Little House in the Hollywood Hills

by Charlotte Stewart

  Through the tears in my eyes now, I saw police lights flashing in my rearview mirror. Crap. I rolled down the windows to get the marijuana smell out and flicked the roach into the floorboard.

  In true small-town fashion the officer who stopped me was Ron Cardiselli, a guy I’d gone to high school with. I apologized for breaking the speed limit and told Ron about the situation with my mom. If he smelled the weed, he didn’t say anything. I still got the ticket.

  At the hospital, Mom had already received a large dose of morphine and was drifting away. I sat on her bed and said to Barbara Jean. “God. I just got stopped by Ron Cardiselli. I threw my joint on the floor and if he noticed I was going to say it was Mom’s.”

  From somewhere in her haze Mom gave a burst of laughter.

  I turned to her and said, “I’ll see you later Mom.”

  “No you won’t,” she said, pragmatic to the end.

  Chapter 7

  Henry and Mary X, Part 1

  My roommate, Doreen Small, wanted to learn the film business and so became a volunteer at the American Film Institute’s film school, the AFI Conservatory. AFI was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and other big-name contributors, established in 1967 to become the premier institute for the study of American film and to house a graduate-level film school. An institute with a mission this grand was appropriately housed at the very stately Doheny Mansion in Beverly Hills, a huge Tudor-style estate built by an oil baron in the 1920s. Like the Pasadena Playhouse, its alumni list is long and distinguished. Some of the first graduates were Terrence Malick, Paul Schrader, and Caleb Daschenel.

  I knew Doreen was enjoying her work at AFI assisting some hotshot young filmmakers and gradually I became aware that there was one student project in particular that she’d become attached to. In fact one weekend she went up to Neil Young’s ranch in Woodside south of San Francisco to pitch him on helping to fund this AFI student project. Neil had a lot of interest in film. At the time I believe he was in the middle of editing Journey Through the Past, a documentary he directed about a tour with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and within a few years would launch his own feature film project, which would be called Human Highway. For whatever reason Neil didn’t end up writing any checks to help the project Doreen was promoting.

  Not long after that she came home to Topanga Canyon and told me that there was a possible role in this film for me if I was interested. I’d worked in a couple of student films through the years; they were always shot quickly, on a microscopic budget and were shown once or twice and then disappeared without a trace. Often the films themselves weren’t stellar but the work was almost always fun, letting me stretch my actors wings a bit. I said I’d be happy to meet the director.

  Doreen arranged for her student auteur to come over for dinner and we’d chat about the project, see the script, talk about schedule, and all that.

  He arrived the evening of February 17, 1972 on my doorstep tall and lanky wearing a Panama hat with a hole in the brim and not one but two neckties — his signature look I would learn. This guy with a wry, loopy grin then, inexplicably, handed me a sack of wheat as a gift. Hmmmm. This was my introduction to the young David Lynch.

  David had grown up all over the place in lots of outdoorsy settings — Montana, Idaho, North Carolina, and so on. As a boy he went on to become an Eagle Scout and developed a lifelong interest in forests, wood, and woodworking — all of which the world would see in its fullest bloom in the 1990s in Twin Peaks with its eerie owl and spirit-filled forests, drama around the wood mill, Special Agent Dale Cooper’s obsession with tree species, and of course the Log Lady.

  In the mid-1960s David had gone to Pennsylvania School of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, focusing on painting. He tells the story that one day he was working on a painting that was all blacks and dark greens and as he was looking at it he talks about hearing wind and seeing the painting move a little. And he realized through this kind of hallucinatory epiphany that what he wanted was to create a painting that moved and had sound. With this in mind he produced an animated one-minute film called Six Men Getting Sick.

  In 1968 he shot a second short film, about four minutes long, called The Alphabet, which, like his first film, combined elements of animation and of live action, very much having the feel of a painting come to life.

  From there film rather than painting seemed the way forward. While still in Philadelphia David applied for a grant to AFI, showing them his two short films and a script for a new one. He was awarded the grant and with the money shot The Grandmother, a 30-minute film in 1970.

  That evening in Topanga he gave me the beginning of his graduate level project at AFI, a 23-page script (most full-length scripts are 90 to 130 pages) for a film titled Eraserhead.

  What I realized later is that David was auditioning me — as much as he auditions anyone. He never does the traditional thing of asking an actor to read lines or do a scene. He just talks to you informally and gets a feel for who you are as a person. Whatever his process is, I apparently passed the audition as the role was mine if I wanted it.

  A few days later I read the script — more of an outline than a screenplay really. Then I read it again. Which didn’t help because I couldn’t begin to understand it.

  It seemed to be set in a grim industrial landscape where it was always night. The main character, Henry Spencer, an odd, passive, young man with a pocket protector full of pens had fallen in with a weird and dreary young woman named Mary X (my character). Together they became parents to a hideous thing — a baby? — okay, a baby-like thing, that takes over their lives with its insistent, bleating cries.

  I don’t have that original script so I can’t go back and re-read how the film was originally resolved, which kind of doesn’t matter because it evolved so much over time. For example, I do not remember the “woman in the radiator” in the original draft, a character that dominates the final third of the film. I think at some point in shooting David became enamored with the radiator on the set, the light shining from within, the hisses and noises he was creating for it, the possibility of Henry dreaming of a miniature world within.

  From this initial read though, I was able to get a sense for my character, which ultimately mattered more to me than whether or not I understood the movie as a whole.

  Mary X was an overly-protected, awkward girl. I saw her as someone who made her own clothes but had no sense of style, someone who slouched as though she was missing some bones, looked uncomfortable all the time, and always had a bra strap hanging down. She was easily walked over and put-upon. She seemed to either be ill or imagined being ill in very real terms. She reeked of desperation.

  When I discussed this with David he was very enthusiastic about my take on the character and later during filming, before the camera would roll, he would play on the idea of hypochondria by what he called “giving me an ear infection,” putting a dollop of glue in my right ear. This acted as a physical reminder that Mary always had a dull, weird ache in her head. It was brilliant. In some of the shots when Henry and Mary are in bed together you can actually see that glue blob in my ear.

  Because David only had a small AFI grant to work with, there were a lot of do-it-yourself projects both prior to and during filming.

  One of the props we needed was a photo of Mary. At one point in the film Henry pulls two sheets of paper out of a dresser drawer and we see that it’s a picture of Mary that has been torn in half. To make the picture I sewed a dress — I made all my Eraserhead costumes — which didn’t look right. So I made a second one that was less attractive. Bingo. I loaded on make-up for washed-out look and penciled my eyebrows in so that they almost met. Then Doreen, Mary X, and I went to a drugstore that shot passport photos.

  Fearing I may have overdone it, I showed David the outfit and the photo and he gave it his total approval with one of his favorite responses: “Neat!” He is one of the most cheerful people I’ve ever known.

  The first time you see Henry approach the
house where Mary X lives with her parents and grandmother, you’ll notice large dead sunflowers adorning the unattractive front yard. Doreen and I had seen those dried, awful looking sunflowers in someone’s yard in Topanga while we were heading to AFI so we stopped and pulled up a bunch by the roots and stuck them in the back of my car. David loved them.

  A more memorable prop was required for a moment in the original script when Henry and Mary are in bed. She’s asleep and he reaches over, pulls down the bedcover, pushes a hand through her abdomen and pulls out fistful after fistful of umbilical cords. To make this work, David needed a cast of my torso.

  Doreen and I went over to his house where he’d set up a bed on a screened-in porch. I stripped down to nothing, laid on the bed, and David and Doreen went to town slathering me from neck to nethers in latex and then waited for it to set up. Once it was dry — with the consistency of one of those rubbery Halloween masks — they peeled it off, which took some doing in my various cracks and crevices. Both of them at one point were digging around between my legs to get it all tugged out. (Hey everybody — welcome to my privates!) Using the latex mold, David poured a plaster cast of my torso, which looked really cool.

  Unfortunately, after all that, when we filmed the scene it just didn’t work; it looked too much like Henry was punching through a plaster cast. In the end, David filmed it such that Henry reaches down under the bedcovers and pulls out umbilical cords (which were real!), which he flings against the wall each with a wet splat that still gives me the creeps. I still have the plaster cast of my torso — later painting it gold; it sits on my dresser to this day.

  By the time of my first scenes in about May of 1972 David had already done some filming with Jack Nance, who played Henry. They filmed a good deal of footage of Jack dressed in his plain black suit with high-water pants and white socks tottering almost Chaplin-esque through sooty, oily, muddy, abandoned warehouses and construction sites.

  I’m not sure who else David had had in mind for the part of Henry, but I do know Jack very nearly didn’t get the part. Jack had done a lot of theater first in Dallas, Texas, where he’d grown up, and then later in San Francisco at San Francisco State and at ACT. I believe he’d only been in one or two films up to that point. The way Catherine Coulson told it — she and Jack were married at the time — David had Jack come by his house and had done his usual thing of just chatting about this and that, no real auditioning. I think David would rather get a person who he sees as having the natural capacity for a part in their DNA, rather than having to do too much acting. Coming into filmmaking from painting, he comes at things from an all-consuming visual standpoint rather than from a script standpoint. If I had to guess, I’d say he sees actors the way a painter sees color and texture. He sets you up under the lights, in the environment that he’s created — among all the other colors, shapes, and textures — and asks you to go through the movements of the scene. I remember while working on Twin Peaks he’d offer direction like “Make it more blue,” rather than give specifics on how to move or what kind of emotion to shade your voice with.

  Anyway, for whatever reason David just didn’t seem to think that he and Jack clicked or that Jack quite embodied the part.

  As they were wrapping up and walking outside though Jack noticed the cherry wood rack on David’s VW and remarked with real reverence at the beauty of the wood and the workmanship. David had made the rack by hand. For some reason this changed David’s mind. He saw the spark of a similar bent — a level of obsession with detail that seemed right. Ultimately they became good friends and collaborators. Jack was in every film David made up to Lost Highway in the late 1990s.

  Other than the exteriors in which Henry slowly meanders through industrial decay, Eraserhead was shot on the old family estate at AFI. David had secured permission to use an abandoned two-story structure that had been servants’ quarters and horse stables in which to construct sets, to store equipment, set up some office space, and so forth. All the interiors were fastidiously constructed, painted, and decorated by David, with occasional assistance from with his brother John Lynch, and long-time friend, the film’s art director, Jack Fisk, (who would also eventually become David’s brother-in-law when David married Jack’s sister Mary in 1977).

  The reason the hallways and elevator in Henry’s building are so narrow is because David had to construct them as shells within the already narrow spaces of the stables. It worked beautifully helping to make Henry’s world more cramped and soul sucking.

  Besides Doreen, Jeanne Field had also come on board to help out in countless ways. By this time Jeanne had a lot of experience in documentaries, having worked in sound and on the crew in various capacities both on Woodstock and then on Journey Through the Past with Neil Young and Crosby, Stills and Nash.

  The real center of the sisterhood on Eraserhead was Catherine Coulson, who the world would eventually know as “The Log Lady” on Twin Peaks. As early as Eraserhead, David was already dreaming up a character he wanted Catherine to play called “The Log Girl.” By the time Twin Peaks came along in the early 1990s Catherine suggested he change the name to Log Lady given her age.

  Catherine had grown up in Los Angeles around the entertainment business. Her father had been in radio and television and eventually became head of public relations at Disneyland. Her mom had at one time been on the Vaudeville circuit as a dancer partnered with her sister, Margrit Feeligi, who had later been a costumer and went on to became a very successful swimsuit designer.

  Catherine had done camera work, an unusual job for a woman then, and in fact became the first woman to join the camera union. During Eraserhead’s various hiatuses she did some terrific work for John Cassavetes, who was for a time artist-in-residence at AFI, doing hand-held work on the films The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Opening Night. In her post-Eraserhead life she would do a lot more camera work, the most well-known project being Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. She was versatile to say the least. Prior to Eraserhead she’d done some acting, which is how she’d been introduced to Jack. They’d met at San Francisco State when he was a guest artist doing a play called Amerika that had moved from Dallas. They formed a theater group with David Lindeman, who also ended up at AFI. She says they fell in love doing The Threepenny Opera eight days a week together and were married in 1968.

  On Eraserhead Catherine was the glue that held the operation together. I actually didn’t get to know her all that well then because she was so busy on so many fronts — from making hundreds of grilled cheese sandwiches for the cast and crew to lighting to finding the right kind of vanilla pudding for various effects to securing actual human umbilical cords, which on its own was no small task. Somehow — probably because she was just so nice — she managed to talk a local hospital into giving her a seemingly endless supply of umbilical cords. She became such a fixture there; she’d don a pair of blue scrubs and wait outside the delivery room until a nurse would come out with a jar filled with cords in formaldehyde.

  Her mom would also drive in from Anaheim to bring baked treats for the crew and her aunt Margrit helped David by letting him film images in her swimsuit factory. Plus she didn’t mind that Catherine and Jack rummaged through her 17-room house helping themselves to lots of treasures that were used as props in the film such as the vaporizer that Henry uses to try to nurse the baby back to health.

  For David there was no detail too small to obsess over. He did numerous test shots of various shades of white, gray, and black to see how they all showed up on film. When you see Henry getting in and out of bed, David had Catherine first soak the sheets in tea or coffee, to ensure that they were the right shade of white-gray (or gray-ish white) on film. Before shooting started he had us come over to AFI to watch the Billy Wilder film Sunset Boulevard, primarily so we could see what he wanted to achieve in black and white.

  The story of the film begins with insemination imagery. A long sperm like creature drops into a pool of water inside a planet. Then we see a diseased-looking
character called The Man in The Planet, played by Jack Fisk. Only seen in half-light next to broken factory-like windows he sits like a sentinel with railroad-type switching gears in front of him. Then to the sound of industrial grinding, he pulls the gears and seemingly sets something in motion.

  After that we see Henry living in a decayed industrial wasteland, where no one ever sees the sun. He visits what from the outside looks like a haunted house. This turns out to be the home of slouchy, hollow-eyed Mary X and her family, where Henry has come for a nightmarishly awkward family dinner during which, at various times, Mary, her mother, father, and even the tiny roast chickens — that evening’s entrée — each have seizures of varying kinds.

  After dinner Henry is cornered by Mrs. X, who demands to know if Henry is going to marry Mary, revealing that Mary has given birth to a baby — at which point Mary interrupts and tearfully reminds her mother that at the hospital they weren’t even sure if the baby was human.

  Soon enough we see the newborn, which looks like a fetal lama crossed with a frog covered in a sheen of mucus. (Having said that, David swore Jack and me to secrecy about how the baby was made, a promise I’ve always kept.)

  When it came time to film scenes in which I’m in Henry’s dingy apartment trying to feed the baby, David kept it covered. I didn’t see it until I had the spoon in my hand and David said “action.” When it was uncovered I had the same reaction as every other filmgoer — revulsion. But of course this was my baby so in spite of it fighting to move its mouth away from the spoon, and its spitting, its goat-like bleating, and its gut-twisting appearance, I was supposed to love it.

  (Although not named in David’s script, Jack and I decided the baby needed a name, so we called it Spike. I’m still not sure if it was a boy or a girl.)

  So there’s Henry in his weird, ugly, isolating apartment with his weird, desperate wife and his hideous baby. It’s dark and rainy outside and industrial clanging noises come from the radiator next to the bed. Is it any wonder than Henry gazes into the light of the radiator and, like a prisoner in solitary confinement, begins to dream up alternate realities — such as a tiny singing, dancing woman in the radiator. Or vaguely erotic dreams of the one other woman in the building.