The Secret History of Twin Peaks

by Mark Frost

  Who said true love only happens in the movies?5

  * The Bookhouse, circa 1987

  1 According to its foreword, “Tangled Web” was written in order to “set down for posterity the story of our foundational years, while many of this marvelous saga’s original voices, however dimmed by time, can still be heard.” For which, according to the receipt below from city records, the town paid Jacoby the princely sum of $150, plus expenses—TP

  1 According to local records, the impetus to build the Bijou began in 1915 when, during a swing through the provinces, Caruso refused to play Twin Peaks, dismissing it as a backwater venue unworthy of his presence. Three years later, suitably impressed—and in possession of a fat check from the Packards—Caruso sang at the Bijou’s premiere—TP

  3 According to the Gazette, once again—a coincidence surely—the week before the Great Northern opened, their biggest competitor went up in flames. Below is an excerpt from the Gazette—TP

  “A fire of unknown origin destroyed the Sawmill River Lodge Tuesday night, one of the oldest establishments in town. No injuries were reported, but as proprietors Gus and Hetty Tidrow viewed the wreckage in the cold gray of dawn they were heard to say they will not attempt to rebuild.”

  4 That starting roster, engraved on a plaque beside the trophy case in Twin Peaks High’s main corridor, includes the following names: Frank Truman, Harry Truman, Ed Hurley, Tommy “Hawk” Hill, Henry “Hank” Jennings, Thad “Toad” Barker and Jerry Horne, who was apparently the placekicker, punter and return specialist. Ben Horne is listed as the team’s student manager. At the bottom is a special thanks to “our number one booster, Pete Martell.”

  5 For anyone not yet convinced this amateurish slice of Chamber of Commerce civic puffery is pure fiction, the Romeo and Juliet reference should put those doubts to rest. See the following—TP

  *2* CATHERINE AND PETE MARTELL

  By this time an enormous class divide had developed between the two families, given how sharply their fortunes had vectored since the Martells sold their mill to the Packards. If the Packards/Capulets were now the Vanderbilts of Twin Peaks, the Martells/Montagues had devolved into something closer to the Kramdens.

  There must have been sparks flying at that barn-burning hootenanny--Pete and Catherine clearly produced, at first, a high level of chemistry that resulted in their hasty trip to the altar--but according to everyone around them it wouldn’t be long before sparks changed to daggers. (Although they never had a child, there were, at the time, inevitable rumors of a bun in the oven that necessitated their nuptials.)

  The loveless arrangement that resulted between these “star-crossed lovers” deserves a niche in the matrimonial hall of shame. Whatever affection survived between them issued almost entirely from the husband, a well-liked and simple fellow; Pete played checkers, not chess. Catherine played nothing but hardball.

  Despite his woeful fate, Pete’s feelings for Catherine never wavered, decades after his return on that investment dwindled into unrequited longing and, from her end, chronic contempt. His friends marveled at Pete’s undying devotion to his Lady Macbeth of the Sawmill. While in a local diner, I once overheard him explain to a friend in these exact words his formula for a successful marriage:

  As long as whatever both halves of a couple give to each other adds up to 100 percent? Don’t really matter how they divvy it up.

  Pete estimated his part of that equation at 70 percent, by the way, which most who knew them would agree underestimates his actual contribution. He also, once, in a rare moment of candor brought on by a few single-malt scotches, admitted that “Catherine is plain hell to live with.”1

  If Catherine Packard Martell had redeeming personal qualities, she kept them to herself. She did possess an icy Titian beauty and the temperament to match, while inheriting all of her family’s most ruthless instincts and none of her gender’s mitigating compassion. A local wag referred to her as “a Packard by name, a Medici by inclination.”2

  Only a few years into their marriage Catherine entered into a permanent dalliance with the scion of the town’s other most prosperous and prominent clan, Benjamin Horne--married, at the time, with children--someone with whom she shared a cutthroat approach to business and pleasure.

  She also remained unhealthily devoted to her older brother Andrew, acting as his hammer in business while he served as the friendly public face of their company. While they always got along, it seemed to irk Catherine no end that Andrew was also fond of Pete, whom she considered their social inferior. But Andrew appreciated Pete’s lack of pretension and Pete always made him laugh.

  The two siblings--and “third wheel” Pete--shared different wings of Blue Pine Lodge, the Packard compound on the shores of Black Lake near the mill. That arrangement persisted for over three decades, until Andrew married for the first time, late in life--at age 70--and that changed everything.

  1 So the Archivist admits to firsthand knowledge of Pete Martell. Confirms that the Archivist is or was in some way part of the community. We will eventually identify this individual—TP

  2 More confirmation that the Archivist has personal knowledge of or contact with these people. There were no similar references in the early historical sections, which suggests the Archivist was or still is a contemporary of these people. Or could it have been someone from out of town with the ability to observe them with fresh eyes?—TP

  *3* Andrew Packard revisited

  The document excerpted below, author unknown, was found in the Bookhouse.1

  A lifelong bachelor, who’d always played the field while devoting his life to business, Andrew in 1983 did something completely out of character: he lost his heart to a young Asian woman during a business trip to Hong Kong. Andrew traveled there on a two-week state-sponsored trade mission to sell hardwood to emerging Eastern markets. He returned with a blushing bride, and nearly a child bride at that.

  Josie Packard. Her passport claimed she was from Taiwan, but she was born and raised in an orphanage in a provincial region of mainland China. Her marriage license states she was only nineteen at the time of their betrothal. Since she claimed not to speak English, no one in Twin Peaks ever knew too much about her, which wasn’t helped by her spending most of her time alone. The only friend Josie made here was Pete Martell, who shared not only their large and empty house but also a lack of daily structure. (Pete’s “management job” at the mill, for which he was well paid, had by this point become ceremonial.)

  Not long after she arrived, Pete made it a pet project to teach English to Josie. She got fluent so quickly, anyone more curious than Pete would have asked whether she knew more than she was letting on from the get-go. The same thing happened when he tried to “teach” her tennis. How to handle rackets of every variety turned out to be second nature to his new sister-in-law, but Pete was always the last to read the writing on any attractive female’s wall.

  The truth was that, in Josette Mai Wong--not her real name--Catherine had met her match in cold-blooded calculation. That Josie was able to hide her long-play intentions under the placid mask of an innocent immigrant bride, while playing every side around her against the other, made her far more dangerous than anyone could have imagined. Catherine, who never trusted her and was always on the lookout for any hint of scheming in her rival, didn’t even see what was coming until it was too late.

  This is part of the jacket on Josie put together by Interpol in Singapore, just before she showed up in Twin Peaks:

  2

  Enter Andrew Packard. We now know that Josie was actually 27 by the time she met her soon-to-be American husband, not the 21 she claimed. When the two met during a state-sponsored black-tie “mixer” at the Hong Kong Trade Center, Andrew believed Josie was an art and design student from a local university, hired to work as a hostess for the evening. He was also sufficiently swept off his feet to buy that she was Josette Mai Wong, a plucky orphan girl from the slums of Taiwan, not a patricidal sociopath looking to escape a death or
der. Meanwhile, Josie had stashed whatever remained of her ill-gotten fortune somewhere offshore, while retaining enough ready cash to pull off her desperate gambit.

  To set this up, and make her escape from the vengeful triad prior to Packard’s arrival, Josie bought protection from a Hong Kong import-export man, a South African emigré named Thomas Eckhardt,3 using herself as collateral. During Andrew’s business trip, Eckhardt made a successful play to become Packard’s local contact in Hong Kong. When Packard left to head home, Eckhardt thought that Josie would be staying with him in Hong Kong; her disappearance seemed to take him by surprise. If he knew that she’d left for the Pacific Northwest to join Packard, Eckhardt took years to find her there. Which is one of the reasons to suspect Eckhardt knew her intentions all along, as part of a comprehensive plan he and Josie had devised.

  According to Pete, Josie told him she had refused Andrew’s first proposal in Hong Kong as too impulsive, but then showed up at their door in Twin Peaks unannounced three weeks later and accepted, saying she’d needed some time to think it over. She apparently made that midnight entrance wearing only high heels, a mink coat and Chanel No. 5.

  Blindsided by this seductive interloper parachuting into her life, Catherine thought her brother had gone mad; Andrew hadn’t even mentioned Josie when he returned. When she failed to dissuade him from going through with the marriage--without even the prenup she begged him to make Josie sign--her shock turned to slow-burning rage; her grip on the Packard fortune was in trouble.

  While Josie played the part of the fragile bird with a broken wing to perfection, she mesmerized the guileless Pete and slowly and subtly undermined Catherine’s influence with Andrew. Josie also cast her hooks into the new community around her. Local lout Hank Jennings fell under her spell--clearly no match for her charms--and began working as her accomplice in various ways.

  The next victim Josie foozled was more pragmatic, and her success even more surprising: Sheriff Harry Truman. A man of more pristine character in the region is impossible to come by, but Josie’s charms were world class, and Harry was a small-town guy who’d never found the right woman. The wrong one found him first. It’s not known exactly when their romance began; I believe it happened after Andrew Packard’s “first death.”4

  Like many of his class, Andrew Packard was a boating enthusiast, and his prize possession was a 1936 40-foot mahogany-hulled classic Chris-Craft Sportsman, harbored in a boathouse on the Packards’ family estate--the Blue Pine Lodge--and rechristened the “JOSIE” just after their wedding. Andrew could be seen at her helm during the season tooling around in his peacoat and captain’s cap with Josie at his side. Until one afternoon in September of 1987 when Josie stayed home with a migraine and the JOSIE exploded in the boathouse the moment, apparently, that Andrew fired up the ignition.

  Local police concluded that although there were plentiful human remains at the scene, the explosion had been so violent--it leveled a sturdy timbered boathouse that had stood for 60 years--that no identifiable human tissue could be found. Since Pete and Catherine had both seen Andrew enter the boathouse moments earlier, from the kitchen window inside, the report concluded Andrew had been the only casualty. Josie claimed not to have seen the blast, but only heard it from her bedroom upstairs.6

  5

  Because so little evidence remained, the only conclusion insurance investigators could draw was that a leak in the fuel line near the ignition prompted the explosion. Since there was a seven-figure life insurance policy involved, as well as Andrew’s recently redrafted will designating a new sole beneficiary--guess who--Josie became a figure of significant interest not only to the insurers but also Andrew’s bereaved, suspicious and coldly vengeful sister. In cold black ink: Andrew had left the Packard Mill, and all his assorted businesses, exclusively to Josie.

  Josie now wore the veil of the grieving widow to perfection--she fainted at the funeral--and not a hint of impropriety came close to sticking to her. No connection to her criminal past in Asia ever surfaced. She possessed a rare and ethereal beauty that was almost otherworldly, one that women--Catherine excluded--were not threatened by, and that most men felt an impulse to protect. The Twin Peaks community mourned with her. Near the end of her period of “mourning,” around the time the insurance companies took a harder look at the accident, Josie first ensnared the good and decent Sheriff Harry Truman in her web, as an insurance policy of her own.

  No coincidence, then, that at this point in the investigation their interest began to drift away from Josie in the direction of Hank Jennings--the henchman Josie had hired and paid handsomely to arrange Andrew’s “accident.” Josie was also gently nudging Sheriff Truman in Hank’s direction--an aside here, a suggestion there--but it turned out that Hank had (conveniently) been arrested two hours before the explosion on suspicion of vehicular homicide; a hit-and-run involving Hank’s truck on a highway near the border. All part of Josie’s plan.

  A first-rate lawyer from Seattle--way out of Jennings’s price range--bargained that charge down to a guilty plea on one count of vehicular manslaughter. Hank never stood trial and began serving a five-year stretch in the state pen, knowing he had the cash Josie paid him stashed and waiting for him on release.

  A brief look at how Hank Jennings’s criminal disposition developed is in order.

  It’s tempting to see Hank as a bad seed that germinated into a nasty piece of rotten fruit on a warped family tree. His father, Emil, was a ne’er-do-well souse about whom no town resident has a good word to say, since he owed most of them money.7

  Emil’s uncle Morgan died in 1914 when he fell down drunk in a Spokane street after a three-day bender and was run over by a beer wagon. Hank’s mother, Jolene, was a hardworking, hash-slinging waitress at the Double R for 35 years. Hank was her only child with Emil, and Jolene doted on him, filling him with a confidence that surpassed the borders of his actual qualities by a wide margin.

  Hank grew up strong and sturdy and was a more than competent athlete, which kept him out of trouble for most of his teenage years. The innate ferocity of football suited his temperament; he became a standout two-way player for Coach Hobson’s Lumberjacks at Twin Peaks High. He also benefited from membership in the Bookhouse Boys--recruited by the Truman brothers--where his somewhat surprising love for American literature blossomed. (He favored Kerouac, Irwin Shaw and, more useful to his later career, the collected works of Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain.) Hank and Harry were close during their high school years, fullback and quarterback, respectively.

  The first sign of moral rot emerged during the 1968 state championship football game.

  A few in the crowd that night grumbled along the lines of “what else would you expect from a Jennings.” The rest seemed to accept it as yet another lesson in the bittersweet human condition in general, and life in Twin Peaks in particular.

  A few years later a more unsavory scenario for Jennings’s mishap emerged. A visitor to the brothel and gambling establishment known as One Eyed Jacks, just across Black Lake on the far side of the Canadian border, heard a story one night that turned the accepted version of events on its ear.

  Jean Renault--oldest son of deceased family patriarch Jean Jacques Renault--was overheard bragging during a poker game that he’d placed a substantial wager on underdog Kettle Falls in that game and then “fixed” the outcome. When asked why he’d go to all that trouble to corrupt a high school football game, Jean laughed and was heard to say, in thickly accented English: “Because I can.”

  Given Renault’s amoral viciousness, that’s easy to believe, but in pulling that string he also made an investment in the future loyalty of Hank Jennings. A few months later, after Christmas, Hank was driving around town in a brand-new, tricked-out cherry red Chevy pickup. When asked how he came by it Hank explained that he’d used savings scrapped together cooking short order at the Double R over the holidays.

  You don’t need to be Perry Mason to connect these dots.

  A few months late
r, Hank and Harry Truman had an abrupt falling-out--a fistfight that erupted at the Bookhouse when Harry confronted him about the “fumble.” Harry’s older brother Frank and Big Ed had to pull Harry off Hank or he might have pummeled him to death. Did Harry connect

  A few in the crowd that night grumbled along the lines of “what else would you expect from a Jennings.” The rest seemed to accept it as yet another lesson in the bittersweet human condition in general, and life in Twin Peaks in particular.

  A few years later a more unsavory scenario for Jennings’s mishap emerged. A visitor to the brothel and gambling establishment known as One Eyed Jacks, just across Black Lake on the far side of the Canadian border, heard a story one night that turned the accepted version of events on its ear.8

  Jean Renault--oldest son of deceased family patriarch Jean Jacques Renault--was overheard bragging during a poker game that he’d placed a substantial wager on underdog Kettle Falls in that game and then “fixed” the outcome. When asked why he’d go to all that trouble to corrupt a high school football game, Jean laughed and was heard to say, in thickly accented English: “Because I can.”

  Given Renault’s amoral viciousness, that’s easy to believe, but in pulling that string he also made an investment in the future loyalty of Hank Jennings. A few months later, after Christmas, Hank was driving around town in a brand-new, tricked-out cherry red Chevy pickup. When asked how he came by it Hank explained that he’d used savings scrapped together cooking short order at the Double R over the holidays.