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

by Edwards, Gavin

  “He did not use anything during the period we were in Utah,” Sluizer insisted. “I would put my hand in the fire and swear to it.”

  River’s difficulty with the script derived from the quantity of Boy’s monologues; he was having a hard time memorizing them accurately, and would sometimes flip the word order. “He had difficulty with certain lines,” Sluizer said. “He asked me a few times in rehearsal if he could change the line—it’s too complicated or too long. I was strict. I said, ‘We’ve been thinking about the story and the character for two years now—we’re not going to change it because you’re dyslexic.’ And that might hurt a little bit—I’m saying, ‘I don’t care if you’re blind. You have to see anyway.’ ” Ultimately, Sluizer said, he consented to the modification of one line.

  Davis’s version was that River was having problems with the character: “In my opinion, that was made more difficult by the director constantly telling him how he should play it. Whether he should be angrier, loonier, whatever. It was a difficult part because it could so easily be absurd. He had most of the dialogue in the film, huge speeches; he kept trying to cut the lines down. Any change freaked the director out. River said to me one day, ‘Maybe I should give up acting.’ ”

  For the entirety of the shoot, River ate nothing but artichokes and corn: he wanted to look as if he had been living in the desert and eating insects to survive, like a modern John the Baptist. He wasn’t alone in the wilderness, though; accompanying River to Utah were Samantha Mathis and his personal assistant, Abby Rude.

  River was delighted to discover that the area where they were filming had a reputation as a hot spot for alien visitations. He would drop the phrase “Thanks be to UFO Godmother” into casual conversation, and tried to convince friends that he had levitated over his bed. Sometimes he would lie down and shout, “Take me, I’m ready! What else is out there?”

  Meanwhile, the tension on the set grew. Davis refused to take direction from Sluizer. In scenes with River, she would act in ways that seemed designed to break his concentration, like moving around erratically during his dialogue. “You’re in this picture, so why do you have to make it so difficult for me?” River implored her. He never yelled at her, but between takes he would retreat to his trailer and play Fugazi, the hardcore band, at top volume.

  “I had to sometimes say hey, a little less, because it’s loud,” Sluizer remembered.

  “We were on this kind of inexorable journey to some disaster,” Pryce said. “Every day there was some kind of difficulty.” After some unseasonable rain, the remote location became muddy, with vehicles careening on the dirt roads. Once, Sluizer’s director’s chair went over the side of a cliff minutes after he had vacated it.

  River told Pryce, “Somebody’s going to die on this film.”

  Mathis went home, and the only phone line River could use was a party line shared by six people, making it difficult for him to call friends and unburden himself emotionally. River had been clean for almost two months without any real support system. And then one day, about five weeks into the shoot, he snapped.

  A scene in the movie featured a dead snake—and when it came time to shoot the scene, River flipped out, locking himself in his trailer and refusing to come out until the production presented a death certificate for the snake.

  On the phone with Iris Burton, River ranted, “Iris, they’re killing snakes. They want me to work with murdered snakes. They poisoned them. Or strangled them. I don’t know. They’re liars—they say the snake died of old age. I don’t believe it. They’re liars, fucking liars, all of them. They killed the snake. They’re murderers! Murderers!”

  Once again, Burton flew to the set, complaining, “I’m not a pet coroner, for Christ’s sake!” The desert shoot concluded without further incident. At River’s request, Sluizer rescheduled the love scenes between Boy and Buffy for the end of the shoot. Tension was so high between River and Davis, he wanted to put them off as long as possible.

  River left a message on Richert’s answering machine, saying, “I’m having a hard time keeping my head above water in this crazy business.”

  The production moved briefly to New Mexico, and then headed to Los Angeles for its final two weeks, to shoot interiors and close-ups in a studio. River caught a cold and wasn’t needed for a night shoot in New Mexico; Sluizer gave him permission to head back to L.A. a day early. Bidding Sluizer farewell, River told him, “I’m going back to the bad, bad town.”

  PART SIX

  “I DON’T WANT YOU TO DIE”

  © by Lance Staedler/Corbis Outline

  78

  THE BAD, BAD TOWN

  River came to Los Angeles for the last time on Tuesday, October 26, 1993. He didn’t stay at his usual hotel, the St. James’s Club—the Dark Blood production booked him a room at the elegant, Japanese-themed Hotel Nikko. After two months of staying straight on a stressful movie, River took the opportunity to cut loose, and promptly started a drug binge.

  He managed to make a lunch appointment the next day with Iris Burton, who was still trying to sell him on the virtues of doing Safe Passage. River unenthusiastically agreed to meet with director Robert Allan Ackerman, who could fly in from London, where he was directing a play. When he saw Chris Snyder at Burton’s office, River apologized for calling in the middle of the night and swearing at him. They hugged; River was so skinny, Snyder could feel his skeleton.

  “He looked like a corpse,” Snyder said. “His skin was pasty and white, almost as if he’d been ravaged by illness. His jet-black hair looked as if he cut it himself without looking in a mirror.” Some of his appearance may have been attributable to playing Boy—he had dyed his hair for the part, and the artichoke-and-corn diet wasn’t packing on the pounds—but not his shuffling affect.

  River returned to the Hotel Nikko, and his old habits.

  4:30 P.M., FRIDAY, OCTOBER 29: Safe Passage director Robert Allan Ackerman, having spent all day flying from London to Los Angeles, had cleared customs and was on his way to the Hotel Nikko to meet with River. That’s when River called Snyder. Barely coherent, he whispered into the phone, “Chris . . . I can’t . . . the . . . meeting. You have to . . . cancel.”

  Snyder tried to stave off disaster, getting Nikko room service to send a large pot of coffee to the room of “Earl Grey.” Hollywood indulged substance abusers so long as they still showed up for work—if people found out that River was missing meetings because he was drunk or stoned, he’d be virtually unemployable.

  Snyder patched in Burton and Heart so they could hear River’s condition, and they gently persuaded him to take a shower and drink the coffee before Ackerman showed up. After River hung up, they agreed that Burton would supervise River on the Dark Blood set the following day, while Heart would fly into L.A. on Sunday. As Snyder remembered it, he told them, “This can’t go on.”

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 30: RIVER SHOWED up on time for work, but looked exhausted, as if he had pulled an all-nighter. He had taken a Valium to bring himself down for work. “He was not one hundred percent in control of his body movements,” Sluizer said. “But there was no problem with his acting and so there was no reason for me to interfere.” Burton didn’t show up to supervise him.

  The scenes that day were set in Boy’s underground fallout shelter, which he had decorated like a religious shrine, with candles, used paperbacks, and handcrafted wooden dolls. Boy gives his visitors a tour; he and Buffy have both consumed datura (an herb with hallucinogenic effects similar to peyote). “Magic’s just a question of focusing the will,” Boy tells her while Harry’s out of the room. “You don’t get what you want because you’re lucky. You get it because you will it.” And they kiss by flickering candlelight.

  Davis had told River that she wouldn’t be taking peyote to prepare for the scene; she said that he agreed.

  3:30 P.M.: LUNCHTIME. RIVER AND Sluizer discussed their plans for the following day: Sunday, a day off from shooting. They agreed to meet at 10:30 A.M. to go over the scenes for t
he coming week. After that, River had a 2 P.M. meeting scheduled with Terry Gilliam, the genius director behind Brazil. Pryce had arranged it, and River was almost vibrating with excitement at the prospect of meeting one of his heroes.

  4:30 P.M.: RIVER AND DAVIS returned to the fallout shelter. In their second scene, Boy explains how he has created an archive of human knowledge that can be passed down after a nuclear holocaust: “Took a few thousand years just to invent the alphabet! All gonna be flushed down the john. An entire civilization.”

  The stage directions in James Barton’s screenplay say, “He looks deep into her eyes, grasps her hand like a rope.”

  Then Boy tells Buffy, “I don’t want you to die!”

  She assures him, “Nobody’s going to die.”

  When they finished the scene, Sluizer called “cut,” but cinematographer Ed Lachman accidentally kept the camera running until the film ran out. Power was cut to the klieg lights, but there was just enough illumination from the candles that the final feet of film in the reel captured River in silhouette.

  “He came up to the camera and became total blackness, because he covered up the lens,” Lachman said. “It was like he created an image of his nonexistence.”

  79

  VIPER HEROIN X

  6 P.M., OCTOBER 30, 1993: Sluizer wrapped the Dark Blood shoot for the day. River lingered for about an hour, hanging out and helping the crew take down the lights. Lachman had grown accustomed to River volunteering: a week before, in New Mexico, the cinematographer had been schlepping a large number of equipment cases out of his hotel room. He came out into the hallway and shouted, “Can someone help me with my gear?”

  A minute later, River knocked on his door.

  “River, what are you doing here?” Lachman asked.

  “I came to help you,” River said simply, proposing to violate both union rules and the star-power hierarchy of a movie shoot.

  “I didn’t mean you!” Lachman said.

  “Why can’t I help ya?” River asked.

  7 P.M.: RIVER TOOK A limousine back to the Hotel Nikko, where Rain (now twenty) and Joaquin (who had turned nineteen two days earlier) were waiting in his room. They had flown into town so they could audition to play River’s on-screen siblings in Safe Passage. If either of them got the part, it would be the first time River got to act with a family member since “Backwards: The Riddle of Dyslexia,” nine years earlier.

  Mathis was also there, soon joined by River’s assistant Abby Rude and her husband Dickie. They ordered room service, cranked up the music, and started to party. Abby Rude went down the street to buy a bottle of Moët champagne. When a room-service waiter arrived with some vegetarian snacks, the music was so loud, they almost didn’t hear him knocking. The waiter wheeled in the food, and saw a room in disarray. River was dancing by himself, spinning in the middle of his room.

  10 P.M.: AFTER A LONG day, and a largely sleepless night, River was exhausted. He called his friend Bradley Gregg, with whom he had acted in three movies (Explorers, Stand by Me, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) to let him know that he wouldn’t be able to attend the birthday party the next day for Gregg’s young son. River was ready to collapse, but Joaquin and Rain had just arrived: they wanted to go out and enjoy a Saturday night in Los Angeles.

  Prince had recently opened an outpost of his Glam Slam nightclub in downtown L.A., while the Auditorium on Hollywood Boulevard was hosting a “ska-lloween skankfest.” But Joaquin wanted to check out the Viper Room, where Flea and Johnny Depp were going to be playing together in a version of Depp’s band P. The club had been open for two and a half months.

  The hitch: Joaquin and Rain were underage, meaning they couldn’t get in without an adult escort, ideally a celebrity, so that whoever was working the door would turn a blind eye. Mathis agreed to take them, and they called downstairs for a car. River would stay behind, as would the Rudes.

  While Mathis, Rain, and Joaquin were waiting at the elevator, River changed his mind—either because he wanted to keep partying or because he was falling into his usual paternal role, taking care of his younger siblings. He ran down the hall, shouting, “I’m coming, I’m coming!” River grabbed his guitar, planning to get onstage with his old friend Flea, and they rode the elevator down.

  As Mathis and the three Phoenixes left the Hotel Nikko, Sluizer was arriving in his car. He saw them and called out to them, “Have a good time,” but didn’t think they heard him.

  10:30 P.M.: HALLOWEEN WAS OFFICIALLY the next day, but since it was Saturday night, adult costume parties were in full swing. River was dressed casually, in dark brown pants and Converse All Star sneakers. The quartet headed for a party they had heard about in the hills of Hollywood, at the house of twin actors. Also at the party: Leonardo DiCaprio, two weeks away from his nineteenth birthday, dressed up as “Johnny Hollywood,” a generic hipster actor with a leather jacket and his hair slicked back. “It was dark and everyone was drunk,” DiCaprio said. “I was passing through crowds of people so thick, it was almost like two lanes of traffic.” Then he spotted River.

  “When I was eighteen, River Phoenix was far and away my hero. Think of all those early great performances: My Own Private Idaho, Stand by Me. I always wanted to meet him,” DiCaprio said. And now he was right next to him. “I wanted to reach out and say hello because he was this great mystery and we’d never met and I thought he probably wouldn’t blow me off because I’d done stuff by then that was probably worth watching.” (This Boy’s Life had come out six months prior; Gilbert Grape had wrapped but wouldn’t be released until December.)

  “Then I got stuck in a lane of traffic and slid right past him,” DiCaprio lamented. “He was beyond pale—he looked white.” Before he could circle back around to talk to his hero, River had vanished into the Hollywood night.

  12:27 A.M., OCTOBER 31: CARRYING his guitar, River arrived at the Viper Room’s front door on Larrabee Street and secured entrance for his party. He got stamped with a red star on the back of his right hand, and went into the club. River mingled in the crowd, finding his old friends from the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Flea and John Frusciante (who had quit the band a year and a half earlier). Flea informed River that he wouldn’t be able to play with P that night. The group was already cramming too many musicians onto the tiny Viper Room stage: Depp, Flea, Sal Jenco, Gibby Haynes, Al Jourgensen of Ministry, and on keyboards, Benmont Tench of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

  Disappointed but unfazed, River returned to the table where Mathis, Rain, and Joaquin were sitting. “I’ll sing at the table,” he told them, and prepared to stand on a chair and improvise a song.

  12:40 A.M.: P TOOK THE stage. Jourgensen was wearing a floppy cowboy hat; Haynes had removed his shirt and scrawled on his belly with Magic Marker. Depp had an effete pageboy haircut—an artifact of filming Ed Wood with Tim Burton. Benmont Tench proved to be the musical spine of the band; Haynes, on lead vocals, amused himself with fart jokes and demands for vodka and bourbon.

  12:45 A.M.: A GUITARIST FRIEND of River’s came over to his table, holding a cup. “Hey, Riv, drink this—it’ll make you feel fabulous,” he told him. River didn’t know what was in it, but since he had taken this friend to rehab twice, he could guess that it wasn’t ginger ale. Being the sort of person who would jump off cliffs to travel through clouds, River downed it in one gulp.

  In the drink was a dissolved speedball: a mixture of cocaine and heroin. The heroin circulating in L.A. that fall included a particularly potent variety of Persian Brown. River immediately felt unwell. “What did you give me? What the fuck is in it?” he shouted. To calm himself and his system down, River took some Valium—which didn’t seem to do the job. Soon he had vomited on himself and the table. He then slumped in his chair, unconscious.

  This was the crucial moment. River was clearly not in good shape, but the Cedars-Sinai hospital was only one mile away. If an ambulance had been called right then, he might have been saved. But he also would have become a tabloid sensat
ion, with his wholesome granola image destroyed. And he had survived other scary drug episodes before. So Mathis made a phone call—but it was to Abby Rude back at the Hotel Nikko.

  “Sam called and said she was really scared. She said River had just keeled over,” Rude remembered. “We said we’d be right over to help.”

  An actress in the Viper Room remembered that night as having been a good time, before everything went wrong. She noticed there was some commotion in a corner of the room, but “figured some guys were having a brawl or somebody was getting sick. I kept seeing Samantha running back and forth and back and forth, and she looked really worried.”

  The actress grabbed Mathis and said, “Hey, Sam, what’s up? What’s wrong?”—but Mathis couldn’t even speak.

  12:55 A.M.: RIVER JERKED AWAKE and asked to go outside to get some fresh air. He had trouble walking, and fell to the floor. Joaquin assured everybody that he was fine, and helped his brother past the stage where P was playing, through the back door and onto the Sunset Boulevard sidewalk.

  Across the street at the Whisky, there was a triple bill in progress featuring the Pies, from Liverpool. Milling outside the Viper Room were young people dressed in costume: witches, harlequins, somebody in a Louis XIV getup. Nobody noticed a young man with dark hair stumbling into the night air.

  1 A.M.: MOMENTS AFTER RIVER stepped outside, he collapsed onto the sidewalk. Photographer Ron Davis was outside the Viper Room, hoping to get a picture of the Chili Peppers when they left the club. Rain flipped River’s body over, and Davis recognized him immediately. (In a rare example of paparazzi restraint, Davis did not take any pictures that night.) River started having violent seizures, his whole body shuddering and flopping on the pavement.