Posted on 02/11/2004 9:53:03 AM PST by Hillary's Lovely Legs
His scent still lingers on the bed sheets in their SoHo loft. Kathie Russo hasn't changed them. She wants to remember the last time her husband, Spalding Gray, slept there.
His skis still stand in a corner of the living room. He was supposed to fly to Aspen on Jan. 10, but his flight was canceled. So he saw a movie, Big Fish, with two of their kids, Theo and Marissa, and walked the dog.
That evening, with Russo at a conference, Gray went back out. He boarded the Staten Island Ferry. For years, the acclaimed 62-year-old monologuist and actor had been tormented and suicidal. And that evening, he vanished. He could be alive, out there somewhere. But those closest to him, who know his obsession with death, fear he jumped into New York Harbor.
Since then Russo has waited, gone mad from not knowing, suspected the worst, and waited and gone mad. Family and friends have poured out support. ("Mom, why are all these people bringing food?" 7-year-old Theo innocently asked.)
Looking for clues or a note, police have searched the couple's three residences and found nothing helpful, Russo says.
What happened to Spalding Gray? No one can say for sure.
Russo, 43, Gray's wife of seven years and partner for 14, has had to make life go on, for the three children. She would like to think she has shielded Theo and Forrest, 11, from the likelihood of their father's suicide. (Marissa, 17, knows, or at least suspects.)
On his birthday four days after his father's disappearance, when helium balloons filled the house, Theo told Russo, "Mom, tomorrow I'm gonna let the balloons go with a note, `Please help me find my daddy.'"
Obsessed with death
He expressed such profound love for his children. He called Theo "my outdoor bliss kid" and Forrest "child light of my life." Marissa, he wrote, was a "drama queen" -- as much, perhaps, as he was a drama king. He had not expected kids; had not wanted them. But they transformed him, and brought him fullness.
Yet even as he wrote of the preciousness of fatherhood in his 1999 book Morning, Noon and Night, the specter of death lurked over him. "The disembodied voice of death still visits me every day to remind me that I will die, and the idea of that, of not being here forever, just wipes me out," he wrote.
Death has been Gray's obsession. It petrified him, yet he grew accustomed early on -- from his own mother's suicidal threats -- to death's constant presence.
He is known as a man of some angst, of edge, maybe a little bit crazy in that colloquial showbiz kind of way. His award-winning stage monologues, including Swimming to Cambodia and Gray's Anatomy, both of which became movies, are filled with anxiety. He has told stories straight from the strangeness of his life, from his own marital infidelity to a near-death experience in Ireland. His gift as an artist has been the ability to tell stories that seemed literary even as they were extemporaneous, free-associated.
"Most of us didn't recognize it as mental illness at all, because he was incredibly gifted about bringing back those experiences" in his monologues, says Mark Russell, executive director of Performance Space 122, an experimental theater and cultural center in the East Village where Gray developed work. "And we're all a little bit crazy. In my business it's a necessity."
But over the years, Gray had been diagnosed as depressed or bipolar or obsessive-compulsive, depending on the doctor, Russo says. He has taken enough medication to make his body a pharmaceutical cocktail.
Fateful accident
In June 2001, during a trip to Ireland that was a 60th-birthday present from Russo, Gray's life fractured.
Russo drove that night. Friends filled the rental car. Gray sat in the back seat, behind his wife. A small truck smashed into them head-on, shoving the car's engine into the front seat.
Russo was treated for burns, severe bruising and a head injury requiring a dozen stitches.
Gray's forehead crashed into the back of Russo's head. His eyeglasses were embedded into his sinuses. His skull was cracked, the frontal lobe of his brain was damaged. His hip was broken, his sciatic nerve severed. He was left with metal plates in his skull and hip, and required extensive surgery during four hospital stays, plus rehabilitation to learn to walk again.
The suicide attempts began, which led to two stays in psychiatric hospitals. He saw a shrink as often as twice a week.
The man he once was, he was no more. Russo recalls how he spoke of feeling tired and old.
"I think he was beleaguered," says Rockwell Gray, Spalding's older brother, a lecturer in English at Washington University in St. Louis. "He was feeling so reduced from the effects of the accident. Physical impairment weighed on him heavily."
In 2002, Spalding left a note on the kitchen table and jumped from a Sag Harbor bridge, a fall of 25 feet. A passer-by rescued him. She asked him later, "`How do you feel?' And he said, `Well, I got that out of my system.'"
Two more suicidal episodes followed. At that very same bridge, a stranger talked Gray down from the railing. Last fall, he left a telephone message saying he would jump from the Staten Island Ferry. Russo called police, who found Gray roaming Staten Island.
In September he had the most recent of his surgeries. In October, he started two months of workshop performances at PS 122 of a monologue about the accident, Life Interrupted.
Though patrons understood the monologue still was in development, Gray's reputation was such that some expected far more than he at first could deliver, says Russell. There were a few irate phone calls about the quality of the performances. But Russell saw Gray blossoming anew.
"He was a man dealing with physical disabilities and obviously depression and he would be sometimes more present and animated than other times," Russell says. "We were seeing him re-emerge. It was really exciting.
"We were getting great response. And actually the piece was hilarious, no matter how terrifying the situation was. That's why this was such a shock to many of us, because I just thought we had gotten him back."
Battling demons
Gray felt he would kill himself at 52 -- his mother's age when she took her own life. He felt, say Russo and Rockwell Gray, somehow destined to meet the same end. He monologued about it in Slippery Slope, published as a book in 1997.
He had been close to his mother, in terms of her "wild energy" and how it "corresponded to something in him," his brother says. Spalding spent a lot of time with her while she "was having periodic troubles, like a breakdown."
"From the age of 12, she would ask him how she should kill herself," says Russo. Gray chronicled some of this period in Swimming to Cambodia.
In 1967, when Gray was 26, his mother succumbed to exhaust fumes in the family garage. On his own 52nd birthday, Gray went into a deep depression and had suicide fantasies.
His sense of doom deepened when he and his family moved into a new Long Island home in North Haven, near Sag Harbor -- on Sept. 11, 2001. The movers arrived as the couple saw the news of the terror attacks. Gray regretted leaving his former house in North Haven, and never felt comfortable in the new house.
Gray talked, both to Russo and to his brother, of the fact that his mother moved unhappily into a new home shortly before her death. He obsessed about the signs he saw that doomed his own move.
His moods swung wildly. He sometimes receded into silence for days. Clinical psychologist Robby Stein, a close friend of 17 years and Theo's godfather, says Gray frequently told him about his fears.
"He felt he was being attacked by witches, that there was a cosmic and universal plot against him, that he was too weak to resist it, that he had what his mother had, that he was detrimental to his family," Stein says. "He could not get it out of his mind, that he was being taken over and he somehow needed to end his life."
Five miles of rough currents in New York Harbor separate the ferry terminals at Battery Park in Manhattan and Staten Island. The waters are exceptionally frigid this winter, with ice floes here and there. Because of the cold, people who jump in will die. Their bodies will likely sink. After each winter, law enforcement routinely sees the remains of jumpers surface in these waters.
The ferry boats chug through in 25 minutes, back and forth, back and forth. They give a perfect view of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.
Gray rode the ferries a lot. Like the day before Christmas, when he came into the city from North Haven and bought a lovely garnet ring for Russo. And Gray rode the ferry twice on Friday, Jan. 9.
And on Jan. 10, Russo now knows from police, four people saw Gray aboard the ferry. The last contact his family had with him came at 7:30 p.m., a call police traced to a pay phone at the ferry terminal building on Staten Island.
He called the loft to tell Theo he loved him and would see him soon.
(Excerpt) Read more at sun-sentinel.com ...
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