think that Forrest, to him, was just the kind of boy he wanted to be but couldn't, because of his mother," says Russo. "He battled the demons of his mother's suicide all his life."

Turbulent Waters

Five miles of rough currents in New York Harbor separate the ferry terminals at Battery Park in Manhattan and Staten Island. The waters are exceptionally frigid this winter, with ice floes here and there. Because of the cold, people who jump in will die. Their bodies will likely sink. After each winter, law enforcement routinely sees the remains of jumpers surface in these waters.

The ferry boats chug through in 25 minutes, back and forth, back and forth. The boats give a perfect sea-level view of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Many people enjoy riding those ferries as relaxation. It now seems that Gray's fixation was different.

It didn't seem altogether strange to Russo that he rode the ferries so much. She knew that Gray believed in symbols and cosmic connections. He'd always felt a special need to be near water.

He rode that day he came into the city from North Haven before Christmas and bought a lovely garnet ring for Russo. The ferry pilot remembered seeing him, Russo says. And Gray rode the ferry twice on Friday, Jan. 9. The ferry captain saw him, Russo says.

And on Jan. 10, Russo now knows from police, four people saw Gray aboard the ferry. The last contact his family had with him came at 7:30 p.m., a call police traced to a pay phone at the ferry terminal building on Staten Island.