Room to Dream Read online

  My grandmother let me use her car and I went to this hotel, up to the mezzanine level, which was kind of strange and dark, and there was a soda fountain there where this girl I’d been writing to worked. I asked her if she wanted to go to the drive-in that night, and after I had dinner with my grandmother and Mrs. Foudray, this girl and I went to the drive-in. In those days there were drive-ins everywhere. It was fantastic. So we start making out at the drive-in and she’s telling me things about herself and I realize this is a really wild girl. She had strange boyfriends after that, probably because so-called regular guys like me were sort of afraid of her. I remember her saying to me, “Most people don’t know what they want to do in life and you are so lucky that you know what you want to do.” I think her life was already headed in a dark direction.

  We continued writing to each other—in fact, I was still writing to her, and two other girls, when I married Peggy. I’d been writing to these three girls for years, and finally one day Peggy said, “David, you’re married now; you gotta stop writing to these girls.” Peggy wasn’t the jealous type at all, but she said, “Look, you write a nice little letter and they’ll understand,” like I was a little kid. And I stopped writing to them.

  Many years later, in 1991, I’m up shooting Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and during lunch I go into my trailer and meditate. One day after I finish meditating, I open up the trailer door and there’s somebody on the film saying, “There’s a man named Dick Hamm here, and he says he knows you.” I said, “Dick Hamm? Are you kidding?” I’d gone to elementary school with Dick Hamm and hadn’t seen him in decades. I go over and there he is with his wife from New York City, and it was great to see him. I asked him if he’d run into this girl I’d gone to the drive-in with and he said, “No, she’s dead. She jumped into the big canal and killed herself.” I started wondering, What is the story here? What happened to her? So I went back to Boise after the film wrapped and looked into this thing. I went to the library and read articles about this girl, and I saw police reports about the day she died.

  This girl had married an older guy who her brother and father hated, and she was also having an affair with this guy who was a prominent citizen in Boise. One Friday night this guy broke it off with her and she was devastated. She couldn’t hide her sadness, so maybe her husband suspected something. The following Sunday morning a neighbor down the street was having a brunch, and she and her husband went there separately. The story goes that her husband left the brunch and went home, and a little while later she comes home and goes into the bedroom and gets this Western-style .22 pistol, then goes into the laundry room, points it into her chest, pulls the trigger, then staggers out of the house and dies on the front lawn. I wondered, If you were committing suicide, why would you stagger out on the lawn?

  As far as the police looking into this, I think they got word from the guy she was having the affair with: This is a suicide; don’t go anywhere near it, because it’s going to come back to me; don’t fuck around, guys. Put it under the rug. I went to the police department and tried to trick them by saying, “I’m looking for a story for a film; do you have any girls who committed suicide during this period?” It didn’t work, because they were never going to bring up that story. I got permission to get a photograph of the crime/suicide scene, and I filled out these forms and turned them in, and they said, “We’re sorry, but that year’s stuff was thrown away.” I knew this girl from the beginning, when she was young, and I can’t explain why her life went the way it did.

  But I do know that a lot of who we are is already set when we get here. They call it the wheel of birth and death, and I believe we’ve been around many, many times. There’s a law of nature that says what you sow is what you reap and you come into life with the certainty that some of your past is going to visit you in this life. Picture a baseball: You hit it and it goes out and it doesn’t come back until it hits something and starts traveling back. There’s so much empty space that it could be gone for a long time, but then it starts coming back and it’s coming back to you, the person who set the baseball in motion.

  I think fate plays a huge role in our lives, too, because there’s no explaining why certain things happen. How come I won an independent-filmmaker grant and got to go to the Center for Advanced Film Studies at the American Film Institute? How come you meet certain people and fall in love with them and you don’t meet all those other people? You come in with so much of who you are, and although parents and friends can influence you a little, you’re basically who you are from the start. My children are all really different and they’re their own people and they came into the world with their little personalities. You get to know them really well and you love them, but you don’t have that much to do with the path they’re going to travel in life. Some things are set. Childhood experiences can shape you, though, and my childhood years in Boise were hugely important to me.

  It was an August night in 1960. It was our last night in Boise. There’s a triangle of grass separating our driveway from the Smiths’ driveway next door, and my dad, my brother, my sister, and I were out in that triangle saying goodbye to the Smith boys, Mark, Denny, Randy, and Greg. Suddenly Mr. Smith appears and I see him talking to my dad, then shaking his hand. I stared at this and started feeling the seriousness of the situation, the huge importance of this last night. In all the years living next to the Smiths I had never spoken one-on-one with Mr. Smith and now here he was walking toward me. He held out his hand and I took it. He might’ve said something like, “We’re going to miss you, David,” but I didn’t really hear what he said—I just burst into tears. I realized how important the Smith family was to me, then how important all my Boise friends were, and I felt it building on a deeper and deeper level. It was beyond sad. And then I saw the darkness of the unknown I’d be heading into the next day. I looked up through tears at Mr. Smith as we finished shaking hands. I couldn’t speak. It was definitely the end of a most beautiful golden era.

  Alexandria, Virginia, was a very different world. A relatively sophisticated city seven miles south of downtown Washington, D.C., it’s essentially a suburb of D.C. and is home to thousands of government workers. Alexandria had a population five times the size of Boise’s during the early sixties, but Lynch was apparently unfazed by the bigger world he stepped into. “From everything I’ve heard, David was a star in high school and had that sense of being the golden boy,” said Peggy Reavey. “From the start he had that.”

  Lynch’s course in life clarified itself significantly when he befriended Toby Keeler shortly after beginning his freshman year. “I met David on the front lawn of his girlfriend’s house, and my first impression was of her, not David,” said Keeler, who proceeded to woo the girlfriend, Linda Styles, away from Lynch. “David lived in another part of town, but the driving age in Alexandria was fifteen, and he’d driven his family’s Chevy Impala, with big wings on it, to her house. I liked David immediately. He’s always been one of the most likable people on the planet, and we’ve joked for years about the fact that I stole his girlfriend. We were both in a fraternity at Hammond High School whose secret phrase was ‘Trust from beginning to end,’ but the David I knew wasn’t a partying frat boy.”1

  Lynch and Keeler became close friends, but it was Toby’s father, artist Bushnell Keeler, who really changed Lynch’s life. “Bush had a big effect on David, because he had the courage to break away from the life he’d been living and get a studio and just start making art,” said Toby. “David said a bomb went off in his head when he heard what Bushnell did. ‘A fine-art painter? You can do that?’ ”

  Bushnell Keeler’s younger sibling, David, remembered his brother as “a very up-and-down guy. Bush got a degree from Dartmouth College in business administration and married someone from a wealthy Cleveland family. He was a junior executive and was doing well but he hated it, so he and his family moved to Alexandria so he could study to become a minister, but after two years he reali
zed he didn’t want to do that, either. He was a pretty angry young man, always challenging things, and he was taking a lot of upper and downer drugs, which didn’t help. Finally he realized that what he really wanted to do was be an artist, and that’s what he did. The marriage didn’t survive that decision.

  “Bush understood something nobody else did at the time, which was that David really and truly wanted to be an artist,” David Keeler continued about his brother, who died in 2012. “Bush thought he was at a good point in life to get a boost with that, and I guess David wasn’t getting it from his parents, so Bush was absolutely fully behind him. David often stayed at his house, and Bush made space in his studio for David to work.”2

  Lynch’s commitment to art deepened further when he met Jack Fisk during his freshman year, and they laid the foundations for an enduring friendship that continues to this day. Now a widely respected production designer and director, Fisk—who went by the name Jhon Luton at the time—was a rangy, good-looking kid born in Canton, Illinois, the middle in a family of three children; his sister Susan was four years older, and his sister Mary was a year younger. Following the death of Fisk’s father in a plane crash, his mother married Charles Luton, whose job overseeing the building of foundries required the family to make frequent moves. (Later in life Fisk reverted to his birth name, as did his sister Mary.) Fisk attended a Catholic military school as a boy, and at various points the family lived in Kalamazoo, Michigan; Richmond, Virginia; and Lahore, Pakistan. Finally, they settled in Alexandria when Fisk was fourteen years old.

  “David and I had heard about each other because we were both interested in painting,” said Fisk. “I remember him standing in a doorway at school introducing himself—he told me he was a sophomore, but I knew he was just a freshman. We sometimes laugh about the fact that he lied to me that day. I was working as a soda jerk at Herter’s Drug Store, and he came there and got a job driving their jeep around, delivering prescriptions.”3

  Lynch’s job took him all over town, and he didn’t go unnoticed. “I had a newspaper route, and for maybe two years before I met David I’d see this guy with these little bags, knocking on doors,” said artist Clark Fox, who attended high school with Lynch. “He didn’t quite fit in. If you had your hair long back then it was kind of rough, but he had his hair as long as it could be without getting in trouble, and he was really pale. He always had a tie and jacket on when he was working for the drugstore. He was very distinctive.”4

  Fisk’s childhood had been tumultuous while Lynch’s was bucolic and secure, and their temperaments were different, but the two of them shared the goal of committing their lives to art, and they fell into step. “Because I’d moved around so much I was kind of a loner, but David was easy to make friends with. Everybody liked him,” Fisk said. “When David talks you want to listen, and he was always that way. David was eccentric from the start, too. We were in a straight school that had fraternities—everybody was in one, although I wasn’t—and all the guys wore madras shirts and khaki pants. David ran for school treasurer—his campaign slogan was ‘Save with Dave’—and we had an assembly where the candidates spoke and he got up to speak wearing a seersucker suit with tennis shoes. That doesn’t seem crazy today, but at the time no one would think of wearing tennis shoes with a suit.”

  Lynch won that election for high school treasurer, but at approximately the same time his interest in painting began to eclipse pretty much everything else in his life. “He didn’t want to do stuff like be high school treasurer anymore,” Fisk recalled. “I don’t know if he was removed or he resigned, but it didn’t last long.”

  Rebellion is a standard part of most people’s teenage years, but Lynch’s recalcitrance was different in that he didn’t rebel just for the hell of it; he rebelled because he’d found something outside of school that was vitally important to him. “It was unusual in that time and place for somebody like David to get so interested in oil painting,” said John Lynch, “and our parents were upset with how he was going astray. His rebellion began in the ninth grade, and although he never got into trouble with the law, there was partying and drinking, and the first year in Alexandria he snuck out at night a few times and got caught. Then there was dinner. My mom would make normal dinners, but David thought they were too normal—he’d say, ‘Your food is too clean!’ When David was in Boise he was serious about Boy Scouts, but when we moved to Virginia he rebelled against that, too. My dad encouraged him to keep going and get his Eagle Scout rank, and David did it, but I think he partially did it for our dad.”

  Lynch bid a kind of farewell to the Scouts on his fifteenth birthday, when he was among a handful of Eagle Scouts selected to seat VIPs for the inauguration parade at John Kennedy’s swearing-in. He remembers seeing Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon cruising by in limousines just a few feet from where he stood.

  Impressive, no doubt, but Lynch’s mind was on other things. Martha Levacy said, “Not long after we moved to Alexandria, all David wanted to do was paint, and I was the mediator. I’d talk to David about things that were bothering my parents, then I’d talk to my parents about his point of view, and I tried to keep the peace. Our parents were real patient people and David was always respectful of them so there weren’t big fights, but there were disagreements.”

  His cousin Elena Zegarelli described Lynch’s parents as “very straight, conservative, religious people. Sunny was a pretty woman with a soft, sweet voice, but she was strict. I remember being in a restaurant in Brooklyn with the whole family at a birthday celebration for our great-grandmother Hermina. David was sixteen at the time and everybody was drinking wine and celebrating, but David’s mother didn’t want him to have a glass of wine. When you see David’s work it’s hard to believe he’s from the same family. My sense was that because his family was so straitlaced, that made him go the other way.”

  Regardless of the constraints he encountered at home, Lynch was on his way. “David had already rented a room from Bushnell Keeler when we met,” Fisk recalled, “and he said, ‘Do you want to share my studio?’ It was really tiny, but I shared the studio with him—it was around twenty-five dollars a month—and Bushnell would come in and give us critiques. Bushnell told him about Robert Henri’s book, The Art Spirit, and David turned me on to it, and he sat around reading it and talking to me about it. It was great finding somebody who wrote about being a painter—suddenly you didn’t feel alone anymore. Because of the Henri book we knew about artists like van Gogh and Modigliani, and anybody in France in the 1920s interested us.”

  A leading figure in the Ashcan School of American art, which advocated a tough, gritty realism, Robert Henri was a revered teacher, whose students included Edward Hopper, George Bellows, and Stuart Davis. Published in 1923, The Art Spirit is a usefully technical distillation of several decades of his teaching, and it had a big impact on Lynch. The language and syntax of the book seem dated today, but the sentiment it expresses is timeless. It’s a quietly remarkable and encouraging book with a simple message: Give yourself permission to express yourself as freely and completely as possible, have faith that this is a worthy endeavor, and believe that you can do it.

  Early in 1962, when he was sixteen years old, Lynch decided it was time for him to move out of Bushnell Keeler’s studio and get one of his own, and his parents agreed to contribute to the rent. “It was a big step for them to take,” said Levacy. John Lynch recalled that “Bushnell talked to our parents about David getting his own studio and said, ‘David’s not goofing off. He’s using the studio as a place to paint.’ David got a job and helped pay for it, and it was real cheap. In the 1960s there was a section called Old Town that was kind of the skid row of Alexandria. [Today, this area is an upscale district full of boutiques and expensive coffee emporiums.] The streets were lined with brick houses that were built two hundred years ago and were just junk, and one of them that was even less than junk was the one David and
Jack rented. They had the second floor, and the building had narrow old stairs that creaked when you walked on them. There was a little partying going on but they really did use it as a studio, and David went there every night and stayed pretty late. He had a curfew, and there was an electric clock he was supposed to unplug when he got home so our parents would know what time he got in. Still, it was always hard for him to wake up in the morning, and Dad would take a wet washcloth to his face sometimes. David hated that.”

  During high school both Fisk and Lynch attended classes at the Corcoran School of Art, in D.C., and their focus shifted increasingly to their lives off campus. “I got a failure notice in art in school, and I think David was doing pretty poorly in his art class, but we were painting all the time and had many different studios together,” said Fisk. “I remember one on Cameron Street where we managed to rent a whole building, and we painted one room black and that was where you could go to think. When I first met David he was doing Paris street scenes, and he had a way of doing them with cardboard and tempera paint that was kind of nice. One day he came in with an oil painting of a boat by a dock. He was putting the paint on really thick at that point and a moth had flown into the painting, and as it struggled to get out of the paint it made this beautiful swirl in the sky. I remember he got so excited about that, seeing that death mixed in with his painting.

  “If David was going in a certain direction with his art, I found another way to go,” Fisk continued. “We were always pushing each other to get better, and it worked well in helping our work evolve. My work grew increasingly abstract, and David got into painting darker things—docks at night, animals dying—real moody stuff. David’s always had a cheerful disposition and sunny personality, but he’s always been attracted to dark things. That’s one of the mysteries of David.”