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

by Edwards, Gavin

  The best song was “Note to a Friend.” “My days are heavy / Of the inside of your denial,” River and Rain harmonized, transforming surreal gloom into a pretty melody, while River did some open-chord strumming. Their voices blended and separated with the ease that came after years of playing together. It sounded lovely, but at seventy-two seconds, it also sounded like the introduction to an unwritten song.

  River’s preferred mode of lyric writing was to string together evocative non sequiturs: “Let’s start with nothing,” “Backwards motion, all fall down,” “Don’t want to hear from your satellite.” He had grown fond of palindromes (phrases that have the same letters when read backward): Never Odd or Even was one, as were the song titles “Dog God” and “Senile Felines.” A palindrome promises the ability to reverse time: to return to your youth with the knowledge of how to survive it or to bring your childhood innocence into the present day. River could do those things in music, if nowhere else.

  76

  FIRST NIGHT AT THE VIPER ROOM

  In Los Angeles, a building seems historic if it makes it ten years without being knocked down for a gas station, which made 8852 Sunset Boulevard the Stonehenge of L.A. drinking establishments. It dated back to Prohibition times, when it was a speakeasy partially owned by “Lucky” Luciano. (Since Luciano was the supreme boss of organized crime in the United States, the same could likely be said of many drinking establishments.)

  In the 1940s, it was called the Melody Room, and was controlled by “Bugsy” Siegel, a childhood friend of Al Capone who became a bootlegger and hit man; he had come to Los Angeles to develop gambling syndicates, and palled around with movie stars and studio heads. He poured an enormous amount of mob money into building Las Vegas, specifically the Flamingo Hotel; in 1947, he was shot twice in the head.

  The Melody Room hosted an array of cool musical acts, including Dizzy Gillespie, Esquivel, and Billy Ward and His Dominoes. Circa 1969, it was renamed Filthy McNasty’s, having been bought by two German brothers who legally renamed themselves Filthy McNasty and Wolfgang McNasty. Filthy was the showman, who cruised around town in his antique hearse or his stretch limo. One bartender remembered, “On nights when a hired band failed to show, Filthy climbed onstage with his all-girl band.” His big hit: “You’re Breakin’ My Heart, You Tear It Apart, So Fuck You.”

  In 1974, the British glam-rock band the Sweet had a Sunset Strip photo session for the cover of their second album, Desolation Boulevard (featuring the immortal “Fox on the Run”). They took the picture just outside Filthy McNasty’s; the club’s sign can be seen in the upper-left-hand corner of the cover.

  In the eighties, after the McNasty brothers sold out, the bar became an anonymous watering hole called the Central. “It was a dive,” said musician Morty Coyle. By 1993, the Sunset Strip had been rendered generally uncool by the lingering aroma of heavy metal and Aqua Net, but the Central was particularly low rent, with sawdust on the floor and a peanut vending machine mounted on the wall. “Anybody could get a gig there,” Coyle said. “Anybody. There was a great AA meeting at the Central during the day on Mondays. It was like therapy—at the point of the problem.”

  The musician Chuck E. Weiss, an old drinking buddy of Tom Waits and the subject of Rickie Lee Jones’s 1979 hit single “Chuck E.’s in Love,” took up a weekly residency at the Central. He had been playing every Monday night for eleven years when one of the co-owners died. The remaining owner, Anthony Fox, didn’t want to run the business—he had another job, and the Central was piling up bills.

  Weiss alerted Johnny Depp, who had been coming to his Monday-night shows with his pal Sal Jenco. Adam Duritz, lead singer of Counting Crows, explained what went down with Depp and Jenco: “When the Central was closing down, the idea of Chuck not having a place to play was just terrible to them. So in order to keep Chuck playing and have a place for all their friends to hang out, they started the Viper Room.”

  Both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Frank Stallone (Sylvester’s brother) made bids on the property, but Depp won out. Essentially on a lark, he put down a reported $350,000 to acquire fifty-one percent of the club’s controlling company, making him CEO of “Safe in Heaven Dead.” Fox retained forty-nine percent and was named vice president, drawing a salary of $800 a week; Jenco became general manager (and had a share of Depp’s stake).

  Depp renamed the club the Viper Room—a “viper” was 1920s drug slang for, depending on who you asked, a heroin user or a pot smoker. Depp explained the inspiration as “a group of musicians in the thirties who called themselves vipers. They were reefer heads and they helped start modern music.”

  The new regime tore out all the Central’s decor (such as it was) and refurbished the club in basic black. It was a small space, holding about 250 patrons; the club was built into the side of a hill. The entrance was on the side street of Larrabee; after coming in, you could linger in the downstairs bar or head up the stairs to the main room, where there was a small stage and another bar. A VIP room was tucked behind one-way glass, and an exit led directly to Sunset Boulevard. One private booth was reserved for Depp and his agent, Tracy Jacobs, adorned with a sign reading DON’T FUCK WITH IT.

  Depp’s stated plan was to make the ambience cooler, but to maintain the Viper Room as a low-key joint where he and his friends could hang out. Like River, or Dan Aykroyd, who had opened the House of Blues on the other end of the Strip, Depp loved music—and now he had a place where he could jump onstage whenever he felt like it.

  What Depp hadn’t counted on was that the very fact of his owning the club would alter its status—just as in quantum mechanics, you can’t observe a particle without changing its condition. “The place became a scene instantly when we opened it,” Depp complained. “I never had any idea it was going to do that. I really thought it was going to be just this cool little underground place. You can’t even see the place—there’s no sign on Sunset. It’s just a black building, and the only sign is on Larrabee: a tiny little sign, real subtle. And I figured it’d be low-key.”

  Of course, if Depp had really wanted to keep everything low-key, he wouldn’t have booked Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The band—Gainesville’s most famous residents before River Phoenix—owed Depp a favor for his appearance in the video for “Into the Great White Open,” and so agreed to play a benefit on opening night. Well, all of them except drummer Stan Lynch, who had recently moved back to Florida and didn’t see why he should return to L.A. for a free show.

  A pissed-off Petty directed the band’s management office, “Just tell Stan, ‘Never mind, Ringo’s going to do it.’ ” Within twenty-four hours, Lynch was back in town.

  Depp was unaware of that drama until years later. When informed, he mused, “God, it would have been cool to see Ringo play.”

  Weiss was astonished at how quickly attitudes had changed toward his old haunt: “People who had never walked into the Central felt very strongly about being there.” People who made it inside for the Viper Room’s opening night on August 14, 1993, included Quentin Tarantino, Julien Temple, Mary Stuart Masterson, Crispin Glover, and Tim Burton.

  Part of the reason the Viper Room was immediately trendy was that although the Sunset Strip was arguably the heart of Los Angeles, by 1993 it was covered in arteriosclerotic heavy-metal plaque. The eighties had made the Strip synonymous with hair-metal bands. A few of them became internationally famous (Mötley Crüe, Poison), but most had nothing more to show for their time in L.A. than some herpes sores. In 1991, when rock fans moved on to Nirvana and Pearl Jam, big hair and screeching vocals were immediately out of date. The metal party was over and “alternative” was cool.

  The most storied of the Sunset Strip’s rock temples was the Whisky a Go Go, right across the street from the Viper Room. “There used to be graffiti by Morrison and Hendrix on the dressing room’s ceiling panels,” punk-rock legend Henry Rollins said of the Whisky. “That’s pretty amazing.” The club opened in 1964 (there was an earlier outpost in Chicago), and with l
ive music and dancing girls soon became the center of the L.A. rock scene. For a while, the house band was the Doors, who played dozens of shows until the night Jim Morrison blurted out “Mother, I wanna fuck you” at the climax of “The End.” Since then, it had hosted everyone from Van Halen to Guns N’ Roses.

  On the corner of Sunset and Larrabee, sharing a physical building with the Viper Room, was a liquor store. Just down the street was Tower Records, which by 1993 had switched most of its stock from vinyl to CDs, and still provided employment opportunities for musicians who needed to pay the rent.

  Close on the heels of the Tom Petty show came another impossibly hot ticket: country legend Johnny Cash had signed with Rick Rubin’s American Recordings label (which had just changed its name from Def American Recordings, holding a mock funeral to bury the “Def,” with Al Sharpton presiding). Cash did a solo acoustic gig on the Viper Room stage; the club was soon hailed as the hippest room in town.

  The Viper Room was quickly turning into a giant VIP room, a place where on many nights the audience was more famous than the performers. The most exclusive spot within the Viper Room, unusually, was not the actual VIP room, but the club’s offices, where Depp could sometimes be found. When he got bored, he would watch the Viper Room entrance through a closed-circuit TV and instruct whoever was working the door on whether to admit particular individuals to the club or turn them away.

  Many of the regulars were Friends of Johnny, including actor Vincent D’Onofrio, musician Evan Dando (of the Lemonheads), the band Thelonious Monster, and rock legend Iggy Pop. By most accounts, the people working at the Viper Room were warmhearted and generally not assholes—but you might never learn that if you didn’t already have some celebrity juice. The Wallflowers got a weekly gig at the Viper Room right after it opened; they didn’t even have a record contract at the time. Singer Jakob Dylan said, “We just walked in, brought Sal a tape, and for whatever reason, he gave us a chance to play.” It surely didn’t hurt that his father was Bob Dylan.

  Some nights, a limousine would shuttle select personalities back and forth between the Viper Room and a hotel room at the Chateau Marmont, on the other end of the Strip. They could do some serious drug consumption off premises, and then move the party back to the Viper Room.

  By the early nineties, the L.A. music world had migrated east, to the boho district of Silver Lake, home of hipsters and adult kickball games; folkie/rapper Beck exemplified the new scene, even before he had the surprise hit single “Loser.” While the Viper Room would attract rock stars looking for an intimate place to play—Lenny Kravitz and Stephen Stills both got onstage multiple times (not together)—it rarely booked musicians from the east side of town. But the club did get Beck to play—once.

  George Drakoulias, a producer at American Recordings who got name-checked on the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, remembered the show as “a very bizarre night. He did some break dancing and things like that, and people didn’t know what to make of it. They just stared at him.” When Beck played a solo on an electric leaf blower, Depp personally pulled the plug on him.

  “Johnny lost interest in the place really quick,” said one former employee. He mostly left the logistics of running the club to Jenco and dropped by when it entertained him. Sometimes at the end of the night, Depp would host a private party for his friends. Kate Moss might get behind the bar; Naomi Campbell might dance with security; Depp might have a long conversation with Chrissie Hynde about religion. On those nights, Depp had reduced the Viper Room to its essence: a party room for him and his celebrity pals.

  77

  GIVE BLOOD

  After finishing the Aleka’s Attic sessions, River celebrated his twenty-third birthday—on August 23, 1993—and then flew down to Costa Rica with all his siblings and his father. John was opening a vegan restaurant, but his real agenda was to get his children, especially River, to leave behind the corruption of the USA and live by the Phoenix family values again. John explained, “The idea was for them to spend more time here, helping with the cooking, making music, writing, harvesting the organic fruit, and living off the land like we used to.”

  John implored River to get out of the movie business before it ate him up. Eventually, River acceded, either because John had convinced him or because he was tired of arguing about it. But he had to fulfill his agreements, he told his father: he had signed contracts to appear in Dark Blood and Interview with the Vampire, and he had promised William Richert that he would be in his version of The Man in the Iron Mask. After he made those three films, he could quit and move down to Costa Rica.

  “As it turned out,” John said, “that was too many.”

  When River left Costa Rica, he said, “I’ll see you after this movie, Dad”—a commonplace sentiment that nobody would ever have remembered if things had turned out differently.

  “Well, he did,” John said. “Only he was in a box.”

  George Sluizer, the director of Dark Blood, had heard rumors about River’s drug use, but he didn’t worry about them. “I knew of his drug habit,” he said. “The actors in Hollywood, at the top level, all are, I would say, drug addicts in some way or another. I worked with Kiefer Sutherland: he was a whisky addict, two bottles a day. He wanted to compete with me: ‘You drink one bottle, I drink one bottle, let’s see if you’re drunk.’ I never on set noticed that he had drunk anything—in the morning, he was sober.”

  Sluizer asked River to come out to the film’s desert location five days before everyone else. “I wanted him to breathe the Utah air, to readjust, and let him remember the relationship we had to build for the next seven or eight weeks,” Sluizer said. Those five days also provided some time for River to detox, but apparently he arrived clean and healthy.

  Actor and director went hiking in the Utah mountains, bringing a few sandwiches and spending all day tramping about: breathing fresh air, they attuned themselves to the desert landscape. River was gradually submerging himself in his character. More than ever, he liked shedding the person he had become so he could transform into somebody else’s invention. “That’s the only time I have security,” he said. “Myself is a bum! Myself is nothing!”

  The movie was centered on the house of Boy, ramshackle but scenically located. Sluizer had found the location he thought was ideal visually, but it was far from any vestiges of civilization: “Maybe twenty miles from the nearest house and thirty miles from the nearest village,” Sluizer said. The production staff objected—they wanted to be closer to a restaurant and a hotel, and other useful infrastructure. “I’m not an idiot,” Sluizer said. “I’m not like Werner Herzog, saying, ‘There’s a nice tree, but it’s thirty miles away,’ when the same tree is one mile away. But the location was important.”

  Sluizer had actually worked with Herzog, the famously uncompromising German director, on his 1982 movie Fitzcarraldo, about a European rubber baron attempting to bring a steamer ship across land in the Peruvian jungle. The movie was originally intended to star Jason Robards and Mick Jagger, but Robards dropped out when he got dysentery, and Jagger then had to depart for Rolling Stones commitments. “All the Americans left,” Sluizer said dismissively. “That’s why they lost Vietnam.”

  Sluizer took pride in working on that movie, as he did in the documentary he made for National Geographic in the sixties that required him to spend five months in Siberia at temperatures reaching seventy degrees below zero (Celsius). “Very difficult, but I loved it,” he said. “There’s something that attracts me to extreme circumstances, the opposite of the Hollywood people who are used to a swimming pool and a shower.”

  So Sluizer scoffed at the relatively mild deprivations of Dark Blood; the production booked a local motel and rented some nearby houses. Hollywood people being unable to cope with the real world is a major theme of Dark Blood: a Hollywood couple drive their Bentley into the desert on a second honeymoon, and get into big trouble when it breaks down. The couple, Harry and Buffy, was played by British actor Jonathan Pryce and Australi
an actress Judy Davis (Oscar-nominated for her work in David Lean’s A Passage to India and Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives).

  River played Boy, who takes them in, but develops an infatuation with Buffy, whom he recognizes from her days as a Playboy pinup, and becomes hostile when Harry attempts to leave. It emerges that Boy is mourning the death of his Native American wife (a motif overlapping with Silent Tongue). She died from cancer, a result of the fallout from the nuclear bombs the U.S. government had tested—and while Boy may be a prophet of the desert, he is also unbalanced. The movie ends in violence and fire. Harry kills Boy with an ax, and Boy’s house burns down.

  River revered Pryce: he had starred in River’s favorite movie, Brazil, the absurd urban dystopia directed by Terry Gilliam (formerly of Monty Python’s Flying Circus) that River had seen thirteen times. Things were tougher with Judy Davis, who was brilliant, but famously acerbic. Dark Blood producer Nik Powell said, “Since David Lean could not get Davis to do what he wanted her to do in his film, it is no surprise that George Sluizer had difficulties.”

  “We were not the best of friends, Judy and me,” Sluizer said. “She made my life very tough, and I have never had to deal with a person making it so difficult.” Having agreed to the script, he said, she started demanding various changes; as Sluizer told it, some were to correct what she saw as the screenplay’s antifeminism while others were to cater to her vanity.

  River, used to playing the peacemaker, tried to intercede between Davis and Sluizer, only to find himself the object of her scorn: she nicknamed him “Frat Boy.” When River, trying to be friendly, asked Davis when her family would be visiting the set, she snapped, “What is this, Frat Boy’s question time?” She also believed River was using drugs. “I thought he was doing something when I first got there,” she said. “There was one day when he came in so out of it. River said he’d had too much sodium the night before. Okay, I’ve never had a sodium overdose. Maybe that’s exactly what they’re like.”