PART THREE
“AN EXCUSE TO GET THAT FAR OUT OF YOUR HEAD”
© by Lance Staedler/Corbis Outline
22
SMALL-TOWN HOLLYWOOD
Ione Skye had just turned fifteen when her big brother, Donovan Leitch, brought home River Phoenix. She didn’t know who River was and wasn’t clear on how he had ended up in her house—she thought maybe he was shooting a TV movie down the street. “Our neighborhood kind of looked like Anywhere, U.S.A., even though it was right in the middle of Hollywood,” she said.
Skye and River immediately hit it off. “His mother and my mother are similar,” she said. “They’re New York Jewish women who became hippies.” (Skye’s mother is model Enid Karl; her father is British singer/songwriter Donovan, who unlike his son, generally goes by a single name.) A couple of weeks later, River called Skye up and asked her on a date, inviting her to come along while the Phoenix family went busking in Westwood. She happily consented, but before it happened, he called back and canceled. “I can’t, I’m gonna do a movie,” River told her—and then he left town.
23
WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE
Youth evaporates in Hollywood like rain on hot California pavement—but it’s unusual to find yourself too old for a part at age fifteen. For the plum role of the son in The Mosquito Coast, about a father (Harrison Ford) who uproots his family and moves them to the South American jungle, River was disqualified from the start: director Peter Weir was set on an actor not older than twelve, thirteen at the outside. Burton got River an audition anyway, but his tape was shelved, while Weir looked at dozens of younger actors.
Rewatching some of the audition tapes, casting director Diane Crittenden stumbled on River’s and was astonished. She immediately took the video-cassette to Weir and pressed it on him. “There’s a boy on this tape named River Phoenix,” she told him. “He’s terrific, only he’s fifteen.” Weir watched the tape, and was duly impressed—but was leaning toward Wil Wheaton, River’s younger Stand by Me costar. Then he read River’s résumé, and was astonished to discover that he had spent years living in Latin America. The parallels between the actor and the role seemed too strong to ignore. Weir remembered, “I finally said to myself, ‘What does it matter how old he is? He looks like Harrison’s son!’ And I cast him.”
In his native Australia, Peter Weir had become an acclaimed director of moody art-house films (such as the brilliant Picnic at Hanging Rock); The Mosquito Coast (an adaptation of a Paul Theroux novel) was his second Hollywood film after Witness, which also starred Harrison Ford. Helen Mirren, not yet a grande dame of cinema, played Ford’s wife. The cast also included the unlikely combination of Jason Alexander (with hair, not yet famous for Seinfeld) and Butterfly McQueen (best known for her role as a maid in Gone with the Wind).
Filming took place in the small Central American country of Belize, chosen for its variety of terrain (especially jungle), its English-speaking population, and its stable government. In late 1986, River flew down, with his father accompanying him as chaperon. Over a decade earlier, John had brought River along on his South American journey; now the roles were reversed.
24
ECHO #3: THE MOSQUITO COAST
Harrison Ford’s character, Allie Fox, becomes disgusted with the United States and its disposable consumer culture. A genius inventor working as a handyman in Massachusetts, he packs up his wife and four children and books passage on a freighter bound for the “Mosquito Coast,” the jungle stretching from Guatemala to Panama. From the boat, Fox shouts, “Good-bye, America, and have a nice day!”
This was not the exact trajectory of the Phoenix family, but their south-of-the-border odysseys was also rooted in contempt for the excesses of American materialism. Utopia collapses for the Foxes, just as it did for the Phoenixes. Allie Fox buys an abandoned town named Jeronimo and tries to turn it into a thriving jungle village, with an ice-making business at its center. The town is fueled by his hubris; when hoods with guns find it and try to take over, he blows the whole thing up.
The family ends up floating down the river on a boat, with Charlie (River’s character) exiled to a smaller trailing boat for the sin of insufficient belief in his father. When they try to make shelter on a beach, a storm blows everything away. The beliefs of the patriarch have proved to be no more reliable than a makeshift tent.
“The Mosquito Coast tells you to be true to someone you love,” River opined. (Not necessarily the most obvious moral—one could say it tells you to beware of how a loved one can take you to places you shouldn’t go, but that wasn’t something River wanted to say out loud, or maybe even think.) “I knew that character so well because I was that character. I knew his whole path,” River said.
“Paul Theroux didn’t steal my life story,” River declared. “I just misplaced it.”
25
JUNGLE BOY
To make filming more efficient, the Mosquito Coast production team built Jeronimo in three stages. Reminding everyone that this was a real jungle, big snakes such as boa constrictors frequently visited the set. Harrison Ford stayed at a nearby hotel, but most of the film’s cast and crew found accommodations in the jungle. “It was very hot,” River said, “and there were a lot of mosquitoes, but I got used to it. We ate a lot of rice, mangoes, and coconuts, which is what I eat anyway.” For variety, sometimes the production would fly in bagels from Miami.
Stand by Me hadn’t been released yet, so many of the Mosquito filmmakers were agog at River’s transformation from the pudgy nerd of Explorers into a lean young man with the face of an archangel. “In a matter of months, he seemed to have gone from Spanky McFarland to James Dean,” unit publicist Reid Rosefelt remembered.
In order for the cast and crew to see dailies (the raw footage filmed on a given day), the film had to be flown to the United States for processing and then back to Belize. As they watched the dailies, it quickly became clear to everyone that River was turning into a movie star, more than capable of holding his own opposite Ford and Mirren. Sometimes he would back away from the camera, trying to let other actors be front and center. “But the more he stepped out of frame,” Rosefelt remembered, “the more your eyes were drawn to him.”
“River Phoenix was born to movies,” Weir said. “He has the look of someone who has secrets. The last time I remember seeing it in someone unknown was with Mel Gibson.” (Weir directed Gibson in Gallipoli [1981] and The Year of Living Dangerously [1982]; he proved to be perceptive about how both River and Gibson were concealing certain parts of their lives.) “It’s something apart from the acting ability,” Weir added. “Laurence Olivier never had what River had.”
River grew close to the sometimes-cantankerous Ford, and was smart enough not to pepper him with questions about Han Solo or Indiana Jones. “In his position, you have so many phony people trying to dig at you that you’ve got to have a shield up,” River said. “The biggest thing about Harrison is that he makes acting look so easy; he’s so casual and so sturdy.”
Ford, for his part, lauded River’s natural talent. “There are a lot of people who have that, but River is also very serious about his work, very workmanlike and professional, far beyond what you’d expect from a fifteen-year-old boy. I don’t like to talk to other actors about acting. I think it’s a real mistake. But River asks a lot of questions that require answers, none of which I can really supply—but they’re interesting questions.”
The movie shot six days a week. On his days off, River explored the nearby jungle. He would talk with the natives, snorkel with his dad in the barrier reef, or look for jaguars. Sometimes, he and Rosefelt played music together: Rosefelt had brought a small synth to Belize, and River arrived with his guitar. “I wondered if there was something strange about my hanging out with someone so much younger than myself,” Rosefelt said. “But I found him much more stimulating company than most of the other people on the set.” River didn’t just talk shop: he could be alternately cosmic and introspective.
&n
bsp; “I was a curious kid when I was younger,” he told Rosefelt. He wanted to experience everything possible—so at age eleven, when he wondered how it would feel to cut himself with a razor blade, he tried it out. He confided, “I quickly realized that this pain thing wasn’t the way to go.”
John Phoenix kept encouraging his son to play hooky with him: to go off and jam on guitar together, or to take a trip to Guatemala on his day off. River had to play the mature professional, explaining to his dad that he needed to be respectful of the film and the people making it, which meant being rested and ready when he got in front of the camera.
Weir could see the growing tension between father and son, although he didn’t attempt to mediate. “With a young person who suddenly becomes the key breadwinner of the family, there’s an incredible amount of rearranging things in the family hierarchy,” he commented. “Sometimes a tension develops, particularly with the father.”
Weir did see River indulging in small acts of open rebellion: when John wasn’t around, he would eat foods never allowed in the Phoenix house. Not meat—his vegan beliefs were far too strong for that—but processed foods instead of all-natural snacks. “He’d stuff himself with a Mars Bar and a Coke,” Weir said. “It seemed a healthy steam valve.”
There was harder stuff than chocolate bars available on the set; nobody working on The Mosquito Coast who wanted alcohol or cocaine went unsatisfied. “It was like living in the drug capital of the Northern Hemisphere,” River allowed a couple of years later. “I’ve been so much more exposed than my folks think,” he said, with naked pain in his voice—regret that they had isolated him? Remorse for partying on the sly?
Also in the Mosquito Coast cast was the fifteen-year-old Martha Plimpton, the daughter of Keith Carradine and Shelley Plimpton (her parents met when they were both performing in the original Broadway run of the rock musical Hair). She played Emily Spellgood, the daughter of the Reverend Spellgood, a missionary who battles Allie Fox for influence over the natives. Emily has a crush on Charlie, as she lets him know in one of the most awkward come-ons in cinematic history: “I could be your girlfriend, if you want. I think about you when I go to the bathroom.”
“The character’s just so weird,” Plimpton later said of Emily. “She’s this missionary’s daughter who’s all sort of decked out in eighties new-wave teeny-bopper garb in the middle of the jungle, with her Walkman and her Lolita sunglasses.”
River and Plimpton had met a year earlier. “But we couldn’t stand each other,” River said. Isolated in the jungle, however, romance bloomed. “We’re just cooler, I guess,” he quipped.
Plimpton said the relationship was founded on professional respect: “I knew what it was like to work with adults who took their job seriously, but most of the time, if I was working with people my own age, they weren’t particularly interested in authenticity or studying what they were doing. So I think I had a kindred spirit there. And it was really great.”
“Martha Plimpton was his first real girlfriend,” Ethan Hawke observed. “Martha’s wonderful and extremely smart, but it wouldn’t be easy to have her as your first girlfriend. She doesn’t buy any bullshit.”
In his four months in the jungle, River grew three inches and lost the last remnants of his baby fat, dropping twenty pounds. Of his time in Belize, he said, “I learned that even among the chaos and discomfort you need to have the freedom of standing back and laughing, and not to take it all too seriously. Yet it is a serious job.”
When The Mosquito Coast was finally released, its reviews were middling; many critics found the monomania of Allie Fox (Ford’s character) as off-putting as his family ultimately did. Sheila Benson wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Half the conflict of the film lies in the horrified awakening of Charlie (played with exquisite gradation by River Phoenix) to the fallibility and growing madness of his father, whose image in the boy’s eyes once blotted out the sun. The film’s focus should eventually shift from father to son. But Allie Fox is too indelible a character for the reasonable transfer of power.” The movie wasn’t a hit; Ford cited it as the only movie he had ever made (at the time) that hadn’t earned its money back.
The Mosquito Coast is the movie where River discovered that he could immerse himself in a role so deeply that it would temporarily blot out his own personality and memories. He quickly decided that this was an excellent form of escapism. “It just feels so good,” he said. “It has nothing to do with the idea of movies, it’s just getting lost. Having an excuse to get that far out of your head is just a really good feeling.” In River’s telling, the pleasures of Method acting and large quantities of drugs sounded indistinguishable.
26
LAST YEAR AT THE VIPER ROOM
When Adam Duritz wrote “Mr. Jones,” he thought of it as a playful little tune about the fairy tale of rock stardom. Then it became a jet engine that propelled his band, Counting Crows, to stardom, and their debut album, August and Everything After, to sales of over seven million copies in the United States.
After a year on the road, Duritz returned home to Berkeley, California, and discovered that he had transformed from an underdog musician who loved Van Morrison into a figure of contempt. “I was having a really rough time—I was too famous that week,” Duritz said. “It just seemed like everywhere I went, for about six straight days, somebody came up to me and said something terrible—just something fucking nasty. And it was really all new to me then, so I was having a little trouble dealing with it.”
At home, Duritz got a call from Sal Jenco, Viper Room general manager, who had recently become a friend. Duritz unburdened himself, talking about how unhappy he was with this sort of homecoming. Jenco put him on hold—which didn’t seem like the most considerate response, except he returned a minute later to say that he had just reserved Duritz a plane ticket to L.A. at seven, and booked him a room at the Bel Age Hotel. “We’re having this party tonight and Johnny wanted me to invite you anyway, so why don’t you just come down?” Jenco asked.
Fuck it, Duritz thought. He threw a few things into a bag, headed to the airport, and never lived in Berkeley again. He went to the party and became a Viper Room regular.
“Adam was embraced by the Viper contingent,” said another Viper habitué, singer Morty Coyle. “The Vipers always had a soft spot in their hearts for the glitterati.”
Sometimes Duritz would even go behind the bar and pour drinks for a while. “I did make great tips,” he conceded. “I’ve never had a problem there. That’s one of the reasons I moved [to Los Angeles],” he said. “With everybody else running around, who cares about me? At the Viper Room, it was like I was a totally normal guy.”
27
HIS NAME IS RIO AND HE DANCES ON THE SAND
River was feeling vaguely uncertain about life, and considered his family’s usual solution: changing his name. He started introducing himself to people as “Rio”—Spanish for “river”—and wondered whether Rio Phoenix, or maybe just the single name Rio, sounded more viable as a name for a rock star. Although he had resolved to make a real effort when he acted, he hadn’t given up his first dream: having a musical career and changing the world through his songs.
While he dithered, fame overtook him: Stand by Me was released in August 1986 and became the sleeper hit of the summer. Within a few weeks, positive word of mouth had made it the number one movie in the United States, edging out The Fly and Top Gun. Reviews singled out River; People said he was being acclaimed as “one of the most exciting young actors on the screen.”
“Because he made such an impact on that film, he was not just another kid actor,” said preeminent film critic Roger Ebert. “He had a special quality, and it was a quality that he had all through his career. A certain cleanness or transparency, so it seemed that he was very natural and unaffected on the screen and not acting.”
As the breakout star of a surprise hit movie, River found his life changing quickly. His quote went up to $350,000 per movie, giving his family a financial cus
hion for the first time in his life and making him the most important client of Iris Burton’s agency. River attempted to block out the sensation that the world was now spinning on its axis five times faster than previously. “After Stand by Me came out, people were telling me ‘You’re so good,’ ‘You’re going to be a star,’ and things like that,” he said. “You can’t think about it. If you take the wrong way, you can get really high on yourself. People get so lost when that happens to them. They may think they have everything under control, but everything is really out of control. Their lives are totally in pieces.” As River spoke, he seemed to shift gradually from describing people he had observed to describing the pitfalls and hazards of his own life.
River tried to find ways to undermine his new, exalted movie-star status. Burton accompanied him to Tokyo for the Japanese premiere of the movie; they stayed at the lavish Imperial Hotel. When River found that the park next to the hotel had groups of kids hanging out and playing guitar, he invited them up to his room. “That room was filled with kids from the park,” Burton said. “He would play guitar for them and give them fruit and juice.”
An undeniable indicator of River’s new stardom: his appearance in the pages of celebrity pinup magazines like Bop! and Tiger Beat. (The class of publications is best typified by Lisa Simpson’s favorite, Non-Threatening Boys Magazine.) Cooperating with the publicity departments of movie studios, River found himself the subject of photo sessions that turned him into a pinup alongside Rob Lowe, Kirk Cameron, and the members of Duran Duran.
Only a few years later, he shuddered at the memory: “They teach you how to pose, you know, they say, ‘You have to do it like this!’ And you tilt your head and they show you how to push your lips out and suck in your cheek.” River groaned. “And then all the outtakes that you never want to see again in your life go through the teen magazines forever.”
Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind Page 8
