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

by Edwards, Gavin

  Fairly transparently, River was describing his idealized version of childhood. If he felt that he hadn’t been protected in his own youth, he didn’t want to wallow in self-pity: he tried to convert that feeling into charity. (Often, his intentions were better than his follow-through.)

  River invested in a business Richert was starting: manufacturing a coffee alternative from soybeans. Richert put up $300,000 of his own money and River had Heart cut a check for his $50,000 contribution to the Incognito Coffee Company. Richert opened up a storefront in Venice Beach, but when the business had cash-flow problems, he asked River to invest another $25,000.

  River visited Richert’s home, with a few friends in tow, including Joaquin and Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders (another PETA supporter, who had once joked about fire-bombing McDonald’s restaurants). He handed the check to Richert, who put it on the kitchen table. They all hung out for an hour or two, and then River left with his crew—at which point Richert realized he couldn’t find the check. Thinking he had misplaced it—“I’ve lost a lot of checks in my time”—he searched every room. When he couldn’t find it, he decided that River must have taken the check home, although he had no idea why.

  Irate and worried about making payroll, Richert called up River: “Hey man, where’s the twenty-five grand? You took it back, right?”

  River just laughed. “No no no, it’s right there. You’re probably standing next to it. Are you in the kitchen? Just look in the refrigerator.”

  Richert found the check in his freezer. “You put it in the freezer?” he said. “Why would you do a thing like that?”

  “Why would you lose twenty-five thousand dollars?”

  River was acting out a real-life parable, one with the sensible message “be careful with your money, especially when it’s actually my money.”

  River bleached his hair, looking to play the young Andy Warhol in a Gus Van Sant film about the artist; the movie never got off the ground. He was offered the male lead in Sliver, an erotic thriller starring Sharon Stone with a screenplay by Joe Eszterhas—their follow-up to the hugely successful (if slightly incoherent) erotic thriller Basic Instinct. He turned it down, and the role was taken by William Baldwin.

  “I get offered a lot of stuff,” River said. “And sure, you pause when they say on the phone, ‘You won’t do this for two [million], well, how about three?’ But after the movie comes out, I think, ‘Man, I’m glad I didn’t do that. It’s just not worth it. It’s all in the script and whether I believe in it.”

  One script that River fervently believed in was Richard Friedenberg’s screenplay for A River Runs Through It, based on Norman Maclean’s semi-autobiographical book. River usually didn’t need to audition for roles anymore, but he did for director Robert Redford—“me and about a thousand other guys,” he said with a laugh. “I had a really good talk, good meeting with Redford, but I think he’s gonna find the guy. The guy who just is that image—that Montana mountain boy, fly-fisherman image. That’s what I think he should do. I believe so strongly in it, I just want the best guy for it. If I get it, great. If I don’t, I wasn’t right for it.”

  The movie is the story of two sons—one dutiful, one wayward—of a Presbyterian minister, growing up in Missoula, Montana, in the 1920s. The minister teaches them the art of writing and the art of fly-fishing. It’s no wonder River was drawn to the project, since the story’s underlying theme is an Americanized version of Siddhartha, the Hesse novel that gave him his name: the river will reveal its wisdom to you if you listen carefully enough. “Beneath the rocks are the words of God,” the minister tells his children as they walk on the riverbank. Or as the narrator concludes, “Eventually, all things merge into one.”

  The part of Paul, the reckless brother who grows up to become a hard-drinking newspaper reporter with crippling gambling debts, went to Brad Pitt, transforming him from shirtless sex symbol to leading man. While River certainly could have played the role well, Pitt had a robust quality that the part needed, giving the audience the physical sense that nothing could ever kill this avatar of American manhood. Pitt considered it to be one of his weakest performances—that may be because it was a film where he didn’t need to stretch. As River anticipated, Redford found somebody who embodied the golden-boy part just by showing up.

  WHILE VISITING L.A., RIVER WOULD often end up at Richert’s Malibu home—they’d talk until 2 A.M., at which point Richert would stagger off to bed and River would stay up playing guitar. Sometimes, River would just show up in the middle of the night. “He knew ways to get in,” Richert said. “I’d wake up and there’d be River and some girl looking at me.”

  When River came during daylight hours, Richert would always get advance warning—not from River himself, but from the flurry of phone calls made by other people looking for him.

  “Hey, can I talk to River?”

  “No, he’s not here.”

  “He’s not? Do you know when he’s coming?”

  Soon River would arrive, often with a coterie of family and friends. He’d bring his own food—“he wanted to make sure that he had his diet right”—and his own cigarettes. (River had learned to smoke for his Dogfight role and never quit, although he tried to conceal his habit from the public.) Richert regarded his interactions with River as evidence that he couldn’t possibly have had a secret life as an addict: “River was around people all the time.”

  MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO WAS released in October 1992; the film and its two young leads mostly received raves. In Entertainment Weekly, Owen Glieberman singled out River: “Phoenix’s slightly anonymous quality works for him here, and he gives an extraordinary performance. His Mike is dazed and weirdly becalmed, like a drugged-out animal living on his last shreds of instinct. When his pain comes to the fore, it’s startlingly direct. Sitting around a campfire with Scott, who he knows sleeps with men only for money, Mike says, ‘I really wanna kiss you, man,’ and it’s the saddest, loneliest declaration of love imaginable.”

  River missed Idaho’s Hollywood premiere. He said it was because he had driven all the way from Florida and misjudged how long it would take. He did make it to the New York premiere; Solgot stayed in Gainesville, so Martha Plimpton walked the red carpet with him.

  In general, River dreaded doing interviews, and when he felt they weren’t going well, he would undermine them, either by withdrawing or by making up answers to amuse himself. As he put it, “I have lied and changed stories and contradicted myself left and right, so that at the end of the year you could read five different articles and say, ‘This guy is schizophrenic.’ ”

  So it wasn’t too surprising that when River had a press junket for My Own Private Idaho, he found a way to sabotage it. He had a full day of interviews scheduled at Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont hotel, but he overslept, either because he had been up too late the night before or because he had learned the crucial lesson of narcolepsy: sleep can let you avoid unpleasant experiences. Mike Parker, who was also doing the junket, had to wake him up.

  “River walked into the room, set up for the television interview with lights and everything, after just waking up,” Parker said. “His hair was all matted and he looked a mess.”

  The interviewer said, “How are you today, Mr. Phoenix?”

  River responded by scratching himself. “Not too bad,” he said, “except for the crotch rot.”

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  ACROSS THE WAY

  KEANU REEVES: I’m not against gays or anything, but I won’t have sex with guys. I would never do that on film. We did a little of that in Idaho, and it was really hard. Never again.

  RIVER PHOENIX: I thought you liked that. Was it something I did?

  KEANU REEVES: Shut up, dude!

  Since the beginning of Hollywood, its male actors have often strived to assert their heterosexuality, regardless of whether they actually like to go to bed with men or women. Acting is a feminizing job in many ways (judging by the general mores of Western civilization for the past century): when you go to
work, you put on makeup and let yourself be ogled by the camera, even in action roles. Especially in action roles.

  Panic about actors’ sexuality has been around since Hollywood had groves of orange trees. Take Rudolph Valentino, the Italian actor who became the exotic sex symbol of silent movies, starring in such films as The Sheik and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (both released in 1921). When a journalist compared him to a pink powder puff in 1926, Valentino felt compelled to prove his masculinity by challenging him to a boxing match. Valentino won the fight—just a few weeks before he died, at age thirty-one.

  Classic Hollywood was full of sham marriages and fake romances, efforts to protect matinee idols like Tab Hunter and Rock Hudson from gossip and insinuations. Even the suave Cary Grant, married four times, spent twelve years living with his “housemate,” western star Randolph Scott. Given that a gay public image was considered to be a career killer, it’s perhaps not too surprising that most on-screen homosexuality was coded, as in the Spartacus scene where Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis discuss the difference between “eating oysters” and “eating snails.” (That one may not have been coded enough, actually—it got cut from the film.)

  On the rare occasions when gay characters appeared in movies, they were usually presented to be as exotic or as depraved as possible—most famously in the 1980 film Cruising, where Al Pacino played a straight cop who dons leather and goes undercover in the gay S&M world to track down a serial killer. William Hurt won the Oscar for his portrayal of the homosexual Luis Molina in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)—the character was not only gay, but a pedophile, which is why he spends most of the movie in a Brazilian prison cell.

  Street hustlers and underage prostitutes aren’t the societal norm either. If you view My Own Private Idaho through the reductive lens of “does this movie present positive gay role models?” it is yet another entry in the “er, no” column of the Hollywood ledger. So how did River become a gay icon? (Beyond his ultrahandsomeness, of course.) He never condescended. Not just in his public statements while promoting the movie, where it became clear that he was relaxed about and around gay people, but in the movie itself, in which Mike Waters, while not without flaws, felt like a real human being.

  It’s no wonder that rumors flew about River actually being gay or bi; whether he experimented with homosexuality or not, he didn’t have any protective distance between himself and his character. It’s also not surprising that Idaho provided a catalyst for young gay men to come out of the closet.

  Two years later, Tom Hanks won the Best Actor Oscar for playing an HIV-positive gay lawyer in Philadelphia. But while Hanks was earnest and well intentioned, his character felt like a noble cipher. The same year, Will Smith had his breakthrough role in Six Degrees of Separation as a young gay con man—but on the advice of Denzel Washington, he refused to kiss another man on-screen.

  Twenty years after My Own Private Idaho, many gay actors have come out of the closet—at first loudly, and then matter-of-factly. Movies and TV shows are rife with homosexual characters; what remains taboo is the depiction of same-sex physical affection, even relatively chaste kisses. River shattered this unofficial prohibition in the opening minutes of My Own Private Idaho; when we first see Mike, he is in a hotel getting a blow job from a john. It’s about as graphic as you can get without actually inspecting River for crotch rot—we know exactly what’s happening by looking at his face.

  As River said when discussing the scene, “God, the physical sensation of ejaculating can be orgasmic.”

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  THAT NIGHT AT THE VIPER ROOM

  Wednesday nights became theme nights at the Viper Room, called Mr. Moo’s Adventure, named after Johnny Depp’s dog. One Wednesday might be “Women in Prison” night, with the VIP booths turned into prison cells; another might find the club converted into an airplane; another would have the black walls covered with aluminum foil. These elaborate evenings were money losers, but fun for the club staff.

  The Viper Room hosted two episodes of their version of The Dating Game; for one of them, bar back Richmond Arquette recruited his younger brother, actor David Arquette (Scream) to be the bachelor. Richmond wrote some questions for his brother to read to his romantic prospects, but when David attempted the first one, he laughed so hard, he couldn’t get the words out. The question was “I like to masturbate for hours on end until I’m in danger of dying from dehydration. What do you like to do in your spare time?”

  Another night, the bachelor was actor Norman Reedus (now most famous for The Walking Dead). “They sort of set him up,” Richmond Arquette remembered. “One of the bachelorettes was this Mexican tranny. They gave her the best answers, and he picked her. When Reedus’s choice was revealed, “even though it was all in jest, you could see her vulnerability. He did this beautiful thing: he kissed her, said ‘I’m so happy,’ and was really gracious about it. I always liked him for that.”

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  SATIATE LACK

  After the emotional wringer of My Own Private Idaho, “I just did not feel like barreling through someone’s psychosis,” River said. He opted for a low-stress money gig: Sneakers. As one actor in the film said of the title, “It sounded like a bad teen comedy about a hapless junior-high basketball team that is saved when they recruit a girl point guard who’s a great shot.”

  The movie was actually a heist caper centered on a band of professional computer hackers and security consultants; the NSA dragoons them into stealing a black box that is the ultimate code-breaking tool. Director Phil Alden Robinson (Field of Dreams) assembled an absurdly star-studded cast: Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, Dan Aykroyd, and Ben Kingsley, not to mention Mary McDonnell, David Strathairn, and James Earl Jones. A hugely classy ensemble—but the studio wanted to make sure that there was also some youth appeal, and pushed for River.

  On the set, River quickly bonded with Aykroyd (another actor who really just wanted to rock). The two of them would gaze awestruck at Redford and Poitier, River said. “We’d think, ‘These guys are like national monuments, like the pyramids.’ And that poses the question, ‘But what are we?’ Well, I guess we’re sand crabs or scabs or something less dignified.”

  Aykroyd and River had a host of running jokes; they dubbed the catering truck the Roach Coach, which evolved into calling each other Mr. Woach and Mrs. Woach. River would pinch the fat on Aykroyd’s waist, or blow on his bald spot. “Just complete, absolute, total irreverence,” Aykroyd said. “And he could get away with it.”

  The first day of shooting, Robinson thought River was fine—but when he saw him in dailies, he was much more impressed. “He makes very quirky choices that really come alive on film,” the director said.

  The quirkiest choice of all comes during a montage at a party, where most of the cast takes turns dancing with Mary McDonnell while Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools” plays. Poitier is all stiff reserve, while Aykroyd proves to be a surprisingly accomplished swing dancer. And then River flails around like a punk moshing at a Germs concert, kneecaps bobbing and arms waving. It’s the most visually arresting seven seconds in the movie.

  The shoot stretched over five months, but River had plenty of downtime, both because he had a supporting role in a large ensemble and because breaks were built into the schedule; Redford insisted on ten days off at Christmastime so he could go on his annual skiing vacation. So River pushed forward with Aleka’s Attic.

  Drummer Josh Greenbaum came to California and spent hours jamming with River between scenes. The two-year development deal with Island had been going on for roughly four years; the label wanted to see if their investment had paid off. A&R rep Kim Buie engaged top-flight producer T-Bone Burnett (Elvis Costello, Los Lobos) and River went into the studio to record two songs with Greenbaum, Rain, and Flea.

  When Chris Blackwell heard the tape, he decided not to pick up the option on the band—to River’s dismay. “It turned out that my voice wasn’t star-quality,” River said sardonically. “I’m so glad that it didn�
�t happen, because I don’t want to make music for the masses. I just want to make it for my friends and the people I play with.”

  “In hindsight, I’m not sure that River having a band was necessarily the best decision,” Buie said; she thought he might have done better as a solo acoustic performer. “A band takes time. And his acting career was always competing for his time. Finding the flow and the continuity within a band, it was a challenge. I think he just wasn’t at a place where he could do it full-time, and figure out what River Phoenix—the musician, the artist, the songwriter—wanted to be.”

  While Sneakers shot in Los Angeles, River stayed at Flea’s house. The bassist was out of town on tour, but plenty of his friends still came around, giving River easy access to whatever drug he wanted, including heroin. Not that it was all party time: one disagreement led to a drug buddy chasing River through the house with a butcher’s knife.

  Soon after that incident, River’s former tutor Dirk Drake came to visit and was extremely concerned by the heroin situation. He told River that he was “furious about the glamour those friends attached to skag.”

  To which River replied, “Don’t worry, I have the fear of God.”

  That infuriated Drake, who suggested that River should change careers from actor to Baptist preacher.

  Jim Dobson, who had been the publicist on Jimmy Reardon, saw River for the first time in years, and was astonished by the transformation. “He was 100% different,” Dobson said. “He’d gone from a cute, well-groomed kid to someone who wouldn’t bathe, and his face was very gray. We all assumed he was on drugs.”