I was re-watching And Everything Is Going Fine the other day, Steven Soderbergh’s touching tribute to Spalding Gray, and it made me happy and sad all over again. So many of Gray’s monologue works are hard to get ahold of, especially the early ones, which may literally not exist anywhere. It got me hunting around for whatever I could find on YouTube, and I discovered a pretty solid Spalding Gray monologue movie I hadn’t heard of before.

Terrors of Pleasure has the distinction of being the other monologue that Spalding Gray performed at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in 1986—it alternated with the far better known Swimming to Cambodia, which was filmed by Jonathan Demme as a movie for release in 1987. That movie was for many people the “gateway drug,” if you will, to the endlessly entertaining world of the New England WASP neurotic who before then had toiled in the downtown performance scene for quite a while with experimental theater outfits such as the Wooster Group. Afterwards his filmed monologues such as Monster in a Box and Gray’s Anatomy became much better known than, say, Sex and Death to the Age 14 or 47 Beds. (Like Swimming to Cambodia, Terrors of Pleasure could be considered a 1986 monologue that was released in 1987.)

This movie of Terrors of Pleasure is an odd duck. Directed by Thomas Schlamme (who later became more prominent as a key collaborator of Aaron Sorkin’s), it features a technique of filming brief vignettes (with hired actors, location scouts, the whole deal) of the story Gray is telling, which is primarily about the misadventures Gray and his longtime girlfriend Renee Shafransky invite when they impulsively buy a small cabin in a rural outpost near New York City (although there is a significant tangent of Gray auditioning to co-star opposite Farrah Fawcett in a movie). 
 

 
Terrors of Pleasure is very funny indeed—it might be Gray’s funniest, hard to tell. At the core of the narrative about the cabin is an audio recording, played by Gray with a boombox, of the seller of the house attempting to strong-arm Gray into buying—it’s an amazing clip but one wonders if it was real, a question that maybe too few have asked in connection with Gray’s monologues. I suspect that a lot of them were pretty far from literally true even as they probably remained scrupulously true in a psychological sense. The recent troubles of performance artist Mike Daisey, whom I’ve seen perform several times (I saw Gray do his thing twice), haven’t really raised similar questions about Gray’s work—although the filmed clips in Terrors of Pleasure very much expose the absurdity of many of his stories. The literalization of actually seeing the characters of his stories hectoring him or intoning their ridiculous utterances should at least give the skeptical viewer pause.

Two other quick things that are odd about Terrors of Pleasure—the laugh track, which I suspect was taken directly from the audience but was merely amplified, is a choice that wouldn’t be made the same way today, we can be certain of that. And for some reason the monologues ends almost mid-sentence. It doesn’t cohere to an end and then fade out or anything, it pretty much just cuts to a “Directed by” screen for Schlamme, who apparently was the one who made the weird decision to cut it off so abruptly. The YouTube video matches the length of the official release, so that isn’t the problem.
 

 
I think the formative literary experiences of adolescence are far less uniform than we sometimes (condescendingly) assume. For example, Catcher in the Rye left me flat, Slaughter House Five didn’t really “hit” me until after my second reading in college, and no, I never had an Ayn Rand phase. No, I was a fourteen-year-old midwestern girl who was really into Spalding Gray.

My mother had his monologue collections, Swimming to Cambodia, Sex and Death to the Age 14 and Monster in a Box, which I devoured after seeing a recorded performance of Gray’s Anatomy on TV. Although hearing and watching Gray deliver a monologue is absolutely essential, his intimate, honest, and endearingly neurotic storytelling translates beautifully to the written word as well. (One wonders how much his acute dyslexia is responsible for his craft; reading was incredibly difficult for him, not to mention writing, and he attributed his strength in monologue to an adept, discursive auditory memory.)

But of course, Spalding Gray was not always the Spalding Gray, and in the early days of his career, in addition to summer stock and experimental theater, he had a little bit of a side career in skin flicks—two or three, depending on the source. Of course, given Gray’s avant-garde-ish background (and the fact that this was 1976), it’s entirely possible that this was all done in the spirit of radicalism and testing the boundaries of “acting”—the director of Farmer’s Daughters, Zebedy Colt was an early, outspoken gay arts pioneer and activist.

Or maybe Gray was just broke and needed the money

The clip below, from Farmer’s Daughters, is totally safe for work, and you get to hear Gray’s trademark Rhode Island accent on stilted, vintage, naughty dialogue! However, although it’s apparently possible to view the notorious Farmer’s Daughters in its entirety, it is not the sort of cheesy, novel smut people tend to watch for a retro laugh. It is fucked up. So fucked up, in fact, that I’m just going to link the plot here. Even if you do want the perverse details—imagine Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left remade for a “raincoater”-crowd—I wouldn’t want to spring them on you before you’ve had your morning coffee…

Did Gray ever do a monologue about the making of Farmer’s Daughters I wonder? Probably not!
 

 
It’s ten years since the actor and writer Spalding Gray disappeared in New York. He is believed to have committed suicide by jumping off the Staten Island Ferry. His body was surfaced in the East River two months later.

Gray achieved international success as a story-teller, who used the events, adventures, traumas and fascinations of his life to create the acclaimed productions Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box. Gray enthralled with his personal tales, told in a direct though intimate style, seated behind a desk, with a minimum of props. He drew an audience in and kept them engaged, amused and thrilled with his unique, moving and often hilarious tales of life.

It was probably a car accident in Ireland, June 2001, that started Gray’s severe depression. He suffered a broken hip, that left his leg almost immobilized, and a horrifically fractured skull that left a jagged scar across his forehead. It was said that during the operation to replace part of his shattered skull with a titanium plate, the surgeon found shards of bone embedded in Gray’s frontal cortex. Thereafter, Gray suffered from a debilitating depression.

He tried various therapies to cure his condition. This included a course of treatment with neurologist Oliver Sacks. On the first anniversary of Gray’s disappearance, Sacks suggested that suicide was perhaps a part of the writer’s “creative” end to his life:

“On several occasions he talked about what he called ‘a creative suicide.’ On one occasion, when he was being interviewed, he thought that the interview might be culminated with a ‘dramatic and creative suicide.’” Sacks added, “I was at pains to say that he would be much more creative alive than dead.”

I met and interviewed Gray some twenty-odd years ago. He was in Glasgow to perform Monster in a Box, and we met in an hotel off the city center. He was tall, friendly, polite, enthusiastic, dressed in his uniform of plaid shirt and back jeans. Though jet-lagged, he entertained with amusing answers to questions he must have been asked innumerable times before. Then for the camera, he improvised about traveling and performing and living in hotels, and how he’d asked for a quiet room, a hushed room, away from the city tumult, and instead found himself perched over a cobbled lane where the click-clack-click-clack of late night revelers and day-time shoppers kept him awake, leaving him sleepless to count down the hours between shows. 

The day he disappeared, Gray said to his wife, Kathleen Russo:

“OK, goodbye, Honey.”

“And I go, ‘You never call me Honey!’

“And he goes, ‘Well, maybe I’ll start!’

So I left for work that day being hopeful that there was a future for us, that he was really going to try to get better.”

When Gray went missing, his disappearance was featured on TV news and America’s Most Wanted. Sadly, the hope he would turn up one day and recount magical tales of his misadventures were all too quickly destroyed.

This is Splading Gray in Gray’s Anatomy, directed by Stephen Soderbergh, in which our monologist talks about his rare ocular condition, and interweaves it with his Christian Scientist upbringing, Elvis Presley, sweat lodges, and his own fears around surgery.
 

 
H/T NPR;