Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind (20 page)

72

YOUNG HOLLYWOOD 1993

For his
Idaho
follow-up, Gus Van Sant was offered the job of directing a movie about famed gay politician Harvey Milk, with Oliver Stone producing and Robin Williams starring. He spent a year working on the project, but instead made
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,
an adaptation of the cult Tom Robbins novel about a girl with abnormally large thumbs (played by Uma Thurman). Reeves played her husband, a repressed Mohawk named Julian Gitche; Rain Phoenix also appeared as the sexually liberated cowgirl Bonanza Jellybean. The film debuted to widespread critical derision. (It was rumored that River made a cameo, but Van Sant insisted not.) Later in the year, Reeves started filming
Speed,
everybody’s favorite bus-that-can’t-slow-down-because-there’s-a-bomb-strapped-to-it movie, costarring with Sandra Bullock; it would prove to be an enormous, star-making hit for both of them.

Leonardo DiCaprio was handpicked by Robert De Niro and director Michael Caton-Jones to play De Niro’s stepson in
This Boy’s Life,
a drama about an abusive family. Critics raved that DiCaprio gave as good as he got from De Niro; the New York
Daily News
called it “the breakthrough performance of the decade.” (And although the decade wasn’t even half done, they were probably right.)

DiCaprio then teamed up with Johnny Depp: they played brothers in the moving, off-kilter Lasse Hallström drama
What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?
Depp starred as Gilbert, stuck in a small town caring for his family, which includes his five-hundred-pound mother and his mentally impaired brother (DiCaprio, in a great performance). DiCaprio had been offered a part in
Hocus Pocus,
a forgettable comedy with Bette Midler, Rosie O’Donnell, and Sarah Jessica Parker as a family of witches. “I knew it was awful,” DiCaprio said, “but it was just like, ‘OK, they’re offering me more and more money. Isn’t that what you do? You do movies and you get more money.’ But something inside me kept saying, ‘Don’t do this movie.’ ” All of his advisers were telling him to take the job, but he decided to audition for
Gilbert Grape
instead. Artistic virtue was rewarded when he received an Oscar nomination for his work on the movie.

Depp had largely put his career on hold the previous two years while Winona Ryder worked almost continuously, but he knew they were growing apart; they broke up in May, right after
Gilbert Grape
wrapped. “Johnny was pretty unhappy then,” Depp said of the
Gilbert Grape
shoot. Mercifully switching to the first person, he continued, “I was poisoning myself beyond belief. There was a lot of liquor, a lot of liquor. I was in a pretty unhealthy state.”

He did find solace during the shoot by attending a Neil Young show, where he met and befriended Gibby Haynes; the Butthole Surfers had recently released their sixth album,
Independent Worm Saloon.
For fun, Haynes and Depp started a new band together. Called P (“spelled u-r-i-n-e,” Depp helpfully explained), the band also included songwriter Bill Carter and Depp’s close friend Sal Jenco. They mostly played sloppy, squalling rock with a sense of humor, as in their cover of Daniel Johnston’s “I Save Cigarette Butts.”

Brad Pitt followed up on his success in
A River Runs Through It
(the
Los Angeles Times
called his performance “career-making”) by scuffing up his wholesome blond image. He and his then-girlfriend Juliette Lewis starred in the serial-killer drama
Kalifornia
(she would make a more successful version of the same movie the following year with
Natural Born Killers
). He also had a small role in
True Romance
(directed by Tony Scott, written by Quentin Tarantino) as a metal-head couch potato, getting stoned from a honey-bear bong, unfazed by the appearance of gangsters with shotguns. Christian Slater starred as the comic-book clerk who marries a hooker named Alabama (Patricia Arquette), kills her pimp, and heads to California with a bag full of uncut cocaine.

R.E.M. was still releasing singles off the massively successful
Automatic for the People,
generally regarded as the best album the band ever made. Michael Stipe had stopped giving interviews (guitarist Peter Buck and bassist Mike Mills took care of that), but since he was interested in photography and filmmaking, he oversaw the band’s videos.

Martha Plimpton was working steadily in little-seen projects: the improvised film
Chantilly Lace
(on Showtime), the dystopic movie
Daybreak
(on HBO), and the child-runaway movie
Josh and S.A.M.
(a theatrical flop). Jerry O’Connell had slimmed down dramatically since his
Stand by Me
days, and began an adult leading-man career playing a one-legged character opposite Jason Priestley in the period film
Calendar Girl,
about three friends on a mission to meet Marilyn Monroe.

Ethan Hawke followed up his appearance in
Alive
(plane crash! cannibalism! survival!) by making
Reality Bites,
a Generation-X romantic comedy, opposite Winona Ryder and director Ben Stiller, that captured both the exciting and annoying aspects of discovering you’re part of a generation.

John Frusciante had abruptly quit the Red Hot Chili Peppers the year before—during a tour in Japan, he told them, “I can’t do this anymore. I will die if I don’t get out of this band right away.” Before he left, he had been getting sloppy and erratic. Kiedis said: “I don’t know if it was a combination of the wine and the pot, but it seemed like he was drinking psycho juice rather than just wine.” Frusciante flew back to California, where he was free to play guitar and ingest whatever he liked without worrying about the rest of the world.

Depp and Haynes made a twelve-minute experimental film about Frusciante, called
Stuff.
In it, the camera pinwheels around Frusciante’s home, showing guitars, sagging shelves of vinyl records, and debris on pretty much every flat surface. On the soundtrack, wheezing psychedelic music by Frusciante plays while the camera lingers on the walls of his home, covered with angry red scrawls of incoherent graffiti such as
KILL PIGS BY LETTING THEM BECOME SHITS PEANUTS
. The house is small enough that halfway through, the filmmakers just start repeating footage, which is perhaps more claustrophobic than intended. Somebody reads a poem on the soundtrack, and we finally see Frusciante—short hair, gray sweater, button-down shirt—and then LSD guru Timothy Leary, bald and in a psychedelic waistcoat. Surrounded by his clutter, Frusciante doesn’t look like he has any intention of ever leaving his house again.

73

TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT

There’s nothing in Hollywood so harrowing that it can’t be presented with artifice. A West Hollywood chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, held its meetings in a fake log cabin. River went to a couple of meetings, but he didn’t buy into the program, complaining, “I’m here because my manager and my publicist and my agent want me to be here. I drink and I do drugs, but I don’t have a problem.”

A British model/actor with the pseudonym of Cedric Niles had been holed up freebasing cocaine for two days straight—and then River showed up at his door, guided there by friends who knew they had shared interests. Niles didn’t immediately recognize River, and not just because he had spent the previous forty-eight hours freebasing. River “was wearing those flared-out hippie pants and one of those hooded Mexican shirts” and no shoes. River had grown his hair long again; he kept it hanging over his face.

The two of them smoked their way through River’s ample stash of cocaine, and then went wandering down Melrose Avenue, barefoot, looking for a guitar. Over the following two weeks, they kept getting high. River told Niles the password that would get phone calls put through to his room at the upscale St. James’s Club & Hotel: “Earl Grey.”

According to Niles, River lived in fear that his drug use would become general knowledge. River would call Niles when he got bored, but would never leave his name on the answering machine: “Hey, is anyone there? Is anyone there? It’s . . . it’s . . .” And then he’d hang up.

Another friend remembered River as always having top-notch pot, plus Valiums. His suspicions were aroused by River’s tiny pupils—in his experience, that meant heroin. “When you do blow, your eyes get huge,” he said. But when he asked about heroin, River denied it emphatically. Apparently, some things were secret, even from drug buddies.

The first time the two of them freebased coke together, Niles recalled, River said, “Gee, I’ve never done this before.” But when they prepped their works, River “knew exactly how to do it. We freebased all night at the St. James’s Club in West Hollywood, staying up ’til 6
A.M.,
getting totally paranoid. It was a nightmare, really. When he was very high, he’d play and sing these songs with the most bizarre lyrics. Through it all, though, he was an absolute sweetheart.”

It wasn’t hard to find drugs in Hollywood. The Sunset Strip was practically a narcotics supermarket, where it was easy to get cocaine, Ecstasy, weed, and a potent dose of heroin branded “Body Bag.” (Explained one dealer, “That’s what they’ll take you out in if you use it.”) Heroin had recently acquired a hipster sheen; junkies could snort lines in clubs instead of shooting up in a filthy crash pad. “Heroin chic” and emaciated models became trendy—with Calvin Klein’s 1993 ad campaign starring a skinny Kate Moss, the look and vibe of the drug went mainstream.

The intoxicant of the season in Los Angeles, however, was GHB, a chemical cocktail of gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid, nicknamed “Grievous Bodily Harm.” “People say it’s an amino acid, and it’s all natural, but it’s really a drug, like liquid Ecstasy,” said one Sunset regular, then in her twenties. The euphoric effects were similar to Ecstasy, which had fallen out of vogue, both because regular users found their bodies habituated to it and because a lot of dealers sold placebos. Bodybuilders started using GHB to take the edge off steroids, and the drug then crossed over to the club scene. Doses got passed around as a clear liquid.

Another Sunset regular said, “I tried it once, and I was never so high in my life. The guy who gave it to me said it was a ginseng drink, but it tasted like salt water. An hour later, I couldn’t put one leg out in front of me to make it out of the building.” Sneering rock star Billy Idol took too much GHB and went into convulsions outside the hip club Tatou; he was rushed to the hospital and survived to release the 1993 flop album
Cyberpunk
.

As one graffiti artist summed up the Los Angeles nightlife, “The real drug of choice in this city is ‘more.’ ”

Pleasant Gehman, a former roommate of Belinda Carlisle (lead singer of the Go-Go’s), was a writer who also performed in a band called the Ringling Sisters. She helped put together an annual orphanage benefit at the Roxy nightclub. While Gehman was running around, organizing audience raffles, she noticed “a really cute boy passed out backstage,” looking sweaty and unhealthy. Time passed, and he didn’t get up. Finally, Gehman demanded, “Who is that really cute and really fucked-up boy that’s laying on the floor? We have to get him out of here.”

Somebody informed her that it was River Phoenix.

“
That’s
River Phoenix? Jesus.”

Flea, formerly a heavy-duty drug user himself, saw the condition River was in and urged him to get help, to no avail. Early one morning, River stumbled into the house of his friend Bobby Bukowski, the
Dogfight
cinematographer, blotto on a speedball of heroin and cocaine, and crashed. When he finally woke up, he staggered to the kitchen and attempted to purge his system with his preferred cure: garlic, raw vegetables, and lots of water. Bukowski confronted him, saying, “I’d rather you just point a gun at your head and pull the trigger. I want to see you become an old man, so we can be old friends together.”

River started crying, and promised to stop using. “That’s the end of the drugs,” he promised. “I don’t want to go down to the place that’s so dark it’ll annihilate me.”

Meanwhile, River needed to book his next job. With word out around town about his erratic behavior in Nashville, offers and scripts were no longer flowing into the office of Iris Burton. And the clock was ticking: the release of
Silent Tongue
and
The Thing Called Love
were going to make him even less employable. Or as he put it, “When my next two films are released, I’m only going to be doing B-movies.” (
Silent Tongue
didn’t hit theaters until after River died, but it had already played Sundance, and Todd McCarthy had slammed it in
Variety
as “a bizarre, meandering, and finally maddening mystical oater that will find few partisans.”)

Burton’s assistant Chris Snyder remembered one night at 3
A.M.
when he got a drunken phone call from River, in a car with Samantha Mathis, wanting to know why the agency had been hiding scripts from him—specifically, the screenplay of
Reality Bites
.

“You’ve had that script for a month,” a groggy Snyder told River. “I’ve asked you to read it
five
times. You told me to pass on it for you.”

“Samantha said it was great. I trust her. I don’t trust you!” River yelled. “I just want to do the fucking movie!”

“I think Samantha wants to do the fucking movie,” Snyder snapped. “You want the script, you’ll have it tomorrow, but tell Samantha, Winona Ryder already has the part she wants.”

The next day, Snyder delivered the
Reality Bites
script to River at the St. James’s Club. River came to the door, soaking wet in a towel, and hugged Snyder, soaking his shirt. Having finally read Mathis’s copy of the script, he decided that the project wasn’t actually right for him. He still hadn’t read
Interview with the Vampire
or
Dark Blood,
projects that the agency was keen on him doing—to demonstrate his lack of interest in the
Vampire
script, he threw it across the room.

“Do you have any idea how hard Iris and I have worked to get you considered for these parts?” Snyder asked him.

“I don’t want to work any more!” River replied. “You can tell Iris and my mother! My passion is my music.” Moments later, reality set in: “I have to work,” he conceded. “After all these years, I still don’t have enough money to just say ‘Fuck you’ to this town. The band is expensive. So is Costa Rica.”

River asked Snyder how he could get a bank account that was solely in his name; Snyder assured him that he probably had more money than he thought. “Not enough to never have to fucking bleed in front of the camera again,” River said. “Maybe I should just disappear for a while.” In one breath, he was wondering if he could stop acting and go to college; in another, he was thinking about picking films that his grandchildren could be proud of.

Around this time, River said to Snyder, “I don’t even like this business any more. I don’t know if I ever liked it. I wasn’t exactly given a choice.”

When he was thinking about future movies, River juggled projects like the Hollywood pro he had become. He talked to William Richert about doing
The Man in the Iron Mask,
a Dumas adaptation, but cautioned him, “You know, Bill, I’m working with a lot of directors right now.”

Some of those projects were less fully formed than others: for example, Polish actress/director Agnieszka Holland had a meeting with River around 1
A.M.
in his hotel room. She later wrote:

He was sweating, drunk, tired, very beautiful. I suspected he had just read
Jack and Jill
, a screenplay by Robbie Baitz which is supposed to be my next movie. He very much wants to play Adam. He played Adam for an hour. He achieved what he wanted; I escaped from his room, I was dying of fatigue, but I was sure that none of the other wonderful actors I had met for this role would have such truthfulness, would have such courage and self-awareness of auto-destruction as River does.

Burton and Snyder were also leaning on River to do
Safe Passage,
a domestic drama about a mother who has psychic premonitions. Susan Sarandon and Sam Shepard were signed on as the parents, and there were opportunities for multiple Phoenix children to be in the cast.

John Boorman, undaunted by the failure of
Broken Dream
to move from screenplay to actual film, was pitching River another project, called
Noah
. In this update of the Bible story, River would have played the title character, a stuttering zookeeper at the Bronx Zoo. God visits him and instructs him to build another ark. Noah reluctantly builds a ship and leads his animal charges to the East River to get on it. At the movie’s end, he looks over the rising waters and sees countless other boats bobbing in the water. This time, when the world floods, everybody gets a boat.

River was also talking about making his directorial debut with a movie called
By Way of Fontana.
It would have told the story of his father’s tumultuous childhood; Joaquin would have played John. The real-life John implored River to take a break from Hollywood and come down to stay with him in Costa Rica for a while, to flush out his system and get healthy. River rebuffed him.

George Sluizer was a Dutch director, sixty-one years old in 1993, best known for the chilling abduction drama
The Vanishing
(he also helmed the inferior American remake of the same name, starring Kiefer Sutherland). He was putting together a movie called
Dark Blood,
about a Hollywood couple who get stranded in the southwestern desert and meet a mysterious figure called Boy. He wanted River to star as Boy.

Sluizer met River in a chic hotel restaurant; early in the meeting, he apologized for being vague, saying he was suffering from a terrible headache. “River didn’t ask the waiter to get aspirin,” Sluizer said. “He left the table and ran, more than walked, to the pharmacy to get me aspirin.” Duly impressed with River’s charity toward somebody he had just met, Sluizer officially offered River the part.

River related a more cynical version of the meeting: “I told the director I loved the movies he’d made. Blah, blah, blah. I’ve never seen one of his fucking movies. I told him I
loved
the script and that I
really really
wanted to do his movie. The usual.” But he agreed to star in
Dark Blood,
and to appear in a small but prominent role in
Interview with the Vampire,
as the interviewer.

Even when River regarded Hollywood courtship rituals with a jaundiced eye, flashes of generosity—running for the aspirin—came through. He kept putting himself in situations almost guaranteed to bring out the worst in people (all-night freebasing sessions, for example), but once he was there, somehow the best aspects of River would still shine.