and I got all these great sounds, too. Then I took everything into Bob Column at Calvin de Frenes, and he had a little four-track mixing console and I mixed it there with Bob. This mixing and getting stuff in sync was magical.
Before I got together with Peggy, I’d have brief relationships with people then move on. I dated a girl named Lorraine for a while, and she was an art student who lived with her mother in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Lorraine looked Italian and she was a fun girl. We’d be at her mom’s house and all three of us would go down to the basement and open up the freezer and pick out a TV dinner. This freezer was packed with all different kinds of TV dinners, and her mom would heat ’em up for us. You just put them in the oven and pretty soon you’ve got a dinner! And they were good! Lorraine and her mom were fun. Lorraine ended up marrying Doug Randall, who took some still photos for me on The Grandmother. There was also this girl Margo for a while, and a girl named Sheila, and I really liked Olivia, the girl who got arrested, but she wasn’t really my girlfriend. There’s a film called Jules and Jim, and Olivia and Jack and I were kind of like that—we’d go places together.
Peggy was the first person I fell in love with. I loved Judy Westerman and Nancy Briggs, but they didn’t have a clue about what I did at the studio and were destined to live a different kind of life. Peggy knew everything and appreciated everything and she was my number-one fan. I didn’t know how to type and Peggy typed my scripts, and she was incredible to me, so incredible. We started out being friends and we’d sit and talk at the drugstore next to the Academy and it was great.
One day Peggy told me she was pregnant, and one thing led to another and we got married. The only thing I remember about our wedding is that Jack wore a taxicab-driver shirt to it. I loved Peggy but I don’t know that we would’ve gotten married if she hadn’t been pregnant, because marriage doesn’t fit into the art life. You’d never know I think that, though, because I’ve been married four times. Anyhow, a few months later Jennifer was born. When Jen was born fathers were never in the delivery room, and when I asked if I could go in, the guy looked at me funny. He said, “I’ll watch you and see how you do,” so he took blood from Peggy and I didn’t pass out, and she puked up a bunch of stuff and that didn’t bother me, so he said, “You’re good to come in.” So I scrubbed up and in I went. It was good. I wanted to see it just to see. Having a child didn’t make me think, Okay, now I’ve got to settle down and be serious. It was like . . . not like having a dog, but it was like having another kind of texture in the house. And babies need things and there were things I could contribute. We heard that babies like to see moving objects, so I took a matchbook and bent all the matches in different directions and hung it from a thread, and I’d dangle this thing in front of Jen’s face and spin it, like a poor man’s mobile. I think it boosted her IQ, because Jen’s so smart!
I always felt that the work was the main thing, but there are fathers now who love spending time with their children and go to school functions and all that. That wasn’t my generation. My father and mother never went to our baseball games. Are you kidding me? That was our thing! What are they going to go for? They’re supposed to be working and doing their thing. This is our thing. Now all the parents are there, cheering their kids on. It’s just ridiculous.
Not long before Jen was born, Peggy said, “You gotta go and see Phyllis and Clayton’s house. They’ve got a setup that’s unbelievable.” So I rode my bike over to see this artist couple we knew and they were living in this huge house. Both of them were painters and each of them had their own floor to work in, and they showed me around and I said, “You guys are so lucky—this is great.” Phyllis said, “The house next door is for sale,” so I went and looked at this place and it was a corner house that was even bigger than their house. There was a sign with the name of the real estate company, so I rode over to Osakow Realty and introduced myself to this nice plump lady in a little office and she said, “How can I help you?” I said, “How much is that house at 2416 Poplar?” and she said, “Well, David, let’s take a look.” She opened up the book and said, “That house is twelve rooms, three stories, two sets of bay windows, fireplaces, earthen basement, oil heat, backyard, and tree. That house is three thousand, five hundred dollars, six hundred dollars down.” I said, “I’m buying that house,” and we did. It was right on the borderline between this Ukrainian neighborhood and a black neighborhood, and there was big, big violence in the air, but it was the perfect place to make The Grandmother and I was so lucky to get it. Peggy and I loved that house. Before we bought the place it had been a communist meeting house, and I found all kinds of communist newspapers under the linoleum flooring. The house had kind of a softwood floor, and they’d put newspaper down then put linoleum on top of the newspaper. This linoleum was really old, so I was breaking it up and throwing it away and one day I was working at the front of the house and I hear this noise like the sound of many waters. It was weird, something really unusual. I opened the blinds and looked out and there were ten thousand marchers coming down the street, and it freaked me out. That was the day Martin Luther King was killed.
We didn’t go to the movies a lot. Sometimes I would go to the Band Box, which was the art house where I saw French new wave and all that for the first time, but I didn’t go there much. And even if I was in the middle of making a film, I wasn’t ever thinking I’m in that world. Not in a million years! My friend Charlie Williams was a poet, and when he saw The Alphabet, I said to Charlie, “Is this an art film?” He said, “Yes, David.” I didn’t know anything. I did love Bonnie and Clyde, although that’s not why I started wearing an open-road Stetson panama-style hat. I started wearing one just because I found one at the Goodwill. When you take those hats off you sort of pinch the front of the brim, so they start coming apart. The Stetsons I was buying were already old, so the straw would break and pretty soon there would be a hole there. There are lots of pictures of me in hats with holes in them. I had two or three of them and I loved them.
The Goodwill in Philadelphia was incredible. Okay, I need some shirts, right? I go down Girard Avenue to Broad Street and there’s the Goodwill and they’ve got racks of shirts. Clean. Pressed. Some even starched! Mint. Like brand-new! I’d pick out three shirts, take them up to the counter: How much is this? Three dimes. I was into medical lamps, and this Goodwill had lamps that had all kinds of adjustments and different things, and I had fifteen medical lamps in our living room. I left them in Philadelphia because Jack was supposed to help pack the truck I drove out to Los Angeles, but he worked in a porno place that was busted and he was in jail the day we were loading the truck. It was just my brother and Peggy and me loading, and some good stuff got left behind.
When I got with Peggy, Jack moved into this place over an auto-body shop owned by a guy from Trinidad named Barker, and everybody loved Barker. He had legs like rubber and could crouch and then spring up, and he was built for auto-body work. One day he walked me past all these cars on racks to the very back of the place, where there was this old dusty tarp covering something. He pulls this tarp back and said, “I want you to have this car. This is a 1966 Volkswagen with hardly any miles on it. It was rear-ended and totaled, but I can fix this car and you can have it for six hundred dollars.” I said, “Barker, that is great!” So he fixed it up and it was like brand-new—it even smelled new! It rode so solid and smooth and it was a dream car in mint condition. I loved that car. When I brushed my teeth in the second-floor bathroom, I’d look out the window and see it down there parked in the street and it was so beautiful. So I’m brushing my teeth one morning and I look out and I think, Where did I park my car? It’s not there. That was my first car and it was stolen. So I moved on to my second car. There was a service station at the end of the street where Peggy’s family lived, and Peggy’s father took me down there and said to the guy who ran the place, “David needs a car. What used cars do you have?” I got this Ford Falcon station wagon and it was a dream, too. It was three-on-the-tree, the plainest Ford Falcon station wagon there could be—it had a heater and a radio and nothing else, but it had snow tires on the back and it could go anywhere. I sort of fell in love with that car.
I had to wait for the license plate for the Ford Falcon to come in the mail, so I decided to make one for the meantime. The license plate was a really fun project. I cut some cardboard, and it was a good piece of cardboard that was the same thickness as a license plate. I cut it in exactly the shape of a real license,