32
YOUNG HOLLYWOOD 1987
In 1987, the Fox network, cobbled together from previously independent stations, launched with the programs Married . . . with Children and The Tracey Ullman Show. The latter program, a sketch-comedy anthology, would ultimately launch The Simpsons, while the former, an unusually crass sitcom, would keep Christina Applegate employed for the next eleven years. Another Fox program, 21 Jump Street, about the adventures of a group of police officers youthful enough to go undercover at high schools, cast Johnny Depp—and made him a teen idol.
That year, fourteen-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio was struggling to find an agent. His closest brush with show-biz glory: On a family trip to Germany, he entered a break-dancing contest and almost won. Brad Pitt had uncredited work on a variety of films with nihilistic titles—No Way Out, No Man’s Land, and Less Than Zero—before booking a two-episode role on the NBC daytime soap Another World. Samantha Mathis was also filming an NBC program: Aaron’s Way was a high-concept spin on The Beverly Hillbillies, starring former NFL star Merlin Olsen as the patriarch of an Amish family that relocates to California when his estranged son dies in a surfing accident. Mathis played one of Olsen’s daughters, but the program lasted only fourteen episodes.
Gibby Haynes and the Butthole Surfers recorded and released their third album, Locust Abortion Technician. Working in the basement of Capitol Records, the Red Hot Chili Peppers recorded The Uplift Mofo Party Plan, the last album guitarist Hillel Slovak made with the band before dying of a heroin overdose. Singer Anthony Kiedis was dating Ione Skye and struggling with his own heroin addiction—when staying at his manager’s place, he would use a fishing rod to retrieve the manager’s car keys from his bedroom dresser without waking him up, so he could go score.
Kiefer Sutherland and Corey Feldman starred in the modern vampire movie The Lost Boys. The project marked Feldman’s first time working with Corey Haim; the duo became an on-screen team, known to teenage audiences as “the Two Coreys.” Ethan Hawke was attending high school in New Jersey. Wil Wheaton, having been cast as Ensign Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, was traveling through the galaxy at warp speed nine.
33
I HOPE THE RUSSIANS LOVE THEIR CHILDREN TOO
Another story of parents in a foreign land, and a child who doesn’t have any choice in the matter: Two Soviet agents live as sleepers in a wholesome American suburb, running a garden store and raising a teenage boy who has no inkling he’s actually Russian-born until he applies for the Air Force Academy. This was the ludicrous premise of The Sleepers, later renamed Little Nikita—and the story didn’t get any better, with a rogue Soviet agent named “Scuba” hunting down sleeper agents in the USA.
River’s willingness to subject himself to such material at a point when he needed to elevate his career above teen tripe suggests that his judgment was clouded, either by money or by the emotional pull of yet another story where a son feels betrayed by his parents.
Little Nikita started filming in January 1987, in locations near the Phoenix family’s San Diego ranch. The director was Richard Benjamin, who had made the transition from acting (Goodbye, Columbus; Westworld) to directing (My Favorite Year; The Money Pit). River, who had grown accustomed to being taken seriously by directors such as Weir and Richert, soon discovered that Benjamin was going to treat him like a kid: he wasn’t allowed to see the daily rushes, and so couldn’t assess how his performance was working on-screen. If the decision was meant to make River less self-conscious, it backfired, having the opposite effect.
“I felt so out of place with my acting,” River said. “I just felt off. And maybe it’s good, because the guy’s supposed to be insecure and confused,” he rationalized. (“The guy” being all-American Jeff Grant, who discovers his real identity as Nikita.) River delivered a withering but accurate self-review: “I feel like I gave a television performance, a combination of Leave It to Beaver and Kirk Cameron and Michael J. Fox.”
“Is River Phoenix a star?” wrote critic Hal Hinson in the Washington Post. “Perhaps not. But his hair is. ‘Little Nikita’ would be nothing without River Phoenix’s hair. It’s the most engaging, the most watchable thing in the film. It has body. It has character. It even has drama. In other words, it has everything that’s missing from the rest of the picture.”
The good news, other than River being self-aware enough to point out his own failings: He found another father figure on the set, in the person of his costar, the legendary Sidney Poitier, then sixty-four years old. Poitier played the FBI agent trying to uncover the truth about the Grant family. Their scenes together were a contrast in styles, River jabbering away at the speed of sound, Poitier working at a deliberate pace, letting audiences see the thoughts on his face.
When they played basketball together, with River’s bouffant haircut bouncing on his scalp, it felt like beefcake pitted against gravitas. River wanted the gravitas: he studied Poitier, trying to learn everything he could. Poitier, in turn, took a shine to River and made a point of praising him in public: “I feel River Phoenix is one of our finest young actors and destined to leave an indelible imprint on American films.” If he sounded like the Lincoln Memorial coming to life to deliver film reviews, River still appreciated it.
“He gave me tips about life,” River said of Poitier. “I learned not to take everything personally. Not to take the negative things about your acting personally and not to take this fame personally. It’s just a job and I’m trying to do it well.”
34
DINNERTIME FOR THE PHOENIX FAMILY, SPRING 1987
Arlyn pages through The Cookbook for People Who Love Animals, surrounded by all five of her children. “Tofu cheesecake, please!” begs Liberty, eleven years old.
“I get to lick the bowl,” insists Summer, nine years old.
While Rainbow and Leaf do Julia Child impressions, River converts wheatgrass into juice. At their feet are the family dogs, Justice and Sundance, looking hopefully for scraps.
The location: an industrial kitchen in a deserted school. With the lease expiring on the San Diego ranch, the family has relocated back to the Los Angeles area, renting the school for $1,500 per month, putting six water beds in the classrooms and installing Havahart traps to catch the mice, which they then set free in the desert.
When dinner is served (whole-wheat spaghetti and salad), John says grace: “We are very thankful.”
“Bless the cook!” River chimes in.
35
PARTY AT THE ZAPPA HOUSE
Ione Skye was dating Red Hot Chili Peppers lead singer Anthony Kiedis, but she still had a “big crush” on River. “He was very real and very fun. He had a wildness, in a way—he was a free spirit.”
One day, Skye was supposed to pick up River at the Chateau Marmont, the exclusive Hollywood hotel. When she came to get him, he wasn’t at the designated meeting spot: “He was walking on Sunset Boulevard without his shoes,” Skye said. “He wasn’t a buttoned-up kind of person.”
Skye and River hung out; they improvised a free-form song about Judaism, in tribute to their Jewish mothers. They went shopping for vintage eyeglasses together; he confided that he was virtually blind in his right eye.
Periodically, they would spend time at Frank Zappa’s house, which had become a salon for young Hollywood: they were both friendly with the Zappa kids, Dweezil and Moon Unit. “It was a really wild, eclectic mix of actors that would hang out at the Zappa family house,” said musician and TV journalist Frank Meyer, who spent many evenings there as a teenage pal of Dweezil’s. “Some famous TV star would walk in and go off with Moon. Dweezil would be waiting for Warren DeMartini of Ratt to waltz in so they could go jam. And then Frank would just wander in, in his robe, and he’d make peanut butter toast, smoke cigarettes, and chit chat with the kids. He was actually very friendly, in his own mysterious rock-star kind of way.”
At age sixteen, River had finally found a peer group: artsy show-biz kids, some of them with weirder names than
his. Happy not to be the center of attention for once, he was soft-spoken and unassuming.
Around the same time, Meyer met Matthew and Gunnar Nelson, the twin sons of Ricky Nelson, later famous as a pop-metal duo creatively named Nelson. Meyer said with a laugh, “I remember the Nelsons showing me how to apply eyeliner and coverup so that when you went out on the town, you had the proper amount of makeup on. This was not done ironically in any way, shape, or form. It was, ‘Dude, you gotta fuckin’ know how to use your makeup. We’ll show you.’ ”
Meyer also spent time with the two Coreys: “Corey Feldman and Corey Haim were absolutely full of themselves and as obnoxious as you would think based on their movie personas. It was always me, me, me, me, me. So having met some of those teen heartthrobs, I assumed that all of them were kind of douchey.”
And River? “He wasn’t like those other guys at all. He was a normal dude. Very charming. Quiet. Kind of in his own world. Really good-looking, but not rubbing it in your face, like Mr. Hollywood Guy.” Meyer paused. “We were all teenagers, so who knows? He might still have thought of himself as a dopey kid.”
To entertain themselves, Dweezil and Meyer formed a band called Grüen (named in tribute to rock photographer Bob Gruen), with over-the-top comedy songs like “Porno Queen,” “We’re Studs,” and “Too Young to Fuck but Not Too Young to Suck.” They recorded many of the songs, with musical contributions from Donovan Leitch, Scott Thunes (the bassist in Frank Zappa’s band), a drum machine, and River Phoenix.
The music was raunchy, goofy, and sloppy. Listening to the demos in his car, over two decades later, Meyer commented, “You have to start together so you can fall apart.” River mostly contributed backing vocals and handclaps, although he may have played some guitar on “Rock Out with Your Cock Out.” He’s definitely audible on that song doing high-pitched “whoo-ooh-hooh-hooh” backing vocals. “You can tell there’s a guest vocalist—we actually sound remotely in key,” Meyer said.
“There was a no-holds-barred vibe at the Zappa compound, but it was weird, because Dweezil’s parents were around constantly,” Meyer said. “They just chose to give a shit about different things than your parents did.” Gail Zappa didn’t mind if you said “fuck”—but she’d hammer you for having an uninformed opinion. “It was a very creative and intellectual place to be, especially for a young person when a lot of adults didn’t take you seriously. River stumbled into this alternative universe for a few months—and then he got a movie, went on location, and disappeared.”
36
ECHO #4: RUNNING ON EMPTY
Running on Empty is the story of two sixties radicals (Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti) who have been on the lam from the FBI since 1971, when they blew up a napalm laboratory (and accidentally blinded a janitor). Whenever the law gets close, they uproot themselves and their two sons, including seventeen-year-old Danny (played by River). But now Danny, an extremely gifted pianist, wants to go to Juilliard—which would mean declaring his true identity and not being able to see his family anymore, lest he lead the feds to them.
River bristled when people compared Running on Empty and his own life: “People think the Popes are like my family, but they aren’t. My parents were never on the run . . . My parents would sympathize with the Popes, but they are pacifists.” But the parallels extended beyond two families that kept changing their names: both the Popes and the Phoenixes were insular families, extremely devoted to each other and mistrustful of outsiders. While the Popes had battled the military-industrial complex, the Phoenixes were skeptical of American society in general. Both families had moved constantly: the Popes driven by the need to stay ahead of the law, the Phoenixes by the urge to change the world. At age seventeen, Danny Pope was finally asserting that he needed to live his own life away from the family; at age seventeen, River wasn’t sure.
“There’s a connection there,” River admitted when he was less defensive. “I think that’s maybe why the Running script appealed to me from the start.”
37
RUNNING INTO THE SUN BUT I’M RUNNING BEHIND
The director of Running on Empty was the legendary Sidney Lumet, famous for Dog Day Afternoon and Network, among many other classics; he had the cast learn the script as if it were a play, and led rehearsals for two weeks before he started shooting. Lumet compared River to Henry Fonda, whom he directed in 1957’s 12 Angry Men, for the honesty of their performances. “He’s never studied formally, but boy, does he know how to reach inside himself,” Lumet said of his young star. “So long as River follows his instincts, takes stuff he believes in, there’ll be no stopping him. I first saw him in Stand by Me and there was such an extraordinary purity about him. Then he did Mosquito Coast and you could feel the growth of his understated power. There were a couple of films he could have done without: Little Nikita and Jimmy Reardon. Terrible scripts. But he didn’t have the choice then that he has now. He still has a long way to go. He has to make the transition from kid actor to grown-up, but he has such intelligence and such a good heart, I don’t have any doubt he’ll do it.”
Playing a musical prodigy, River practiced on the piano for six months before shooting. While he wasn’t able to get up to concert-pianist proficiency, his “pianomanship” (as Lumet put it) got good enough that he could synchronize his fingers with the music on the soundtrack (actually played by Gar Berke).
In the middle of shooting one scene, River stopped and complained, “This feels fake to me.” From another actor, it might have been a prima donna move, but coming from River, it was a genuine concern. Lumet, who didn’t coddle actors, agreed with River that his character’s motivations were sketchy and cut the scene. “River doesn’t have a false bone in his body,” Lumet testified. “He can’t utter a false line.”
The script by Naomi Foner explored the emotional territory that Little Nikita gestured in the direction of: a son’s conflicted response to his parents’ legacy. At the time of the movie, Foner had two grade-school children, who grew up to be the well-known actors Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal. She was fond of River, but astonished by the gaps in his knowledge. When his character railed against his father for becoming the authoritarian figure he claimed to despise, he asked, “Who do you think you are, General Patton?” River, who had never heard of the famous World War II commander, had to stop the scene to ask, “Who’s General Patton?”
Foner concluded that education had not been a priority for the Phoenixes. “He could read and write, and he had an appetite for it,” Foner said, “but he had no deep roots into any kind of sense of history or literature.” For River’s birthday, Foner gave him an assortment of classic novels.
On the set, River was an advocate for veganism and healthful eating, even lecturing Christine Lahti, who played his mother, for drinking a Diet Coke. Lahti (then thirty-six, and most famous for her Oscar-nominated performance in Swing Shift) found herself wrestling with competing biological urges toward River, a beautiful creature with one foot in boyhood and the other in manhood—did she want to mother him or seduce him?
The latter option was a passing fancy for a variety of reasons—to start, River didn’t need another Jocasta figure in his life. Also, Martha Plimpton was on the set, playing River’s love interest for the second time in three years. The intensity of their relationship only grew: one day, during a shoot at a high school, producer Griffin Dunne went looking for the couple and spotted them by an athletic field. “As I got closer,” he said, “I could see by their silhouettes that they were having a really heated conversation. And I just watched in the distance for a moment. They were both gesturing really strongly at each other. And all of a sudden, they embraced with such passion, such love like they were never going to see each other again.” Dunne couldn’t tell if they were rehearsing a scene or really arguing.
Foner witnessed a happier scene between the couple, when River couldn’t physically contain his joy as they walked down a New York City sidewalk. “He was leaping and jumping, sort of like a young deer,” Fo
ner said, recalling how River would twist his body in midair. “He would hail taxis, leaping like Baryshnikov, and Martha would say, ‘That taxi’s taken, River. See, the light’s off.’ He didn’t care. He danced down the street.”
38
EXT. PHILLIPS HOUSE
Danny Pope has been falling for Lorna Phillips, the daughter of the music teacher at his latest high school, but he keeps dodging her questions about his past and his future. The emotional turning point of Running on Empty comes when he climbs into her bedroom late at night and leads her outside.
She sits on the ground, wearing a blue nightgown and his sneakers, as he tells the truth to somebody outside his family for the first time in his life. At first, he speaks haltingly, unable to look her in the eye, and then the words come tumbling out of him, his face showing fear and relief. “I don’t know what I’m doing and I love you,” he concludes.
Both of them burst into tears and he buries his head on her chest. It’s an astonishingly intimate moment, both between Danny and Lorna, and between River and Martha.
In the following scene, wrapped in each other’s arms in a postcoital embrace, she says to him, “You have a lot of secrets? Now you have one more.” A light sparks in his eyes, as if it’s the truest thing anybody has ever said to him.
PART FOUR
“WE’RE ALL WORTH MILLIONS OF PLANETS AND STARS AND GALAXIES AND UNIVERSES”
© by Lance Staedler/Corbis Outline
39
MAKING PLANS FOR RIVER
John Phoenix wanted his family to quit Hollywood—both the town and the business. To his thinking, the family had some money in the bank, but they had lost sight of their original intentions: not just to pursue fame, but to bend Hollywood toward their belief system, rather than getting sucked into a vortex of commercial values.
Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind Page 10