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

by Edwards, Gavin

  What did this mean in practice for children born into the cult? With missions scattered across the globe, the implementation of Berg’s principles varied somewhat by location, but in the personal stories and testimonials of the Children of God’s actual children, unmistakable patterns emerge. Children were separated from their parents and raised communally, with an emphasis on apocalyptic teachings and conformity. With the adults bed-hopping, fatherhood could be uncertain, or nominal: some mothers of large families had multiple children who only vaguely resembled one another.

  Children as young as three were encouraged to “play” sexually with their parents and other adults. But even greater emphasis was put on the children stimulating each other; they could pair off for sexual exploration at night, after prayers but before bed.

  Rose McGowan, the actress famous for Charmed and Grindhouse, was born three years after River Phoenix, and, like him, grew up in the sweaty embrace of the Children of God. Her community was fifty hippies, living on the property of a duke just outside Florence, Italy.

  “Like most cults, you were cut off from your family” outside the religion, McGowan remembered. “There were no newspapers, no television. You were kept in the dark so you would obey.” She learned to read at age three, but didn’t have anybody around who would teach her to tie her shoes. “The group encouraged you to have a lot of kids as fast as you could,” she said. “Then if you made plans to leave, they would lean on you. You know . . . maybe your kids would disappear.”

  While her father happily drew illustrations for Children of God comic-book pamphlets, McGowan never bought into their philosophy. “When I was five, we had a complete wall of Bibles, and I burnt that down,” she said. “I think I had some anger.” McGowan decided that she didn’t want to live like the women she saw around her: not only were they subservient (some men, including her father, had multiple wives), they had hairy legs.

  McGowan’s father could see that the Children of God were about to start more actively proselytizing for sex between adults and children: he was instructed to draw cartoons about it. He took that as a sign it was time to leave. The family escaped, fleeing through a cornfield in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm.

  “Their whole thing was that children are very sexual beings,” McGowan said. She remembered Berg declaring that God wouldn’t have made children capable of enjoying sex if he hadn’t expected them to engage in it. She concluded, “I was not molested because my dad was strong enough to realize that hippie love had gone south.”

  6

  FOLLOW THE LEADER

  Like sheep looking for a shepherd, John and Arlyn wandered around the Southwest until they got shorn. Their hippie ramblings were now imbued with a sense of providence—so in 1972, when they encountered the Children of God in Crockett, Texas, they were eager to join the flock. They disavowed their previous worldly existence, pledged their devotion to Christ, and donated their possessions to the Children of God. (The church’s communes sometimes looked like pawnshops or garage sales: a jumble of used stereos and TV sets donated by new members, waiting for resale.)

  With thirty other true believers, the Bottom family then trekked over eight hundred miles in a converted school bus to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where they founded a new commune on the site of an abandoned vacation resort near Pike’s Peak: they recruited new members by visiting Denver and Boulder, where they distributed pamphlets and sang Children of God hymns in the street. The Children of God songbook included selections such as “Mountain Children,” “You Gotta Be a Baby,” and “God’s Explosions,” which placed religious faith halfway between a volcanic eruption and an orgasm: “We’ll blow like Krakatoa / If you try to shut us up / ’Cause we’re filled with God’s hot Spirit / And exploding with His love.”

  After a few months, they moved back to Texas for “Leadership Training” classes at the cult’s Texas Soul Clinic ranch. The ranch was in Thurber, Texas, a deserted coal-mining town west of Fort Worth—but not completely unpopulated, as drunk cowboys would sometimes come by with rifles to take potshots at the hippies. John and Arlyn picked new Old Testament names for themselves: Amram and Jochebed, the parents of Moses. By extension, River was Moses; already, they were casting him as a future prophet. On November 21, 1972, John and Arlyn (or Amram and Jochebed) had a second child: a baby girl they named Rain Joan of Arc, after the weather during her birth and the French religious martyr. John delivered the baby himself.

  Having established themselves as loyal members of the Children of God, the Bottom family were sent south to proselytize. “We moved around a lot,” River said later. They went first to Mexico, then to Puerto Rico for almost two years, where River’s younger brother was born on October 28, 1974, and given a Spanish-language name, Joaquin Rafael. Young River quickly became fluent in Spanish and acquired the nickname “Rio” (the Spanish word for “river”). The family then headed even farther south, living in multiple South American countries before landing in Caracas, Venezuela. For his devotion to the Children of God, John was named “Archbishop of Venezuela and the Caribbean.”

  John the Archbishop was basically left alone to run things in Venezuela: John and Arlyn had oversight of nine or ten Children of God homes in Venezuela. Underneath archbishops in the Children of God hierarchy were “regional shepherds,” “district shepherds,” and “colony shepherds.” The only guidance came in the form of Mo Letters, which regularly arrived in the mail with Berg’s latest pronouncements on matters theological and sexual. The family was expected to set an example of adherence to the Children of God creed.

  The Bottoms established a Children of God colony and lived in a house in Mariposa Hill in Venezuela’s capital city of Caracas—the property, previously owned by one of their new converts, had been donated to the cause. The Children of God provided no financial support to the colonies, which meant the children of John and Arlyn Bottom were constantly at risk of going hungry.

  Some families might have gotten paying jobs, or returned to the United States. The Bottoms’ solution was to have the children beg. River and Rain had already been helping their parents “witness,” trying to convert Venezuelans to the sect. They sang in the street, performing the Children of God songbook and becoming known as Los Niños Rubios Que Cantan: “The Blond Children Who Sing.” “The kids grew up going out on the street, telling people God loved them,” Arlyn said. “They gave their lives to God.” Now the tossed coins they received had become their family’s primary source of income.

  On nights when River was restless or overwhelmed, Arlyn would lull him to sleep by singing “You’ve Got a Friend.” Soon he had memorized the words and was singing along with her.

  “They were devoted parents,” said another member of the Children of God, called Ado. “We took many camping trips together with our kids.” He remembered John and Arlyn telling him that one reason they had joined the Children of God was to stay off drugs.

  The family befriended Alfonso Sainz, a local doctor who had previously been a Spanish pop star, cofounder of the band Los Pekenikes. The group had started in the 1960s by doing Spanish-language covers of the pop hits of the day, and eventually began recording their own material. Although none of their work broke out of the Spanish-speaking market, they became a footnote in Beatles history: in July 1965, weeks before the famous Shea Stadium show, they opened for the Fab Four at their concert in Madrid’s Plaza de Toros de Madrid.

  By 1975, Sainz was living in Venezuela, and had become improbably friendly with the gringo missionaries. River spent hours talking with him about music, and on Christmas of that year, Sainz gave him a real guitar. River took the instrument everywhere, practicing incessantly, undaunted by how disproportionately large it was compared to his five-year-old body and hands. Within a few months, he could play simple songs; Sainz was impressed enough to offer to record him at his studio in Orlando, Florida.

  The Blond Children Who Sing performed everywhere: hospitals, jails, the streets. “We did it because we needed
money, but we also wanted to pass along love,” River remembered later. “A lot of people would gather and listen to us. It was really a novelty. We had a whole act together. I’d be strumming on a guitar that was taller than I was at about a hundred miles an hour. I knew about five chords. That was where I learned to give a lot of joy and happiness, from singing.”

  Around the age most children attend kindergarten and are entrusted with blunt-tipped scissors, River had the massive responsibility of supporting his family. If he didn’t come home with enough money after serenading the citizens of Caracas, then they wouldn’t eat that night. He and Rain learned which locations were the most lucrative: hotels and the airport.

  On July 5, 1976—one day after the American Bicentennial—the family grew again with the birth of another girl, Libertad Mariposa (which translates into English as “Liberty Butterfly”). July 5 was Liberty Day in Venezuela; “Mariposa” came from the name of the hill where the Children of God colony was housed.

  Under John’s leadership as archbishop, the Children of God were thriving in Caracas. The sect found an ally in “Padre Esteban”—Father Stephen Wood, who was director of the Catholic Church’s local youth ministry. Presumably unaware of the more outré beliefs of the Children of God, he tried to incorporate them into his work, reasoning that they were fellow travelers. If he was doing youth outreach, he might invite a Children of God contingent along to sing. When the Children of God population expanded beyond the limits of their Mariposa house, Wood even provided lodgings for a dozen of them in the basement of the Cathedral of Los Teques.

  Wood, who died in 2010 (stabbed in his Venezuela home), remembered the Children of God as being so spontaneous that it was impossible to make any plans with them: “It was what God told them to do that day,” he said. He also discovered he had theological differences with them in regard to the Bible. “Their interpretation tended to be rather fundamentalist Protestant and very apocalyptic,” Wood remembered. They ultimately went their separate ways, although he would sometimes spot Children of God missionaries as far afield as Colombia or Costa Rica.

  Arlyn, hoping to make more of River and Rain’s musical act, entered the children in local talent shows, without any particular success. The family lived with empty pockets but good cheer. “I’ve been through some pretty desperate times,” River admitted as a teenager. “I’ve lived a lot even though I’m still young. But I feel that when you’re born into a way of life—and that’s all you know—you don’t mind it. The good times and the bad are all part of the experience.”

  Then, in 1976, the mailman brought an international delivery that changed everything. The latest Mo Letter was advocating the benefits of “flirty fishing.” The term was derived from Jesus Christ’s message to his disciples (in Matthew 4:19): “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Now, Berg told his female followers, they should bring new men into the Children of God by sleeping with them.

  “What greater way could you show anyone your love than to give them your all in the bed of love?” Berg wrote. “How much more can you show them the Love of God than to show them His Love to the uttermost through you?”

  Flirty fishing was the official policy of the Children of God for a full decade, until 1987, when it was curtailed because of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. Apparently, it did bring thousands of men into Berg’s flock, but it also transformed many of his female disciples into prostitutes—or, as some nicknamed them, “Hookers for God.” Some women established long-term sexual relationships with locally powerful men who could offer political protection for their commune, or with wealthy men who provided funds to keep the commune going. In other locations, the transactions became even balder, as the women were hired out to local escort services.

  The Bottom family didn’t stick around for these developments. Arlyn’s summary of the Children of God experience: “The guy running it got crazy. He sought to attract rich disciples through sex. No way,” she said. “The group was being distorted by a leader who was getting very full of power and wealthy. We were serving God; we weren’t serving our leader. It took several years to get over our pain and loneliness.”

  John looked back at Berg ruefully, unable to condemn his onetime spiritual guide: “He may have been a sexual pervert, but he is still a better man than a lot of people.”

  Without money or a place to stay, the Bottom family turned to their friend Padre Esteban—Father Stephen Wood was now pastor of his own parish in Caracas. They told him that the twin lodestars that guided their conduct had long been the Bible and the Mo Letters. Now that they found these two sources to be in conflict, they had opted for the Bible.

  Concerned for their four children, Wood invited the family to stay at his church for a few weeks, in return for singing at Sunday services. During the week, the Bottoms kept proselytizing at the shopping malls of downtown Caracas. “They tried to evangelize and entertain at the same time,” Wood said. “I got the feeling that all the parents in the Children of God were exploiting their kids’ talents, aware that the kids were more effective beggars than them.”

  Later in life, River would describe his seventh birthday—August 23, 1977—as a day spent in squalor. As he told it, his family at that point was living on the beach in a rat-infested shack with no toilet, surviving by scavenging coconuts and mangoes from the trees. In fact, Wood said, while River may have availed himself of the local fruit, there was always food available at the mission. “While they were definitely poor, it was never quite down to the level of Venezuelan poverty,” Wood said. “They were struggling, and they didn’t have much money, and they didn’t know where they were really going to go.”

  The family did stay on the beach—not in a shack, but in the caretaker’s cottage at the back of a large property unused by its owners except on weekends. So during the week, the family had access to the main house’s swimming pool.

  UNDER THE HOT VENEZUELAN SUN, River jumps into the swimming pool, his limbs skinny and his hair a golden bowl crowning his head. A jet airplane flies overhead, leaving from the nearby airport at La Guaira for someplace far away. The family has put the Children of God behind them; an uncertain future lies before them. But a salty breeze is blowing in from the ocean, and for the moment River is free.

  LATER IN LIFE, RIVER WOULD treat interviews as opportunities for spontaneous fiction: he would give answers that were at variance with other things he had said, or with reality. George Sluizer, who directed him in his last movie, Dark Blood, remembered, “When a journalist would come, he’d say, ‘Oh, George, let’s see how much I can lie to him.’ ” This wasn’t pathological; mostly, it seems to have been a young actor enlivening the sometimes dull work of talking about himself with some improvisation. But it was also a defense mechanism: when River described his parents as having been “missionaries” during their time in Venezuela, rather than “cult members,” he was being misleading if not quite untruthful, both out of consideration for them and out of a desire not to unwrap part of his life that he had boxed up and put away.

  For public consumption, River was usually casual about his unusual childhood, even glib: “It was a neat time growing up in Venezuela in the late seventies.” But once, his shell cracked, in a 1991 interview with Details.

  Q. Is there anything you did at an early age that you wish you had waited for?

  A. Yes—make love.

  Q. How old were you?

  A. Four.

  Q. With whom? Another four-year-old?

  A. Kids. But I’ve blocked it out. I was completely celibate from ten to fourteen.

  “Yes, yes, yes, he was molested,” a good friend said. “It began with other friends in the same commune/cult, and it escalated.”

  Some people have drawn a straight line from the sexual abuse of River as a child to later aspects of his life: in this narrative, acting and drugs were both parachutes that let him escape from his own damaged self, while his philanthropy and veganism were attempts to negate the guilt he felt o
ver being abused. Another possibility: despite being repeatedly molested, he ended up a joyful person anyway, full of love for the world. He was certainly self-aware enough about what had happened—he told good friends about it, although he chose not to share it with the world.

  Even if River were alive today, he might not be able to explain how his experiences in Venezuela formed his adult self. The human spirit is a mysterious thing: traumas that flatten some people bounce off of others. Pain and hope get tangled into uncuttable Gordian knots.

  One would hope that leaving the Children of God and getting out of Venezuela put an end to this chapter in River’s life where his young flesh served as the raw material for the sexual desires of others. By his own telling, however, he was active sexually between the ages of four and ten—meaning that it continued for three years after the family left the cult.

  Once, when River was eighteen, somebody asked him if he had had a happy childhood.

  “Happy?” he replied, as if the idea had never occurred to him. “Well, it was interesting.”

  7

  ANOTHER NIGHT AT THE VIPER ROOM

  Down the rabbit hole: the Viper Room is hosting an Alice in Wonderland night. Bartenders have dressed up as playing cards at the Queen of Hearts’ croquet match; bar back Richmond Arquette is kitted out as the White Rabbit. Two different women are in pinafores, acting as Alice. The onstage entertainment is sixties icon Timothy Leary, LSD advocate and godfather of Winona Ryder, reading excerpts from Alice and discussing the life of its Victorian author Lewis Carroll, the stammering Oxford mathematician with a taste for absurdity and the company of little girls. (Nonsexual, by all accounts, but still unusual.)