Read Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind Online
Authors: Gavin Edwards
Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind (9 page)
When Adam Duritz wrote “Mr. Jones,” he thought of it as a playful little tune about the fairy tale of rock stardom. Then it became a jet engine that propelled his band, Counting Crows, to stardom, and their debut album,
August and Everything After,
to sales of over seven million copies in the United States.
After a year on the road, Duritz returned home to Berkeley, California, and discovered that he had transformed from an underdog musician who loved Van Morrison into a figure of contempt. “I was having a really rough time—I was too famous that week,” Duritz said. “It just seemed like everywhere I went, for about six straight days, somebody came up to me and said something terrible—just something fucking nasty. And it was really all new to me then, so I was having a little trouble dealing with it.”
At home, Duritz got a call from Sal Jenco, Viper Room general manager, who had recently become a friend. Duritz unburdened himself, talking about how unhappy he was with this sort of homecoming. Jenco put him on hold—which didn’t seem like the most considerate response, except he returned a minute later to say that he had just reserved Duritz a plane ticket to L.A. at seven, and booked him a room at the Bel Age Hotel. “We’re having this party tonight and Johnny wanted me to invite you anyway, so why don’t you just come down?” Jenco asked.
Fuck it, Duritz thought. He threw a few things into a bag, headed to the airport, and never lived in Berkeley again. He went to the party and became a Viper Room regular.
“Adam was embraced by the Viper contingent,” said another Viper habitué, singer Morty Coyle. “The Vipers always had a soft spot in their hearts for the glitterati.”
Sometimes Duritz would even go behind the bar and pour drinks for a while. “I did make great tips,” he conceded. “I’ve never had a problem there. That’s one of the reasons I moved [to Los Angeles],” he said. “With everybody else running around, who cares about me? At the Viper Room, it was like I was a totally normal guy.”
HIS NAME IS RIO AND HE DANCES ON THE SAND
River was feeling vaguely uncertain about life, and considered his family’s usual solution: changing his name. He started introducing himself to people as “Rio”—Spanish for “river”—and wondered whether Rio Phoenix, or maybe just the single name Rio, sounded more viable as a name for a rock star. Although he had resolved to make a real effort when he acted, he hadn’t given up his first dream: having a musical career and changing the world through his songs.
While he dithered, fame overtook him:
Stand by Me
was released in August 1986 and became the sleeper hit of the summer. Within a few weeks, positive word of mouth had made it the number one movie in the United States, edging out
The Fly
and
Top Gun
. Reviews singled out River;
People
said he was being acclaimed as “one of the most exciting young actors on the screen.”
“Because he made such an impact on that film, he was not just another kid actor,” said preeminent film critic Roger Ebert. “He had a special quality, and it was a quality that he had all through his career. A certain cleanness or transparency, so it seemed that he was very natural and unaffected on the screen and not acting.”
As the breakout star of a surprise hit movie, River found his life changing quickly. His quote went up to $350,000 per movie, giving his family a financial cushion for the first time in his life and making him the most important client of Iris Burton’s agency. River attempted to block out the sensation that the world was now spinning on its axis five times faster than previously. “After
Stand by Me
came out, people were telling me ‘You’re so good,’ ‘You’re going to be a star,’ and things like that,” he said. “You can’t think about it. If you take the wrong way, you can get really high on yourself. People get so lost when that happens to them. They may think they have everything under control, but everything is really out of control. Their lives are totally in pieces.” As River spoke, he seemed to shift gradually from describing people he had observed to describing the pitfalls and hazards of his own life.
River tried to find ways to undermine his new, exalted movie-star status. Burton accompanied him to Tokyo for the Japanese premiere of the movie; they stayed at the lavish Imperial Hotel. When River found that the park next to the hotel had groups of kids hanging out and playing guitar, he invited them up to his room. “That room was filled with kids from the park,” Burton said. “He would play guitar for them and give them fruit and juice.”
An undeniable indicator of River’s new stardom: his appearance in the pages of celebrity pinup magazines like
Bop!
and
Tiger Beat
. (The class of publications is best typified by Lisa Simpson’s favorite,
Non-Threatening Boys Magazine
.) Cooperating with the publicity departments of movie studios, River found himself the subject of photo sessions that turned him into a pinup alongside Rob Lowe, Kirk Cameron, and the members of Duran Duran.
Only a few years later, he shuddered at the memory: “They teach you how to pose, you know, they say, ‘You
have
to do it like this!’ And you tilt your
head
and they show you how to push your
lips
out and suck in your
cheek
.” River groaned. “And then
all
the
outtakes
that you
never
want to see again in your
life
go through the teen magazines
forever
.”
The peg for just about every mini-profile accompanying a pinup: River’s taste in girls. One magazine quoted him thus: “I like girls who are so natural because I’m natural in everything I do.” Another: “It’s a great feeling to think that I can be a friend to so many people through my movies.”
The notion that these magazines made him fodder for romantic fantasies disconcerted River, reasonably enough. “It’s like there’s a grandstand full of girls who think I’m the greatest without knowing anything about me personally. It makes me very nervous. It’s as if everybody’s getting all worked up over an image they don’t know anything about. And if
you
are that image . . . I mean, don’t they know I’m an actor?”
While it’s disconcerting for any teenager to find himself an international sex object, River’s situation was even more fraught. As a child, under the aegis of the Children of God, he had been drawn into sexual activity before he could understand it or consent to it. Although he was still a minor—just sixteen years old—he once more found his own personality submerged in the deep waters of other people’s lust. He wasn’t comfortable with it, but again, he went along with it.
Now legitimately famous, even appearing on
The Tonight Show
(with guest host Joan Rivers), River spent a lot of time worrying that he would lose himself in a whirlwind of celebrity and hollow praise. He struggled for ways to maintain his integrity—the same impulse that drove Ethan Hawke to write letters to himself. Reid Rosefelt said of River, “He told me that he had to get up every morning and fight to remain himself.”
While a professional name change to Rio no longer made any sense, River kept using the name privately. Over the years, introducing himself to strangers as Rio proved to be a useful way to sidestep fame-addled encounters. Calling himself Rio became a symbol of integrity—a way to assert that he had an identity that was distinct from the “River Phoenix” that could be found on newsstands and billboards.
River wouldn’t have necessarily put it that way at age sixteen. Not that he was inarticulate, just that he was more prone to sentences like this: “Yo, Mama-jama, can we have some OJ, pleeze!”
JOHN PHOENIX WAS LOOKING FOR
more stability in his family’s living situation—they had moved over forty times during River’s life—and wanted to take a step away from what he saw as the iniquity of Hollywood. The solution to both problems, financed by River’s newfound success: renting a twenty-acre ranch just outside San Diego.
Burton started to find work for the other Phoenix children. Leaf was part of an ensemble of kids in
SpaceCamp
—which flopped when audiences didn’t want to see a comic adventure about kids going into outer space only five months after the shuttle
Challenger
exploded and killed seven astronauts.
Leaf was also cast in
Russkies,
in the starring role of a Key West teen who captures a Soviet sailor. Summer played his little sister, edging out Liberty for the role. Meanwhile, Rainbow booked a small part in the Ally Sheedy comedy
Maid to Order
.
River took a paternal attitude toward his younger siblings, playing with them on the backyard trampoline and guiding them through Hollywood. He called them “my kids,” speaking of his time with the family as if he were returning from a war zone rather than a movie set: “That’s been a lot of fun, getting to know my kids.”
“His parents saw him as their savior,” Martha Plimpton observed. “And treated him like the father.”
River filmed one last TV movie,
Circle of Violence: A Family Drama,
about elder abuse. River played unruly teen Chris Benfield, whose mother (Tuesday Weld), unbeknownst to him, is mentally and physically torturing her own mother (Geraldine Fitzgerald). The project was unnotable except for a line of dialogue that River later nominated, tellingly, as the worst he ever had to say on camera: “It was something like, ‘Mom, why can’t we be like most families and get along?’ Like most families get along!”
“River went off to do
The Mosquito Coast,
and he came back with a girlfriend, Martha Plimpton,” Ione Skye remembered. “So I was kind of bummed.”
It wasn’t just jungle love—once River and Plimpton were back on American soil, the relationship only got more serious. One night, when they were fifteen, they were both in New York City, and they went out for a fancy dinner. (Foraging for mangoes on the beaches of Venezuela was only seven years in the past, but it must have seemed like another life to River.) Plimpton ordered soft-shell crabs.
A horrified River abruptly left the restaurant. When Plimpton followed him, she found him walking down Park Avenue, crying. “I love you so much—why?” he wept. He was devastated that she was eating animals, but even more, he was deeply wounded that he hadn’t been able to convince her that veganism was the better, more moral path.
“I loved him for that,” Plimpton said. “For his dramatic desire that we share every belief, that I be with him all the way.”
Plimpton stayed with the Phoenixes for a while. She said, “I love River’s family; they brought him up to believe he was a pure soul who had a message to deliver to the world. But in moving around all the time, changing schools, keeping to themselves, and distrusting America, they created this utopian bubble so that River was never socialized—he was never prepared for dealing with crowds and with Hollywood, for the world in which he’d have to deliver that message. And furthermore, when you’re fifteen, to have to think of yourself as a prophet is unfair.”
Every day, all over Hollywood, thousands of people have meetings where they hash out the details of movies, most of which will never get made. One afternoon in 1986, writer/director William Richert returned from yet another Hollywood lunch to his office on Sunset Boulevard. His secretary told him that River Phoenix was waiting to audition for him, for a project of Richert’s called
Jimmy Reardon
. There was industry buzz that River was excellent in
Stand by Me,
which hadn’t been released yet, but nobody in Richert’s office even knew how old he was: one person said twenty-five, while another said thirteen.
Richert went to his waiting room, where River was sitting in the shadows next to a potted plant. Then River stood up, “and he was completely surrounded by light,” Richert said. He knew it was because of the way the California sun was streaming through the window, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that River was glowing from within.
Richert said, “You know, you’re a movie star.”
River demurred; only one of his movies had even been released, and that was
Explorers
.
“And you’re going to be incredible in my movie,” said Richert, overcome by River’s luminous beauty.
“But you haven’t auditioned me—I haven’t read anything.”
“You don’t need to.”
“Oh, I should read it,” River said. “Don’t you want to hear me read it?”
“Do you
want
to read it?”
“Yeah.”
Richert consented; they went into his office and River gave a fine reading. When he was done, Richert instructed him, “Take the script and go home and call your agent. Tell them you’ve just been offered the lead in this movie.”
Richert was a garrulous, strong-willed operator. Then forty-four, he had made a series of documentaries—one about the daughters of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, another about roller derby. When his political satire
Winter Kills
(with a cast including Jeff Bridges, John Huston, and Elizabeth Taylor) was shut down mid-shoot—the producers got busted for smuggling pot—he made another movie (
The American Success Story
) with much of the same cast in Europe to finance completion of the first one.
Jimmy Reardon,
based on Richert’s own semi-autobiographical novel,
Aren’t You Even Going to Kiss Me Goodbye?,
was the story, set in 1962, of a high school senior from a middle-class family in Evanston, the upper-class Chicago suburb. Jimmy Reardon, a Casanova with women, is nevertheless out of place with his rich friends—who are heading off to Ivy League colleges and other exotic locales, while his father is steering him toward an uninspiring local business school. As Jimmy frantically tries to scrounge up enough money for a plane ticket to follow his girlfriend to Hawaii, all his schemes gradually come undone. If he doesn’t arrive at an adult acceptance of his situation, he at least ends the movie with a greater understanding of the world he lives in.
River hoped it would be an “intelligent teenage comedy,” a coming-of-age story that crossed
Risky Business
and
The Catcher in the Rye
. John was against River taking the role, feeling that it was too licentious, but Arlyn and Iris Burton both thought it was a good career move—a transition into adult parts—and their view prevailed. River signed the contract and started to prepare.
“In three months, he made himself look seventeen years old,” Richert said. “He wasn’t eating, and he was doing push-ups day-in and day-out, because he had a kid’s body and he wanted to get some abs.”
River went to Illinois for the shoot, joined by a cast that included Ione Skye, performance artist Ann Magnuson, future
Big Bang Theory
star Johnny Galecki (then just eleven years old), and in his first movie ever, future Friend Matthew Perry (Richert discovered him while eating breakfast in the San Fernando Valley). Not there: John and Arlyn Phoenix, who opted to go to Key West to supervise Leaf on the set of
Russkies
.
River was chaperoned by his maternal grandfather, Meyer Dunetz—but the supervision proved to be nominal. “I could get away with a lot,” River said, “because he didn’t know me, so he didn’t know how I acted. So I could not be River, and there wasn’t my mom around to say, ‘Hey, come on, what’s going on, you’re losing yourself.’ ”
Richert fondly remembered the time River stepped out of his trailer, still wearing a bib to protect his clothes from makeup. There were dozens of teenage girls sitting on a nearby lawn, a crowd waiting to catch a glimpse of River Phoenix, the latest teen idol. “He looked at me and said, ‘How many blow jobs do you think are lying out there?’ ” Richert recalled, roaring with laughter. But the quip was much more like Jimmy Reardon than River Phoenix; it was mostly a sign that River was experimenting with staying in character.
According to Skye, the shoot had a “very party atmosphere,” with the teens and the adults socializing together, and Richert leading the way. “It wasn’t creepy,” she said—it was exhilarating for the kids to be taken seriously by their adult coworkers.
If River was misbehaving, he did so discreetly. Cast member Louanne Sirota said, “The most out-of-control thing we ever did was order beer through room service when we were underage, and that was cool.” Although River was in a movie full of attractive women ready to “rehearse” their sex scenes together, he seems to have resisted temptation. Mostly, anyway—actress Jane Hallaren, who played his mother, once found him entangled with a girl in a hallway.
“Don’t tell anybody, okay?” River asked.
Like, yeah, I’m going to call his girlfriend, Hallaren thought. “But that was River,” she said. “Whenever you thought you had him pigeonholed, he was someone else.”
“I’m the monogamous type,” River said. “I believe romance is important in sex. Doing it just for sensation and immediate gratification is selfish.” And then, without missing a beat, he argued the other side of the equation: “We all have these kinds of urges and feelings inside us and we can’t always suppress them.”
Martha Plimpton visited the set the day after River had spent a late evening in his hotel room with one of the actresses, hanging out and listening to Roxy Music. Plimpton, apparently unthreatened, teased him: “You were listening to the ultimate makeout record, Roxy Music!”
“I remember thinking that was such a grown-up thing to say,” Skye recalled. “I looked up to her—she was this New Yorker who was very intelligent and sophisticated.”
While Richert likened the blond couple of River and Plimpton to a pair of Tinker Bells, his son Nick (who had a small part in the film), thought that Martha had River perpetually apologizing to her. “She seemed to be in charge,” he said. “She was upset with him a lot of the time. I was never sure exactly what he’d done, but she probably had good reason.”
Working on movies, River often sought out older men and adopted them as mentors and father figures (Rob Reiner or Harrison Ford, for example).
Jimmy Reardon
was no exception, as he and Richert bonded—their friendship would last for the rest of River’s life.
Speaking of the novel that inspired
Jimmy Reardon,
Richert said, “I wrote that back when I was nineteen, and I shot it word for word. So the movie was written by a nineteen-year-old, directed by a forty-year-old, making a movie about himself with a kid who is acting out him, coming from a similar background. Because I came out of a Catholic cult and he came out of a Children of God cult.”
After River got a haircut, Richert was astonished at how much he looked like James Dean. He showed River a photo of Dean, and even staged one shot specifically to evoke the teen idol of the fifties, who died at age twenty-four. River shrugged off the resemblance, indifferent.
One day, he asked Richert, “Where do I cry in this movie?” Asked what he meant, he replied, “I’ve cried in all my movies.”
“Not in this one,” Richert told him.
“I’m not going to cry?”
“No.”
Realization dawned on River. “Because you want other people to cry.”
River had never done a love scene on camera before; now he was starring in a film full of them, and Richert had to walk him through the mechanics. “He was very powerful and confident as a performer. And with grown-ups,” Skye said. “But he was uncomfortable playing a ladies’ man.” River also worried about dialogue in which Jimmy encouraged his friends to get drunk, not wanting his fans to emulate that behavior.
There was only one line River wanted to add, Richert said, and it came in the scene where the older woman played by Ann Magnuson seduces him. River showed him what he had written in the script—“and his handwriting was like hieroglyphics, because River never really went to school,” Richert said.
The new line: “Well, I really do want to say that I’m a firm believer that everything happens for a reason.”
Richert was flabbergasted; not only did the idea seem precocious for a sixteen-year-old, “there aren’t a lot of actors who change dialogue with a philosophical context, or even think that way. It didn’t quite fit the scene, but I thought it was great. River was not one of us, not a person that would just go along with everything the way it was.”