Yahoo! News - Spalding Gray's Body Found in East River

So that's it for Spalding. Obligatory remembrance: Spalding Gray represented my first-ever brush with celebrity (unless you count an even earlier interview I did with Stan Brakhage, which come to think of it I guess you should but whatever because Spalding was quite a bit more famous at the time). It was not too long after the success of the film version of Swimming to Cambodia, and he was coming to CU — Boulder, where I was working on the student newspaper, to perform his Monster in a Box monologue. I landed a phone interview and asked him a whole series of stupid questions, with which he was very patient. I remember laughing when he mentioned somebody whose name sounded like "Tommy Shlommy" just because I had never heard Thomas Schlamme's name pronounced that way before, and laughing again when I asked him what he liked about appearing in Hollywood films like Beaches and The Killing Fields and he responded, "Well, it's one way to get health insurance." Of course, I didn't realize at the time that in the world of grown-ups, even famous ones, health coverage was A Big Deal, and I credit Gray with cluing me in to the very ordinary, boring struggles that even successful artists had to contend with on a regular basis. (I grew up in a town that nobody famous ever visited, except Jesse Jackson on one notable occasion, and therefore had rather naive ideas about the nature of celebrities.)

I later saw the performance in person and thought it was just great, and it blows my mind that someone (anyone!) with that kind of legacy, that facility with ideas and communication, would be driven by whatever demons to off himself by, apparently, jumping into the East River. Contemplating that level of unhappiness certainly helps me put a few things about my own life in the proper perspective.

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