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

salty breeze is blowing in from the ocean, and for the moment River is free.
     
    LATER IN LIFE, RIVER WOULD treat interviews as opportunities for spontaneous fiction: he would give answers that were at variance with other things he had said, or with reality. George Sluizer, who directed him in his last movie, Dark Blood, remembered, “When a journalist would come, he’d say, ‘Oh, George, let’s see how much I can lie to him.’ ” This wasn’t pathological; mostly, it seems to have been a young actor enlivening the sometimes dull work of talking about himself with some improvisation. But it was also a defense mechanism: when River described his parents as having been “missionaries” during their time in Venezuela, rather than “cult members,” he was being misleading if not quite untruthful, both out of consideration for them and out of a desire not to unwrap part of his life that he had boxed up and put away.
    For public consumption, River was usually casual about his unusual childhood, even glib: “It was a neat time growing up in Venezuela in the late seventies.” But once, his shell cracked, in a 1991 interview with Details .
    Q. Is there anything you did at an early age that you wish you had waited for?
    A. Yes—make love.
    Q. How old were you?
    A. Four.
    Q. With whom? Another four-year-old?
    A. Kids. But I’ve blocked it out. I was completely celibate from ten to fourteen.
    “Yes, yes, yes, he was molested,” a good friend said. “It began with other friends in the same commune/cult, and it escalated.”
    Some people have drawn a straight line from the sexual abuse of River as a child to later aspects of his life: in this narrative, acting and drugs were both parachutes that let him escape from his own damaged self, while his philanthropy and veganism were attempts to negate the guilt he felt over being abused. Another possibility: despite being repeatedly molested, he ended up a joyful person anyway, full of love for the world. He was certainly self-aware enough about what had happened—he told good friends about it, although he chose not to share it with the world.
    Even if River were alive today, he might not be able to explain how his experiences in Venezuela formed his adult self. The human spirit is a mysterious thing: traumas that flatten some people bounce off of others. Pain and hope get tangled into uncuttable Gordian knots.
    One would hope that leaving the Children of God and getting out of Venezuela put an end to this chapter in River’s life where his young flesh served as the raw material for the sexual desires of others. By his own telling, however, he was active sexually between the ages of four and ten—meaning that it continued for three years after the family left the cult.
    Once, when River was eighteen, somebody asked him if he had had a happy childhood.
    “Happy?” he replied, as if the idea had never occurred to him. “Well, it was interesting.”

8
    MEAT IS MURDER
    After a year living in the caretaker’s cottage and swimming in that pool, John and Arlyn were eager to get the family back to the United States, not least because Arlyn was pregnant again. Six international plane tickets, however, seemed as unattainable as seats on a rocket to the moon.
    Arlyn’s parents might have been able to afford the airfare, but she refused to ask them for money. Wood had a church fund for needy people, but didn’t feel he could tap it to send some Americans home. Then he had an epiphany: “An airplane is not the only way to get them there.” He went to a member of his parish who was a maritime captain and the owner of a small shipping line. Wood explained that he was trying to get Los Niños Rubios Que Cantan and their family to Miami: “All of them are U.S. citizens with passports, so we’re not smuggling anybody.”
    Arrangements were made; in October 1978, the family got on a cargo ship for the thirteen-hundred-mile journey north. In later years, River liked to claim they