A Double Dose of Bad Luck for Earth Trust

The obituary for River Phoenix ran on Monday, Nov. 1. The 23-year-old actor had collapsed and died outside a Sunset Strip nightclub early the morning before. The family requested memorial donations to “Phoenix’s favorite charities,” Earth Save in Santa Cruz and Earth Trust in Malibu.

At its hilltop Malibu headquarters, the small Earth Trust Foundation staff geared up for a windfall.

The nonprofit organization--which espouses a philosophy of linking personal consciousness, social justice and environmental activism and has a membership of only 100--is hardly high-profile. But Phoenix’s mother, Heart, a dedicated Earth-watcher, had been to an Earth Trust workshop in Malibu about 18 months earlier.

She was her son’s adviser in matters environmental, says Earth Trust founder/president Andrew Beath, and the actor was “tuned in” to the foundation’s work.

From her Florida home, Heart Phoenix asked a friend to call Beath and tell him she wanted to honor her son by aiding his work to preserve the rain forests and help their indigenous peoples.

The first day, 20 phone calls came in. The next day, the Malibu/Calabasas fires broke out. The phone would be out for nine days.

“The timing was so bad,” says Beath. By the time phone service was restored, “the energy had just dissipated. Or they called Earth Save, the other group.”

Within hours after the fire began, executive director Matthew Nichols--who’d planned to spend the day writing “Thank you for your donation” letters--was helping to carry the computers and files out of Earth Trust’s office.

“One of the worst birthdays I can remember,” says Nichols, who turned 31.

By day’s end, 60-foot flames were licking within 10 feet of the sprawling structure that is both home to Beath--a 48-year-old dropout from the corporate world--and headquarters for the foundation he started in 1985.

Beath stuck it out, fending off the flames with a garden hose and buckets, until a helicopter dump doused them. But nothing could be done to save the house two doors down--once the home of actor John Houseman--that was Earth Trust’s conference center.

Its rental income had provided half of Earth Trust’s modest operating budget.

The fire now a dimming nightmare, Beath and Nichols scan the blackened hills and count themselves lucky.

Sort of.

“We’re still here,” Beath says. “We’re alive and operating at a little less than we’d like to be.”

With its conference center income gone, Earth Trust now must rely for most of its operating expenses on rental income from properties Beath has bought and fixed up. The annual budget of $55,000 has been halved, resulting in salary cuts and pared-down staff.

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This is not an organization that gives away money. Rather, it finds funding--grants and other--to aid projects worldwide and provides administrative assistance and moral support.

Among these good works: A rain forest preservation campaign in Papua, New Guinea; esteem-building workshops for troubled L.A. youths; children’s feeding programs in Peru, and a project to help Salvadoran refugees resettle in the L.A. area and rebuild their lives.

With the phone back in order, calls from admirers of Phoenix are trickling in. And there are letters, some with small checks, from fans and friends. The largest single donation, $2,500, has come from the rock group R.E.M.

A Toluca Lake man sent a donation to the River Phoenix Memorial Fund. “I shall miss his talent,” he wrote, “and I shall miss the way his talent touched me.”

A Los Angeles woman wrote a poetic five-page tribute to the actor, who died of a massive drug overdose:

” . . . River is in every beautiful green leaf. River is in every sunshined mountain . . . “

She wants to paint a picture to be made into a poster as a rain forest fund-raiser.

Still, the fact remains that Earth Trust has taken a bad hit.

“We’re saying, ‘Hey, we still exist!’ ” Nichols says.

But, he adds, “We’re struggling.”

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Streetwise Author Lars Eighner is feeling quite overwhelmed, being hailed as the Thoreau of Dumpsters, a latter-day Candide.

Eighner, 45, has written “Travels With Lizbeth,” a chronicle of his three years on the road as a homeless person with Lizbeth, his black Lab mix.

Their odyssey took them in 1988 and again in 1989 from home base, Austin, through Texas and Arizona to Los Angeles, where he spent seven months, hoping to find work.

How does L.A. stack up as a home for the homeless?

“It was particularly horrible,” Eighner said in a telephone interview from Austin where--thanks to the book, and a film deal--he now has a small apartment. “The competition for resources was just too intense.”

On the streets, Eighner and dog survived chiefly through his dumpster diving. And L.A., he says, “was the only place where I found almost every one of them locked.”

He did not raid residential trash cans. “It’s messy and you have to get close to trespassing. And they just don’t produce the good garbage.” Nor did he panhandle.

Lizbeth, though, had no scruples about begging. He notes that she “displayed a talent for hustling . . . a wan look, a few feeble twitches of the tail, a languid, tentative lick.” He calls it “the dying dog routine.”

Eighner perfected the urban art of scavenging, lowering himself into a dumpster, armed with a stout, pointed stick. Among his finds: The computer on which he wrote the final draft.

Lizbeth proved worth her weight (70 pounds) in gold. Prostitutes and winos on Hollywood Boulevard gave her money; little old ladies proffered dog biscuits. “In L.A., there’s an affection for animals that borders on the English attitude.”

Eighner’s odyssey began after leaving (under pressure) his job at a state mental hospital in Austin. As a student at the University of Texas, he’d written term papers for money. Later, he wrote for slick gay magazines and “The Threepenny Review.”

Success has presented a dilemma. “I don’t want to be typed as the ‘homeless author’ for the rest of my life. And there (won’t) be ‘Travels With Lizbeth II’ and ‘More Travels With Lizbeth.’ ”

Eighner is adjusting to the structured life. On the streets, he says, “If I found a quilt in the dumpster, I’d feel like I really accomplished something that day.” Now, he has speaking dates into February.

“Travels With Lizbeth” is sometimes wickedly funny. “This is not meant to be a grim book,” he says. “There really is a romantic element to the road. But that doesn’t mean I want to do it again.”

What would he like to do?

“I’d like very much to live in West Hollywood.”

Lizbeth, by the way, is now almost 9 and doing very well, too.