Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind (23 page)

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 sensation, 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.

“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.