NEW YORK (AP) – Nearly two months after actor-writer Spalding Gray walked out of his Manhattan apartment and disappeared, his wife holds out hope that he will return unharmed. “Everyone that looks like him from behind, I go up and check to make sure it’s not him,” Kathleen Russo said in a recent phone interview with The Associated Press. “If someone calls and hangs up, I always do star-69. You’re always thinking, ‘maybe.’” Police said they have received 36 tips since Gray’s disappearance Jan. 10, including several accounts from reliable witnesses who believe they saw Gray on the Staten Island ferry the night he vanished. Russo has said she fears he may have tried to jump off the boat. Gray tried suicide several times, including an attempt in late 2002 to jump off a bridge near his second home at the east end of Long Island. A passer-by talked him down.
Russo has two sons - ages 11 and 6 - and a stepdaughter with Gray. She has been frustrated that she has nothing to tell them beyond “Dad’s missing and the police are looking.” She has relied on the companionship of relatives and friends, and has been reading books about other people who have lived through the disappearance or suicide of a loved one. She also tries to be “as present as possible” for her children, with whom she has been planning a vacation to Arizona. Though she still hopes that Gray will turn up unscathed, Russo said her rational side now believes “he’s had some kind of accident, either intentional or not.” “If you can imagine, it’s pretty awful,” she said. “There’s no closure, no answers - no definitive outcome right now.”
—My guess is that he’s under the East River and will, ummm, turn up when the weather gets warmer. Ghastly. Always liked him.
