Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind Read Online Free PDF Page A

with our kids.” He remembered John and Arlyn telling him that one reason they had joined the Children of God was to stay off drugs.
    The family befriended Alfonso Sainz, a local doctor who had previously been a Spanish pop star, cofounder of the band Los Pekenikes. The group had started in the 1960s by doing Spanish-language covers of the pop hits of the day, and eventually began recording their own material. Although none of their work broke out of the Spanish-speaking market, they became a footnote in Beatles history: in July 1965, weeks before the famous Shea Stadium show, they opened for the Fab Four at their concert in Madrid’s Plaza de Toros de Madrid.
    By 1975, Sainz was living in Venezuela, and had become improbably friendly with the gringo missionaries. River spent hours talking with him about music, and on Christmas of that year, Sainz gave him a real guitar. River took the instrument everywhere, practicing incessantly, undaunted by how disproportionately large it was compared to his five-year-old body and hands. Within a few months, he could play simple songs; Sainz was impressed enough to offer to record him at his studio in Orlando, Florida.
    The Blond Children Who Sing performed everywhere: hospitals, jails, the streets. “We did it because we needed money, but we also wanted to pass along love,” River remembered later. “A lot of people would gather and listen to us. It was really a novelty. We had a whole act together. I’d be strumming on a guitar that was taller than I was at about a hundred miles an hour. I knew about five chords. That was where I learned to give a lot of joy and happiness, from singing.”
    Around the age most children attend kindergarten and are entrusted with blunt-tipped scissors, River had the massive responsibility of supporting his family. If he didn’t come home with enough money after serenading the citizens of Caracas, then they wouldn’t eat that night. He and Rain learned which locations were the most lucrative: hotels and the airport.
    On July 5, 1976—one day after the American Bicentennial—the family grew again with the birth of another girl, Libertad Mariposa (which translates into English as “Liberty Butterfly”). July 5 was Liberty Day in Venezuela; “Mariposa” came from the name of the hill where the Children of God colony was housed.
    Under John’s leadership as archbishop, the Children of God were thriving in Caracas. The sect found an ally in “Padre Esteban”—Father Stephen Wood, who was director of the Catholic Church’s local youth ministry. Presumably unaware of the more outré beliefs of the Children of God, he tried to incorporate them into his work, reasoning that they were fellow travelers. If he was doing youth outreach, he might invite a Children of God contingent along to sing. When the Children of God population expanded beyond the limits of their Mariposa house, Wood even provided lodgings for a dozen of them in the basement of the Cathedral of Los Teques.
    Wood, who died in 2010 (stabbed in his Venezuela home), remembered the Children of God as being so spontaneous that it was impossible to make any plans with them: “It was what God told them to do that day,” he said. He also discovered he had theological differences with them in regard to the Bible. “Their interpretation tended to be rather fundamentalist Protestant and very apocalyptic,” Wood remembered. They ultimately went their separate ways, although he would sometimes spot Children of God missionaries as far afield as Colombia or Costa Rica.
    Arlyn, hoping to make more of River and Rain’s musical act, entered the children in local talent shows, without any particular success. The family lived with empty pockets but good cheer. “I’ve been through some pretty desperate times,” River admitted as a teenager. “I’ve lived a lot even though I’m still young. But I feel that when you’re born into a way of life—and that’s all you know—you don’t mind