Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind (12 page)
Read Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind Online
Authors: Gavin Edwards
“Gainesville is your basic college town,” journalist Michael Angeli wrote. “Some disenchanted conquistador tossed his copy of
Summa Theologica
into a swamp and the University of Florida bubbled up from the cattails, Burt Reynolds and all.”
For the first time in his life, River felt at home. He wandered around Gainesville, happy to be part of the crowd. He reveled in his anonymity, growing his hair long and letting it fall over his face whenever he went out. He explored the town, meeting people, skateboarding in parking lots, and checking out the bars and record stores.
“He came in one day and started talking about XTC,” said Hyde & Zeke Records proprietor Charlie Scales. XTC, the British new-wave and psychedelic-pop band led by Andy Partridge, was never a force on the American charts, but had recently gotten a lot of attention for their angrily atheistic single “Dear God”; they had become River’s favorite band. (River’s family had become less devout and his faith had become less dogmatic since the days when he memorized the Bible in Spanish. He still prayed regularly, but conceded, “I don’t know if the superior being is in the form of a man, woman, or jellyfish.”)
Scales didn’t recognize River, but he liked his passion for XTC, and even let him borrow a rare XTC bootleg. “I’m usually wary of lending people albums,” he said, “but he loved the band so much, I let him have it. A week later, he came back with the album and thanked me.”
River had been writing songs with titles like “Aleka Doozy Encircles” and “Dublin in Mardi Gras.” One composition, “Mother Earth,” conflated his love of Arlyn and Gaia, with lyrics like “Don’t bite the hand that heals your wounds and keeps you fed / Mother dear was always there to tuck us into bed . . . / Still betraying Mother Earth.” When he played it for visiting journalist Blanche McCrary Boyd, she nominated it as River’s “worst song, but perhaps his most touching.”
River needed a band. He put up signs around campus:
NEEDED: BASS GUITARIST WITH YOUNG BLOOD WHO’S INTO PROGRESSIVE ROCK ’N’ ROLL, JAZZ. FOR A DEMO.
The first musician to join him was actually a friend of the family: his aunt Merle introduced him to a drummer named Josh Greenbaum, whose father, Kenny, had grown up in the Bronx with Arlyn. Greenbaum was living in Fort Lauderdale, delivering pizzas and playing with a band called Toy Soldier. (They would evolve into Saigon Kick, and in 1992 score a number twelve single with “Love Is on the Way” and a gold record for their album
The Lizard
.) Greenbaum visited River for a couple of weeks and ended up moving in with the Phoenix family. “It wasn’t just the music, it was the whole thing,” Greenbaum said. “I met the whole family and I loved them from the start. They were like the family I’d never had. I’d never known such warmth and love.”
Greenbaum and River spent hours sitting on the trampoline in the backyard, figuring out songs. They ate at the Falafel King and worked out together at the Gainesville Health and Fitness Club. Going to the gym was novel for River. “I’ve got more of a musician’s build than a gymnast’s,” he said. “I’ve got really skinny arms.” He reveled in the results of his workouts, feeling muscles develop in his body that he’d never had before. “Then there was this flu virus going around town and I got it!” he said. “That was the end of the health kick.”
At night, the duo went to parties, sussing out Gainesville’s music scene together. “We were like soul brothers,” Greenbaum said.
After a few months, Greenbaum’s dad, Kenny, called to check on him. Arlyn chatted with Kenny on the phone, catching up on life after the Bronx, and then suggested that he come live with them as well. “I’ve been doing that all my life,” Kenny said. “Just give me five minutes to throw everything in my van and I’m off.” The Phoenix family was on its way to building another commune.
Kim Buie, back in Los Angeles, suggested a musician she thought might be simpatico with River: Josh McKay, a twenty-two-year-old Texas guitarist with his own band, Joshimisho. River sent him a cassette of some of the songs he had been working out with Greenbaum, and McKay was pleasantly surprised. “I thought these tight jam-box garage tapes were really nice,” McKay said. “This was about music and not just some movie star’s hobby trip.” He started figuring out bass parts for the songs—and when he and River spoke on the phone, they discovered they were both vegetarians and believers in animal rights. McKay’s friends advised him not to join a band with a movie star, but he decided to take a chance, reasoning, “This is a very unusual thing to fall down from nowhere.” He took his final exams in anthropology, flew to Gainesville, and moved in with the Phoenix family.
The next recruit: Tim Hankins, a classically trained viola player and a member of the Gainesville Chamber Orchestra. Seventeen years old, he had never played rock ’n’ roll before (not that violas were in heavy demand from rock bands). Rounding out the group on harmony vocals: River’s sister and longtime musical partner Rain, who had recently reverted from Rainbow to her birth name.
The band practiced for hours in the loft of the guesthouse, a space that River dubbed “Aleka’s Attic”; soon that also became the name of the band. River eventually developed a mythology around the name for anybody who asked: “Aleka is a poet-philosopher. The Attic is a meeting place where he lives and he has a secret society. They come and visit him and read his works. He then dies and they meet irregularly and continue the readings of his works, and from that learn their own, and become filled with this new passion for life. And they express it through music and form a band. We’ve put it in a fairy-tale setting.”
Aleka was an obvious stand-in for River, who yearned to inspire the world. But disturbingly, even in this pastel-colored idyll, he could only achieve that dream by dying.
Arlyn Phoenix changed her name for the last time, dubbing herself Heart Phoenix. John, meanwhile, worked on his organic garden and grew ever more fearful of the outside world. When a journalist visited the Phoenixes, she noticed that on the back of a happy family picture, John had written this list:
airplane crash
radon leak—gas
whites hacked to death
garbage leak
Those were the stories that had grabbed his attention in the morning paper.
When John got drunk—on port, vodka, or beer—he would rant against Hollywood, calling it “the great Babylon.” He lectured, “They care for money and nothing else. It’s an evil, bad place.” He felt betrayed by how River had sided with his mother and stayed in show business.
John explained, “Heart thought she could look after River, protect all his interests within the system. But our original idea was for him to make enough movies to be financially secure—milk the system, if you want—then stop. We had made enough money to keep all those closest to us, in-laws, outlaws, friends, environment groups, whatever, and I wanted us all to get out. Still, the pressure was there to keep going.”
River struggled to make peace between his mother and father, to reconcile his show-business desires with his religious upbringing—or as he put it, “The Devil is so pretty and tempting.” River confessed, “I go back and forth about success and wealth.”
When Martha Plimpton came to visit River, she found a household filled with tension and her boyfriend at the conflicted center. “We had five million talks about his compulsive personality and his guilt and fear over not being able to save his father,” Plimpton said. “River and his father were
always
having breakthrough conversations where River would tell his father his feelings about alcohol, about their roles. But the next day, nothing would change. River would then say to me, ‘Well, it’s not
that
serious, it’s not
that
bad.’ ”
River was drinking more himself—he favored pints of Guinness at a local bar, but sometimes would imbibe with John, finding a tenuous bond. Tutor Dirk Drake said, “You have to remember that River had never seen alcohol when he was growing up. When he finally started, he’d drink all-out. It wasn’t like you or I would drink. He often became a fall-down drunk.” On one of their nights out, River was arrested for public drinking.
River was also partial to cocaine and hallucinogenic mushrooms—and there was always plenty of “Gainesville Green” marijuana in the house. “He really liked getting drunk and high,” Plimpton said. “But he didn’t have a gauge for when to stop.”
Meanwhile, Island Pictures was having financial difficulties; Chris Blackwell shut down his film division. Fox bought the distribution rights to
Jimmy Reardon,
wanting to capitalize on River’s growing fame—and then tried to recut it into a teen-exploitation comedy. The score by Elmer Bernstein was ditched in favor of one by Bill Conti, bolstered by period rock ’n’ roll. Richert’s narration was rerecorded by River. Some crucial cuts were made, including a closing-credits song by River, “Heart to Get.”
Arlyn and John were worried about the line where Ann Magnuson tells River, “Jimmy, I want to fuck you,” and how it would play with River’s young fans. They threatened to have River not promote the film. Richert wouldn’t remove the line entirely—it had too much personal import from the parallel incident in his own life—but agreed to silence the offending “fuck.”
The original cut of
Jimmy Reardon
wasn’t flawless, but the movie hit its target: a rueful story about a teen who discovers that his hustles have limits and that he’s more like his father than he knew. The melancholy tone that made it work is exactly what Fox tried to stamp out with its changes—but the result was neither chalk nor vegan cheese.
A furious Richert railed against the studio execs, calling the president of Island Pictures a traitor and the Fox marketing department knaves. Somehow, this did not persuade them to change their minds: the recut, retitled
A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon
was dumped into the marketplace with little fanfare in March 1988. River had three movies released in 1988:
A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon
was followed by
Little Nikita
and
Running on Empty
. While none of them were hits,
Running on Empty
was well reviewed: Roger Ebert called it “a painful, enormously moving drama,” while Janet Maslin in the
New York Times
said River played the role of Danny “outstandingly well.”
Of the three films,
A Night in the Life of
Jimmy Reardon,
surprisingly, did the most box office.
Time Out
magazine captured the mixed critical opinion on the movie: “While the film has the charm of a rose-tinted retrospect and is often very funny, the pacing is wrong (it seems much longer than it is) and the sex scenes fail to convince.”
River had always been nervous about the character of Jimmy Reardon and his caddish ways; the final cut of the movie had the glib tone he had feared. “I’m not sure I was even the right person for the role,” he mused. “The whole plot revolves around the guy’s sexual exploits that one night, and for it to work properly, I think you want to see somebody a little more masculine, like Tom Cruise. He’d have done it much better than me.”
River’s public comments on the movie progressed from “I chose the role because I wanted to play a complex character” to “It didn’t turn out the way I thought it would” to “Let’s not even think about that anymore, all right?”
River wandered through the house of his friend Anthony Campanaro, high on mushrooms, looking for the room with the best acoustics. For the first time, Aleka’s Attic was going to play for an audience, and even for a small group of friends, River wanted everything to be perfect. He chose the open-air veranda, and the band set up for a late-night session, fortified with beer and cigarettes. Pleasantly buzzed, the band worked their way through River’s catalog of songs, and improvised around loose grooves. Their music swirled into the humid Florida night.
After the performance, River was eager to start playing in front of larger crowds. But first he had to go make a major motion picture.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
was the third film starring Harrison Ford as a swashbuckling archaeologist, in a series that was responsible for the Tomb Raider video games, the advent of the PG-13 rating, and the mainstreaming of whips. With producer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg returning to the franchise, it was also as close as one could come to a guaranteed hit—no small thing, given the tepid box office of River’s recent films.
Although it was River’s second movie with Harrison Ford, after
The Mosquito Coast,
they wouldn’t be on-screen together: in an eleven-minute prologue to the movie, River played the teenage Indiana Jones in a Boy Scout uniform. In the hills of 1912 Utah, on an expedition with his Scout troop, Indy comes upon a gang of looters who have discovered an artifact called the Cross of Coronado—he grabs it and runs, hoping to put it in a museum. In a chase that goes from horseback to a circus train, we learn how Indiana Jones acquired his hat, his whip, his fear of snakes, and even the scar on his chin. (The only thing it doesn’t seem to explain is River’s anachronistic haircut flopping into his eyes.) It was a charming sequence, if a bit formulaic, and River acquitted himself well—although he wasn’t a brawny guy, he seemed to be establishing his action-hero bona fides for some future franchise.
Although Ford didn’t appear with River, he nevertheless spent a week on the set in Colorado, to give highly individualized instruction on how to play Indiana Jones. “Harrison came out and he helped me a lot with motivation,” River said. “You know, where does all this come from, and what propels him, and what makes him really cool when he has to jump off a horse onto a train?” Like Ford, River did most of his own action sequences. “It would have been lying to have someone else do the stunts,” he said.
River attempted to interpret Ford rather than mimic him, and was careful to say he wasn’t interested in taking over the role of Indiana Jones. While this may have been politic, it had the advantage of being true. River’s prologue ultimately inspired the big-budget Lucasfilm TV show
The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles,
but when approached about appearing on the program, River declined.
As expected,
The Last Crusade
ended up being a big hit (the second-most-popular film of 1989, behind Tim Burton’s
Batman
), receiving generally positive notices as well-made escapism. River wasn’t hyped in the trailers or the publicity. Many reviews, focusing on the dynamic between Ford and Sean Connery (who played Indiana Jones’s father), didn’t even mention River.