When River Phoenix fatally collapsed from a drug overdose on the sidewalk outside the notorious Viper Room on Halloween 1993, he was a 22-year-old Oscar-nominated star of the classic “Stand by Me” with a brilliant future in the making.
Or so people thought. As Gavin Edwards reveals in his new book, “Last Night at The Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind,” the actor was planning to quit moviemaking.
He also had a serious heroin problem.
That night he headed out into the Hollywood scene with his younger brother, Joaquin, and sister, Rain. First, they headed in the hills for a party where Leonardo DiCaprio, dressed in costume as Johnny Hollywood, “a generic hipster actor,” spotted River in the crowd.
Then 18, DiCaprio idolized Phoenix, whose industry cred had only risen when he played a street hustler in “My Own Private Idaho.” DiCaprio couldn’t get close enough to talk to Phoenix, but he did get a good look at his face.
“He was beyond pale — he looked white,” the actor recalled.
The Viper Room had been open only a couple of months. Johnny Depp, looking for a cool, underground place to listen to music, had bought the space with associates. It quickly became one big VIP room, with all the famous faces in the crowd rather than performing onstage. Some nights, Depp would host late-night parties for his friends.
“Kate Moss might get behind the bar; Naomi Campbell might dance with security; Depp might have a longer conversation with Chrissie Hynde about religion. On those nights, Depp had reduced the Viper Room to its essence: a party room for him and his celebrity pals,” Edwards reports.
Phoenix toted his guitar to the club that night, but his buddy Flea, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, told him that all the space on the stage was taken, with Depp leading a roster of performers. So he headed back to the table to share the evening with girlfriend Samantha Mathis and his brother and sister.
There he took a drink from a friend, someone he had twice taken to rehab, and gulped it down without asking what was in it. It was a liquid speedball, a mix of cocaine and heroin. Soon after, he vomited and slumped in his chair.
Edwards speculates that if an ambulance had been called at that moment, Phoenix might have been saved.
Instead, his brother Joaquin walked River out of the club when he groggily roused himself. There, the dark-haired actor fell to the ground and went into seizures. His sister, Rain, sat on his chest to still them.
Phoenix’s girlfriend, Mathis, was futilely banging her head against the wall; Joaquin kept insisting everything was fine.
They were young, they were scared, and they didn’t know what to do.
At one point, Christina Applegate came out of the club and walked by. She was crying by the time she reached the corner. Joaquin’s agonized call to 911 — “Please come, he’s dying, please” got wide play in the aftermath.
River Phoenix was declared dead at Cedars-Sinai at 1:51 a.m.
Only later did Depp learn that it was Phoenix who had died outside his club. Mourners scrawled memorials on the door. Depp, who had friends in common with Phoenix, had it unhinged and sent to the Phoenixes in Florida.
Edwards layers “Last Night at The Viper Room,” with context threading a synopsis of Hollywood at the time throughout. DiCaprio was only just getting started, Tom Cruise was willing his way to big-screen stardom and Brad Pitt had just been anointed a star after beating out Phoenix for the lead role in Robert Redford’s “A River Runs Through It.” But the core story is that of River Phoenix, who surely had one of the most unusual childhoods of any kid come to Hollywood.
His parents, Heart (Arlyn) and John, joined the Children of God cult when River was a toddler. They became itinerants, always drifting south when they finally came to rest in the Children of God commune in Caracas, Venezuela. The children were sent into the street to sing or go hungry.
The Children of God was considered a Christian sex cult. The children were encouraged to have sex with adults and with each other. The routine was prayers, and then to bed for “sexual exploration” — including children as young as 3.
In an interview, Phoenix told Details magazine he was 4 when he first “made love.” The encounter was with “kids.”
“But I’ve blocked it out,” he said. “I was completely celibate from 10 to 14.”
The family left the cult before he turned 7. When the directive came that the women should take up “flirty fishing,” using sex to recruit male members, Arlyn balked.
“The guy running it got crazy. He sought to attract rich disciples through sex. No way,” she said later.
But at least to some people’s minds, the family perpetuated the sexual weirdness. For instance, when Phoenix resumed having sex at 15, the act took place in a tent in the family’s backyard decorated by his parents.
Corey Feldman, his co-star on “Stand by Me” — where the young actors, including Wil Wheaton and Jerry O’Connell, were obsessed by sex — says that Phoenix referred to it as his “second virginity.” The girl was a family friend and they went to both sets of parents to get their blessings first.
But while Phoenix asked permission to have sex, and even as his siblings followed him into the business, most notably Joaquin, River remained the family bread-winner. His stand-out movies included “The Mosquito Coast” with Harrison Ford and a role as young Indiana in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”
He was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in 1988’s “Running on Empty.” He played the son of a fugitive family living underground. There were some parallels to his own life. On Gus Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho,” where he and Keanu Reeves played street kids hustling gay men for money, Phoenix took the role seriously enough to research hard drugs.
One production assistant, Matt Ebert, says there was “rampant heroin use” on the set. And while Phoenix was new to using “it did not take him long to go from, you know, a casual user to having an intense drug problem.”
By the time he made his last movie, “The Thing Called Love,” Phoenix was an obvious casualty. After he stumbled through one scene repeatedly, his eyes unfocused, his agent and then his mother flew in to baby-sit him on location.
By then, his mother had changed her named to Heart and was managing his career. His father, John, had moved to Costa Rica, where the two would fight about the father’s drinking and the son’s career. John believed Hollywood was corrupt and evil and wanted River to quit.
Phoenix, meanwhile, would blow off opportunities like “Reality Bites,” which did so much for Ethan Hawke’s career, and then accuse his agency of hiding scripts from him.
Finally, he agreed to star in “Interview with the Vampire,” and another movie, “Dark Blood.” But he promised his dad that once those movies were done, so was he. He was quitting acting.
Of course, he might have reneged. On Oct. 31, 1993, the star told his young sister and brother to go have fun listening to Depp play The Viper Room.
Then, suddenly River changed his mind, grabbed his guitar and . . .