Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind (8 page)
Read Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind Online
Authors: Gavin Edwards
River’s life-changing summer in Oregon came with a paycheck: $50,000 for ten weeks of work. Agent Iris Burton got a $5,000 commission, while the government withheld about $14,000 for taxes. John and Arlyn got a $7,500 commission as managers; after a few other minor deductions, River Phoenix was paid just over $20,000. He was Team Phoenix’s breadwinner and he needed more work.
As soon as River returned to L.A., Burton booked him his highest-profile job yet: a guest appearance on TV’s second-most-popular show,
Family Ties
. In its fourth season, the show was powered by the charisma of Michael J. Fox as Alex Keaton and by the best time slot in television (NBC, Thursdays at 8:30
P.M.
, right after the number one
Cosby Show
).
River played Eugene Forbes, a genius math student who tutors Alex—despite being, to Alex’s chagrin, much younger than him. “Alex, you’re still clinging to Euclidean geometry,” River tells Keaton. “Embrace the abstract. Let go of rational thought!” Wearing a bow tie and a plaid sleeveless sweater, River was playing a variation on his
Explorers
character. While that movie got him this part, he had become a much better actor since making it, either because he had a year’s more experience or because he had started taking the job seriously. His comic timing had hugely improved and his growing confidence let him command the screen. If he identified with Eugene not fitting in with kids his age, at least here he could play that for laughs.
It turns out that Eugene Forbes is pining for a girlfriend: “A companion, a confidante, a friend. A chick in hot pants.” He becomes smitten with Alex’s sister Jennifer (played by Tina Yothers), and awkwardly woos her, giving her an X-ray of his brain. He brings her to a university faculty party—which, as a date, proves to be a debacle. The episode ends with him asking her out for a soda instead.
Arlyn hired a family tutor, Ed Squires, who observed River’s difficulty reading and concluded that he suffered from dyslexia. While it might seem astonishing that nobody in the family had ever considered this possibility—River, after all,
had starred in a TV movie about dyslexia
—John and Arlyn resisted the notion of seeing a doctor and obtaining a formal diagnosis.
Arlyn also hired a housekeeper, a young bearded man named Larry McHale, who would not only do laundry, but serve as River’s personal assistant and companion. His job title was NANNY: “New Age Non-Nuclear Youth.” McHale drove River around L.A., introducing him to his own friends—adults, some of whom liked to take drugs.
On one outing, McHale joined a group of pals on an all-day trip to the Magic Mountain amusement park. One of them, Pat Brewer—then a twenty-five-year-old acting student—didn’t recognize the kid who seemed to be tagging along with McHale for no reason. Only fifteen at the time, River looked even younger. “We partied all day,” Brewer said, “with River becoming the butt of a lot of jokes because he was so young.”
At the end of the day, the group left the park, ending up at a Santa Monica home, near the Pacific Ocean. Somebody brought out a stash of cocaine and started cutting up lines. “River looked very unsure,” Brewer said. “It was something new to him. I remember saying, ‘I wouldn’t give any of that to the kid.’ But then River insisted on having his share. I think he was trying to prove himself in the group and felt peer pressure.”
After snorting up the coke, River felt unwell and short of breath; he went outside to clear his head. Brewer ended up taking him on a walk down to the Santa Monica Pier. “I didn’t even realize he was River Phoenix until some little girls came up and asked him for his autograph,” said Brewer, who remembered River as not enjoying even his low level of stardom. “He just wanted to be John Doe and anonymous.”
McHale and River hung out more with Brewer in the following weeks. It was mostly low-key: River would play guitar and talk about music. “At first he was very self-conscious about drugs and didn’t really know what to do,” Brewer said. “He soon picked it up, though.” River’s family didn’t know that in just a few months, he had experimented with alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine. The Children of God had taught River that cocaine was “the devil’s dandruff.” It had also taught him to keep secrets.
Ione Skye had just turned fifteen when her big brother, Donovan Leitch, brought home River Phoenix. She didn’t know who River was and wasn’t clear on how he had ended up in her house—she thought maybe he was shooting a TV movie down the street. “Our neighborhood kind of looked like Anywhere, U.S.A., even though it was right in the middle of Hollywood,” she said.
Skye and River immediately hit it off. “His mother and my mother are similar,” she said. “They’re New York Jewish women who became hippies.” (Skye’s mother is model Enid Karl; her father is British singer/songwriter Donovan, who unlike his son, generally goes by a single name.) A couple of weeks later, River called Skye up and asked her on a date, inviting her to come along while the Phoenix family went busking in Westwood. She happily consented, but before it happened, he called back and canceled. “I can’t, I’m gonna do a movie,” River told her—and then he left town.
Youth evaporates in Hollywood like rain on hot California pavement—but it’s unusual to find yourself too old for a part at age fifteen. For the plum role of the son in
The Mosquito Coast,
about a father (Harrison Ford) who uproots his family and moves them to the South American jungle, River was disqualified from the start: director Peter Weir was set on an actor not older than twelve, thirteen at the outside. Burton got River an audition anyway, but his tape was shelved, while Weir looked at dozens of younger actors.
Rewatching some of the audition tapes, casting director Diane Crittenden stumbled on River’s and was astonished. She immediately took the video-cassette to Weir and pressed it on him. “There’s a boy on this tape named River Phoenix,” she told him. “He’s terrific, only he’s fifteen.” Weir watched the tape, and was duly impressed—but was leaning toward Wil Wheaton, River’s younger
Stand by Me
costar. Then he read River’s résumé, and was astonished to discover that he had spent years living in Latin America. The parallels between the actor and the role seemed too strong to ignore. Weir remembered, “I finally said to myself, ‘What does it matter how old he is? He looks like Harrison’s son!’ And I cast him.”
In his native Australia, Peter Weir had become an acclaimed director of moody art-house films (such as the brilliant
Picnic at Hanging Rock
);
The Mosquito Coast
(an adaptation of a Paul Theroux novel) was his second Hollywood film after
Witness,
which also starred Harrison Ford. Helen Mirren, not yet a grande dame of cinema, played Ford’s wife. The cast also included the unlikely combination of Jason Alexander (with hair, not yet famous for
Seinfeld
) and Butterfly McQueen (best known for her role as a maid in
Gone with the Wind
).
Filming took place in the small Central American country of Belize, chosen for its variety of terrain (especially jungle), its English-speaking population, and its stable government. In late 1986, River flew down, with his father accompanying him as chaperon. Over a decade earlier, John had brought River along on his South American journey; now the roles were reversed.
Harrison Ford’s character, Allie Fox, becomes disgusted with the United States and its disposable consumer culture. A genius inventor working as a handyman in Massachusetts, he packs up his wife and four children and books passage on a freighter bound for the “Mosquito Coast,” the jungle stretching from Guatemala to Panama. From the boat, Fox shouts, “Good-bye, America, and have a nice day!”
This was not the exact trajectory of the Phoenix family, but their south-of-the-border odysseys was also rooted in contempt for the excesses of American materialism. Utopia collapses for the Foxes, just as it did for the Phoenixes. Allie Fox buys an abandoned town named Jeronimo and tries to turn it into a thriving jungle village, with an ice-making business at its center. The town is fueled by his hubris; when hoods with guns find it and try to take over, he blows the whole thing up.
The family ends up floating down the river on a boat, with Charlie (River’s character) exiled to a smaller trailing boat for the sin of insufficient belief in his father. When they try to make shelter on a beach, a storm blows everything away. The beliefs of the patriarch have proved to be no more reliable than a makeshift tent.
“
The Mosquito Coast
tells you to be true to someone you love,” River opined. (Not necessarily the most obvious moral—one could say it tells you to beware of how a loved one can take you to places you shouldn’t go, but that wasn’t something River wanted to say out loud, or maybe even think.) “I knew that character so well because I
was
that character. I knew his whole path,” River said.
“Paul Theroux didn’t steal my life story,” River declared. “I just misplaced it.”
To make filming more efficient, the
Mosquito Coast
production team built Jeronimo in three stages. Reminding everyone that this was a real jungle, big snakes such as boa constrictors frequently visited the set. Harrison Ford stayed at a nearby hotel, but most of the film’s cast and crew found accommodations in the jungle. “It was very hot,” River said, “and there were a lot of mosquitoes, but I got used to it. We ate a lot of rice, mangoes, and coconuts, which is what I eat anyway.” For variety, sometimes the production would fly in bagels from Miami.
Stand by Me
hadn’t been released yet, so many of the
Mosquito
filmmakers were agog at River’s transformation from the pudgy nerd of
Explorers
into a lean young man with the face of an archangel. “In a matter of months, he seemed to have gone from Spanky McFarland to James Dean,” unit publicist Reid Rosefelt remembered.
In order for the cast and crew to see dailies (the raw footage filmed on a given day), the film had to be flown to the United States for processing and then back to Belize. As they watched the dailies, it quickly became clear to everyone that River was turning into a movie star, more than capable of holding his own opposite Ford and Mirren. Sometimes he would back away from the camera, trying to let other actors be front and center. “But the more he stepped out of frame,” Rosefelt remembered, “the more your eyes were drawn to him.”
“River Phoenix was born to movies,” Weir said. “He has the look of someone who has secrets. The last time I remember seeing it in someone unknown was with Mel Gibson.” (Weir directed Gibson in
Gallipoli
[1981] and
The Year of Living Dangerously
[1982]; he proved to be perceptive about how both River and Gibson were concealing certain parts of their lives.) “It’s something apart from the acting ability,” Weir added. “Laurence Olivier never had what River had.”
River grew close to the sometimes-cantankerous Ford, and was smart enough not to pepper him with questions about Han Solo or Indiana Jones. “In his position, you have so many phony people trying to dig at you that you’ve got to have a shield up,” River said. “The biggest thing about Harrison is that he makes acting look so easy; he’s so casual and so sturdy.”
Ford, for his part, lauded River’s natural talent. “There are a lot of people who have that, but River is also very serious about his work, very workmanlike and professional, far beyond what you’d expect from a fifteen-year-old boy. I don’t like to talk to other actors about acting. I think it’s a real mistake. But River asks a lot of questions that require answers, none of which I can really supply—but they’re interesting questions.”
The movie shot six days a week. On his days off, River explored the nearby jungle. He would talk with the natives, snorkel with his dad in the barrier reef, or look for jaguars. Sometimes, he and Rosefelt played music together: Rosefelt had brought a small synth to Belize, and River arrived with his guitar. “I wondered if there was something strange about my hanging out with someone so much younger than myself,” Rosefelt said. “But I found him much more stimulating company than most of the other people on the set.” River didn’t just talk shop: he could be alternately cosmic and introspective.
“I was a curious kid when I was younger,” he told Rosefelt. He wanted to experience everything possible—so at age eleven, when he wondered how it would feel to cut himself with a razor blade, he tried it out. He confided, “I quickly realized that this pain thing wasn’t the way to go.”
John Phoenix kept encouraging his son to play hooky with him: to go off and jam on guitar together, or to take a trip to Guatemala on his day off. River had to play the mature professional, explaining to his dad that he needed to be respectful of the film and the people making it, which meant being rested and ready when he got in front of the camera.
Weir could see the growing tension between father and son, although he didn’t attempt to mediate. “With a young person who suddenly becomes the key breadwinner of the family, there’s an incredible amount of rearranging things in the family hierarchy,” he commented. “Sometimes a tension develops, particularly with the father.”
Weir did see River indulging in small acts of open rebellion: when John wasn’t around, he would eat foods never allowed in the Phoenix house. Not meat—his vegan beliefs were far too strong for that—but processed foods instead of all-natural snacks. “He’d stuff himself with a Mars Bar and a Coke,” Weir said. “It seemed a healthy steam valve.”
There was harder stuff than chocolate bars available on the set; nobody working on
The Mosquito Coast
who wanted alcohol or cocaine went unsatisfied. “It was like living in the drug capital of the Northern Hemisphere,” River allowed a couple of years later. “I’ve been so much more
exposed
than my folks think,” he said, with naked pain in his voice—regret that they had isolated him? Remorse for partying on the sly?
Also in the
Mosquito Coast
cast was the fifteen-year-old Martha Plimpton, the daughter of Keith Carradine and Shelley Plimpton (her parents met when they were both performing in the original Broadway run of the rock musical
Hair
). She played Emily Spellgood, the daughter of the Reverend Spellgood, a missionary who battles Allie Fox for influence over the natives. Emily has a crush on Charlie, as she lets him know in one of the most awkward come-ons in cinematic history: “I could be your girlfriend, if you want. I think about you when I go to the bathroom.”
“The character’s just so weird,” Plimpton later said of Emily. “She’s this missionary’s daughter who’s all sort of decked out in eighties new-wave teeny-bopper garb in the middle of the jungle, with her Walkman and her Lolita sunglasses.”
River and Plimpton had met a year earlier. “But we couldn’t stand each other,” River said. Isolated in the jungle, however, romance bloomed. “We’re just cooler, I guess,” he quipped.
Plimpton said the relationship was founded on professional respect: “I knew what it was like to work with adults who took their job seriously, but most of the time, if I was working with people my own age, they weren’t particularly interested in authenticity or studying what they were doing. So I think I had a kindred spirit there. And it was really great.”
“Martha Plimpton was his first real girlfriend,” Ethan Hawke observed. “Martha’s wonderful and extremely smart, but it wouldn’t be easy to have her as your first girlfriend. She doesn’t buy any bullshit.”
In his four months in the jungle, River grew three inches and lost the last remnants of his baby fat, dropping twenty pounds. Of his time in Belize, he said, “I learned that even among the chaos and discomfort you need to have the freedom of standing back and laughing, and not to take it all too seriously. Yet it is a serious job.”
When
The Mosquito Coast
was finally released, its reviews were middling; many critics found the monomania of Allie Fox (Ford’s character) as off-putting as his family ultimately did. Sheila Benson wrote in the
Los Angeles Times,
“Half the conflict of the film lies in the horrified awakening of Charlie (played with exquisite gradation by River Phoenix) to the fallibility and growing madness of his father, whose image in the boy’s eyes once blotted out the sun. The film’s focus should eventually shift from father to son. But Allie Fox is too indelible a character for the reasonable transfer of power.” The movie wasn’t a hit; Ford cited it as the only movie he had ever made (at the time) that hadn’t earned its money back.
The Mosquito Coast
is the movie where River discovered that he could immerse himself in a role so deeply that it would temporarily blot out his own personality and memories. He quickly decided that this was an excellent form of escapism. “It just feels so good,” he said. “It has nothing to do with the idea of movies, it’s just getting lost. Having an excuse to get that far out of your head is just a really good feeling.” In River’s telling, the pleasures of Method acting and large quantities of drugs sounded indistinguishable.
