My Extraordinary Ordinary Life (27 page)

Later that year he learned the truth about Santa Claus, too.

Jack Sr. still loved the air corps, and kept up his skills piloting planes out of Chanute Airfield whenever he could. He was flying to Washington, DC, to petition for reinstatement into active duty when his plane was caught in a thunderstorm and crashed in a cornfield in Indiana. Jack Jr. was just shy of his third birthday when his father died. He has only hazy memories of his dad, what he looked like, what they did together. What he does recall is that his world felt warm and complete and safe when his father was alive; and then things were not very good at all.

Gerri was left with three young children and working for her in-laws. Hoping for a better life, she remarried. Charles Luton was an executive who set up and managed brass foundries all over the world. He adopted Gerri’s children and changed Jack’s first name to John. So for all of his school years, Jack was known as John Luton. Jack was sent to a Catholic military boarding school when he was in the third grade. I have trouble imagining a military academy run by nuns, but Jack did well there, even though he was a little homesick. He was the highest ranking officer in third and fourth grade, which meant he got to lead the cadets when they marched on the parade ground. For some reason Jack could never remember the drill routine, but he was so popular that his fellow cadets always covered for him. The most important thing he took away from that school was something Sister Mary Bartholomew told him. “Think of your every action as a prayer,” she said. The notion that you were speaking to God in everything you did, both good and bad, and that praying was more than just repeating words in church, made a deep impression on Jack. One’s whole life can be a manifestation of God, a continuous act of love. Of course she also told him that because he wasn’t Catholic, the best he could ever do was purgatory.

The family moved constantly. Charlie Luton’s job took them to Michigan, to Virginia, and even overseas. In Lahore, Pakistan, Jack used to play with another American boy named Bill, whose father worked at the embassy. Years later, Jack was surprised to run into his childhood playmate again at the release party in New York for a PBS film called
Verna, USO Girl.
My costar in that film, William Hurt, turned out to be the little boy that Jack had known in Pakistan. They hadn’t seen or thought about each other for decades. Talk about a small world.

Jack’s family ended up in Alexandria, Virginia, and Jack enrolled in public high school. He was still going by the name John Luton, and the student alphabetically assigned to the seat next to him in homeroom was a boy from the Northwest named David Lynch. A few years later, after he left home, Jack changed his name back to Jack Fisk. But if he had done it sooner, he might never have met David, and his life might have taken a very different direction.

David’s father was a research scientist with the Interior Department who had transferred to Washington after years in Montana and Idaho. David was a handsome, all-American-looking kid who seemed perfectly conventional, at least on the outside. Like Jack, he had already decided he wanted to be an artist.

They shared a rented studio in Alexandria and painted side by side. After graduation, David went to college at the Museum School in Boston, which he hated, and Jack went to Cooper Union in New York City, which he found too commercial for his taste. David and Jack both decided to drop out and travel to Europe, where they planned to study with the Viennese painter Oskar Kokoschka. But they didn’t think it out very well. They managed to get free tickets over the Atlantic by signing up as chaperones for a group of teenage girls on their way to a summer vacation. But once they landed in Europe, they quickly realized that the couple of hundred dollars they had saved up wasn’t going to last long. It was much more expensive than they’d imagined, especially since David insisted on drinking real Coca-Cola and would only smoke American Marlboro cigarettes. After a series of misbegotten adventures—including a wild train ride on the Orient Express and getting stranded in Athens—the young artists ran out of money and had to wire their families to help them get home. The trip that was supposed to have lasted several years lasted two weeks.

Shortly after that debacle, Jack transferred from Cooper Union to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which he decided was a true artists’ paradise. Some of the finest young painters in the country were there, including James Havard. When David heard Jack’s stories, he packed up and moved to Philadelphia.

There, Jack and David were living the “art life,” staying in dangerous rattrap apartments, showering at school, buying all their clothes and furniture at Goodwill, and eating when their dieting girlfriends gave them their school meal tickets. Rumors circulated that Jack and David were really from very wealthy families. To some people it seemed they were far too happy to be truly indigent. Jack started experimenting with sculpture and other media, creating the large constructions that would later inspire his production design. One of his pieces was a fiberglass sculpture of a man who had fallen asleep in a chair reading a newspaper. The figure had a rubber stomach embedded with a battery-powered device that moved his belly go up and down under the paper, like he was breathing. Jack stored it in the basement of his apartment building, where it nearly gave the gas meter reader a heart attack. The meter reader came to love the sculpture so much that Jack gave it to him when he moved away.

David Lynch’s latent eccentricities flowered in Philadelphia. He would work all night, then sleep until five o’clock in the afternoon, just in time to head next door to Pop’s Diner for a cup of coffee before it closed. The diner was also popular with workers from the city morgue across the street, and David befriended them. They would take him on tours of the facility and show him the “parts room,” where they kept unidentified body parts. He’d get dressed up for these occasions in at least two ties—one regular and the “lucky tie” that he wore everywhere.

In 1967, David married a fellow art student and moved into a house in an even rougher neighborhood. He also bought a used Bolex camera for $400 and started making short art films. For his first piece, he projected an animated film onto a three-dimensional, white, sculpted screen. Before long, David’s quirky vision earned him the attention of the American Film Institute, which gave him funds for a short film called
The Grandmother
, about a boy who plants a seed in the ground that grows into, well, his grandmother. In 1970, David was accepted into AFI’s Center for Advanced Film Studies—the same place Terry Malick was honing his skills.

That August, David moved out of his house, rented a U-Haul truck, and drove to Los Angeles with his brother John and his best friend, Jack. Initially, Jack had no particular interest in moving to LA, but he decided to come along for the ride. “Let’s just say it was time for me to get out of Philadelphia,” he told me, offering no explanation other than a mischievous, gap-toothed grin. Once on the road, he decided to make the most of it. He had just been to a James Rosenquist show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum and had been inspired by the eighty-foot paintings of spaghetti and jet airplanes. Jack was attracted by the scale, and he was bored painting by himself in a studio. Since Rosenquist had worked as a billboard painter, Jack got an idea: Maybe Los Angeles would be an interesting place, with good weather, to start painting billboards. He also thought he might try his hand at acting, since he had appeared in some of David’s short films.

It turned out that his acting skills were not as good as he’d thought once he had actual lines to say. And because the studio system was collapsing in Hollywood, all the best scenic artists were working as sign painters. But Jack was fascinated by the film business and got his first job directing traffic for a biker movie being shot in Topanga Canyon. He graduated to gaffer and grip jobs, and eventually art directing and production design. During the filming of
Badlands
, he fulfilled one of his art school dreams: Terry Malick made Holly’s father a sign painter, and Jack got to create the most wonderful billboard ever seen on the Colorado plains.

Jack had given up his small rented house in Laurel Canyon while we were on location for
Badlands
, so when we arrived back in LA we stayed with Janit and Dona for a few days. We wanted a place that felt like living in the country, so we rented a little stone house just off the main road in Topanga Canyon. We furnished it with $300 and the props from
Badlands.
The first person Jack wanted me to meet was his younger sister, Mary, who had also moved to Los Angeles. Mary met us at the door looking very cool in a Hawaiian shirt, but she was in a bit of a tizzy because the soufflé she’d made for dinner had fallen. She apologized all evening, but I thought it was delicious. I had no idea it was supposed to be fluffy. What she didn’t know was I’d never even seen a soufflé before and wouldn’t have recognized one if I’d tripped over it. I haven’t had one since, so I can honestly say that Mary’s was the best soufflé I’ve ever eaten.

The next person I met was Jack’s best friend, David Lynch. David was living in what had been the horse stables of the twelve-acre estate in Beverly Hills that the American Film Institute was leasing as its headquarters. David had turned the stables into a makeshift soundstage, where he was filming his first feature,
Eraserhead
, a film about “dark and troubling things.” He was surreptitiously living behind a padlocked door in the stables, sleeping during the day and working all night.

Although we had been together for months, it wasn’t until I met David that Jack really started making sense to me. Together they were like two alien Eagle Scouts on a mission from Planet Art. For them, filmmaking was an expressive form that synthesized all of the creative elements of painting and sculpture, light and music. It’s what they talked about, and all they wanted to do. I felt lucky to be included, and I found that I fit right in with them. This was the place I had been looking for. For the first time in my life, I felt a part of the conversation. I finally had my own seat at the table.

Soon after we met, David started imagining a role for me in one of his future films. “We’ll call it
Ronnie Rocket
, Sis,” he said in the funny, clipped way that he speaks. “We’ll shave your head and dress you in dungarees with a wide belt and heavy work boots. It will be great!” Thanks, Dave.

While he was making
Eraserhead
, David was always broke. His only source of income was his paper route, delivering the
Wall Street Journal
in his Volkswagen Beetle. The film consumed every dime he made, and the production lurched along in fits and starts. The delays have become famous. It’s true that the lead character, played by Jack Nance, walked through a door one day and walked out of it a year and a half later.

Jack helped David however he could, by collecting material for sets and even appearing in a small role as “Man in the Planet,” which involved having his face and torso slathered with latex. It took days to get the gunk out of his beard, and Jack still jokes with David about it. Whenever Jack had extra money, he would invest it in the film. There was a time when Jack cashed in every paycheck he got from one film job and handed it over to David.

When
Eraserhead
was finally released in 1977, it became an instant cult classic. It also caught the eye of Mel Brooks, who was producing a dramatic film about John Merrick, the deformed sideshow performer known as the Elephant Man. By then David had married Jack’s younger sister, Mary, and had come up in the world. Instead of locking himself in the stables, David and Mary lived in a garage that they converted into an apartment. David still worked at night, spending all afternoon drinking milk shakes and coffee at Bob’s Big Boy and jotting ideas down on paper napkins. After he was nominated for two Oscars for adapting and directing
The Elephant Man
, he and Mary finally moved into a real house. His lucky tie was working.

Even though
Badlands
was a hit with the critics, it was not my ticket to instant stardom. I was getting some roles, but a lot of the time, I was helping Jack. I would run errands and help dress the sets and paint flats. It was the hardest work I ever did. I got shin splints running from one prop house to another. I wasn’t very good at it, but I was learning, and everything I did with Jack was fun.

A few months after we arrived back in LA, Jack had the chance to work with another up-and-coming director named Brian De Palma, who was filming
Phantom of the Paradise
, a rock ’n’ roll remake of
The Phantom of the Opera.
I had auditioned for the film and lost out to Jessica Harper, a talented actress with an enormous voice. But I was happy to pitch in and help with the sets—and Jack needed help. The day before filming was to begin, he fired his entire art department because they hadn’t gotten the first set ready on time. Then he had to scramble to finish decorating the sets by himself. We stayed up all night sewing together a black satin bedspread that was designed to look like a 45 record. Jack’s construction crew had built a huge skylight over a big round bed for an important scene that takes place in a thunderstorm. Unfortunately, one of the crew members used water-soluble caulking on the skylight, which fell apart during the rainstorm and ruined the set. It was only the first of many disasters on that film.

The next location was in Dallas, Texas, where we took over the old Majestic Theatre and dressed it like a gothic opera house for the concert scenes. Jack had no time to assemble a real art department, so he took what he could find—me and my teenage cousin Sam, who had long curly hair and wore a beaver top hat. The closest Sam had ever gotten to an art project was helping his mother with her decoupage. But he was smart and funny, and he was willing to work hard.

Brian De Palma, the son of a New Jersey surgeon, had studied physics before becoming a director. Although Brian is a very talented filmmaker, he is also a famous curmudgeon. It is not easy to make him laugh. If and when you ever did, you felt like you’d won the lottery. I would say to him, “Good morning, Brian,” and he’d growl, “What’s so good about it?” It didn’t take long to realize that his gruffness was part of a razor-sharp sense of humor and a huge part of his charm.