[Obit] An American Original: Troubled, Inner-Directed and Cannot Type.

[khaosworks]

"I fantasize about going back to high school with the knowledge I have now. I would shine. I would have a good time, I would have a girlfriend. I think that's where a lot of my pain comes from. I think I never had any teenage years to go back to."

Comments

[tibicina.livejournal.com]

*looks distressed* He died? When? What happened?

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

Click on the image.

[pafuts.livejournal.com]

Well shit....

Projo.com obit, part 1

[pickledginger.livejournal.com]

Projo.com had this story, which gives Spalding back his other brother:

Actor Gray's body recovered

The Barrington native had been suffering from depression and had previously attempted suicide, before disappearing in January.


01:00 AM EST on Tuesday, March 9, 2004


BY DOUG RIGGS
Journal Staff Writer

The body of Spalding Gray, the Barrington native whose funny, edgy monologues, books and movies about his own inner demons earned him a reputation as "the WASP Woody Allen," was found in the East River in New York City on Sunday, two months after he disappeared from his Manhattan apartment.

The New York City medical examiner identified Gray yesterday through dental records, said spokeswoman Ellen Borakove. The medical examiner is now trying to determine how Gray, who was 62, died.

Gray had been struggling with depression and had attempted suicide last year, his brother Channing Gray, an arts writer at The Providence Journal, said in January.

Gray, who had homes in New York City and Sag Harbor, N.Y., was last seen by his family on Jan. 10. Wearing a sweater, black corduroys, brown shoes and and a blue scarf over his jacket, he left his loft in Manhattan around 6 p.m. on a Saturday. He told his wife, Kathleen Russo, that he was meeting a friend for a drink. His family reported him missing when he failed to return.

Throughout Gray's disappearance, Russo had held out some hope that he might still be alive.

"Everyone that looks like him from behind, I go up and check to make sure it's not him," Russo said in a phone interview with The Associated Press about a week ago. "If someone calls and hangs up, I always do star-69. You're always thinking, 'maybe.' "

The New York City police received a 911 call on Sunday morning, reporting that the body of a man had been spotted in the water, near the shore, in Greenpoint, a waterfront neighborhood in Brooklyn, police spokeswoman Jennara Everleth said yesterday.

In the misty rain, the harbor police pulled Gray from the water.

Gray's death was the final act in a long-running inner drama, in which dark thoughts of dying coexisted incongruously with his gift for humor and self-parody, a gift that brought laughter, and a nervous self-recognition, to millions.

Gray's obsession with death began in Barrington as early as age 12, when his mother began talking to him about killing herself. She actually asked him how to do it, he recalled much later. In 1967, at age 52, she locked herself into the family garage, started the car, and sat there until the end came.

Spalding Gray talked about her suicide often. He talked about everything in his life -- to friends, reporters, strangers, onstage, anywhere -- a compulsion, he once speculated, that may have been a reaction to having grown up in a Christian Science household, in which any sort of illness or emotional weakness was regarded as "error" and could not be openly discussed.

He started writing a book about his mother's death. By the late 1980s, he had typed 1,359 pages and couldn't bring himself to finish it. He carried it with him everywhere in a cardboard box. He talked about it in a monologue titled The Monster in the Box, clearly conscious of its weighty symbolism.

Gray's career as a performance artist began in a small theater in the SoHo section of Manhattan, where he developed a series of monologues about growing up in Barrington. He went to Barrington public schools before attending Boston University and then transferring to Emerson College, from which he graduated in 1965.

The last of these stage performances, Sex and Death to the Age 14, gained him national attention in 1979. A decade later, he had done 13 of them -- 13 slices of his increasingly chaotic life, often embarrassingly intimate and confessional, always fascinating. Typically, he delivered them to small audiences, seated at a desk on a bare stage.

Projo.com obit, part 2

[pickledginger.livejournal.com]

His patrician good looks and serious bearing often won him stage and film roles as buttoned-down WASP-ish characters wildly at variance with his true nature. These included the stage manager in Thornton Wilder's Our Town, and, most recently, a leading role on Broadway in Gore Vidal's The Best Man.

A small role in Roland Joffe's The Killing Fields led to his most famous monologue in 1987, Swimming to Cambodia, about his comical experiences -- and the terror and alienation he had felt -- in Thailand during that filming. It won an Obie and later became a movie.

But always there was the struggle to maintain some sort of equilibrium. Over the years, he was in and out of treatment for depression, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive syndrome -- the labels varied depending on the doctor.

Outwardly, he seemed to have turned some sort of corner in recent years. In 1993, he left his first wife and longtime collaborator, Renee Shafransky, and moved in with Kathie Russo. They had two children, Forrest, now 11, and Theo, 6.

According to an old friend, Dale Scott, quoted in the Feb. 2 cover story of New York Magazine, Gray had been transformed by the birth of Forrest, behaving remarkably like a family man. He seemed to be experiencing something even more foreign: contentment. The years they all spent together, along with Marissa, 17, Gray's daughter from a previous relationship, in an old Victorian house in Sag Harbor were "the happiest five years of his life," Scott said.

That ended abruptly on a June night in 2001.

Russo had arranged a trip to Ireland for Gray and some of their friends, to celebrate his 60th birthday. They were driving home from a restaurant along one of Ireland's notoriously narrow lanes, Russo at the wheel, when a van containing mad cow medicine and driven by a local veterinarian smashed into their rented car.

Four of the five passengers in Gray's car were knocked unconscious. Gray suffered serious head injuries -- not immediately diagnosed -- as well as a crushed hip that left him crippled. Back home, his depression returned, along with bouts of obsessive-compulsive behavior -- and a new bitterness, according to the New York Magazine article by Alex Williams.

Whether his head injuries caused brain damage that contributed to his emotional state remains unclear, but he had tried to drown himself at least three times in the last several months.

During a dinner party one recent Christmas, Steven Gaines, a writer and friend of Gray's, told Williams, "Spalding was catatonic .... One of the few times he spoke, he just looked up at the ceiling and bellowed, 'God save us. God save us all!' And he meant it."

By the beginning of this year, he seemed to be regaining control. He was working on a monologue, Life Interrupted, about the accident. His body had healed to the point that he planned to fly to Colorado on Jan. 10 for some skiing.

His flight was canceled because of bad weather. So he took his kids to a movie instead. They saw Big Fish, the Tim Burton film in which a son tries to sort through his father's tall tales to find the real man behind them.

In the last scene, the father is dying in a hospital and has a fantasy: He strolls down to a river and throws himself into it in front of a gathering of his friends. Miraculously, he is transformed into a giant fish and swims away.

Gray was last seen later that frigid night, alone, aboard the Staten Island ferry.

Russo saw the movie days later. Friends had advised her not to, but she had to go, she said. The next day, holding back tears, she told Williams: "You know, Spalding cried after he saw that movie. I just think it gave him permission. I think it gave him permission to die."

Besides his widow and children, he leaves two brothers, Rockwell Gray, a lecturer in English at Washington University in St. Louis, and Channing Gray, an arts writer for this newspaper.

With reports from staff writer Jennifer Levitz and The Associated Press