Julia Phillips, queen of the night

She'll never eat lunch on this planet again, but while she was here the Oscar-winning producer outdid Truman Capote in shrieking truth to decadent power.

By Tim Appelo

Jan. 17, 2002 | After River Phoenix took 11 fatal overdoses one Halloween in 1993, my editor sent me to tour the L.A. druggy underworld with Julia Phillips as my Virgil. Phillips, who died of cancer on Dec. 31 at age 57, had long since vanquished her coke problem, with the same iron will that won her an Oscar, forced Scorsese to cast De Niro not Keitel in "Taxi Driver" and enabled her to dynamite her bridges with her book "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again," which could've been called "Take This Oscar and Shove It." Phillips was, in my opinion, Hollywood's queen of the night, a scene who couldn't wait to happen, a talent magnet. Close encounters at her beach parties produced movies like "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

The night I met her, in her "'70s room," festooned with artifacts such as the original "Close Encounters" photo streaked by the coke blowtorch she formerly kept permanently lit, and a snap of Scorsese in bell-bottoms so flared he resembled a melting candle ("What were we thinking?" he said later, his voice softening at the mention of Phillips' name), she was still in the sizzling center. She whipped up a superb home-cooked meal with fine wine and Pine Sol-like frozen Jaegermeister ("You have to take two shots; I won't give you any otherwise"), hopped into her sporty rig, and light-warped off to Babylon, a restaurant so hip it was unlisted, so that only stars could make reservations.

We hooked up with the aptly named trailblazing producer Kit Carson and his skinny new discoveries, two Dallas burger-flippers and professional car parkers, on their first night in Hollywood. (Now Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson are the co-authors of "The Royal Tenenbaums," the best movie of the new millennium.) Phillips wanted me to put them in a magazine to make them stars, not really to cash in on it herself -- she just liked to warm her hands with new flame. They were very much like Spielberg when she'd met him, back when Spielberg was a nerd in creased jeans, except that they idolized drug bard Gus Van Sant. Phillips was evangelical about the latest Tinseltown party favor, invented by her: Ecstasy soaked into a joint in a microwave. The Texans stepped outside at her behest; then she skipped back without them, laughing and clapping her hands. "I was a naughty girl! I made the boys throw up!"

"It was worse than that," Anderson told me later. "One of us collapsed into the dirt, just like River Phoenix."

They awoke with nothing worse than nasty headaches. "We really liked Julia, though," Anderson told me. I wrote up the incident with no names, but everyone knew it was Phillips, and somebody faxed the piece with sarcastic comments to Anderson's home office at his mom's place in Texas, and his mom gave him a royal lecture about falling in with fast company. Thanks, Mom! Like Spielberg, who (according to Phillips) barely inhaled at her beach parties, Anderson went further in the slow lane.

Phillips, however, was unfazed by the semihigh life. She could puff Ecstasy, down heroic cocktail after cocktail and still chat up a witty storm and drive like Mario Andretti -- no, like Steve Martin at the start of "L.A. Story" -- zipping crosstown via hair-raising shortcuts only the ultimate local would know, stopping with a rakish screech at the valet's feet and flipping him the keys with the aplomb of Top Cat. Infamously, in L.A., the center cannot hold because there is no center, but everywhere I went with Phillips seemed to be the center: the No. 1 record producer feting the cool-du-jour ingénue, the power moshers who never let their hair get mussed.

After much club-hopping and no sleep, Phillips wanted to go dancing with what she termed "the cliterati" at Girl Bar. But I had previous engagements. So I bid farewell to Phillips and proceeded to risk getting shot taking my photographer to a crack house, tried but failed to wangle an invite to a clothing-not-optional "underwear party" (where would I put my tape recorder?) and trolled for quotes at Club Lust, formerly Club Fuck, where the dripping Whipping Room had been converted to the more huggable Pillow Room under the influence of (not yet microwaved) Ecstasy and police pressure to tone down the S&M.

The kids seemed more out of control to me than Phillips was: They considered an organic arugula diet by day the antidote to narcotics by night, and to a person, they denied having any drug problem. They never used heroin -- only on weekends, and they never smoked from a tinfoil pipe, because that shit gives you Alzheimer's! I asked a girl named Bunny, whose breasts erupted from a leopard-skin top tucked into spray-on pants, if she was a member of the Hollywood drug scene. "Oh, I took a few Valium an hour ago," she said, slurping from a birdbath-size beer.

"How many milligrams?"

She looked at me like this was the most irrelevant question she had ever heard. "I don't know. They had V-shaped holes in the middle." (By contrast, Phillips recalled precisely what she took on Oscar night in 1974: three Valiums, one upper, one and a half drinks, two joints and a dash of cocaine.) I asked Bunny if she had a job.

"Oh, yes, a wonderful job!" Doing what?

"Well," she beamed, "it's illegal!"

Next page: The Hollywood Vampires Club