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

by Edwards, Gavin

  Jacked up on hope and naïveté, River resolved that acting rather than singing was his path forward, and announced this destiny to anyone who would listen. “We’d roll into gas stations,” River said, “and I’d tell the attendant, ‘I’m going to be an actor!’ ”

  The family kept moving west, looking through the windshield with the optimism of a nine-year-old, and doing everything they could to block out the view of what lay behind them.

  10

  JOHNNY CAME FROM MIAMI F-L-A

  Around the same time, farther down the peninsula, in a Miami suburb called Miramar, a sixteen-year-old Johnny Depp was considering his future. Determined to be a rock star, he had just quit high school, and now worried that he had made a huge mistake.

  Depp grew up in Kentucky watching his uncle play guitar with his gospel group: “These hillbillies, for lack of a better description, playing guitar right in front of me—that was where the bug came from.” When a young Depp was listening to Frampton Comes Alive, his older brother grabbed the needle off the record and turned him on to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks instead.

  At age twelve, Depp talked his mom into buying him a Decca electric guitar for twenty-five dollars; he taught himself songs from a Mel Bay chord book that he had shoplifted by stuffing it down his pants. Depp locked himself in his bedroom and learned to play chords: soon he could hammer out Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” and Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4.”

  With some other neighborhood kids, he started a band called Flame and played backyard parties: “This one guy had a bass, we knew a guy who had a PA system, it was ramshackle and great.” They even cobbled together a homemade lighting system. Depp knew he had found his calling in life.

  “There’s a big change from thirteen to fifteen,” Depp noted. “You start out with super-innocent names, and then by the time you’re fifteen, you’re a guitarist in a band named Bitch.” He laughed. “Kind of ludicrous.” Depp never considered being lead singer: ironically, he didn’t want to be the guy that everybody looked at.

  The band got popular enough to play local clubs—which is when Depp dropped out of school, reasoning that he was on the fast track to stardom. After two weeks, reality set in: he wasn’t ready to be an adult. He considered joining the marines, but instead, went back to his school to talk to his dean.

  “Listen, I’ve realized that I’ve made a terrible mistake, and I’d like to come back and try again,” Depp told him.

  The dean gazed at him, not unkindly, and said, “Johnny, you can do what you want, but I don’t think that’s such a good idea. You love your music—that’s the only thing you’ve ever applied yourself to. You should go out there and play.”

  “He wasn’t nasty about it,” Depp remembered. “He was giving me what he felt to be very good advice. I wouldn’t say that this is right for everyone, certainly not, but in my case at that time, it was exactly the right thing for me. That was the proper medicine.”

  After Bitch came Bad Boys (“very original,” Depp notes of the name) and then a new-wave group called the Kids, who became local superstars, opening for the Ramones, the Pretenders, Iggy Pop, and the Stray Cats.

  In 1983, when Depp was twenty years old, the Kids packed up a U-Haul trailer and moved to Hollywood, intent on getting a record deal. On the way, they changed their name to Six Gun Method. They soon discovered that gigs were few and far between—and that L.A. clubs worked on a “pay-to-play” system, where you had to sell a certain number of tickets or make up the financial gap yourself (sometimes with confiscated musical instruments). “Suddenly,” Depp remembered, “we’re not big fish in a little pond. We’re like guppies and we’re nearly destitute.” They needed to eat, so they got day jobs.

  Depp found a gig in phone sales. He tried to convince people to buy a gross of customized pens, with incentives such as a grandfather clock or a trip to Greece. “Oddly, that’s kind of my first experience with acting,” he said. “There was a whole spiel. You had the lines right in front of you.” On the phone, Depp called himself Edward Quartermain, a character on the soap opera General Hospital.

  Despite working on commission, Depp would torpedo his own sales. “People only bought the pens because they wanted the grandfather clock,” he said. “When the supervisor wandered off, I’d say, ‘Listen, don’t buy these pens. The grandfather clock is made of corkboard. I’m a thief—we’re ripping you off.’ ”

  On Melrose Avenue, Depp was filling out a job application at a video store when he ran into Nicolas Cage, who had already starred in Valley Girl. They knew each other through Depp’s first wife, Lori Anne Allison: Cage dated Allison during a break in her relationship with Depp before they got married (they got hitched when Depp was twenty, and divorced when he was twenty-two). Cage suggested that Depp meet with his agent: “Why don’t you try acting? I think you could do it.”

  Motivated by the desire to pay rent and buy groceries, Depp auditioned for a horror movie, A Nightmare on Elm Street. For playing the role of Glen Lantz, he received the unthinkably large sum of $1,200 a week for eight weeks. He told the band they would take a short break, but when he came back after two months, everybody had gone their separate ways. The movie turned out to be a huge hit, launching a franchise with nine sequels and spin-offs. “I never wanted to be an actor,” Depp said. “It was a good way to make easy money, it seemed. I didn’t care what the movies were—if you’re going to pay me, fine. So I just kept going forward.”

  11

  SHOW-BIZ BABIES

  The Phoenix family arrived in California, unheralded and unwanted. Lacking any other options, John drove to Orange County (the semi-urban sprawl south of Los Angeles), the home of the Becks: his aunt Frances and uncle Bruin. Twenty years earlier, when he was a runaway from the orphanage, they had declined to take him in, but now they welcomed his whole family. Frances offered them dinner, but was flummoxed by their dietary restrictions. They ate only fruits and vegetables and wouldn’t even mix the two.

  She recalled, “I put a bowl of fruit on one side, a bowl of vegetables on the other. River came in the kitchen. He said, ‘Aunt Frances, we can’t eat but one.’ I said, ‘Okay, well, eat the one, and then you can take the other home.’ ” (There’s no reason vegans couldn’t mix fruits and vegetables, other than personal preference.) The Phoenixes slept in their camper; the next morning, they drove up to Hollywood.

  When their cross-country journey ended at Paramount Studios, they were rebuffed. “We were really naïve,” reflected River. “I figured I’d play guitar and sing with my sister and we would be on television the next day.” Instead, they found themselves living in the camper. They couldn’t afford apartments at L.A. rents, but sometimes they talked their way into one anyway. After a few months, they’d be evicted and head back to Orange County to visit Aunt Frances and Uncle Bruin again.

  “We schlepped forever in L.A.,” River said. “Moved every three months, being evicted regularly for late rent, for kids, for whatever. We just kept it so we’d rather be poor than owe anybody money. So we didn’t have any debts, but we had no money whatsoever—it was just day-to-day.” He particularly remembered a “shitty little apartment” in North Hollywood. Kids were prohibited, so when the landlady came around, all five Phoenix children had to hide in the closet.

  The family returned to their busking ways. Aunt Frances said: “When they went to L.A., they started playing on the streets. They’d put out the pan, and they’d get money. They kept doing that, then the police would make ’em leave, and they’d go to another spot.” The younger siblings were now incorporated into the act, singing, playing tambourine, and wearing matching Western-style costumes (complete with fringe).

  “That’s the way I understood they got their money to live on,” Aunt Frances said. “Johnny claimed he was hurt—hurt his back or something—and never could work. I think he was too lazy to work.”

  Around 1980, Arlyn remembered, the family appeared on a local NBC news segment. The reporter interviewed them about
their street performances and asked Leaf, “So what’s been the happiest day of your life?”

  Somewhat baffled by the question, Leaf shrugged and asked his siblings, “What am I supposed to say?” Finally, he settled on an answer: “It hasn’t happened yet.”

  “Oh,” the reporter said. Before he could ask the next question, Leaf interrupted, shouting, “But it’s coming soon!”

  Recognizing that donated loose change wasn’t paying the bills, Arlyn found a secretarial job, working for Joel Thurm, head of casting at NBC. This was a savvy move on her part: it let her suss out the mechanics of Hollywood and network with people in the business. She brought her kids to audition for the brassy Iris Burton, one of Hollywood’s leading talent agents for children.

  “I’m a groomer. A talent scout,” Burton said of her relationship with her juvenile clients. “I watch their weight. Hair. Nails. And most of all, I watch their parents. By the time a kid walks through the door, I know if he or she’s a winner or a loser. If they jump in or slouch in, if they’re biting their nails and rocking back and forth, I don’t want ’em. If I don’t see the hidden strength, feel the energy, then the magic isn’t there. I can smell it like a rat.”

  Burton, born in 1930 to a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl, entered show business as a dancer: on Broadway in the 1940s and on Milton Berle’s TV show. She moved to Hollywood and played a seductive Egyptian dancer in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1951 biblical epic The Ten Commandments. After stints selling dishes and working as a waitress at the Playboy Club, she found a job at a talent agency. Discovering that nobody wanted to handle kids—the stage parents were too big a headache—she left after a year and opened her own agency, working out of her home (as she did for her whole life).

  Her first star client was Andy Lambros, star of Oscar Mayer TV ads for b-o-l-o-g-n-a, but she went on to represent a huge swath of actors in their childhood years, including Henry Thomas circa E.T., Kirsten Dunst, Drew Barrymore, Jaleel “Urkel” White, Kirk Cameron, and the Olsen twins. In a town where the agent archetype became a young CAA rep in an Armani suit, she was old school: a five-foot-two fireplug who would never take no for an answer. When the mother of one client called to tell Burton that they would miss an audition because a windstorm was blowing sand across the highway and there was no visibility, Burton’s response was “Throw a white sheet around you, grab a camel, and pretend like you’re Lawrence of Arabia. I don’t care how you do it—just get to the call.”

  Burton’s philosophy: “Kids are pieces of meat. I’ve never had anything but filet mignon. I’ve never had hamburger. My kids are the choice meat.” Despite this unvegan point of view, she signed up all the Phoenix offspring. “River was the most beautiful child you’ve ever seen, like a little Elvis,” she said. He started going on casting calls for commercials, accompanied by his dad. Even with hundreds of kids competing for each job, he landed several spots, including ads for Ocean Spray cranberry juice, Mitsubishi cars, and the toy Star Maker electric guitar.

  After only a year, River announced that he didn’t want to do any more commercials. He felt like a fraud, and he had difficulty smiling on demand. “Commercials were too phony for me,” he explained later. “It was selling a product, and who owns the product? I mean, are they supporting apartheid? I just didn’t like the whole thing, even though it helped us pay the rent. How could I tell anybody to drink canned cranberry juice? I didn’t drink it. I didn’t believe in what I was saying. I guess what I was zeroing in on was that performing was more about telling the truth through a different character’s eyes. I felt that the constant lying, the smiling on cue, and the product naming was going to drive me crazy or numb me to a not-yet-developed craft that I was beginning to feel staring me in the face.”

  Remarkably, the adults around ten-year-old River supported his decision. If Arlyn was captain of Team Phoenix, John was the family’s hippie idealist, worried that they would have to compromise their values in Hollywood. His son’s refusal to be the smiling pitchman for American society must have felt like a victory for John.

  Burton was perplexed—she wasn’t accustomed to clients turning down work—but River was a prime enough piece of steak that she accepted his decision and focused her efforts on getting him cast on a TV show.

  Meanwhile, the Phoenix kids kept performing on the streets of Los Angeles. Video from 1982 captured all five children, in yellow tank tops and matching satin shorts, doing a choreographed routine as they sang, “Straight to the top / Gonna make it, gonna make it.” They were all young enough that it was hard to figure who was a boy and who was a girl—but River was unmistakable. He was the blond front man wearing sneakers without socks, expertly playing the guitar, finishing the song with a spin and bathing in the applause of passersby. The star of the show, even if the show was still on a Westwood sidewalk.

  12

  LET’S WORK

  Bright colors. That’s what many people remember about the 1980s: neon fashions, the jumbled faces on a Rubik’s Cube, Duran Duran videos on MTV. But the real spirit of the decade was the valorization of work: relentless industry as the supreme virtue. Gym culture went mainstream; people traded in bell-bottoms for gym shorts. Bruce Springsteen had the biggest album of his career when he changed his image from scrawny street poet to muscular laborer wielding a guitar. Ronald Reagan was elected president twice with bromides about hard work and American strength. The drug of the decade was cocaine, or, as some called it, “Bolivian Marching Powder”: a stimulant that let you keep partying all night. It was an illegal drug with a Calvinist work ethic.

  The two emerging stars who best embodied the sweaty spirit of the eighties were Michael J. Fox and Tom Cruise. Starring as Alex P. Keaton on Family Ties, Fox was the very symbol of generational change: he played a money-minded young Republican whose supply-side values were consistently at odds with those of his parents, former hippies. Fox’s winning smile made Reaganism go down easy. “What are your goals?” Fox jokingly asked himself in an interview, and then answered, “Women, money, and world domination.”

  Fox capitalized on his fame with hit movies such as Teen Wolf and The Secret of My Success. But the project that put him over the top was Back to the Future, the inventive time-travel comedy produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Robert Zemeckis. Fox’s character, Marty McFly, traveled from 1985 to 1955 in a souped-up DeLorean—reflecting the mood of the times, the movie was set in the presidencies of Reagan and Eisenhower. To make the movie, Fox pulled double shifts, shooting Family Ties during the day and Back to the Future during the night, filming until 2:30 A.M. “I averaged about four hours of sleep a night,” Fox said. “Working such long hours really taxes your sanity. But what was I going to do? The movie had to get done.” It grossed over $200 million in the United States and spawned two sequels.

  Tom Cruise, meanwhile, became a star by playing a junior capitalist run amok in Risky Business—when his parents go out of town, he not only dances around the living room in his underwear, he runs a brothel out of their suburban home. The movie was originally intended as an exploration of the underbelly of American go-go capitalism in the eighties, but with Cruise’s megawatt charisma and a new happy ending where he gets the girl (Rebecca De Mornay) and secures admission to Princeton, it became a sales pitch for the virtues of entrepreneurship. Soon after, Cruise also played a hotshot pilot called Maverick in Top Gun, which similarly glorified Reaganite military muscle—it played as a de facto recruiting film for the military.

  Cruise became known for his unblinking intensity, on-screen and off. His relentless work habits and focus earned him the nickname “Laserhead.” He found himself drawn to Scientology, one of the most capitalist religions around: it promised that all problems could be solved with sufficient applications of work and money.

  13

  THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

  In the fall of 1982, Americans could choose from just three broadcast television networks. Wednesday nights at eight, NBC was broadcasting Real People, their hit hour of
human-interest stories (a man who walks everywhere backward!), which alternated between heartwarming and bizarre. ABC offered Tales of the Gold Monkey, a Raiders of the Lost Ark ripoff about a seaplane pilot in the South Pacific in 1938, featuring Roddy McDowell as a dapper French magistrate. And CBS had a modern update of the 1954 frontier musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers—this version was about a family of ranchers in Northern California. The oldest brother was played by Richard Dean Anderson, soon to be famous as MacGyver, while the youngest brother was played by newcomer River Phoenix.

  The series featured a musical number each week, so River brought his guitar to the audition and did his Elvis Presley impersonation. Executive producer David Gerber said, “He had that clean, fresh, wholesome young look and a really ingratiating smile. He was a natural. I always thought he was the peach-fuzz kid.”

  When River found out he had the part, he said, “I just leaped five feet into the air.” Or more honestly: “I got all red and freaked out.”

  The Phoenix family relocated to the Northern California town of Murphys, in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains. John and Arlyn took turns supervising River on the set and homeschooling the rest of the family.

  Almost immediately, River’s veganism came into conflict with the production: he wouldn’t wear leather cowboy boots or a leather belt. After some wrangling, the costume department found plastic cowboy boots (and River went without a belt). But the incident provided fodder for the actors playing River’s six older brothers: they would razz him about his veganism and generally condescend to him. Twelve-year-old River didn’t know how to cope.