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

by Edwards, Gavin

  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, se
parated 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.

  3

  DEAR GOD

  Only ten miles away from the Viper Room, just three weeks before River Phoenix died on the sidewalk, the Los Angeles Sports Arena was decorated with golden columns and torches. The building was usually home to the hapless L.A. Clippers, not simulations of the excesses of Roman emperors. But on this night, the Church of Scientology was having a party.

  Ten thousand Scientologists gathered under the arena’s roof—the largest such gathering ever—to celebrate a historic moment in the church’s history. After twenty-five years of legal wrangling and corporate espionage, the IRS had officially classified Scientology as a religion, not a commercial enterprise. “There will be no billion-dollar tax bill which we can’t pay,” declared church leader David Miscavige, looking natty in a tuxedo. This ruling made all the difference: if a language is a dialect with an army, as philologists say, then a religion is a cult with a tax exemption.

  In 1993, the streets of Los Angeles were punctuated by Scientology buildings: the Dianetics Testing Centre, the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition, an array of Celebrity Centres. Behind the scenes, Miscavige was living lavishly, with $5,000 suits, a $100,000 stereo system, a car collection, and a staff that included two full-time chefs making him dual entrées for every meal so he could reject one.

  Miscavige was not the first religious leader with an extravagant lifestyle financed by the contributions of his followers, or even the first in Los Angeles. Before Miscavige (or his predecessor, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard), the city of angels seemed to attract as many religious leaders as it did aspiring actresses. Aimee Semple McPherson, for example, drove into town in 1922, arriving in a beat-up car with two small children and one hundred dollars. Three years later, she had collected a million dollars in donations from tens of thousands of followers and had another quarter-million dollars’ worth of land. Soon she built the five-thousand-seat Angelus Temple, at a cost of $1.5 million, where she staged elaborate religious pageants. She had beauty and charm, and consorted with movie stars like Charlie Chaplin. But her glamour was eroded after she disappeared for a week in 1926—she said she had been kidnapped, but the newspapers soon reported that she had been shacked up in a “love cottage.” McPherson led her diminished church until 1944, when she died of a drug overdose.

  Katherine Tingley, the “Purple Mother,” built the Point Loma Theosophical Community, featuring a bugler hidden behind the Egyptian-style gates to herald the arrival of any visitors. Albert Powell Warrington bought fifteen acres of Hollywood real estate and dubbed it “Krotona,” a sanctified colony on “magnetically impregnated” ground. The “I AM” cult was based on a vision Guy W. Ballard had while hiking: the Ascended Master Saint Germain materialized, tapped Ballard’s shoulder, and let him drink a cupful of “pure electronic essence.” Arthur Bell, founder of Mankind United, promised a future age of luxury, thanks to the revelations of miniature metallic supermen living in the center of planet Earth. The “New Thought” movement originated in New England—it was known as “the Boston craze”—but migrated west until Los Angeles became its home.

  The American story is a westward journey, looking for new frontiers as a way to leave one’s troubles in the rearview mirror. It’s not an accident that the movie studios are located in Hollywood: studio heads wanted to be as far away as possible from Thomas Edison, inventor of the motion picture camera, and his patent lawyers. And so many new religions—or sects, or cults, depending on their tax situation—kept heading west until they found a place to settle. For the Mormons, the Utah desert sufficed. For some other infant religions, the only thing stopping their continued travels west was the Pacific Ocean.

  In Southern California, they found a ready pool of followers—Los Angeles has traditionally been a city of recent arrivals. Separated from their families and the churches they grew up in, but seeking some spiritual solace, many Los Angelenos have ended up joining fringe sects.

  Sometimes the religions, like successful TV shows, have developed in L.A. and then been released across the globe. The Pentecostal movement had its origins in Texas, but became an evangelical blockbuster at the Azusa Street Mission in L.A., under the guidance of a one-eyed preacher named William Joseph Seymour, the son of former slaves; it now has over 250 million adherents worldwide.

  The term cult suggests not just that a religion is new and small, but that outsiders see its unfamiliar beliefs and rituals as nefarious. Even a few thousand worshippers in a new sect can seem threatening to old-time religions. Sometimes, those sects can take wrong turns.

  Living in and around Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969, Charles Manson got his acolytes to believe in “Helter Skelter,” the apocalyptic race war that would be coming soon—and to hasten its arrival through a campaign of brutal murders. A more benign cult in that era was the Source Family, whose members, under the guidance of “Father Yod,” lived in a commune, practiced free love, played in psychedelic rock bands, and ran an incredibly lucrative organic vegetarian restaurant at 8301 Sunset Boulevard—just one mile east of the building that twenty years later would host the Viper Room.

  4

  ONE NIGHT AT THE VIPER ROOM

  The staff of the Viper Room—bartenders, bar backs, security—is gathered around a table. Club co-owner Johnny Depp stands there, as does his girlfriend, British supermodel Kate Moss, and his best friend (and Viper Room general manager) Sal Jenco. On top of the table is a towel. On top of that towel is a toilet, at which they all gaze intently, trying to puzzle out how to remove a toilet-paper roll that has gotten firmly lodged in the plumbing.

  Finally, Moss asks Depp, “Would you give me $100 if I stick my hand in and take it out?”

  Depp immediately agrees. His logic: “I can get $400 from the National Enquirer for a picture of you with your hand in a toilet.”

  5

  SUFFER THE CHILDREN

  Flower children who discovered that the flowers had wilted: that was who David Brandt Berg wanted in his church. As he told the story, “One dark night, as I walked the streets with those poor drugged and despairing hippies, God suddenly spoke to my heart and said, ‘Art thou willing to go to these lost sheep to become a king of these poor little beggars? They need a voice to speak for them, they need a shepherd to lead them, and they need the rod of My Word to guide them to the Light.”

  In 1968, Berg—“Father David,” or later, “Moses” or “Mo”—turned forty-nine and brought his Teens for Christ ministry to Huntington Beach, California. In this sleepy seaside town, just a little south of Los Angeles, the Teens for Christ traded in their neckties for groovy threads and took over a local coffeehouse. The message: praise the Lord and fight the system.

  By 1971, renamed the “Children of God,” their numbers had grown from fifty disciples to fifteen hundred, with sixty-nine religious communes scattered around the United States and Canada. And Berg ha
d found the spiritual cornerstone of his church in Scripture, specifically First Corinthians 6:12: “All things are lawful to us.” In Berg’s reading, all forms of sexual freedom were encouraged, if they were motivated by love. This was only a cubit’s distance from “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” the credo of British occultist and black magician Aleister Crowley.

  Sexual libertinism became the rule at the Children of God, practiced first by Berg, then condoned among the rank and file, and ultimately, encouraged as a sacrament—or as Berg put it, a “come-union.” Former members of the Children of God have called it a “Christian sex cult.”

  Berg became steadily more reclusive, communicating with his followers through epistles called “Mo Letters.” In 1973, the letters began to read like Playboy editorials: “It was not until I kicked over the traces, thumbed my noses at old-fogey churchianity and all of its old-bogey inhibited sexual superstition and really let myself go and enjoy sex to the full, wild and free, to the absolute utmost, it was only then that God also helped me to achieve this spiritual and mental and physical freedom that I have since had, to completely explode in a total orgasm of psychological, social, economic, political, religious and sexual freedom and liberty and worldwide accomplishments.”

  Or more succinctly (in a Mo Letter titled “Come On Ma!—Burn Your Bra”), “We have a sexy God and a sexy religion with a very sexy leader with an extremely sexy young following! So if you don’t like sex, you better get out while you can.”

  While male homosexuality was forbidden by the Children of God (underscoring that its tenets were just reflections of Berg’s personal mores), they believed that the Bible approved of adultery and incest. Children should be raised as sexual beings, Berg wrote, and encouraged to bathe together, play in the nude, and experiment sexually. But not, Berg emphasized, in front of outsiders unfamiliar with “the revolutionary sexual freedoms.”