Robert Downey Jr.: Rockin' Robert
New Age-ism apparently ranks high on Downey's list of replacement addictions. When he isn't quoting The Mathematical Tourist or the Seth books, he litters his conversation with impassioned anecdotes about his and his friends' experiences with telepathy and "lucid dreaming." To wit: "I was playing piano this morning and I felt like something could have happened--a vision or whatever--that sounded like a little internal click. For some reason, I said, 'No, I'm not ready for it.' The idea of really experiencing the vastness of the psyche, that's heavy. I'm starting to mess with the magic of life, telepathy, clairvoyance, really heavy things to process." For almost a full minute, he stares into space, grinning beatifically. When I bring him to, he beams an okay-you-caught-me-so-what? smile and offers, "Maybe it's the endorphins." After all, he just left his four-times-weekly pump session at his West Hollywood gym, The Sports Connection, which he has nicknamed "The Sports Erection."
But in Hollywood, even cloud-cuckoo-land stuff has a payday. Downey describes the photo shoot for this interview as "a ritual that was kind of sending out an energy; now I feel like a period or '40s movie will happen." Or, more to the point, did the actor--who brought along a dozen or so changes of costume--want to send out to Richard Attenborough, who is preparing to direct a movie about silent movie comic Charlie Chaplin, "energy" in the form of photographs of himself looking nifty in period clothes?
Downey came into the earth plane genetically programmed: Be Different or Die. His father, Robert Elias, was a high school dropout who adopted "Downey"--his stepfather's name--when he joined the Army at 16. He married singer/actress Elsie (Robert's mother), pitched semi-pro ball, waited tables, and sometimes acted, before making his big splash directing nose-thumbing mid-'60s and '70s movies some of us got high to. Growing up, Downey "had no choice" but to watch his father's flicks: "He was screening them in the living room half the time." By the time he turned eight, Downey was cast by his father as the kid who gets his neck slit by God in Greaser's Palace, which features such weirdness as psychotic cowpokes, a topless Indian squaw, a horny gay midget, and a faith-healing Christ figure who doubles as a song-and-dance man.
With Putney Swope, in which militant blacks take over a Madison Avenue ad agency, daddy cool looked as if he might flip into the mainstream. But Downey, Sr. ("So sick, so fucking warped," his son has said) never tired of telling the Hollywood suits where to shove it, and stayed underground. In and out of schools in Queens, Forest Hills, and Greenwich Village ("Either I didn't show up or we had been out of town"), unsure whether this month his family was rich or broke, Downey, Jr. fought for the limelight. "I worked at it, I wanted to be entertaining," he recalls. "I felt inadequate because I wasn't in schools much and didn't know what was going on. When your mom's making underground films, four out of five dentists surveyed say she doesn't put on the shawl and drive you to work every morning: 'I'm sorry, your father and I have to go to Florida to shoot a beach sequence that just came to his mind.' "
Downey's parents split up while they were living in Woodstock. By his sophomore year at Santa Monica High School, where he sang in a madrigal group, he was snagging leads in The Detective Story, Sheridan's The Rivals, and Oklahoma! Classmates and teachers alike remember Downey's stage presence with awe. For one show, classmate Ramon Estevez, the middle Sheen kid (and, according to Downey, "a true eccentric"), taught him to tap dance--"a real skill that has certain uses, like waiting for elevators." With his father's approval, he bailed out in the 1lth grade and fled back to Manhattan, where, while auditioning "for everything," he bussed tables and shared a no-frills apartment with his older sister, Allison.
On the audition circuit, he won a rep for attitude, reading cold for John Hughes on Weird Science, free-associating for The Pick-Up Artist while lying sprawled across James Toback's office floor, auditioning for George C. Scott's Mussolini miniseries with purple hair. Before winning those three parts, he had bits in Baby, It's You and Firstborn, then, later, held his own against Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School and Kiefer Sutherland in 1969, and obliterated Anthony Michael Hall in Johnny Be Good. In 1985, Hall, with whom he was then tight, convinced Downey to join him on the cast of "Saturday Night Live," in which both were embarrassingly mirthless in the show's nadir year. Back in movies, to measure up to his father's casting him as a super endowed porno star, "Wolf Dangler," in Rented Lips, Downey stuffed Kleenex into his fishnet underwear. People expected Less Than Zero to say Important Things about fast-lane drugs and sex among rich Beverly Hills kids, but it came off instead as Valley of the Dolls without the giggles. Still, Downey, unforgettably touching and funny as a coke-addled Beverly Hills screw-up, brought out the fans in critics and rescue fantasies in fans. "I have a strong co-dependent following," he says, goofing, between mouthfuls of potato chips. "I like the idea that people want to nurture me, you know? That I could probably go into any major shopping center and find someone who would say the right things or, at least, rub my feet."
One thing Downey learned on the Zero shoot was the exercise of star clout. His mentor was co-star James Spader. Downey was so thrilled that the studio was putting him up at the famed Sportsmen's Lodge, he "didn't care if the elevator smelled like urine because I was in Hollywood. The first day Spader came to the production office, he said, 'You've got to get out of there,' and brought me over to the Chateau Marmont. From that minute on, I had it together--The Chateau, Fred Segal--and there I was, a young actor in L.A. All I needed was the apartment on Beachwood and some red furniture."
The red furniture came, too--with movie money rolling in. "I used to just carry around all my money on me all the time. I bought stuff for friends. Now, I look back and go, 'I've made that much money and I don't have any saved?' What the fuck is going on? I have a car, a house, a bunch of nice clothes, tons of music equipment, toys, and guns." Real guns? "Just one by the bed for any of those late-night stalkers who bought the map."
After making new fans and lots of money doing True Believer and Chances Are with co-stars whose names screamed "Wait for the video," Downey took on Air America, a Tom Cruise reject, in which he looked puffy and brain dead. At Cannes to promote the mess, he was downing cappuccino with a friend when Arnold Schwarzenegger, with cigar and wife in tow, hulked over to his table and boomed, "Rob, this is Maria. Maria, this is Rob Lowe." To worsen matters, a critic wrote that Downey had replaced Rob Lowe as "the male Ali MacGraw." Mention this to Downey and he's all over you. "What is Ali MacGraw? Was she in the worst movies? Was she bad?" Willing to play straight man for the sake of a response, I explain that MacGraw was once Someone Important's darling who, as an actress, made great set dressing. "Oh," says Downey, pretending to be sussing all this out, "so, was he saying I was good-looking? Does he miss me? Would he like to buy me something?" No, Robert, you know that he was calling you a bimbo. Drawing himself up, Downey says, shuddering, "Are you insinuating that I got a bad review? There's no one that can act better than me. There's no one that will go places that I will go."
Downey, the jokester, finally cops to his revulsion for Air America: "It was a tossup whether to go see Diane Schuur at the Pantages, or go to the opening of Air America. I knew [Schuur] was only going to be there for two nights, but I thought, 'Hey, that could happen with the movie, too.'" Warming to his theme, Downey says that the movie "represented making a film industrially, with little revolution--or revelation. The frustration I felt affected me literally--chest pains and stuff, in those sections of your body where energy gets pent up. It was like, I CAN'T STAND THIS." As is his current wont, Downey ascribes cosmic implications to this personal and professional nightmare. "I needed to have a frustrating experience making the kind of movie I thought I was supposed to do to let me know the kind of movies that I'm going to do. It's such a roundabout way to get where you think you want to go. But then, that presupposes that I know where I want to go. I don't. I just know how I want to feel when I'm getting there: excited."
Oedipal,as it may be, Robert Downey, Jr. is way more famous than Robert Downey, Sr. Such a latter-day effort as the recent Too Much Sun, sonny's third movie for pop, has not redressed that imbalance. Father and son live two blocks apart; Jr. in the high-end Hollywood Hills, and Sr. "slightly in the flats," as his son puts it. Their relationship is "good, for the last few years," now that "there are fewer parts of me that are shut down to how your father's penis controls you." Chortling, he says, "I've started realizing how we're a lot more alike. We don't get certain things. He's like, 'Well, we'll just do this movie with, say, him, and like he'll produce it and we'll get the video rights and just show it.' And I'm like, 'Dad, we have to think this through.'"
Almost as if on cue, the waiter yells up from the main dining area, "Robert, you just got a ticket on your car." Downey thanks the waiter for telling him, gives a fuck-it shrug, then moves on to discussing his future plans. "This year..." becomes the leitmotif that begins such sentences as "... I really want to start taking charge..." and "... I want to try stand-up comedy...." In a rare, welcome expression of self-doubt, he allows: "I've really been a pinch-hitter so far. I can count the stuff that I've liked so far because they're just scenes, which scares me. I don't think people are aware what I'm capable of in this industry." As he excitedly begins to detail his strategies for rectifying that injustice, the waiter again hollers up to Downey: his car is about to be towed.
When we meet again days later, Downey bops into a crowded Westside health restaurant wearing a t-shirt with Interview scrawled across it, shades, dark slacks, a few days' stubble, and a finger splint (more about that later). I mention that I just noticed him streak past in a crimson Carrera 2 that practically screams "Fresh off the showroom floor." Wait, wasn't his vehicle of choice last week the black Porsche that replaced the earlier, beloved black BMW L6 635 CSI? "I traded it in yesterday," he explains, airily. Too many tickets? "No," he says, suppressing giggles. "It's just what I wanted, you know? Well, actually, I wanted a black one, but they didn't have one on the lot. My father calls and says, 'Robert, you didn't own the car you traded in.' I thought I'd paid it all off, but I guess I hadn't. I earned it, I just don't own it. And, I go, 'Oh, I see, do they mind?' So, now I have to take the money they gave in the trade-in and pay off the car that I traded in."
Downey-isms like that one help explain such recent attempts at more responsible career management as Jill Greenbaum, a friend who now functions as his fiercely protective, motherly assistant. But whither Loree Rodkin, the ubiquitous manager to many other Young Hollywood household names? "We're just not in business anymore," Downey announces, toying with his silverware. "There was a time when I really needed a manager, you know? Then, when I didn't anymore, it wasn't [anything] particular with her, it's just that there wasn't really any other business things for her to do. It's always strange in a business relationship because no one's the enemy and no one's wrong. Sometimes things just live out their span. It's alright that everything ends. It's about the validity of the experience."
And his new assistant, who once worked for Dustin Hoffman? "She's unruly," he says, mugging, with grudging affection. "She's like, 'I'm not going to run your fucking errands.' I need to set boundaries with her so that I don't character assassinate her when I'm not with her. This is a horribly egotistical analogy, but it's like training your dog not to piss on your bed. You get things set up for two weeks of training, so that you don't have to beat the fucking shit out of the dog ten times a year. I need to do that in most areas of my life. Boundaries, man. It's fucking boundary time."
Although he observes that it is "really hard not to like me because whatever's not likeable isn't really out for guests," deep down on some primitive, Downey-centric level, the actor says he is beginning to understand he "must learn tact, diplomacy." He rationalizes having been turned down for roles. Edward Scissorhands? "Going from Air America into three months of prosthetics would have been too symbolic, like, 'Let's see, how else can I constrict myself?'" White Palace? "I was fucking petrified; I tested [with Susan Sarandon] but instead of using the nervousness, I held onto the shame of what was going on inside without shot-putting it into where I wanted to go." Again, the cosmic law according to Downey: "There's a certain trust I have that what's meant to come to me does. There's times that I've felt myself enter onto that freeway of competition and psychologically, it's just terrifying, filled with paranoia and the presupposition that everything you get is at the expense of someone else not getting it. Then, there's the smarminess of knowing that someone's shooting a movie that I turned down. But then, I'm sure people turned down Air America. That could go fucking on and on."
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