Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind (2 page)
Read Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind Online
Authors: Gavin Edwards
River Phoenix stands high in the hills of Malibu, facing west. On a clear day, he would be gazing at the Pacific Ocean: sparkling blue, full of possibility all the way to the horizon. Today, the marine layer has rolled in, meaning that clouds have come right up to his feet.
On one side of River stands a friend of his, a beautiful young dark-haired woman. On the other side is another friend, William Richert, almost three decades his senior; Richert has directed him in one movie (
A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon
) and acted with
him in another (
My Own Private Idaho
). They are all standing outside Richert’s house, which is currently full of River’s young Hollywood friends, including actress Ione Skye. Keanu Reeves rolled up to the party on his motorcycle. River has adopted Richert’s house as a second home, sometimes sneaking in during the dead of night.
“Take my hand,” River says, and the woman and the man both comply. They stand on the edge of a platform, and although clouds swaddle the house, making it look like Shangri-la in a Maxfield Parrish painting, Richert knows all too well that underneath the clouds, there is a thirty-foot drop down a steep hill.
“We’re going to jump,” River tells his friends. They aren’t sure this is a good idea, but he continues, “And as we go through these clouds, all our past sins, and everything we ever did that we thought was wrong, will all be forgotten. All new things will happen to us, and we’ll be filled up forever.”
River jumped into the clouds, and his friends leaped with him.
River always jumped.
River Phoenix’s mother changed her name piece by piece, but her life all at once. Born Arlyn Dunetz in the Bronx (on New Year’s Eve 1944), by age twenty-three she had settled into a cozy, dull domestic life: married to a computer operator and employed as a secretary in a Manhattan office. Her destiny as a mother and housewife seemed preordained, as inevitable as
Gunsmoke
and
The Carol Burnett Show
on Monday nights.
“I just wanted to be loved,” she said, “and find somebody to love. I wanted to do what I saw in movies and television: get married and live happily ever after. I found it immediately—and within two years, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is not the way they said. I have to start all over.’ So I did.”
The sounds in the air were psychedelic: the national mood oscillated between embracing love and advocating revolution. Dunetz didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life, but she knew it exceeded the boundaries of a Bronx apartment. In the summer of 1968, she put some clothes into a backpack and, with just a few dollars in her pocket, started hitchhiking west.
Left behind: her astonished husband and parents. Her mother, Margaret Dunetz, knew that Arlyn was going to become a hippie: “I wasn’t thrilled, but what could I do? I didn’t try to stop her because she was a grown woman already.”
RIVER PHOENIX’S FATHER GOT A
head start on running away from home, but he was never able to run away from himself. John Lee Bottom was born on June 14, 1947, and grew up in Fontana, California—part of the “Inland Empire” east of Los Angeles. Fontana was a hot, desolate slice of desert suburb, home to a Kaiser Steel plant and famous as the birthplace of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club.
John didn’t have an overabundance of parental attention: his father, Eli, was too focused on his glass business to spend time with him. And as John entered his teen years, his mother, Beulah, was in a terrible car accident: after being in a coma for a year, she was sent home from the hospital as a brain-damaged husk of her former self. Overwhelmed by a failing business and a failing wife, Eli started drinking heavily and staying away from home. One day, without warning or explanation, he left. (Eli headed up to San Francisco, and ultimately relocated to Perth, Australia, where he would die on September 23, 1993—five weeks before the death of River, the grandson he never knew.) Beulah was sent to a home; John stayed with his seven-years-older brother, Bobby. But when Bobby joined the navy, John ended up in a private Methodist orphanage.
John tried to escape: “I ran away from home to become a songwriter in Hollywood,” he said. The freedom was short-lived, and not marked by a hit single: he was soon sent back to Fontana. John also ran away to Long Beach, south of L.A., where his aunt Frances and uncle Bruin lived, and begged them to take him in. They told him that they couldn’t look after him, and he sadly returned to the orphanage.
John Bottom turned from a gentle child full of daydreams into an unhappy, wounded teenager. He drank heavily, smoked pot, and started riding motorcycles, with what he said were serious consequences: “When I was sixteen, a drunk lady ran head-on into me and I spent one and a half years in the hospital.” His relatives, such as Aunt Frances, don’t remember that accident, and think that he suffered his lifelong back injury while working as a carpenter.
Some possibilities to consider that might explain that discrepancy, none of them happy: John was trying to make sense of his mother’s tragic accident by folding the narrative into his own life. Or he couldn’t distinguish between reality and his own fables. Or he was so abandoned by his relatives that they didn’t know he was hospitalized.
John left the orphanage and floated around California with his guitar, picking up jobs gardening and refinishing furniture. At age fifteen, he got a girl pregnant, resulting in a daughter named Jodean (aka “Trust”). Like his own father, he didn’t stick around. In 1966, worried about the draft—Lyndon Johnson was starting to ramp up the Vietnam War—John headed up to Canada.
A year later, he drifted back into the United States and drove down to Los Angeles in his battered Volkswagen minibus. On Santa Monica Boulevard, he saw a hippie chick sticking her thumb out for a ride. She was short (five foot two), beautiful, radiant. John Bottom stopped to pick up Arlyn Dunetz.
“It’s very interesting that my mom and dad met at all,” River mused years later. “I feel they were meant to be together.”
John invited Arlyn to his place; two nights later, she accepted the invitation. They stayed up all night, finding common ground in the tie-dyed verities of the day: the insanity of the Vietnam War, the shallow values of the materialistic world, how everybody’s problems could be solved with peace and love. By dawn, they were already falling in love.
In that VW minibus, they spent the next few years floating up and down the West Coast, staying in various communes. They never got legally married, but they did have a commitment ceremony in April 1968. As they wandered, seeking new friends and new truths, they became eager consumers of mind-expanding drugs, particularly LSD, which Arlyn described as a “gift from God.”
The couple treated tabs of acid as religious sacraments. “Acid was the truth serum,” Arlyn said. “It was the thing that was going to get you above the world to a level of consciousness where you could feel the power of God. That was the only reason we took it.”
For John, the drug reframed his perceptions of American society. “I just instantly saw that I was living in a pit,” he later told River. “There were a lot of lost people and the president wasn’t necessarily the nicest guy in the world.”
(“Maybe you didn’t need drugs to know that,” River riposted.)
Looking to build a society where “nicest guy in the world” might actually be a job qualification for the presidency, John and Arlyn collected a dozen fellow seekers in a traveling commune. “We were flower children,” John said. “We were full of faith and we loved everybody.”
Intending to work their way across the United States to Florida, they started by heading north. In early summer 1970, they ended up in the flat scrubland of Oregon, specifically a small town called Madras. Arlyn was in an advanced state of pregnancy when they arrived; the group needed to stay in one place until she gave birth. None of the local farmers had ever hired hippies, but John convinced a young farmer named Roy Nance to take them on. The band of hippies moved into a small two-story house on the farm, and did the manual labor of a peppermint farm, growing a crop that would end up in America’s toothpaste and chewing gum. They hauled sprinklers and hoed the mint—and befuddled Nance by taking unannounced breaks whenever they felt the impulse, sitting down in the middle of a field if necessary.
“They were a rather strange lot,” said Nance, who was bewildered but tolerant. “One time, I was driving the tractor. The hippies all were supposed to pick the rocks off the ground and put them in the trailer I was pulling. All of a sudden, it got quiet. I looked back, only to find that they all decided to just lay down on their backs and look up at the sun. One of them did that too many times: I still know him, and today he’s nearly blind.”
The hippies did some freelance agriculture, planting marijuana seeds on Nance’s land and trying to grow their own crop. What they didn’t know: to reduce weeds, Nance had treated the soil with a “preemergence spray.” “Every time the plants got about an inch high, they would die,” Nance said with a chuckle. They never did figure out why they were doing so poorly with such fertile land.
Although Nance, then around twenty-five, wasn’t much older than his guest workers, he had a more conservative outlook. “They just didn’t have the morals that the rest of us had,” he said. The women worked in long skirts, and delighted in shocking him by letting them ride up over their waists, revealing that they weren’t wearing any underwear. They would regularly strip to go skinny-dipping in the farm’s creek, and then splay their nude bodies spread-eagled on the grass, laughing at his reaction. “Once I was on the tractor when they did that,” Nance said. “I nearly wrecked several rows of potatoes.”
The hippie contingent kept to themselves, but were well liked by their fellow workers, who considered them to be courteous if unconventional. After long days in the fields, the hippies spent their nights by themselves in that two-story house, listening to music by candlelight and taking turns reading books out loud, including Hermann Hesse’s
Siddhartha
.
The novel, set in India, is about a young man’s quest for enlightenment: he experiments with various instructors and identities (like many college sophomores) until he discovers wisdom by working as a ferryman (unlike most college sophomores). Sample dialogue: “The river has taught me to listen; you will learn from it, too. The river knows everything; one can learn everything from it. You have already learned from the river that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to seek the depths.”
Arlyn kept working until the hot, dry summer day when she went into labor. She refused to go to the hospital in Madras or to have a doctor present, although Nance arranged to have a nurse around. In later years, the story of this birth would become mythologized as a three-day delivery in a log cabin. (Nance said there was no log cabin on his property and that the labor went on for “three and a half hours to five hours at most.”) On August 23, 1970, at three minutes after noon, Arlyn gave birth to her first child.
Years later, she told a story about another birth she had attended: “When the baby came out, they said, ‘Please don’t tell us what it is.’ For the first half hour, we just held the child in the birthing tub, and nobody looked. Let’s just hold this being as a being, without labeling him right away. If it’s a boy, it won’t be long before people will be buying him only blue clothes. It was so interesting, because you’re dying to know. But why does it matter so much? Why are we obsessed with the difference?”
Her own child was a boy. Later that afternoon, John rushed into the nearby town of Metolius and bought some candles at the hardware store, excitedly telling the clerk that he needed them for a naming ceremony for his newborn son. By candlelight, John and Arlyn christened the child River Jude Bottom. “River Bottom” might be evocative of catfish and mud, but the name “River” was intended as a tribute to a cleansing force of nature, flowing through all of existence.
The name was prompted by the commune’s recent choice of reading material, Arlyn explained: “The book
Siddhartha
talks about the river being an answer to life’s many questions, as looking into it you can see the reflection of everything.”
And “Jude”? The name had biblical overtones: Jude was one of the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ, sometimes believed to be his brother (but not to be confused with his betrayer, Judas Iscariot). The actual inspiration, however, was more immediate and suffused with a “na na na na” chorus: one of John and Arlyn’s favorite songs was the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.”
The name laid out their hopes and expectations for the newborn child: a shimmering reflection of the entire world who could salvage any lost cause, taking a sad song and making it better.
As summer turned into fall, the peppermint was harvested and work on the farm dried up. Arlyn was wan and sickly after the birth, so she and John lingered in Madras with River, even as the other members of their commune hit the road without them. Winter in Madras can be harsh: the high altitude means heavy snowfalls and impassable roads. The family decided they wanted to head back south to warmer climes. The problem was that the VW minibus had stopped running, and neither John nor Arlyn was capable of fixing it. Although Nance was concerned that Arlyn and little River weren’t healthy enough to be traveling, he nevertheless towed the bus fifty miles to the south, where a friend of John’s repaired it.
For the next couple of years, the family continued their nomadic journey through the American West and Southwest. Greeted with antipathy by straight American society, John and Arlyn would bond briefly but intensely with fellow long-haired travelers. They continued to get high with pot and various hallucinogens, but eventually two stoned visions, separated by one year, sent them looking for actual religion.
Arlyn’s: She was in the void, until a golden hand seemed to rip away the darkness.
John’s: Lying in a field, he was surprised by a disembodied voice asking, “Why don’t you receive me?” When he asked for proof that the voice was real, a “tall fellow” materialized, holding two Bibles and proclaiming, “I’m a Christian.” One of the Bibles was antique—a touch that John believed was intended to appeal to his interest in history. John wept. Then he resolved to stop using drugs and smoking cigarettes.
“Spirituality has changed,” Arlyn reflected years later. “It’s not in the box it used to be in, when you
had
to be in this religion. There’s a new understanding that we are all a part of this creation. There’s no getting away from it. It’s a miracle, and it’s magic, and nobody understands it. And there’s a great power that comes from that.”
John and Arlyn’s aimless voyage of self-discovery was transforming into a quest for the divine. Their faith was like a body of water searching for a vessel that would give it a shape. They found it, or it found them: a sect called the Children of God.
