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Room to Dream. Kristine McKenna
Читать онлайн.Название Room to Dream
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781782118404
Автор произведения Kristine McKenna
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Approximately a year into the shoot, Doreen Small began living on the Eraserhead set. “It was a long commute from Topanga,” she recalled, “and I wound up having a personal relationship with David—it happened one day in the music room and it was an intense relationship. My dad died during the shoot and my mom moved to Santa Monica, and David would sometimes stay with us. We all became very close, and my mom would buy clothes and art supplies for David.”
Needless to say, Lynch’s home life was unraveling and he and Reavey were headed toward a separation. “In Philadelphia I’d been an integral part of everything David did, but in L.A. that changed,” said Reavey. “I wasn’t part of it anymore, and there were all these assistant-type girls around—there was no place for me. My sister came to L.A. and visited the set, and she came back and said, ‘You know they’re all in love with him,’ and I said, ‘Isn’t that nice?’ I was very naïve.”
This was a stressful period for Lynch. He was making a film he passionately believed in but money was a constant problem, and his personal life was becoming complicated. More significant, he felt unsettled on a profound level that went beyond money or love. Lynch’s parents moved to Riverside in 1973, so his sister, Martha Levacy, was in Southern California regularly, and she was about to play a central role in a transformative event that spoke to the deeper feelings he was experiencing.
This story began in 1972, when Levacy was in Sun Valley training to be a ski instructor. Early one morning she was scheduled to attend a teacher’s clinic on top of the mountain, “and I was riding up the chairlift next to a nice young man,” she recalled. “I mentioned how alert he seemed for such an early hour, and he told me about the deep rest that’s a benefit of Transcendental Meditation and talked to me about it the whole trip up the mountain. I learned to meditate and it became an important part of my life.”7
Shortly after Levacy began meditating, she was speaking to Lynch on the phone and he detected something different in her voice. He asked her what was going on and she told him about TM, then directed him to the Spiritual Regeneration Movement center. “That was the ideal place for David to take the next step,” Levacy said. “Not every center might’ve gotten him excited, but this was the perfect fit—he liked the feeling of it and on July 1st, 1973, he learned to meditate. David told me long before any of this happened that he’d been thinking about the bigger picture, and TM’s belief that there is enlightenment out there resonated with him.”
The Spiritual Regeneration Movement center was directed by Charlie Lutes, who was one of the first people in America to enroll in Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s meditation program, which revolves around a simple technique that allows practitioners to reach the deepest levels of consciousness and is rooted in ancient Vedic wisdom. After bringing TM to the United States in 1959, Maharishi opened hundreds of centers around the world in partnership with Lutes, including the first U.S. TM center, in Santa Monica, where Lutes’s weekly lectures drew large crowds during the 1970s. Lynch attended regularly. “Charlie was like a brother to Maharishi, and he was pivotal for David,” said Levacy. “He became very close to Charlie and his wife, Helen.”
Everyone who knew Lynch was struck by how meditation changed him. “David was a lot darker before he started meditating,” recalled Small. “It made him calmer, less frustrated, and it lightened him. It was as if a burden had been lifted from him.”
After devoting every waking moment to Eraserhead for nearly two years, Lynch made room in his life for meditation. “We all went to see Maharishi when he was on The Merv Griffin Show,” said Levacy. “Catherine came with David and he was wearing a nice blazer and a white shirt, and as they were walking in someone said, ‘You two! This way!’ They guided them down to the front row—I guess they liked the way they looked—so David landed right in front, lookin’ good, and it had to be a thrill.”
Lynch made several drawings during this period that are reflective of how he was changing. In Infusing the Being, a pair of images of dark, treelike forms are positioned side by side; there’s a prism of color at the base of the form on the left, while the form on the right has color at both the base and the crown. Images evocative of growth depict underground forms that are pushing to the surface, and there are untitled compositions that combine recognizable elements—trees, clouds—with abstract patterning and have the feeling of entryways into domed cathedrals.
“I was five when Dad started meditating, and I was definitely aware of a change in him when that happened,” recalled Jennifer Lynch. “I remember there was less yelling, but it was then that I also started feeling like he was around less.”
Meditation brought something into Lynch’s life that he needed, but it exacerbated the growing schism in his marriage. “David worshipped Charlie Lutes, who was a nice guy, but nothing he said was of any interest to me,” Reavey recalled. “David couldn’t understand why I wasn’t excited about meditation, because he really wanted spirituality at that point, but I wanted to go out and have fun.”
Mary Fisk had returned to the East Coast by this point and was working for Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge in Washington, D.C. “One night I was in the office, talking to Jack on the WATS line, and David got on the phone and started talking to me about meditation—that’s really when we began communicating,” said Fisk, who moved back to Los Angeles at the end of that year.
Lynch took her to the Spiritual Regeneration Movement center and she began attending regularly. “Charlie Lutes was a dynamic, handsome, perceptive man who could change the energy in a room,” Fisk recalled. “The Beatles called him Captain Kundalini—he was impressive.
“Meditation changed David and he got conservative—he stopped eating meat and smoking,” Fisk continued. “He told me there were months when he went around with a five-foot cigarette in his head—he couldn’t stop thinking about it—but he managed to stop smoking. He also started dressing differently, and the two ties and the moth-eaten hats vanished. He dressed nicely when he went to the center.”
During this period Lynch’s marriage deteriorated further. “One day I came home from work for lunch and David was there,” Reavey recalled, “and I said, ‘I wonder if we should think about separating.’ He said, ‘You don’t love me as much as you used to, do you?’ meaning that he didn’t love me as much, either, and I said, ‘I guess not.’ I’d reached a point where I wasn’t as fascinated with how his mind worked as I’d once been and I wanted some time to myself. It’s claustrophobic to live inside somebody else’s head. Plus, what are you going to do? Fight to keep a marriage? I wouldn’t be competing with some neighborhood girl. It would’ve been me versus loads of women, plus Hollywood.”
During those years Lynch lived a completely nocturnal life, and shortly after splitting up with Reavey he took a job delivering The Wall Street Journal for $48.50 a week. Levacy once accompanied him on his midnight route and recalled it as “a great experience. He got it all organized, with the papers piled up in the passenger seat, and I sat in the back seat of his VW Bug because he needed both windows free. He knew the route like the back of his hand and made an art out of whisking the papers out the windows. He liked hitting certain windows a certain way because a light would come on in the house.”
Shooting on Eraserhead resumed in May 1974 and continued sporadically for the next year. At approximately the same time, Splet left L.A. to spend several months at Findhorn, a utopian community in northern Scotland whose founders, Peter Caddy and Dorothy Maclean, claimed to have direct contact with the spirits of the natural world. Not long after Splet left, Doreen Small moved to Santa Barbara and things got harder for Lynch. George Stevens, Jr., made arrangements with Sid Solow, director of Consolidated Film Industries laboratory, to process Lynch’s film for free, but the AFI began retrieving pieces of equipment and, as usual, there was no money. “At one point David said,