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.
74
I’M IN A TRANSITIONAL PERIOD, SO I DON’T WANT TO KILL YOU
Three years later, Quentin Tarantino surveyed the state of the movie business in the nineties, when the realization sank in among studio executives that the rules for commercial success had been upended. “Basically, that whole Touchstone formula that was existing in the eighties, that couldn’t miss, is missing now. It doesn’t work,” he said gleefully. “The movies that are, like, sequels to the real big ones work because the audience has an investment in the franchise. But either the movies that used to be making $100 million are barely making $20 million or they’re not even making that. I think right now is the most exciting time in Hollywood since 1971. Because Hollywood is never more exciting than when you don’t know.”
Tarantino did as much as anyone to upend those expectations when his Pulp Fiction did over $100 million at the American box office, reviving John Travolta’s career and making the multiplexes safe for chronology-scrambling movies about foulmouthed gangsters making unlikely pop-culture references and groping toward a state of grace. (Unfortunately, that became a formula too.) In 1993, Tarantino was filming Pulp Fiction; the same year, sensing a tidal change in taste without really understanding it, Disney acquired Harvey and Bob Weinstein’s Miramax, the production company behind Tarantino.
Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater’s pitch-perfect comedy about the last day of school in a Texas town in 1976, didn’t do as much box office, but it laid out a new, looser way forward for movie comedies, and launched the careers of a large ensemble cast, including Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, and Milla Jovovich.
By 1993, River had been acting long enough—over a decade since he showed up at the Seven Brides for Seven Brothers ranch—that he was a seasoned veteran. But he was young enough that he was in a good position to surf the wave of generational change washing through Hollywood. He was, for example, younger than Matthew McConaughey.
Bill Clinton won the 1992 presidential election and moved into the White House in 1993. Just forty-six, he represented a new generation: the first American president born after World War II. (River served as his opening act at an early-morning campaign rally in Florida, playing music for a crowd of thousands of voters.)
Nineteen ninety-three was also the year of the first web browser, and the debut of Wired magazine. Culture was rapidly decentralizing, both through technology and changing taste, but the transition provoked anxiety. When Nirvana hit the top of the charts in 1992 and made the cover of Rolling Stone, Kurt Cobain wore a handmade T-shirt to the cover shoot. Its message: CORPORATE MAGAZINES STILL SUCK. It was a gesture born not just out of surprise that the band had catapulted from the cultural margins to the center, but out of dismay that the margins themselves had collapsed.
75
IF I HAD A HI-FI
The onetime dogfather of Gainesville was spending less and less time in Florida. After The Thing Called Love wrapped, he officially broke up with Solgot; they parted on amicable terms and she moved to San Francisco to work as a masseuse. While River and Mathis were smitten with each other, they didn’t have the easy hippie domesticity that he and Solgot had found. One friend commented later, “I don’t think their relationship would have lasted.”
Some fans started making pilgrimages to Gainesville specifically to seek out River. One group of young Japanese female tourists came into a bar where River was having a beer, said a woman who was working there, and “started crying and trying to touch him. It was a weird scenario and it really freaked him out.”
River considered leaving Florida, maybe giving away the Micanopy property to charity. He talked about moving to Boston, or Canada, or Athens, Georgia—he had spent time there playing music and hanging out with Michael Stipe. What kept him in Gainesville was Aleka’s Attic.
With enough time to recover from the shock of the Island rejection, River had thrown himself back into his music. Violist Tim Hankins and bassist Josh McKay were gone, having started a new group. River didn’t replace Hankins, but he recruited Sasa Raphael, a friend of Joaquin’s, to play bass. With Rain and drummer Josh Greenbaum, they all went into the Pro Media Recording Studio in Gainesville. River paid for the studio time, and for the services of Grammy-nominated recording engineer Mark Pinske (a Frank Zappa veteran).
The sessions, costing thousands of dollars a week, happened sporadically for over a year whenever River was in Gainesville, ultimately adding up to about three months in the studio. Before River had to start filming Dark Blood, he made a final monthlong push, wanting to complete enough material for an album.
“River was in charge of everything,” Pinske said. “Whatever River wanted, we did. He was a workhorse. He’d want to go, go, go, and sometimes we’d get past the point of no return.”
Recording would typically last from noon until 6 A.M. the following day. After eighteen hours, River would collapse, sometimes falling asleep in his clothes, cradling his guitar. Heart made a daily appearance with health drinks and vegetarian platters, helping to keep everyone’s strength up for the marathon sessions.
River kept writing song after song—after he finished each one, he would declare, “It’s brilliant, brilliant.” If anyone offered him advice or suggestions, he would blow them off, saying he didn’t want to compromise the original idea. During the course of the sessions, he got a staggering ninety songs down on tape, but many of them were unpolished. River would quickly lose interest in fleshing out his material—he always had another song he wanted to get down.
“We were in overdrive,” Raphael said. River experimented with unusual sonic ideas, such as doi
ng vocals through a long tube or recording windshield wipers in the parking lot and incorporating the rhythm into a song.
Studio owner Dave Smadbeck, who was also working on the sessions, advised River that he needed more focus, with no effect. “He was being so creative that it was just one raw piece after another,” he said. “He just had to get it out at any cost.”
John had come up from Costa Rica to visit the family. He tried to be at every session, but didn’t have the stamina for River’s relentless pace. One time, when River found his father asleep on the studio couch, he positioned a microphone near his mouth to record his snores. Turning on his video camera to capture the scene, he then “interviewed” John. He would ask his father various questions—and each time, in response, John would snore. River and Joaquin were both helpless with laughter; when John woke up, he thought it was funny, too, and watched the video over and over. Neither father nor son could fix the other’s problems, but they could take pleasure in each other’s company.
The tracks, compiled after River’s death and leaked under the title Never Odd or Even (also sometimes called Zoo), showcased the strengths and weaknesses of Aleka’s Attic. On the positive side, the band was in sync; Sasa Raphael proved to be an inventive bassist; Rain Phoenix had a lovely, warm voice, and got most of the lead vocals. On the negative side, the tracks felt more like sketches than actual songs. Some of them were extremely short—“Scales & Fishnails” was just forty-eight seconds long—and would have benefited from choruses, bridges, and other fundamentals of songwriting. When River didn’t write a melody or a hook, the band either noodled pleasantly or settled into a languorous groove. In person, River’s charisma (even with his hair over his face) was sufficient to make up for these flaws, but without his physical presence, Aleka’s Attic was just another pretty good local band not ready to go nationwide.
Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind Page 19
