Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind (18 page)

66

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.”

Aykroyd, who had lost his close friend and performing partner John Belushi to a drug overdose, tried to steer River away from heroin. “I think Aykroyd was a very good influence on his life,” Dobson said.

Drake said that there were multiple interventions by River’s friends about his drinking and drug abuse, but none of them had any effect: “River had a strong passion and love of sensation, whether it was watching a full moon or tossing some pints.”

Sneakers
is not without charm—in a climactic scene, the principals are being held at gunpoint by the NSA, but then realize they have the black-box MacGuffin, and hence, the upper hand. They start making demands before they hand it over. Redford’s character obtains a promise that the federal government will leave him alone, while Aykroyd’s gets a fully kitted Winnebago. River’s character, Carl Arbogast, just asks for the phone number of “the young lady with the Uzi.” Moments like that are why the film was not only a solid box-office hit, but also has retained a small but devoted cult following across the decades.

The film received generally positive, if not effusive, reviews. Rita Kempley in the
Washington Post
called it an “entertaining time-waster,” describing River’s performance as “sweetly underwhelming.”

Ultimately, for all its twists, turns, and reverses, the picture feels thin and formulaic. River didn’t care for it, and told his friends not to see it. “I play this cyberpunk nerd, just full on,” he said. “I’ve really degraded myself. He’s very hyper, always twitching, the kind of guy you avoid playing if you want to walk with dignity and grace at the premiere.”

In keeping with its code-breaking theme, the opening credits of
Sneakers
has the names of some of the film’s major players presented as anagrams before they get unscrambled: “BLOND RHINO SPANIEL” becomes “PHIL ALDEN ROBINSON,” while “FORT RED BORDER” turns into “ROBERT REDFORD” and “A TURNIP CURES ELVIS” reveals itself as “UNIVERSAL PICTURES.” Not all cast members got their names shuffled—if they had, the world might have discovered that one anagram for “RIVER PHOENIX” is “VIPER HEROIN X.”

67

THE MOVIES OF RIVER PHOENIX, RANKED BY AMERICAN BOX OFFICE

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
($197.1)

Stand by Me
($52.3)

Sneakers
($51.4)

I Love You to Death
($16.1)

The Mosquito Coast
($14.3)

Explorers
($9.8)

My Own Private Idaho
($6.4)

A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon
($6.2)

Running on Empty
($2.8)

Little Nikita
($1.7)

The Thing Called Love
($1.0)

Dogfight
($0.3)

Silent Tongue
($0.06)

All numbers are in millions of dollars and not adjusted for inflation or rounded up, meaning that
Sneakers
grossed $51,432,691,
Dogfight
$394,631 and
Silent Tongue
just $61,274.

68

COWBOY MOUTH

With
Sneakers
all laced up, River went straight to New Mexico to make
Silent Tongue
. The western ghost story was written and directed by Sam Shepard, the acclaimed playwright who had found primal poetry in surreal tales of family conflict such as
True West,
winning the Pulitzer for
Buried Child
. He was also famous for playing Chuck Yeager in
The Right Stuff—
he received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor—and for his long-term relationship with Jessica Lange.

Another
Silent Tongue
actor was Dermot Mulroney, who became friendly with River and tried to bring him up to speed on their director’s awe-inspiring CV. “Imagine me having to be the one to educate River on what Sam Shepard has written,” he said. “He had no concept of Sam as a playwright or a screenwriter or a director, or anything other than a sort of actor or well-known something or other. I had to explain to him what a Pulitzer Prize was and what Sam won it for and why: ‘Here’s another play, River, I know you’re not going to read the whole play, but please read these three pages before you have to jump up and do something else.’ He was undereducated and overintelligent.”

Aside from Mulroney, the cast included Bill Irwin, Alan Bates, and Richard Harris. River played Talbot Roe, a settler on the American frontier in 1873, driven mad with grief over the death of his wife, the half–Native American Awbonnie (Sheila Tousey). His father (Harris) visits Eamon McCree (Bates), who runs the traveling Kickapoo Indian Medicine Show, and offers him gold for his daughter—the sister of Talbot’s wife. Meanwhile, Talbot sinks deeper into insanity, putting a shotgun to his chin, covering his face with white paint, and refusing to dispose of Awbonnie’s corpse, declaring, “I will not stop until your hair has blown away”—even after her ghost appears to him, demanding that he burn her body so she can move on to the spirit world.

The movie, stronger on mood than plot, isn’t very good—
Silent Tongue
ended up being the second and final film directed by Shepard. But if its ambition exceeds its reach, at least it has ambition.

As was his habit, River found an older man working on the movie to be his role model and surrogate father for the duration of the shoot. In this case, it was the hard-living Richard Harris, an Oscar nominee in 1967 for
This Sporting Life
and in 1990 for
The Field,
and also a top-ten recording artist with his version of “MacArthur Park.”

River was very protective of the sixty-year-old Harris, driving him to the set every day and making sure that he had company. “He looked upon me as a kind of father figure. He’d knock at my door and ask if he could come in and sleep,” Harris said. “He’d sleep on the couch. I could hear him rehearsing his lines—at four in the morning. I said, ‘Fuckin’ go to sleep.’ He’d be in the bathroom, taking a crap, doing his lines.”

River’s actual father, John Phoenix, was well aware that his son had filled his absence with a series of other men—which didn’t stop him from abdicating to Costa Rica. When John met William Richert, the longest running of the substitute patriarchs, he looked him in the eye and said, “You know, I think you’re his real father.”

Richert replied, “No, I’m his real
friend
.”

John, who might have preferred to be friend rather than father, ended up not really being either.

River was booked to work only three weeks on
Silent Tongue,
but he ended up staying for the whole seven-week shoot. When he was playing Talbot, he did so with vigor, his voice cracking, his eyes wild, his face a rictus of grief and madness. River was so fully grunged up as an unwashed frontiersman, he was barely recognizable.

Mulroney said, “Sam was, in my opinion, completely and utterly perplexed by River. He was truly taken with him but couldn’t figure him out. Sam would always have that crooked smile, watching, trying to figure out how much of this was River preparing to play an uncultured mad dog, and how much of it was really River.”

Some of the filmmakers wondered whether River was acting under the influence, but everyone was impressed by his spirit and his generosity. This was consistently true—even during his periods of heaviest drug use, River didn’t succumb to the solipsistic worldview of the junkie, where humanity separates into people who can help you get your next fix and people who can’t. The
Silent Tongue
production had only four trailers, which were assigned to the top talent. When River discovered that Sheila Tousey, who played his wife, required long hours for her revenant makeup and extensive vocal exercises, but had access only to the communal makeup trailer nicknamed the “honey wagon,” he volunteered to swap spaces with her. Producer Carolyn Pfeiffer remembered, “I’d never had an actor say, ‘May I give up my comfortable space for a smaller one because one of my fellow performers needs it more than I do?’ ”

69

BURN HOLLYWOOD BURN

While River Phoenix was in New Mexico, Los Angeles caught on fire. After four policemen brutally beat Rodney King at the end of a high-speed chase—an act caught on videotape—they went on trial for assault and excessive force. When they were acquitted, on April 29, 1992, the African American community of Los Angeles exploded, furious at the jury condoning the white-on-black police brutality. Thousands (of all ethnicities) rioted over the course of a week; there was almost a billion dollars in property damage and over fifty people died. The violence was quelled only by the arrival of the National Guard and federal troops.

The Cosby Show,
which had presented a prosperous black family in Brooklyn Heights for eight seasons without dwelling on race relations, aired its final episode on April 30, with the riots in full swing and nobody in the United States thinking about anything but race relations.

With the LAPD unable to provide security, the studios shut down location shoots. A mob of one hundred attempted to storm the headquarters of the Directors Guild of America, where a screening of
Big Girls Don’t Cry
was being held. The Lakers and Clippers both moved their playoff games out of town. David Bowie and Iman, intending to begin their married life together in Los Angeles, flew into LAX just as the riots began; they ended up living in New York.
Playboy
didn’t cancel the Playmate of the Year lunch at the Playboy Mansion, crowning Corinna Harney as its youngest-ever holder of that title.

There were dead bodies in the streets.

By the time
Silent Tongue
wrapped, the riots were over, but L.A. was pockmarked with rubble—buildings and entire minimalls that just weren’t there anymore, like a pearly-white smile that had a few teeth knocked out. Nevertheless, River flew west to L.A. rather than east to Gainesville. After he’d gotten dropped by Island, there didn’t seem to be much point to revving up Aleka’s Attic again. L.A. offered him the opportunity to figure out his next move, and to have a good time.

River visited Richert, with Joaquin tagging along—he had decided to drop “Leaf” and revert to his birth name. Richert’s house had a two-story atrium with a glass dome on the top. The day was cold, so the glass had fogged up. Richert looked up to discover that “Joaquin had drawn Satan in every single window.”

Worried that Joaquin might fall through the glass, killing himself and the people below, Richert yelled at him to come down. Joaquin, framed by the scrawls in the condensation so that he appeared to have horns himself, just laughed.

“Joaquin had a whole other kind of energy,” Richert said. “He was not River. His mother was not River. None of those people were River, even if he took care of them and they all called themselves Phoenix.”

“I’m a minor, stupid talent compared to my brother,” River said.

River was fond of pranks himself, although without a diabolical edge—his taste lay more in the direction of tall tales. Nick Richert, son of the director, said, “River would just bullshit and say anything and you’d believe it. He was a mind-fucker. I always had to stay aloof from him because I didn’t want to get drawn in and seem gullible.”

River decided that he would surprise Solgot, who was in San Francisco on her birthday. He flew up to visit her, accompanied by Richert. They went to her birthday party—but just before they entered, River pulled out a paper bag and put it over his head. “Nobody knew it was him, even his girlfriend didn’t,” Richert said. This seems, frankly, implausible—even if somehow Solgot didn’t recognize his voice or his body, surely the presence of River’s close friend Richert was a dead giveaway.

Whether they were genuinely fooled or just humoring River, everyone at the party played along, interacting with Mr. Sack as an anonymous party guest. River didn’t drop the gag, keeping the paper bag on for three hours; eventually everybody accepted that there was a guest with unusual headgear. “He was watching what everybody else was doing,” Richert said. “I remember thinking how devoted he was to a trick that he wanted to pull off. He never took this bag off.”