The Maly Poppins of Mulholland Drive

When I was nine, Lara Flynn Boyle was my father's sweetheart- and my best friend

- Lorraine Nicholson

FOR MANY GIRLS, best friends are their first loves. They spend all their time together. Learn from each other. Protect each other. And when the time comes for boys to enter the picture—and a best friend’s attention is split between them and another—it is their first great heartbreak. When I was nine, my best friend was 30-year-old ingenue Lara Flynn Boyle.

The world fell in love with Lara long before I did. A lead actor on the cult TV show Twin Peaks, she burst onto the scene as America’s good girl in angora. From the very first, she was determined to buck this image. In a 1990 cover story for Rolling Stone, the journalist seems taken aback by Lara, then just 20. “The actress smokes heavily and is game and playful; the character has no questionable habits (besides crying frequently), and is somber and conflicted.” Lara, an Irish girl from Iowa, represented everything that America could be at its best: tough, beautiful, dangerous.

Much like the universe, Lara’s romance with my father began with a bang. One quiet summer night in 1999, the nascent couple was dressed for dinner, the engine of his Mercedes the only sound. My father moved to make a left on Mulholland from Coldwater, just a quarter mile from our house, when their car collided with another. When Dad finally came to, head dripping blood, he looked up to see Lara crawling out of the sunroof. She reportedly screamed, “I can’t be here!” and abandoned the steaming hunk of metal like it was a dead horse.

I first heard about the crash not from any members of my family, but from a nosy mother at school. This was confusing—I’d seen my dad just a few days previously and he didn’t mention a car accident. Not knowing the news would be picked up by the tabloids, he wanted to introduce Lara on his own terms.