Detour, February 1993, by Steve Garbarino
Robert Downey has no home. He sleeps on the couch of a friend named Tim. No more has Downey the designer duds he donned at Oscar, Cannes, and countless other fêtes. Marsuda, Armani, Gabbana, all gone -- lost, stolen, given away, some of them even buried in his old back yard (this is true, from his Less Than Zero days). Now he wears what's on the floor -- regular guy stuff, chinos and such, or what he gets given to him on movie sets, the latest of which. In Dreams and Black and White, very apt titles for his tragicomic life. ("They both suck!" he critiques, "and you can quote me." But of course, he's kidding; the actor's a kidder.)
He has no wife -- they separated in '96, when Robert Downey had a great fall, and all the kings horses... well, you know how it goes. Falconer, as in Deborah -- one cool chick -- flew the coop and moved; as we speak, she's moving again. Fly, Deborah Falconer, fly, but not too far, because he loves her and she loves him, and then there is Indio, their son, to consider. Dough, Robert Downey has little of (at least to hear him tell it -- and we believe him, we do, he's been up front so far). Hence couch, hence employees who currently work on spec. Hence haircuts, for which he'll gladly pay you tomorrow.
And wheels? We are talking, how you say, rubber heels. But although Downey has no means of transportation, he did recently land a brand new driver's license. (Could a car be far away in his future?)
In so many ways, Robert Downey Jr. is starting from scratch -- the littlest tramp of the late 20th century -- but what he still has isn't bad at all: his life (that's a start!), his friends, his family, and his 5-year-old son -- the latter his most cherished of treasures, who does a dead-on imitation of the kid from The Shining. Ask Indio to give you a taste, and you'll hear "REDRUM! REDRUM!" all over the place.
And then there is Tim, his friend and supporter, whom he met in '97, on the set of The Gingerbread Man, in the sleepy port of Savannah. A Hyatt employee, not part of Hollywood's "shitty committee," Tim is, at 27, a straight shooter, fast driver, and -- surprise -- recreational drinker, who keeps things going smoothly in Downey's reckless life. Looking as if he walked off the pages of Boy's Life -- or like one of fresh-faced models from a Bruce Weber shoot with a piece of straw in his mouth and a retriever at his dungareed side -- Tim plays the role of accountant, driver, resident protector.
"He's a very organized, cool, diplomatic guy," details Downey with great affection. "He's stayed in the picture because he’s a gentleman and has no entwinement with me. He's not trying to accelerate his own career by the proximity. He's like my guardian angel -- and he gets along with everybody. He's easy to be around."
So Robert has Tim. And although he has lost a great deal in his life since his highly publicized possession mess in which he violated probation on a 1996 drug conviction and found himself serving 113 days in the L.A. County Jail, he's "kept" more than others like him -- that is, huge substance abusers -- are typically able to keep around. Like his acting career, which never, ever, went south, even when he awoke like Goldilocks in a stranger's bed, and Smokey was called to Malibu to take him away.
Indeed, according to Neil Jordan, who directed him in the just-released psychological thriller In Dreams -- a departure, says the director, from Downey's "lost boy thing" (he plays "a horribly damaged child possessing a perverse adult psyche, an utterly unpredictable, amoral person, a serial killer") -- Downey's jail time helped Jordan in getting things accurate. "For a strategic jail scene, he was our prison expert.
"His acting was utterly fresh -- like Eamonn Owens's in The Butcher Boy. It was an absolutely impressionistic performance," Jordan gushes. "Robert has his troubles -- we all do. We all just don't end up in jail."
Robert Altman, who has directed Downey in three films, says that the actor's affiliation with drugs had, as he puts it, "no effect whatsoever on his performance in The Gingerbread Man, his most recent work co-starring Downey. "What he did is not a sin, nor is it irregular," says Altman, his voice rising with passion. "You'd be surprised at the number of people in our industry working every day with a needle in their arm. If I had another role for him, right now, I wouldn't give it a second thought to call him on the spot," Altman continues. "And I wouldn't ask his people, 'So, uh, how's he doing?' How dare we judge him! Everybody should spend more time looking into their own closets."
James Toback, who directed Downey in last year's steamy, solipsistic relationship drama Two Girls and a Guy -- and who just finished directing him in Black and White -- says: "If anything, Roberts torrid personal history makes him that much more free-wheeling in the physicality and sexuality he brings to his roles." A self-confessed "older alter-ego" of Downey -- whom Toback describes as "an instrument of my own sensibilities" -- Toback says of his friend, "He doesn't act a role, he embodies it."
Despite the fact that Downey himself says that he's never had anything but "utter confidence in his acting abilities" -- drug-free or high as a kite -- and that he doesn't "have a competitive bone in his body" -- he concedes that his Hollywood supporters are being too kind.
"There've been times when I've been treated by directors -- critics, even -- better really than I might have deserved," says Downey. At the height of his heroin use, he details, "Some people's patience was running thin. It could have gone from, 'Oh, well, he's on the set, but he's hungover,' to 'He's on the set, but he drove into the catering truck. You'd better call the fire department.'"
Perhaps there will be a happy ending -- even though, as Downey himself puts it, laughing (he's never stopped that either, ever): "I've had happiness, Mr. President ... and it's largely overrated."
Robert Downey is at a critical juncture in his life. When we first caught up with him in mid-December -- prompting a discourse that lasted for over two weeks and continues today -- he was in full gear to step out of what he calls "the couch phase of my life." The reinstatement of his driver's license (you might recall that Robert didn't do very well with cars) is akin, for him, to an immigrant being issued his green card. Downey is now, once again, a semi-responsible member of society. He is renting his own vehicle, nothing fancy -- "I've always had a compulsion to live far beyond my means," he says -- and is setting up temporary residence at the austere, barely opened Standard hotel on Sunset Boulevard. Living up to its name at $85 per night, it's a far cry from the digs he kept during what he calls his "custom-sushi-sticks days," when he'd sometimes spend as much as $2,000 over the course of a few hours on clothes, food, and drugs.
It could very well be all an act -- recall how the Oscar-nominee literally became Charlie Chaplin in the 1992 Richard Attenborough-directed film, Chaplin -- but to his intimates, he seems genuinely set on turning his life around, and leaving drugs (even drinking) behind.
"If you don't kill yourself, something else inevitably will," says Downey. "But no one knows how to do it better, or get it done quicker, than yourself."
"You can wake up in the morning, and say, This is chaos, and I'm not to cause any more serious damage to my health, or continue to do so. But if you do choose to recover, then you have to replace that fear with some sort of faith."