The Flight of One Phoenix

A predictably eclectic luncheon in an East Village restaurant. Beef, fish and fowl are banished from the menu, which suits Joaquin Phoenix fine, since the actor has been a vegan from the age of 3 1/2. Phoenix’s belt is made of fake leather, his sneakers betray not the thinnest strip of suede. He wears a Goodyear baseball cap, a drab shirt and trousers that once might have marked him as a full-service gas station attendant but now mislabels him as a hipster of Los Feliz.

Over thin soup and a herbal-blend tea so overly ambitious that he abandoned it after one sip, Phoenix is explaining how his father, despite having raised a family of film actors, wasn’t much of a performer himself. Just a few school plays and the skits he used to put on for his children.

“Like the fly skits,” Phoenix explains. “He was reading the paper. ZZZZZ-zzzz!” He tracks the imaginary insect under his brim. “The fly is going around; he tries to kill it. He gets up. Finally he gets a can of something, and it lands on his nose, and he sprays himself and passes out.”

After the anecdote come the inevitable regrets. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” Phoenix says with a dispirited chuckle. “You made me tell a story and I wish I didn’t. Sorry! Sorry! I feel awful.”

He rustles through a modest pile of past Joaquin Phoenix articles resting upon the over-varnished table. A dozen pairs of wide-set blue eyes stare back at him. He chafes at all these images of himself, lolling around in smart tux and tails on the cover of Vanity Fair, or pretending to wash dirty restaurant dishes in an absurdly clean apron in Premiere. Just as unnerving are the chance words he once misspoke to a reporter, now committed to posterity.

“ ‘First of all, I hate actors talking about acting,’ ” he quotes himself. “I spent eight hours talking about acting with this journalist. You say something, and who knows? You know what I mean? Who knows? It’s all up in the air. I change.”

He rises from his chair on legs that wobble like Jell-O. “I feel awful,” he says. “I gotta go smoke!”

Certainly, Phoenix, 23, has undergone extreme physical changes for his film roles. Under supervision of a personal trainer, he has been buffing up for his role as a street tough in “The Yards,” a movie he has begun shooting with Mark Wahlberg and James Caan. He finds the transformation of his slight frame into a more powerful one--and even the requisite pain--exhilarating.

“On the treadmill,” he says, ‘I thought my shins were going to explode. It’s the best.”

In “Return to Paradise,” the Vince Vaughn/Anne Heche drama debuting Friday, Phoenix took his body to a different extreme. As Louis, a gentle youth with dreams of saving endangered orangutans, Phoenix’s character is imprisoned for hash possession on a Malaysian beach and sentenced to death. He had his diet managed by two nutritionists, who succeeded almost too well in starving him toward oblivion. Malnutrition fuels the delirium of his emaciated prison scenes. The stretched skin around his rib cage contorts with each bronchitic cough, and Phoenix’s mumblings on mental and physical depravation sometimes rise to the cracked clarity of a medieval flagellant.

For Joel Schumacher’s upcoming “8 Millimeter,” a thriller starring Nicolas Cage, Phoenix did not have to waste away or pump himself up, although, as a surly clerk in a porn shop, he did pierce his eyebrow and dye his hair blue. He appears in more or less his off-screen physical state in “Clay Pigeons,” set for a Sept. 25 release, which finds him again teamed up with the “Swingers” star, playing the patsy for Vaughn’s aw-shucks serial killer.

All the extreme preparations, the endless takes and remote location shoots seem easier to weather than the painful experience of actually seeing himself on screen. “I like the process,” he says. “But the product is very rarely endurable to me.”

Perhaps he might make an exception for his breakthrough role in Gus Van Sant’s “To Die For” in 1995. Playing Jimmy, the dimwitted teen seduced by Nicole Kidman’s would-be newscaster into murdering her husband, Phoenix saturated his face with so much adolescent confusion and pain that he invited a kind of compassion that probably was absent from Buck Henry’s wicked script. But not even this performance gives him solace.

“No, no, no, no, no,” Phoenix answers, resuming the conversation on a bench in Central Park. He can’t remember specifically what was wrong, but he does know that he can’t bear watching it. “I can’t even sit and enjoy it and think about it objectively,” he says. “I just make so many mistakes. There’s so many things I should have done that I didn’t do.”

Fortunately, while he is acting, he manages to keep the audience out of sight and mind. “My directors have been from that perspective, where I can just be inside of it and develop.” Phoenix hesitates. “I’m talking about acting, aren’t I? There goes my quote, ‘There’s nothing worse than actors talking about acting.’ The reason why I keep making movies--which is the reason why I keep doing interviews--is ‘cause I hate the last thing that I did. I’m always trying to rectify my wrongs.”

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Once, Joaquin Phoenix did not face the audience with such chagrin. As a child, he sang songs on the streets of Westwood with his brother, River, and his sisters Liberty, Rain and Summer. Christmas was the big money season. “We did a lot of Beatles,” he remembers, “ ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ and some originals.”

Sometimes, his father, originally named John Bottom, would melt into the crowd pretending to be a spectator, but usually, he and their mother, Arlyn Dunetz, would “just sit there beaming, like beautiful, proud parents.” (After River’s birth, the family changed their surname to Phoenix.)

River, Summer, Rain and Joaquin Phoenix all became movie actors, which seems a strange career path. However much their parents encouraged their acting, the Phoenix children grew up as shielded from social conformity and the mass media that feeds it as any American family could strive to be. Dunetz left her family’s New York City apartment when she was a teenager.

“She comes from a nice background,” Joaquin says, “and she was doing a 9-to-5 job, and she wanted something different out of life, which was very impressive.”

Hitchhiking with a friend outside of Los Angeles, she was picked up by Joaquin’s father, then an 18-year-old landscaper of like mind.

After they married, the Phoenixes remained vagabonds--River was born in Oregon, Rain in Texas, Joaquin in Puerto Rico, Liberty in Venezuela (where the parents did missionary work for a Christian sect) and Summer in Florida. Wherever they traveled, they refused long-term wage labor and the separation that would go along with it. “Most of my childhood,” Joaquin says, “I grew up with both parents. They were poor, with all these kids, but they always found open arms; people who took us in.”

Among the most fateful benefactors was the crew of a toy company boat, who took the destitute family back to the U.S. after the Venezuela sojourn. Joaquin turned 3 on that trip; he remembers the birthday cake the ship’s cook baked for him.

On the trip, the Phoenix children spotted some flying fish. “They were amazing,” Joaquin can recall despite his age then, “these fish that were leaping above the water. So gorgeous.” But then the crew began fishing. “They’re pulling in nets with tons of fish,” he says, “and they’re flopping on deck, and in order to kill them, they threw them against the wall. How barbaric it was, and these people had been so kind to us. We were all just pathetic, screaming, and we said to our parents, ‘How come you never told us?’ ”

It was to be the start of the entire Phoenix family’s conversion to veganism. Vegan cuisine--meatless, milkless, eggless--has improved over the years, but the leather prohibitions did complicate a recent modeling gig.

“When I did the Prada campaign,” Joaquin says, “the stylist wore the shoes. They did a separate shot of the shoes and it wasn’t me. You know, it’s kind of ridiculous because who the hell’s going to know that?” He bears no ill will to Prada footwear. “They make nice shoes. I tried to get them to make a vegetarian shoe, but no.”

He has never faced the dilemma of a meat-eating girlfriend. Two weeks before he began work opposite Liv Tyler on “Inventing the Abbotts,” the actress became a vegetarian. “Now, she’s trying to be a vegan,” he says of his girlfriend of two years, currently seen in “Armageddon.” “But it’s a habitual thing. I was blessed that I made that change at such a young age.”

After River broke into acting, his brother followed. In 1987, Joaquin co-starred in a summer turkey called “Space Camp,” and later, in Ron Howard’s “Parenthood,” in which he played the tormented son of Dianne Wiest. Joaquin was invited to read for other parts as troubled teens, which he turned down.

“Just really awful movies,” he remembers. “He’s my step-dad. He’s coming to pick me up, so I can see my mom. He and I don’t get along. I throw a pie. It’s just [expletive] b.s.”

At 16, he left for Central America. “I was riding horses and just growing up.” Following 1995’s “To Die For,” he says, “I suddenly realized that--’Oh my God, I’ve got to do this.’ ”

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Another afternoon, another overly ambitious meatless restaurant. The waiter brings dishes of noodles, dumplings, vegetables. He puts down three sauces--brown, green and red--and explains which entree must be dipped into which. As soon as his back is turned, Joaquin Phoenix picks up a dumpling and dunks it into all three.

The conversation turns toward the 911 call that Joaquin made the night his brother River died of a drug overdose on the Sunset Strip on Oct. 30, 1993. Joaquin’s anguished cries for help as he watched his brother writhing on the sidewalk were excerpted in newspapers the day after River’s death, and broadcast on “The NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw” and “Hard Copy.”

“I didn’t find out that happened until a long time afterward,” Phoenix says, “but it’s pretty awful, pretty awful. Everyone who writes for these shows--I know they have families of some kind. How did we come to a society where we’re so cut off from one another, and from common courtesy for someone and his feelings? It’s just gone out the [expletive] window.”

“A little b.s. gossip, I don’t care. If you want to talk about how this singer has [expletive] that dancer, great!” But he still can’t understand how people could find so much enjoyment in other people’s suffering.

“It’s not fair, not fair,” he says. “‘This is the price of fame.’ What are you talking about? Nobody deserves that pain, that hurt.”

He has heard the speculation surrounding his family, that his parents must have somehow raised them wrong for this to happen, the media working the Phoenixes’ alternative lifestyle into a threadbare Hollywood morality tale.

“It’s bizarre to me,” Joaquin says, “because there is nothing I would change about my life except my brother’s death.”

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Last year, Liberty Phoenix gave birth to a son she named Rio. “He’s gorgeous,” Joaquin enthuses. “Curls, and he’s beautiful bronze. He’s half Costa Rican. His daddy is Costa Rican and he’s just--ah--so gorgeous.”

Though Joaquin’s parents have divorced, the entire family gathered to watch Rio’s natural childbirth, at home in a custom tub. Joaquin himself snipped the umbilical cord.

He doesn’t anticipate having a child of his own soon. He is still without a permanent residence, living temporarily in New York with his personal effects also scattered about Florida and Los Angeles.

“I love that image of a father--a mom and dad--someone who’s really a parent,” he says. “My dad holding me at different times, I love that! And I love the strength and the wisdom and the years on one’s face--it’s just gorgeous! But I’d be too selfish right now to have such a huge responsibility, and I just don’t know where it’s all going. I don’t think I’m terribly optimistic about the future of the world. So I’m a little frightened.”

The waiter returns with the bill. In a minute, Phoenix will rise on his wobbly legs, place a cell-phone call to Tyler in England and wish her good night. At the mouth of the subway, he’ll smile, shake hands, say he knows we’ll meet again.

The restaurant is called Zen Palate, so it seems only right that the waiter should refrain from cracking a smile, even when the actor tries to settle the bill with a little joke. But even this explanation cannot quell one last moment of vegan self-doubt. “I don’t feel loved here,” Joaquin Phoenix confesses. “I thought I did something wrong.”

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Ed Liebowitz is an occasional contributor to Calendar.