Little House in the Hollywood Hills

by Charlotte Stewart

  I think Henry finds something — God knows what — to love in Mary X. In spite of her spasms, her agonizing awkwardness, and emotional brokenness, he wants to be with her. He loves her. And when Mary leaves him and Spike, he gingerly and tenderly tries to care for the baby — the ugliest and least loveable infant in all of movie history. He exhibits love and care for this creature that shows no ability to love in return.

  To love the unlovely, to love the thing that cannot return love — in all major religions and philosophies, this is the highest form of love.

  To me it’s no surprise that while David has long refused to discuss the meaning of the film, he has remained steadfast that this is his most spiritual work.

  On release, Eraserhead caused a sensation. It got a big reaction at the Los Angeles Film Festival. It was polarizing. And audiences had a gut reaction that was either love or hate.

  It joined Rocky Horror Picture Show as one of the top grossing midnight movies of that era. It showed every Saturday night for at least four years in L.A., New York, and other cities around the country. People would shout goofy instructions and encouragement to Henry and Mary up on the screen and audience members would dress like us and act out scenes from the movie while it was playing.

  As you might expect, though, it was not met with universal praise. Variety called it “sickening” and “gory” adding: “Eraserhead consists mostly of a man sitting in a room trying to figure out what to do with his horribly mutated child.”

  The New York Times called Eraserhead “…a murkily pretentious shocker” and added, “It runs for two hours but because of its excruciatingly slow pace and the under-lighting of all its scenes, it seems to be twice that long.”

  Well, harrumph, harrumph.

  One of the people who loved the film, however, was Mel Brooks, who was gearing up to produce The Elephant Man. Yes, Mel Brooks of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. Mel hired David to direct The Elephant Man, which like Eraserhead was shot in black and white, featured a main character in a kind of terrible isolation, and contained some of David’s signature ominous background noises of machines hammering away somewhere two floors below.

  My early prediction about his having no future as a director were, I am happy to say, completely off the mark. And you may quote me.

  Charlotte’s mother, Alice Stewart, in an image from the 1930s.

  Charlotte’s dad, Willis Stewart, as a young man.

  Charlotte’s parents, Alice and Willis Stewart, in the early days of their marriage.

  Charlotte Stewart shows her readiness for the spotlight, posing on the back of her dad’s flatbed truck.

  A childhood portrait of Charlotte Stewart.

  Charlotte with her brother and sister at their home in Yuba City, CA. Left to Right: Lewis Stewart, Charlotte Stewart, Barbara Jean Stewart.

  Charlotte Stewart as The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe posing by the shoe built by her father, Willis Stewart, for her Yuba City competitive rollerskating team.

  Left to right: Charlotte Stewart, William Frawley, Willis Stewart, and Alice Stewart on the set of My Three Sons.

  Charlotte Stewart, Tim Considine and their many attendants at their wedding in Bel Aire in 1964.

  Charlotte Stewart and Tim Considine at their wedding in Bel Aire in 1964.

  Charlotte Stewart and Tim Considine as newlyweds out on the town.

  An image of Jimmy Stewart and Charlotte Stewart in character on the set of Cheyenne Social Club.

  Joni Mitchell (left) and Charlotte Stewart on the back porch of Charlotte’s house in Topanga Canyon in the early 1970s.

  Charlotte Stewart (left) and her roommate Doreen Small (right) on the back porch of the house they shared with many other drop-ins in Topanga Canyon.

  A candid shot of an evening in Topanga Canyon with Charlotte Stewart. Blurred in the background with a guitar is Peter Butterfield.

  A photo by Julian Wasser at The Liquid Butterfly. Left to right: Two unidentified people, Dani Senator, Charlotte Stewart, and Jeanne Field.

  Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, from an image taken from a Super 8 mm film Charlotte shot on a road trip they took together in November 1970.

  Charlotte Steward as Mary X and Jack Nance as Henry Spencer in an image from the film Eraserhead. Courtesy of David Lynch.

  Charlotte Stewart playing soccer in the weekly game organized by Tim Considine in the 1970s at the UCLA fields.

  Charlotte Stewart and Tim Considine finding friendship after their divorce.

  Charlotte Stewart (right) and Patty Elder (left), Charlotte’s stunt double on the set of Little House on the Prairie.

  A candid image of Charlotte Steward shot near the schoolhouse on the set of Little House on the Prairie..

  Charlotte Stewart as Miss Eva Beadle and her long-time friend Josh Bryant as Adam Simms, the pig farmer Miss Beadle marries on Little House on the Prairie.

  Charlotte Stewart and her second husband, Jordan Hahn, dance at their wedding, held in Kit Carson’s and Karen Black’s backyard.

  Neil Young as Lionel Switch and Charlotte as Charlotte Goodheart in Young's classic Human Highway, originally released in 1982. Courtesy of Shakey Pictures.

  Charlotte Stewart and long-time friend Jeanne Field in 1984 soon after Jeanne’s divorce and Charlotte’s stint in rehab.

  An image of Jack Nance after he embraced sobriety and roomed with Charlotte Stewart.

  Charlotte Steward and David Lynch on the set of Twin Peaks in the early 1990s.

  The Briggs Family on the set of Twin Peaks. Left to Right: Don Davis as Garland Briggs, Charlotte Stewart as Betty Briggs, and Dana Ashbrook as Bobby Briggs.

  Jack Nance (without pants) and Kelly Van Dyke at Charlotte Stewart’s “bad taste” 50th Birthday Party.

  Charlotte Stewart and Don Davis at Charlotte’s 50th “bad taste” birthday party.

  Screen and Broadway star Patti LuPone gives Charlotte Stewart a hug on the set of Life Goes On in the mid 1990s.

  Charlotte Stewart looking pretty pleased to be standing this close to Kevin Bacon on the set of Tremors in the 1990s.

  Charlotte Stewart and her third husband David Banks pose for a shot soon after their marriage in the early 1990s. He is seen here, as he nearly always was, in a straw Panama hat.

  Chapter 9

  Any Port in a Storm

  In September of 1977, I was out with some friends one night at Ports, doing cocaine, drinking, and playing Backgammon, and saw a good-looking guy there performing magic tricks. I watched as he cracked an egg into a glass and made it disappear. And then it reappeared in someone else’s glass. Pretty slick.

  Jordan Hahn was a professional magician, a good one too, and we started hanging out and having a lot of fun. He was a member of the Academy of Magical Arts, which meant he could take me as his guest to The Magic Castle, a private L.A. club for members of the Academy of Magical Arts.

  We had a lot in common. We loved to drink, do cocaine, and hang out at my house and watch Battlestar Galactica (which starred Lorne Greene from my old Bonanza days).

  The first time I’d ever done cocaine was in the early 1970s at Elliot Robert’s house. I remember doing a couple of lines and announcing that it didn’t affect me in the least — and then I cleaned his entire kitchen.

  Mainly, I liked coke because I could afford it and it allowed me to drink more. It was my wingman drug. Eventually, I’d worked out a pretty neat barter system. My dentist had access to pharmaceutical-grade cocaine but he preferred cocaine that was cut. My therapist had cocaine that was cut but preferred pharmaceutical grade. Enter Charlotte, the coke fairy. I was able to help them facilitate a swap on a regular basis and got some coke out of the bargain.

  And no, it never occurred to me at the time that having a therapist who relied on me to secure his drug of choice might indicate I was working with the wrong therapist.

  Within a few months of first meeting, and having a great time together — there’s nothing like doing nothing to bring a couple tog
ether — Jordan and I took a trip to Mexico where we did more nothing together and had a good time and got engaged.

  In retrospect it happened pretty fast and without a lot of thought, but at the time it seemed like the most perfectly natural thing to do. We should not have gotten married; we should have just thrown a party.

  I was, though, thinking clearly enough to realize that we needed a place to get married that would be easy and fun — neither of us wanted a church nor did we want a place that would be too expensive. We needed to save our money for more important things like drugs and alcohol. We had priorities.

  I put a lot of thought into trying to figure out where to have the ceremony until I had a flashbulb moment. My mind went back to the poker nights at my house in Topanga and to my buddy Kit Carson, who was both an actor and was turning out to be a very gifted writer. At the time he was working on a screenplay that eventually became the 1982 film Paris, Texas among other things. Kit was married to the actress Karen Black and I knew they had a beautiful backyard. Karen, you may remember, had appeared in a string of great films including Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Nashville and The Great Gatsby.

  I called up Kit and told him what I was calling about and he said, “Well, ask Karen.” So he put Karen on the phone and she was just fine with it.

  This phone call must have triggered something in Karen’s mind because she called me back a few days later.

  Here was her question: “Kit was telling me about these little houses he used to eat at your place. I was wondering if you could tell me how to make them?”

  Um. Houses? That you eat?

  Back in the Topanga Canyon days Kit had spent the night any number of times and my mind went back to what I may’ve cooked up for breakfast. Drawing a blank.

  “Houses?” I asked.

  “Yeah, you know. He said you made these houses. With cheese. I think he called them houses.”

  “Do you mean quesadillas?” I asked, taking a wild stab in the dark.

  “Yeah, maybe that was it.”

  And so I explained the approximately three steps it takes to make a quesadilla.

  I liked her a lot but sometimes she was a bit on Planet Karen if you know what I mean.

  Our wedding in their backyard was on a perfect, warm, sunny L.A. day. There were lots of guests, many of whom I barely knew or not at all. Including Harrison Ford although for the life of me I cannot think why. He must have gotten dragged along as someone’s date.

  In front of all these people we promised to be true to each other for the rest of our lives.

  It was a terrible idea.

  I don’t know what it is with me getting involved in film projects that take years to complete. Right around this time I was cast in one of my favorite films, which almost no one has ever seen, called Human Highway. This time instead of David Lynch throwing five years of his life at a movie, it was Neil Young.

  Neil loves movies and had already shot a couple: Journey Through the Past and Rust Never Sleeps. This time he really wanted to make something creative, anarchic, something he was excited about, and that had some meaning.

  He’d come up with an idea in rough form and had gotten together with actor friends Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn, and Dennis Hopper. From the start Neil knew he didn’t want anything scripted. He wanted to catch moments as they unfolded naturally in front of the camera. In the late 1970s they’d spent a few months in and around San Francisco and Taos, New Mexico, shooting scenes for a kind of road movie, which Neil eventually hated and finally walked away from.

  There are two ways of looking at this first attempt at shooting the film. The first is this — these guys had all lived next to each other in Topanga Canyon and that first on-and-off film shoot was just a typical Topanga thing — a bunch of hippies getting stoned and grabbing a camera, going out on the road and seeing what happened.

  The other way of looking at it is that these guys really knew the movie business. Remember that Russ Tamblyn had been acting in film since the late 1940s, as an eighth grader, and had later been a song and dance guy in musicals such as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and then in West Side Story (with my old friend Richard Beymer) as well as in straight dramas such as Peyton Place and How the West was Won. Likewise Dean Stockwell got his start as a little kid in the mid-1940s shooting the big-budget musical Anchors Aweigh with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly. At age 12 he’d starred in The Boy with Green Hair and appeared in one of the Thin Man movies with William Powell and Myrna Loy — he’d grown up in the Golden Age of Hollywood — and had gone on to build a huge resume in TV and film.

  Dennis Hopper had gotten his start rather famously in the 1955 blockbuster Rebel Without a Cause and had gone on to roles in a string of now-classics such as Gunfight at the OK Corral, Cool Hand Luke, and True Grit.

  These guys were hardly naïve flower children when it came to the film industry. What they saw I’m guessing, with the success of Dennis’s film Easy Rider, was that something was “blowing in the wind.” There was an audience hungry for movies with a completely different feel — something grittier, less perfect, and more like their real lives.

  The remnants of that first attempt at Human Highway appear in a 20-minute dream sequence in the middle of the final film and, in my opinion, it’s great stuff. Weird but great. There’s a whole extended performance of “Hey, Hey, My, My (Into the Black)” with Neil and the band Devo, which is trippy and pretty cool.

  I was only involved a little bit in that first round of filmmaking. It was a scene shot somewhere near Neil’s ranch in Woodside in which Neil and I are apparently married and live in this odd little white clapboard house. He’s leaving in the morning and something like a dozen of our kids are streaming out past me as I stand in the doorway waving goodbye.

  As Neil is taking off, the actor David Blue shows up dressed to the hilt as a milkman in a snappy white suit. Once Neil and the kids are gone, the milkman and I dash inside and shut the door. (Wink.)

  It was fun but I had no idea what it was about and as I would later learn, neither did anyone else.

  In spite of something like $1-million down the drain, Neil decided to start over but he didn’t quite know what to do. He bemoaned the fact that in the first version of the film he’d made the mistake of casting himself as a musician and he just didn’t think anyone would find that very interesting.

  Jeanne Field meanwhile, who never seems short on ideas, had a concept that she thought might work and wrote a treatment for a new version of Human Highway that she described as a rock-n-roll Wizard of Oz.

  Neil liked this new direction a lot and used it as a loose — very loose — roadmap for what became the final film, a dark, spoofy, cartoony anti-nuclear-power film.

  We shot the new version at Raleigh Studios, which sits across the street on Melrose from Paramount. The good-looking studio manager from Raleigh named Kevin kept an eye on our production, rented Neil lights and equipment, kept things cleaned up, and would sometimes hang around to watch us work. At some point we all eventually learned Kevin’s last name, which was Costner.

  Every morning we’d show up to the sound stage and Neil would outline what the upcoming scene was about, what he was looking for in terms of what would happen, how it would advance the story, and then we’d wing it. Once we’d filmed the scene in a way that worked, someone would write down the dialogue so that the screenplay was actually written after we shot it.

  Neil played two characters in the new version, a grease monkey mechanic named Lionel Switch, a completely clueless dork, and Frankie Fontaine, a rock star, who is too cool to even emerge from his limousine. He saw the idea of playing Lionel, something totally the opposite of his onstage persona, as being a much more interesting proposition for an audience. For those of us who know Neil, playing a nerd wasn’t a huge stretch. If anything it was simply revealing a side of himself that audiences hadn’t seen. This is a guy, remember, who when he got money did what? Built a barn and filled it with model trains. He loves them so mu
ch he bought an interest in the Lionel train company. And note the name of the character — Lionel Switch.

  I loved how Russ Tamblyn put it once in an interview saying that in Human Highway Neil got to play two characters, “Himself and himself.”

  Besides starring and producing the film, Neil directed along with Dean Stockwell, who played Otto Quartz, the new owner of the Rail Café in Linear Valley who appeared to be up to no good. Dennis Hopper remained in the cast, along with Russ Tamblyn, who, since he was the resident song and dance guy, was now tasked with choreographing a big dance number that takes place just before the world blows up.

  Elliot Roberts, who makes an appearance in the film as the manager of Neil’s superstar rocker character, produced along with Jeanne.

  Elliot and Neil hired Sally Kirkland, Geraldine Barone, and me to round out the cast, as waitresses in the Rail Café and my friend Mickey Fox as one of the café’s more memorable customers.