by David Lynch
Lynch made several drawings during this period that are reflective of how he was changing. In Infusing the Being, a pair of images of dark, treelike forms are positioned side by side; there’s a prism of color at the base of the form on the left, while the form on the right has color at both the base and the crown. Images evocative of growth depict underground forms that are pushing to the surface, and there are untitled compositions that combine recognizable elements—trees, clouds—with abstract patterning and have the feeling of entryways into domed cathedrals.
“I was five when Dad started meditating, and I was definitely aware of a change in him when that happened,” recalled Jennifer Lynch. “I remember there was less yelling, but it was then that I also started feeling like he was around less.”
Meditation brought something into Lynch’s life that he needed, but it exacerbated the growing schism in his marriage. “David worshipped Charlie Lutes, who was a nice guy, but nothing he said was of any interest to me,” Reavey recalled. “David couldn’t understand why I wasn’t excited about meditation, because he really wanted spirituality at that point, but I wanted to go out and have fun.”
Mary Fisk had returned to the East Coast by this point and was working for Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge in Washington, D.C. “One night I was in the office, talking to Jack on the WATS line, and David got on the phone and started talking to me about meditation—that’s really when we began communicating,” said Fisk, who moved back to Los Angeles at the end of that year.
Lynch took her to the Spiritual Regeneration Movement center and she began attending regularly. “Charlie Lutes was a dynamic, handsome, perceptive man who could change the energy in a room,” Fisk recalled. “The Beatles called him Captain Kundalini—he was impressive.
“Meditation changed David and he got conservative—he stopped eating meat and smoking,” Fisk continued. “He told me there were months when he went around with a five-foot cigarette in his head—he couldn’t stop thinking about it—but he managed to stop smoking. He also started dressing differently, and the two ties and the moth-eaten hats vanished. He dressed nicely when he went to the center.”
During this period Lynch’s marriage deteriorated further. “One day I came home from work for lunch and David was there,” Reavey recalled, “and I said, ‘I wonder if we should think about separating.’ He said, ‘You don’t love me as much as you used to, do you?’ meaning that he didn’t love me as much, either, and I said, ‘I guess not.’ I’d reached a point where I wasn’t as fascinated with how his mind worked as I’d once been and I wanted some time to myself. It’s claustrophobic to live inside somebody else’s head. Plus, what are you going to do? Fight to keep a marriage? I wouldn’t be competing with some neighborhood girl. It would’ve been me versus loads of women, plus Hollywood.”
* * *
—
During those years Lynch lived a completely nocturnal life, and shortly after splitting up with Reavey he took a job delivering The Wall Street Journal for $48.50 a week. Levacy once accompanied him on his midnight route and recalled it as “a great experience. He got it all organized, with the papers piled up in the passenger seat, and I sat in the back seat of his VW Bug because he needed both windows free. He knew the route like the back of his hand and made an art out of whisking the papers out the windows. He liked hitting certain windows a certain way because a light would come on in the house.”
Shooting on Eraserhead resumed in May 1974 and continued sporadically for the next year. At approximately the same time, Splet left L.A. to spend several months at Findhorn, a utopian community in northern Scotland whose founders, Peter Caddy and Dorothy Maclean, claimed to have direct contact with the spirits of the natural world. Not long after Splet left, Doreen Small moved to Santa Barbara and things got harder for Lynch. George Stevens, Jr., made arrangements with Sid Solow, director of Consolidated Film Industries laboratory, to process Lynch’s film for free, but the AFI began retrieving pieces of equipment and, as usual, there was no money. “At one point David said, ‘I think we have to stop,’ ” Elmes recalled. “Catherine, Jack, and I looked at each other and said, ‘David, we can’t stop—it’s not done. We’ll figure it out.’ ”
So they kept at it. One day Lynch was sitting in the food room sketching, and a figure that came to be known as the Lady in the Radiator took shape on his drawing pad. Lynch recognized the character as the element needed to bring Henry’s story to a close, and to his delight, he discovered that the radiator that happened to be part of the set was designed in such a way that it could accommodate his vision of how the character would function in the story. Played by vocalist Laurel Near, the Lady in the Radiator lives in a place of protection and warmth and represents unity and hope; her arrival marks a shift in the narrative trajectory and allows the film to conclude on a note of optimism and possibility. A wide-eyed blonde with grotesquely exaggerated cheeks, the Lady in the Radiator required a great deal of makeup, which Lynch spent hours applying, and he wrote lyrics to a song for her to sing, called “In Heaven.” His friend Peter Ivers put the lyrics to music and sang the song for the soundtrack; it’s Ivers’s voice you hear in the film.
Eraserhead’s frequent periods of downtime left Lynch free to search for funding—certainly one of the most odious parts of being a filmmaker—but occasionally he had some fun. In 1974, executives at the AFI were trying to decide whether to use Ampex or Sony videotape for school directing projects and asked Elmes to shoot a comparison test of the two. Lynch got wind of this and asked Elmes to let him write a scene for the test; he quickly wrote a script for a short called The Amputee, and Coulson agreed to star in it. “David plays a doctor who’s bandaging an amputee’s stumps, and he wrote a monologue for the amputee, who I play, to do in voice-over,” Coulson recalled. “We shot it twice using the different tape stocks, in one of the many deserted rooms in the Greystone Mansion, then Fred took it to a gorgeous screening room at the AFI to show these executives. When the film ended I remember somebody yelling, ‘Lynch! Lynch had something to do with this!’ ”
By late 1974 Lynch’s marriage had officially ended. “I went to legal aid and paid fifty dollars for the forms I needed, then a girlfriend went with me to court, where I filed them,” Reavey recalled of her remarkably amicable divorce from Lynch. “My parents adored David and they were upset when we split up. I loved David’s parents, and although they made an effort to maintain the connection between us, it was still a real loss for me when we divorced.” As for Jennifer Lynch, she said, “It was excruciating for me when my parents divorced. I hated it.”
Lynch was living on the Eraserhead set when his divorce was finalized but was ordered to vacate the AFI stables at the end of 1974 and moved into a bungalow on Rosewood Avenue in West Hollywood. “It had a tiny fenced-in yard with a picket fence, and a big orange tree in the yard that parrots loved—there were always lots of parrots out there,” said Mary Fisk of the house, which rented for eighty-five dollars a month. “David put skylights in the house and built a shelf you could cook on in the kitchen, which didn’t have a sink; when you only eat tuna fish sandwiches you don’t need much of a kitchen. I remember Jen spending weekends there with David. He had very little money and wasn’t able to take good care of himself, much less a child.”
“When I stayed with Dad he didn’t ‘take care of me’ in conventional ways,” Jennifer Lynch recalled. “We did adult things. We delivered papers and walked around oil pits; we’d talk about ideas and dig in dumpsters and pull stuff out, and we’d eat at Bob’s. It was great. I remember when Eraserhead was playing at the Nuart, we’d go to Bob’s, and you know those little plastic stands that hold pieces of cardboard listing the day’s specials? We’d take those out and flip them so the blank side was out, and we’d write, “Go see Eraserhead” on them and put them back in the plastic stand. When he was living on Rosewood he was really into stuff like bee pollen and soybeans and ginseng, and I’d watch
him take his vitamins and get a little dose. He was hugely into that stuff.
“I didn’t realize we were poor until I was around nine,” she continued. “I brought a friend over for the weekend when Dad was living on Rosewood, and Mary Fisk took us to Disneyland, and we built a dollhouse with David, and we went bowling. It was a great weekend, right? I got sick on Sunday night and missed school Monday, and when I got to school Tuesday morning, people said to me, ‘Sherry says you live in a garage.’ No one got invited over again for a long time.”
Lynch is a creature of habit, and around this time he established a ritual that was to remain part of his life for the next eight years: Every day at two-thirty he went to Bob’s Big Boy and consumed several cups of coffee and a chocolate milkshake. If someone had a meeting with Lynch during those years, it probably took place at Bob’s. (He was open to other coffee shops, too, however, and also frequented Du-par’s, in the San Fernando Valley; Ben Frank’s, on Sunset Boulevard; and Nibblers, on Wilshire Boulevard.)
A few months after Lynch’s move, Splet returned from Scotland, and they transformed the double garage adjoining the Rosewood bungalow into a post-production facility where Splet took up residence. From summer 1975 until early 1976, Lynch cut picture while Splet cut sound, and it was during these eight months of intensive work that Eraserhead became the masterpiece that it is. There’s an almost unbearable tension in the soundtrack to Eraserhead, and the layers of sound—the menacing barking of a dog, the whistle of a distant train, the hiss of churning machinery, the hollow room tone that’s the very embodiment of loneliness—are so complex and rich it’s as if you could close your eyes and experience the film simply by listening to it. “David and Alan harnessed the power of industrial sounds and really made them work in terms of controlling the mood and the feeling of the movie,” said Elmes. “The way they built that soundtrack is brilliant.”
Mary Fisk had taken an apartment a few blocks from Lynch’s bungalow during this phase of post-production, and the two had begun dating. “David and Alan agreed that neither of them would date until they finished the film,” said Fisk, “but David would meet me for lunch every day and not tell Alan. At the time David was also dating Martha Bonner, a friend of ours from the center, and he went back and forth between us for two years. David didn’t try to hide it from me that he was attracted to Martha, but she knew he was seeing me and that he was trouble, so things never went anywhere with her.”
Regardless of the status of their relationship, Fisk was a firm believer in Eraserhead, and she persuaded family friend Chuck Hamel to invest ten thousand dollars in the film. These indispensable funds allowed Lynch to focus on the completion of Eraserhead, and once he and Splet finalized the sound, he had a finished cut of the film. At that point he asked the principal cast and crew to meet him at Hamburger Hamlet, a now-defunct restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, and to everyone’s surprise told them they were among fourteen beneficiaries who would be receiving a percentage of any future profits the film made. He wrote the terms of the agreement on napkins, and “a few years later we all got checks in the mail,” said Coulson. “It’s pretty amazing that he did that.” All the beneficiaries continue to receive annual checks.
Eraserhead had its unofficial premiere in a cast-and-crew screening at the AFI. “When David first showed us the film, it seemed like an eternity,” recalled Stewart of the screening, which ran for an hour and fifty minutes. “He called me afterward and asked me what I thought, and I said, ‘David, it was like a toothache—it hurt so bad.’ It was grueling to sit through.” Lynch listened to what his inner circle had to say but wasn’t yet ready to edit anything out of the film.
Representatives from the Cannes Film Festival were visiting the AFI when Lynch happened to be there mixing the film, and they expressed enthusiasm over the footage they saw; at that point he set himself the goal of getting Eraserhead into Cannes. This proved to be a fruitless ordeal, and Eraserhead was then rejected by the New York Film Festival, too. This was not a good period for Lynch. “I remember meeting him for lunch at Bob’s after we divorced, and he said, ‘I’m ready to be in the inner circle—I’m tired of being outside,’ ” said Reavey. “Yes, his sensibility is underground and dark, but once he got involved in Hollywood he didn’t want to be this weirdo, and he wanted to operate in the field where the real stuff was happening—and that’s the way it should be. I’d hate to live in a world where somebody like David doesn’t get to do his thing.”
When the Los Angeles International Film Exposition—Filmex—began reviewing movies for its 1976 program, Lynch was too demoralized to consider submitting Eraserhead. Fisk insisted that he submit it, though, and it was accepted and screened for a public audience for the first time at the festival. It got a nasty review in Variety, and watching the movie with an audience was an enlightening experience for Lynch. He realized the film would be better with a tighter edit, so he cut a composite print and discarded twenty minutes of footage containing at least four substantial scenes, including Henry kicking a piece of furniture in the lobby of his apartment; and Coulson and her friend V. Phipps-Wilson bound to beds with battery cables, being threatened by a man holding an electrical device. Lynch loved the scenes but knew they were dragging the film down and had to go.
Word of Eraserhead made its way to Ben Barenholtz, in New York, and he requested a print. A producer and distributor who’s been a hero in the world of independent film for decades, Barenholtz was the originator of the midnight movie programming that’s served as a lifeline for iconoclastic filmmakers who couldn’t get their work seen any other way. His innovation allowed films like John Waters’s Pink Flamingos to find their audiences, and his support was crucial to Eraserhead. Barenholtz’s company, Libra Films, agreed to distribute the film, and he sent his colleague, Fred Baker, to L.A. to seal the deal with Lynch. The official handshake took place at Schwab’s Pharmacy, which is the setting for a scene in Sunset Boulevard and thus had particular meaning for Lynch.
As Eraserhead began making its way safely into port, Lynch’s personal life continued to be messy. “One day not long after Ben agreed to take Eraserhead, David told me he wanted to be with Martha Bonner,” said Fisk. “David and I had moved in together by that point, and I said, ‘Fine, I’m moving back to Virginia,’ and I left. Three days after I left, David called and asked me to marry him. My mother was against it because he had no money, and my brother didn’t think I should marry him, either. He sat me down and said, ‘David is different, Mary, the marriage won’t last,’ but I didn’t care. David has this incredible love inside of him, and when you’re with him you feel like you’re the most important person in the world. Just the tone of his voice and the amount of caring he gives people is extraordinary.”
On June 21st, 1977, Lynch and Fisk married in a small ceremony at the church his parents attended in Riverside. “We were married on a Tuesday and David’s father had arranged to have the flowers from the Sunday service saved for us, so we had flowers, and he also hired an organist,” said Fisk. “We had a traditional wedding, then went on a honeymoon of one night in Big Bear.”
Sixteen days later Lynch registered a treatment with the Writers Guild for what he hoped would be his next film, Ronnie Rocket, then he and Fisk headed to New York City. Lynch lived in Barenholtz’s apartment there for three months while he worked with a lab, attempting to get a satisfactory release print of Eraserhead. Barenholtz paid to clear the rights to the Fats Waller music that plays an integral role in setting the mood of the film, and it was good to go. It premiered at Cinema Village in Manhattan that fall, with a birth announcement serving as the invitation to its official opening.
Getting a distributor for Eraserhead did nothing to solve Lynch’s money problems, and after returning from New York he spent the next few months living in Riverside, where he worked with his father remodeling a house they planned to flip. While Lynch was in Riverside, Fisk worked in the property-management divi
sion of Coldwell Banker and visited him on weekends. “We lived with David’s parents on and off for a while after we got married,” said Fisk. “He and his dad would come home from working on that house and his mother would rush to the door with her arms open and hug David and his dad. They’re a very loving family. The profit on the renovated house was seven thousand dollars, and David’s parents gave it all to him. They worried about him because they didn’t see the dreams he saw for himself—and yet they helped fund The Grandmother. It’s extraordinary that they would look at a son making work they could never grasp and support it anyway.”
At the end of 1977 Lynch was still in a black hole financially, so he converted his post-production facility into a workshop and began what he’s referred to as his “shed-building” phase, which means exactly that—he was building sheds and picking up odd carpentry jobs. Discouraging though this may sound, Lynch’s hopes were undimmed. “He was excited,” said Mary Fisk. “He’d finished the film, it had been at Filmex, and there was a buzz. I’d wake up to David and he’d have this big smile, ready for the day. He was ready for the next thing.
“Our social life revolved around spending time with the meditation community at the center,” she continued. “We were there every Friday night, and the people there became our closest friends. We’d meet up with them and go to movies—I saw lots of movies with David—but we weren’t caught up in the movie business at all.”
Meanwhile, Eraserhead was quietly becoming a word-of-mouth sensation on the midnight movie circuit and was in the early days of what turned out to be a four-year run at Los Angeles theater the Nuart. Eraserhead came along at an opportune time in that precisely the sort of hip audience capable of appreciating it was coalescing in Los Angeles then. Radical performance art was in its heyday, punk rock was gathering steam, and outré publications like Wet magazine, Slash, and the L.A. Reader, which celebrated all things experimental and underground, were flourishing. People from these factions of the city filled the seats at the Nuart and embraced Lynch as one of their own. John Waters encouraged his fans to see Eraserhead, Stanley Kubrick loved the film, and Lynch’s name started to get around.
