kept at it. One day Lynch was sitting in the food room sketching, and a figure that came to be known as the Lady in the Radiator took shape on his drawing pad. Lynch recognized the character as the element needed to bring Henry’s story to a close, and to his delight, he discovered that the radiator that happened to be part of the set was designed in such a way that it could accommodate his vision of how the character would function in the story. Played by vocalist Laurel Near, the Lady in the Radiator lives in a place of protection and warmth and represents unity and hope; her arrival marks a shift in the narrative trajectory and allows the film to conclude on a note of optimism and possibility. A wide-eyed blonde with grotesquely exaggerated cheeks, the Lady in the Radiator required a great deal of makeup, which Lynch spent hours applying, and he wrote lyrics to a song for her to sing, called “In Heaven.” His friend Peter Ivers put the lyrics to music and sang the song for the soundtrack; it’s Ivers’s voice you hear in the film.
Eraserhead’s frequent periods of downtime left Lynch free to search for funding—certainly one of the most odious parts of being a filmmaker—but occasionally he had some fun. In 1974, executives at the AFI were trying to decide whether to use Ampex or Sony videotape for school directing projects and asked Elmes to shoot a comparison test of the two. Lynch got wind of this and asked Elmes to let him write a scene for the test; he quickly wrote a script for a short called The Amputee, and Coulson agreed to star in it. “David plays a doctor who’s bandaging an amputee’s stumps, and he wrote a monologue for the amputee, who I play, to do in voice-over,” Coulson recalled. “We shot it twice using the different tape stocks, in one of the many deserted rooms in the Greystone Mansion, then Fred took it to a gorgeous screening room at the AFI to show these executives. When the film ended I remember somebody yelling, ‘Lynch! Lynch had something to do with this!’ ”
By late 1974 Lynch’s marriage had officially ended. “I went to legal aid and paid fifty dollars for the forms I needed, then a girlfriend went with me to court, where I filed them,” Reavey recalled of her remarkably amicable divorce from Lynch. “My parents adored David and they were upset when we split up. I loved David’s parents, and although they made an effort to maintain the connection between us, it was still a real loss for me when we divorced.” As for Jennifer Lynch, she said, “It was excruciating for me when my parents divorced. I hated it.”
Lynch was living on the Eraserhead set when his divorce was finalized but was ordered to vacate the AFI stables at the end of 1974 and moved into a bungalow on Rosewood Avenue in West Hollywood. “It had a tiny fenced-in yard with a picket fence, and a big orange tree in the yard that parrots loved—there were always lots of parrots out there,” said Mary Fisk of the house, which rented for eighty-five dollars a month. “David put skylights in the house and built a shelf you could cook on in the kitchen, which didn’t have a sink; when you only eat tuna fish sandwiches you don’t need much of a kitchen. I remember Jen spending weekends there with David. He had very little money and wasn’t able to take good care of himself, much less a child.”
“When I stayed with Dad he didn’t ‘take care of me’ in conventional ways,” Jennifer Lynch recalled. “We did adult things. We delivered papers and walked around oil pits; we’d talk about ideas and dig in dumpsters and pull stuff out, and we’d eat at Bob’s. It was great. I remember when Eraserhead was playing at the Nuart, we’d go to Bob’s, and you know those little plastic stands that hold pieces of cardboard listing the day’s specials? We’d take those out and flip them so the blank side was out, and we’d write, “Go see Eraserhead” on them and put them back in the plastic stand. When he was living on Rosewood he was really into stuff like bee pollen and soybeans and ginseng, and I’d watch him take his vitamins and get a little dose. He was hugely into that stuff.
“I didn’t realize we were poor until I was around nine,” she continued. “I brought a friend over for the weekend when Dad was living on Rosewood, and Mary Fisk took us to Disneyland, and we built a dollhouse with David, and we went bowling. It was a great weekend, right? I got sick on Sunday night and missed school Monday, and when I got to school Tuesday morning, people said to me, ‘Sherry says you live in a garage.’ No one got invited over again for a long time.”
Lynch is a creature of habit, and around this time he established a ritual that was to remain part of his life for the next eight years: Every day at two-thirty he went to Bob’s Big Boy and consumed several cups of coffee and a chocolate milkshake. If someone had a meeting with Lynch during those years, it probably took place at Bob’s. (He was open to other coffee shops, too, however, and also frequented Du-par’s, in the San Fernando Valley; Ben Frank’s, on Sunset Boulevard; and Nibblers, on Wilshire Boulevard.)
A few months after Lynch’s move, Splet returned from Scotland, and they transformed the double garage adjoining the Rosewood bungalow into a post-production facility where Splet took up residence. From summer 1975 until early 1976, Lynch cut picture while Splet cut sound, and it was during these eight months of intensive work that Eraserhead became the masterpiece that it is. There’s an almost unbearable tension in the soundtrack to Eraserhead, and the layers of sound—the menacing barking of a dog, the whistle of a distant train, the hiss of churning machinery, the hollow room tone that’s the very embodiment of loneliness—are so complex and rich it’s as if you could close your eyes and experience the film simply by listening to it. “David and Alan harnessed the power of industrial sounds and really made them work in terms of controlling the mood and the feeling of the movie,” said Elmes. “The way they built that soundtrack is brilliant.”
Mary Fisk had taken an apartment a few blocks from Lynch’s bungalow during this phase of post-production, and the two had begun dating. “David and Alan agreed that neither of them would date until they finished the film,” said Fisk, “but David would meet me for lunch every day and not tell Alan. At the time David was also dating Martha Bonner, a friend of ours from the center, and he went back and forth between us for two years. David didn’t try to hide it from me that he was attracted to Martha, but she knew he was seeing me and that he was trouble, so things never went anywhere with her.”
Regardless of the status of their relationship, Fisk was a firm believer in Eraserhead, and she persuaded family friend Chuck Hamel to invest ten thousand dollars in the film. These indispensable funds allowed Lynch to focus on the completion of Eraserhead, and once he and Splet finalized the sound, he had a finished cut of the film. At that point he asked the principal cast and crew to meet him at Hamburger Hamlet, a now-defunct restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, and to everyone’s surprise told them they were among fourteen beneficiaries who would be receiving a percentage of any future profits the film made. He wrote the terms of the agreement on napkins, and “a few years later we all got checks in the mail,” said Coulson. “It’s pretty amazing that he did that.” All the beneficiaries continue to receive annual checks.
Eraserhead had its unofficial premiere in a cast-and-crew screening at the AFI. “When David first showed us the film, it seemed like an eternity,” recalled Stewart of the screening, which ran for an hour and fifty minutes. “He called me afterward and asked me what I thought, and I said, ‘David, it was like a toothache—it hurt so bad.’ It was grueling to sit through.” Lynch listened to what his inner circle had to say but wasn’t yet ready to edit anything out of the film.
Representatives from the Cannes Film Festival were visiting the AFI when Lynch happened to be there mixing the film, and they expressed enthusiasm over the footage they saw; at that point he set himself the goal of getting Eraserhead into Cannes. This proved to be a fruitless ordeal, and Eraserhead was then rejected by the New York Film Festival, too. This was not a good period for Lynch. “I remember meeting him for lunch at Bob’s after we divorced, and he said, ‘I’m ready to be in the inner circle—I’m tired of being outside,’ ” said Reavey. “Yes, his sensibility is underground and dark, but once he got involved in Hollywood he didn’t want to be this weirdo, and he wanted to operate in the field where the real stuff was happening—and that’s the way it should be. I’d hate to live in a world where somebody like David doesn’t get to do his thing.”
When the Los Angeles International Film Exposition—Filmex—began reviewing movies for its 1976 program, Lynch was