Author’s Note: Episodes 1 and 2 of Song of Lynchadelphia (Season 3 of Hidden City’s Song of Philadelphia Podcast) focused on the creative big bang that took place during David Lynch’s time in Philadelphia, between 1965 and 1970. Episode 3 examined the wild ways in which the city—Lynch’s impression of the city—manifests itself in Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive, and the Twin Peaks universe. Episode 4 explored the Lynchian happenings in Philly. In episode 5, Philly’s own and Lynch’s first wife Peggy Reavey recalled how he projected his own fears on the city. Available today on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, episode 6 is the second part of Reavey’s interview. As she reflects on her contributions to The Grandmother, Lynch’s third short, and remembers how she was replaced “by a whole staff” on the set of Eraserhead, we come to realize that each film originated in a bundle of dreams, experiences, people, and places that could not be ascribed only to the person known as the author.

Peggy Reavey took a long breath, thinking about the best way to phrase what was on her mind. “It was his thing,” she said, “but I knew what it was.”

She had married David Lynch back in 1968, when they were both in their early twenties and lived in Philadelphia. Five decades after their divorce, in Lynch’s final years, they zoomed at least once a month for a couple of hours with their daughter Jennifer, who was born in Philly on April 7, 1968. During those conversations, Lynch often brought up the home they’d bought that year at 2416 Poplar Street and how lucky they’d been to find such a big house.

As Reavey recalled how the two of of them had worked on The Grandmother, Lynch’s third short and the last film he made in Philly, on the top floor of 2416 Poplar, I heard an undertone of nostalgia for their beginnings in adulthood, love for her first husband, and pride to have been there with him. On a lower frequency, I also heard something more tender: the regret of having not always stood her ground in their artistic relationship and the desire not to be reduced to a footnote in film history.

“I showed him a painting I had done,” Reavey told me. “It was a nude of myself painting with a muse above me. He said: ‘Well, I don’t know, Peg, that’s kind of weird.’ And I have to say that, unfortunately, I did not have the confidence to tell him to shut up. If he said something wasn’t good, it really set me back. I was a girl. Obviously, I didn’t have that kind of confidence as a painter at all yet. I got it eventually, but it took me a lot longer.”

When Lynch wrote The Grandmother script, he borrowed details from Reavey’s personal life, as he had done with his second short, The Alphabet, shot at 2429 Aspen Street. “David never wet the bed,” Reavey told me. “I did and my brother did. My brother’s name is Martin, and we called him Mart. In the film, the father yells ‘Mot!’ when the boy wets the bed. David never had a scary, angry father. I did and my brother did.”

As an artist, Reavey knows that art takes from life all the time. She’s not out to claim shared authorship over any of Lynch’s works. As thoughtfully as the blind spots of art history allow, she is just demanding a more complex and nuanced understanding of Lynch’s creative process—and about how David Lynch became the artist we know. For instance, she recalls him wondering how he could make the wet bed in The Grandmother look like a wet bed. “This whole thing is like a cartoon,” she answered. “Just paint it bright yellow. A big yellow circle.”

Listening to Reavey, I thought about Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet and about all the women who lived with a male artist and who disappeared in the shadow of the artist’s greatness once that greatness was established by the canon. Putting the emphasis on the artist implies a self-driven narrative that typically acknowledges artistic influences but often minimizes the impact of loved ones: we basically choose what and who is worth remembering. That’s why I think the politique des auteurs, as formalized by the French New Wave, is both a conceptual scam with its focus on the creator and a misogynistic world view because a lot of the people that get pushed on the sidelines happen to be women.

Peggy Reavey was a key enabler for David Lynch. She’s not the only one—in the previous Song of Lynchadelphia episodes, we talked to Jack Fisk, we discussed the mentoring role that Bushnell Keeler played during Lynch’s teenage years, as well as the creative explosion that happened when Lynch discovered the work of Francis Bacon. But, from 1967 to 1970 in Philadelphia, she is the person who lived with Lynch on the good and the bad days, through the eureka moments, the doubts, and the anxieties. She was there for all of it.

It’s always the people who are there all the time that we end up unseeing. They become part of the artist’s habitat, and whatever agency they had in the making of the artist takes on a form of invisibility too.

In this episode, I don’t mean to diminish the merits of my favorite filmmaker. My intention is to find a way back to that lost agency. Who was Peggy Reavey as a 20-year old? What did she dream about? How did she find a balance between life and art, between Lynch’s art and her own? What did she give away to support the man she loved?

“I went away for one weekend,” Reavey told me. “When I came back, he was sitting inside the entryway, waiting for me to come through the door, smoking cigarettes. And he just said he couldn’t do anything.” That doesn’t mean Lynch was helpless by himself. But he had to constantly be in conversation with Reavey to translate his ideas into sounds and motion pictures. He needed her close to make art. They were romantic, emotional, and creative partners.

That ability to create together came to an end when they moved to California and Lynch started working on Eraserhead. “I wasn’t needed anymore,” Reavey said. “I was replaced by a whole staff.” The marriage ended soon after, but the complicity never disappeared. Twenty-five years later, when Lynch was working on the production design of Lost Highway, he bought three paintings from Peggy Reavey and hung them on the wall of Fred and Renée Madison’s living-room.

I see that gesture as a way to let his first wife know that she was still in his heart and that her art had been an organic part of his the whole time.