Remembering Spalding Gray

by Francine Prose

One: Listening

For a guy whose life in art mostly involved talking about himself, Spalding was an unusually attentive and thoughtful listener. It was among his most striking qualities and among the first I noticed, though at the beginning I got it wrong. That is, I thought he had an odd sense of timing. Slow. I'd say something, and a long silence would pass before he replied. Later, I understood that, in that lag, he was taking in, and reflecting upon, whatever I'd just said, instead of, like most people, merely marking time until it was his turn to talk. The ability to listen, truly listen, is so rare and remarkable that, during our early conversations, I assumed it was a tic.

This was in 1982. Spalding and his girlfriend Renee were looking for a country place to rent, and a mutual friend had told them that Howie and I had an eighteenth-century cabin—"the little house"—on our land in the Hudson Valley. It was the dead of winter. Spalding and Renee drove up from Manhattan in the dark green wreck of a Dodge van that he would eventually abandon behind our barn, where it has remained, slowly sinking into the earth until its wheels are now nearly buried.

I hadn't yet seen Spalding perform, but one of his early monologues, 47 Beds—the title came from a count of the places he'd slept in during one peripatetic year—had just opened at the Performing Garage, and I'd read a review. We ate chicken soup with egg, escarole and Parmesan, and talked about food (I remember him saying gah-lic in his New England accent) and quitting smoking. He told a story, the first of the hundreds, maybe thousands he would tell us over more than twenty years—this one about giving up tobacco and then being required to smoke during his brief, inglorious career as a porn star in a film called "The Farmer's Daughter."
Not long afterwards, Spalding began doing a theater piece entitled "Interviewing the Audience," which involved calling audience members up onstage and encouraging them to tell stories about their lives. Being open and listening without judgment was extremely important to him, it was something he often talked about, and I think that was partly what persuaded these volunteers to tell him (and his listeners) their secrets. I saw the piece a half dozen times, it was one of my favorites, and what I loved best was how it provided the thrill of that moment when you first get to know someone, the instant when a stranger suddenly reveals a dazzlingly human, endearingly familiar face-but without the effort of making that moment happen.

On that chilly February afternoon, a similar sort of magic transpired. By the time Spalding and Renee left, we'd agreed to rent them the cabin for the summer. More importantly, we'd become friends. I felt then, as I felt throughout our friendship (and I emphasize this because one running joke of Spalding's stage persona concerned the intensity of his self-involvement), that he saw us clearly, understood our family in ways mostly hidden from outsiders. In several monologues, he referred to Howie as "my demi-shaman friend upstate," thus encapsulating a series of personal qualities that have never been more succinctly expressed and that have nothing to do with masks or ritual dances.

That summer, the four adults were almost comically respectful of one another's privacy. No eye contact when we passed in the yard, no conversation until the nightly "cocktail hour," a rite that was not only essential to Spalding's day but to his whole concept of civilization, and to which he rapidly introduced us, his willing students. But every morning our son Bruno, then four, wandered over to the little house for a companionable breakfast of Cheerios and bananas. On the day I went to the hospital to give birth to Leon, Bruno stayed behind for a barbecued swordfish dinner with Spalding.

I am certain that my sons never met anyone who listened to them with quite the same rapt, nearly solemn attention. Just after my father died, a period when I felt walled off from the rest of the world, including my own grieving children, Spalding came to visit. From the living room couch, on which I was spending most of my time, I could hear him and the kids outside, on the front porch. He was asking about their grandfather's death, and they told him—clearly, honestly, sweetly—how sad they were. Spalding listened, then told them that he too had been sad after his mother's death. They asked how she died, and he said she'd committed suicide. They seemed to understand. He spared them the details which by then he'd revealed to so many audiences. Because one mark of the perfect listener was that he had been able to intuit, from what they had said, precisely how much, and exactly what, they wanted and needed to hear.

Two: Storytelling

We all repeat ourselves, and we all long to believe that our friends and loved ones are telling us what they have never before, and never will, tell anyone else. With Spalding, it was different. When he told his friends a story, we knew he was working, because he was always trying out material for his monologues, which he wrote partly by telling stories, in social settings, until he'd polished them enough to tell onstage. In fact it was a pleasure to serve as a sort of test audience, not only because the stories themselves were so entertaining, but also because it was fascinating to see how he transformed them into art, how he shaped a narrative and imposed an order on the ragged unruliness of daily experience.

The second summer Spalding lived with us, he had just come back from Thailand, where he'd gone to play an American diplomat in The Killing Fields. Though I didn't realize it for a while, he was having the first of the several breakdowns we would watch him endure. He was convinced that he should have stayed in Thailand, and no matter how we reasoned with him, now matter how convivial our cocktail hour was, the obsession persisted: Why had he come home? What wondrous adventures would have befallen him if he'd stayed? It made for a harrowing summer, a fairly grim few months for us all.

A year or so later, we attended an early performance of Swimming to Cambodia. The first version lasted four hours, took place over two successive evenings, and was—I thought then, and still do—a masterpiece. Spalding had managed to seamlessly weave together all the themes that preoccupied him and that recurred constantly in his work and his conversation: politics, history, spirituality, America, drugs, sex, language, philosophy, anxiety, indecision, experience, health, the body, and the soul. His account of the troubled summer that followed his return from Asia was notably more entertaining and funnier than what we remembered. Nothing he said was untrue, it was just-like art-different from life. He'd transformed darkness into dark comedy. Whenever he mentioned the name of our town in the Catskills—Krumville—the audience burst out laughing.

The experience became a kind of template for our friendship and, indeed, for Spalding's life. What was, in reality, often chaotic and terrifying was transmuted into an artful narrative that leavened pain with humor, irony, and intelligence. We watched such transformations occur when Spalding left our little house and bought a hideous shack in the Catskills (Terrors of Pleasure), through the period when a degenerative eye condition led him to sample a smorgasbord of New Age healings and quack cures (Gray's Anatomy), and throughout his agonized efforts to write a novel (Monster in A Box). Convinced that novel-writing was superior to writing for the stage, he had a huge respect for novelists, and the fact that I was one was an important part of our friendship. We talked about books, writing, narrative, and especially about the challenge of making art that combined (or so we hoped) high seriousness with high irony.

Because his stage persona emphasized the most neurotically obsessive and self-monitoring aspects of his personality, because he used the self as a lens through which to view the world, people tended not to notice how much of the world he saw, and how much, beyond the self, engaged his passionate interest—how much of Swimming to Cambodia, for example, was about the Cambodian genocide and our involvement in Vietnam. He was meticulously observant, and though dyslexia made it difficult, he read widely. He was fascinated by Buddhism and horrified by the excesses of capitalism. His politics were what I suppose you would call sixties left: antinuclear, anticorporate, wise to the government's insidious manipulations and deceptions.

It often seemed that Spalding was, as we were, always leaving for somewhere or returning from somewhere else. We'd lose touch for months. But always he'd return from his travels with stories that we listened to, often several times, enjoying both the hearing and the expectation of hearing them undergo that sea change that would turn them into art.

Three: Happiness

In the early 1990s, Spalding had another breakdown, the worst so far. He stopped bathing and nearly stopped talking, except to himself. He developed weird habits: he'd carry chicken around in little bags he'd nibble from, in restaurants. He married Renee. At their wedding, on Long Island, Spalding had taken a disturbingly long time to say "I do," and had introduced me to someone as Francine Prozac-neither of which seemed like good signs. Like most of his friends, we were unaware that he'd already started an affair with Kathie, who was pregnant. By the time we found out, Spalding had left Renee to live with Kathie and their son Forrest. Spalding's depression lifted.

His two most recent monologues—It's a Slippery Slope and Morning, Noon, and Night—are partly about the process of falling in love, first with Forrest, and then with family life. Morning, Noon, and Night was, I think, the trickiest monologue for him to write. There were an unusual number of false starts, and, even for Spalding, paralyzing doubts. The problem, he kept saying, was the difficulty of making art about happiness—happy families are all alike—and the essential relationship between narrative and conflict. Amazingly, he succeeded. Morning, Noon, and Night worked, partly because of his ability to observe, to listen, to let the voices of his children—Marisa, Forrest, and Theo—come through and join his own in a chorus of utterly quotidian domestic strangeness.

That was one of the things we discussed when Howie and I visited Spalding in the fall of 2000. He and Kathie and the kids were living in the green Sag Harbor village house that he so loved, and that would soon become the subject of yet another obsession. We drove out to Long Island in a torrential rainstorm. I remember bursting into Spalding's bright kitchen, and that feeling of gratitude that sweeps over you when you come in out of bad weather and find yourself in the warmth and light with the friends you love most.

Late at night, after the kids were in bed, Spalding spoke of his worries about ever writing another monologue, about whether he could continue to make art out of a life that was increasingly calm, placid—and happy. That night, we talked as if happiness were a permanent condition, a nearly insurmountable obstacle.

Four: Grief

I often think how none of the people I've loved have chosen to make a hasty departure from this world. And Spalding's disappearance—not so much the sudden vanishing this past January, but the slow diminution that took place over the previous two years—was especially protracted, and cruel.

In the summer of 2001, a friend e-mailed me to say that Spalding and Kathie had been in a serious auto accident in Ireland. Another friend gave me the number of Spalding's hospital room, and, astonishingly, I got through. Spalding's injuries (a broken hip; the skull fracture was as yet undiagnosed) were grave indeed, but he sounded cheerful and launched into a hilarious description of the filthy country hospital and of the broken vials of mad cow medicine littering the road after their car was struck by a local veterinarian rushing to make a house call. I remember saying that, after all, life was giving him material for another monologue, and he said yes, he knew, he was taking notes.

That was our last cheerful conversation. By the time Spalding returned to New York, and began undergoing a series of reparative surgeries, he was gloomy, distant, and it was all too easy to recognize the familiar symptoms of a rapidly deepening depression.

On the night of September 11, 2001, we called to see how he was. He knew what had happened, but mostly what he wanted to talk about was the fact that they had moved that day from the house he loved to a new house, further out of town, that he hated. I recall feeling slightly shocked and irritated, and thinking—for the first time—that, even though I knew he was ill, maybe he was self-involved. Over the next weeks, as he expressed his regret that the aftermath of the accident had left him unable to report from Ground Zero, he sometimes sounded as if he thought the disaster was a missed career opportunity. And then he forgot about that, and there was only the house, the houses: the house he loved and left, the house he hated and lived in. He couldn't be distracted, couldn't talk about anything else for longer than a few minutes. And now, at last, he was truly self-involved, self-absorbed, sunk into himself. But the tragedy was that he had no more self (that is, anything recognizable as his lively, complex, and immensely lovable former self) to sink into.

Any long decline leaves its survivors with images and memories they would rather not have lodged in their minds. The last time I saw Spalding, he was in a psychiatric clinic. He was frightened, trembling, terrifyingly thin, receiving electroshock treatments. After he got out of the hospital, he came up to our country house, where Howie and two other close male friends spent a weekend talking to him, trying to ease his reentry into "normal life." For a while they thought it had worked, and then they knew it hadn't.

Over the summer, I spoke to Spalding on the phone a few times, but mostly I talked to Kathie. He got better, then worse. There were suicide attempts. In the fall, he performed in Manhattan. Howie and I were scheduled to go, but didn't. We were leaving for Mexico. If he was, as people said, improving, I figured I'd catch him slightly further along on the upswing. The truth was, I still found it too painful to see him. It felt a little like visiting someone in a deep coma: it doesn't seem to make them feel better, it just makes you feel worse. And I was frightened by the way that the miserable and frustrating realities of his illness were beginning to erode my memories of what a joy it had been, what a privilege it had felt like, to talk to someone—to have a friend—with such a unique and profoundly interesting way of seeing the world.

And then, in January, a friend phoned to say that Spalding had disappeared. It seemed probable (and more likely, as time passed) that he might have jumped off the Staten Island Ferry. It was something he'd talked about doing, and several times nearly done. Which makes sense, if anything does. He'd always loved the water, he'd always said he could never live very far from the sea.

Spalding also loved poetry, the more difficult and cerebral the better. Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot-he read them with relative (that is, relative to most people) ease, perhaps because the dyslexia obliged him to go slowly, stopping at every word. And now, when I wake up in the middle of the night, as I still do, thinking about Spalding, about Kathie and their kids and my kids and his friends and our grief and the monologues that will never be written, poetry is the only thing that helps. Not Eliot or Stevens, but, in this case, Shakespeare—Ariel's song from "The Tempest." I repeat it silently, over and over, like a kind of mantra, an idea that Spalding would have enjoyed, since the idea of a personal mantra was a recurrent theme in his work, and one that he found simultaneously compelling and ridiculous.

Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

As I said, it helps. It's all there: the sea, the coral, the pearls. I like the idea of Spalding not fading, and of what he left us undergoing yet another sea change into something that will not only endure but will reveal itself, over time, as endlessly more rich and strange than we can hope, at this moment, to know.

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