I first encountered Rebekah Del Rio as millions of others did — at the movies. I was away from Los Angeles, visiting my parents in Indiana, when a friend and I went to see director David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” at Movies 6, a second-run house in nearby Mishawaka, where tickets cost a buck. With the exception of loving “The Straight Story,” I hadn’t been a David Lynch aficionado at all, having seen “The Lost Highway” in film school and stupidly dismissing it as an over-symbolic kooky piece of hoohah. (Boy was I wrong.)
I sat in that creaky seat, watching a dim projection on a tattered screen, and was instantly transported to another world — or should I say, back home to L.A. Beyond Naomi Watts and Laura Harring’s wonderful wig-swapping weirdness, what truly pulled me in was the scene where their two characters attend a late night performance in a Los Angeles theater (aptly named “Club Silencio”). The club’s announcer introduces “Rebekah Del Rio” and a pale woman with a jeweled tear under her eye walks slowly and sadly to the theater’s lone microphone. Against blood-red velvet curtains, and without any musical accompaniment, she belts out Roy Orbison’s “Crying” in Spanish (“Llorando”).
Like Watts’s and Harring’s characters, I was completely and utterly mesmerized. Del Rio’s performance, both intimate and grand at the same time, was a moment that captured the truth of Los Angeles like I’d never seen before — the experience of going out in the wee hours and discovering profound beauty in strange corners that can move you to tears. The melancholy and melodrama of that simple scene, mixed with Del Rio’s mournful singing of Orbison’s old pop song, still moves and inspires to this day.
Many years later, my wife came home from work and said she had a new assistant who’d supposedly starred and sang in “Mulholland Drive.” Did I know of her? I nearly flipped out. I asked, “It couldn’t be Rebekah Del Rio, who had performed perhaps the greatest scene in film in the last twenty years, could it?” My wife didn’t quite understand my enthusiasm, but confirmed that was her. Like so many in Hollywood, Rebekah had a day job. Fame and art don’t pay all the bills.
Rebekah was a kind, ebullient soul if ever there was, blessed with, as Lynch himself said, “one of the most beautiful voices in the world.” I later learned she’d suffered real hardship in her life, including the unbelievable tragedy of losing her only son. She was still singing as recently as June 13 at a charity event in Los Angeles and had toured with filmmaker Richard Kelly for screenings of the film “Southland Tales,” in which she’d also been featured. I wish we had more from her. “Mulholland Drive” is now rightly recognized as one the greatest — if not the greatest — films of the 21st century and Rebekah’s performance is the beating, crying heart of it. Her voice haunts not only the rest of the film but the rest of American cinema ever since. Llorando.