He capped things off by offering Jack and me parts in the show, which of course we were thrilled to hear. David said they’d film the pilot first and if that did well, ABC would pick it up for a season.
At some point in the evening — and it’s why I remember the date so clearly — I got a phone call from someone I was close to, who told me that my dear, beautiful friend Mickey Fox had been found dead in her apartment.
It just crushed me. I knew Mickey hadn’t been well and was having some kind of health issue she didn’t want to talk about. I’d gone to her apartment the day before, where I found her in bed and she was kind of rambling, her words and thoughts not quite connecting. She’d wet herself in bed and I got her up and with the help of another friend got her and her bed all cleaned up.
I loved Mickey so much. She’d been big all her life and it was as though only a body that size would be large enough to hold that heart and that sense of life and adventure. In her youth she’d been a bar girl in Havana, Cuba. Later she’d lived in Rome and if you were an actor visiting Rome — usually to do voice-over work — you knew Mickey. All the American actors would eventually find their way to her house for fun, companionship, a taste of food from home and of course she had the best weed in town.
Later when she and “the Rome crowd,” as Jeanne called them, all lived together in a commune in Topanga, Mickey had worked at Everybody’s Mother, where she made everyone feel welcomed.
I’d tried to talk Mickey into seeing a doctor but she’d refused both on the grounds that she didn’t have any money and she simply didn’t want to.
Now she was gone.
So often Life had served up good and bad at the same time. The same night I found out I’d be working with David again, I learned of Mickey’s passing. The Rolling Stones concert with Robert Greenfield on the day of my mother’s cancer diagnosis. My split from Tim and experiencing my first taste of confidence as an actor. I remember once reading that when Andy Warhol mixed paints to get the colors he was looking for, he always blended in some black — even if he wanted a neon pink or a green apple. It’s never all one color, one flavor, one texture. No matter how good someone’s life looks from the outside, there’s always darkness blended in with the light and light swirled around in with the dark.
You’ve seen lots of pictures of actors, models, directors, or producers posing in designer clothes at movie premiers. Flashbulbs going off. Paparazzi shouting their names. It’s easy to think those people live a dream life. A perfect existence where everything is easy. I assure you that behind those confident smiles and poses are often people who feel vulnerable, stupid, inadequate, unsure, angry, depressed, broken, lonely, overwhelmed, and trapped.
I remember putting down the phone after getting the news about Mickey and just spending a few minutes remembering her, feeling the raw empty place inside of me that her death had created. Then I cleaned up my face and went back to the table and shared the news with David and Jack.
Putting a show together for a major network takes a long time and things can evolve in surprising ways. In this case, the name changed from Northwest Passage to Twin Peaks and David and Isabella broke up and her part went to Joan Chen.
I learned later that during its development, the show caused something of a war within ABC with executives on both coasts fighting for or against it. Everything was a battle — the plot, the tone, even the casting. David wanted to hire actors from soap operas and old movies, people with fairly obscure careers — no big stars. He never auditions, as I’ve said, never asks a person to read script pages. Often he doesn’t really even talk about the project. He talks to people for a while, gets a sense of who they are and casts them if he thinks they’ve got what it takes to inhabit the part. One day David caught a taxi in L.A. and struck up a conversation with the driver, a guy named Harry Goaz. David liked him so much he cast him in Twin Peaks as Deputy Andy Brennan (the officer who cries at crime scenes).
At one point all the main actors had to go to ABC headquarters to be interviewed by top network brass. I didn’t have to go, thank goodness, but Jack did and he was nervous. He put on a suit and muttered to me as he left the house, “I don’t think I’m going to pass.”
But he did, they all did, though the network tried to get David to change his casting to fit more traditional lines with names that were more marketable. But he and Mark Frost were firm. In the end David got the go-ahead to shoot the pilot his way.
We shot most of the two-hour pilot in and around the town of Snoqualmie, Washington in early 1989. My first scenes as Betty Briggs were shot on my birthday, Monday, February 27. After I’d wrapped that evening Jack took me for a celebratory dinner to the Salish Lodge, which was the exterior of The Great Northern Hotel in the Twin Peaks world. The schedule had been set up so that I had scenes on Monday and then more on the following Friday and in the middle I’d get to hang out and have some fun. Except that I got a horrible bout of the flu. There’s nothing worse than being ill in a hotel room — you just want to be home being miserable in your own bed. At one point I was watching The Legend of the Lone Ranger on TV and Michael Horse was playing Tonto — Michael Horse whom I’d just seen a couple of days before on the Twin Peaks set. I thought I was hallucinating.
Other than being sick, shooting the pilot was like a great vacation, being around old friends like Richard Beymer, whom I’d known since the day I met him at the commissary at Samuel Goldwyn while shooting The Loretta Young Show, my former Topanga neighbor Russ Tamblyn, who had been so much fun to work with on Human Highway, Jack of course, and Michael Ontkean, who was playing Sheriff Harry S. Truman. I’d first met Michael in the early 1970s when we’d both hang out with Sam and Annie Melville. I’d befriended Sam when he played a villain on Gunsmoke (the episode called “Lyle’s Kid”). Michael knew Sam because they were both on the TV series The Rookies, which ran from 1972 to 1974. Sam and Annie had the kind of laid-back place in Hollywood where friends would just come over, smoke a little dope, and hang out all day. It was a great place for me to get my head together after my split with Tim.
And in yet another of those who-knows-who oddities in the Hollywood bubble, Michael’s manager in the early 1970s was Thor Arngrim, father of Alison, whom I would later work with on Little House and decades later would inspire me to write this book.
I loved the humor and humanity Michael brought to his role. He and Kyle MacLachlan (playing Special Agent Dale Cooper) were both great at that — incredibly good-looking guys who didn’t play their parts for sex appeal and sizzle though they certainly could have.
I remember once I’d finished up a scene and was walking through the various sets on my way out and came across Kyle standing by himself, wearing a tuxedo, reading a script. The light was hitting him just right and — I know Kyle, he’s a really nice, normal guy — but there he was with that coal black hair and that porcelain skin and that jaw from a 1930s Hollywood musical — it just took my breath away.
But as I said instead of playing their parts as TV hunks, he and Michael both looked for the inherent comedic possibilities, often self-deprecating, that worked so brilliantly.
One of the best things about shooting Twin Peaks is that it’s when I finally came to know Catherine Coulson as a friend, which probably sounds weird because we’d shared such tight quarters while shooting Eraserhead in the early 1970s. But she’d been so busy we hardly got a chance to become acquainted.
On Twin Peaks, in which she became famous as The Log Lady, we had lots of time during filming to hang out and have fun. Even though she and Jack had divorced in the 1970s, she still cared about how he was doing and was so happy that he was sober — his alcoholism was the primary thing that had driven them apart. She expressed a lot of gratitude for the role I’d played in getting him a place to live in a setting where alcohol recovery was a way of life.
By the way, Catherine and I were convinced that David Lynch had given Jack’s Twin Peaks wife, Piper Laurie, the name Catherine because on the Eraserhead s
et we’d all heard him say her name in his elongated, nasal drawl that bordered on a bleat, managing to break it into several extra syllables as “Caa-aa-ther-ine…”
The other thing I loved about shooting the show is that it brought two new men into my life and family — Don Davis and Dana Ashbrook.
Don was a total surprise to me. When I read the script and learned that my character Betty Briggs would be married to a military man named Major Garland Briggs, I think I imagined someone tall, dark, and handsome and when Don walked into the room, well, Don was compact, roundish,and ginger. It was a change of gears in my brain — but once again David Lynch had given me an unexpected gift. Don was a kind, smart, sweet guy to know and play scenes with — a true artist, who produced sculpture and poetry. He wore his military uniform beautifully and created an authentic character that you knew right away, who would evolve in some pretty unexpected ways.
And Dana Ashbrook, who played Betty and Garland’s son Bobby Briggs, I just loved from moment one. Those big gorgeous eyes and eyelashes and all that rowdy hair; he’s like chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream for the eyes. As an actor he was up for anything — boundless and fearless. You can see that on full display at Laura Palmer’s funeral when he cuts loose with a Wolfman howl. It’s so much fun to play scenes with him.
While I was thrilled to be part of Twin Peaks, I was a little nervous going into it. I knew that for David there was a lot riding on getting this thing right. I wanted to support him, wanted to support the cast and crew. Both Don and Dana were right there for me from the start. Within the large solar system of the cast we were like our own little three-planet orbit supporting, protecting and encouraging each other. The Briggs family might have been wildly screwed up on screen but off we were the best there could be.
Like any production this size, Twin Peaks came with lots of trucks, lights, cables, jibs, and tracks, trailers for make-up and wardrobe and all the stuff that makes it feel like the circus has come to town. Even so, shooting the pilot also felt like a lark. We were basically left alone as we were out in the boondocks filming this thing that was, yes, headed for a shot at mainstream television, but it had the surreal nature of David Lynch written all over it. The cast would hang out together and watch filming. We were in and out of each other’s trailers. It was that Eraserhead feeling of summer camp only more so.
By now David was a name. He’d been nominated for Academy Awards for Best Director for The Elephant Man as well as for Blue Velvet. He was a familiar figure in People, Newsweek, and The New York Times.
In terms of sheer production size, Twin Peaks was Eraserhead multiplied by a magnitude of about 100,000. David had all the funding he needed (at least by comparison) and had scads of great assistants, staff, writers, producers, and collaborators to help him power through filming. Where on Eraserhead he’d been a one-man band, on Twin Peaks he was the conductor of an orchestra. Even so, he was very much the artistic soul I’d worked with in the early1970s. He could be both very specific — asking me to turn my head or my hand, say, in distinct ways. And at the same time, he could be very vague, talking in pictures, if you will, to set the tone of a scene.
What I was reminded of working with him again is that as an actor, I didn’t need to understand why he was asking me to move or talk or exhibit stillness. I just needed to do it. I continued to see the influence of his painting background, that for him the actors were part of the lines, shading, color or texture he had in mind. Often in work such as Eraserhead, David has talked about feeling the film rather than thinking it. And when you’re going for a feel, you may not be able to explain that to an actor. Nor should you have to. It’s a waste of time.
On Twin Peaks, just as in Eraserhead, he was always open to new ideas — eager for them. There was no point in this huge production that I got the idea that the script was “locked.” A young actress from Seattle, Sheryl Lee, had been hired simply to play the corpse of Laura Palmer. But as filming progressed David saw something in her — as they shot footage that was meant to show her and her friends hanging out prior to her murder — and the next thing you knew he’d written a part for her as Laura’s lookalike cousin. She was a bright talent and brought a great touch to the show.
In another case, a member of the crew, Frank Silva, was doing some set decoration in the set for Laura Palmer’s living room and David caught Frank’s reflection in a mirror during filming. David found it so startling that he cast Frank as the disturbing, malevolent character of Bob.
Any actor could come to him with ideas that, as long as they felt right, were incorporated into your scene or your character. With David’s approval Russ Tamblyn cooked up a lot of the razzle-dazzle of his character, Dr. Lawrence Jacoby — the red and blue-lens glasses, the Hawaiian shirts, the bowties. None of that had been in the script.
Early on while discussing with David the underlying reasons why Bobby Briggs, my son on the show, was so messed up, I laid out his main issues, “Garland is military and I’m super Catholic. He’s fucked.” David brought that into his interpretation and as a way of delving into that took my suggestion to start a scene in the first season in which Bobby and his dad, Major Briggs, have an important moment together. But the scene starts with Bobby gazing up at a huge crucifix on the wall that’s enshrined with fern fronds and candles. At first you think Bobby’s in a church but the camera pulls back and you realize he’s at home. Yikes.
My time in Washington State flew by and before I knew it I was back on a plane headed home. Looking out the window I saw those endless forests, rivers, and lakes far below and hoped that some of the magic in those trees and wild places would rub off on Twin Peaks. It seemed like it had some great potential but nobody would know if it would soar or sink for another year, when the pilot would eventually air in the spring of 1990. In the meantime, we’d all have to wait and see.
Chapter 13
Alone But Not Alone
Not long after David had asked me to shoot the pilot of Twin Peaks, my agent had called with an opportunity for a role in a movie called Tremors. When I read the script it reminded me, in a way, of Human Highway, as it was comedic, full of odd-ball characters out in the middle of nowhere under a big, bizarre threat.
Shooting the film meant spending three weeks in Lone Pine, California, which is located up between the Sierras and Death Valley, about 160 miles northeast of Bakersfield. It defines the boonies. All of which you can see in the film.
The town you see in the film was fake — all sets for the film. The actual town of Lone Pine, located nearby, is basically one street with a couple of stores, a café, a hotel, and a few other businesses on both sides. There’s a smattering of houses spreading out from the town center.
One of the challenges of working in a place so remote is that I still very much wanted — needed might be the better word — to go to alcohol recovery meetings. By now, about five years into sobriety, I was no longer attending meetings every day, but I still found strength and support in three meetings a week.
I hated the thought of going for such a long stretch of time without my safety net. The desire for alcohol does not go away. Ever. It’s always there in some form — sometimes in a whisper, sometimes in an insistent shout — in my head. Spending that many weeks away from “my people” made me feel vulnerable.
At the little hotel where the cast was staying, I noticed a car parked out front that had a bumper sticker with a symbol on it that is identified with alcohol recovery. Based on the age and model of the car it could simply be an artifact from several owners-ago or…and I hardly let myself hope for this…somewhere out here in the middle of nowhere was someone like me. It sent me into Agatha Christie mode. Inside the hotel I asked the person at the desk if they knew whose car that was. After a bit more sleuthing around, I was eventually able to track it to the maid who cleaned my room. The next morning I hung around as long as I could and when she came in to tidy up, I asked her about her bumper sticker. This led to a funny back-and-forth with the little
Spanish I knew and the little English that she knew. Finally she pulled another maid into the room, who was able to translate. Both of them, it turns out, were in a local alcohol recovery group and warmly and happily welcomed me to join. I was so relieved and delighted I hugged them both.
The group met in a local church several times a week, their sessions held in English and Spanish; it was a joy to be so far from home and yet even there to find members of my far-flung alcohol recovery family. It set the stage for me to truly enjoy the Tremors shoot, which was just as much fun as you might suspect.
The story of Tremors is of a small, dusty, high desert town that is terrorized by giant, slug-like, human-eating creatures called Graboids that travel underground at high speed — making the earth shake wildly just before they burst to the surface and devour the next townsperson. In the wrong hands this premise could have played out pretty poorly but the director, Ron Underwood, took this story and really spun out of it a fun, high-speed, and surprisingly human adventure.
The cast was such a great group. Well, mostly.
It was a total joy to work with then 10-year-old Ariana Richards, which was a good thing as I spent most of the movie clutching her, trying to keep her from being gulped by Graboids. (Thanks to Little House, I’d long ago abandon my fear of working with kids.) A couple of years later I was very happy for her as she was cast as one of the kids in the Steven Spielberg blockbuster Jurassic Park. She and I worked together again in Tremors 3, when she was 21, which was pretty cool.
Little House in the Hollywood Hills Page 22
