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

by Edwards, Gavin

  The centerpiece of River’s performance, and the film, is a campfire scene with Reeves. Scott Favor takes Mike Waters on a road trip (on a stolen motorcycle) to visit Mike’s brother. At night, sitting by a fire they’ve made, they discuss their respective childhoods: “If I had a normal family and a good upbringing, then I would have been a well-adjusted person,” Mike insists. What’s really on his mind: he’s in love with Scott, and he’s terrified of saying so.

  “I only have sex with a guy for money,” a reclining Scott tells him. “Two guys can’t love each other.”

  A miserable Mike says haltingly, “I could love someone even if I, you know, wasn’t paid for it. And I love you, and you don’t pay me.” Curling up in a ball, he tells Scott, “I really want to kiss you, man.” The scene ends with Scott gently holding Mike, stroking his hair.

  “This is the best part in the film,” Van Sant said, “and was chosen by River to be his big scene.” At River’s request, Van Sant scheduled it for the last day of shooting. River rewrote it himself, making it more lyrical and making his love for Scott explicit (in Van Sant’s original script, the relationship was more ambiguous).

  “ ‘I love you, and you don’t have to pay me’—I’m so glad I wrote that line,” River said. “I think that in his private life, Mike was probably a virgin, so he only relates sex with work.” River had spent some time thinking about situational virginity, and the emotional consequences of having sex when you didn’t want to have it.

  The final scene of the movie, however, is River Phoenix, all alone by the side of a lonely northwestern highway (filmed just fifteen miles away from Madras, where he was born). Mike Waters is stranded, without any obvious future and without Scott Favor, who has accepted the mantle of city scion, with a hot Italian girlfriend on his arm. Mike peers into the distance and staggers into sleep, escaping from the world.

  Later, a truck pulls up; two guys steal Mike’s shoes. Then, with a steel-guitar version of “America the Beautiful” quivering on the soundtrack, we see a long shot of a car stopping: the driver puts Mike into the car and speeds away. It could be his brother taking him home, a john with malicious intent, or maybe (if you’re a romantic), Scott returning to rescue him.

  In 1997, Van Sant was doing a reading at a bookstore from his novel Pink. (Dedicated to River, the book starred a thinly disguised version of him.) An audience member asked him who had hoisted River Phoenix’s body into the car.

  “I was hoping that viewers would project themselves into the film and decide for themselves who it was,” he told her.

  “Okay, then,” she replied. “Who picked him up in your version?”

  Van Sant paused. “In my version . . . in my version, I pick him up.”

  60

  YOUNG HOLLYWOOD 1991

  Brad Pitt became famous in 1991 as a vision of temptation. In Thelma & Louise, Ridley Scott’s movie about two women on the run from the law, he played J.D., a hunky young hitchhiker who turns out to be a criminal himself. In fourteen minutes of screen time, Pitt looked good with his shirt off, spent the night with Geena Davis (playing Thelma), and drawled lines like, “Well, now, I’ve always believed that, if done properly, armed robbery doesn’t have to be a totally unpleasant experience.” The role instantly established him as a sex symbol and a movie star. J.D. steals $6,000 from Thelma and Louise; a popular conversational topic among women at the time was whether Thelma’s night of passion was worth that much.

  Ethan Hawke was getting lead roles in movies both solid (White Fang, a Disney adaptation of the Jack London novel about a wolf dog in the Yukon) and terrible (Mystery Date, a wacky teen comedy). Leonardo DiCaprio made his film debut in the otherwise unmemorable horror movie Critters 3, playing what he described as “your average, no-depth, standard kid with blond hair.” It was straight-to-video, but at age seventeen, he was working as an actor. DiCaprio gloated, “All you math teachers who’ve been scolding me all my life, ha ha! I laugh.”

  Martha Plimpton appeared in Stanley & Iris, which starred Robert De Niro as an illiterate cafeteria worker and Jane Fonda as the woman who teaches him how to read. Samantha Mathis was cast by Nora Ephron in her directorial debut, This Is My Life, playing the disaffected teen daughter of Julie Kavner, who has made a career shift from selling cosmetics to stand-up comedy.

  The Butthole Surfers crisscrossed the country as part of the first-ever Lollapalooza. The package tour, an invention from the fevered mind of Jane’s Addiction lead singer Perry Farrell, also included Nine Inch Nails, Living Colour, Ice-T, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and headlining, Jane’s. (The following year, the Red Hot Chili Peppers filled the headlining slot.) Lollapalooza was a huge success, becoming a brand name for the nineties counterculture and demonstrating the commercial clout of “alternative” music. A few months after the tour ended, Nirvana released “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and turned popular music upside down; when the band’s album Nevermind hit number one, that was generally regarded as the moment when “alternative” put a knee on the windpipe of mainstream rock ’n’ roll.

  R.E.M. also redefined the mainstream in 1991, hitting number one with Out of Time, powered by the omnipresent mandolin riff of “Losing My Religion.” The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik—with photography and art direction by Gus Van Sant—made it to only number three on the Billboard charts, but it ultimately sold over seven million copies in the United States. The breakthrough hit was “Under the Bridge,” a coded paean to Anthony Kiedis’s misadventures with heroin. After the album was completed, Kiedis said, guitarist John Frusciante had a hard time emerging from the studio and readjusting to day-to-day Western civilization: “It got to the point where he wouldn’t want to see a billboard for, say, The Arsenio Hall Show, or an advertisement for lipstick. He wanted to be in a world that was a beautiful manifestation of his own creation. You’re not going to find that on a promo tour.” One consequence: “John started to dabble in using heroin.”

  Christian Slater made a traditional Hollywood trade: he cashed in some buzz for a studio paycheck, with a supporting role as Will Scarlett in the dull but wildly popular Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, starring Kevin Costner. He also got to live out a dream by putting on a Starfleet uniform for a cameo in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Wil Wheaton, meanwhile, had quit Star Trek: The Next Generation in favor of a desk job with the computer company NewTek, doing testing and quality control on the Video Toaster 4000, a pioneering home video-editing system. The company was based in Topeka, Kansas: “I figured that was about as far from Hollywood as I could possibly get, both geographically and culturally,” Wheaton said.

  As 1991 began, Johnny Depp was basking in the success of Edward Scissorhands. It was not only his first film with Tim Burton, but also his first with Winona Ryder. Burton affectionately dubbed the couple “an evil version of Tracy and Hepburn.” Depp and Ryder had the unpleasant experience of being the object of tabloid obsession, meaning that they had to fend off paparazzi and swat away constant rumors that they were sleeping with other people. But at home together, life was good.

  Depp rented a house in the Hollywood Hills and stuffed it full of clown paintings, Jack Kerouac memorabilia, and a nine-foot fiberglass rooster. (He would cite it as evidence that he had the “biggest cock in Hollywood.”) Now that he and Ryder were in the same place, he always made her breakfast in bed, she said: “Eggs, hash browns, bacon, toast, and coffee,” she specified. “Lots of coffee.”

  61

  PSIONIC PSUNSPOT

  River was having difficulty shedding his Mike Waters skin. Tabloid photographers spotted him at New York nightclubs—the Limelight, Danceteria—wearing his thrift-store Idaho clothes, talking about how he was doing “research,” stripping off his shirt, and hitting the dance floor bare-chested. Even if the reports were exaggerated, it was out of character for River. As time passed, his internal gyroscope righted itself and his natural personality returned—but the drug habit wasn’t so easily disposed of.

  River
kept his life compartmentalized; he once told William Richert, “You’re my best friend in your age group.” This is an occupational hazard for many actors—for a few months, a team of people make a movie and feel like a family, and then they scatter, most of them never to be seen again—but River reveled in the peripatetic life more than most. One result is that different people who knew him saw divergent aspects of his personality—and his consumption of various substances.

  “The hardest drink I ever saw him drink was carrot juice,” said Dan Mathews of PETA. “He liked red wine—that was his thing. I don’t think drug use was a long period of his life,” said Ione Skye. “We had the same heroin dealer. I used to see him there all the time,” said a former Viper Club employee.

  They could all be telling the truth as they knew it, of course. One way River avoided having people track on his drug use was his habit of hopscotching from one social group to another. He also liked to mention that he had heard rumors of his taking drugs, which let him preemptively dismiss them. And he was a binge user: he would indulge intensely for a while, and then get clean and wait before starting the cycle again. “Here’s a kid that does not know how much to take,” said Matt Ebert. “When I saw him do drugs, I was always scared for him.”

  62

  YOU’RE WHERE YOU SHOULD BE ALL THE TIME

  River returned to Gainesville and reconvened Aleka’s Attic; their track “Across the Way” was included on the PETA compilation Tame Yourself, and they prepared to tour the East Coast. He had been gone from Gainesville for most of 1990, and some band members resented having their professional and artistic lives be contingent on his film career. Drummer Josh Greenbaum said, “Having a movie star as the front man for a band is a double-edged sword.”

  Aleka’s Attic started a ten-week tour: the centerpiece was a week in New York. They did three rain-forest benefits at Wetlands, opening up for the Spin Doctors, the jam band that was still a few months away from releasing their debut album and having the inescapable hit singles “Two Princes” and “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong.” They also attended the release party for Tame Yourself at the Hard Rock Cafe; River met other contributors to the album, such as Canadian chanteuse k.d. lang and R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe.

  Stipe and River were both vegetarians, both socially conscious, both considerate to the people around them. Each had moved repeatedly in their childhood (Stipe’s father was in the army) and settled in the southern United States. They soon became fast friends.

  Kim Buie, the A&R rep at Island working with River, remembered seeing an Aleka’s Attic show in Athens, and afterward being told that Stipe wanted to talk to her. When he met her, he grabbed her hand and then said, looking intently into her eyes, “I just have to tell you that I think he is really special and really good. If there’s anything I can do to help you, just let me know.”

  To promote Tame Yourself, PETA arranged for Aleka’s Attic to do an interview with Sassy. Between 1988 and 1995, Sassy was an extremely cool magazine for American teenage girls, one that didn’t condescend to its readers but did speak in their language. Although the magazine was alternative-rock friendly—editor in chief Jane Pratt was close friends with Stipe and appeared in R.E.M.’s “Shiny Happy People” video, while Sonic Youth contributed a flexi-disc to the magazine—sometimes hip celebrities would give them grumpy interviews, either because they associated the magazine with pinup magazines like Tiger Beat or because the very notion of having teenage girls as fans made them nervous. When that happened, the magazine bared its teeth, as it did in this article, written by Christina Kelly and slugged “River Phoenix’s Little Hippie Band” on the cover. (Other cover lines in the June 1991 issue: “Black Kids Who Are Fed Up,” “Eavesdrop on 3 Heavy-Duty Couples.”)

  Kelly captured the tenor of an excruciatingly uncomfortable group interview with Aleka’s Attic, where River drank from a room-service bottle of Moët champagne and swatted away questions. River was wearing his olive-green army jacket from Dogfight, which he had rendered less militaristic by putting an antifur pin on it. Violist Tim Hankins said that he had spotted Tame Yourself in a record store, but he didn’t have any money, so he couldn’t buy it. Rain talked about how she was studying opera at the University of Florida. “She has a very flat stomach, is short with dark skin and hair and features that are pretty and ugly at the same time,” Kelly wrote. “Rain was very serene and quiet. She seemed like a nice person.”

  Although Kelly clearly was frustrated by the awkward hour she spent with the band, she seemed genuinely shocked by River’s physical deterioration: “I was stunned at how different River’s once shiny, silky blond hair looked. It was short, a dirty color, and kind of brittle. I don’t know if the Riv was trying to dread or what, now that he is 21 and has left his teenage years behind him.”

  After the tour, the band went into River’s home studio in Micanopy and recorded a bunch of songs, which they called the “Here’s Where We’re At” demos.

  River felt sufficiently at home in Florida to tell a Rolling Stone reporter, “I’m kinda like Gainesville’s godfather. Or dogfather, I should say—it’s a backwards town.” Although he was joking around, many locals were insulted when the article appeared. He also tried a new tactic for deflecting his own stardom: he talked about himself in the third person, but called himself “Rubber Penis.” The explanation: “When you see the name ‘River Phoenix’ everywhere, you gotta, like, joke about it.”

  River and Solgot had two canaries, which they let fly around unfettered in their enclosed porch. The male canary was called Honeypie Ice Cream; the female canary had no name at all. The moral apparently was that if somebody in the Phoenix family couldn’t come up with an elaborate, unconventional name, it wasn’t worth having a name at all.

  The Rubber Penis household was filled with plants and wall tapestries. A mattress on the floor was surrounded by piles of books and dirty dishes. In one corner was an empty suitcase, belonging to Solgot: a symbol that she was an independent woman who could leave whenever she wanted.

  In the middle of the dining room was a massage table—Solgot had begun studying massage therapy. That gave her something to work on, but her course schedule meant that she usually couldn’t travel with River when he went on tour or on location. “It sucks and it kinda doesn’t suck,” she said. “Because it gives us space.”

  River objected to being tagged as a “hippie”—especially on Sassy’s cover—but he and Solgot had a relaxed attitude toward personal hygiene. “River and Sue never took baths,” Richert remembered. “And they let all their hair grow—River had incredibly hairy legs.”

  A visiting journalist, Michael Angeli, noticed that River had the same outfit on two days in a row: “the same threadbare print shirt hanging out of the same migrant work pants he wore the previous day.”

  “Jesus, River,” Angeli exclaimed, “you slept in your goddamn clothes.”

  “No, man—I slept in a blanket of warm flesh.”

  When the Aleka’s Attic demos were finished, River headed out to the West Coast, to do press and visit friends. Frustrated by the continued delays, and by years of working on a project “that never came to fruition,” Hankins quit the band. The viola player also had personal issues with River, whom he described as a “serious drinker” and a “junkie.”

  River drove a white Mercedes from Los Angeles all the way to Portland to visit Van Sant. Back in L.A., he hung out with the Chili Peppers, who had finished recording Blood Sugar Sex Magik and had some downtime before its release. He was tight with Flea because of their time on Idaho, but now he was jamming and philosophizing with the whole band, becoming especially close with guitarist John Frusciante. “River loved nothing better than hanging around the Chili Peppers,” said a friend of his. “I remember how happy River was when he was with the Peppers. His beaming face said to me, ‘This is where I want to be.’ ”

  River invited the band to join him on a trip down to Costa Rica to visit his father; they accepted. Down there, they e
xplored the rain forest and saw a total eclipse of the sun. John was content to stay out of the United States, and had become more sociable; at the local bar, people called him “Don Juan.” Father and son stayed up late talking, discussing their addictions. Scott Green said that River acknowledged he was an alcoholic: “During one of our conversations, he said he thought he might have inherited his dependence from his father but he didn’t think it was in any way his father’s fault.”

  On the plane back to the United States, the in-flight movie was Awakenings, starring Robert De Niro as a man who emerges from a yearslong coma and has to figure out the modern world he is suddenly, unwillingly a part of. River watched it and wept copiously.

  63

  THE REFRIGERATOR PARABLE

  River’s asking price for movies had reached a million dollars per picture. He told a friend, “I want to make $1 million on my next picture, $2 million on the one after that, and $3 million on the one after that.” This wasn’t just so he could afford room-service champagne: he was financing the family compound in Micanopy, and felt the weight of that responsibility—not to mention his desire to buy up more rain forest, although that proved to be a more complicated proposition than he had originally imagined.

  “River realized that his family’s ideas had been a little simplistic,” a good friend said. “The idea that when he bought up rain forest in Costa Rica he was preventing Third World people from making a living there left him confused and unhappy.”

  River’s long-standing dream was to use his money to buy land and set up a sanctuary for damaged children, “all sorts of homeless kids and kids from foster homes or kids who have been in and out of mental institutions.” He envisioned a farm, so the children could help grow their own food, also populated by stray cats and dogs. “The kids would be assigned to an animal of their own and they would have this cycle of caring for something. The farm would have solar panels and be self-sufficient. It wouldn’t be isolated because it would be a whole community in itself. There would be room for individual expression and creativity. It would be really wonderful.”