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

by Edwards, Gavin

  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!”

  28

  MARTHA MY DEAR

  “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.”

  29

  COMING-OF-AGE STORY

  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 uni
nspiring 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.”

  30

  RATTLESNAKE SPEEDWAY

  When the movie finished shooting, River drove two thousand miles back to Los Angeles, traveling in a motor home that he had bought, accompanied by housekeeper/aide-de-camp Larry McHale. Around 2 A.M. on a New Mexico highway, River got pulled over for speeding; McHale was sleeping in the back.

  Still channeling Jimmy Reardon, River sassed the cop, calling him “ossifer” instead of “officer.”

  “Yeah, very funny, kid,” said the patrolman, who proved to be a hard-ass. He didn’t believe a sixteen-year-old would actually own a motor home, figuring it was more likely he’d stolen it for a joyride.

  While the cop went back to his car to check it out, River started doing push-ups on the floor of the motor home. When the cop came back, River didn’t stop.

  Irate, the policeman thoroughly searched the vehicle for narcotics. Finding nothing, he finally sent River on his way, with a speeding ticket as a souvenir.

  The ticket had a stern warning that you had to pay it or go jail—so River didn’t mail it in for three months.

  31

  I AM AN ISLAND

  In 1986, the major American film studios had not yet become subsidiaries of Japanese electronics manufacturers. The movie business was still run by misfits, eccentric geniuses, and runaway aristocrats: Chris Blackwell fit right in. Born to a rich white family in Jamaica, he grew up to found Island Records, home to Jimmy Cliff, Bob Marley, Roxy Music, and U2. “The bigger labels are supermarkets,” he once said. “I like to think of Island as a very classy delic
atessen.” His offshoot company Island Pictures was financing Jimmy Reardon, so during the shoot, Blackwell visited the set in Evanston to check on its progress.

  River made a point of meeting Blackwell, and of letting him know that he also played music. Blackwell called Kim Buie, who was Island’s head of A&R on the West Coast, and asked her to meet with River, saying, “He seems like a really cool kid.” (A&R stands for “artists and repertoire”—it’s the department at the record label that signs and handles musicians.)

  Buie knew who River was—when she saw Stand by Me in the theater, she had made a point of staying for the credits so she could learn his name. “My God, he just stood out,” she said. “He was the James Dean of that movie—he had a commanding presence and a real vulnerability. A lot of emotion, coming through in such a mature way.”

  When the Phoenix family was all back in Los Angeles, River came to visit Buie at Island’s offices, accompanied by John and Arlyn. River played her a few rough demos of his songs. She heard potential and, even more importantly, learned that music was his passion and his first love. “I just felt that there was a light there,” she said. “A real desire was being conveyed to me through River and Arlyn. The father didn’t say a whole lot—he just had this blank stare.”

  After the meeting, Buie told Blackwell that River wasn’t ready to release a record, but they should try working with him. Island signed River to a development deal—“that was at a time when labels were still doing such a thing,” Buie later said with a mordant laugh. “A development deal was a step past a demo deal. You help somebody, and give them some time and resources to be able to put a little more time into their music and figure out what they want to do.” The money wasn’t extravagant—about $20,000—but River was ecstatic that his musical career was finally starting, and that soon the world would hear his music, which he called “progressive ethereal folk-rock.”