|
TOFU
GUYS DON'T EAT MEAT
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| Magazine
& Date: |
Vogue,
1990 |
| Written
by: |
Vicki
Woods |
| Provided
by: |
Sarah V |
River Phoenix is only nineteen.
That's the most important thing about him He's been in the
movies so long you'd think he'd be older by now; really
knocking on, like... oh, I don't know. Twenty-two or something.
But nope. Nineteen. Wholesome as a tofu omelet. And as good-looking
as all get-out.
Another important thing is
his funny name. River Jude Phoenix. All the baby Phoenixes
have Spaceship-Earth, Save-the-Planet sixties names, which
their parents (Arlyn and John) clearly gave a lot of thought
to, and now that the kids have lived with their names for
some years and worn them in a bit, they suit them right
down to the ground. Rainbow Joan of Arc Phoenix, seventeen,
is called Rain; Leaf Joaquin Phoenix, fifteen, is calling
himself Joaquin these days; Liberty Mariposa Phoenix (mariposa
is Spanish for "butterfly"), thirteen, is known as Libby;
and Summer Joy Phoenix, twelve, sticks to Summer. These
are great names for end-credits titling, aren't they? Better
than... Meryl Streep.
When River isn't making movies,
he's making music. He lives with his family in Gainesville,
Florida. Ever been to Gainesville? Neither had I. North
central Florida isn't exactly a tourist hub, being humid,
flat, spotted with alligators, and at least a hundred miles
from the ocean in any direction. But it's warm, and Arlyn
Phoenix likes the heat. And Gainesville (population ninety
thousand and rising) has thirty-five thousand college students
living there.
The University of Florida,
one student told me, is about the cheapest public university
in the entire United States, which is why it's busting at
the seams with crop-headed, athletic-looking boys in white
T-shirts and bermudas who play football by floodlight until
the early hours of the morning. Arlyn Phoenix liked the
idea of a university town when it came to settle finally,
because she wanted plenty of cultural facilities for her
brood of children: arts, music, drama.
River Phoenix isn't crop-headed
of course. And he doesn't wear bermudas. He arrived at my
hotel in his mother's car wearing a jade green Gap sweat-shirt,
navy blue long johns, and tennis shoes. He's grown since
we last saw him (in Running on Empty - what a tearjerker).
He's now five eleven ("Barefoot!''), slim as a willow and
hung with wisps of beard like Florida's Spanish moss. He
wouldn't shave them off, even for Bruce Weber's pictures.
He didn't have to fatten up for his new role in Lawrence
Kasdan's I Love You to Death. He plays a pizza chef who
has a fairly off-center weltanschauung and tries to help
his boss's wife (Tracey Ullman) attempt to murder her husband
(Kevin Kline) numerous times .He's a lean pizza chef, playing
his age. (He put on fifteen extra pounds for Stand by Me
because he was fourteen playing twelve and fatter looks
younger.)
After I Love You to Death
comes Dogfight, directed by Nancy Savoca. I'm really looking
forward to it. River plays a marine who has a bet with the
other guys that he'll pick up a worse dog - an unhandsome
woman - than any of them. This should be a real coming-of-age
movie and the first that he'll have to carry on his own.
Director Savoca says, "River has an emotional weight that
other young actors just don't have."
We went for coffee in Gainesville.
The teenage waitress was a little excited, but she kept
her cool. "Do you have Venezuelan coffee?" No. "Do you have
carrot juice?" No. "Well, I'll just have a double espresso
then,'' he said, and promptly ticked away for hours about
how hyper he felt from the caffeine.
I told him he was a pinup
even in the British teen mags and then immediately wished
I hadn't. So did he. He laid his beautiful head on the table
and groaned with real embarrassment. "A pinup. Oh, God.
I wish you hadn't said that. A pinup!" He told me about
the publicity stills that were taken of him "when I was
younger." You do everything they tell you, he said "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...
oh, oh [groans] and then all the outtakes that you never
want to see again in your life go through the teen magazines
forever. Oh. oh [more groans]." It was very funny, but he
meant it. Gentlemanly modesty is River's strong suit.
River's press so far has been
a combination of large paragraphs about the state of the
planet (which can read kind of irritating, from a fifteen-,
sixteen-, seventeen-year-old) and a "Wow, freaky!" examination
of his unconventional family.
Let's take the family first.
Arlyn and John Phoenix (him I didn't meet - he was in Mexico
with Leaf Joaquin) had a pretty wacky life until they go
to Gainesville (and compared with Married... with Children
mainstream America it's still a tad wacky). They were sixties
dropouts, they were on the road, they thought LSD was a
truth serum, they found God, joined a sect, went to South
America as missionaries (River was fluent in both Spanish
and English from age three), had their babies by natural
childbirth, believed in a Whole Earth... you know.
Arlyn and John seem to have
followed the beat of the sixties drum harder than most,
and instead of turning into eighties yuppies, they've hung
on in there. They are now perfectly regular folks, with
twenty acres of property, a few cars, a few bank accounts,
a cook, a gardener, a business manager, and five handsome
kids, most of whom are actors, but - they do vegetables
instead of drugs now, they don't eat animal products, don't
waste paper, wear leather, or overconsume any of the planet's
resources. They have SAVE THE RAINFORST stickers on their
cars, and their two big dogs, a Doberman-German shepherd
mix and a full German shepherd, are both vegans. (They don't
smell any sweeter than regular, carnivorous dogs, I might
add.)
So River's handsome little
head, from an early age, has been full of global concerns
and the need to save water when you flush. This is fine,
except when you're a Hollywood star at the same time and
writers jet in to ask you what you think of God, Harrison
Ford, Rob Reiner, Sidney Lumet, President Bush, and all
those other grown-ups. And you've been brought up to think
for yourself, hold your own in conversation, stick up your
chin and talk. So they take it all down as if it were gospel
and you end up sounding like a real dweeb.
River groans again at the
thought of his early interviews. "Oh, oh, I just find them
misleading. I don't recognize myself... I sound kind of
like... bright boy, teenage messiah, health fanatic... uh.
Save the World... hippy-dippy background... the whole collage
reads false. It's the terms that are wrong. I mean... Save
the World."
As it happens, he did give
me a long riff on God ("or Supreme Being or Life Force,
call it what you will"), but you don't want to read it here.
(I'm an atheist, I said. "Good move!", said River with tact
and charm.) We talked about trees. He wanted to write something
down on my notebook and I flicked over so he couldn't see
what I'd been writing about him. "Tsk tsk!" he said. "You
could've used that bottom half. You shouldn't waste paper."
Why not? "Why not? Because trees are a diminishing resource,
that's why not. The American Forest Council ran an add saying
that we have 40 percent more trees in America now that we
had eighty years ago. Sure! Yeah - in the form of toilet
paper and used paper cups! I n fact, we cut down an area
of the size of Connecticut every year. The Forest Service
plant trees, sure, but for wood pulp. I think wood pulp
should only be used for writing materials. People waste
so much paper. In every hardware store, you get acres of
paper for every receipt. Three copies of all this crap -
surely our technology is more advanced than this! I mean,
if they can make a plutonium generator that will orbit Jupiter
and stay out there for forty-three years, surely they can
make a receipt than will save paper."
River became pretty intense
about orbiting Jupiter. "Drives me nuts! We have amazing
superpower technology that will now never need to be devoted
to... to arms, and instead of putting the money into building
safe sewers and protecting the groundwater, they... they...
can't even make a damn birth control device that will limit
the world's population."
Now, hang on a minute. How
many brothers and sisters have you, River? Four, is it?
Five of you altogether? Uh, not much population limiting
going on there. His eyes opened up, but he took it on the
chin. "My family," he said carefully, "don't waste the world's
resources. We eat what we grow, we don't exploit animals,
we use up less than our share of electricity and power,
we have solar heating, we aren't materialistic..." It was
a spirited defense, and I thought he was sweet, and we changed
the subject.
The waitress brought us a
small bill (on a small piece of paper). "Let's go to the
smoke shop," said River. He has to smoke in Dogfight (and
presumably to shave, too), so he's practicing. Gainesville's
smoke shop is a wonderful place, tall and airy with aluminum
ashtrays and racks of books. I asked River what he was reading
at the moment and he said, "Nothing": he was busy with his
music, he liked reading, though: he was always looking for
good books; he liked big, universal themes; something that
told him something large-scale about the human-condition.
Did I have any recommendations? he asked with artful flattery,
head to one side. He'd really appreciate my advice. Oh,
mercy. I went totally blank. Er... War and Peace? The nice
old guy in the smoke shop went off on a long search and
came up with a dusty copy. River said it looked great. And
big. We bought it.
Every time we crossed a street,
some little person popped up to say, Hey, Riv! And River
would cross over to slap him on the arm and say Hey! Back.
None of the hailers were crop-headed, and they weren't wearing
bermudas: River's friends aren't among the thirty-five thousand
college kids of Gainesville: they're the cool dudes. Musicians,
mainly. They're all terrifically polite, just like him.
River's in a band, too: he loves it. He writes songs and
plays guitar. It's called Aleka's Attic, and Island Records
is very interested in it. One of his friends told me that
he changes the band's name periodically "so that people
will go along to see the whole band, not to see River Phoenix."
River told me that he'd actually toyed with the idea of
calling himself something else for musical purposes.
We hung out all day. We hung
out at the vegetarian lunch place, where we ate falafel
and tahini, and a blushing girl asked River for his autograph.
We hung out at Gainesville's sound studio, where River picked
up fifty copies of the tape of his new song and asked the
engineer to play it for me on the studio equipment. It came
soaring out, full of guitars and drums, but River said it
wasn't loud enough. We hung out at a frat party in one of
the millions of frat houses that run through the center
of Gainesville. That was weird. Lots of cheerful kids of
River's age and with River's dress sense were setting up
amps and drum kits to play for the party, while the athletic
denizens of the frat house sat around on their balconies
combing their golden hair.
We didn't stay anywhere very
long. We hung out at River's house while Arlyn got a meal
together for her son, me, and a twenty-year-old girl from
England who'd met the Phoenixes in Mexico. The meal was
radically vegan, organic, animal-by-product-free, and delicious,
in fact. Arlyn, a chunky, smiling woman with graying hair,
explained to me about milk while she squished tofu, colored
yellow with turmeric, into a skillet to make an eggless
omelet. "Why should adult humans drink milk?" she said.
"Human milk is for baby humans, cow's milk is for baby cows."
It was unarguable.
River clearly adores Arlyn,
who does a great job as mother Phoenix. Her children are
all beautiful and they seem as happy as clams; also busy,
musical, drug-free, and polite. River gave me another long
riff on drugs: he works in cocaine country, after all, on
film sets. He said he becomes completely paranoiac in Los
Angeles. "People look at you if you have a cold: you feel
you can't blow your nose." And he can see the hand-shaking
and hand-passing that goes on at parties. "I just stay away
from it," he said, "I don't even like talking about it.
It depresses me. The biggest thing that really gets me are
the girls... because of being used, the way men use women.
It really upsets me - the wonderful extra-virgin-olive-oil
young ladies, who are so wholesome and so together and their
heads are on tight, and you see them a year later and they're"
- River puts on a blank, empty face and round, blank eyes
- "and all they've got left is just a recorded message in
their heads." He was very earnest about this. Then he listened
to his own earnestness, said, "Uh-oh, I'm going to segue
out of this," put on another face, and drawled, "Nancy's
said it all for me, anyway. Just say no." I thought the
whole performance was really endearing.
The last place we hung out
was with some very laid-back musicians. River bounced up
the steps of a frame house in Gainesville's main street
and said, "Hi, guys". The guys said hi and looked at me.
River looked at me, too, and was socially wrong-footed for
the first time in a long day. "This is... my aunt," he said.
"From England." The guys said hi. As we left, River grabbed
my arm and said, "Sorry about the aunt bit. I'll explain
it to them later." He gave me a big kiss and drove me back
to the hotel. I was charmed.
END OF INTERVIEW
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