developed. Lynch was determined to explore the new direction that had presented itself to him, though, and he rented a camera from Photorama, in downtown Philadelphia, and made Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), a one-minute animation that repeats six times and is projected onto a unique six-by-ten-foot sculpted screen. Made on a budget of two hundred dollars and shot in an empty room in a hotel owned by the Academy, the film pairs three detailed faces cast in plaster, then fiberglass—Lynch cast Fisk’s face twice and Fisk cast Lynch’s face once—with three projected faces. Lynch was experimenting with different materials at the time, and Reavey said, “David had never used polyester resin before Six Men Getting Sick, and the first batch he mixed burst into flames.”
The bodies of all six figures in the piece have minimal articulation and center on swollen red orbs representing stomachs. The animated stomachs fill with colored liquid that rises until the faces erupt with sprays of white paint that trickle down a purple field. The sound of a siren wails throughout the film, the word “sick” flashes across the screen, and hands wave in distress. The piece was awarded the school’s Dr. William S. Biddle Cadwalader Memorial Prize, which Lynch shared with painter Noel Mahaffey. Fellow student H. Barton Wasserman was impressed enough to commission Lynch to create a similar film installation for his home.
“David painted me with bright-red acrylic paint that burned like hell and rigged up this thing with a showerhead,” Reavey recalled of the Wasserman commission. “In the middle of the night he needed a showerhead and length of hose, so he goes out into the alleyway and comes back with them! That kind of thing happened to David a lot.” It took Lynch two months to shoot two minutes and twenty-five seconds of film for the piece, but when he sent it to be processed, he discovered the camera he’d been using was broken and the film was nothing but a long blur. “He put his head in his hands and wept for two minutes,” said Reavey, “then he said, ‘Fuck it,’ and sent the camera to be fixed. He’s very disciplined.” The project was decommissioned, but Wasserman allowed Lynch to keep the remainder of the funds he’d allotted for it.
In August of 1967, Reavey learned she was pregnant, and when the fall semester began a month later, Lynch left the Academy. In a letter to the school administration, he explained, “I won’t be returning in the fall, but I’ll be around from time to time to have some Coca-Cola. I just don’t have enough money these days, and my doctor says I’m allergic to oil paint. I am developing an ulcer and pinworms on top of my spasms of the intestines. I don’t have the energy for continuing my conscientious work here at the Penn. Academy of the Fine Arts. Love—David. P.S.: I am seriously making films instead.”5
At the end of the year Reavey left school, too. “David said, ‘Let’s get married, Peg. We were going to get married anyway. Let’s just get married,’ ” Reavey recalled. “I couldn’t believe I had to go and tell my parents I was pregnant, but we did, and it helped that they adored David.
“We got married on January 7th of 1968 at my parents’ church, which had just gotten a new minister, who was great,” she continued. “He was on our side: Hey, you guys found love, fantastic. I was about six months pregnant at the time and wore a floor-length white dress, and we had a formal ceremony that David and I both found funny. My parents invited their friends and it was awkward for them, so I felt bad about that, but we just rolled with it. We went to my parents’ house afterward for hors d’oeuvres and champagne. All our artist friends came and there was plenty of champagne flowing and it was a wild party. We didn’t go on a honeymoon, but they booked us a room for one night at the Chestnut Hill Hotel, which is beautiful now but was a dump then. We stayed in a dismal room, but we were both happy and had a lot of fun.”
Using the funds remaining from the Wasserman commission, along with financial aid from his father, Lynch embarked on his second movie, The Alphabet. A four-minute film starring Reavey, The Alphabet was inspired by Reavey’s story of her niece giving an anxious recitation of the alphabet in her sleep. Opening with a shot of Reavey in a white nightgown lying on a white-sheeted bed in a black void, the film goes on to intercut live action with animation. The drawings in the film are accompanied by an innovative soundtrack that begins with a group of children chanting “A-B-C,” then segues into a male baritone (Lynch’s friend Robert Chadwick) singing a nonsensical song in stentorian tones; a crying baby and cooing mother; and Reavey reciting the entire alphabet. Described by Lynch as “a nightmare about the fear connected with learning,” it’s a charming film with a menacing undercurrent. It concludes with the woman vomiting blood as she writhes on the bed. “The first time The Alphabet screened in an actual movie theater was at this place called the Band Box,” Reavey recalled. “The film started but the sound was off.” Lynch stood up and shouted, “Stop the film,” then raced up to the projection booth with Reavey behind him. Reavey’s parents had come to see the movie, and Lynch remembers the evening as “a nightmare.”
“David’s work was the center of our life, and as soon as he made a film it was all about him being able to make another one,” said Reavey. “I had no doubt that he loved me, but he said, ‘The work is the main thing and it has to come first.’ That’s just the way it was. I felt extremely involved in David’s work, too—we really did connect in terms of aesthetics. I remember seeing him do stuff that just wowed me. I’d say, ‘Jesus! You’re a genius!’ I said that a lot, and I think he is. He would do stuff that seemed so right and original.”
Reavey had begun working in the bookstore at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1967, and she continued at her job until she went into labor. Jennifer Chambers Lynch arrived on April 7th, 1968, and Reavey recalled, “David got a kick out of Jen but had a hard time with the crying at night. He had no tolerance for that. Sleep was important to David, and waking him up was not fun—he had issues with his stomach and always had an upset stomach in the morning. But Jen was a great, really easy kid and was the center of my life for a long time—the three of us did everything together and we were an idyllic family.”
When Reavey and Lynch married, Reavey’s father gave them two thousand dollars, and Lynch’s parents contributed additional funds that allowed them to purchase a house. “It was at 2416 Poplar, at the corner of Poplar and Ring-gold,” Reavey said. “Bay windows in the bedroom—into which our bed was tucked—looked onto the Ukrainian Catholic church, and there were lots of trees. That house made a lot of things possible, but aspects of it were pretty rough. We ripped up all the linoleum and never finished sanding the wooden floors, and parts of it were really bitten up—if I spilled something in the kitchen, it just soaked into the wood. David’s mother visited us right before we moved to California and said, ‘Peggy, you’re going to miss this floor.’ Sunny had a wonderful, very dry sense of humor. She once looked at me and said, ‘Peggy, we’ve worried about you for years. David’s wife . . .’ She could be funny, and Don had a great sense of humor, too. I always had fun with David’s parents.”
Life as Lynch’s wife was interesting and rich for Reavey; however, the violence of Philadelphia was no small thing. She’d grown up there and felt it wasn’t any rougher than any other large Northeastern city during the 1960s, but she conceded that “I didn’t like it when somebody got shot outside our house. Still, I went out every day and pushed the baby coach all over town to get film or whatever we needed, and I wasn’t afraid. It could be creepy, though.
“One night when David was out I saw a face at a window on the second floor, then after David got home we heard someone jump down. The next day a friend loaned David a shotgun, and we spent the night sitting on our blue velvet couch—which David still pines for—with him gripping this rifle. Another time we were in bed and heard people trying to bash in the front door downstairs, which they succeeded in doing. We had a ceremonial sword under the bed that my father had given us, and David pulled his boxer shorts on backward, grabbed the sword, ran to the top of the stairs, and yelled ‘Get the hell out of here!’ It was a volatile neighborhood, and a lot happened at that house.”
Lynch didn’t have a job when his daughter was born, nor was he looking for
