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

by Edwards, Gavin

  “No one was doing anything,” Davis said. “They were all standing around like deer caught in headlights.” He saw Mathis leaning against the wall, futilely banging her head. Rain sat on River’s chest, trying to restrain his body. They were young and terrified.

  Two girls in witch costumes walked past the scene. One of them said to the other, “Oh God. Gross.”

  Christina Applegate came out of the club, saw what was happening, and walked away. On the corner, she started crying.

  A Viper Room doorman came outside, surveyed the situation, and told Joaquin, “You need to call 911.”

  “He’s fine, he’s fine,” Joaquin said while his brother thrashed around.

  Across the street, the manager of the Whisky a Go Go, Sean Tuttle, saw something was happening at the Viper Room, but classified it as a typical Saturday night: “It looked like a normal occurrence.”

  Inside the Viper Room, completely unaware of what was happening outside its walls, P played a country-flavored song called “Michael Stipe,” about celebrity and feeling out of place at glitzy parties in the Hollywood Hills. Spookily, it mentioned River by name: “I finally talked to Michael Stipe / But I didn’t get to see his car / Him and River Phoenix / Were leaving on the road tomorrow.”

  1:09 A.M.: EACH SEIZURE LASTED about twenty seconds. River’s arms would flail around, while his knuckles and the back of his head kept smacking against the pavement. Davis started hoping for more seizures—they were evidence that River was still alive.

  1:10 A.M.: JOAQUIN CALLED 911, frantic but trying to keep it together as his beloved brother passed away before his eyes.

  “It’s my brother. He’s having seizures at Sunset and Larrabee. Please come here,” Joaquin begged.

  “Okay, calm down a little bit,” the dispatcher replied.

  Moments later, Joaquin said, “Now I’m thinking he had Valium or something. I don’t know.” His voice cracked with anguish. “Please come, he’s dying, please.”

  1:12 A.M.: AN ACTRESS ON the scene remembered, “Outside there was a crowd of people, and I saw him—lying flat, totally ghostly white. It didn’t really look like him. He had, like, this dark hair, this totally pasty complexion, and he was panting and sweating. He was convulsing. People were trying to splash water on his face and move his head and get his tongue out of his mouth. He was kind of changing colors, and his eyes were all dilated and open, and it was really scary. I kept hearing from people, ‘Wow, it’s River, it’s River.’ You don’t think it’s going to happen. One minute you’re on top of the world and the next minute you’re gone—you’re gone and nobody can help you.”

  1:14 A.M.: A TEAM OF four paramedics arrived in a fire truck and immediately went to work. “We found him pulseless and not breathing,” stated Captain Ray Ribar. “We went into our cardiac arrest protocols. CPR was immediately started, along with airway breathing and circulation. Then we went into our advanced life support, which is a paramedic operation.”

  Some of the bystanders said that drugs had been involved; somebody mentioned “speedballing.” The paramedics injected River’s heart with a medication called Narcan, designed to counteract the effects of narcotics, and began chest compressions. “However, his heart was in a flatline—clinically dead,” said Ribar. “We stabilized him the best we could and prepared him for transportation.”

  While the paramedics worked, Abby and Dickie Rude arrived. Dickie said, “It was a terrifying shock to see your best friend lying on the sidewalk with paramedics standing over him, and a crowd of people dressed up in Halloween costumes.”

  “It was the classic cocaine overreaction,” Ribar said. “It just nails some people and stops the heart.”

  1:25 A.M.: P FINISHED THEIR set and walked off the stage. One of the bouncers told them that a friend of Flea’s was having a seizure on the sidewalk. Flea and Depp went out the door to see River—whom Depp didn’t recognize—with his shirt and jacket stripped off, being worked on by the paramedics.

  Depp stood there, unable to do anything, hoping everything would be okay. He didn’t recognize Mathis either, but he told her, “If there’s anything we can do, if you need a ride to the hospital?” She politely declined his offer.

  Flea wanted to ride in the back of the ambulance with River. He was allowed to come along, but only in the front seat. He hopped in.

  1:31 A.M.: THE AMBULANCE LEFT for the one-mile drive to Cedars-Sinai hospital. Ribar didn’t know who his patient was, but one of the other paramedics did: “I could hear him saying, ‘Come on, River, you can make it.’ ”

  1:34 A.M.: THE AMBULANCE ARRIVED at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. River’s skin was turning blue but his body was still warm. He had been in full cardiac arrest for at least twenty minutes, but the emergency room doctors labored mightily to pull him back into the land of the living, opening his chest to massage his heart, hooking him up to a respirator, even inserting a pacemaker. Nothing worked.

  1:51 A.M.: DR. PAUL SILKA officially pronounced River Jude Phoenix dead.

  80

  R.I.P. RJP

  Iris Burton got a phone call summoning her to Cedars-Sinai. She identified River’s corpse, and then collapsed, a sobbing mess. When Mathis arrived, she also insisted on seeing the body; a nurse took her to where it lay in the emergency room.

  All through the night, people got woken up with news of the tragedy: friends, family, producers, executives. One person who couldn’t be reached right away was Heart: she was already on the first flight out of Gainesville, on her way to Hollywood to help River with his problems before it was too late. Once she arrived at the hospital, Burton left, crying so hard that she burst a blood vessel in her nose. Heart wanted to take possession of River’s body, but was told that the autopsy would have to happen first. The Phoenix family all flew home to Florida the same day, before they could be questioned by an L.A. homicide detective.

  Eleven years earlier, comedy superstar John Belushi had died from an overdose while speedballing, on the other end of the Sunset Strip, in a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont hotel. Cathy Smith, the woman who provided him with the drugs and helped inject him, ended up pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter and serving fifteen months in prison. But the Phoenix family (and Mathis) ducked questions from the police department, not wanting to see anyone prosecuted for River’s death by misadventure. “The bottom line was the family didn’t want anyone to go to jail who was participating with River in ingesting the drugs,” said L.A. homicide detective sergeant Mike Lee. “They said if it was an overdose of drugs, then so be it.”

  Sometime after 3 A.M. on October 31, Depp found out that the kid who had collapsed on his doorstep was dead—and that it had been River Phoenix. He hadn’t known River well, but he was shocked. Depp closed the Viper Room for the next ten days. That patch of sidewalk outside his club’s back door quickly drew crowds anyway: news crews getting footage of the Viper Room’s exterior, and mourners leaving flowers and scrawling memorials to River on the club’s wall and door. Depp later offered to take the door off its hinges and send it to the Iris Burton Agency; they gave him the Florida address of the Phoenixes instead.

  In the newspapers, the story of River’s death played alongside obituaries of the Italian director Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita, 8½), who had died in Rome the same day, at age seventy-three. But although Fellini had half a century and five Oscars on River, he didn’t have a younger brother pleading with 911. The tape of Joaquin’s call went into heavy rotation on TV news and tabloid shows—the worst moment of his young life was when most Americans first heard his voice.

  The Dark Blood cast and crew showed up at the studio on Monday, not that there was any way to keep working. Jonathan Pryce said a few words in memory of River, and asked everyone to join hands in a circle. They did, except for Judy Davis. “I didn’t want to hold hands,” she said. “I don’t believe in spirits passing, but I didn’t have a choice, so I wished that I’d not gone into the studio. I don’t like to be forced to be dishonest. I th
ink it has to be remembered in the midst of all this that he was twenty-three, and he made the choice.”

  River was cremated in a blue coffin, wearing an Aleka’s Attic T-shirt, with the long hair he had cut off for Dark Blood laid next to him as a ponytail. The night before the cremation, somebody with access to the funeral home took a picture of his body and sold it to the National Enquirer.

  On November 12, about a hundred guests went to Micanopy for a memorial service, held under a large oak tree on the Phoenix property. Neighbors walked over; Dan Aykroyd and Keanu Reeves came in limousines. Flea and Michael Stipe were in attendance, as were Martha Plimpton, Suzanne Solgot, and Samantha Mathis. Heart tracked down Father Stephen Wood, who had helped her family get out of Venezuela; he was doing missionary work in Mexico. She paid for his plane ticket to Gainesville and he helped officiate.

  Heart gave a eulogy for the child she had thought would change the world, talking about River’s life and how, even in death, he touched her: “When the sun shines I see River, when I look in someone’s eyes and make a connection, I see River. To have death transformed into another way to look at life is his huge gift.”

  The mourners took turns remembering River. “He was my brother and I loved him a great deal,” Stipe said. “It was just an awful, awful mistake. We fed off each other and learned a lot from each other.”

  Ethan Hawke copped to how he had been in awe of River, and then asked whether the people in attendance would learn anything from his death.

  John kept interjecting wisecracks that made many of the guests uncomfortable.

  As the residents of Camp Phoenix took turns speaking, the tenor shifted: River’s pure soul was too good for this world, they said, and so he had progressed to a higher state of being. (Essentially the same message that had so infuriated Judy Davis, but at greater length and without the hand-holding.) Or as Solgot summarized it: “River’s in heaven, blah blah blah, it was his time, blah blah blah.”

  The sentiment began to rankle some of those in attendance. Bradley Gregg—father of the child whose birthday party River didn’t attend on October 31—shouted, “River didn’t have to die to be free!”

  Later, the perspicacious Martha Plimpton observed, “You would have thought he was ninety and had died in his sleep. The people who were saying this felt tremendous guilt that they had contributed to his death.” She wasn’t any happier about how his death was being discussed outside Micanopy: “He’s already being made into a martyr,” she complained. “He’s become a metaphor for a fallen angel, a messiah. He was just a boy, a very good-hearted boy who was very fucked up and had no idea how to implement his good intentions. I don’t want to be comforted by his death. I think it’s right that I’m angry about it, angry at the people who helped him stay sick, and angry at River.”

  Two weeks later, there was another memorial service, this one on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles, with about 150 of River’s show-biz colleagues in attendance. Before it started, they milled around outside, smoking cigarettes and gossiping about Hollywood casting, as if it were just another movie screening. The list of speakers was star-studded: Sidney Poitier, Rob Reiner, Jerry O’Connell, John Boorman, Christine Lahti, Peter Bogdanovich, and Helen Mirren. When it was Heart’s turn, she related a vision she had: that River hadn’t wanted to be born, preferring to stay with God in heaven. God had convinced him to go, and they haggled over how long, settling on twenty-three years.

  After a moment of silence, Jane Campion, the director of The Piano, stood up and announced that earlier that year, her infant son had died when he was only thirteen days old, and that although she hadn’t known River, she had come to the service in search of some solace and understanding. Heart stepped off the stage and gave Campion a hug.

  Not to be outdone, Peter Bogdanovich’s wife, Louise Stratten, stood up and said, “Peter and I adopted this stray cat that came around the house every day.” They believed, she explained, that the spirit of her sister (murdered Playmate Dorothy Stratten) lived in that cat.

  The testimonials continued: people who had known River intensely and briefly, all talking about how he had touched their lives. Then John Boorman, sitting in a corner, spat out a question: “Is there anybody here who can tell us why River took all those drugs?”

  The room fell silent. Heart looked shocked; River’s younger sisters, Liberty and Summer, left the room in protest. Mathis, who had been silent until then, tried to answer the question: “River was a sensitive,” she said gently. “He had so much compassion for everyone and everything that he had a weight on his heart.”

  In December, Christina Applegate found her own way of memorializing River: at a Studio City theater, she starred in an antidrug performance piece based on witnessing his death. While a song called “Junkie” played, she writhed on the stage.

  81

  BROKEN DREAMS

  While Hollywood agents mouthed pieties of sorrow, some of them smelled chum in the water. River’s in heaven, blah blah blah—but that meant there were vacancies to be filled in movies here on earth, especially in Interview with the Vampire, which now needed a new interviewer—and quickly. The interview scenes had already been held to the end of the shoot so River could finish making Dark Blood.

  It was an ideal gig: a quick, lucrative job in a classy movie that looked like it would be a hit. Christian Slater got the role, but recognizing the gruesome situation, donated his paycheck to two of River’s favorite charities, Earth Save and Earth Trust. Interview with the Vampire proved to be a respectable success: apparently audiences liked watching a vision of Hollywood stars who couldn’t die and looked young forever, even if River Phoenix wasn’t one of them.

  Safe Passage filled the role of the son with Sean Astin, fresh off the success of Rudy. Some other films got shelved permanently: without River to wear the gorilla suit, Allan Moyle couldn’t imagine making Morgan. Similarly, Agnieszka Holland abandoned Jack and Jill, and Gus Van Sant never revived his Andy Warhol movie.

  John Malkovich didn’t want to play Verlaine without River as Rimbaud, and dropped out of Total Eclipse; director Volker Schlöndorff followed. The project was taken over by (coincidentally) Agnieszka Holland, who cast Leonardo DiCaprio as Rimbaud and David Thewlis as Verlaine; the film was released in 1995. In 2008, Van Sant finally made Milk, his award-winning Harvey Milk biopic. Sean Penn starred instead of Robin Williams, while the role of Cleve Jones, which Van Sant had earmarked for River, was taken by Emile Hirsch, who was just eight years old when River died.

  The movie that was the most problematic was the one River had been in the middle of, Dark Blood. Sluizer had completed about eighty percent of the shooting schedule, with roughly eleven days to go—not very many, except that they would have included crucial interior scenes and close-ups of River. With CGI in its infancy, a special-effects solution wasn’t feasible. The missing pieces were too big to edit around. And nobody had the stomach to start over with a new actor in the role of Boy.

  As was customary, the film had been insured against a disaster like this; CNA International Reinsurance made the unusual but appropriate call to abandon the picture. They paid off the movie’s investors and ended up as the legal owners of Dark Blood, not to mention 1,500 pounds of 35mm film. Some of the filmmakers were glad to put the tragic episode behind them. Dark Blood producer Nik Powell said, “For me, the most respectful thing was to close it, not attempt to finish it, and let bygones be bygones.”

  The insurance company then sued River’s estate for about $5.5 million, arguing that by “taking illegal drugs, River J. Phoenix deprived the parties to the contract of his services, and he therefore breached his obligation/duty.” The crux of the argument was that River had lied when he attested during his insurance-required medical exam that he didn’t use drugs. The lawsuit kept River’s estate tied up in probate until 1997, when it was finally dismissed.

  In 1999, Sluizer found out that the insurance company was going to dispose of the Dark Blood footage, believing it was of no
value. Sluizer liberated the reels of films from the storage facility, with the consent of the claims adjuster—when they couldn’t find a key, they had to break open a lock. “I call it saving, not stealing,” Sluizer said. “Morally, I was saving important material. If you go to the Guggenheim and it’s a fire and you save a painting, you’re not stealing a painting—you’re saving it.”

  82

  NEVER GONNA WITHER

  As he would have wanted, River lived on in song. Friends recorded tributes to him: Flea’s composition “Transcending,” found on the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ One Hot Minute album, includes the lyrics “Smartest fucker I ever met” and “I called you hippie, you said fuck off.” Michael Stipe was so shattered by River’s death that he found himself unable to write songs for five months. When he recovered, R.E.M. made the classic Monster, which they dedicated to River; the song “Bang and Blame” had backing vocals by Rain. (Behind the scenes, Stipe bought the rights to the Aleka’s Attic recordings from Island.)

  There was also a slew of songs about River by musicians who didn’t know him well, or at all, including Natalie Merchant, Rufus Wainwright, Belinda Carlisle, the Cult.

  When River died, it was generally assumed that he would become the “vegan James Dean”—a star even better remembered in death than in life, a potent symbol of youthful talent and beauty snuffed out at an early age. Instead, he faded in people’s memories.

  Partially, this is because of the idiosyncrasies of River’s filmography: of his four great films, two (Dogfight, Running on Empty) are basically forgotten, while My Own Private Idaho is well-regarded but rarely seen (there’s no easy way to edit it down to make it palatable on basic cable). Stand by Me has become an enduring classic, but River was so young in the movie, it can be hard to connect his performance to the man he became.