Swimming to Spalding (a memory)

I recently re-watched Jonathan Demme’s film Swimming to Cambodia, based on Spalding Gray’s one-person show of the same name. That stimulated a flood of memories of Spalding’s original Off-Broadway production—at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse theater in 1986—and of Spalding Gray himself, who I got to know during that selfsame production. 

When I first moved to New York, I got a part-time job at Lincoln Center selling concessions. Not for the money, of course, which wasn’t much. The company I worked for handled the concessions for all of Lincoln Center, and as an aspiring actor and writer the only real perk of this employment was being able to see all the Lincoln Center plays for free. I saw quite a few productions during my time there, and served brownies, Diet Cokes, and M&Ms to quite a few theater and film luminaries along the way: Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, John Lithgow, Peter Falk, Dustin Hoffman, Richard Thomas, Danny Aiello, Madonna, Sean Penn… The list goes on, and includes Spalding Gray, whom I got to know when I worked the entire run of Swimming to Cambodia.

For those who’ve never heard of Spalding, he was best known for the autobiographical monologues he wrote and performed in the 80s and 90s at various New York City venues. He was a co-founder of The Wooster Group, an experimental theater company that helped launch the careers of many actors, including fellow founding member Willem Dafoe. Spalding also appeared in a number of films, usually playing upper crust types—likely due to his rather formal New England accent—or government bureaucrats, like his small role as a U.S. Consul in the 1984 Oscar-winning film, The Killing Fields. It was Spalding’s experience shooting that film in Southeast Asia that provided the basis for his one-person show.

Though I got to know Spalding, I was certainly not what either of us would consider a friend. I guess you could say we were friendly acquaintances. Co-workers, really, when you think about it. He in front of the audience, and I behind (except at intermission!).

Anyway, our relationship began the night of the first preview of the play, when I was in the lobby well ahead of the evening’s performance brewing coffee and setting out the sweets and treats. Spalding appeared from the stage door, shambled up to the counter, and asked for a cup of joe. I poured him one, he pulled out a couple dollars, but I told him it was on the house, what with him being the star of the show and all. He dropped the money in my tip cup anyway, and then stood there next to me, sipping and looking nervously around the empty lobby. After a moment, he smiled self-consciously and admitted as how it was cavernous and lonely down in the dressing rooms. 

“I mean, it’s a one-person show,” he said, or something like. “Who the hell am I going to hang out with?”

After that, he often came up to the lobby while I set up and we’d chat. I told him I was an actor and a writer myself, and he was gracious, kind, and supportive. Sometimes we talked about plays, or film, writing, performing, even politics. Sometimes we wouldn’t talk at all. He’d sit in a corner, drink his coffee, and quietly read the paper, content simply to be in a room with another living soul before returning to the dungeon dressing room in preparation for his performance. Ours was a calm, uncomplicated relationship, and one that perhaps he wouldn’t have remembered, though I’ve never forgotten it.

One story in particular stands out. Spalding was in the lobby before the show, and I was doing my thing behind the concessions stand. Two elderly patrons arrived rather noisily and far too early, and stood there blinking as they looked around. The ancient woman screamed across the lobby at me:

“Is this the Cambodian play?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, with a quick glance at Spalding, who eyed her above the rims of his reading glasses. “Swimming to Cambodia,” I added for unnecessary clarification.

She humphed and then informed her husband—and by that I mean all of us in the lobby—that she was going to the ladies room. Her husband humphed himself and began close-eyeing the photos of previous productions hanging on the lobby wall. He eventually made his way over near the concession stand and leaned in to stick his nose inches away from a photo. He suddenly released the most spectacularly loud fart, then calmly walked away as though it had never happened. 

I suppressed a laugh and glanced at Spalding to see if he’d heard. He rose, folded his paper, and whispered as he passed me.

“Obviously a critic.”

In January 2004, Spalding Gray went missing. Two months later, a couple fishermen found his body floating in the East River. It was deemed a suicide, and when I heard the news I felt sick. I was surprised by my own grief, and I found myself having some of the usual thoughts one feels when someone close takes his own life. Could I have helped somehow to ease his pain? Could I have done anything to help him see that life was worth living? It was absurd, of course, because I wasn’t close. I hadn’t seen him since the closing of his play back in 1986. Even then, I wasn’t his friend, only a friendly acquaintance, and someone that perhaps Spalding never would’ve remembered, though I never forgot him.

Still, my own grief at his passing compelled me to try to reach out somehow. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but one night I pored over the internet, hoping for anything to help me understand why such a kind, talented person would take such a drastic step.

I discovered that he’d long suffered from depression, which was exacerbated by the intense pain from severe injuries he received in a car crash while on vacation in Ireland in 2001. His mother had committed suicide when he was a young man (the guilt and torment from which he explored in many of his monologues over the years). The chronic pain. The already debilitating depression. The legacy of his mother. It began to crystalize why Spalding finally decided to ease it all with a quick jump into the icy waters of the East River.

During my search I also found a blog post by John Perry Barlow—a close friend of Spalding’s—on his passing. Barlow was a writer, political activist, a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but probably best known as a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead.

Though I don’t remember the specifics of his online tribute—and it’s no longer on the web—I do recall being touched by it, not only by the beauty of Barlow’s writing, but also by his tender, frank (even sometimes angry), and thoroughly sorrowful remembrance of his departed friend. Indeed, his tribute spoke so directly to what I was feeling that I was compelled to write to Barlow and tell him so. I told him the story of my encounter with Spalding, the tale of the gaseous patron, and the sadness I felt at Spalding’s death at far too young an age.

Barlow wrote back. Kind and generous, even in the face of his own grief, he praised my story, and asked my permission to possibly read it aloud at an upcoming tribute he was planning. He also wanted to publish it in a remembrance he was putting together for Spalding’s kids. Of course I replied that he could do anything he wanted with it. 

I do know there was a tribute at Lincoln Center not long after, though I don’t know whether Barlow read my story. I don’t know if he ever published a remembrance to give to Spalding’s kids. I like to think he did both. I like to think that, in some small way, his family might find comfort in the image of Spalding, sitting in a theater lobby, drinking coffee, and reading the paper, about to go onstage.

That’s how I’ll always remember him.