Little House in the Hollywood Hills

by Charlotte Stewart

  Also in May 1991, Jack Nance and Kelly Van Dyke were married. To say it was a tumultuous relationship would be putting it mildly. Jack would eventually learn that while he was away on film locations, she was shooting porn films under the name Nancee Kelly. One of them, which must have come as a cruel slap to her father, was called The Coach’s Daughter. Remember that her dad, Jerry Van Dyke, was a lead on the TV sitcom Coach, a role that earned him four Emmy nominations. Beyond that Kelly hired herself out to perform live stripping and sex acts at stag parties.

  None of us knew the extent of what Kelly was up to, but you did get the sense that something wasn’t right.

  On Monday, November 17, six months after their wedding, I’d just arrived at work at Lantana when I got a phone call from Jack. I knew immediately that something was wrong. He sounded destroyed.

  “I need you to come over to the apartment with me,” he said.

  His apartment? I thought Jack was away somewhere filming a movie.

  “What’s happened?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.

  Jack had indeed been on a very remote film set shooting the comedy Meatballs 4. They were at Bass Lake in the Sierras, which is located just a few miles from the southern entrance of Yosemite National Park. That Sunday night, using the one phone that was available at the camp where they were shooting, Jack had called Kelly and she was a mess, hysterical, talking nonsense, angry, sad, and confused. She kept saying that if he hung up, she’d kill herself.

  Outside in the darkness, a storm was whipping up and as Jack tried to talk to Kelly over the growing noise of the wind and the trees, tried to calm her down, there was a crack of lightning — in an instant the power went out and the phone line went dead. Remember, this was before cell phones were common, certainly before texting, social media, or any of the many ways you might get in touch with someone in an emergency. Jack panicked, realizing that from her end it would’ve sounded like he had hung up.

  He grabbed the director, Bob Logan, who raced Jack through the storm in his car on treacherous back roads until they found a pay phone where they got in touch with Madera County Sheriff’s Department, who in turn contacted police in Los Angeles.

  The local police acted quickly and got to Jack and Kelly’s North Hollywood apartment as soon as they could. By the time they arrived, however, she’d already hung herself in a closet.

  Jack got the news from the local Sheriff. Someone from the film crew had driven him home to Los Angeles and he’d just gotten into town.

  “Will you come to the apartment?” Jack asked. “I don’t want to go in by myself.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I absolutely ached for him.

  I drove out to the apartment and there he was looking like he’d been hit by a semi, the life crushed out of him. I gave him a hug and together we went inside. The police investigation was over; they were gone. The coroner had already taken Kelly’s body. The apartment looked as it always had, totally surreal in its ordinariness. Jack just walked around the interior of the place heartbroken and in shock. It seemed unthinkable to him that their furniture, their kitchen things, their lamps, their clothes, their bed — everything was so unchanged when such an act of violence and brutality had erupted within those walls hours before. It was like everything should have exploded. We should be kicking through shambles now instead of this bizarre normality.

  Jack found out afterwards a lot of the stuff that she’d been up to without his knowledge and it didn’t change much in terms of how he felt about her. He understood addiction too well. Understood how it warps you, changes you, brings out the worst.

  Of course one of my big concerns was that this would drive Jack away from sobriety, but he hung in there. Though I have to say it physically aged him; it made him quieter, and he was never quite the same.

  Chapter 15

  Life Goes On

  Finally, we have come to the happily ever after part. Or at least, that was my frame of mind when on January 19, 1992, I married the tall, handsome, funny, smart, good-hearted David Banks.

  We were both pretty short on money just then — as those in the entertainment business tend to be from time to time — so we bootlegged our wedding at an old hotel in Pasadena that had been called the Huntington Hartford Hotel in our student days (known today as The Langham Huntington) and where we’d gone for drinks while at the Playhouse.

  Bootlegging worked like this: we invited a group of old Playhouse friends to brunch and had a lovely meal, then stepped outside into the flower garden, had a quick service with my friend Liz Barron, who was now a judge. Then we snapped some pictures — all before we were thrown out/asked to leave.

  Actually the staff there was very nice, even after they’d figured out that we’d worked around their wedding party policies and pricing.

  David and I enjoyed each other so much — things were easy between us. I think getting married in our 50s meant that we had a lot fewer expectations of each other than we might have had we tried to do this in our twenties. Besides loving spending time together and with friends we each got busy in our own spheres. He had become a partner in a construction firm and I focused on getting work.

  Not long after our wedding I landed a recurring role on ABC’s groundbreaking series Life Goes On. Unfortunately I don’t think the show is available on DVD or video on demand now but at the time it was a big deal. Pattie LuPone was the mom of a family in which one of the kids had Down Syndrome. And in that regard it was the first show in which an actor wasn’t simply playing a character with Down Syndrome but the actor, Christopher Burke, himself had the condition. John J. O’Connor, television critic of The New York Times, termed it “sensitively written, wonderfully cast and beautifully executed…in the admirable family-drama tradition of The Waltons and Family.”

  In the string of episodes I appeared in, I played the mother of a daughter with Down Syndrome but where Patti LuPone’s character was a patient, supportive mom and a stellar human being, my character was a complete bitch and got into it with Patti. I have to say that I really relished playing a mouthy, unlikeable character for a change. I got a sense of how much fun Alison Arngrim had had playing Nellie Oleson.

  Patti was a joy to work with; it’s always a pleasure to work with a real pro. She brings firecracker energy and smarts to everything she does. She is probably best known for her performances on Broadway in Evita. More recently she was in the news because during a Broadway show she actually took a cell phone away from an audience member. Good for her.

  Around this same time I landed a multi-episode gig on the sitcom Coach where among other people, I worked with Kelly’s dad, Jerry Van Dyke. Of course I didn’t mention Jack or Kelly to him, assuming that his daughter’s death was still a terrible wound. Somehow though Jerry put two and two together and he asked if he could talk to me. I said of course and we found a quiet corner.

  While on camera he often plays a complete dope, Jerry in reality is a sharp guy and in this case was actually pretty intense. He came straight to the point asking what I knew about Kelly and Jack. There was no way I was going to tell him that she’d been doing drugs and had been involved in prostitution and porn films. I just said that Jack loved her very much and was devastated by her death.

  Jerry had already made his mind up about the situation and was sure it was all Jack’s fault. Poor guy, I could see it from his perspective. What father wouldn’t rather pin the blame on someone else? The fact was though that besides her drug addiction, to my mind, it seemed like Kelly had some unresolved mental health issues. On top of that I knew what I knew about Jack and what he’d been through and the kind of person he was.

  I did my best to let Jerry know that his daughter, at the very least, had been loved, figuring that that might bring some small measure of comfort.

  He appreciated my time but I could see he was furious at Jack and convinced that he’d led Kelly down a path that had ended in suicide. If he truly believed that I could not imagine the kind of anger and sad
ness he must live with.

  Above all though Jerry was a professional. I appeared on Coach several times, in a role that I really enjoyed, playing an utter dingbat, and it was the only time that anything about Jack and Kelly came up.

  In 1995 at some point, Jack and I got together for lunch. I hadn’t seen him much since that day at the apartment. Because we’d stayed in touch by phone I knew he’d suffered a stroke and had spent some time in the hospital. He was out now and seemed to be doing better. He was finding acting jobs now and then but to fill in the income gaps he’d taken a job as a clerk at a motel on Ventura Blvd, which also gave him a place to stay — in one of the motel rooms, which he liked because it was private, small, and contained. It also came with maid service, which he loved — and very much needed. He took the job seriously wearing a suit and tie and he looked very dapper.

  As we sat down at the table, he asked if I minded if he ordered a drink and I said that I did mind. Very much. I asked him what was going on.

  He sighed and said he’d just woken up one day and just couldn’t do it anymore. He walked down to a store and bought a bottle of gin.

  I tried to stay in regular touch with Jack after that and I do know that he kept going back to sobriety and would be successful for a few months at a time and then would relapse.

  In the summer of 1996 I was contacted about appearing in a short documentary about the filming of Eraserhead along with Jack, David Lynch, and Catherine Coulson. We were going to film an interview and some other scenes at AFI, where the stable and old servants’ quarters still stood, though largely in ruins now.

  Jack asked if I could give him a ride to AFI, which of course I was happy to do. David (my husband in his Panama hat) and I drove to South Pasadena, where he was now living, to pick him up. Jack had moved into an old Mission-style apartment house built, I’m guessing, in the 1920s. It stood on Fair Oaks Avenue across the street from a Winchell’s Donuts. It had what novelists might call faded glory. When we walked down the long hallway where he lived, it looked just like something straight out of Eraserhead — a long, dark, weirdly narrow hallway with Jack’s door being the last one on the left.

  Jack met us at the door walking slowly with a cane. Six months prior he’d been in a car accident — he’d been a passenger — and it had messed him up pretty badly. He was also drinking again, heavily I assumed given the bottles here and there about the place, and he looked 20 years older than his actual age.

  If you want to see the short documentary, it’s included on the recent Criterion re-release of Eraserhead. You can see Jack moving with measured, careful steps and speaking slowly, though his dry wit is still intact. In the film you can see us, bathed in sunlight, poking around the stables where we had filmed the cult classic some 25 years earlier. It was great to be reunited with those guys. I think you can tell we’re having a good time.

  It was the last time I would see Jack. And I suppose if I had to choose a place to spend my last hours with him it would be back there in that special place where we’d first met and had created the characters of Henry and Mary X.

  On December 29, 1996, something happened to him, the details of which remain a mystery. All the information I have comes from police reports and a couple he’d befriended in the neighborhood — people who’d stepped in to help Jack take care of himself. They’d do his laundry, give him rides to the store, things like that.

  That day they said they saw Jack at lunch and that he had a black eye and wasn’t feeling well. The story they said he gave them was that he’d walked over the Winchell’s Donuts late the night before and he’d been drinking and he mouthed off to a couple of young Latino guys in the parking lot. One of them, he said, had punched him in the face and had then taken off. The story was that the blow had been especially painful because Jack had been wearing his glasses.

  He’d told the couple that he’d be fine, just needed to nurse his eye.

  The next morning they came to check on him and found Jack lying motionless in his Murphy bed. They called the police who pronounced Jack dead and since the coroner listed the cause of death as “subdural hematoma caused by blunt-force trauma,” the case was listed as a homicide.

  The investigation found that there was no evidence that Jack had gone to Winchell’s Donuts that night. None of the employees remembered seeing him there and no one recalled a scuffle or a fight in the parking lot. No one could say they’d seen a couple of Latino guys hanging around outside. There was no evidence that Jack had been wearing his glasses. He rarely wore them anyway and they weren’t found at Winchell’s nor were they in his home.

  The investigation eventually sputtered out. No leads. No suspects. Just a middle-aged guy found with a blood alcohol level of .24 dead in his apartment.

  If there is any silver lining to his grim and heartbreaking end, it’s that I know how totally delighted Jack would be to know that his death will forever be listed as an unsolved homicide.

  Chapter 16

  Saving Mr. Banks

  Working at Lantana was in a lot of ways like other office jobs with paperwork to fill out and file, phones to answer, budgets that needed to be stayed within, spreadsheets to analyze and all that. At the same time it was totally unlike the grim, cubicles of slow death I’ve seen at other businesses. Our office was fun and busy with producers, directors, and actors dropping in almost daily. We devoted a lot of energy to putting on great events for all the companies renting production space. At Thanksgiving we’d set out a big dinner with trimmings galore, at Christmas there was always a big tree and celebration. We also did a lot of fundraising for various causes.

  One of my favorite tenants was Larry David, who’d rented a block of six offices as production offices for his show Curb Your Enthusiasm. Larry would always complain — with a twinkle in his eye — every time we’d come by the Curb offices looking for donations. He’d always spout off with something like “Oh God, if I’d left 20 minutes sooner I could’ve saved myself twenty bucks!”

  One thing you learn about tenants over time are their various quirks and eccentricities, which we always tried to accommodate. In Larry’s case, we learned that he hated being in the bathroom with anyone else. For a while if he was in the restroom, which was located down the hall from the Curb Your Enthusiasm offices, we’d casually post someone outside the door to keep other people from entering when Larry was in there. Later we solved the issue fully by installing a bathroom in his office.

  Knowing of this bathroom phobia came in handy once when I had a chance to audition for a small part on his show as a nurse in a proctologist’s office.

  Knowing that Curb was totally improv — and that the audition would be as well — I prepped by going online and getting the names of as many horrible-sounding medical problems as I could find relating to excrement and the anus.

  As I’d expected, for the audition I was simply given the set-up for the scene, which was that Larry had just arrived at the proctologist’s office and that he did not want to talk to the nurse about his condition. He would only talk to the doctor. The nurse insists he answer some questions first.

  It went something like this:

  Nurse: Good morning Mr. David, How are you today?

  Larry: I need to talk to the doctor.

  Nurse: (pleasantly) Yes, of course…but I need you to answer a few questions first.

  Larry: No…

  Nurse: Do you notice blood in your stool?

  Larry: (aghast) WHAT? No…I —

  Nurse: Anything black or mucus-y?

  Larry: I want the doctor, please.

  Nurse: Hemorrhoids? Anal warts? Pain evacuating your bowels?

  Larry: No! Stop! I can’t talk to you about this! I want to see —

  Nurse: Mr. David! You’re behaving childishly.

  Larry: Aaagh…please go get —

  Nurse: (Leaving) Honestly, what a baby…

  I waited outside the door for a minute until the laughter died down and poked my head in the room. Larry was
staring at me. The only thing he knew about me was that I worked at Lantana. After a beat he said, “That was good…really good.”

  I said thank you and went back to the office. Ultimately I didn’t get the part but I felt great about my audition. I’d made Larry David laugh.

  Around this time I landed a small part in a film called Slums of Beverly Hills with Alan Arkin and made a straight-to-video horror film in Romania for Full Moon Entertainment called Dark Angel: The Ascent. A little of this and a little of that. But as I headed toward the age of 60 the thing that all women in Hollywood talk about happening very clearly did. The roles became less plentiful.

  In 2005 I drove over to Warner Brothers for an audition for the TV show Cold Case. And I pulled up to the main gate — I’d been entering through the main gate since the mid-1960s on the crime drama The F.B.I. But not anymore. I was directed to a parking lot near a secondary side gate for actors like myself who no longer rated main-gate status. Even with this demotion, I gave it my best and did get the part.