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

negative and hurtful. Sure, it’s natural for kids to act in school plays, but to be adulated by fans is not natural. It’s not natural for a fourteen-year-old to have adults fetch him coffee.”
    Hawke didn’t appear in another movie for four years, although he did audition for Stand by Me, which would prove to be the movie that launched River to stardom. Hawke wasn’t cast. He went home to New Jersey, and soon found that people wanted his autograph—because he knew River. “He would send me into fits of envy,” he said. “Unadmirable fits of envy, because I respected him. He became wildly famous, and I was in French class.”
    It worked out in the long term for Hawke: he had a relatively normal high school life, and then left college after one semester to make Dead Poets Society, directed by Peter Weir. River very much wanted to be in Dead Poets Society and, having starred in Weir’s Mosquito Coast, hoped he had the inside track. But even writing a song about the Dead Poets Society didn’t get him the part—Weir wanted unfamiliar faces opposite Robin Williams. “The fact that I was unknown helped me get the part,” Hawke said. “We were friendly competitors. He said he admired my work, but I didn’t believe him. He liked to play head games.”
    Eating in a high school cafeteria instead of at the craft-services table gave Hawke perspective, and fostered ambitions beyond money and fame. He started a theater company and wrote novels—but after Dead Poets Society, he was so worried that he would become a cheesy sellout, he wrote himself letters reminding himself of his values, to be opened at age forty. “My biggest fear,” he said, “was that you get a lot of success as a young person, you don’t know who you are. I was just worried I would turn into somebody I hated. And that’s what makes you come off as pretentious—but the one thing you learn pretty quickly is that if you don’t take yourself seriously, nobody else is going to.” He smiled ruefully. “Ultimately, nobody else cares what you do.”
    Hawke never moved to Hollywood, which, ironically, may have helped with his longevity in the movie business: being three thousand miles away from the Viper Room proved to be a better way for him to become an artist.
    In regard to River, Hawke said, “I would have really liked to work with him again. I had a really hard time with the idea that he wasn’t going to give me the opportunity to be better than him. I’m a very competitive person. You remember the Daffy Duck cartoon, where Daffy’s trying to do all this stuff in front of this audience and the cane keeps coming and dragging him off? And finally he does this big magic trick and kind of lights himself on fire and he gets a standing ovation, and as he floats up and away, he goes: ‘It’s a great trick, but you can only do it once.’ I thought that about My Own Private Idaho: We got to watch River light himself on fire. And he did. And he was somebody really worthy of being competitive with.”

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    IF THE SKY THAT WE LOOK UPON SHOULD TUMBLE AND FALL
    “Chris Chambers was the leader of our gang, and my best friend. He came from a bad family, and everybody just knew he’d turn out bad—including Chris.” That was how Richard Dreyfuss, narrating as the adult Gordie Lachance, described the character in Stand by Me that made River Phoenix a star.
    River had been treating acting as a lark—he enjoyed doing it, but music remained his first love. After wrapping Explorers, however, he was fooling around on a motorcycle, racing it in a dirt field, and he took a spill, tearing up a tendon in his left knee. The injury gave him plenty of time to sit on the couch, thinking about life. River had an epiphany: acting in movies was not just a fluke detour in his life, it was important to him, and he wanted to do it well. Before he was fully healed, he went on an audition for Stand by Me . “I kind of limped in,” River said, but he thought that the injury