After years of talking about sex,
suicide and self-obsession,
Spalding Gray finally gets personal.

By Cathleen Hockman
Photos by Natalie Montgomery

t started with this image: He was running down 42nd Street, naked except for a red jock strap.

There he was, a never-heard-of-him actor in New York City. It was 1979, and Spalding Gray had just left a theater group he had cofounded. He knew he wanted to go solo, whatever that meant. But he had no idea how. He just had this image.

"I realized I was trying to expose myself, but when I opened the raincoat, I wanted you to see it all: genitals, heart, knees, throat, brain. I'm an exhibitionist but a very creative one. My nature is to confess and do it well. Confession as entertainment -- ultimately it's a healing act."

Oh, the man can talk. During the last seventeen years, Gray has written and performed fifteen autobiographical monologues and appeared in six feature films, most recently Diabolique with Sharon Stone. Two of his monologues -- the award-winning Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box -- have been made into films.

Seventeen years of talking about himself in front of thousands of people: Is this nothing more than narcissism run amuck?

Gray prefers "poetic journalist" to describe himself (please don't call him a monologist). But if he were a poet, he would be a straight Allen Ginsberg -- if you can imagine Ginsberg as an ironic, neurotic, existential, hypochondriacal ex-Christian Scientist from New England. Gray's favorite definition of his role came from a 10-year-old girl he once saw hanging around after a performance. When he asked what she was doing, she replied, "My dad said I had to come and see the talking man."

You'll find Gray's monologue films in the stand-up comedy section of your nearest Blockbuster Video, although he is often billed as a sit-down comic. But sometimes it's hard to understand why he's labeled a comic at all. Sure, Gray's stories are often hilarious, and he has an acute eye for the ironic and the ridiculous in everyday life. But there's always a dark side to his light, an underlying sadness -- much of it public mourning for his mother, who killed herself when Gray was 26.

"The audience doesn't see the enormous amount of pain the humor comes out of," he says. "They laugh right over it. There's a line in one of my monologues. It's funny -- but not funny -- that my father never went to see Swimming to Cambodia because he wouldn't miss cocktail hour. The audience would just howl, but that was the truth."

Still, Gray feels guilty about exposing the audience to his pain, even when it is masked with humor. "They need to laugh. I try to entertain them because I'm so fearful to take them into my sadness," he says.

The remarkable thing about his latest monologue, It's a Slippery Slope, is that he does risk revealing that sadness.

Slippery Slope is the story of what Gray calls his three-year slow-motion car crash. For decades he had dreaded turning 52, the age his mother was when she went into the garage, started up the car and let the carbon monoxide take her away. Gray was convinced that he too would kill him self. In a way, he did.

He had an affair with his neighbor. She got pregnant and refused to have an abortion. The affair (and the baby) ended Gray's relationship with his long-time girlfriend and short-time wife, Renee Shafransky. As if that weren't a big enough life change, Gray took up skiing; a sport he says you've got to have a death wish to try. But try he did. He wanted to get out of his head; he wanted to stop being a detached observer of life and experience it instead.

After fourteen monologues filled with drugs and booze and sex and politics, the story of learning to ski and to live again might seem tame. Or it may be the most shocking of all. Optimism and tenderness do not come easily for Gray. But the birth of his son, Forrest Dylan, has lightened his darker side. After years of death-obsession, Gray seems to have become -- of all things -- future focused. Spalding Gray is turning toward the son.

Gray first saw his child when Forrest was 8 months old.

It was a perfect paradox. Now I could die, but I also had to stay alive to see this little guy through. I took him home with me and laid him on the floor. I bent over him and looked into his eyes -- those absolutely clear, no-agenda eyes -- and I fell in. It was, 'Oh my God, until death do us part.' It's not like being seduced by a woman. There's always another woman. But you don't go around saying, 'Hey, there's a son. Take a look at those sons.'

Forrest, his mother, Kathy, and her daughter, Marissa, moved into Gray's loft in New York. Now they're a family, a three-ring circus. To Gray's astonishment, it's working.

In his monologue, Gray reflects on how his life changed while his feet dangled from the seat of a slow ski lift. The peace, the silence, gradually slipped into melancholy. "Let it go," he thought. The remorse and the sadness. His betrayal of Renee. His mother's madness. His father, who died three days after Gray first cradled his son in his arms. "Let it go." His sorrow floated away like a gossamer thread wafting down to the snow.

At the top -- the slope, icy and dangerous -- Gray met a 72-year-old man who had been carving deep arcs down the mountain. When the man returned, Gray said to him, "I don't know if I'm having a good time or trying to kill myself."

"That's when you know you're alive!" the man answered cheerfully and once again launched himself down the slope.

In that moment, Gray saw the man as a specter of his future. He saw himself alive at 72, not dead at 52 -- alive and with his son, skiing down the mountain, finding balance in motion, taking leaps of faith at every turn.

But it hasn't always been this easy to get Gray's adrenaline pumping. There was a time, in the decade between free love and New York visions of self-exposure, when it took a lot more for Gray to find life's perfect moments, as he did when he first saw his son.

In 1967, Gray was introduced to Richard Schechner's Performance Group in SoHo as it presented a contemporary Dionysis. Back then, only the extremes were able to meet Gray's demands for stimulation.

It was terrifying, what I saw. The actors were naked, and they started playing conga drums. They actually turned that space into an orgy. People would come down from the audience and take women under the bleachers and start to make love to them, and Pantheus would have to run around in his loincloth trying to get people back into the space. I climbed up to the highest bleacher; I didn't want anyone near me. I left the theater, but I couldn't stay away from it. I was buzzing like a fly.

Stories like this one make it hard to imagine that Gray can now find stimulation in the Leave-It-to-Beaver world of family life. But somehow, he does.

Kathy, Marissa and Forrest have been flying in to see Gray during his current tour. His program alternates between the more traditional format of Slippery Slope and Gray on Gray, an evening of questions from the audience and answers from the talking man. Forrest, now 3½, can sit through the whole show. He will one day ask his father, "Why do you always talk about yourself?" By then, Gray may be able to tell him without irony that confession is indeed a healing act.

Of course, Gray is still doubting, questioning, unsure, scared. And he's still thinking about death, that king, that absolute queen. During an interview with University of Oregon radio station KWVA, Gray and his interviewer began talking about Timothy Leary's threats to commit suicide on the Internet. Gray's first question was, "What is his method going to be? Has he said?"

But for now, Gray takes satisfaction in knowing that perhaps the worst has passed. The slow suicide of his darker life has given birth to a new perspective. And as Gray shares his delight in the beauty around him, one can't help but wonder whether he would have been so touched back in the days when it took conga drums to make his blood stir. After years of flashing his audience his genitals, knees, throat and brain, he is at last exposing his heart.

During a performance of Gray on Gray in Eugene, Oregon, an audience member asked if Gray had experienced any perfect moments. "Well," Gray cautioned, "you have to be careful about those perfect moments. If you look for them, you'll never find them. But yes, there was one."

For two nights, Gray had been doing time at the Eugene Hilton Hotel with the Sweet Adelines, a women's barbershop group. He woke up slowly and fuzzily after a night of too many microbrews, wanting only to eat his oatmeal in peace. But the singing competition was over, and the Sweet Adelines were riding high.

They were celebrating -- wow, wow, chaotic, with that great liberated woman laugh, that the-children-are-now-in-college-or-married-and-we-are-having-a-good-time-together laugh. It was annoying because it was chaotic, and they were having a better time than I was. But then they were all singing 'Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.' The tears poured down. It was so divine. Totally unexpected.

Unexpected, Spalding? Unexpected healing, indeed.

More information on Spalding Gray

Authors, Links and Info page on Spalding Gray
The Kennedy Center Spalding Gray page