Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind (10 page)
Read Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind Online
Authors: Gavin Edwards
When the movie finished shooting, River drove two thousand miles back to Los Angeles, traveling in a motor home that he had bought, accompanied by housekeeper/aide-de-camp Larry McHale. Around 2
A.M.
on a New Mexico highway, River got pulled over for speeding; McHale was sleeping in the back.
Still channeling Jimmy Reardon, River sassed the cop, calling him “ossifer” instead of “officer.”
“Yeah, very funny, kid,” said the patrolman, who proved to be a hard-ass. He didn’t believe a sixteen-year-old would actually own a motor home, figuring it was more likely he’d stolen it for a joyride.
While the cop went back to his car to check it out, River started doing push-ups on the floor of the motor home. When the cop came back, River didn’t stop.
Irate, the policeman thoroughly searched the vehicle for narcotics. Finding nothing, he finally sent River on his way, with a speeding ticket as a souvenir.
The ticket had a stern warning that you had to pay it or go jail—so River didn’t mail it in for three months.
In 1986, the major American film studios had not yet become subsidiaries of Japanese electronics manufacturers. The movie business was still run by misfits, eccentric geniuses, and runaway aristocrats: Chris Blackwell fit right in. Born to a rich white family in Jamaica, he grew up to found Island Records, home to Jimmy Cliff, Bob Marley, Roxy Music, and U2. “The bigger labels are supermarkets,” he once said. “I like to think of Island as a very classy delicatessen.” His offshoot company Island Pictures was financing
Jimmy Reardon,
so during the shoot, Blackwell visited the set in Evanston to check on its progress.
River made a point of meeting Blackwell, and of letting him know that he also played music. Blackwell called Kim Buie, who was Island’s head of A&R on the West Coast, and asked her to meet with River, saying, “He seems like a really cool kid.” (A&R stands for “artists and repertoire”—it’s the department at the record label that signs and handles musicians.)
Buie knew who River was—when she saw
Stand by Me
in the theater, she had made a point of staying for the credits so she could learn his name. “My God, he just stood out,” she said. “He was the James Dean of that movie—he had a commanding presence and a real vulnerability. A lot of emotion, coming through in such a mature way.”
When the Phoenix family was all back in Los Angeles, River came to visit Buie at Island’s offices, accompanied by John and Arlyn. River played her a few rough demos of his songs. She heard potential and, even more importantly, learned that music was his passion and his first love. “I just felt that there was a light there,” she said. “A real desire was being conveyed to me through River and Arlyn. The father didn’t say a whole lot—he just had this blank stare.”
After the meeting, Buie told Blackwell that River wasn’t ready to release a record, but they should try working with him. Island signed River to a development deal—“that was at a time when labels were still doing such a thing,” Buie later said with a mordant laugh. “A development deal was a step past a demo deal. You help somebody, and give them some time and resources to be able to put a little more time into their music and figure out what they want to do.” The money wasn’t extravagant—about $20,000—but River was ecstatic that his musical career was finally starting, and that soon the world would hear his music, which he called “progressive ethereal folk-rock.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
