John Phoenix wanted his family to quit Hollywood—both the town and the business. To his thinking, the family had some money in the bank, but they had lost sight of their original intentions: not just to pursue fame, but to bend Hollywood toward their belief system, rather than getting sucked into a vortex of commercial values.
“My father is worried that we could be ruined by this business,” River said. “It’s got a lot of pitfalls and temptations, and he doesn’t want us to become materialistic and lose all the values we were brought up believing in . . . he’s pleased we’re doing well, but in a way he’s almost reached a point where he could just drop out again like he did in the sixties and move to a farm and get close to the earth.”
After some heated family discussions, Team Phoenix arrived at a decision. River would not quit acting—he loved it too much—but the family would leave California, and rely on Iris Burton to handle day-to-day contact with producers and studios. Hollywood stars have often left town in favor of a ranch (Harrison Ford relocating to Wyoming, for example)—River was younger and not as well established as other performers who chose that path, but he could always get on a plane to take care of (show) business.
Although John would have preferred that the family return to Mexico or Venezuela, they looked for a warm-weather American college town with a thriving music scene. They considered Austin, Texas, but settled on Gainesville, Florida, once home to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and still the host city of the University of Florida.
They also decided that it was time for River to put forward his beliefs more forcefully, using interviews as opportunities to change the world. Soon he was holding forth to journalists: “I’m against the nuclear arms race and apartheid in South Africa and cruelty to animals, which means that I’m a vegetarian. Diet is a good place to start making a change, because it’s something I can do. I can’t on my own change the regime in South Africa or teach the Palestinians to live with the Israelis, but I can start with me. I have strong opinions and people disagree with me, but there are those who agree, too.”
Sometimes simplistic but always sincere, River quickly became a poster boy for environmentalism and animal rights, the sort of person prone to describing dolphins as “the gods of the oceans.”