fine-art etchings. McGinnis’s mother, Dorothy, worked at the printshop, too, and LaPelle recalled, “We all had lunch together every day, and the only thing we talked about was art.”6
The strongest paintings Lynch made during his time in Philadelphia were produced during the final two years that he lived there. Lynch had seen and been impressed by an exhibition of work by Francis Bacon, which ran from November through December of 1968 at the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery in New York. He wasn’t alone in his admiration, and Maitland said that “most of us were influenced by Bacon then, and I could see Bacon’s influence on David at the time.” Bacon is inarguably there in the paintings Lynch completed during this period, but his influence is largely subsumed by Lynch’s vision.
As is the case with Bacon’s work, most of Lynch’s early pictures are portraits, and they employ simple vertical and horizontal lines that transform the canvases into proscenium stages, which serve as the setting for curious occurrences. The occurrences in Lynch’s pictures are the figures themselves. Startling creatures that seem to have emerged from loamy soil, they’re impossible conglomerations of human limbs, animal forms, and organic growths that dissolve the boundaries customarily distinguishing one species from the next; they depict all living things as parts of a single energy field. Isolated in black environments, the figures often appear to be traveling through murky terrain that’s freighted with danger. Flying Bird with Cigarette Butts (1968) depicts a figure hovering in a black sky with a kind of offspring tethered to its belly by a pair of cords. In Gardenback (1968–1970), an eagle seems to have been grafted onto human legs. Growths sprout from the rounded back of this figure, which walks in profile and has a breastlike mound erupting from the base of the spine.
It was during the late 1960s that Lynch made these visionary paintings, and although the latest Beatles album was usually on permanent rotation on the turntable at home, the deeper waters of the counterculture were of little interest to him. “David never did drugs—he didn’t need them,” Reavey recalled. “A friend once gave us a lump of hash and told us we should smoke it and then have sex. We didn’t know what we were doing, so we smoked all of it, sitting there on the blue velvet couch, and we could barely crawl upstairs by the time we were done. Drinking was never a huge thing in our lives, either. My dad used to make this thing he called ‘the Lynch Special’ out of vodka and bitter lemon that David liked, but that was about the extent of his drinking.”
“I never saw David intoxicated other than at my wedding, where everybody was falling-down drunk,” said Maitland. “Later, I remember my mother saying, ‘Your friend David was jumping up and down on my nice yellow couch!’ It’s probably the only time David’s been that drunk.”
With encouragement from Bushnell Keeler, Lynch applied for a $7,500 grant from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles and submitted The Alphabet, along with a new script he’d written called The Grandmother, as part of his application. He received $5,000 to make The Grandmother, the story of a lonely boy who’s repeatedly punished by his cruel parents for wetting the bed. A thirty-four-minute chronicle of the boy’s successful attempt to plant and grow a loving grandmother, the film starred Lynch’s co-worker Dorothy McGinnis as the grandmother. Richard White, a child from Lynch’s neighborhood, played the boy, and Robert Chadwick and Virginia Maitland played the parents.
Lynch and Reavey transformed the third floor of their house into a film set, and Reavey recalled “trying to figure out how to paint the room black and still define the shape of a room; we ended up using chalk at the joints where the ceiling meets the wall.” The creation of the set also called for the elimination of several walls, and “That left a big mess,” she said. “I spent lots of time filling little plastic bags with plaster and putting them in the street to be picked up. Big bags would’ve been too heavy, so we used little bags that had ties on them like bunny ears. One day we were looking out the window when the trash guys came, and David was falling down laughing because we’d filled the street with these little bags and it looked like a huge flock of rabbits.”
Maitland said that her participation in The Grandmother began with an overture from Reavey. “Peggy said, ‘Do you want to do this? He’ll pay you three hundred dollars.’ I have strong memories of being in their house and how bleak it was the way he had it set up. David had us put rubber bands around our faces to make us look strange and made all of our faces up with white. There’s a scene where Bob and I are in the ground buried up to the neck, and he needed a place where he could dig deep holes, so we shot that scene at Eo Omwake’s parents’ house in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. David dug the holes, which we got into, then he covered us up with dirt, and I remember being in the ground for what seemed like way too long. But that’s the thing about David that makes him so great—he was an incredible director, even then. He could get you to do anything, and he’d do it in the nicest way.”
A crucial element of The Grandmother fell into place when Lynch met Alan Splet, a kind of freelance genius of sound. “David and Al getting together was a cool thing—they just really clicked,” said Reavey. “Al was an eccentric, sweet guy who’d been an accountant for Schmidt’s Brewery, and he was just naturally gifted with sound. He had the red beard, red hair, and intense eyes of Vincent van Gogh and was skinny as a pencil and blind as a bat, so he couldn’t drive and had to walk everywhere, which was fine with him. He was a totally uncool dresser who always wore these cheap short-sleeved shirts and was a wonderful cellist. When he was living with us in L.A., we’d sometimes come home and he’d be blasting classical music on the record player and sitting there conducting.”
Lynch discovered that existing libraries of sound effects were inadequate for the needs of The Grandmother, so he and Splet produced their own effects and created an unconventional soundtrack that’s vital to the film. The Grandmother was almost completed in 1969 when the director of the American Film Institute, Toni Vellani, took a train from Washington, D.C., to Philadelphia for a screening; he was excited by the film and vowed to see to it that Lynch was invited to be a fellow at the AFI’s Center for Advanced Film Studies for the fall semester of 1970. “I remember David had a brochure from the AFI and he used to just sit and stare at it,” Reavey recalled.
Vellani kept his word, and in a letter to his parents dated November 20th, 1969, Lynch said, “We feel that a miracle has occurred for us. I will probably spend the next month trying to get used to the idea of being so lucky, and then after Christmas Peggy and I will ‘roll ’em’ as they say in the trade.”
Philadelphia had worked its strange magic and exposed Lynch to things he hadn’t previously been familiar with. Random violence, racial prejudice, the bizarre behavior that often goes hand in hand with deprivation—he’d seen these things in the streets of the city and they’d altered his fundamental worldview. The chaos of Philadelphia was in direct opposition to the abundance and optimism of the world he’d grown up in, and reconciling these two extremes was to become one of the enduring themes of his art.
The ground had been prepared for the agony and the ecstasy of Eraserhead, and Lynch headed for Los Angeles, where he’d find the conditions that would allow the film to take root and grow. “We sold the house for eight thousand dollars when we left,” said Reavey. “We get together now and talk about that house and that blue couch we bought at the Goodwill—David gets so excited talking about the stuff we got at the Goodwill. He’ll say, ‘That couch was twenty dollars!’ For some reason Jack was in jail the day before we left Philadelphia, so he couldn’t help us move it. David still says, ‘Damn it! We should’ve brought that couch with us!’ ”
I KNEW NOTHING ABOUT politics or the conditions in Philadelphia before I went there. It’s not that I didn’t care—I just didn’t
