Spalding Gray: 1941-2004
by Chris Ott

No eulogy, poem or peer-penned literary remembrance can memorialize writer, actor and monologist Spalding Gray as well 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 8, 2004, a few weeks after he apparently jumped off the Staten Island Ferry.

In his mid-1990s monologue "It's a Slippery Slope," booked in proximity to ski resorts so he could pursue his latter-day passion for the sport, Gray discussed smoking pot and hitting Buttermilk for an entire day with a small group of fans. While he was barreling down the hill, trying to get the knack of turning right, one of them called out, "Spalding, think of it as a white wall of death!" to which he, en monologue, replied, "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 reassuring moments of self-awareness and levity, the degree to which Gray was consumed by doubt in recent years is now fatally obvious. 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's monologues may have provided a framework for holding his life together, a way of crystalizing his existence. After his near-fatal car accident three years ago, however, splitting headaches, constant hip pain and an assortment of medications — both psycho- and physiological — drove Gray from depression to starkly detached mental illness. Though it's easy to wonder if mimicry had anything to do with recent bouts of 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 veiled autobiographical novel "Impossible Vacation," but mentions it in all of his full-length monologues.

Of all Gray's work, perhaps only one, "Terrors of Pleasure," fully escapes the otherwise omnipresent questions of death and dying that constantly paralyzed the author. "Terrors," a late-80s piece Gray revived in the mid-90s, is 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). The superlative rendition released in 1996 by Audio Literature is striking in its simplicity, in its immediacy and in how much more personality it delivers than the dramatic, storyboarded works for which Gray is lauded.

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 its 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."