148 VANITY FAIR NOVEMBER 2019
changed their
last name to Phoenix, packed their station
wagon and moved to L.A. “We said, ‘Well,
that’s good enough,’ ” says Heart Phoenix.
“It turned out that we never did meet them.”
Heart got a job as a secretary for an execu-
tive at NBC and met a high-prole child agent
named Iris Burton, who got the children into
commercials and bit parts on TV. To supple-
ment their income, the kids sang their origi-
nal songs like “Gonna Make It,” written by
River, and busked for money in matching
yellow shirts and shorts. They studied dance;
Joaquin became an avid break dancer.
The Phoenix family were both morally
rigid—the children would not appear in soda
or fast food commercials—and totally free-
wheeling: When Joaquin asked his mother if
he could change his name, she told him yes,
and he went to see his father, who was in the
yard raking leaves. A moment later his new
name was Leaf.
In some ways, his early roles as Leaf Phoe-
nix set the tone for his career. In an episode
of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, for instance,
he played a deaf rich boy who witnesses a
murder and hatches a plan to blackmail the
murderer. He also costarred with River in an
ABC Afterschool Special called “Backwards:
The Riddle of Dyslexia.”
With the success of the Rob Reiner–
directed boyhood drama Stand by Me in
1986, River was catapulted to stardom and
the family became a minor media sensation.
In 1987 they were featured in Life magazine
(“One Big Hippy Family”), which featured a
photo of River pretending to break Joaquin’s
nose with a pair of pliers.
In the late ’80s, Phoenix was getting roles
in middlebrow kid ¡ilms like SpaceCamp
and Russkies, which didn’t necessarily meet
his high standards but earned him his own
press. He came o¢ as eccentric and hyperac-
tive. “During the course of an interview, he
could not stay still,” went one prole in the
Orlando Sentinel, written when he was 14 and
known as Leaf. “He rocked back and forth in
his chair, sometimes half out of it. He took a
brief ride on a motorized skateboard and once
fell to the ¤oor to examine a tiny black bug.”
“Leaf believes in animal rights (tuna
harvesting often kills baby dolphins),” it
continued. “He loves fried tofu. He wants
more people to care about world peace.”
Phoenix says he rst understood the power
of acting while playing a role in Hill Street Blues
in 1984. While being briefed at the police sta-
tion about his mentally unstable father, Phoe-
nix wallops a victim’s advocate in the face and
then kicks and screams while being restrained.
“After they said ‘cut,’ I remember the other
people and the other actors, I could feel that
they went, ‘Oof,’ ” he recalls. “There was this
moment and I felt it too, like my body was fuck-
ing buzzing. I’ll never forget this feeling. It’s
like the rst time you drink or smoke a joint or
something. You’re like, holy fuck, my whole
body is aware of it in a way that I’ve never been
aware. It felt incredible. It was an incredible
feeling, and I think the organism went, ‘Oh,
well, huh, we’re tapping something.’ ”
He pauses to consider his own story.
“Does that seem believable? Really? Because
if somebody told me that, I’d be like, ‘You’re
7 years old [in fact, he was 10]. You really had
a knowing of what the fuck you were?’ ”
Dissatised with life in Los Angeles, the
Phoenixes moved back to Florida, settling in
Gainesville, and River bought the family a
ranch in Costa Rica.
As River’s fame grew with Running on Emp-
ty, about a family of ’60s radicals on the run,
and an Indiana Jones movie, playing a young
Indy, Joaquin wasn’t getting any appealing
o¢ers and took a break to hang out on a beach
with his dad in Mexico, learning Spanish and
riding motorcycles. After he returned to the
States, his brother was shooting the indie clas-
sic My Own Private Idaho with director Gus
Van Sant. River began tutoring his younger
brother about cinema. “My brother came
home and he was like, ‘We need to watch
this movie called Raging Bull.’ And I’m like,
‘What?’ Prior to that, I watched Caddyshack
and Spaceballs. And Woody Allen comedies.”
Not long after, he recalls his brother mak-
ing a strange prediction. “He suggested
I change my name [back to Joaquin] and
then, I don’t know, six months later, what-
ever it was, we were in Florida, we were in the
kitchen, and he said, ‘You’re going to be an
actor and you’re going to be more well known
than I am.’ Me and my mom looked at each
other like, ‘What the fuck is he talking about?’
“I don’t know why he said that or what he
knew of me at the time. I hadn’t been acting
at all. But he also said it with a certain weight,
with a knowing that seemed so absurd to me
at the time, but of course now, in hindsight,
you’re like, ‘How the fuck did he know?’ ”
When he was 16, Phoenix says, he was sent
a dead frog in the mail to dissect for his biol-
ogy studies, which prompted him to discon-
tinue his studies. When his parents protested,
he dared them “to have me arrested.” (His
mother says she doesn’t recall this.) Around
that time, he appeared in Ron Howard’s Par-
enthood as a brooding, inarticulate adolescentgrappling with his budding sexuality. Heart
remembers her son’s intense emotional com-
mitment to the part, especially in a scene
where Joaquin’s character trashed his father’s
dental oªce and broke down crying. After-
ward, she says, “I had to come on the set and
hold him, because he just inhabited what he
believed that young child felt.”
Phoenix says that he and his siblings were
not frequent denizens of clubs like the Viper
Room. His brother had gone there in 1993,
and reportedly stayed in hopes of playing
music. “I don’t think it was typical. To be hon-
est, I don’t think it was really—I don’t think it’s
what he would have wanted to have done with
his night. He’d, just before that, spent time
just playing me new songs that he’d written.”
After River’s death, the family retreated to
Costa Rica to escape the media glare as the
tragedy metastasized into a cautionary tale of
young Hollywood and became a never-ending
stream of myth and conspiracy. “We just
walked away from everything,” says Heart. “It
was horrendous. The newspapers, we didn’t
see any of that, we just walked away.”
The family grieved in private for months.
The rst time any of the Phoenixes emerged
from the Costa Rica compound was when
Joaquin and his mother ¤ew to New York so
Joaquin could try out for a part in Gus Van
Sant’s latest lm, To Die For, starring Nicole
Kidman. (The casting assistant on the lm,
Meredith Tucker, still says his audition was
the best she has ever seen.) When he arrived
in New York, Phoenix hadn’t acted in three
or four years. “As soon as I saw him, I started
crying,” Van Sant says. “I didn’t realize that
would happen but it was pretty sad.”
In Phoenix’s rst scene as an adult actor,
he appears in a prison uniform, his head
shaven, as a mumbling criminal with a coal-
dark gaze and the suggestive scar above his
lip. He has a primal power that radiates vul-
nerability and a kind of tragic presence.
Or was that just how we viewed it because
he was River’s brother?
A few years later, when he transformed
completely for a career-de¡ining role as
Johnny Cash, whose own brother had died
when Cash was 12, the number one question
Phoenix seemed to get asked was how his
brother’s death informed his acting—a ques-
tion he resented at the time, expressing anger
at being cast as the “mourning brother.”
Smoking a cigarette on the shaded patio
behind his home, his dogs running in and out
of the dog door, he considers his response
to those inquiries over the years. “Because
I came out publicly as an actor at that time,
I suddenly was confronted with having to
talk about something that already was very
public, in the public sphere,” he says, “where
you’re in a ve-minute interview, every ve
minutes and everything, at a fucking junket.
“It felt like, ‘Well, I’m not sure this is the
right place and it feels insincere to be talkingJoaquin Phoenix
CONTINUED FROM PAGE