This article originally appeared in the January 1994 issue of SPIN. On the 30th anniversary of his death, we're republishing this article in his memory.
This article originally appeared in the January 1994 issue of SPIN. On the 30th anniversary of his death, we’re republishing this article in his memory.
An agent echoed the industry’s hasty retreat. “We thought he was going to be his generation’s Al Pacino,” he told me, “but in the end he turned out to be its John Belushi. What, it’s not enough to make half a million bucks a picture, to be young and beautiful, to have your dick sucked every 15 minutes, to be envied and loved? What the fuck do they need the drugs for? The whole thing just makes me sick.
Christina Applegate, who had been inside the club, came out and nervously watched Phoenix shaking. When she went to report what was going on to one of her girlfriends, someone said that they were laughing and making fun of Phoenix’s soon-to-be-fatal condition. But Applegate says she was genuinely upset, and that the stories about her laughing are simply untrue.
Much was made of Phoenix’s public service announcements for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and of his anti-fur stance. He also formed the band Aleka’s Attic with Rain, and was seen jamming at clubs around the country. We may have expected him to make a bad movie or two, maybe drive his motorcycle too fast, perhaps put out an album that sucked. What we didn’t expect was that he’d overdose on Sunset Boulevard.
Phoenix’s tendency, Van Sant says, to carry the weight of the world may have driven him over the edge that Halloween morning. “It probably stemmed from something that day on the film he was working on . I heard it had a torrid set, a lot of fights and disagreements. It was the weekend, and maybe he was just letting loose from all the turmoil.”
There, John injured his back, and the couple didn’t know what to do about money. “We’d had a vision that our kids could captivate the world,” Arlyn toldmagazine. So in the hippie version of stage-mothering, the brood headed to Los Angeles, the land of dreams. Soon, Phoenix was doing commercials, and then, at the age of 11, got his first dramatic role, in the TV series“Before I came back to America ,” River told thein 1991, “I thought features were Kellogg’s commercials and cartoons.
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