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

by Edwards, Gavin

  17

  IF THE SKY THAT WE LOOK UPON SHOULD TUMBLE AND FALL

  “Chris Chambers was the leader of our gang, and my best friend. He came from a bad family, and everybody just knew he’d turn out bad—including Chris.” That was how Richard Dreyfuss, narrating as the adult Gordie Lachance, described the character in Stand by Me that made River Phoenix a star.

  River had been treating acting as a lark—he enjoyed doing it, but music remained his first love. After wrapping Explorers, however, he was fooling around on a motorcycle, racing it in a dirt field, and he took a spill, tearing up a tendon in his left knee. The injury gave him plenty of time to sit on the couch, thinking about life. River had an epiphany: acting in movies was not just a fluke detour in his life, it was important to him, and he wanted to do it well. Before he was fully healed, he went on an audition for Stand by Me. “I kind of limped in,” River said, but he thought that the injury ultimately helped him land the part. “I had this tragic air to me ’cause I was bummed out by the accident.”

  River’s character was tough, sensitive, and just a little goofy. In blue jeans and a white T-shirt, sporting a short fifties haircut, he looked like a screen star of the past—one in particular. Director Rob Reiner said, “He was a young James Dean and I had never seen anybody like that.”

  Wil Wheaton, who played the twelve-year-old Gordie, said that the movie worked, in large part, because the four young actors starring in it matched their characters so well: he was nerdy and uncomfortable in his own skin; Jerry O’Connell was funny and schlubby (looking nothing like the chiseled hunk he became as an adult); Corey Feldman was full of inchoate rage and had an awful relationship with his parents. “And River was cool and really smart and passionate,” Wheaton said. “Kind of like a father figure to some of us.”

  At first, Wheaton was intimidated by River, who was fourteen to his twelve. He explained, “He was so professional and so intense, he just seemed a lot older than he was. He seemed to have this wisdom around him that was really difficult to quantify at that age.” He was smart, he was musically talented, and he was one of the kindest people Wheaton had ever met. In other words: “He just seemed cool.”

  Stand by Me, based on the Stephen King novella The Body, is the story of four boys in small-town Oregon in 1959. Just before junior high school begins, they hike twenty miles down the train tracks to the spot where they have heard the corpse of a missing kid lies, and come home older and wiser.

  Production began on The Body (as it was then known) in June 1984. Reiner, most famous for playing “Meathead” on All in the Family, had already directed This Is Spinal Tap and The Sure Thing. He didn’t think a coming-of-age period piece had much commercial potential, but it was the sort of movie he wanted to make.

  Reiner gave his stars tapes of late-fifties music and made sure they learned the slang of the era. More importantly, he summoned his four young leads one week early to Brownsville, Oregon (about a hundred miles west of where River was born, on the other side of the Cascade Mountains). Reiner led them in games drawn from Viola Spolin’s book Improvisations for the Theater: River and the other boys mimed each other’s gestures as if they were mirror images, told collaborative stories, and took turns guiding each other blindfolded through their hotel lobby. “Theater games develop trust among people,” declared Reiner, who needed his four actors to become friends—quickly.

  Feldman had known River a long time—they had become friendly on the L.A. audition circuit. “Whenever we saw each other on auditions,” Feldman remembered, “we would hang out or play outside while everyone else was sitting in the room waiting for their shot.”

  The quartet soon bonded. When The Goonies, starring Feldman, was released that summer, they went to see it together; a few weeks later, they all went to Explorers. Wheaton’s family organized weekend white-water rafting trips for the cast and crew. At the end of one outing, they found themselves at a clothing-optional hot springs that was hosting a hippie fair; some of the cast got to juggle with the Flying Karamazov Brothers.

  At the hotel, the actors were testing their limits. When River found out Wheaton was adept with electronics, he encouraged him to monkey with a video-game machine so they could play for free, promising that he’d take the blame if they got caught. They soaked Feldman’s wardrobe in beer; after his clothes dried, he smelled like a wino. And they threw the poolside chairs into the hotel pool—the closest four well-meaning young adolescents could get to acting like the Who.

  Kiefer Sutherland had a supporting role as the quartet’s nemesis, a juvenile delinquent named Ace Merrill. Sutherland was almost four years older than River, and spent most of his time on set in character, so the two actors didn’t get to know each other very well. Nevertheless, on a day when River was in a destructive mood, he bombarded Sutherland’s car with large dirt clods until it was covered in muck. “The other guys dared me to do it,” River explained. “They knew it was Kiefer’s car—I didn’t. When I found out, I was scared for my life.”

  Soon after, Sutherland spotted River at a local restaurant and called him over to his table.

  Terrified, River blurted out, “Kiefer, I’m really sorry.”

  Sutherland was confused; he was just saying hello. When River explained he was the culprit behind the dirt-clod fusillade, Sutherland laughed and said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s a rental car—they washed it off.”

  River was relieved, having conflated Sutherland with his character: “I didn’t know if he was going to pull out the switchblade and slit my throat.”

  Feldman and River checked out a local underage nightclub. Feldman said, “There was no alcohol served there or anything, but of course, all the kids were drinking anyway.” The locals offered booze to the visiting Hollywood actors and, with the lightest touches of peer pressure, got them to take their first drinks.

  “Kids never got along with me,” River said. The experiences that had made his life extraordinary had also made it impossible to find common ground with regular teenagers. “These kids, because this was Oregon and not L.A., and because we were actors and they admired us or whatever, they’d do anything to appease us. So they got me a forty-ouncer of beer, which I drank straight down just to show them. The only other thing I remember about that night was laying on the railroad tracks with everything spinning all around me.”

  Feldman said that he and River also had their first significant marijuana experience together. They were hanging out in another hotel room, this one occupied by one of the movie’s technicians. When the two kids spotted a bong in his closet and asked what it was, he not only explained its purpose and workings to them, he (with what seems an astonishing lack of adult responsibility) let them try it out. Feldman recalled, “We both coughed a lot and had sore throats—but even though we were kind of bouncing off the walls of the hotel, neither of us seemed to be affected by it. It didn’t change our state of mind in any way.”

  The coda: Some months later, when the Stand by Me cast stayed in a New York City hotel for the movie’s press junket, a distinctive aroma was wafting from River’s room. “I could smell the pot coming all the way down the hallway,” Feldman said. River laughed it off, saying it was somebody else’s.

  River turned fifteen while shooting Stand by Me, and seemed determined to grow up just as decisively as the movie’s characters. The four young actors talked about sex all the time, despite (or because of) their lack of experience. “Sex was nearly all that River could think about,” Feldman said.

  River had a major crush on a friend of the family, an older teenager; the feeling was apparently mutual, since she propositioned him. “He decided it was time to end his self-imposed ‘second virginity’ and get on with his first teen sexual encounter,” Feldman said. River and his friend went to his parents to get their blessing—Arlyn and John not only consented, they pitched a tent in the backyard of their rented house and decorated it to enhance the mood.

  “It was a beautiful experience,” Arlyn said lat
er.

  “A very strange experience,” River said. “I got through that, thank God.” He wasn’t just relieving his teenage hormones: he was attempting to have a mature sex life uncolored by his experiences with the Children of God. His emotions may have been mixed, but he was outwardly overjoyed: the next day on the set, he was telling the news to anybody who would listen. He even wrote a letter to Explorers director Joe Dante, who knew about River’s unslaked teenage lust, with the caps-lock on his handwriting: “WELL IT HAPPENED. IT FINALLY HAPPENED.”

  Although the cast and crew remember the idyllic shoot of Stand by Me as the best summer ever, they were also making a quiet little movie that would turn out to be a masterpiece. The movie is saturated with issues of mortality—even if the boys treat their journey like an impromptu camping jamboree, they are looking for a dead body—but the flip side is that it has an unusually warm, generous sense of what it means to be alive. Stand by Me is full of quotable lines (“Mickey Mouse is a cartoon. Superman’s a real guy. There’s no way a cartoon could beat up a real guy”), but the foundation of the movie is the friendship between Wheaton’s Gordie and River’s Chris.

  The defining scene for Chris comes when, late at night by a campfire, he confesses his fear that no matter what he does, the town will always think of him as “one of those low-life Chambers kids.” On the night the scene was shot, River delivered the monologue, telling the story of how he stole milk money from his school and then had moral qualms and returned the cash to a teacher—only to have her keep the money for herself, letting him take the blame and a three-day suspension.

  Reiner wasn’t satisfied with River’s performance—it seemed emotionally flat. Sometimes he would act out dialogue himself so his young performers could hear what he was looking for, but this time Reiner had a quiet word with River, asking him, “Is there a moment in your life where you can recall an adult letting you down, and betraying you in some way? You don’t have to tell me who it is. I just want you to think about it.”

  River walked away from the camera, replaying memories in his mind. A few minutes later, he returned and told Reiner he was ready to try again. This time his performance felt like an open wound: River wept while anger and pain roiled him. After the scene, Reiner went to River, who was still crying, gave him a big hug, and told him he loved him.

  “It took him a while to get over it,” Reiner said. “Obviously, there was something very hurtful to him in his life that he connected with to make that scene work. You just saw that raw naturalism. I’ve seen the movie a thousand times—and every time I see that scene, I cry.”

  Although River always praised the finished film (which changed titles from The Body to Stand by Me when marketers at Columbia Pictures worried that audiences would think it was a bodybuilding movie or a horror flick), he wasn’t so happy with his own performance. “Personally, I didn’t think my work was up to my own standards,” he said. Perhaps he felt that by drawing on his wellspring of pain and betrayal, he had exposed his secrets to the world. “I was going through puberty and I was hurting real bad,” he said of his emotional nakedness. “It’s not easy watching yourself so vulnerable.”

  18

  ECHO #2: STAND BY ME

  At the end of the movie, when the boys return from their odyssey on the train tracks, Chris waves good-bye to Gordie and walks away from the camera. In voiceover, the adult Gordie (Richard Dreyfuss) tells how Chris took college-prep classes with him, worked hard, and ultimately became a lawyer—until one day, he tried to break up a fight in a fast-food restaurant and got stabbed in the throat for his trouble, dying immediately.

  As he tells this story, the image of River fades from the screen, dead too soon. Reiner described this disappearance as “sad and weird and eerie”—just eight years later, the real-life River would be gone, too.

  19

  YOUNG HOLLYWOOD 1985

  In 1985, Leonardo DiCaprio was dazzling the other kids at his elementary school with his Michael Jackson impression. Martha Plimpton was enjoying the success of The Goonies, in which she costarred with Corey Feldman—she played “Stef,” the tough girl of the gang. Keanu Reeves made the movie that would be his Hollywood debut: Youngblood, the hockey drama starring Rob Lowe. Brad Pitt was attending the University of Missouri, where he was a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity, majoring in journalism with a focus on advertising. The following year, he would leave college only two credits shy of his degree and move to Hollywood to try to be in the movies.

  Also in 1985, Red Hot Chili Peppers went to Detroit to record their album Freaky Styley with producer (and funk legend) George Clinton. The band and Clinton did copious amounts of drugs together; the song “Yertle the Turtle” featured a cameo spoken-word appearance from Clinton’s Middle Eastern drug dealer. Clinton was in debt to him, but letting the dealer be on the record ensured that the supply of cocaine wouldn’t get cut off. That year, Michael Stipe was touring with R.E.M. behind Fables of the Reconstruction; when he was off the road, he found himself being stalked by the members of the Texas punk band the Butthole Surfers, including lead singer Gibby Haynes. They had relocated to Stipe’s hometown of Athens, Georgia, and declared their intention to park a van outside his house inscribed with the message “Michael Stipe / Despite the hype / I still wanna suck / Your big long pipe.”

  20

  FAMILY AFFAIR

  River’s life-changing summer in Oregon came with a paycheck: $50,000 for ten weeks of work. Agent Iris Burton got a $5,000 commission, while the government withheld about $14,000 for taxes. John and Arlyn got a $7,500 commission as managers; after a few other minor deductions, River Phoenix was paid just over $20,000. He was Team Phoenix’s breadwinner and he needed more work.

  As soon as River returned to L.A., Burton booked him his highest-profile job yet: a guest appearance on TV’s second-most-popular show, Family Ties. In its fourth season, the show was powered by the charisma of Michael J. Fox as Alex Keaton and by the best time slot in television (NBC, Thursdays at 8:30 P.M., right after the number one Cosby Show).

  River played Eugene Forbes, a genius math student who tutors Alex—despite being, to Alex’s chagrin, much younger than him. “Alex, you’re still clinging to Euclidean geometry,” River tells Keaton. “Embrace the abstract. Let go of rational thought!” Wearing a bow tie and a plaid sleeveless sweater, River was playing a variation on his Explorers character. While that movie got him this part, he had become a much better actor since making it, either because he had a year’s more experience or because he had started taking the job seriously. His comic timing had hugely improved and his growing confidence let him command the screen. If he identified with Eugene not fitting in with kids his age, at least here he could play that for laughs.

  It turns out that Eugene Forbes is pining for a girlfriend: “A companion, a confidante, a friend. A chick in hot pants.” He becomes smitten with Alex’s sister Jennifer (played by Tina Yothers), and awkwardly woos her, giving her an X-ray of his brain. He brings her to a university faculty party—which, as a date, proves to be a debacle. The episode ends with him asking her out for a soda instead.

  21

  TILT-A-WHIRL

  Arlyn hired a family tutor, Ed Squires, who observed River’s difficulty reading and concluded that he suffered from dyslexia. While it might seem astonishing that nobody in the family had ever considered this possibility—River, after all, had starred in a TV movie about dyslexia—John and Arlyn resisted the notion of seeing a doctor and obtaining a formal diagnosis.

  Arlyn also hired a housekeeper, a young bearded man named Larry McHale, who would not only do laundry, but serve as River’s personal assistant and companion. His job title was NANNY: “New Age Non-Nuclear Youth.” McHale drove River around L.A., introducing him to his own friends—adults, some of whom liked to take drugs.

  On one outing, McHale joined a group of pals on an all-day trip to the Magic Mountain amusement park. One of them, Pat Brewer—then a twenty-five-year-old acting student—didn�
�t recognize the kid who seemed to be tagging along with McHale for no reason. Only fifteen at the time, River looked even younger. “We partied all day,” Brewer said, “with River becoming the butt of a lot of jokes because he was so young.”

  At the end of the day, the group left the park, ending up at a Santa Monica home, near the Pacific Ocean. Somebody brought out a stash of cocaine and started cutting up lines. “River looked very unsure,” Brewer said. “It was something new to him. I remember saying, ‘I wouldn’t give any of that to the kid.’ But then River insisted on having his share. I think he was trying to prove himself in the group and felt peer pressure.”

  After snorting up the coke, River felt unwell and short of breath; he went outside to clear his head. Brewer ended up taking him on a walk down to the Santa Monica Pier. “I didn’t even realize he was River Phoenix until some little girls came up and asked him for his autograph,” said Brewer, who remembered River as not enjoying even his low level of stardom. “He just wanted to be John Doe and anonymous.”

  McHale and River hung out more with Brewer in the following weeks. It was mostly low-key: River would play guitar and talk about music. “At first he was very self-conscious about drugs and didn’t really know what to do,” Brewer said. “He soon picked it up, though.” River’s family didn’t know that in just a few months, he had experimented with alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine. The Children of God had taught River that cocaine was “the devil’s dandruff.” It had also taught him to keep secrets.