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 one when Rodger LaPelle and Christine McGinnis—graduates of the Academy and early supporters of Lynch’s art—offered him a job making prints in a shop where they produced a successful line of 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