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

by Edwards, Gavin

  While Leary speaks, an audience member lights a joint and passes it up to the stage. Leary takes a long pull from it—when he’s done, the Viper Room staff promptly disposes of it. The last thing they want is another drug-related incident.

  At the end of the night, Arquette stands outside the Viper Room, getting some fresh air and flirting with one of the Alices. A couple walks out—they look like tourists who had come to the Viper Room hoping to spot a celebrity. Arquette hears the guy say to the girl, “You know, these people sure do party strange in L.A.” Arquette isn’t irate that they haven’t appreciated a historic evening, or even dismayed that mainstream American culture will never understand what the Viper Room is trying to do. He’s happy to be in the minority.

  8

  MEAT IS MURDER

  After a year living in the caretaker’s cottage and swimming in that pool, John and Arlyn were eager to get the family back to the United States, not least because Arlyn was pregnant again. Six international plane tickets, however, seemed as unattainable as seats on a rocket to the moon.

  Arlyn’s parents might have been able to afford the airfare, but she refused to ask them for money. Wood had a church fund for needy people, but didn’t feel he could tap it to send some Americans home. Then he had an epiphany: “An airplane is not the only way to get them there.” He went to a member of his parish who was a maritime captain and the owner of a small shipping line. Wood explained that he was trying to get Los Niños Rubios Que Cantan and their family to Miami: “All of them are U.S. citizens with passports, so we’re not smuggling anybody.”

  Arrangements were made; in October 1978, the family got on a cargo ship for the thirteen-hundred-mile journey north. In later years, River liked to claim they were stowaways—“the crew discovered us halfway home,” he said. But although the accommodations were Spartan, they were welcome guests: the ship’s cook even brought along the ingredients for a birthday cake, because Joaquin turned four during the journey. The ship was carrying a shipment of Tonka Toys and the crew gave some damaged trucks to Joaquin as a birthday present.

  While the family lived in Venezuela, the United States had become a land of polyester, disco, and Farrah Fawcett posters. Number one singles that fall were Exile’s “Kiss You All Over” and Nick Gilder’s “Hot Child in the City,” while the Grease soundtrack dominated the album chart. The top shows on TV were the sitcoms Laverne & Shirley and Three’s Company, followed by the Robin Williams vehicle Mork & Mindy. As River and his family plowed north to the United States and its colorful, tacky, vibrant culture, they made another major life choice.

  Some of the crew were fishing off the side of the ship; when they reeled in a catch, they would unhook the fish from the line and then impale it on a board that had nails sticking out of it, so it wouldn’t flop back into the water. The Bottom children had never seen anything like that before, and were horrified. “These weren’t bad people, but they’d become totally desensitized to the pain they were causing,” River said. “It was the first time that I really saw that meat wasn’t just a hamburger or a hot dog or some disguised food on your plate, that it was an animal, it was flesh. It seemed very barbaric and kind of cruel, and me and my brother and sister were all crying and were traumatized. The reality just hit us so hard.”

  River, Rain, and Joaquin told their parents that they didn’t want to eat meat anymore. “Our parents were very sensitive to our feelings,” he remembered. “I mean, they were obviously immune to it themselves—meat-eating is so much a part of society as a whole and how people eat—but they were very interested in our sensitivity to it, so they were open to us becoming vegetarian.”

  The lighter ecological impact of vegetarianism was appealing to the parents. “I tell my kids to celebrate the Earth,” Arlyn said. “We’re living creatures who should live as gently and lovingly as we can on the Earth.”

  Within months, the family was not only eschewing meat, they—led by River, and encouraged by Arlyn’s vegan sister—had sworn off eggs and dairy. At the time, vegetarianism was further out of mainstream American culture than it is today; veganism (where one avoids not only meat, but animal products in general) was so fringe that magazine articles about River sometimes just called it “ultravegetarianism.” “It was hard to give up dairy for a while for a lot of people in my family,” River said. “My mom and dad were so used to eating cheese, and it was so convenient. But I said, ‘Hey, if we’re doing this thing, let’s go all the way with it.’”

  “Every child starts out loving animals, identifying with them,” River declared later. “But early on, adults start sending them contradictory messages. They’ll give a kid a stuffed animal to hug and love and sleep with. But at the same time, they’re serving them animals for dinner every night. It’s crazy, if you think about it. But when you’re young, you just accept what grown-ups tell you as the truth.”

  Now that River’s family had left the Children of God and street-corner evangelism behind, veganism became the central tenet of his philosophy: not just a way to be kind to animals, improve the environment, and better one’s health, but the root of enhanced planetary consciousness.

  “Vegetarianism is a link to perfection and peace,” River said when he was seventeen, after years of considering these beliefs (and acting on them). “But it’s a small link. There are lots of other issues: apartheid, vivisection, political prisoners, the arms race. There’s so much going on in this world today, so much ignorance among people. That’s not to say I’m not standing amongst everybody. But the point is, What can we do now? That’s the thing about vegetarianism; it’s an individual’s decision and it’s something you have control over. How many things do we really have control over?”

  RIVER PHOENIX WALKS DOWN A wooded path, accompanied by two large dogs, a German shepherd and a Doberman/German shepherd mix. He calls for the dogs, Justice and Jupiter, to come along. The camera cuts to a close-up: River rubs a dog’s neck, and kisses it on top of its nose.

  “Hello, I’m River Phoenix,” he says, and swallows uncertainly, as if he’s trying the name out for the first time. He’s wearing black jeans, black boots, and a white People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sweatshirt with a microphone clipped to it. His hair is long but tucked behind his ears. He’s glowing as if there’s a forty-watt bulb concealed in his esophagus. “And if you care about animals, here’s some good news: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals can show you some easy ways to help out.”

  The camera pulls back to reveal that River is sitting cross-legged on the ground, holding his dogs, surrounded by fallen leaves. “It’s up to us to take care of all our friends,” he says as we dissolve to footage of him wrestling and playing with one of the dogs. “Write for a free brochure: PETA Kids, Washington, D.C., two-zero-zero-one-five. Thank you.” The camera dissolves back to River on the ground, although one of the dogs has wandered off for a nap. He smiles so winningly that you want to buy whatever it is he’s selling, whether it’s cranberry juice or animal liberation.

  In another take, River sits on a bench, his right arm draped around one of the dogs as if he’s a high school quarterback on a date. “Are you a kid who cares about animals?” he asks. “There are lots of us. Come join us and find out how you can help.” River turns to the dog. “Hope to hear from you soon. Right, Jupiter?”

  Outtakes from the PSA reveal the work that goes into letting River Phoenix chat casually with his fans for thirty seconds. He tries talking while walking toward the camera, but the wire for his microphone gets snagged. He trips over his lines and rolls his eyes. Cue cards are offered to him, but he objects, “If I read it, it’ll just look like I’m reading it!”

  River pushes his hair back, but then it falls into his face again, revealing how long it actually is. With one hand on each dog, he casually jerks his head clockwise, flipping his hair so it goes sailing over and back, a fleeting blond waterfall.

  “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals can show you—” River stops short. �
�You’re not filming this, are you?”

  PART TWO

  “I’M GOING TO BE FAMOUS”

  © by Lance Staedler/Corbis Outline

  9

  BACK IN THE U.S.A.

  Delivered to the docks of Miami like a cargo package, the Bottom family returned to the United States with few possessions beyond River’s acoustic guitar and some battered Tonka trucks. They headed to Winter Park, near Orlando; Arlyn’s parents had retired and moved from the Bronx down to Florida. They were delighted to see their grandchildren, but there wasn’t room in their house for six more people. Fortunately, the family found a place in the Orlando area where they could stay: Alfonso Sainz, their friend from Venezuela who had given River his guitar, had a mansion nearby. John agreed to serve as handyman for Sainz’s property, and the family moved into another caretaker’s cottage.

  River was having 120-volt culture shock. After four years away from the States—half his young life—he thought of Spanish as his native tongue. And like millions of children before him, he discovered television, which he found alluring and confusing. He saw a western movie and, not realizing it was fiction, thought “that companies paid people’s families money to kill them.”

  River’s grandparents were shocked to discover that he had never attended school. Since he was now eight, they insisted that he enroll right away. He entered the first grade but felt hugely out of place: the older kid who didn’t get anybody’s jokes. It wasn’t just that River didn’t understand American cultural references—he had never really developed a sense of humor and was unfamiliar with the format of a joke. Director and friend Gus Van Sant remembered River saying “that he never really got its logic, the surprise of the unexpected. You know: an elephant and a hippo go into a bar, something is introduced, punch line. And he’d be like, ‘Yeah? So what happened then?’ ”

  It wasn’t just his lack of punch-line comprehension: young River Bottom stood out in every way possible, starting with his name. “When I was in first grade, everybody made fun of my name, of course,” he said later. “I think it’s kind of a big name to hold up when you’re nine years old. It seemed goofy. I used to tell people I wanted to change the world and they used to think, ‘This kid’s really weird.’ ”

  Within his own family, it had long been expected that River would carry the weight of the world like a pint-size Atlas. Now he was discovering that other kids cared more about recess and Star Wars.

  Arlyn and John had their fifth child on December 10, 1978. Ignoring the calendar, they named her “Summer Joy.” Four-year-old Joaquin, dismayed at being the only child in the family with a mundane name, asked his mother if he could change it.

  “Ask your father,” Arlyn said.

  Joaquin went to John, who was earning the family’s keep by raking leaves. “Pick another name,” John assented. With a pile of leaves in front of him, the boy chose “Leaf.” As writer Michael Angeli later observed, the names of the children (River, Rain, Leaf, Liberty, and Summer) sounded like “generic items you’d find on the Family Feud tote board if the subject were Emerson.”

  A few years later, River considered the personalities of the five children. “We all look completely different and we all have our distinct things. Leaf was the family clown, the comedian—very witty and smart.” Rain (who would later modify her name to Rainbow) “was the older sister and trendsetter. Mom had to work a lot, so she took her place.” About himself, River said, “I played the guitar.” Although he thought that was a sufficient summary of his personality, he continued, “I went off to my room a lot and had a real goofy side to me, really corny—laughing about stupid things, making fart noises with my mouth. A lot of inside jokes. Liberty was always the most physical, like an acrobat: nimble, strong, slender, a really beautiful girl. And Summer was the youngest, the baby of the family, with big brown eyes and blonde hair. She looks WASPy. Liberty and Rainbow have more of an ethnic look, Israeli or Italian.”

  John and Arlyn strived to speak with their children as if they were peers. “We never treated them like children, but like extra added friends,” Arlyn said. “It was never like, ‘We know better because we’re the parents.’ It was more like, ‘This is the first time we’ve ever done this, too. What do you think?’ And the children were so wise. If we made a mistake, we made it together.”

  The family wasn’t big on table manners, or on taking turns in a conversation, but John did have one rule of family comportment: “The youngest gets to yell the loudest because they’re never listened to!”

  The Bottom kids played with other neighborhood kids, and became friendly enough to have sleepovers. Decades later, one of their child guests still remembered the bedtime stories: “They were really trippy—about the stars.” After tucking in the kids with celestial tales, John and Arlyn would sneak out of the house to visit other neighbors, fearlessly leaving the children alone. “I just remember the parents were major hippies,” River’s friend said. “His mom had this crazy curly hair, and his dad had a beard, and they smoked a lot of pot.”

  Even with a place to stay, finances were tight for a family of seven. The kids were well dressed, but only because they received a large donation of upscale clothes from a wealthy local family. “They were the best clothes we ever had,” River said. “We were these pure, naïve, poor children,” he said. “The rich kids called us a lot of names but it never bothered us because we didn’t know what the names meant,” he insisted.

  John started a landscaping business, with the kids helping him haul plants and sod, but before it could take off, he threw out his back, his old injury recurring. The business went kaput, and when John stopped acting as caretaker on the Sainz property, the family had to leave. They moved about eighty miles west, to Brooksville, in a rural corner of the county. While John recuperated, Arlyn got a job as executive secretary for the director of the Hernando-Sumter Community Action Agency.

  Feeling that the family’s fortunes had hit bottom, John decided that the way to change them would be to abandon the surname Bottom. He chose a replacement: “Phoenix,” the glorious firebird of Greek mythology, periodically reborn from its own ashes. Although the name is entirely suitable as a symbol of resurrection and rejuvenation, John might have gotten the idea from a source other than classical mythology: in the spring of 1979, the “Phoenix Saga” was in full swing in the pages of the Uncanny X-Men comic book. (The telepath Jean Grey transforms into the godlike Phoenix and becomes corrupted by power, killing billions of aliens when she annihilates a solar system. To stop the rise of Dark Phoenix, she commits suicide.) Joaquin was a fan of the X-Men comic book—even if John wasn’t reading it, the Phoenix character was regularly featured on the cover and a stray sighting could well have sparked the idea. (If it did, then River and Joaquin Phoenix would end up as two of three Oscar-nominated actors whose last names were drawn from Marvel Comics characters, the other being Nicolas Cage, who traded in his Coppola family name for the surname of Luke Cage [aka ghetto muscleman Power Man.])

  Meanwhile, River and Rain were retooling their act, with more emphasis on popular songs and less on Children of God hymns. Arlyn dubbed the family Team Phoenix, emphasizing that they were focused on show-biz success, but River later insisted that she was not the driving force behind his music and acting. “We all wanted to be entertainers,” he asserted, “and our parents did whatever they could to help us out.” Alvin Ross, part of the management team for the rock band Kiss, expressed interest in the act, but nothing came of it.

  River and Rain were no longer spending their days busking; instead, they performed at every talent contest and county fair they could find. On April 25, 1979, they entered a contest at the “Hernando Fiesta” in Spring Hill, Florida. Also entering were a belly dancer and a snake charmer, sent over by the Busch Gardens amusement park. “Those girls were moving parts of their bodies I didn’t know existed,” said one female spectator.

  Second place went to a mime, but first place went to River and Rain, performing their old
Children of God showstopper, “You Gotta Be a Baby.” “Except a man be born again, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven,” they sang, first rendering the biblical quotation in English, and then in French, Spanish, German, and Japanese. They won fifty dollars. More importantly, they caught the attention of Gayle Guthman, the reviewer from the St. Petersburg Times, who wrote a full article about the Phoenix family three weeks later.

  The article, appearing on the same page as “Murdered Man’s Pickup Truck Found” and “Lutherans to Sponsor Ice Cream Social,” featured John Phoenix’s cleaned-up version of the family history. As John related the family history, they had been working as “independent missionaries” in Latin America; River and Rain first performed with a Venezuelan band John was leading when he lost his voice; Liberty was actually born one day earlier, on the Fourth of July, making her name a tribute to America rather than Venezuelan independence.

  One thing that couldn’t be concealed: the precocity of River, who told Guthman, “I hope to be famous one day, not to be proud of myself because I thank God for giving me my powers.”

  “This was an 8-year-old talking,” an astonished Guthman wrote.

  Team Phoenix proudly touted the article, sending it to friends, family, and anyone they thought could help the kids get famous. One copy was mailed to Penny Marshall in Hollywood: the star of the top-rated TV show Laverne & Shirley was an old school friend of Arlyn’s in the Bronx. The letter ended up in the hands of the Paramount Pictures casting department, which sent Arlyn a form letter. As River described it, “They answered, ‘Yeah, we’d be happy to see your children. If you’re ever in California, by all means, look us up, but don’t make a special trip.’ And so, of course, we just threw everything into the old station wagon and drove out to Burbank.”

  The Phoenix family wasn’t just chasing stardom: they thought this was all part of a divine plan in which the children, especially River, could be instrumental in changing the world into a better, holier place. The family sold their possessions, loaded up another battered VW minibus (which John had converted into a camper), and drove three thousand miles west: seven people and a dog, looking like Grapes of Wrath reenactors. “Things went wrong for us all the time,” Arlyn said. “One night, it was freezing—but we didn’t have a back window in the camper. It got so cold, we stuffed Pampers in the window.”