to Boise the summer after he completed ninth grade in Virginia and spent several weeks staying with different friends. “When he came back he was different,” Smith remembered. “He’d matured and was dressing differently—he came back with a unique style and had black pants and a black shirt, which was unusual in our group. He was really self-confident, and when he told stories about experiences in Washington, D.C., we were impressed. He had a sophistication that made me think, My friend has gone somewhere beyond me.
“After high school David stopped coming back to Boise and we lost touch,” Smith continued. “My youngest daughter is a photographer who lives in L.A., and one day in 2010 she was assisting a photographer who told her, ‘We’re shooting David Lynch today.’ When they took a break during the shoot she approached him and said, ‘Mr. Lynch, I think you might know my dad, Mark Smith, from Boise.’ David said, ‘You’re shitting me,’ and the next time I visited my daughter I got together with David at his house. I hadn’t seen him since high school and he gave me a big hug, and when he introduced me to people at his office, he said, ‘I want you to meet Mark, my brother.’ David’s very loyal, and he stays in touch with my daughter—as her dad, I’m glad David’s there. I wish he still lived next door to me.”
The 1950s have never really gone away for Lynch. Moms in cotton shirtwaist dresses smiling as they pull freshly baked pies out of ovens; broad-chested dads in sport shirts cooking meat on a barbecue or heading off to work in suits; the ubiquitous cigarettes—everybody smoked in the 1950s; classic rock ’n’ roll; diner waitresses wearing cute little caps; girls in bobby sox and saddle shoes, sweaters and pleated plaid skirts—these are all elements of Lynch’s aesthetic vocabulary. The most significant aspect of the decade that stayed with him, however, is the mood of the time: The gleaming veneer of innocence and goodness, the dark forces pulsing beneath it, and the covert sexiness that pervaded those years are a kind of cornerstone of his art.
“The neighborhood where Blue Velvet was shot looks very much like our neighborhood in Boise, and half a block from our house was a creepy apartment building like the one in the movie,” said John Lynch. Blue Velvet’s opening sequence of idyllic American vignettes was drawn from Good Times on Our Street, a children’s book that permanently lodged itself in David’s mind. “The joyride in Blue Velvet came from an experience in Boise, too. David and a few of his buddies once wound up in a car with an older kid who claimed he was going a hundred miles an hour down Capitol Boulevard. I think it was frightening, this crazy older kid with a hot car driving dangerously, and that memory stuck with David. He draws on his childhood a lot in his work.”
Lynch does reference his childhood in his work, but his creative drive and the things he’s produced can’t be explained with a simple equation. You can dissect someone’s childhood searching for clues that explain the person the child grew up to be, but more often than not there is no inciting incident, no Rosebud. We simply come in with some of who we are. Lynch came in with an unusually intense capacity for joy and a desire to be enchanted, and he was confident and creative from the start. He wasn’t one of the boys buying a T-shirt with an irreverent drawing on it. He was the boy who was making them. “David was a born leader,” said his brother, John.
IT’S NICE OF my brother to say I was a born leader, but I was just a regular kid. I had good friends, and I didn’t think about whether or not I was popular and never felt like I was different.
You could say that my grandfather on my mother’s side, Grandfather Sundholm, was a working-class guy. He had fantastic tools down in his basement woodshop and he had these exquisitely made wooden chests, all inset locking systems and stuff like that. Apparently the relatives on that side of the family were expert cabinetmakers and they built a lot of cabinets in stores on Fifth Avenue. I went to visit those grandparents on the train with my mom when I was a little baby. I remember it was winter and my grandfather would stroller me around, and apparently I talked a lot. I’d talk to the guy who ran the newsstand in Prospect Park, and I think I could whistle, too. I was a happy baby.
We moved to Sandpoint, Idaho, right after I was born, and the only thing I remember about Sandpoint is sitting in this mud puddle with little Dicky Smith. It was like a hole under a tree they filled with water from the hose, and I remember squeezing mud in that puddle and it was heaven. The most important part of my childhood took place in Boise, but I also loved Spokane, Washington, which is where we lived after Sandpoint. Spokane had the most incredible blue skies. There must’ve been an air force base nearby, because these giant planes would fly across the open sky, and they went real slow because they were propeller planes. I always loved making things, and the first things I made were wooden guns that I made in Spokane. I’d carve them and cut them with saws and they were pretty crude. I loved to draw, too.
I had a friend named Bobby in Spokane who lived in a house at the end of the block, and there was an apartment building down there, too. So, it’s winter, and I go down there in my little snowsuit, and let’s say I was in nursery school. I’m in a little snowsuit and my friend Bobby is in a snowsuit and we’re going around and it’s freezing cold. This apartment building is set back from the street and we see that it has a corridor that goes down to these doors, and the door to one of the apartments is open. So we go in there and we’re in an apartment and no one’s home. Somehow we get this idea and we start making snowballs and putting them in the drawers of this desk. We put snowballs in all the bureau drawers—any drawers we could find, we’d make a hard snowball and put one in there. We made some big snowballs, about two feet across, and set them on the bed, and put some more snowballs in other rooms. Then we got the towels out of the bathroom and laid them in the street, like flags. Cars would come and they’d slow down, then the driver would say, “Screw it,” and they’d drive right over these towels. We saw a couple of cars go over the towels, and we’re in our snowsuits rolling more snowballs. We finish up and go home. I’m in the dining room when the phone rings, but I don’t think anything of it. In those days the phone hardly ever rang, but still, I’m not panicked when the phone rings. My mother might’ve answered, but then my father took it, and the way he’s talking, I’m starting to get a feeling. I think my dear dad had to pay quite a lot of money for damages. Why did we do it? Go figure . . .
After Spokane we moved to North Carolina for a year so my dad could finish school, and when I hear the song “Three Coins in the Fountain” I’m a certain height and I’m looking up at this building at Duke University and there was a fountain there. It was sunny 1954 light, and it was incredible with that song going in the background.
My grandparents Sundholm lived in a beautiful brownstone on 14th Street, and they had a building that my grandfather oversaw on Seventh Avenue. There might’ve been some storefronts in the building and it was a residential building, too. People lived there, but they weren’t allowed to cook. I once went there with my grandfather and the door to one of the apartments was open and I saw a guy cooking an egg on a flat iron. People find ways of doing stuff. It’s true that going to New York would upset me when I was growing up. Everything about New York made me fearful. The subways were just unreal. Going down into this place, and the smell, and this wind would come with the trains, and the sound—I’d see different things in New York that made me very fearful.
My father’s parents, Austin and Maude Lynch, lived on a wheat ranch in Highwood, Montana. My father’s dad was like a cowboy and I loved to watch him smoke. I came in wanting to smoke, but he reinforced that desire. My dad smoked a pipe when I was real little, but then he got pneumonia and quit. All his pipes were still around, though, and I loved to pretend to be smoking them. They put Scotch tape around the mouthpieces because they figured they were dirty, so I had all these scotch-taped pipes, some curved,
