Institute for Robert Downey Jr Studies > Required Reading

The Sobering Life of Robert Downey Jr.

“So you’re going to go all linear on me?” Robert Downey Jr. says. “Killjoy,” he adds, leaning into the tape recorder. I had just shifted the conversation from spontaneous chat to Keith Gordon’s film adaptation of Dennis Potter’s 1986 mini-series, The Singing Detective, in which Downey has his first lead role after officially becoming free and clear of all legal constraints and confinements since his arrest on drug and gun-possession charges in 1996.

Downey, 38, is a warm presence, and the extraordinary charm of his conversation, full of quicksilver feints away from ego, is almost impossible to render in print. He is sitting at a round glass table on the patio outside Elias Arts, a music-production-and-development company owned by his old friend Jonathan Elias, a composer. “Initially, it was just like: I can get free lunch here every day, and no one will say anything as long as there’s no police presence,” says Downey, who keeps an office at Elias Arts. “But there’s been a lot of business going on here lately.”

Today’s business is various, a typical mix of art, work and family. He’s recording demos of some songs he has written recently (Downey, who has been playing piano, writing and singing for as long as he has been acting, has, he estimates, about three albums worth of material). He’s checking in on a film project he and Elias are working on, an adaptation of A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Dito Montiel’s punk-rock memoir of growing up amid violence and learning to see holiness in the everyday of hard-core life. In the afternoon, he will attend his 10-year-old son Indio’s first day of soccer practice. And he’s making some calls about the possibility of suing Woody Allen.

The background for the last consideration is more telling than the consideration itself, which he quickly rejects. Downey has made two movies over the last year — The Singing Detective described by Gordon as “your basic comedy-drama surrealist 1950’s lip-synching rock n’ roll musical absurdist expressionist film-noir pastiche naturalist character study,” which opens this Friday in New York and Los Angeles; and Gothika a psychological thriller starring Halle Berry, which opens nationwide on November 21. He would already be making a third movie, the Woody Allen fall project, if he had not been dropped when the producers found out that there was no affordable way to resolve the cost of insuring him. “I found the whole thing outrageous,” Allen said in a statement relayed through his publicist. “He’s a great talent, he’d just done two movies with no problem and we were crushed that the insurance company was being so difficult.”

For The Singing Detective Downey’s bond wasn’t a problem, owing to Downey’s closeness with the film’s prducer, Mel Gibson — a friend since the two made Air America in 1990 — who was willing to take the risk on Downey himself. On Gothika Downey explains, “they withheld about 40 cents on the dollar from my payment and gave me back some of it at the end.” Downey passed the physical for the Woody Allen movie, but according to Letty Aronson, Allen’s producer and sister, the deductible to insure him was prohibitively expensive. That this is an issue he might have to deal with for some time is, obviously, not a news flash to Downey — “It’s like trying to insure Keith Richards without breaking a guitar string,” he says. But neither is it something he spends his days and nights lamenting. “The Woody Allen thing was because they are such notoriously cheap speed skaters,” Downey says over the phone a few days later, on his way to meet Peter Bogdanovich about another part he’s considering. “But it’s really all my fault if I want to think about it for half an hour.”

In The Singing Detective Downey plays Dan Dark, a man whose anger, confusion and denial have so overtaken him that he is virtually paralyzed, physically and psychologically. His reality is divided between his life in the hospital ward where he is being treated for the psoriatic disorder that has immobilized him and a shadow universe where, both as himself and as the singing detective, he sublimates and battles the ghosts of his past. Ultimately, with the help of a psychiatrist played by Gibson, he recovers enough at least to begin a new life. The parallel between this story line and Downey’s personal history isn’t hard to see. “The idea of someone who has a disease that’s so humiliating, because it’s worn right on the surface of his skin — in my own way, I can relate to that,” he says, with a certain amount of mock sobriety.

Downey, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in Richard Attenborough’s 1992 biopic, Chaplin is routinely referred to in the press as among the greatest actors of his generation. And he has generated a lot of press since June 1996, after the police, who stopped him for speeding, found small amounts of cocaine and heroin and an unloaded .357 magnum in his truck. Just over three weeks later, hours before he was charged with the counts stemming from that arrest, he was cited for trespassing and being under the influence of a controlled substance after wandering into a neighbor’s house and passing out in a child’s bedroom.

After failing to take court-ordered drug tests and doing a number of stints in an array of institutions, Downey was sent to state prison in 1999. Paroled in 2000 after 12 months, he was arrested twice more in the course of the next 8 months, after which he spent a year at Wavelengths International — the last in a series of numerous court-ordered drug-treatment facilities, where he still, of his own accord, spends 9 to 12 hours a week. Basically he has been in the unique position for seven years of frequently being lauded in a throwaway line, which in rough paraphrase would go: “Appearing in court for the second time since he was put on probation, Robert Downey Jr., wearing a jail-issue yellow jumpsuit, looked gaunt and tired. He is, by the way, among the greatest actors of his generation.”

But when it’s suggested that a truer, deeper reason for his initial anger at Woody Allen might be that Downey’s replacement was not just an inconvenience or something that made him look uninsurable, but an act that felt like artistic disrespect, he dismisses it with characteristic backhanded ease. “I can’t believe you said that!” he says, laughing. “I could weep that’s so true. I’m in a class by myself. I am. God, if I get my hands on him, I’m going to catch another felony case.”

Downey has not pursued a path-to-stardom career. His role choices have been diverse — the flip, imperturbable literary agent in Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys the unscrupulous Australian television journalist in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers the drunken private eye in Robert Altman’s The Gingerbread Man. But he is, in a way, in a class by himself, as any actor who could credibly be described as great is, by definition.

“Robert can take a two-minute scene and take you through five different arcs of emotion as he takes himself through that,” Keith Gordon says. “Which is very much like life, but not very much like what we usually see in acting. Many actors are more in the tradition of De Niro, where watching the performance is part of the pleasure, being aware that that’s the great character that they built. Robert’s one of those rare actors who when you watch him, you go: Oh, he must just kind of be like that part. And it’s only when you see him play 15 completely different roles that you realize, Well, wait a minute, he can’t be like all these people.”

Downey’s earliest memory is being on Fire Island with his family, holding onto his father’s ankles in the surf. “He was 6 foot 3, and I was probably 3 1/2 or 4,” he says. “It seemed to me that he wasn’t even aware that every time the waves came in and went out, he was saving my life. And all I had to do was hold on hard enough, just hard enough to have the pull of the wave dissipate.” He describes his family — he is the son of the director Robert Downey Sr. and the actress Elsie Downey — as gypsies, superheroes and big mismanagers of money and opportunity. His therapist says he thinks Downey was raised by wolves.

Famously, his involvement with drugs began when his father passed him a joint at a party when Downey was 8. His parents, who are long divorced, are now in recovery. His struggle with addiction is obviously neither wholly unrelated to what he calls the “boheme pressurefest” of his childhood, or to being the child of a family with a history of addiction. “I think the wounds with Robert are growing up and repeating the pattern,” said his wife, Deborah Falconer, from whom he is separated and with whom he shares custody of Indio. “I think his specific wounds are yet to be revealed to him. They’re yet for him to look at.”

But that’s not primarily how Downey says he sees it. In his view, his childhood was not spent entirely in the uncharted wilderness. “Can’t we just get past that?” he says of the pot-smoking incident. “There was a lot of other stuff, too. Texas beef and rice, my dad mixing iced tea with an upside-down hammer. We had a dog, a Yorkshire terrier named Sturgess, and it would be like dinner and a show: my dad would tell us what Sturgess was thinking, and we would all just fall out laughing.”

At Indio’s soccer practice, on a sunny green field in a neighborhood that is literally lined with houses that have white picket fences, Falconer and Downey are engaged in the usual tensely amicable back-and-forth about the usual practical details of Downey’s taking Indio for the night and half of the next day — what clothes are where and what time will Indio (incidentally the leading scorer in the league last year, as both his parents will separately tell you in a heartbeat) be returned. It is a scene of absolute, almost Norman Rockwell normalcy — soccer parents dealing with what soccer parents do. You’d have to know that one party to it is a famous actor, who is not legally entitled to vote or to own a firearm, and who has spent part of the day addressing the ghosts of his past in the form of insurance problems, to see anything the least bit unusual about it.

Downey can, in person, actually take you through five different arcs of emotion as he goes through them. “Ally McBeal was my bottom,” he says. He means “bottom” in the 12-step sense of the word, the point from which an addict cannot go lower short of death, and he is not joking at all. He does not mean that working on a popular David E. Kelley television show for which he won a Golden Globe is in itself the thing from which he could not go lower. He had, after all, just finished 12 months in a state penitentiary when he joined the cast. When he says that Ally McBeal was his bottom, he means that it is lower to have been where he was and nevertheless go on to be arrested twice more. “Those last couple of runs, the impulse at that point was not even about acting out anymore,” he says. “It was not like: I’m thinking about tying one on and pretending that it will still be fun. It was more like: the arm’s been cut off, but the phantom limb is still twitching.”

But, in a 12-step sense, a bottom is not necessarily a bad thing, wherever it is. Once you get there, you’ve got nowhere to go but up. Downey takes 12-step recovery very seriously. He says he does not think he was too harshly punished when he was sent to prison. Of one bust, which was a result of an anonymous tip, presumably from someone looking to profit from tabloid scandal, he says: “People go, ‘Oh, you were set up, man, this guy dropped a dime on you.’ And I’m like, at that point, don’t blame it on anyone. It was just flagrant disregard. No one’s ever set me up except me.”

On the principle that anonymity is part of the program, he prefers not to discuss either his story or his recovery in great detail, except in ego-feint asides: “I guess sometimes I want to have a drink with dinner. But then I remember that I have plans for Christmas.” He goes to meetings — regular ones, rather than the private, not-in-the-meeting-book kind that exist for the famous in Los Angeles and New York. “I have more in common with people who aren’t at secret meetings than I do with the people who are at secret meetings going, ‘We have special needs.’”

He also practices yoga and wing chun, floats in an isolation tank and is subject, voluntarily, to random drug testing for Falconer, among others. The program is clearly something that is in him, not shellacked on; he can reel off what are known in A.A. parlance as “the promises,” two paragraphs from the Alcoholics Anonymous “Big Book,” something that no one who was just going through the motions could do. No addict, with or without a history of relapse, is ever free from that prospect. And the person who is prone to going through five different arcs of emotion in two minutes is never going to have a wholly easy time in life. But then again, neither is the person who isn’t.

The phrase that his friends use to describe the difference between Downey then and Downey now is that he is more comfortable in his own skin, more secure. For the last six months, he has been seriously involved with Susan Levin, a producer of Gothika The two see each other daily and check in with each other by phone constantly. (Downey, who has long had “Indio” tattooed on his right shoulder, now has “Susie Q” tattooed on his left.)

And he is sanguine, both about recovery and about the professional difficulties he might continue to confront. The money from The Singing Detective and Gothika has already been spent paying off debts. He might be filing for bankruptcy in the not-too-distant future. For the interim, he is living rent-free in what he describes as “a ratty old ranch house” in Malibu on some property owned by Jonathan Elias. Downey says: “He said: ‘Oh, my God, look at him, he’s homeless again. Put him up in Malibu in one of those houses we’re going to tear down. Go to Ikea. Get him a flat-screen TV. And he’ll be happy for about a week.’”

The house is indeed sparsely and inexpensively furnished, with Indian bedspreads on the windows and incense burners in almost every room. But it’s clearly not all serenity. There’s a hole in the exterior plasterboard of his bedroom, which he kicked when angry about something he declines to explain. In the area around the hole, he has written, in black marker, “I kicked ‘the habit.’” The walls around his bed are also covered with drawing and writing: “Prayer”; “Critical List: A) Friendship; B) Trust; C) Growth/Change; D) Sanctity/Honor”; “Fierceness, fidelity, care of family, wolves mate for life.” Like many, if not all, phrases and principles related to A.A., these may sound simplistic, even silly, to people who know, without effort, how to live by them. Anyone in the program, or close to someone who is, would recognize them as representing the commitment to faith and recovery that they are.

Downey’s history with recovery as well as with drugs long predates the press coverage. He had in fact already been in three rehabilitation facilities between 1987 and 1996 without, as he says, “the nudge from the judge.” It is an oddity of Downey’s reputation as a celebrity addict that the extensive publicity surrounding it makes his uneven pattern of recovery seem both exceptionally dramatic and drastic, when it is actually so typical that you might hear a story like his in, say, approximately two out of any five A.A. meetings. Another is that in a business well stocked with the fragile, he is not that exceptional an insurance risk; most everyone who has worked with him agrees that he has never wandered onto the wrong set in a blackout and passed out. “I’d work with him on anything,” says Joel Silver, whose company produced Gothika. “I’ll use him again in a second. I’ll try to put him in anything I can.” Basically, as an addict, Downey is only exceptional in that he got so very publicly caught. It used to bother him when people said they believed in him; it seemed condescending and a comment on his liabilities rather than a commendation of his assets. But it doesn’t anymore.

“If I didn’t believe in myself, there’s no way I would have made it this far,” Downey says, sitting in his son’s bedroom in his actually not-so-ratty ranch house in Malibu. “But which self are we talking about? I know that I am currently embracing a much more authentic and much less complex me. One that doesn’t have to hold on to that thing, the part of my whole package that is that I’m this wild, unpredictable, tragic and self-destructive guy. It’s so passe, but it did work for me. Now I am culpable and accountable for the things that got me to that impasse where I was just running, running, running, with nothing to show for it. But again, that’s me saying that having something to show for it has to be . . . stuff. And I’ve had all the stuff before. The big spread and the cars and the dough and all that. It is nice to have. But it’s nicer to be free from the attachment to identifying with it.” All he has to do is hold on hard enough, just hard enough, to have the pull of the wave dissipate.