Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind by Gavin Edwards Page A

Their lives are totally in pieces.” As River spoke, he seemed to shift gradually from describing people he had observed to describing the pitfalls and hazards of his own life.
    River tried to find ways to undermine his new, exalted movie-star status. Burton accompanied him to Tokyo for the Japanese premiere of the movie; they stayed at the lavish Imperial Hotel. When River found that the park next to the hotel had groups of kids hanging out and playing guitar, he invited them up to his room. “That room was filled with kids from the park,” Burton said. “He would play guitar for them and give them fruit and juice.”
    An undeniable indicator of River’s new stardom: his appearance in the pages of celebrity pinup magazines like Bop! and Tiger Beat . (The class of publications is best typified by Lisa Simpson’s favorite, Non-Threatening Boys Magazine .) Cooperating with the publicity departments of movie studios, River found himself the subject of photo sessions that turned him into a pinup alongside Rob Lowe, Kirk Cameron, and the members of Duran Duran.
    Only a few years later, he shuddered at the memory: “They teach you how to pose, you know, they say, ‘You have to do it like this!’ And you tilt your head and they show you how to push your lips out and suck in your cheek .” River groaned. “And then all the outtakes that you never want to see again in your life go through the teen magazines forever .”
    The peg for just about every mini-profile accompanying a pinup: River’s taste in girls. One magazine quoted him thus: “I like girls who are so natural because I’m natural in everything I do.” Another: “It’s a great feeling to think that I can be a friend to so many people through my movies.”
    The notion that these magazines made him fodder for romantic fantasies disconcerted River, reasonably enough. “It’s like there’s a grandstand full of girls who think I’m the greatest without knowing anything about me personally. It makes me very nervous. It’s as if everybody’s getting all worked up over an image they don’t know anything about. And if you are that image . . . I mean, don’t they know I’m an actor?”
    While it’s disconcerting for any teenager to find himself an international sex object, River’s situation was even more fraught. As a child, under the aegis of the Children of God, he had been drawn into sexual activity before he could understand it or consent to it. Although he was still a minor—just sixteen years old—he once more found his own personality submerged in the deep waters of other people’s lust. He wasn’t comfortable with it, but again, he went along with it.
    Now legitimately famous, even appearing on The Tonight Show (with guest host Joan Rivers), River spent a lot of time worrying that he would lose himself in a whirlwind of celebrity and hollow praise. He struggled for ways to maintain his integrity—the same impulse that drove Ethan Hawke to write letters to himself. Reid Rosefelt said of River, “He told me that he had to get up every morning and fight to remain himself.”
    While a professional name change to Rio no longer made any sense, River kept using the name privately. Over the years, introducing himself to strangers as Rio proved to be a useful way to sidestep fame-addled encounters. Calling himself Rio became a symbol of integrity—a way to assert that he had an identity that was distinct from the “River Phoenix” that could be found on newsstands and billboards.
    River wouldn’t have necessarily put it that way at age sixteen. Not that he was inarticulate, just that he was more prone to sentences like this: “Yo, Mama-jama, can we have some OJ, pleeze!”
     
    JOHN PHOENIX WAS LOOKING FOR more stability in his family’s living situation—they had moved over forty times during River’s life—and wanted to take a step away from what he saw as the iniquity of Hollywood. The solution to both problems, financed by River’s