Astrology, Hollywood Weirdness and Twin Peaks: A Conversation with Bill Herbst
With a career spanning over five decades, astrologer Bill Herbst has seen some weird shit. During the 1980s, Herbst’s clientele included a cast of Hollywood characters. Among them was Mark Frost, co-creator of TWIN PEAKS, the cult phenomenon that changed the landscape of television. I got the chance to talk with Herbst about his time as Frost’s personal astrologer, the astrological influences in TWIN PEAKS and why he was happy to get the hell out of Hollywood.
William
I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.
Bill Herbst
It's interesting to me that anyone wants to talk to me about all that stuff from way back when.
William
I find it totally interesting. I have been a gigantic Twin Peaks fan since I was a kid, and I mean, besides that I'm also an astrologer. Tell me about how astrology presented itself to you.
Bill Herbst
I was 19 years old. I was going through my great birthing love lust affair. This was back in the late sixties, 1969. I'd already been in the subculture and done psychedelics. They sort of opened me up. I met this girl – found her in my bed the first day that I met her. And yet I wasn’t ready to do anything about it. One day we were standing in a drug store in the checkout line with all the crap that's for sale. She was looking at the sun sign books and saying things like “Oh, I'm a Gemini. What are you?”
So, I said that I would like if I could find someone to do our charts. Anything I could do to keep her bonded to me while I was advancing through the stages of being ready to make love was fine by me. I found three people in the town that supposedly could do charts. One was this hippie girl with ironed hair, granny glasses and flower dresses. Everything was so far out. “You're a Scorpio? Oh, that's so cool.” I was like, no, no, no, no, no, not, not acceptable to me.
The second was a townie in her fifties. I went to her house to talk to her, and it was all this sort of dark curtains and gargoyles and, you know, weirdness. I called it weirdness. And I thought, no, that's not gonna work.
The third was this student at the University of Missouri that was a math nerd. And he was fascinated by the math of astrology, the celestial mechanics of it. But he couldn't talk about any of it in a way that made sense. So, I thought to myself foolishly there can't be a lot to this. I'm in college to avoid being fodder for Vietnam. I'm hardly going to class anymore. I'll buy a couple of books and learn it.
I went down to the local hole in the wall, a cult metaphysical bookstore, bought three or four books and learned to draw up charts. I drew up her chart and mine which, back then, was like 16 hours. I mean my first two charts ever took forever to draw up and I had your basic sort of cookbooks. Interpretive cookbooks. I looked at her chart and read the interpretations. I looked at my chart and read the interpretations and then I went whoa, wait a minute.
This was supposed to be garbage. I mean, I was sure that it was going to be nonsense. But her chart reflected her. And my chart reflected me. Her chart was all ‘making love in fields of clover and sweetness and kindness’. My chart was all ‘dark and twisted and crazy’, which was exactly the life that I had had up to that point for 19 years.
I decided I wanted to do the charts of people I knew and see if there's anything to this stuff. I was doing sessions for a month in, and I just jumped right in the deep end of the pool. By the first year I had done 1,000 sessions. A couple years later I said, well, I'm not going to be a musician. I'm not going to wait tables. I'm not going back to college. I guess I'm going to be an astrologer, and I was for 50 years.
William
Amazing. The other day I saw someone on social media recommending your book, Houses of the Horoscope. I know you said that the book didn’t get you the recognition you wanted but these things can take a life of their own and before you know it…
Bill Herbst
That book has turned out to have good traction and has lived on nicely. I mean, it's really old now, Jesus, it was first published in 87. I think about it sometimes now and the metaphors I was using then. Nobody knows what a DeLorean is. The car metaphor that I use for different house systems is entirely outdated. But it was OK, it was fine and still works.
William
You were in the Midwest in the seventies. When did your clientele stretch to Hollywood? When did that start happening?
Bill Herbst
I met Mark Frost. You know Mark Frost as the Twin Peaks guy. I met Mark in Minnesota in 1981. He came for a session. He found out about me and came to my house for a session. He was young and ambitious and from an acting family, his father was an actor. Mark had done a little bit of Hollywood work. I think on the $6 Million Man for a short time. And he had gone to Carnegie Tech with Steven Bochco who was a friend of his. Bochco hired him after I met him, and we started working together pretty frequently. Most people that I worked with were once a year or twice a year. And Mark was more frequent right from the very beginning. He liked what we did, and he was interested in it.
He left Minnesota to move back to LA where his family was from around 1982 and we kept working by phone. It got more and more frequent because he got hired by Hill Street Blues, Steven Bochco's series and became the head writer there. I tracked with him through all that. Eventually he was no longer doing Hill Street Blues and was making a living as a screenwriter.
The crazy thing about Hollywood is you can make a good living as a screenwriter and never have a credit. For every 50 movies, maybe one gets green lit and turned into a movie. There are hundreds of people in Hollywood getting paid handsomely to write screenplays who don't necessarily have movie credits. Mark was in that mode for a while, through the mid-eighties.
In 1984, I started going out to Hollywood twice a year and I would stay with Mark at his house in the Hollywood Hills. He would introduce me to people in the biz and we would do sessions. Then he met David Lynch and eventually started writing Twin Peaks, which was originally called Northwest Passage. I have one of the original shooting scripts for the pilot. It’s in a box somewhere. By the time he started writing Twin Peaks in like 88 or 89 we were working together almost daily. I'm like Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, right? He's off doing the crazy Hollywood shit; looking to make a career, be a success and live the Hollywood life and I'm riding on the donkey behind him.
What I learned in the initial years when I would go to Hollywood was that every story you've ever heard, every bad story you've ever heard about Hollywood is true. It’s just as crazy as everybody says. I wanted the Hollywood experience. I wanted to see Hollywood from behind the scenes and being a soldier with Mark gave me that chance. I took it but I gotta tell you, I was always really relieved to get back to Minnesota. Hollywood was insane. It was extraordinary to me, the levels of weirdness. I never really adjusted to it.
When Mark was writing the show with David Lynch, who I did a session with and, by the way was crazy, you know, completely fucking nuts. I mean, he’s obviously a very talented filmmaker. But another Hollywood looney, another crazy guy. And while Mark and David were working together, I was talking to Mark every day. We did with Twin Peaks what we had done on a number of scripts he had worked on before. He would tell me about the characters and sometimes even send me the script and I would then create charts for the characters, and we would interpret those charts as a way of helping him in the writing.
There are 35 charts that I did. Most of them are just solar charts. There are three charts that were complete natal charts where I got the time also. I custom tailored them so the houses would reveal something.
Now, I don't wanna over emphasize the importance of this in his career. It was not important. It was just this thing that he and I did. He would tell me things, like how old they were and maybe where were they born. Then from the information that he gave me about the character, I would then find a chart that worked to reflect what that information was. Then we would do an interpretive session on the chart. And he would take that into the writing process with him. I don't in any way wanna over emphasize my importance in any of this…
William
But it’s a part of where these characters come from…
Bill Herbst
It was an interesting thing that we did that was very creative and revealed lots of possibilities.
Let’s take a look at the Twin Peaks character birth data created by Bill Herbst:
Audrey’s Leo Sun / Scorpio Moon going off, while Donna the Virgo judges away…
Sarah Palmer and her Pisces Sun, Moon, Mercury, and Venus problems…
“Little Boy” aka Pierre Tremond showing off all his Sagittarius and Aquarius placements…
Bill Herbst
During the second season of the series is when the playing cards were being developed, I forget what they call that?
William
They were like collectable cards.
Bill Herbst
They called me and asked if they could use the charts. I don't think they ever hired me because I don't remember getting paid. But I don't care.
William
Twin Peaks has a lot of occult elements and there is even a storyline about a Saturn/Jupiter conjunction…
Bill Herbst
I helped write that. What I mean is I sent Mark some text which he then adapted and put in script form. A lot of the occultism in Twin Peaks was from stuff Mark and I had talked about. I'm a kid from the subculture of the sixties, I lived through all that stuff, you know, Carlos Castaneda and Don Juan and Seth and all this other kind of occult jazz. I spent 15 years in communities that were very invested in that. And Mark was interested in it.
Many things that we talked about in years past appeared in Twin Peaks. I mean, an example, I'm gonna muck this up because it's so long ago and I'm an old fart now and my memory is not good. But the thing about shooting…Wasn't there one episode where Dale Cooper was having to make choices…
William
He throws the rocks!
Bill Herbst
The rocks, right! He throws rocks. Well, that was a thing that Mark and I had talked about many years before that, we had picked it up from the subculture and discussed it. A lot of the occultism in Twin Peaks, not all, but a lot of it I recognized as products of our conversations.
By the time Twin Peaks first aired, Mark and I were taking a break from each other because we'd already had almost a decade of intense work with each other. And that's a long marriage and, you know, it got to be codependent. I mean, Mark couldn't take a shit without calling me. I was at his beck and call 24 hours a day and that got old for us both. So, when Twin Peaks first came out, we weren't interacting, but we were not estranged.
When my Hollywood days ended in 1994, I was sort of happy about it because I'd had enough craziness. But then after a five- or six-year hiatus where we didn't speak to each other, we started reconnecting. On a sporadic basis, maybe once a year. You know, we were important people in each other's lives. Mark doesn't live in LA anymore. He lives in Ojai. When he married his fourth wife, they had a kid. Mark's son is very important to him. It changed him as a person. From the foot loose and free, crazy guy that he was to something more serious. He could probably tell you the same shit about me.
William
It’s wonderful to have those experiences but then also to be on the other side of it.
Bill Herbst
Yeah. I don't regret it, but I don't wanna go back and do it again. The ambition to accumulate experience in our youth is obviously something that's built in. But you know, I was an American born in the mid-20th century. I was a middle-class kid. I was smart. That was my one gift. I was smart. I wasn't healthy, I wasn't sane, but I was smart, and it opened many doors for me.
There are lots of people in the world. I mean, what out of 8 billion, maybe there are 2 billion people that never have much choice at all. They must scrape and work hard and do whatever they can to survive from the get-go. I quake in fear for so many of the younger people. I'm a boomer for God's sake. I'm not a boomer in that I never became a stockbroker or a lawyer. I've lived outside of institutions my entire life and been pretty much a radical, you know, politically the whole time. No one was telling me what I could and couldn't do as an astrologer. And I loved that. I loved being able to shape my own career.
This is wonderful—how marvelous to have such a great example of how astrology can serve the creative process. Thanks for this terrific piece.
Another reason to love twin peaks!