Institute for Robert Downey Jr Studies > Required Reading

The Star in Cell 17

Roughly 180 miles northwest of Los Angeles, a good three-hour drive up Highway 99, a prison stands under a hard gray sky. Pull over at any exit along the way—Earlimart, Pixley, Weed Patch and you will likely see wild dogs roaming in packs or goats loitering outside nameless gas stations. Except for the prison itself—a barracks-like facility holding more than 6,000 inmates—there is nothing here but California wasteland, mile after mile of dry dirt.

“In the winter it feels like you’ve landed on the surface of the moon,” says Curtis Hanson, director of L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys. “It’s so desolate and sterile and depressing.” This is where Robert Downey Jr., one time Oscar nominee turned Inmate No. P50522, has been doing time since August 1999.

Now he’s seated in the corner of a vast room guarded by three correctional officers. A sign on the wall reads: 1 KISS, 1 EMBRACE AT THE BEGINNING. 1 KISS, 1 EMBRACE AT THE END.

HOLDING HANDS ONLY. As I approach, Downey smiles, his eyes crinkling. It’s the same mischievous look you may have seen in such films as Less Than Zero, Soapdish, True Believer, Natural Born Killers, and Wonder Boys.

“Is this the most surreal thing you’ve ever seen?” he says laughing. “I mean, I’m no more equipped for this than you are.”

For this visit, the first of five I paid to him over an eight-month period, Downey is in his ‘bonneroos’ (jailhouse slang for being dressed to the nines). He looks gangsta chic in blue jeans and a prison-issue denim overcoat. Beneath the denim he’s wearing designer undergarments (known as “love-loves”), a white Emporio Armani t-shirt, and Calvin Klein boxers. His face has a healthy glow from his morning racquetball game, but there are stress lines in his forehead, and his eyes are bloodshot from lack of sleep.

Downey wastes no time getting over to the vending machines for a breakfast burrito, a jalapeno cheeseburger, and several coffees. I insert the coins and make the selections, since inmates aren’t allowed to touch the machines. “Now, don’t forget the condiments,” he says. “They’re crucial to the enjoyment of this fine fare.” Back at the table, Downey digs in, warning me not to eat from his snacks. “I’m probably, like, creepy-crawling with every disease in the book,” he says matter-of-factly. Having lost 15 pounds—due in part to having in his system no cocaine or heroin, which gave him a doughy appearance when he was “using”—he looks muscular and lean. While he is noticeably Robert Downey Jr., the actor, he’s not recognizable to most inmates. Robert Altman’s The Gingerbread Man is not exactly in the prisoner’s film canon; neither is Richard Attenborough’s grand 1992 biopic, Chaplin, for which Downey, playing the title role, earned an Oscar nomination for best actor. Then again, there was Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. In that one, Downey’s character helps incite a prison riot—something he’s certainly not going to attempt in real life. When Downey arrived here, he recalls, the assistant warden told him, “If we have any discipline problems with you, we’re going to come down on you like a ton of shit.”

Downey and I step outside, into a mini-yard surrounded by tall fencing. From here you can see some of the two-story buildings that make up the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison, Corcoran. This is no country club. The buildings on the prison grounds have security levels ranging from “minimum” to “maximum.” Downey lives in “high-minimum” to “moderate” building. Adding to the menacing atmosphere is the fact that right next door stands the maximum-security California State Prison, Corcoran, home to Charles Manson, numerous Crips and Bloods, and guards who allegedly forced inmates to engage in “gladiator” fights, shooting one who refused to participate.

A couple of inmates ask about his six-year old son, Indio, who has visited twice, in the company of Downey’s wife of 8 years, Deborah Falconer.

Downey watches a large black inmate spinning his boy around in the visitors yard. “Can you believe this shit?” says Downey, visibly weakened by the father-son scene. “I feel so guilty that Debbie is now additionally accountable to Indio. I just feel so awful about that.” He describes how, during the ride home from his first visit to the prison, Indio asked his mother, Is Daddy a bad man? “I’ve always bolstered myself up with him,” says Downey. “I’ll say, ‘You know, Indio, there are a lot of people who think that Daddy is one of the greatest living actors.’ I play myself up as a hero. He likes films with Mel Gibson and Arnold Schwarzenegger in them. So it was kind of awful to hear that.”

Deborah Falconer (who has successfully battled a drug addiction of her own) is legally separated from her husband. She’s Downey’s age—35—and now lives with another man.

“Indio doesn’t care if Robert is a hero,” she says. “He just wants to love and be loved back. Robert wanted to tell him how he was going off to Yugoslavia to learn how to be a spy. And I said, ‘No, that’s not right, tell him the truth.’ So he did. It’s thrown Indio for a loop—he gets quiet and doesn’t like talking about it. But Robert’s been gone many times before—working on a film, in rehab—so he’s used to that. Jail, for Indio, is what he sees in the movies.”

“I’m angry at Robert,” continues Deborah, a former model now trying to get a music career going, “But I’d never use Indio as a weapon. Robert and I will always be connected through him.”

Mention Indio—who looks like his father—and Downey withdraws for a moment. Looking up at the sky, he sucks on a Marlboro Medium—his brand—and breaks the uneasiness with a joke. “You know, next time, rather than a long prison sentence, I’m going to break it up into shorter stints.”

After visiting Downey, Sean Penn (who staged 2 failed drug interventions on his friend’s behalf) offered an appraisal: “His humor was well intact. He seemed like a guy doing time, one day at a time. Robert’s always been a hard read, though, because of his sense of humor. It’s difficult for someone to say something as silly as ‘Boy, he’s doing great!’ But given that, he looked great and he made me laugh a lot.”

Nevertheless, Penn is concerned that all this prison time may be too much for Downey. “I felt that a sentence was needed—something had to happen—but now it’s entering what you’d call cruel and unusual punishment.” Penn laughs. “We need Robert Downey Jr. free! We need him, just selfishly speaking, as an actor. His talent raises that bar. And the bar has dropped so low ever since they put him behind bars.”

Curtis Hanson, who has visited Downey 3 times, says, “I found his mental state to be surprisingly good, given the circumstances. There seemed to be an attitude of acceptance, if you will—an acceptance of responsibility, which made me think that he will get through the situation.”

“We were heartbroken when we heard that he was going to prison,” says Michael Douglas, Downey’s co-star in Wonder Boys. “Initially, I was so mad at him—it’s such a terrible disease. I think he was sober on the set—he was so great to work with. I’m deeply fond of him. In his sobriety, you can sense how painful simple alertness is for him. He feels it all—watching him, you can understand the notion of self-medication. There’s a vulnerability about him that makes you want to protect him. I sure hope he gets himself squared away. I guess we’ll have to wait for the next chapter.”

While being interviewed, Downey thinks like a journalist. (He played one in Natural Born Killers and actually served as one in The Last Party, his documentary of the 1992 presidential campaign.) “Oh, I didn’t tell you my new handle!” he says. A “handle” is a prison nickname. “They call me Mo’ Downey!” He imitates a prison baritone voice right out of The Green Mile. “Like, You Mo’ Downey, now. You just can’t make this stuff up,” he says. “All these years, my favorite thing to do in life was to be laughing until the tears well up. Now I’ve found that humor is something as valuable as an Aqua-Lung is to divers.”

Downey, a clotheshorse and pop-culture fanatic, is starving for news from the outside world: fun, stylish stuff, not world politics. He focuses on New York, where he lived in the late 70s and early 80s, after dropping out of Santa Monica High School. In those days he was a fixture at Area, a popular downtown nightclub. Eventually he met actress Sarah Jessica Parker there and ended up living with her for 5 years—before his drug addiction broke them up. “Is the Mercer Hotel still the coolest place to stay?” he asks. “Is Bond Street still cool?” he says, referring to a sushi place downtown. So what does he miss most in the culinary world? “I’d like to be able to eat anything that’s not from a fucking 15-gallon can. Or a salad that doesn’t taste like it’s been in a bag for two years.” Anything else? “Cineplex fare, because they’ve got those big cold sodas with ice and you can get ice cream.”

I ask him what he was thinking back on August 25, 1999. That was the day Downey—dressed in an orange jumpsuit, his hands and legs shackled—saw this prison’s guard towers for the first time. “I was like, What the dickens am I doing here?” he says. “I wasn’t so much scared as in shock.”

He begins speaking as if reading from a manual on prison survival, “A symptom that characterizes the first phase is shock. Under certain conditions, shock may even precede the prisoners formal admission into the camp. The main symptom of the second phase is apathy, a necessary mechanism of self-defense.”

He was not prepared for life in a state prison.

“I thought it would be a lot smaller and tame. I was like, Oh my God—what the fuck? I thought it was going to be, like, the Corcoran State Prison and Theme Park, and I was fucking speechless.”

Which is worse, he is asked: Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail, where he spent 113 days over 1997 and 1998, or the state prison he’s in now? “That’s like asking a cellist if they prefer speed metal to acid rock,” he says, “because I love both facilities equally, and I admire their tandem homage to torture.” He pulls back. “You know,” he says, “maybe it’s not such a good thing that I have time to come up with witty retorts and all.”

An inmate named Mike (he did not want his last name used) watched Downey as he was learning to survive. “Robert kept to himself at first,” says Mike in a phone interview. “He tried dealing with it like a Trappist monk, which is one way of doing it.”

Downey learned to observe the customs of this particular state prison soon after he was moved into a group cell. “After brushing my teeth one morning,” he says, “I spit in the sink, and one of the cellies goes ‘Hey, what the fuck you doing? Spit that shit out in the toilet! We don’t want your germs in our sink!’ He was angry. I’ve always thought, Mouth, face—sink; feces, urine—toilet!” Later, the inmate apologized. “You know, it’s all about sinks and toilet rims and just the craziest fucking simple shit,” Downey says. “Because that’s what it comes down to. I was new to the cell, so it wasn’t really my sink. I was just a sink guest.”

Eventually Downey began interacting, making his cellmates laugh with Hollywood horror stories. By Christmas he was even leading an inmate chorus in the Yuletide caroling. He called me on Christmas Eve during his nightly hour of allotted phone time, and he sounded ebullient, like someone making the best of a very bad situation.

Because he’s a high profile inmate, Downey has to be mindful of how he appears to others in the prison. “He told me that when he’s in the food line, there’s always somebody going, How come Downey got a bigger portion?” says Curtis Hanson. “He tries to avoid preferential treatment because there’s always somebody trying to stir things up.”

That goes for work as well. As if to make the point that Robert Downey Jr. isn’t relaxing in a federal penitentiary, the prison staff put him on kitchen duty. He works 5 days a week from 4:30 to 8 PM—doling out the food, cafeteria-style. Sometimes he is assigned dish-washing duty. He makes 8 cents an hour.

“Hey,” he says in a phone call one night, “I was pots-and-pans man in the kitchen tonight. That’s the fucking real deal. There was pizza, pasta, and spinach. And so we had about 75 very large, impossible fucking pizza pans to deal with. It was fucking genius! I’m, like, in a fucking disposal. There’s three sinks that are the size of a truck, all filled with piping-hot water and stuff called Dish-All.”

He recalls some kitchen misadventures—how a giant bag of gravy burst open on Thanksgiving and he had to clean it up. Another time, Downey found himself standing in floating garbage water. “Thirty-three gallons of garbage water,” he says. “Like 500 pounds of slop. It is at these moments—these points of acceptance—that you realize that human beings can do fucking anything.”

During a call another evening, Downey laughs about his fellow inmates preparations for Valentine’s Day. “You got to see this cluster of thugs cutting out little valentines to hang on a blackboard, taking this arts-and-crafts thing really seriously.”

Downey shares a “dorm”—Cell No 17 of the F-1 building—with 4 other inmates of varying sizes, shapes and colors. He sleeps on the top bunk. Nobody likes the top bunk. It’s a pain to climb up and down all day. Lying on his 3 inch mattress, staring through his window slit, Downey can see the prison’s sun-fried, wheat-colored yard. Or he can gaze at the shrine he has taped to the wall at his bedside, a collage of personal letters, cutout magazine pictures, and snapshots. He receives about 100 personal letters a week—mostly from women he has never met. He responds to many of them. A follower of the Wicca religion recently wrote him to inform him that his “energies are shifting.” Another correspondent, a woman from Ocean City, New Jersey, end her letters with the words “Consider yourself hugged.” “This girl is the best.” Downey says, meaning it.

He sends his friends art, drawn with markers and crayons on the outsides of paper bags and the backs of envelopes. The art is autobiographical and text-heavy, naive portraits of people, real and imagined, including “St. Memphis: the Patron Saint of Elvis Impersonators,” which evokes the outsider art of Howard Finster and Joe Coleman. Josh Richman, a friend of Downey’s since the mid-80s, is acting as his art dealer, selling some of the prison artwork to his old celebrity pals and supporters, including Johnny Depp, Gavin Rossdale, lead singer of the band Bush, and Mark McGrath, lead singer of Sugar Ray.

Richman, who has seen Downey at his junkie worst: unwashed, catatonic, with bloated feet—admits that even he is a bit “weirded out” by some of Downey’s writings. Particularly unsettling is The Clown, an epic work which Downey recently sent to him. “It’s like anagrams and all this weird other shit,” Richman says, sitting in his house overlooking Sunset Boulevard. (As I entered the place, Keanu Reeves was leaving.) “I mean, it’s so prison! It’s fucking out there! It’s got a little bit of a sense of humor, but there’s really a desperate feeling to it.”

Downey’s four cellmates—or “cellies”—all have names straight out of an Elmore Leonard novel: “Figueroa Slim,” Timmons, “Sugar Bear,” and “Big Al.”

Figueroa Slim’s actual name is Charles Bell. He is, in Downey’s words, a “recovering pimp,” who takes his nickname from the steamy street which cuts through Los Angeles. “Bell talks to satellites,” says Downey.

Timmons, a large man, is “an OVG—Old Valley Gangster.” He’s now into self-help.

Sugar Bear is a clerk in the prison chapel. He is “well connected” and does not always get along with Timmons. They tell each other, “Man, I’ll make you touch the tile!” But the disputes are usually settled amicably, without Sugar Bear or Timmons having to drag the other one across the floor.

Big Al is a neat freak who likes oldies radio stations. Downey calls him white trash, albeit affectionately.

And Mo’ Downey makes five.

Perhaps once a week, the five of them take all the leftovers and food sent from outside and lay out a picnic-like spread. Typically, Downey’s contribution is a bit more upscale. Every so often, Ann Leto, an old family friend of the Downeys’, whom he calls his “guardian angel,” sends him a box filled with chai tea, turkey jerky, Cream of Wheat, Irish Cream coffee, boxes of rice and pastas and cartons of Marlboro Mediums. She also sends what he calls “smell good things,” such as shampoo and clear soap. “You know, some of the guys in here thinks he’s the Bank of America.” says Figueroa Slim. “And they try, you know, to, like, take advantage.”

When Downey needs a break from his cellies, he turns to “Cisco” and “Dvorak.” “If you saw them standing together,” he says, “you’d fall down laughing.” Cisco is wiry and scrappy, and Dvorak looks like a Prussian soldier. Cisco is in for prior possession and petty theft. He never wears a shirt. Downey and Cisco have friendly wrestling matches. They disagree over who pins whom more.

Not all gamesmanship ends in laughter, however. Downey’s friend Mike, who was transferred in April to a facility near San Diego, tells of a close call between Downey and another inmate—“a guy with a chip on his shoulder, who’s at least two people wider than Downey.” The inmate wanted to turn a routine game of racquetball into something more physical. “He started coming at Downey, banging into him, calling him stuff,” recalls Mike, “and Downey’s like, ‘Hey, you don’t have to talk like that,’ and I’m whispering to Downey, ‘Don’t say another word to him, man!’ Next thing I know they’re, like, walking toward each other. Downey just doesn’t take any shit. And Downey will start to walk away, and the guy keeps saying things to piss Downey off. Finally, I convinced the guy that he didn’t want to get more months added to his time, and he backed off.”

“Downey don’t need nobody watching his back,” says Figueroa Slim. Told of the face-off, Downey’s father, 64-year old filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., says proudly, “Gee, I knew that Junior was a pretty tough kid.”

Just how dangerous a situation is Downey in? This is Mike’s take: “They can say Downey is protected, but like with everyone else, it’s a false sense of security because you never know if the guy next to you is going to break your neck in the middle of the night when you’re sleeping. That’s something they can’t prevent. There’s always the danger element. What’s the probability factor? That nothing’s going to happen to him. However, fate is fate. So they’re saying he’s in prison for his own good, but, you know, any day could be his last. That’s the way it is.”

In late January, the New York Daily News ran an item reporting that Downey may have scuffled with one of his cellmates. Downey denies it. But a few days after Mike was transferred, Downey says, one inmate did make a veiled threat: “He goes, ‘so what are you gonna do now that Mike is gone?’ And I said, ‘Your head games never had any effect on me when Mike was here. What makes you think that they’re going to now?’” That, Downey says, ended the situation.

Has he been sexually assaulted in prison? He evades the question by talking about the prison-yard “gals.” “There’s five gals on the yard,” he says. “Five clearly identifiable gals who really make the best of their state blues.” He explains how they cut their long underwear to look like Capri pants and knot their shirts at the midriff. “They do the laundry,” he says. “The funny thing is that they’re highly respected.”

During another visit, I ask again. “What I hear is that if you’re on a lifer yard,” he says, meaning a yard where many inmates are in for life sentences, “then it’s perfectly respectable, to some, to partner up with another inmate.”

In February, during a night-time phone interview, I bring up the question of sexual assault once again. He responds: “I can neither confirm it nor deny it.” In a May interview Downey emphatically denies that he has been sexually assaulted in prison.

If you examine the facts — a rap sheet riddled with non-violent infractions and probation violations — you see that Downey isn’t incarcerated for lack of trying.

June 23, 1996: Driving his Black Ford Explorer along a stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, Downey is clocked going 70 and charged with driving under the influence. Los Angeles County sheriffs search the vehicle and find .42 grams of heroin, 1.49 grams of cocaine .32 grams of it in crack form —enough to bring on a charge of felony drug possession— and an unloaded .357 magnum underneath the front passenger seat. There are four bullets in the glove compartment.

July 16-17, 1996: The infamous “Goldilocks” incident. While awaiting trial, Downey wanders into a neighbor’s Malibu house —the front door was unlocked— and passes out in the empty bed of their 11-year-old son. Revived by paramedics, Spends the night at the USC Medical Center prisoners’ ward. The family refuses to file trespassing charges.

July 18, 1996: Los Angeles County Municipal Court Judge Lawrence Mira orders him into a supervised 24-hour drug rehabilitation program.

July 20, 1996: Dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and hospital pants, Downey escapes from the rehab center through a window, then hitchhikes to a friend’s Malibu home. He is recaptured four hours later and held at Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail for nine days.

July 29, 1996: Judge Mira orders him into another supervised rehabilitation program.

September 11, 1996: Downey pleads no contest to the felony drug possession and the misdemeanor charges of possessing the concealed weapon and driving under the influence.

November 6, 1996: Downey gets six more months of live-in rehab. Also receives three years’ probation, including periodic drug tests.

November 16, 1996: Temporarily released from rehab to host Saturday Night Live. Show includes a skit in which Downey plays a detective who finds a heroin stash. “In my book,” the character says, “if you do drugs, you go to jail and you stay there. You don’t go to some cushy rehab center and take a week off to host some comedy show.”

December 4, 1996: Appears on Prime Time Live. Diane Sawyer asks, “You a good liar?” Downey says, “Yeah. You have to be.” Sawyer: “Great liar?” Downey: “Yeah.” Sawyer: “What is the lie everyone should watch out for that you’ll be telling if you’re using again?” Downey: “I’m fine.”

October 16, 1997: A drug counselor testifies in court that Downey skipped mandatory drug testing in September.

December 8, 1997: The court finds that by skipping drug tests, Downey has violated his probation and orders him to serve 180 days in a Los Angeles County jail. Judge Mira says, “I’m going to incarcerate you and I’m going to incarcerate you in a way that is very unpleasant to you.” Just in case the prospect of county jail sounds too cushy, Judge Mira adds, “I am willing to send you to a state prison, I don’t care who you are.”

January 23, 1998: Downey is furloughed to work on the film U.S. Marshals.

February 13, 1998: Back in county jail, Downey receives a gash during an altercation with three other inmates. He is moved to solitary confinement.

February 17 and March 4, 1998: Furloughed to do postproduction looping for Neil Jordan’s In Dreams.

March 31, 1998: Released from county jail after 113 days. Checks into court-ordered 120-day rehab program.

June 22, 1999: Downey admits in court that he has missed scheduled drug tests since a December 7 hearing. This is probation violation No. 2. “I think there are serious psychological issues we need to address,” says Judge Mira. he is handcuffed and taken to a strict 24-hour rehab program.

August 5, 1999: At sentencing, Downey pleads with the judge not to send him to state prison. “It’s like I’ve got a shotgun in my mouth, and I’ve got my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gun metal,” Downey says. Judge Mira seems unmoved, saying, “We tried rehabilitation, and it simply hasn’t worked.” Basing the sentence on the 1996 cocaine possession charge, Judge Mira gives Downey three years in a state prison, making good on his earlier threat. The sentence means Downey could be released as early as November 2, 2000. He receives credit for 201 days served and is moved to the North Kern State Prison in Delano, California.

August 25, 1999: Downey is transferred to the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison, Corcoran.

September 24, 1999: Downey’s legal team files an appeal.

His 66-year old mother, Elsie Downey, an actress who appeared on TV shows such as Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and in films such as Robert senior’s Greaser’s Palace, laughs at the irony that prison has brought her son closer to her. “Whatever it takes, I guess,” she says. Robert recently wrote her “the most beautiful poem,” she says, obviously touched. “I’m just so pleased to hear from him so often now — however I can get it. I hang on to every word he writes me, like it was, you know, the law. I pay close attention to what he’s saying. The love is there, for sure.” She hasn’t been able to visit him since he has been in the state prison — 2 heart operations have kept her at home in Pennsylvania — and she’s not sure she’ll ever again feel as close to her son as she does now, “As far as true communication down the line, well, you know, Robert can just slip back out of touch as easily as he has . . . slipped back in.”

Downey’s older sister, a 36-year old fledgling filmmaker named Allyson Downey, has been “blown away” by his letters from prison. “It’s the first time ever, I think, that he’s remembered my birthday,” she says. “He made me a card. It was November 29. He’s writing me all the time.”

His letters can be wild, describing moments of both despair and contentment. In one of the half-dozen letters he sent to me, he writes of two guards: “I must confess, it has entered my mind to wait until shift’s end one night and pull a Hannibal Lecter on one of these gentlemen, thus sporting their face masks to freedom. A grisly consideration, and one I could only ponder in jest.” In another letter he writes of a positive aspect of prison: “For those of us who have considered physical ‘flexibilities’ to be of import, I bring news from the field ... It is my newfound experience that in order to get things done, I must be still. When that is afforded by an imposed restriction (illness, weather, incarceration, generally being grounded), I now believe it is God’s way of giving you some true freedom to ‘catch up’ on what you need to accomplish ... inwardly.”

During my fourth visit, Downey talks about not wanting to expose himself anymore, to stop playing the clown. “In the future, I’m going to try to not be so candidly detailed about my personal life. Exhibitionism is just showing my inadequacies and insecurities. And I’m not going to use that ‘dysfunctional family’ terminology ever again. I mean,” he says, as if to himself, “is nothing sacred? I used to think I had nothing to hide, which is complete bullshit. I’d sit back and watch ‘The Robert Downey Show’ pathetically objectively, like I was out of my body.” He says, “I feel guilty about my petty extravagances, that I have sought to delay dealing with, you know, the real stuff.”

When I relay this to his soon-to-be ex-wife, Deborah, she says: “It’s good if he’s not feeling as if he’s got to be ‘on’ all the time. That’s what is going to save his life — to be truthful, to not always be covering something up. What I most wish for him is that he finds a simple way of living.”

For starters. Downey’s friends say, he needs a permanent residence. He has been without one for the past three years, maybe longer. Before his incarceration, he stayed at Curtis Hanson’s Los Angeles apartment for a couple of months. Before that, he stayed at the Standard, Andre Balazs’s stylishly inexpensive hotel on Sunset Boulevard. Before that, he was staying at his former assistant Tim Kessler’s West Hollywood apartment.

“The deal was that if Indio was staying over, then I would take the couch,” Kessler says. “Because Robert was considerate, he slept on the couch a lot more than I did.” Neighbors would trample through the yard to get a glimpse of what was going on. “It was like living in a fishbowl,” recalls Kessler. And Downey kept forgetting where they had hidden the house key. “We had one of those where you can’t replace it,” explains Kessler, “so Robert was always coming in at like four A.M., waking up the landlord. Finally, the landlord was, like, ‘Dude, you gotta move out.’”

Kessler adds, “When someone is drinking or using drugs, you can usually tell right off the bat, because their attitude becomes different, or their personality changes. Well, Robert’s personality changed by the minute, all the time.”

Downey’s friends and relatives say that his drug addiction and spending sprees —at one point he owned hundreds of imported silk scarves and countless Dolce & Gabbana suits— have left him nearly penniless, despite the fact that he was once earning $7 million a year. “There were all the signals that he was going to be at loose ends again after the filming of Wonder Boys,” says Michael Douglas.

“Making a movie is a very intense life experience,” says Curtis Hanson. “Everyone is working on a common goal or cause. A kind of family situation is created. At the wrap of a film, I have always gone through an intense depression — like the family has broken up. Robert’s own family had, in fact, broken up, and I anticipated this feeling with Robert. I wished that he had a base to go back to, a feeling that someone cared or trusted in him.”

For Downey, that feeling has eluded him since childhood, which, while, hardly short of creativity, was extreme. He describes his parents as “artistic and revered East Coast squares who happened to like marijuana. Even the counter-cultural guys couldn’t relate to them . . . When Dad got into coke, he didn’t really know how dangerous it was. He was very naive. He just thought it helped him edit. To me, we were an artistic family trying to find normalcy.” Marijuana, he says, “was a staple — like rice!” He laughs at the notion.

Allyson Downey offers a less glorified view. “To put our growing up into the context of right now,” she says, “it would be equivalent of having Quentin Tarantino as your father. My family were all great characters. I don’t know, though, that they were great family members. We’re all good characters, we all definitely occupy that spot.”

Sitting at the Cedar Tavern, a fabled Greenwich Village watering hole, Robert Downey Sr. tells of Robert junior sipping white wine at the age of six. “We were all sitting around, smoking grass and playing poker down the old West Village loft, and Robert was staring at me kind of funny — Robert was always an observer of it all, even at a very young age. And, I go, ‘You know, you ought to try a little of this instead of drinking.’ I passed him a joint. And suddenly I knew I had made a terrible, stupid mistake.” He pauses. “Giving a little kid a toke of grass just to be funny.” He adds, “The story keeps getting repeated. By now you’d think Robert was Jimmy Cliff’s dealer at age eight. I’ll never forgive myself, but Robert and I have dealt with it, and he’s said to me, ‘I’m not a victim, Dad, I don’t blame anybody.’”

He goes over to his son’s upbringing. “Junior was born in Manhattan. Then we moved to Forest Hills. Then a loft in Greenwich Village. London. New York again. New Mexico. Los Angeles. Connecticut. Woodstock. New York. Los Angeles again. Back to New York. Back to Los Angeles. It was crazy.” The Greenwich Village loft was craziest. Regular guests included Abbie Hoffman, Norman Lear, and filmmaker Hal Ashby. Family friends during the L.A. years included Jack Nicholson, Peter Sellers, and Alan Arkin. To Robert junior, it was dizzying.

“You know, truthfully, I’ve never seen Bobby happy — really, really happy,” says Elsie of her son. “But I haven’t seen many people happy. I’ve never seen him enjoy life — he enjoys lives.”

Did she and her ex-husband —they divorced years ago— try to make their son happy? “Oh, yeah, as hard as could be,” Elsie says. “You only know so much about how to raise children. I always wanted him to be happy.”

At one point father and son tried to heal their strained relationship through therapy. “It ended with the two of us crying and hugging,” says Robert Senior. “Suddenly we both realized that the psychiatrist had put on Cat Steven’s Father and Son.”

Allyson calls their childhood a “nightmare” wholly lacking in adult guidance. “But because Robert’s never known what it means to be happy, it’s not such a sore spot with him. He has no frame of reference. He’s done the best that he can and recognizes that something is missing, but he can’t necessarily put his finger on it.” She tries to put her finger on it. “The world Robert lives in, his emotional reality, it’s so overwhelming for him just to function. He’s like an idiot savant. He’s a brilliant actor, a brilliant person, and a really good friend. But he has handicaps in dealing with day-to-day situations.”

“I think that it’s also the pain that he is in,” she continues. “And it’s been with him for a long time. Like me, I don’t think he uses drugs so much to feel anything as to not feel anything, to block out all the emotions — just so he can function.”

Josh Richman calls Downey ‘a beautiful disaster.’ Richman, who is 35, grew up with Downey in the high-flying 80s and partied just as hard. But Richman was always able to pull himself away from real danger. “Bob’s illness is that he has never known true freedom,” says Richman, an L.A. entrepreneur who has had a hand in running nightclubs and who co-produced The Last Party. “Freedom is dictated by boundaries, and an oddly beautiful thing about Robert is that he’s basically lived without them. His path is not a linear one — you can’t compare it to any other person’s. Maybe, to Bob, leading what everyone else thinks is a perfect life is not perfect. Maybe Bob doesn’t like life like that.” Richman doesn’t want to think this, but he says it anyway. “And maybe he’s not prescient enough in this life-form to fight it any longer. So if it means dying to get to the next life, then drugs will help him get there faster. All this other stuff may just be bumps in the road.”

Dr. Manijeh Nikakhtar, a psychiatrist and UCLA professor, has visited Downey in prison. She has two words for his pain: bipolar disorder. “So Robert has been self-medicating himself,” she says. “He needs to be treated for these things, not punished.”

“It’s obscene and it’s barbaric and it shows that we have no compassion for people with drug problems,” says Robert Altman, who directed Downey in Short Cuts and The Gingerbread Man. “He should be in a hospital-care facility . . . Robert is a gentle human being, with an illness, an addiction. He has no business being in that place.”

At the state prison, Downey is required to attend drug-treatment sessions or classes four hours a day, five days a week. “This guy has been clean since he got here,” says Warren Boyd, who counsels Downey twice a month. He adds, “I don’t think Robert is at risk of re-offending. I’ve gotten quite a few lines from people — trying to look in their eyes and judge if they’re telling the truth. I see the actor and the heart and he’s not trying to bullshit anyone.” As for the effect of prison life on the inmate: “Robert’s charisma allows him to be very much liked,” Boyd says. “Robert is not someone who cowers at all. Robert walks like a man and I’m proud of him.”

Downey describes the drug program as a bit like Scared Straight television program, with oversize inmates shouting in his face, What’s wrong with you Downey? You had everything! And you blew it, man!

But the real deterrent for inmates here is random drug testing that the prison oversees. “A guy’s number can come up five times a week,” says Vitka Eisen, director of Walden House. “If an inmate comes up with a dirty urine test, that’s considered a drug possession and potentially can lead to another criminal charge and more time.”

A prison spokesman says that Downey is “cooperating with the program and doing fine.” Downey, for his part, says he wishes he were tested on a daily basis “all the time,” he says, “because I don’t want there to be any discrepancy, I don’t want there to be an open door.”

His friend Richman points out that Downey is capable of going through long stretches of remaining “clean.” He’s gone as long as 18 months, “But when something bone-crushing happens to him,” says Richman, “Robert falls back into it.”

“He said that he hasn’t used in prison,” says Sean Penn, “I choose to believe him — although I admit I’ve been fooled before.”

I ask him if he’s using, or has used, any drugs in prison. “I haven’t used drugs since June of 1999 — the Thorazine at L.A. County Jail was my swan song,” he says. “End of story.”

It’s a Sunday, high noon, in early May. The sun is baking the empty land around the state prison. This is my fifth and final visit. Downey’s appearance and disposition have changed radically. After almost a year in this place, with months between him and his likely parole date, he has become “one of them.”

The hair at his temples is going gray. His eyes are yellowy. There is a slight cut on the edge of one nostril, which goes unexplained. His shoulders are bulked up, making the rest of his frame look small. No ‘bonneroos’ this time — just prison-issue blues, short sleeves for the coming summer.

I ask him what has changed in the two months since I’ve seen him.

“Nothing has changed.” he says in an angry tone. “Why should it have? I’m just sinking deeper into my depression sessions. Sometimes I’m just dead, living in a fucking warehouse. I’m ready to get out.”

He declines being photographed, saying, “I just look like shit — you’ve got what you need, don’t you?”

He says he’s done with kitchen duty, and he’s happy about that. A high school dropout, he has finally earned his General Equivalency Diploma, and received the highest pre-G.E.D. grade of anyone ever in this facility — a dubious feat, he concedes, chuckling about how the “class” was like the Sweat Hogs in Welcome Back, Kotter. “It’s supposed to be one cellie in the bathroom at a time, but there was always like 15 of them, like the whole class, doing whatever they do in there. I’d be a better poster boy for getting your G.E.D. than for kicking drugs,” he says, smoking a cigarette in the visitor’s yard, which is a lurid spring green oasis in the otherwise bleak surroundings.

He hopes to be moved to another prison. He’d like his new temporary home to be the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo, a half-hour from this place, but closer to the breeze of the Monterey coast. That’s where Marlon Brando’s son Christian did five years on a manslaughter charge for killing the lover of his sister, Cheyenne. “It’s even tighter security, but it would mean getting out of a group dorm and sharing a cell with only one other inmate. I’d actually be able to pick my own shows on television, without it being a group decision,” says Downey.

Not long before this visit, the National Enquirer published a story based on an interview with a recently released inmate, Reginald Harris. Harris told the super market tabloid that members of a Mexican gang tried to stab Downey and that Downey angered a Native American inmate, known as Water Buffalo by “sashaying around without any clothes on.” Water Buffalo choked Downey until he almost passed out, the tabloid reported.

Downey denied it. “I’m not going to respond to any of the allegations with anything, but ‘No Comments’, because either way it could fuck up my situation ... These guys in jail don’t know anything but what they see on television, so they make up a story for the press that is a little bit Jerry Springer, a little bit Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and a dash of Blueboy magazine thrown in for good measure. It’s a ‘Hey, I can top that’ kind of mentality.”

Concerning the Water Buffalo incident specifically, he says, “They can say that I was wearing a skirt, or that ‘That faggot actor was going down with the Water Buffalo’, but I’m not going to comment.” The Enquirer also reported that he has been having difficulties with a jealous “pre-op-transsexual” inmate. Downey denied that part of the story too, saying: “If anyone asked one of the bitches on the yard, they’d say, ‘Well we’d like to do him, but it hasn’t happened.’”

I ask him, then, what’s the worst thing that has happened to him in prison. “I would never tell you the worst things that have happened to me,” he says.

We go out into the visitor’s yard for cigarettes. I give him a Marlboro Medium and we stand there smoking and talking among the inmates and their wives, girlfriends, and children. From time to time a Latina girl, about 18 years old, looks over at Downey. Finally, she leaves the inmate she’s visiting and comes over.

“Are you who I think you are?” she says shyly.

“I don’t know,” Downey says. “Who am I?”

“That actor?” she says.

“Which actor?”

The girl smiles just slightly, apparently realizing he’s not going to give her a real answer. Soon the guard announces that cigarette time is over, and Robert Downey Jr. goes back inside with the other prisoners.