Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind by Gavin Edwards Read Free Book Online

hair, and his dad had a beard, and they smoked a lot of pot.”
    Even with a place to stay, finances were tight for a family of seven. The kids were well dressed, but only because they received a large donation of upscale clothes from a wealthy local family. “They were the best clothes we ever had,” River said. “We were these pure, naïve, poor children,” he said. “The rich kids called us a lot of names but it never bothered us because we didn’t know what the names meant,” he insisted.
    John started a landscaping business, with the kids helping him haul plants and sod, but before it could take off, he threw out his back, his old injury recurring. The business went kaput, and when John stopped acting as caretaker on the Sainz property, the family had to leave. They moved about eighty miles west, to Brooksville, in a rural corner of the county. While John recuperated, Arlyn got a job as executive secretary for the director of the Hernando-Sumter Community Action Agency.
    Feeling that the family’s fortunes had hit bottom, John decided that the way to change them would be to abandon the surname Bottom. He chose a replacement: “Phoenix,” the glorious firebird of Greek mythology, periodically reborn from its own ashes. Although the name is entirely suitable as a symbol of resurrection and rejuvenation, John might have gotten the idea from a source other than classical mythology: in the spring of 1979, the “Phoenix Saga” was in full swing in the pages of the Uncanny X-Men comic book. (The telepath Jean Grey transforms into the godlike Phoenix and becomes corrupted by power, killing billions of aliens when she annihilates a solar system. To stop the rise of Dark Phoenix, she commits suicide.) Joaquin was a fan of the X-Men comic book—even if John wasn’t reading it, the Phoenix character was regularly featured on the cover and a stray sighting could well have sparked the idea. (If it did, then River and Joaquin Phoenix would end up as two of three Oscar-nominated actors whose last names were drawn from Marvel Comics characters, the other being Nicolas Cage, who traded in his Coppola family name for the surname of Luke Cage [aka ghetto muscleman Power Man.])
    Meanwhile, River and Rain were retooling their act, with more emphasis on popular songs and less on Children of God hymns. Arlyn dubbed the family Team Phoenix, emphasizing that they were focused on show-biz success, but River later insisted that she was not the driving force behind his music and acting. “We all wanted to be entertainers,” he asserted, “and our parents did whatever they could to help us out.” Alvin Ross, part of the management team for the rock band Kiss, expressed interest in the act, but nothing came of it.
    River and Rain were no longer spending their days busking; instead, they performed at every talent contest and county fair they could find. On April 25, 1979, they entered a contest at the “Hernando Fiesta” in Spring Hill, Florida. Also entering were a belly dancer and a snake charmer, sent over by the Busch Gardens amusement park. “Those girls were moving parts of their bodies I didn’t know existed,” said one female spectator.
    Second place went to a mime, but first place went to River and Rain, performing their old Children of God showstopper, “You Gotta Be a Baby.” “Except a man be born again, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven,” they sang, first rendering the biblical quotation in English, and then in French, Spanish, German, and Japanese. They won fifty dollars. More importantly, they caught the attention of Gayle Guthman, the reviewer from the St. Petersburg Times, who wrote a full article about the Phoenix family three weeks later.
    The article, appearing on the same page as “Murdered Man’s Pickup Truck Found” and “Lutherans to Sponsor Ice Cream Social,” featured John Phoenix’s cleaned-up version of the family history. As John related the family history, they had been working as