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Institute for Robert Downey Jr Studies > Required Reading

Robert Downey’s Last Party

Detour, February 1999, by Steve Garbarino

It just doesn’t happen. When I set out to meet and interview Robert Downey Jr for this month’s cover story, I pretty much expected the usual, maybe a little bit more. I’d heard over and over again that he was a nice guy, by Hollywood standards.

Here’s what normally would happen: We’d meet for lunch, somewhere obnoxiously trendy (of his, or his publicist’s, choice); talk about his upcoming movie projects (that’s why stars do these things, after all). Maybe—a big maybe—I’d get a comment or two about life as he’s living it after the drugs, possession conviction, the 113 days of jail time, the headlines that chased his every move. We’d tie things up, and some handler would come and whisk him away to his psychic or personal trainer. A few days later, there might be a quickie telephone follow-up. Then the photo shoot (four hours max). And that’s ... it—that’s how it happens.

That’s not how it happened, though. Instead, we met at the obnoxiously trendy-but-reliable Ivy restaurant, where we ate $20 burgers and drank Diet Cokes. (It was the closest place to the West Hollywood office he’s working out of these days, writing his first film script—from 11:30 AM to 2:30 PM daily.) We laughed a lot and got on better than either of us had expected. Readying to leave, Robert had a suggestion: On a lark, why not go get manicures? (A few days later, we also tried out the Biore nose-cleansing strips.)

From there, things got kooky. Cuticles clipped, we picked up my car and were off and running for eleven straight hours—closing time, midnight. (Only days before, Robert had received his renewed driver’s license—something of an event in his starting-over mode.) In that time, we attended a fundamentalist-leaning gospel meeting for recovering “industry addicts,” visited Robert’s five-year-old son, Indio (who Robert sung to sleep with a Police song); went to a cheesy party at the Directors Guild; and closed the night where we began the day: eating burgers, this time from my parked car at a drive-thru In-N-Out.

It wasn’t the last I’d see of Robert. For the next two weeks, I spoke with him almost daily—he answers questions with “yes, sir,” or “no, sir” (in the exaggerated tone of a park ranger)-and dined out with an idiosyncratic cast of characters, ranging from Marla Maples to Brooke Shields (the latter to whom, for a brief stint, we’ve handed over the tape recorder for her to ask the tougher questions).

This is the actor whose semi-private life became insanely public when he woke up one morning in somebody else’s house—a stranger’s—not knowing how he’d gotten there. Heroin. Jail. Recovery. You know the story—but not really. “There isn’t a better actor in America,” says Robert Altman, who has directed Downey in three films. (He has much more to say on the subject in these pages) Neil Jordan, who just directed Downey in the psychological thriller In Dreams. furthers: “He’s the best fucking actor in America.” Note that neither tag the praise with “of his generation.” So what’s Robert Downey Jr. like as a person?

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’ 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.”

Faith. So is Robert Downey admitting to believing in a higher power? He’s the last person to want to tell you about what its like to be a drug addict in a recovery program. “There’s nothing I despise more than these actors who say they can’t talk about what goes on in their allegedly anonymous recovery programs, and then they go on to tell everything to People magazine.” Actually, there is one other thing he can’t stand maybe a bit more—what he calls the “planned unpretentiousness” that some actors put on. “Like, some magazine writer being so impressed by Brad Pitt coming to the door and answering it without a handler or bodyguard or housekeeper in sight.”

“I’ve always felt like such an outsider in this industry,” says Downey, pausing, “because I’m so insane, I guess.” He laughs long and hard. When Downey does, it’s high-pitched and big and takes over his sentences. It’s fitful and infectious. His regular delivery is deep and smooth and seen-it-all-it comes from somewhere back in his throat. Weirdly, he sounds more like Christian Slater—another troubled number—than Christian Slater sounds like, well, Jack Nicholson. “The truth is,” he says, “I’ve never had time to create a proper pretense for myself.”

But you can tell he’s done some practicing on saying some of the right things. Two days after meeting the actor whom directors as diverse as Jordan, Altman, and Toback indisputably call the “greatest in America” Downey is facing court again.

He’s scheduled to go to Malibu to meet with the judge who sentenced him, for a “progress report.” It goes well. In the televised appearance, Judge Lawrence Mira appraised his condition: “You’re doing a lot better than you did in the past. You look great, and you seem to be doing well. Keep up the good work.”

Downey’s reply—and if you knew him, you’d have to wonder how he kept a straight face—was: “I’m just glad to be well.” It was reminiscent of Malcolm MacDowell’s Alex in A Clockwork Orange, earnestly telling the prison chaplain: “But I want to be good.” (Being good, and being forced to be good, of course, are two entirely different animals.)

The court appearance “was to remind everyone that I’m the poster boy for pharmaceutical mismanagement,” says Downey, now 33, the age of Christ when he was crucified. Looking healthy but casually unshaven—he’s been working out daily at L.A.’s Crunch, and is up to a firm 165 pounds from the 138 he weighed in at during his “gracefully emaciated period.” (“No matter what I weigh,” he confesses, “I’m always doughy by nature.”)

He may sound a tad cynical, but he’s actually not. “I’m definitely more open-minded since being sober,” Downey says, adding, “Open-mindedness is one of the great survival skills.” Yet he’s still bristling some from a recent magazine unfunnily dubbing him, in one of those dubious-awards round-ups, “Most Relentlessly Self-Destructive.”

“Look,” he says, “I’m as easily drawn into the gossip cesspool as anyone else, and definitely, on certain days, reading about someone’s demise is infinitely more attractive to me than reading about somebody having a breakthrough, or an epiphany.” And so he doesn’t see his current simple plan of a routine as actually appealing to readers.

A typical day he describes as awakening for breakfast with his son, telling “bug stories” or throwing darts—and, not necessarily in this order—: working out, eating lunch, writing his film script (always, from 11:30 AM to 2:30 PM), attending recovery meetings, chatting on the telephone with Deborah (mostly about Indio, or how her music is coming), going to meetings about potential roles, having dinner, heading to another early-evening support-group meeting. Robert will turn into a pumpkin if he’s out after midnight, so he typically turns in by then. And there is eating. In the time we spend together for this story, we eat—a lot—at the Ivy, the In-N-Out, the Palm, at parties. Lots of meat, but not too much bread. “I’ve gained, like, ten pounds since knowing you,” he tells me.

Sex. His life as he’s living it is about his son, his script, his supporter Tim, and coming as clean with himself as possible—even when doing so is surprisingly candid, and consists of words never spoken before to the press, “I’ve always been a pretty outspoken guy, and just like other aspects of my character, I’ve had no choice but to be candid—sooner or later, all is known anyway.”

So it isn’t that shocking—at least to us—when Downey comes to Detour’s offices, lays back in a leather chair, and answers some intensely personal questions as frankly as if he were meeting with his shrink.

In the film that Downey just wrapped—Toback’s much-talked-about downtown-Manhattan ensemble Black and White—the actor plays a gay character married to Brooke Shields, who hits on every man he meets, including Mike Tyson. (Tyson, by the way, more literally hits back.) It isn’t the first time Downey’s been down this road in movies. In 1987’s Less Than Zero, for instance, his drug-addled character is bisexual, and turns tricks with both women and men. And in the Jodie Foster-directed Home for the Holidays—a role he says is his favorite (“Chaplin is in a category unto its own”)—Downey plays the devil-may-care gay son.

So, we ask—and in real life, there have always been rumors: Has he had any of his own homosexual experiences? His answer pours out naturally, with a dry, sardonic tone, the same way he replies to questions with “yes, sir,” and “no, sir,” in a mock-formal tone.

Beginning by saying that “I think that everybody is bisexual,” he adds, more personally, “I’ve acted upon gay situations less than practically every other man I know. As much as I consider myself a sexual person—and not without a fairly rich fantasy life—I’m not very sexually motivated. I’m not sexually addicted or compulsive,” he says.

He breaks down the sexuality of his friends as such: “I’d say 25 percent of the men I know have a serious addiction to sex. The other 25 percent are bisexual, but are in complete and utter vowed silence about it—which is really weird. The other 25 percent are gay. And the other 25 percent are vehemently heterosexual with leather queen undertones.”

And to answer the original question? Downey wants to do it chronologically. “One of my cousins sucked my dick when I was nine. It was for about four seconds, and I said I would do it back to him, but I reneged. When I was like 15. I had something go on with a trannie. It was in New York City at a Rocky Horror show. There were all these other Addams Family characters of dubious gender around us. Her name was International Crisis, and I really was sure that she was a white girl with a pussy ... but then there was more. I was there, actually, for the pot, not the surprise member. When no girls were around, my best friend in high school and I would make out with each other as a last resort. Let’s see, I woke up in a guy’s house in New York, who I admired from theater camp, and he was sucking my dick. Did he think that I’d wake up and suddenly find him wildly attractive? I never looked at him the same way. And then there was this guy on a soap who was really cool, and he used to have lots of blow, and he kissed me with a five o’clock shadow, and that didn’t work for me. Then there was this hot young director, maybe five years ago, who I found standing behind me in a Royalton hotel robe that had a big boner pushing it up—and that wasn’t going to happen. I immediately started calling hookers to come over just to get a buffer between this, uh, potential intrusion.”

The grocery listing goes on. “My last foray,” he sums up, “was when one of my best friends came to Italy. I warned him about eating in Rome, that for them a four-star-rated restaurant was like a D-rated greasy spoon in Detroit. He got sick on a piece of fish. I wanted to get blow, and so we were heading to a gay bar to look for some, and I kissed him out on the street. I was drunk, and it just felt right.” Downey’s done—almost. “If I was gay, I’d do it the way Sir Ian McKellen has,” he says, “in a classy, tasteful way.”

“It’s so crazy that nowadays people have to consider closeting themselves,” Downey continues. “Because I’m not leading a double life—because I don’t have a quote-unquote documented past—because I’m not using some foot soldier to keep me clamped down from any sort of exposés—I have no reservations about putting to word my thoughts, projections, beliefs. I don’t have those fears.”

Marriage. Robert Downey doesn’t seem entirely unamenable to the concept of someday getting back together with his wife, whom he married in May of 1993, only six weeks after they’d met. “I think for now, we’re just both getting our acts together simultaneously; that’s the first order of business, and that seems to be going very well,” he says. “And we’re both real gangbusters on the parenting trip.” Falconer, a model who is giving a whirl at a singing career—with pride, Downey describes her voice as having something of Rickie Lee Jones to it—doesn’t entirely dismiss the notion either. “If I thought there was just too much water under the bridge, we would have split a long time ago,” says the raven-haired beauty, who is part Native American Indian and Portuguese, over scrambled eggs with Indio. “There’ll never be too much water under the bridge.”

From the start it was life in the fast lane: Indeed, their first date—not long after the dissolution of Downey’s lengthy, turbulent relationship with actress Sarah Jessica Parker—was interrupted by an intervention by Robert’s family and friends. She has to laugh over that. “They were all looking at me like I was the devil’s child. Like, “Pack up your stuff, honey, you’ll never see him again.’ At the very least,” she says, “we’ll be the best of friends forever.”

Wondering if Downey’s drug abuse ever got in the way of his parenting, Falconer—that’s what Downey calls her, like an old college buddy—says never, ever. “He’s much more into the games and pretending, and I’m more the adult role. But Indio is definitely his primary focus. It’s taken practice for both of us. Of course, sometimes, you just don’t want to get up in the morning, but Robert is always pretty game.”

Falconer, who went on the wagon when Robert did—“it was a codependent move, but in the end the right one”—also jumped off of it alongside of him. She says that now that he’s sober, “He’s so much more present. I mean, he’s always Robert in his crazy, spinning way, which is both beautiful and frustrating.” But there’s something else now. “When I see him looking at me, and at Indio, there’s definitely a sadness there. I don’t know if it’s regret—maybe it’s fear.”

And does she have regrets? “You can only know a person for how you know them,” says Falconer, who is the same age as her husband. “I have a sadness that we separated, but the process of evolution is always changing. We separated, but we’re still connected,” she says. “But our greatest accomplishment is Indio—that speaks for itself. There’s so much love that has come from that.”

Children. Every little thing Indio does is magic. Because Robert Downey never does anything in a conventional manner, why would child-rearing be any different? He’s teaching his son some of life’s lessons through, not Barney or the Teletubbies, but the Police’s Message in a Box retrospective set. “I tell him, ‘When Sting sings, “I saw a hundred billion bottles washing upon the shore,” he doesn’t mean that there’s just a whole lot of bottles. He’s saying that everyone is lost, and everyone is sending a message.’” This is how Downey explains it, in a calm Mr. Rogers tone.

“Then I say, ‘You see, that’s a met-a-phor. We’ve already been through what a metaphor means’. And Indio thinks a bit, then goes, ‘Yeaaahhh!,’ like he gets it. “I tell him that Sting is a good role model—he’s a teacher, and not totally destructive, and his music has a message,” says Downey. Other Police songs with messages, to Downey and Indio, include Can’t Stand Losing You, Don’t Stand So Close to Me, King of Pain, and, of course, Every Little Thing She Does is Magic.

Robert: Do you think I’m a good Dad?
Indio: Yeah!
Robert: Do I tell good bug stories?
Indio: Yeah!
Robert: Did I take care of you when you were sick?
Indio: Yeah!
Robert: Why do you love me?
Indio: I love you because when I ask you for something, most of the time, you say yes.

And now, we hand the microphone over to Suddenly Susan’s Brooke Shields, who co-stars with Downey in Black and White.

Brooke Shields: Are you happy right now?

RD: Yes.

BS: What has your son taught you lately?

RD: We were in the Jack-in-the-Box drive thru, and I told him that he was beautiful. Then I said, Did you know that God made us in his image? And he thought about it, and then suddenly shouted, I knewww it! (laughs)

BS: Is there something you’d rather do than act?

RD: I think about painting, I think about architecture. I think about songwriting. But I don’t think any of them suit my hand-to-mouth need for large amounts of cash quite nearly as well. Painting would be it, but I really know little about it. Then again, I know very little about acting. I’m just an incredibly gifted faker.

BS: Are there any directors you’d still like to work with?

RD: The super-famous ones, like Scorsese and Coppola and Peter Weir. I think that Weir’s Green Card is one of the all-time-great romantic comedies.

BS: How do you remain so unjaded?

RD: It’s either some as yet undiscovered tumor, or it’s that at the beginning of every day, I just clean the slate, and say to myself, Something really great could happen.

Question: Will Robert Downey stay clean? The verdict is out—but to hear his friends, colleagues, and family tell it, it’s entirely up to Robert—not his addictions. “I really don’t know—I hope so,” says his father, the writer and director Robert Downey Sr., who fought alcohol and cocaine addictions through most of his life yet has been sober for years. He thinks his son’s sobriety has done wonders for his writing.

Asked if he’s ever felt to blame for Robert Jr.’s drug troubles, he says, “God, yes, I’ve felt tremendous guilt. It’s only now finally leaving me.” When told that his son speculates that his problems are probably genetic, Downey Sr. says, “I don’t know if it’s genetics—I certainly had my problems—but it could be.”

Adds director Altman: “If Robert decides that he’s a person who’s happier when he’s on drugs, that’s fine with me. I’d give him the same advice that I give to my children: Never take advice from anybody—they’re speaking solely from their point of view.” Says Robert’s alter ego Toback: “I believe he’ll choose what to do himself—he may already know what he’s going to do. Of course, he wouldn’t say anything. He is clearly capable of being in total control of his behavior. And he is far too complex and strange to be understood by the outside.”

And where does Robert check in? “I’ve known early on that the only thing I would lose from living a life of chemical dependency—the only sure-fire thing—would be my life,” he says, gravely and true. “At least if I choose to do drugs, I’m controlling my own negative outcome. There’s at least a creepy sort of investment in that.”

Then he responds, as is characteristic, in a gentler vein. “It’s all about tricks—whatever works. My friend Sam was talking about this girl she knew who was bottoming out, and her mom was utterly oblivious to how to handle it. She told her daughter, What you need to do is get yourself a crisp new look.” Downey laughs, but grimly. “For her, ‘crisp’ was the answer.”

Our verdict?

Robert Downey Jr. is as bullshit-free as it gets, and as good a person as they come.