Spalding Gray
Seven Scenes From A Family Album
New York City, USA: Benzene Editions, 1981
30 pp., 5.25 x 8.25”, staple-bound
Edition size unknown
Written during a trip to Amsterdam, Seven Scenes From A Family Album is the first book by American monologist, actor and author Spalding Gray.
Gray began his theater career in New York in the late 1960s, and joined Richard Schechner's experimental troupe The Performance Group in 1970. He cofounded - alongside Willem Dafoe, Elizabeth LeCompte, Kate Valk, and others - The Wooster Group in 1975.
He appeared in several pornographic films around this time, including Farmer's Daughters1 (1976), Little Orphan Dusty (1976), and Maraschino Cherry (1978).
Gray left the Wooster group after five years to concentrate on his own monologues, which were beginning to garner acclaim. He debuted his first solo show in April of 1979. Sex and Death to the Age 14 was well-received and played for six weeks at the Performing Garage.
Roland Joffé invited Gray to audition for a role in what would become the director’s first feature film, The Killing Fields. “I’m not very political," Gray responded, "in fact, I’ve never even voted in my life.” Joffé reportedly replied, “Perfect! We’re looking for the American ambassador’s aide.”
The Killing Fields2 is about the American bombing of Cambodia and the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge. Gray’s role was small, but the experience made an indelible impression on him.
Swimming to Cambodia, about his time on set in Thailand, became Gray’s most celebrated monologue. In 1985 he published it as a book and in 1987 it was adapted into a feature film by directed by Jonathan Demme, in between Something Wild and Married to the Mob, and just a few years prior to his breakthrough works The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia.
Demme was the logical choice, as the director The Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense, which remains of one of the most celebrated music performance films of all time.
The film consists almost entirely of Gray at a desk, performing the monologue, accompanied by limited sound effects and an original score by Laurie Anderson.
I saw the film in the cinema at the time and audiences were transfixed. The New York Times declared "Mr. Gray's feature-length monologue brings people, places and things so vibrantly to life that they're very nearly visible on the screen.”
This was followed by Monster in a Box, which was also released as both a book and film, again scored by Laurie Anderson. The work details the author’s failed attempts at a first novel (which would eventually become Impossible Vacation). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Book Award in 1985 for Monster in a Box, but the novel was quickly remaindered.
While vacationing in Ireland in 2001 - to celebrate his 60th birthday - Gray was injured in car crash. He broke his hip and fractured his skull. Surgeons removed dozens of bone fragments from his frontal cortex and fit him with a titanium plate3. Already struggling with depression, the physical impairments exacerbated his mental health problems.
He sought help from famed neurologist Oliver Sacks, who began treating him in August of 2003. Sacks recounted that Gray frequently spoke of suicide, often in terms of a creative act. He made an unsuccessful attempt the previous year. He proposed killing himself during a live televised interview, as the logical conclusion to his work.
On January 10th, 2004, Gray took his two children to see Tim Burton's fantasy drama Big Fish. The film tells the story of a frustrated man trying to distinguish fact from fiction after the death of his father, a subject that would’ve resonated with the storyteller.
Big Fish ends with the line, "A man tells a story over and over so many times he becomes the story. In that way, he is immortal.” This reportedly moved the monologist to tears.
The next day Gray's wife, Kathleen Russo, reported her husband missing.
An investigation was jointly conducted by the New York Police Department and the Southampton Town Police Department. The story appeared on an episode of the Fox network’s America’s Most Wanted.
Two months later, Gray's body was found in the East River. It is believed that he jumped off the Staten Island Ferry. Russo connected his death to the Tim Burton film: "I just think it gave him permission. I think it gave him permission to die."
Based on his comments to Oliver Sacks, Spalding Gray’s death can be viewed alongside the suicide of Ray Johnson and the disappearance of Bas Jan Ader: as deaths that may have been intended as artworks.
"He took the anarchy and illogic of life and molded it into something we could grab a hold of," said Eric Bogosian, the performer perhaps closest in spirit to Gray. "It took courage to do what Spalding did, courage to make theatre so naked and unadorned, to expose himself in this way and to fight his demons in public."
Gray had began writing his own obituary before his death, at the invitation of TV host Larry King, who was editing a collection called Remember Me When I’m Gone: The Rich and Famous Write Their Own Epitaphs and Obituaries.
“He didn’t get the irony,” his widow remarked. “He was too deep into his depression to see how strange it was that he had been asked to write his own obituary.” It reads:
“SPALDING GRAY 1941.
He was a good and devoted father and a legal husband but most of all he was known for his autobiographical monologues in which he would sit on stage at a table with a glass of water and tell true stories from his life. He could capture the details ______ of his ______ and slightly eccentric life in a way that caused audiences to laugh and relate.
Also known as the talking man, he was an American original and will be deeply missed.”
1. Gray would later write an essay titled Farmer’s Daughter about his role in the film: his initial inability to achieve an erection on set, followed by the horrifying images he had to conjure in his head to prevent premature ejaculation. The day’s entry in his journal simply read: "“I break down on the porno set because director gives me a hard time. I have tears.”
2. At the New York premiere of The Killing Fields, producer David Puttnam sat behind Yoko Ono, who had agreed to have “Imagine", the song she co-authored with her late husband John Lennon, play over the final scene. “The film ended, and she was in pieces,” he later recounted. "She climbed over the back of her chair, hugged me and cried. ‘I promise you this,’ she said: ‘This is exactly the way John would have liked the song to have been used.’ It was an amazing moment.”
3. “The operation lasts six hours. They cut me from ear to ear, peel down my forehead, and put in a titanium plate,” Gray explained in his unfinished monologue Life Interrupted. “More titanium plates in here; bone splinters are released into my frontal lobe—I think they have to try to pick those out—from the smashing of my head against Kathie’s head. They sew me up; it looks like I’ve had a face-lift.”
