Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind Read online

  DEDICATION

  FOR JEN, WHOM I LOVE MORE DEEPLY

  WITH EVERY PASSING YEAR

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Part One: “When You’re Young, You Just Accept What Grown-Ups Tell You”

  1 - Skylarking

  2 - The Searchers

  3 - Dear God

  4 - One Night at the Viper Room

  5 - Suffer the Children

  6 - Follow the Leader

  7 - Another Night at the Viper Room

  8 - Meat Is Murder

  Part Two: “I’m Going to Be Famous”

  9 - Back in the U.S.A.

  10 - Johnny Came from Miami F-L-A

  11 - Show-Biz Babies

  12 - Let’s Work

  13 - The Magnificent Seven

  14 - TV Eye

  15 - Echo #1: Surviving

  16 - Unmapped Territory

  17 - If the Sky That We Look upon Should Tumble and Fall

  18 - Echo #2: Stand by Me

  19 - Young Hollywood 1985

  20 - Family Affair

  21 - Tilt-A-Whirl

  Part Three: “An Excuse to Get That Far Out of Your Head”

  22 - Small-Town Hollywood

  23 - Welcome to the Jungle

  24 - Echo #3: The Mosquito Coast

  25 - Jungle Boy

  26 - Last Year at the Viper Room

  27 - His Name Is Rio and He Dances on the Sand

  28 - Martha My Dear

  29 - Coming-of-Age Story

  30 - Rattlesnake Speedway

  31 - I Am an Island

  32 - Young Hollywood 1987

  33 - I Hope the Russians Love Their Children Too

  34 - Dinnertime for the Phoenix Family, Spring 1987

  35 - Party at the Zappa House

  36 - Echo #4: Running on Empty

  37 - Running into the Sun but I’m Running Behind

  38 - Ext. Phillips House

  Part Four: “We’re All Worth Millions of Planets and Stars and Galaxies and Universes”

  39 - Making Plans for River

  40 - Food for Life

  41 - Camp Phoenix

  42 - Songs in the Attic

  43 - Oranges and Lemons

  44 - A Night in the Life

  45 - Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?

  46 - Down with the Ione

  47 - Our Band Could Be Your Life

  48 - Rolling on the River

  49 - We Are All Made of Stars

  50 - Alone We Elope

  51 - Young Hollywood 1989

  52 - Whip It

  53 - How Do You Say Good Night to an Answering Machine?

  54 - Senses Working Overtime

  55 - Semper Fi

  56 - Int. Still Life Café

  57 - The First Cut Is the Deepest

  58 - The Golden Age

  Part Five: “Barreling Through Someone’s Psychosis”

  59 - The Bottom of the Bottomless Blue Blue Blue Pool

  60 - Young Hollywood 1991

  61 - Psionic Psunspot

  62 - You’re Where You Should Be All the Time

  63 - The Refrigerator Parable

  64 - Across the Way

  65 - That Night at the Viper Room

  66 - Satiate Lack

  67 - The Movies of River Phoenix, Ranked by American Box Office

  68 - Cowboy Mouth

  69 - Burn Hollywood Burn

  70 - Many Rivers to Cross

  71 - The Last Picture

  72 - Young Hollywood 1993

  73 - Tonight’s the Night

  74 - I’m in a Transitional Period, So I Don’t Want to Kill You

  75 - If I Had a Hi-Fi

  76 - First Night at the Viper Room

  77 - Give Blood

  Part Six: “I Don’t Want You to Die”

  78 - The Bad, Bad Town

  79 - Viper Heroin X

  80 - R.I.P. RJP

  81 - Broken Dreams

  82 - Never Gonna Wither

  83 - Echo #5: Montgomery Clift

  84 - Closing Time at the Viper Room

  85 - Blood on the Tracks

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Photographic Insert

  About the Author

  Also by Gavin Edwards

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  It ends outside a nightclub called the Viper Room, on a Hollywood sidewalk. The young man convulsing on the pavement is named River Phoenix. His brother is on a nearby pay phone, pleading with a 911 operator. His sister is lying on top of his body, trying to stop him from injuring himself as his muscles twitch and his limbs flail against the concrete. River Phoenix has overdosed on a speedball of heroin and cocaine, and has only minutes to live.

  It begins twenty-three years earlier, on a peppermint farm. A young woman from New York City had quit her secretarial job, become a hippie, and wandered all the way to Oregon. Now, in a small house with an upside-down horseshoe over the front door, she is in labor, trying to push another life into the world. She declines medical professionals, drugs, a drive to the nearest hospital—but she is surrounded by friends. And when, at last, her first child is born, the infant’s arrival on planet Earth is greeted with the sound of applause.

  Between applause and agony, between the farm and the Viper Room, between peppermint and heroin, there hangs a life: the twenty-three years of River Phoenix. Documenting River’s time on earth are fourteen feature films, one season of a TV show, and a handful of commercials, including spots for cars and cranberry juice. The movies range from excellent to unwatchable; one of them (Running on Empty) yielded an Oscar nomination for River and two others (Stand by Me, My Own Private Idaho) are generally considered classics.

  As an IMDb page, it’s not a huge ledger: a legacy of steady work over a decade as River grew from an adorable tyke with a bowl haircut into a strikingly handsome young man. But River had impact that far exceeded the number of films he made; he seemed like he had the chance to be the brightest light of his generation. Not long after his death, Brad Pitt mused, “I think he was the best. Is. Was. Is the best of the young guys. I’m not just saying that now—I said that before he died. He had something I don’t understand.”

  Ethan Hawke said, “River was one of those people that had that strange magic glow around them; he could drive you crazy, or make you fall in love with him, sometimes in the same minute.”

  Even considering that he was an actor, River had a remarkable number of identities in his short life: Child star. Pinup. Proselytizing Christian. Icon to gay men. Street performer. Drug user. Vegan. Singer/songwriter. Rain forest activist. Hollywood scenester. Oscar nominee. These were skins he lived in, or masks he wore for a while. Depending on your point of view, the number of them meant that he had a life full of lies and contradictions, or that he compartmentalized the different aspects of his existence with remarkable success—or that, like many twenty-three-year-olds, he was still discovering who he was, trying on different identities and figuring out how they connected to his fundamental self.

  The people who knew him, in whatever context, agreed on one thing, even if they fumbled for the vocabulary to describe it—River had a special quality, they said. Some called it a spark, some called it a light, some called it a soul.

  He was the kind of guy, said one friend, “that if you walked outside and it was snowing, you knew the first
thing on his mind was making a snowball.”

  River loved to embrace friends in massive bear hugs, sometimes surprising them by lunging at them from behind. But if somebody hugged him, he’d quickly squirm away. He wanted any embraces to be on his terms.

  Dermot Mulroney, who acted in two movies with River, thought that River’s lazy right eye expressed a fundamental dichotomy in his spirit. He said, “His eyes made him the focus of energy in every scene, the centrifugal force so strong you didn’t even try to duel him for control. The off-center eye read as madness, and the other read pure sanity. In a close-up, from one side he was the guy next door, and from the other he was absolutely insane.”

  Cinematographer Bobby Bukowski spent weeks filming River for the movie Dogfight. He vividly remembered their initial encounter: “He had very long hair and he struck me—as he came out of an elevator—as an angel, some kind of supernatural being. An angel could be Gabriel, but an angel could be Lucifer too. He would as readily delve into the deep, dark recesses as he would fly up to the lofty, illuminated places.”

  On October 30, 1993, actress Patricia Arquette—then best known for True Romance—was at home with her younger brother Richmond, who was staying with her. When he asked her who she most wanted to work with, she said River Phoenix. The next morning, Richmond was woken up by Patricia, who tearfully told him the news: while they were sleeping, River had died on the Sunset Strip. The world had changed overnight, and its possibilities had diminished.

  THE VIPER ROOM WAS A small club: a black box with a stage in the corner. It could hold a couple of hundred people comfortably—more if the fire marshal didn’t pay a visit. But it had the highest celebrity quotient this side of a red carpet, because Johnny Depp was an owner. In the Viper Room on the night of October 30, 1993 (and the early morning of the next day), people in attendance included River; his girlfriend, Samantha Mathis; his sister, Rain; his brother, Joaquin; John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers; Christina Applegate of Married . . . with Children; and Depp himself, who was playing with his band P, which also included Flea of the Chili Peppers, Al Jourgensen of Ministry, Benmont Tench of Tom Petty’s band, and Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers. One of their songs that night was about going to parties in the Hollywood Hills—it name-checked Michael Stipe, Sofia Coppola, and River Phoenix. River had never heard it, and never would.

  When Depp walked off the Viper Room stage, a bouncer told him that a friend of Flea’s was having a medical situation on the sidewalk. Depp stepped out of the club’s back door and surveyed the scene: paramedics treating a young man he didn’t recognize, surrounded by a cluster of onlookers in Halloween costumes. Late that night, Depp found out that the young man had been River, and that he had died.

  Depp and Phoenix had met, but they weren’t close. On a professional level, Depp admired Phoenix’s work; “there was a specific road he was on that I respected,” he said. He recognized a fellow performer eager to get off the Hollywood highway and hack through the undergrowth.

  Depp reflected, “The guy was having a good time but he made a big mistake and now he’s not here. He doesn’t breathe anymore and his mom doesn’t get to see him anymore.” Depp struggled for words. “The thing is, he came with his guitar to the club. You could cut me open and vomit in my chest because that kid . . . what a beautiful thing that he shows up with his girl on one arm and his guitar on the other. He came to play and he didn’t think he was going to die—nobody thinks they’re going to die. He wanted to have a good time. It’s dangerous. But that’s the thing that breaks my heart, first that he died, but also that he showed up with his guitar, you know? That’s not an unhappy kid.”

  Years later, actress Samantha Mathis (“his girl”) said, “It was completely shattering. It was hard to conceive of your mortality at that age. It’s really strange now, to think that I’m not twenty-three, and he’ll always be twenty-three.”

  In 1980s Hollywood, Tom Cruise and Michael J. Fox drew the show-business road map: a relentless path to stardom. At the same time, the Brat Pack demonstrated how fleeting that pursuit could be. In the 1990s, River taught a generation of young actors that there could be a different approach, one that placed greater value on artistic integrity and personal politics. Even today, when a young performer advocates for environmentalism or vegetarianism, it’s a ghostly echo of River’s life. His absence got filled by other performers—Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, his own brother Joaquin. Looking at them, we can see the ectoplasmic outline of what sort of man River might have become—and looking at him, we can better understand the world he left behind.

  PART ONE

  “WHEN YOU’RE YOUNG, YOU JUST ACCEPT WHAT GROWN-UPS TELL YOU”

  © by Lance Staedler/Corbis Outline

  1

  SKYLARKING

  River Phoenix stands high in the hills of Malibu, facing west. On a clear day, he would be gazing at the Pacific Ocean: sparkling blue, full of possibility all the way to the horizon. Today, the marine layer has rolled in, meaning that clouds have come right up to his feet.

  On one side of River stands a friend of his, a beautiful young dark-haired woman. On the other side is another friend, William Richert, almost three decades his senior; Richert has directed him in one movie (A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon) and acted with him in another (My Own Private Idaho). They are all standing outside Richert’s house, which is currently full of River’s young Hollywood friends, including actress Ione Skye. Keanu Reeves rolled up to the party on his motorcycle. River has adopted Richert’s house as a second home, sometimes sneaking in during the dead of night.

  “Take my hand,” River says, and the woman and the man both comply. They stand on the edge of a platform, and although clouds swaddle the house, making it look like Shangri-la in a Maxfield Parrish painting, Richert knows all too well that underneath the clouds, there is a thirty-foot drop down a steep hill.

  “We’re going to jump,” River tells his friends. They aren’t sure this is a good idea, but he continues, “And as we go through these clouds, all our past sins, and everything we ever did that we thought was wrong, will all be forgotten. All new things will happen to us, and we’ll be filled up forever.”

  River jumped into the clouds, and his friends leaped with him.

  River always jumped.

  2

  THE SEARCHERS

  River Phoenix’s mother changed her name piece by piece, but her life all at once. Born Arlyn Dunetz in the Bronx (on New Year’s Eve 1944), by age twenty-three she had settled into a cozy, dull domestic life: married to a computer operator and employed as a secretary in a Manhattan office. Her destiny as a mother and housewife seemed preordained, as inevitable as Gunsmoke and The Carol Burnett Show on Monday nights.

  “I just wanted to be loved,” she said, “and find somebody to love. I wanted to do what I saw in movies and television: get married and live happily ever after. I found it immediately—and within two years, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is not the way they said. I have to start all over.’ So I did.”

  The sounds in the air were psychedelic: the national mood oscillated between embracing love and advocating revolution. Dunetz didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life, but she knew it exceeded the boundaries of a Bronx apartment. In the summer of 1968, she put some clothes into a backpack and, with just a few dollars in her pocket, started hitchhiking west.

  Left behind: her astonished husband and parents. Her mother, Margaret Dunetz, knew that Arlyn was going to become a hippie: “I wasn’t thrilled, but what could I do? I didn’t try to stop her because she was a grown woman already.”

  RIVER PHOENIX’S FATHER GOT A head start on running away from home, but he was never able to run away from himself. John Lee Bottom was born on June 14, 1947, and grew up in Fontana, California—part of the “Inland Empire” east of Los Angeles. Fontana was a hot, desolate slice of desert suburb, home to a Kaiser Steel plant and famous as the birthplace of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club.

  J
ohn didn’t have an overabundance of parental attention: his father, Eli, was too focused on his glass business to spend time with him. And as John entered his teen years, his mother, Beulah, was in a terrible car accident: after being in a coma for a year, she was sent home from the hospital as a brain-damaged husk of her former self. Overwhelmed by a failing business and a failing wife, Eli started drinking heavily and staying away from home. One day, without warning or explanation, he left. (Eli headed up to San Francisco, and ultimately relocated to Perth, Australia, where he would die on September 23, 1993—five weeks before the death of River, the grandson he never knew.) Beulah was sent to a home; John stayed with his seven-years-older brother, Bobby. But when Bobby joined the navy, John ended up in a private Methodist orphanage.

  John tried to escape: “I ran away from home to become a songwriter in Hollywood,” he said. The freedom was short-lived, and not marked by a hit single: he was soon sent back to Fontana. John also ran away to Long Beach, south of L.A., where his aunt Frances and uncle Bruin lived, and begged them to take him in. They told him that they couldn’t look after him, and he sadly returned to the orphanage.

  John Bottom turned from a gentle child full of daydreams into an unhappy, wounded teenager. He drank heavily, smoked pot, and started riding motorcycles, with what he said were serious consequences: “When I was sixteen, a drunk lady ran head-on into me and I spent one and a half years in the hospital.” His relatives, such as Aunt Frances, don’t remember that accident, and think that he suffered his lifelong back injury while working as a carpenter.

  Some possibilities to consider that might explain that discrepancy, none of them happy: John was trying to make sense of his mother’s tragic accident by folding the narrative into his own life. Or he couldn’t distinguish between reality and his own fables. Or he was so abandoned by his relatives that they didn’t know he was hospitalized.

  John left the orphanage and floated around California with his guitar, picking up jobs gardening and refinishing furniture. At age fifteen, he got a girl pregnant, resulting in a daughter named Jodean (aka “Trust”). Like his own father, he didn’t stick around. In 1966, worried about the draft—Lyndon Johnson was starting to ramp up the Vietnam War—John headed up to Canada.