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

by Edwards, Gavin

  The other reason River didn’t become more iconic in death: on April 5, 1994, only five months after River died, Kurt Cobain shot himself in the head and became the symbol of snuffed potential. Apparently the nineties had room for only one angel-faced blond boy, too pained by the world to live in it.

  Ever since River died, his absence has reverberated through Hollywood, and not just in growing awareness of veganism and rain forests. Leonardo DiCaprio played so many parts that River originally intended to do, it’s hard not to wonder which roles River might have beaten him out for, had he stayed alive and healthy. Steven Spielberg commented, “When I finally worked with Leonardo DiCaprio on Catch Me If You Can, he reminded me of River. Not only do they look alike, their approach to acting, to their art, is very similar.” Would River have starred in Titanic, and found himself transformed into a global superstar? Might he have one day vanished into the role of a plantation owner for Django Unchained? Would River and DiCaprio have acted opposite each other as doppelgangers in The Departed?

  Or perhaps River and Van Sant would have forged a long-term collaboration, the way DiCaprio did with Martin Scorsese and Depp did with Tim Burton. As it happened, the first film Van Sant made after River died was To Die For, which featured Joaquin in his breakout role (a disturbed teen who is seduced by a local newscaster and gulled into killing her husband). It was Joaquin’s first movie in six years; he had been spending a lot of time with his father in Costa Rica, but after River’s death, he found himself thrust into his brother’s role as the family breadwinner, if not its missionary.

  While Joaquin chose different roles than his brother probably would have—based on their physical types, if nothing else—his career successfully balanced art films (The Master) with popcorn movies (Gladiator), a path that River had tried to walk himself. The movie that obviously echoed Joaquin’s own life was Walk the Line: he played country singer Johnny Cash, who saw his beloved brother die in front of him. But the film that actually seems to draw from the Phoenix family’s experience is I’m Still Here, the fake documentary Joaquin made with his brother-in-law Casey Affleck (his To Die For costar, who married his sister Summer) and released in 2010 to general confusion.

  River never had a ludicrous beard or a meltdown on David Letterman, but like Joaquin in I’m Still Here, he chafed at the self-important rituals of the acting life, and wanted to trade it all in for music (Joaquin’s version of this impulse in I’m Still Here was making a rap album). The movie begins with all five Phoenix children performing on the streets of Los Angeles and ends with a choice that River never made, although Costa Rica was open to him: leaving the United States behind and heading into the jungle.

  River had a boyish face—and not just because he made the majority of his movies when he was a teenager. Leonardo DiCaprio has maintained the same youthful quality as an adult, giving the impression of having baby fat, even in his late thirties. That look was ascendant in the early nineties, as teenage pinups reliably turned into movie stars. Nineteen ninety-seven proved to be a watershed year for the look: it was when L.A. Confidential came out, making a leading man out of Russell Crowe, who was praised as a sweaty Australian throwback to an era of real men, not a pretty boy like DiCaprio, Depp, or Jared Leto. The praise was often couched as a commercial analysis—where would Hollywood find its new leading men and action heroes?—but had a whiff of homophobia to it nevertheless.

  Film actors know that youthful glamour will fade—there’s a reason that Hollywood plastic surgeons stay busy. River couldn’t have predicted that at age twenty-seven, his physical appearance would be going out of fashion. If he had maintained his acting at a high level, however, his talent and star power would likely have trumped the zeitgeist.

  If he had triumphed over his addiction-prone genes, River would have celebrated his forty-third birthday in August 2013. It’s not hard to imagine him as an actor with dozens of movies of all stripes behind him, a powerful performer in full command of his craft. Sluizer said, “His heart went a little more to music than acting, but probably he was more gifted as an actor. He was an actor who had so much appeal for an audience, film would have carried him on.”

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  ECHO #5: MONTGOMERY CLIFT

  Alive, River was frequently compared to James Dean; after the two actors were united by a young death, the link seemed to be mandated by federal statute. But a more telling comparison may be Montgomery Clift, the 1950s Hollywood icon who was Dean’s hero. (Dean wasn’t just inspired by Clift, he was obsessed—he tracked down the actor’s unlisted phone number and kept calling him.)

  When Clift was just eight years old, in 1928, his family left the United States for three years—in his case, it was a moneyed tour of Europe, with trips to the Louvre and St. Moritz. The roots of his performing life began on that journey, with an outing to the Comédie-Française and a short play that the precocious Clift wrote and performed, about a sixth-century king of France and his conversion to Christianity.

  Back in the States, Clift entered professional show business via advertising: he appeared in print ads for Arrow shirts and Steinway pianos. He became a working actor as a teenager, appearing on Broadway at age fourteen in the play Fly Away Home. Regularly cast in the theater, he found it difficult to adjust to conventional schools or to make friends his age.

  Actress Anne Baxter remembered Clift as “hyperenergetic, hyper-sincere.” In 1948, he made the move from Broadway to Hollywood, appearing opposite John Wayne in the western Red River and starring in The Search in an Oscar-nominated performance as a U.S. Army engineer helping a young concentration-camp survivor find his mother. Clift became a teen idol, but made his disdain for Hollywood widely known and received publicity for his unconventional ideas and his dirty T-shirts.

  The lives of River and Clift did not run on perfectly parallel tracks, of course. Clift lived almost twice as long, had much more classical education, and was a closeted homosexual. His most intense screen partnership was with Elizabeth Taylor, with whom he starred in A Place in the Sun, Raintree County, and Suddenly, Last Summer. Although they were close friends and Taylor reportedly would have happily married him, Clift’s homosexuality meant that they would never register for wedding gifts. The analogue to Taylor in River’s life was Keanu Reeves, a dark-haired beauty who proved to be his most passionate on-screen romantic foil; their heterosexual bent hindered any real-life love affair.

  Clift specialized in beautiful martyrs. His most famous performance was in From Here to Eternity (1953), as Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt, a top-notch Army bugler who is tormented by his company when he refuses to box for them. The script, set in Hawaii in the months before the Pearl Harbor attack, verged on the melodramatic, but Clift made Prewitt a vivid character: passionate, proud, wary, wounded. His rawest moment comes in a flash of sympathy, when he tells his love interest (Donna Reed), “Nobody ever lies about being lonely.”

  In 1956, driving home from a party at Elizabeth Taylor’s house, Clift smashed his car into a telephone pole. He survived, but the left side of his face was largely paralyzed, and he was never the same. He became addicted to alcohol and pills, turning into the sad, dissolute figure the Clash sang about on their song “The Right Profile”: “He said, ‘Go out and get me my old movie stills’ / ‘Go out and get me another roll of pills’ / ‘I’m shaking, but I ain’t got the chills.’ ” And then there’s nothing but anguished sputtering.

  Clift lived for a decade after his accident, and remained photogenic enough to keep working: he made half of his seventeen movies in that time. (Eight before the accident, eight after, and one, Raintree County, that was filmed both before and after.) If Clift had died that night, he might have become mythologized as one of the heroic victims he played so often on film. Instead, he faded away gradually, becoming pathetic rather than tragic.

  Ultimately, alternate histories and other what-if stories are just guesses. People wish that River’s narrative had a different ending: he survives his bad night at the Viper Room
, but the experience scares him straight and he matures into one of our finest actors. But he might have kept using drugs instead, making himself gradually unemployable. Or he might have gotten clean and then had a relapse months later that killed him. He could have had a car crash of his own, or abandoned acting for environmental activism. Cheating death doesn’t guarantee a happy ending—it just gives you a chance to add another chapter to your story.

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  CLOSING TIME AT THE VIPER ROOM

  Sometimes, when Samantha Mathis turned on the television and flipped around, she’d stumble on one of River’s movies: there he’d be, young and alive. “I’m grateful to be able to see him like that,” she said, “but at the same time it is very odd and I’m never quite sure how to explain my emotions.” Mostly, she tried to get on with her life, even as she carried around her loss and her horror. The lesson she took from River’s death was to be more selfish: since life is fleeting, don’t waste it with the wrong people. Mathis worked steadily, appearing in Little Women, The American President, and Broken Arrow. And improbably, she started hanging out at the Viper Room.

  Some friends of River’s won’t even say the Viper Room’s name. Although Mathis described her visit on Halloween in 1993 as “ultimately not a joyous experience,” she decided that the club itself wasn’t responsible for River’s death, even indirectly by creating a libertine environment. “The way the public perceived it was unfortunately out of everyone’s control,” she said.

  Mathis and her friend Tracy Falco, a studio development executive, shared a little house nearby that their friend Adam Duritz (of Counting Crows) jokingly called “the hillside manor.” They found themselves at the center of a bohemian social circle: people would come by their house, stay up late, and drink a lot of red wine.

  “We were all just twenty-three or so and we had all these wonderful friends—people were in town making music or doing things,” Falco remembered fondly. “We always said that we should have had a sign-in book at the house those two years, because at one time or another I think every actor in Hollywood traveled to our house.”

  Their living room was one center of gravity for that crowd, which included old friends of River like Michael Stipe; another was the Viper Room. “It was kind of a given that no matter where we went, we’d end the night at the Viper Room,” Mathis said. “The doors would always be open to us. We would arrive, and Sal would call Damiano’s Pizza, and we’d order fifteen pizzas and sit around and talk and smoke cigarettes and wind down the evening.”

  In 1996, Mick Jagger and Uma Thurman went to the Viper Room together, catching a Wallflowers show from a corner booth. Photographer Russell Einhorn spotted them in a full-on makeout session, what he described as “a real hot, heavy kiss, like in some film with the stars overacting—and he had his hands all over her. His leg was cocked over hers.” Unable to resist the opportunity, Einhorn fished a camera out of his pocket and took a picture.

  As soon as the flash went off, Einhorn was tackled by Jagger’s bodyguard and slammed to the ground. The camera fell out of his hand; Einhorn was restrained by Viper Room security while Jagger’s people found it and removed the film. Einhorn was ejected from the Viper Room and banned for life.

  Einhorn then sued both Jagger and the Viper Room for damages (the confiscated photograph was his property, and a valuable item). Jagger reportedly settled for $350,000 to avoid testifying in court; he was married to Jerry Hall at the time, although she filed for divorce shortly after the story made headlines. The Viper Room fought the suit, but lost at a jury trial in 1998 and had to pay Einhorn $600,000—putting a rather precise price tag on the cost of their mission to create a safe space for celebrities.

  In 2000, Depp (through his lawyers) attempted to buy out Anthony Fox, who had sold him fifty-one percent of the Viper Room ownership back in 1993; relations between them had been strained for years, ever since Fox’s weekly stipend of $800 had been suspended. During negotiations to acquire the other forty-nine percent, Fox discovered that the licensing rights to the Viper Room had been transferred to another legal entity, Trouser Trumpet, which was owned by Depp and Jenco. Fox sued.

  In December 2001, Fox suddenly disappeared, never to be heard from again. He left behind a sixteen-year-old daughter named Amanda and a few thousand dollars in his bank account. Foul play was suspected. “Maybe it’s the curse of the Viper Room,” speculated David Esquibias, one of Fox’s lawyers.

  Even with Fox mysteriously gone, the lawsuit continued, with Fox’s daughter, Amanda, as the beneficiary. In February 2003, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Allan Goodman made a temporary ruling extremely unfavorable to Depp, stating, “The facts establish persistent and pervasive fraud and mismanagement and abuse of authority” and that “Defendant Depp breached his fiduciary duties to the corporation and to Fox as the plaintiff-shareholder and failed to exercise any business judgment.”

  Depp initially appealed, but eighteen months later, he quietly relinquished his shares to Amanda Fox (who promptly cashed out, selling the club). A press release didn’t mention the ongoing legal mess, but rather blamed the “bad memories” of River’s death and the continued presence of “death tourists” who still came to the patch of sidewalk where River had died. Depp had been living in France with model/singer/actress Vanessa Paradis and their children for some years; the Viper Room hadn’t been his personal rec room for a long time.

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  BLOOD ON THE TRACKS

  After River’s death, a devastated Sluizer moved back to Europe. He mostly split his time between Amsterdam and France, and kept making movies, just not for Hollywood studios—one was even in Portuguese.

  “I had the Dark Blood material for years,” Sluizer said. “But I had no desire to look at Judy Davis—I can say I was traumatized by her. That’s my sense of humor: I don’t think I was traumatized, but irritated. I didn’t want to see her, because she made me suffer so much, in so many nasty little things. And I was doing other movies, so it took time.”

  Sluizer acquired the footage in 1999, but had trouble finding an institution to house it and grew frustrated at how film preservation had turned into a 9-to-5 bureaucracy rather than a passion. Then he read a newspaper article about a film museum in Kabul, Afghanistan. Movies were illegal under Taliban rule, so the curators had to keep the museum completely concealed—hiding art carried a death sentence. “I said, ‘God, these people, they put their life at stake for film?’ I like that,” Sluizer chortled. He wrote them a letter asking if they would store the raw Dark Blood footage for him. He never heard back, which he conceded might have been for the best, given that it was wartime: “It would have been lying in Afghanistan, while everybody was shooting each other.”

  Then Sluizer almost died. On Christmas Day of 2007, he was on vacation with his family in the foothills of the French Alps when he collapsed: he had suffered an aortic dissection, meaning that the tissue inside his body’s largest artery had torn, which often leads to fatal blood loss. After a five-hour ambulance ride, Sluizer was in a cardiovascular hospital, where he received life-saving surgery.

  “Normally, within five minutes you’re dead,” he said. But at age seventy-five, Sluizer had been given some extra time. During an arduous year of physical therapy, during which he had to relearn how to sit, how to stand, how to walk, he made a resolution: he didn’t know how much time he had left alive, but he would finish Dark Blood. “I had to finish the creative work which hundreds of people had done together,” he said, “so that it would be there for anyone who wanted to see it.”

  Sluizer struggled with the question of how to work around the missing footage—include animation?—but after months of tinkering, landed upon a simple solution. Where necessary, Sluizer would narrate in a gravelly voiceover, summarizing the content of missing scenes. (Early on, he considered asking Joaquin, but the Phoenix family made it clear they had no interest in getting involved.)

  Sitting in the living room of his Amsterdam apartment in 2013, with two canes
by his chair, a white-haired Sluizer served a visitor fresh herring and bread, and outlined his plans for the movie: play it at various film festivals and then consider the possibility of wider distribution. That would require negotiating with the insurance company—although Sluizer absconded with the physical film, he didn’t control the underlying rights.

  Sluizer discussed how the character of Boy had a degree of fanaticism that was almost totally opposite to River’s own nature. “He had contrasts,” Sluizer said. “It’s not so simple as people think—a ‘nice boy.’ He was as complex as we all are, or maybe even a little more so because of his life. His mother taught him, more or less, everything, and he never had the privilege of being surrounded by a class. He never went to school. I do think that makes a difference—you might be hated by everyone in your class, you might be loved, but because there are a lot of people around, you’re in a solidarity situation. So River’s mind is a little different.”

  Although there are some obvious holes in the footage, the final cut of Dark Blood hangs together remarkably well. Pryce and Davis skillfully portray a couple on the rocks, barely concealing their hostility with acidic banter. The southwestern landscape is gorgeous. But the reason anyone is watching is to see River Phoenix, to witness his final performance as a desert mystic savant, to get one last glimpse of him as a living twenty-three-year-old.

  River gives an unvarnished but magnetic performance. He looks as if he’s emerging from a cocoon after a century-long slumber, gazing at the world with curiosity and taking pleasure in the simple actions of moving his limbs. Watching it in the context of River’s life, it’s inspiring and heartbreaking. Inspiring because of the distance between River’s work here and the sluggish performance he gave in The Thing Called Love: this movie documents an actor who got clean and was rediscovering his gift. Heartbreaking for exactly the same reasons: knowing that he was pulling himself together makes his Viper Room overdose that much more of a senseless waste.