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

by Edwards, Gavin

  Although Ford didn’t appear with River, he nevertheless spent a week on the set in Colorado, to give highly individualized instruction on how to play Indiana Jones. “Harrison came out and he helped me a lot with motivation,” River said. “You know, where does all this come from, and what propels him, and what makes him really cool when he has to jump off a horse onto a train?” Like Ford, River did most of his own action sequences. “It would have been lying to have someone else do the stunts,” he said.

  River attempted to interpret Ford rather than mimic him, and was careful to say he wasn’t interested in taking over the role of Indiana Jones. While this may have been politic, it had the advantage of being true. River’s prologue ultimately inspired the big-budget Lucasfilm TV show The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, but when approached about appearing on the program, River declined.

  As expected, The Last Crusade ended up being a big hit (the second-most-popular film of 1989, behind Tim Burton’s Batman), receiving generally positive notices as well-made escapism. River wasn’t hyped in the trailers or the publicity. Many reviews, focusing on the dynamic between Ford and Sean Connery (who played Indiana Jones’s father), didn’t even mention River.

  46

  DOWN WITH THE IONE

  When River came to Hollywood on business, he would often stay with Ione Skye and her family. “It was a comfortable atmosphere for him,” she said. “My mom had that hippie quality and was very welcoming.” Sometimes River and Skye would share a bed, talking late into the night. “He was so kind and loving,” she remembered. “He was almost like a saint—people really felt he was this golden person, but he had this anger inside him. There was a wild aspect to him.”

  One night, River did something unsaintly but totally human: he came on to Skye, even though she was in a long-term relationship with Anthony Kiedis. “I was kind of depressed,” Skye said, “because Anthony was a terrible drug addict, and at the time, River and I both weren’t doing hard drugs like that. I stopped it, which is not like me. I was very precocious and very free. Any other night, I would have, but I was just in a weird mood.” Kiedis wasn’t around, probably because he was out scoring drugs, Skye said.

  And River? “I felt maybe we were too similar,” Skye said. “We were both Virgos. He was a very free person.”

  47

  OUR BAND COULD BE YOUR LIFE

  Rock Promotion 101: Try to break even. For their debut nonveranda show, in December 1988, Aleka’s Attic rented a Gainesville theater for sixty-five dollars and charged the first sixty-five members of the audience one dollar each; everyone else got in free. The audience, mostly friends and family, gave them a standing ovation, although there were some mixed reviews. “I thought they were a little amateurish,” remembered Charlie Scales of Hyde & Zeke Records. “The songwriting had not yet developed, and after the first couple of songs, which were pretty new and novel, it kind of stalled.”

  Nevertheless, after the new year, the band piled into River’s motor home for a short East Coast tour. Although River didn’t want his name used to promote the band, word got out, and at some shows, the audience consisted of hundreds of young female fans, screaming at the top of their lungs and flinging underwear at the stage. While many of the twentieth century’s greatest musical acts (Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, the Beatles) started by inspiring teenage girls to creative heights of hysteria, River was embarrassed and started performing with his back to the audience. In New York, when the band played CBGB’s, mecca of punk bands and unhygienic bathrooms, River had to hire security guards to keep the situation under control.

  In New York, Aleka’s Attic also played a “Rock Against Fur” benefit for the animal-rights group PETA, on a bill with the B–52’s, the Indigo Girls, Lene Lovich, and Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s. For this cause, River allowed his name to be on the poster. Martha Plimpton introduced the band, proclaiming, “Three years ago, a friend said to me, ‘You can change the world.’ ”

  River hit the stage wearing eyeglasses, blue jeans, an unbuttoned plaid shirt over a T-shirt, and a forest-toned plaid jacket. The shirts looked unwashed—life on the road—and his face had some spots and some wispy stubble, but the overall image was a hunky TA leading a discussion of literary theory. The band played half a dozen songs, with River fervently singing of a “mythical place where there’s no worrying.”

  At their shows, Aleka’s Attic sold a four-song cassette sampler of their music. “Goldmine,” which began with the lyrics “Working the goldmine / Pushing a pencil around,” was the most blatantly XTC-influenced, with River even imitating the vocal mannerisms of Andy Partridge. “Too Many Colors” had some twitchy guitar work and the lyric “Somehow we get strapped into unlikely straitjackets,” but mostly just chugged along pleasantly. “Blue Period” was slower and more soulful, while “Across the Way” was the best track on the tape. Not only did it have some clever turns of phrase (“this myth won’t wash away” and “no rocks, no tools, no stepping stones”—a nice twist on the old Monkees lyric “I’m not your steppin’ stone”), it showed off the band’s strengths, especially the viola of Tim Hankins and the harmonies of Rain. When PETA released a compilation album two years later, with tracks from k.d. lang, Howard Jones, and the Pretenders, River wisely picked “Across the Way” to represent Aleka’s Attic. On the whole, the music was a credible effort by an eighteen-year-old leading a band for the first time—but River’s fame meant that, for good or ill, that wasn’t how Aleka’s Attic would be judged.

  The band traveled in the motor home and slept in cheap motels. After-show parties attracted a crowd that enjoyed cocaine and weed—to the consternation of violist Tim Hankins, who abstained. Early one morning, after a late night of festivities, the phone rang in River’s room: it was Iris Burton, informing him that he had just received an Academy Award nomination, as best supporting actor, for his Running on Empty performance.

  “Oh, my baby!” Burton exclaimed.

  River grunted his agreement, rolled over, and went back to sleep. That night, Aleka’s Attic played a show at the Philadelphia club JC Dobbs. Killing time between sound check and the show, River watched some TV—and a story came on about the Oscar nominations, featuring him. “Holy shit!” he said. “Did Iris call me this morning?”

  48

  ROLLING ON THE RIVER

  River attended the Oscars with his girlfriend, Plimpton, and his mother, Heart. Plimpton sported a blond crew cut on the red carpet, having shaved her head for her role as a cancer patient in Silence Like Glass. Uncomfortable with the spotlight, River spoke modestly of his nomination: “It’s an official bonus to the satisfaction that I had already felt after seeing the movie.”

  The other nominees were Alec Guinness as an imprisoned debtor in the Dickens adaptation Little Dorrit, Kevin Kline as a deranged hit man in the farce A Fish Called Wanda, Martin Landau as an auto-company financier in Tucker: The Man and His Dream, and Dean Stockwell as a Mafia boss in the comedy Married to the Mob. It was an experienced group—on average, fully thirty-nine years older than River. At the lunch for Oscar nominees a week before the awards ceremony, River made a point of meeting Kline: they were slated to work together later that year, in a film called I Love You to Death.

  Infamously, the 1989 Oscars had no host—but began with a production number that included Rob Lowe and an actress dressed as Snow White duetting on Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary.” When the time came for the best-supporting-actor category, Sean Connery and Michael Caine (the winners the previous two years) clowned around with Roger Moore before reading the nominees. While they did, River awkwardly posed for the camera with one finger resting on his cheek—but when Kline was named the winner, he cheered with wild enthusiasm for his new costar, even pumping his fist.

  River wanted to run over and hug Kline, but his mother stopped him.

  49

  WE ARE ALL MADE OF STARS

  River was relieved to return to Florida, and Aleka’s Attic; the band got a regular gig at a s
mall punk club called the Hardback. But his Gainesville anonymity was slipping away, due to the Oscars and an article in the local paper. Another Gainesville band, called the Smegmas, decided to torment River by posting copies of one of his early pinups all over town. River was wounded and confused, but instinctively tried to play peacemaker: Aleka’s Attic opened a gig for the Smegmas, and although the show was attended by hundreds of teen fans of River, he made sure the Smegmas got all the money.

  He tried to brush off people who spotted him, insisting that his name was actually Rio. That wasn’t sufficient at one party, when a gang of racist skinheads tried to pick a fight with him.

  River smiled sweetly at his tormentors and told them, “If you want to kick my ass, go ahead. Just explain to me why you’re doing it.”

  After a confused pause, one of the skinheads said, “Ah, you wouldn’t be worth it.”

  “We’re all worth it, man,” River said with a beatific smile. “We’re all worth millions of planets and stars and galaxies and universes.”

  50

  ALONE WE ELOPE

  There were rumors that River and Martha Plimpton had gotten secretly married before the Oscars—Plimpton batted them away, saying that she and River had engaged in a spiritual ceremony that celebrated their love, but were not wed. “It was kind of a private thing,” she declared.

  In fact, their relationship was crumbling, mostly because of River’s determination to get drunk and high. Plimpton implored him to get clean, to no effect. Exhausted from the emotional turmoil after three years together, she broke up with him shortly after the Oscars. “When we split up, a lot of it was that I had learned that screaming, fighting, and begging wasn’t going to change him,” she said. “He had to change himself, and he didn’t want to yet.”

  51

  YOUNG HOLLYWOOD 1989

  After some commercial work, Leonardo DiCaprio got his first real acting job in 1989: a guest appearance on the syndicated TV series The New Lassie (starring a fifth-generation Lassie as the lead collie). The same year, Ethan Hawke had his breakthrough role in Dead Poets Society, the movie starring Robin Williams as an inspirational English teacher. Before getting cast in the movie, Hawke had enrolled in the theater program at Carnegie Mellon, but lasted only one semester. He got thrown out of his voice class on the first day after arguing with his teacher. Hawke also balked at wearing tights, reasoning that Jack Nicholson wouldn’t do it.

  Wil Wheaton was still working on Star Trek: The Next Generation, but unhappily—his character (Ensign Wesley Crusher) had become unpopular among Trek fans, with some of them sporting buttons at conventions reading “Put Wesley in the Airlock.” Corey Feldman starred in his third movie with Corey Haim, a body-switch comedy that also starred Meredith Salenger (River’s love interest in Jimmy Reardon). Feldman was also developing some serious drug habits; the following year, he was arrested for heroin possession. (“It makes you realize drugs aren’t just done by bad guys and sleazebags,” River said sympathetically. “It’s a universal disease.”)

  Brad Pitt was starting to get work in movies, albeit not good ones. He appeared in the Patrick Dempsey/Helen Slater rom-com turkey Happy Together, about a guy and a girl who are accidentally assigned to each other as college roommates and find true love. He also had a starring role as a high school basketball star in the low-rent slasher film Cutting Class (alongside Donovan Leitch, Martin Mull, and Roddy McDowall.)

  Ron Howard directed the ensemble comedy-drama Parenthood, with an ensemble cast that included Steve Martin, Martha Plimpton, Leaf Phoenix, and Keanu Reeves. Also released that year was the time-travel comedy that fixed Reeves’s public image for many years as a dim-witted stoner savant: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

  Ione Skye starred in Say Anything . . . , the first movie directed by Cameron Crowe. America collectively developed a crush on her as huge as that of John Cusack’s character, who stood outside her house with a boom box playing Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.” She almost ended up as the topless cover model for the Red Hot Chili Peppers album Mother’s Milk; even without her, it became the band’s first gold record. It was also their first album with nineteen-year-old guitarist John Frusciante. He replaced his hero, founding member Hillel Slovak, who had died of an overdose.

  At the end of the year, Skye and Kiedis broke up. He had gotten sober, but they hadn’t found a new dynamic for their relationship, he said: “I was still the jealous, raging, controlling, selfish, bratty kid that I had been, only drug-free.” They fought a lot, until just before Christmas, Kiedis told Skye, “Take your stuff and get the hell out of here.” She did—and then a few days later, Kiedis found himself wondering why she hadn’t come back.

  The cult movie of 1989 was Heathers, the dark comedy in which the heroes kill popular classmates at their high school and stage the deaths as suicides. It was a star-making film for actors Christian Slater and Winona Ryder. Johnny Depp started dating Ryder, and soon sported a “Winona Forever” tattoo (which he redacted to “Wino Forever” when they broke up).

  At age twenty-six, Depp had become a major teen idol. When director John Waters, famous for Hairspray and beloved fringe films such as Pink Flamingos, was looking for an actor to star in his new musical, Cry-Baby, “I went out and bought about twenty teen magazines, which was really mortifying,” the not-easily-embarrassed Waters said. “I found myself hiding them under my jacket. When I got home and started looking through them, Johnny Depp was on the cover of almost every one of them.”

  Sending up his own stardom, Depp played a fifties teen-idol rocker, in a cast that also included Ricki Lake, Traci Lords (in one of her first nonpornographic roles), and as a crossing guard, famous heiress and kidnapping victim Patty Hearst.

  Depp was still under contract to 21 Jump Street, although he chafed at the series and its authoritarian premise of undercover cops in high school. Flying back to Vancouver, where it filmed, he was unhappy to be leaving Ryder, unhappy to be taping more episodes of “that show.” Sitting in the comfort of the first-class cabin, he wanted to turn everything upside down, and he had a thought in his head he couldn’t get rid of, something he felt he needed to say.

  “I fuck animals!” he announced to his fellow first-class passengers.

  Heads jerked in his direction. The Vancouver-bound travelers took in the source of this provocation and then coolly swiveled forward again, trying to ignore him. Except for the man at Depp’s elbow, an accountant. He considered Depp, and then broke the silence with a question.

  “What kind?”

  52

  WHIP IT

  Not long after the Oscars, River had to leave Florida again for another movie. His departures were beginning to rankle the other members of Aleka’s Attic. “We’d practice for six or eight months, and we’d kind of reach this apex, and then he would go off for three months and do a film,” violist Tim Hankins said later. “It was like coitus interruptus, you know?”

  While River’s stardom brought the group a lot of attention, his absences had a way of killing the band’s momentum—and underscored that no matter what he said, his real first priority was movies. Greenbaum said, “We were all kind of at the mercy of his career.”

  I Love You to Death was directed by Lawrence Kasdan, famous for directing Body Heat and The Big Chill (and writing Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back). He hired River after a phone call, never having met him, and added him to an impressive ensemble cast, including Kevin Kline, Tracey Ullman, Joan Plowright, William Hurt, and Keanu Reeves. The plot, loosely based on a true story, is that Rosalie Boca (Ullman) finds out her husband, Joey (Kline), is cheating on her. She resolves to kill him, but he seems impervious to her efforts, surviving poison, bullets, and a car rigged to explode. It’s the only out-and-out comedy River made in his career.

  River played Devo Nod, a chef with New Age beliefs working at Joey’s pizza parlor. Infatuated with Rosalie, he helps her in her efforts to knock off her husband, even hiring a pair of inept, stoned hi
t men (Hurt and Reeves). The film doesn’t really work, partially because Kline gives one of his broadest, hammiest performances. But it’s fun to see so many fine actors goofing around, and River serves ably in a middleman role. As usual, River absorbed all the knowledge he could from the older performers, particularly the British chameleon Ullman. “Tracey and I clicked especially well,” he said. “We’d just mouth off, get clever on each other, and play word games.”

  He formed an even closer bond with Reeves; they knew each other through the movie Parenthood, in which Reeves had appeared opposite Martha Plimpton and River’s brother, Leaf. Reeves—who despite his Hawaiian name had grown up in Toronto, aspiring to be a hockey goalie—was River’s elder by six years. River joked, “He’s like my older brother, but shorter.”

  The production filmed exterior shots in Tacoma, Washington; River and Reeves did their best to locate the local nightlife. One evening, the daughter of a local coffee-shop owner was watching as a drunk River stumbled across the coffee shop’s parking lot and then pissed on the back of her father’s old Ford. Soon after, her father sold the vehicle, for $200. She let him know that he had made a big mistake: “You could have gotten ten times that much! All you had to do was write on that quarter panel, ‘River Phoenix peed here.’ ”