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

by Edwards, Gavin

  Aykroyd, who had lost his close friend and performing partner John Belushi to a drug overdose, tried to steer River away from heroin. “I think Aykroyd was a very good influence on his life,” Dobson said.

  Drake said that there were multiple interventions by River’s friends about his drinking and drug abuse, but none of them had any effect: “River had a strong passion and love of sensation, whether it was watching a full moon or tossing some pints.”

  Sneakers is not without charm—in a climactic scene, the principals are being held at gunpoint by the NSA, but then realize they have the black-box MacGuffin, and hence, the upper hand. They start making demands before they hand it over. Redford’s character obtains a promise that the federal government will leave him alone, while Aykroyd’s gets a fully kitted Winnebago. River’s character, Carl Arbogast, just asks for the phone number of “the young lady with the Uzi.” Moments like that are why the film was not only a solid box-office hit, but also has retained a small but devoted cult following across the decades.

  The film received generally positive, if not effusive, reviews. Rita Kempley in the Washington Post called it an “entertaining time-waster,” describing River’s performance as “sweetly underwhelming.”

  Ultimately, for all its twists, turns, and reverses, the picture feels thin and formulaic. River didn’t care for it, and told his friends not to see it. “I play this cyberpunk nerd, just full on,” he said. “I’ve really degraded myself. He’s very hyper, always twitching, the kind of guy you avoid playing if you want to walk with dignity and grace at the premiere.”

  In keeping with its code-breaking theme, the opening credits of Sneakers has the names of some of the film’s major players presented as anagrams before they get unscrambled: “BLOND RHINO SPANIEL” becomes “PHIL ALDEN ROBINSON,” while “FORT RED BORDER” turns into “ROBERT REDFORD” and “A TURNIP CURES ELVIS” reveals itself as “UNIVERSAL PICTURES.” Not all cast members got their names shuffled—if they had, the world might have discovered that one anagram for “RIVER PHOENIX” is “VIPER HEROIN X.”

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  THE MOVIES OF RIVER PHOENIX, RANKED BY AMERICAN BOX OFFICE

  Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ($197.1)

  Stand by Me ($52.3)

  Sneakers ($51.4)

  I Love You to Death ($16.1)

  The Mosquito Coast ($14.3)

  Explorers ($9.8)

  My Own Private Idaho ($6.4)

  A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon ($6.2)

  Running on Empty ($2.8)

  Little Nikita ($1.7)

  The Thing Called Love ($1.0)

  Dogfight ($0.3)

  Silent Tongue ($0.06)

  All numbers are in millions of dollars and not adjusted for inflation or rounded up, meaning that Sneakers grossed $51,432,691, Dogfight $394,631 and Silent Tongue just $61,274.

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  COWBOY MOUTH

  With Sneakers all laced up, River went straight to New Mexico to make Silent Tongue. The western ghost story was written and directed by Sam Shepard, the acclaimed playwright who had found primal poetry in surreal tales of family conflict such as True West, winning the Pulitzer for Buried Child. He was also famous for playing Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff—he received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor—and for his long-term relationship with Jessica Lange.

  Another Silent Tongue actor was Dermot Mulroney, who became friendly with River and tried to bring him up to speed on their director’s awe-inspiring CV. “Imagine me having to be the one to educate River on what Sam Shepard has written,” he said. “He had no concept of Sam as a playwright or a screenwriter or a director, or anything other than a sort of actor or well-known something or other. I had to explain to him what a Pulitzer Prize was and what Sam won it for and why: ‘Here’s another play, River, I know you’re not going to read the whole play, but please read these three pages before you have to jump up and do something else.’ He was undereducated and overintelligent.”

  Aside from Mulroney, the cast included Bill Irwin, Alan Bates, and Richard Harris. River played Talbot Roe, a settler on the American frontier in 1873, driven mad with grief over the death of his wife, the half–Native American Awbonnie (Sheila Tousey). His father (Harris) visits Eamon McCree (Bates), who runs the traveling Kickapoo Indian Medicine Show, and offers him gold for his daughter—the sister of Talbot’s wife. Meanwhile, Talbot sinks deeper into insanity, putting a shotgun to his chin, covering his face with white paint, and refusing to dispose of Awbonnie’s corpse, declaring, “I will not stop until your hair has blown away”—even after her ghost appears to him, demanding that he burn her body so she can move on to the spirit world.

  The movie, stronger on mood than plot, isn’t very good—Silent Tongue ended up being the second and final film directed by Shepard. But if its ambition exceeds its reach, at least it has ambition.

  As was his habit, River found an older man working on the movie to be his role model and surrogate father for the duration of the shoot. In this case, it was the hard-living Richard Harris, an Oscar nominee in 1967 for This Sporting Life and in 1990 for The Field, and also a top-ten recording artist with his version of “MacArthur Park.”

  River was very protective of the sixty-year-old Harris, driving him to the set every day and making sure that he had company. “He looked upon me as a kind of father figure. He’d knock at my door and ask if he could come in and sleep,” Harris said. “He’d sleep on the couch. I could hear him rehearsing his lines—at four in the morning. I said, ‘Fuckin’ go to sleep.’ He’d be in the bathroom, taking a crap, doing his lines.”

  River’s actual father, John Phoenix, was well aware that his son had filled his absence with a series of other men—which didn’t stop him from abdicating to Costa Rica. When John met William Richert, the longest running of the substitute patriarchs, he looked him in the eye and said, “You know, I think you’re his real father.”

  Richert replied, “No, I’m his real friend.”

  John, who might have preferred to be friend rather than father, ended up not really being either.

  River was booked to work only three weeks on Silent Tongue, but he ended up staying for the whole seven-week shoot. When he was playing Talbot, he did so with vigor, his voice cracking, his eyes wild, his face a rictus of grief and madness. River was so fully grunged up as an unwashed frontiersman, he was barely recognizable.

  Mulroney said, “Sam was, in my opinion, completely and utterly perplexed by River. He was truly taken with him but couldn’t figure him out. Sam would always have that crooked smile, watching, trying to figure out how much of this was River preparing to play an uncultured mad dog, and how much of it was really River.”

  Some of the filmmakers wondered whether River was acting under the influence, but everyone was impressed by his spirit and his generosity. This was consistently true—even during his periods of heaviest drug use, River didn’t succumb to the solipsistic worldview of the junkie, where humanity separates into people who can help you get your next fix and people who can’t. The Silent Tongue production had only four trailers, which were assigned to the top talent. When River discovered that Sheila Tousey, who played his wife, required long hours for her revenant makeup and extensive vocal exercises, but had access only to the communal makeup trailer nicknamed the “honey wagon,” he volunteered to swap spaces with her. Producer Carolyn Pfeiffer remembered, “I’d never had an actor say, ‘May I give up my comfortable space for a smaller one because one of my fellow performers needs it more than I do?’ ”

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  BURN HOLLYWOOD BURN

  While River Phoenix was in New Mexico, Los Angeles caught on fire. After four policemen brutally beat Rodney King at the end of a high-speed chase—an act caught on videotape—they went on trial for assault and excessive force. When they were acquitted, on April 29, 1992, the African American community of Los Angeles exploded, furious at the jury condoning the white-on-black police brutality. Thousands (of all ethnicities)
rioted over the course of a week; there was almost a billion dollars in property damage and over fifty people died. The violence was quelled only by the arrival of the National Guard and federal troops.

  The Cosby Show, which had presented a prosperous black family in Brooklyn Heights for eight seasons without dwelling on race relations, aired its final episode on April 30, with the riots in full swing and nobody in the United States thinking about anything but race relations.

  With the LAPD unable to provide security, the studios shut down location shoots. A mob of one hundred attempted to storm the headquarters of the Directors Guild of America, where a screening of Big Girls Don’t Cry was being held. The Lakers and Clippers both moved their playoff games out of town. David Bowie and Iman, intending to begin their married life together in Los Angeles, flew into LAX just as the riots began; they ended up living in New York. Playboy didn’t cancel the Playmate of the Year lunch at the Playboy Mansion, crowning Corinna Harney as its youngest-ever holder of that title.

  There were dead bodies in the streets.

  By the time Silent Tongue wrapped, the riots were over, but L.A. was pockmarked with rubble—buildings and entire minimalls that just weren’t there anymore, like a pearly-white smile that had a few teeth knocked out. Nevertheless, River flew west to L.A. rather than east to Gainesville. After he’d gotten dropped by Island, there didn’t seem to be much point to revving up Aleka’s Attic again. L.A. offered him the opportunity to figure out his next move, and to have a good time.

  River visited Richert, with Joaquin tagging along—he had decided to drop “Leaf” and revert to his birth name. Richert’s house had a two-story atrium with a glass dome on the top. The day was cold, so the glass had fogged up. Richert looked up to discover that “Joaquin had drawn Satan in every single window.”

  Worried that Joaquin might fall through the glass, killing himself and the people below, Richert yelled at him to come down. Joaquin, framed by the scrawls in the condensation so that he appeared to have horns himself, just laughed.

  “Joaquin had a whole other kind of energy,” Richert said. “He was not River. His mother was not River. None of those people were River, even if he took care of them and they all called themselves Phoenix.”

  “I’m a minor, stupid talent compared to my brother,” River said.

  River was fond of pranks himself, although without a diabolical edge—his taste lay more in the direction of tall tales. Nick Richert, son of the director, said, “River would just bullshit and say anything and you’d believe it. He was a mind-fucker. I always had to stay aloof from him because I didn’t want to get drawn in and seem gullible.”

  River decided that he would surprise Solgot, who was in San Francisco on her birthday. He flew up to visit her, accompanied by Richert. They went to her birthday party—but just before they entered, River pulled out a paper bag and put it over his head. “Nobody knew it was him, even his girlfriend didn’t,” Richert said. This seems, frankly, implausible—even if somehow Solgot didn’t recognize his voice or his body, surely the presence of River’s close friend Richert was a dead giveaway.

  Whether they were genuinely fooled or just humoring River, everyone at the party played along, interacting with Mr. Sack as an anonymous party guest. River didn’t drop the gag, keeping the paper bag on for three hours; eventually everybody accepted that there was a guest with unusual headgear. “He was watching what everybody else was doing,” Richert said. “I remember thinking how devoted he was to a trick that he wanted to pull off. He never took this bag off.”

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  MANY RIVERS TO CROSS

  River started meeting with John Boorman, the British director of Point Blank, Deliverance, and Excalibur. Back in 1979, Boorman and Irish director Neil Jordan had written a science-fiction script called Broken Dream, and had been trying to get it made ever since. River agreed to play Ben, a magician in a dystopic world—Ben’s father teaches him to make things (and ultimately people) vanish. Winona Ryder signed on as well, and when Jordan had a big hit with The Crying Game in October 1992, it looked like the movie was finally happening. But then—in a common film-world setback—the funding collapsed and the project was shelved. (Two decades later, in 2012, Boorman announced the revival of the project with Ben Kingsley, John Hurt, and Caleb Landry Jones—although a year later, there appeared to be no forward motion, meaning the Broken Dream clock had been running for over thirty-four years.)

  “I met with River a few times,” Boorman said. “He was streetwise, but at the same time, there was this fragility about him. You felt that somehow he had to be protected.”

  German director Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum, The Handmaid’s Tale) wanted River to star in the film version of Christopher Hampton’s play Total Eclipse as Arthur Rimbaud, the enfant terrible of nineteenth-century French poetry. As a teen, Rimbaud famously had a torrid affair with the older French poet Paul Verlaine, which ended when Verlaine shot him in the wrist. Rimbaud, ravenous for all forms of human experience, did his most famous work (“Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) and Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell)) before the age of nineteen, when he renounced poetry.

  One hundred and one years after Rimbaud’s death, River felt so deeply connected to him that he started carrying around a copy of Time of the Assassins, Henry Miller’s biography of the poet. He obsessively found connections between his own life and Rimbaud’s and would quote key passages from Miller’s book to friends.

  Time of the Assassins portrayed the artist as the most exalted and the most wretched creature on earth: “Conditioned to ecstasy, the poet is like a gorgeous unknown bird mired in the ashes of thought. If he succeeds in freeing himself, it is to make a sacrificial flight to the sun. His dreams of a regenerate world are but the reverberations of his own fevered pulse beats. He imagines the world will follow him, but in the blue he finds himself alone.”

  For River to discover himself in Rimbaud’s life and Miller’s prose was simultaneously self-aggrandizing and self-pitying. Tellingly, he was more interested in Miller’s book than in Rimbaud’s actual writing: he responded to Rimbaud not as a poet, but as a symbol.

  John Malkovich signed on as Verlaine. While River waited for the project to come together—for any project to come together—he stayed in L.A. and kept partying. Solgot thought of Los Angeles as the poisoned wellspring of River’s drug problems; too many people there were eager to supply him with whatever substance he desired. The couple’s relationship was undergoing tremors as two tectonic plates ground against each other: River’s drug use and his denial of the idea that it was a problem. “He didn’t want me nagging him,” Solgot said. “Pointing out the contradictions between his public stands and what he was doing to his body.”

  “He was hanging around with people who didn’t really care about him,” said Louanne Sirota, who had acted with him in Jimmy Reardon and Seven Brides. “I know he was hanging around with a couple of English dudes that couldn’t have given a shit about who he was, as far as a human being goes; they were about as shallow as a two-foot pool.”

  At a 1992 wedding, River’s decline was obvious to everyone in attendance. “It was a formal affair,” said one of the guests. “Even the Chili Peppers were wearing cheesy seventies tuxedos. But River arrived at 9:30 A.M., drinking a bottle of wine, dressed in sneakers, a pair of shaggy, ripped shorts, and a dirty T-shirt. People were angry with him.”

  Martha Plimpton would sometimes talk with River on the phone, but “his language had become at times totally incoherent,” she said. “He’d often be high when he called, and I’d listen for twenty minutes to his jumbled, made-up words, his own logic, and not know what the fuck he was talking about. He’d say, ‘You’re just not listening carefully enough.’ ”

  River was not blind to addiction—he personally drove a rock-star guitarist friend to rehab. Twice. And he knew that his consumption of hard drugs was not congruent with his tree-hugging image, even wondering aloud, “What would those twelve-year-old
girls with a picture of me over their bed think if they knew?” But that didn’t mean he would actually admit he had a problem.

  “He fooled a lot of people and he fooled himself,” Solgot said. “He was a great actor.”

  Paul Petersen, a former Mouseketeer and star of The Donna Reed Show, had started a support organization for former child stars, called A Minor Concern. In mid-1992, he got “a frantic phone call from a journalist pal who saw River and five other young actors shooting up in the bathroom of the Roxy,” he said. The Roxy was a storied rock club on the Sunset Strip, a quarter mile from the Viper Room’s future location.

  Believing strongly in the power of intervention, Petersen gathered a medical doctor and another former child star, and went to visit River in his hotel room.

  River opened the door a crack, but wouldn’t let them in. He told them that the Roxy story was a lie, declaring, “I don’t even eat meat.” (True, but a non sequitur.)

  “He was in heavy denial and obviously loaded,” Petersen remembered.

  “I don’t need your help,” River told them. And then he shut the door.

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  THE LAST PICTURE

  In an effort to get her top-earning slice of filet mignon working again, Iris Burton sent River the screenplay for The Thing Called Love, a tale of romance among aspiring singer/songwriters in Nashville.

  A few days later, River called her back. “This script really isn’t ready at all,” he chided her.

  Burton agreed, but said that she was confident it would be whipped into shape, since the director was Peter Bogdanovich. River, however, had no idea who that was.

  In the late sixties, Peter Bogdanovich had turned his autodidactic film obsession into a career as a movie director—much like Quentin Tarantino two decades later, except Bogdanovich’s training ground was programming the film series at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, not working behind the counter at the Video Archives video-rental store in Manhattan Beach. After filming two movies for low-budget schlockmeister Roger Corman, Bogdanovich made his masterpiece in 1971: The Last Picture Show was an elegiac black-and-white picture about coming of age in a dying Texas town. Bogdanovich was nominated for two Oscars, and left his wife (editor Polly Platt) for his star, Cybill Shepherd. His movies after that included Paper Moon and Mask, but he entered into a long, slow artistic decline. He became most famous for dating Playmate Dorothy Stratten—and then, after she was brutally murdered by her ex, marrying her younger sister, Louise.