Institute for RDJ Studies ❱ Reading List
Gettin' Downey
Detour, March 1995, by Jim Turner
In order for this story to be understood and appreciated, there are a few facts that must preface the actual event. Malibu and Hollywood are at least an hour apart in inclement weather. It always rains in sunny Southern California. Robert Downey Jr is a madman. And nothing is as it seems.
It is a Saturday morning line any other—wind and rain prevail. Bright red tail lights dot the rain-swollen street on all sides. Although not the best day for lunch at the beach, it is Mr. Downey's wish to eat at Ivy at the Shore in Santa Monica. Splashing along the sidewalk from the valet to front door, I slide across the entry's tile floor, the hostess-stand serving as both a buffer and a handhold.
"Mr. Taylor?" she asks, smiling nervously.
"Turner," I reply.
"Oh, I have a message for you from Robert Downey Jr."
Unbeknownst to me, blood rushes to my face, beginning at my crewneck and rising swiftly to my hairline like mercury in a fevered thermometer. I peer over the top of my sunglasses.
"I'm really sorry," she shines, tears filling her eyes, "a prior commitment ... he tried to call you ..."
I step back into the rain and drive home.
Downey is scheduled to leave from the accompanying photo shoot in Las Vegas early Sunday morning. No one seems to know what really happened —the airplane says he was late, he says he wasn't— regardless, he misses the flight. With photographer and crew waiting at the hotel in downtown Vegas, Downey arrives a couple of flights later in a cab—his limousine nowhere to be found. The limo driver says he was there, Robert says he wasn't. No one knows for sure. He is scheduled to return early Monday morning, which turns into Monday evening, so an interview was scheduled for 9:30 at night, again at Ivy at the Shore. The rain continues.
Sensing a repeat of an earlier performance, I pack my car with friends, and we head toward the beach for dinner. Within minutes of our arrival, a telephone call comes from the limousine driver: "I can't find Mr. Downey. He wasn't on the flight." Robert's wife, Deborah Downey, appears in the doorway shaking rain from her black overcoat. Upon hearing the news, the exact same reaction that had seized me in exactly the same spot two days earlier seizes her as well.
"You have to be fucking kidding," is all she can say.
We all sit at the table, order crab cakes, and crack jokes about the weekend's missed flights, missing limousines, and mishaps in general. Suddenly, her eyes light up. "Why don't you just interview me?" she exclaims. "I'm in the perfect mood." As temptation begins to envelop me, a yellow taxicab pulls up to the curb outside, and a screaming Robert Downey Jr emerges into the rain, overnight bag in hand. He blows into the restaurant like a gust of wind, leans across the table, and kisses Deborah on the lips. "Hi, honey," he whispers, catching his breath.
With an audience of seven, Robert the Entertainer comes alive. He instantly warms up to everyone at the table as though he has known us all his life. He goes into detail about his night in Las Vegas, beginning with the photo shoot, and ending with the cab ride which has just delivered him to the table. Once again, he emphasizes that there was no limousine at the airport.
"Do you think we have enough?" he asks, referring to our conversation thus far. "I think it's going really well. How about if we walk out into the tide to about waist-deep water and do the interview there?" I laugh, he doesn't. "Or, we could go clam-digging," he adds. Now he laughs. He suggests I accompany him and his wife in the limousine back to his house up the coast beyond Malibu. With waves crashing against one side of Pacific Coast Highway and mud slipping down the other, we head toward the Downey residence in the dark of night. It is midnight when the interview begins, and Robert the Entertainer is replaced with Robert the Interviewee.
"Are we starting now?" he asks, looking down at the recorder. "Why don't we just talk for a while first?" The tape recorder hums along in the blackness.
Downey recently completed Miramax's Restoration, directed by Michael Hoffman. "Michael and I are friends, and we do business together," he begins slowly, giving his best effort to warm up to a stranger following a two-day-long adventure. "I just feel like we have stuff that we are supposed to do together. He's cool. The day of the earthquake last year, Deborah and I disappeared, got away from the house with some friends, and went up to the San Ysidro Ranch. Hoffman had been in town staying at the Nikko Hotel. He called me up and said, 'You know, we have been going back and forth with this project Restoration for a long time and I really feel like it's something that we're supposed to do. I really liked it too, and so it was the day of the earthquake that we signed on with each other to do Restoration. I admire the fact that he is one of the few people who has a real inner life. He really takes time to have a life. Aside from that, he is a really excellent chef." Downey looks out the window and grins. "He made me breakfast burritos every morning. Oh, no, that was someone else ... sorry."
This is the second occasion for Hoffman and Downey to work together. Three years ago, they teamed up for Soapdish, a comedy about daytime television dramas, also starring Sally Field, Kevin Kline and Cathy Moriarty. "I've certainly come to care a lot about Robert and have an immense respect and admiration for his talent," Hoffman says of Downey. "His commitment on Restoration was really, really extraordinary. He is a remarkably inventive actor, and although his performance in this movie is as good as you've ever seen him —really wonderful, simple, and truthful— I don't think we've even seen the tip of this guy's talent. He's really gifted."
"Robert was very focused and attentive during the production of this movie. He is at his best when a lot is demanded of him. I think he is at his weakest when he gets bored. There is a part of him that is very restless, which is easily turned into discontent. The more that is asked of him, the better he performs, and this role really did demand a lot. The rehearsal was very fraught, because he was running between the dialogue coach, the writing coach, the oboe coach—he had five or six different coaches. But he is able to absorb a tremendous amount of tasks of pretty high difficulty rating, and really nail them. He works very hard to do it, I don't mean it comes easily. To learn how to fake playing the baroque oboe is not an easy thing to do," he laughs. "But he pulled it off—better than anyone!"
"Well, and you know, that really is saying something, seeing that Michael Hoffman has probably seen more people fake the oboe than anyone else," laughs Downey. "That's what he did before he started directing."
"You know why I think that I'm that way?" says Downey, referring to his being at his best when more is demanded of him. "Because that's how things really are. Time is simultaneous, it just seems to be linear so that we can make sense of it. But in fact, people have connotations that unless you do things in a certain algorithm, or with a certain method, or through a certain approach, then it is not as valid as if you just approach things spontaneously. I think that is something that can really fuck people up creatively."
"Anyway, working with Hoffman was really cool, because his primary objective is that his actors have a positive experience personally. And by personally, I mean above and beyond the work itself—in life. Also, he and I are probably the two most likely people to get into a 73-hour cerebellum swap meet over anything. People say, 'Oh, you guys sit around and overanalyze things too much.' Maybe you shouldn't, but then again, maybe sometimes you should. And, if there were ever two guys for the job, then it's he and I. We can spend hours talking about some kind of minute mythological detail."
"There is something about Michael—he's turned down more films than anyone. He hasn't done a film since Soapdish, and that's a long time. And it's because he is always checking inwardly 'Is this the right thing?' He told me this thing about a whole school of philosophy based on these three ideas: Know your purpose, accept your feelings, and do what needs to be done. I think it really works."
Set in the 17th century, Restoration is a story about Robert Merivel, a young, high-spirited medical student who abandons his schooling to accept the position of Royal Physician in the Court of King Charles II.
"It's hard to explain, but at the same time, it really isn't," says Downey, lowering a window to allow cigarette smoke to escape. "It's a really good book, written by Rose Tremain. It's basically about this guy who is a serendipitous hero, and is studying medicine in 1660 in London. His father is glove maker for King Charles II. He has an opportunity to have an audience with the king, and he blows it. His dad can't believe it and shames him. He loses himself in oblivion. He gets into one-night stands and lots of fucking booze.
"Through a series of events, he winds up being appointed to Keeper of the Royal Dogs—18 Royal Spaniels. The king wants him to marry one of his mistresses just to get her out of his hair, because his main whore is getting pissed. He marries him off as a paper bridegroom to Celia, who can't stand him. The king sends him out of London, away from all the fun and excitement, to this estate out in the middle of nowhere. He's always getting depressed and falling into these two-, three-, and four-day never-get-out-of-bed-spells. Anyway, he changes the house into this gaudy, up-to-date, hip pad and starts throwing these parties. He's having a party that is totally out of control, and goes to the door, and Celia is there, and he falls in love with her and all this stuff happens—he makes a pass at her and she freaks out, and King Charles takes away the estate. Now he has nothing.
"He goes off and finds a friend, Pearce, who is working with a bunch of insane and mentally disturbed Quakers. Meg Ryan plays this Irish girl Katherine, who went nuts when her husband left her, and she's freaked out. Obviously, he winds up getting involved with her, even though he tries not to, and the Quakers make him leave and take Katherine with him—and she's carrying his child. So, I've got this nutty girl pregnant, and we go back to London, and the Plague is sweeping through the city. She has the baby and dies in labor and I'm left alone with our daughter. Then there is this Great Fire of London, and he tries to save his daughter, but he can't. But, he later finds out that his daughter is alive, and saves Celia's life by discovering she doesn't have the Plague. And the King forgives him in exchange for the lives he's saved and the man he's become."
"It's a long story," I yawn.
"It went on and on, didn't it?" Downey smiles sheepishly.
The car passes through water at least two feet deep, and pulls over to the side of the road against a concrete wall with two garage doors and a single wooden door. Inside the gate, what looks more like a compound than a house for three becomes visible in the pouring rain. The two-story glass and wood house, its back facing the coast, sits opposite a small guest house, converted into a studio. A long, dark reflecting pool stretches between the two buildings, flanked by a stone walkway covered with tropical plants and grasses. Stumbling into the shadowy studio, Downey lights two large candles, casting a glow on the high vaulted ceiling. Mixers, synthesizers, and guitars fill half the room, and a small leather couch and table occupy the rest. Downey steps up to a huge synthesizer with a keyboard, turns on the largest of three microphones and blows into it. "I want to play a little bit first," he says. His breath flows out of the huge speakers, and his fingers hit the keys. The electronic waves fill the stillness, accented by his raspy voice in a tune called 'My New Job,' which he wrote for his wife Deborah. The rain pounds outside.
Downey slips into a leather chair on rollers, lights a cigarette, and slumps down into the seat, gliding in place with his feet. He appears ready. When not making movies, free time is spent here in the studio, where the Downey duo writes songs. "I'm doing an album. In fact, I have enough for a couple of albums," he admits. "I'm writing a screenplay," he continues, then hesitates. "I hate —well, not hate— but I always get a little nauseated when actors say, 'Well, what I really want to do is ...' Everyone always wants to do something else, but for me, it happens to be true. I love music, and if I could make the same kind of living doing music that I make doing movies, I'd be happy to do it. I'm just starting to come into it. I start recording my first album in a couple of weeks. Deborah plays, writes her own songs—we've written songs together, we sing together.
"Sometimes it's hard for me not to be self-centered, and not just concentrate on what I'm doing, my thing, be exclusive and only focus on my own shit. It's really dangerous to be like that if you're in a relationship. You have to try to include your partner in as much shit as you possibly can, and let it happen organically. Not like, 'Oh, I better include her or him in this'—you have to want to do it." Pregnant pause. "Wouldn't it be great if I spent the rest of the interview peering out the window, almost scared!" he laughs eerily. "I'm nutty ... fucking nutty. I'm nutty with all my friends, myself, my family. Everybody is sort of strange, though."
"It helps to think it's everyone else that is strange," I laugh nervously.
"Yeah, once in a while that happens," he adds, "but for the most part I usually just recognize how strange I am. I really think I'm stranger than everyone else around me. You know what I mean? It's not even what they call the Impostor Complex. Have you ever heard of that? It's beyond that. I just sometimes think, I really am much more of a freak than anyone I've fucking ever met. It's obvious. It's no one's fault, it's just the truth. I'm a freak. Am I?"
"Well, it certainly hasn't been a bad thing for you," I suggest.
"No, I guess not," says Downey, smiling. "I guess most things haven't been a bad thing. Most everything. But so much shit has gone on in the last couple of years. Like this stuff where I thought I might actually be able to get through life without these three or four certain things happening. And then a bunch of them happened for a first time—like people really close to me dying. Intense, heavy shit going on. You're forced to look at things. It's so quiet here ... relaxing.
"Relaxing for me is never easy at all. It's probably my biggest challenge in life—to actually learn to slow down. I used to think that it was just charming, or part of my personality, and now I think, No, that's just not true, what it really is, is just weird. It's something I should look at and deal with. I know people who actually know how to relax. I wonder how they learn that. Do their parents teach them that? I've been thinking lately about all the things that no one ever taught me. Not that I'm blaming anyone, it's just that there's a bunch of shit that I never learned. A bunch of shit. A lot of it really important stuff, like how to manage money. A lot of the basic stuff. Let's go inside."
We tiptoe inside the front door, and face a staircase leading to the second floor. It's dark, except for small, strategically placed spotlights. Down three steps into the kitchen, a center island with cooking utensils hanging over it dominates the room. A small halogen light pierces the darkness into the center of the table. He whispers, I whisper back. I'm not quite sure why. I mention it; and neither is he. We laugh. Juggling a container of water and a recorder, and Downey with a bottle of juice, we begin a tour of the house. As we walk out of the kitchen, I comment on how beautiful the light fixture is. He walks over to the switch and slaps it, igniting ten other bright lights and flooding the room with whiteness. "See that? That's how a woman turns on lights," he laughs. "Isn't that true? Women like lots of light. I walk around turning lights off all of the time."
We head into a large, open two-storied room with a fireplace, baby grand piano, an antique chaise lounge, and a massive dining table with six high-back upholstered chairs. Huge dark paintings in the style of old masters loom high on the walls, small spotlight hitting the perfect spot on each to accentuate the light source in the painting. We head up the stairs, and find Deborah watching television in bed, two wet dogs at her feet. Robert pauses to give her a peck on the lips, and whispers to her. Down the hall is a guest room, Deborah's office, Robert's office, and the master suite. A huge wooden bed piled high with plump velvet coverings and pillows occupies the main portion of the room; the windows are covered with jewel-toned Indian saris. The bathroom, "the main reason we took the house," is two-stories high, with a glass rotunda centered over the massive marble Roman tub.
Back downstairs we enter yet another room, the media room, with a leather semi-circular couch facing a huge-screen television. "Let's stay here," he says. Outside, wind chimes rustle in the ocean breeze, and the rain continues. Robert picks up a photograph of his young son and smiles. "God," he whispers. "That's Indio," he says, putting the photo back down. "I love it in here," he says, scooping up a big cream-colored Persian cat.
"I watched The Last Party again the other day," I mention, referring to the highly personal documentary in which Downey attended the 1992 political conventions. "That film was pretty revealing."
"I was such a —not that I'm not now— but I was such a total ignoramus about not even politics, but anything that had to do with anything else except my own selfish interests," he says, sipping juice. "I just thought it would be a really cool opportunity. I learned a lot, and at the same time, in the aftermath, I realized I was all fucking gung-ho about Clinton. There was that bias in the documentary. I was just jumping on the bandwagon. That's what I learned the most from it—a year later watching it. Everybody has unconscious biases about everything. Everybody about everything.
"The thing is there's going to be a new way, and right here and now I think, how are we ever going to get to that point? If we can't get to that place, then we won't be able to change or have a big awakening, it's almost like things will change because they have to, but things are going to change no matter what we think or believe, or no matter what we do. Why did we choose to be born in the time slot that will be coming into the 21st century? Why did we choose to be here now? It's going to be one of those times—maybe the Golden Age, whatever the fuck that means, or something.
"Sometimes there is an underlying depression that I feel on a day-to-day basis. We have such a tremendous responsibility more than any usual generation. So many important things are riding on where we take it, and what happens next. I guess in some ways, it's a pressure, because we really can drop the ball. And I feel like I always seem to slip by certain situations by the skin of my teeth. You can say it's being blessed, or having angels, or whatever the fuck it is, but I've become comfortable with the notion that somehow or other I always come out smelling like roses. But now, I think it can't be about that anymore —this being lazy by nature— it's just not going to cut it anymore. I really do feel quite a bit of pressure not to drop the ball with regard to changing, and letting go of my own personal issues, the things that I should be working through. It's kind of scary sometimes. If I really let myself know how significant or important these things, my life, all this stuff is, I would probably wake up ... or freak out."
"Change is good, though. You should never be satisfied," I suggest.
"Yeah, it's a good thing," agrees Downey, lighting a cigarette. "I just recently started actually thinking about how precious life is to me. How much I love sucking air. How much I love being alive, doing what I do, having what I have, loving what I love. Everything is becoming so much more important to me. Because I've spent so much of my life in this sort of happy-go-lucky life —and not necessarily being that— but putting on that air. It's a total mind-blower. Another thing is how worthwhile it is becoming to take certain things very seriously. A big portion of my beliefs and attitudes and all that stuff, are merely outmoded, and that blows my mind. I can hide behind the statement, 'Fuck that, look at what I'm doing. I'm successful, respected, blah, blah, blah.' It all seems to have little or no bearing on what is actually going on, or what I'm really about. I admire artists in a way that might come off almost immature. I really love being able to have those projections, have a hero, or hold someone in high esteem, put them in a little box, like some people might do with me. It's so weird, too, that there is no real external payoff for being true to yourself. The reward is that you get to do it. I think about all of the shit that I do, trying to excel in being an actor, but what about all the time that takes? And what about the time that I don't spend doing things for myself? There will never really be enough time for me to relax and enjoy the day. For as much energy as I have put out to achieve whatever I've achieved, it's very strange how quickly it all goes away. And how it all becomes this machine that needs to be fed this high-octane fuel, and doesn't get good mileage.
"It's harder still to do what you set out to do—to take a period of time and say, 'This is going to be for rejuvenation.' Deborah and I went to Hawaii, and after three days at the Hana Ranch, I was like, 'Wow, that's enough Scrabble for me.' Let's go back outside."
Downey takes a chair in the studio, wipes the rain from his forehead, slicks his hair back with his hands, and looks out of the open door at the rain dotting the black glass surface of the pool. "I love this house. We looked and looked, and then when we walked in the front door and saw the staircase, I knew it was right."
At the age of 28, Downey has appeared in 26 films, but never done a nude scene—quite an accomplishment for someone in today's film fare. "Isn't that weird?" questions Downey. "That's very strange. I still have never had a real steamy love scene, or done nudity. Actually, I did some nudity in Restoration. I wonder what that means? Am I just some kind of PG guy? Is it possible that I'm conservative? I wish I was. I like to think that I'm conservative. Deborah has a name for my alter ego: Slick Stern. I'll be starting a new project, and I'll slick my hair back, and be very stern, efficient, and productive, and she calls me Slick Stern."
"You were on People magazine's 'Worst Dressed List' a couple of years ago," I remind him.
"Oh, that's right," he laughs. "I thought it was more recent than that, but maybe I've been on it more than once. There is definitely some shit that I have worn that has been very lame. There were certain periods that I went through. Were you familiar with me at the time when I did Less Than Zero? I had this whole period I went through where I was really super, super into my clothes. I had tons of clothes, and I would do this combination, and that combination. It was a whole scene, the mixing and matching—a whole production. Now, I'm just very much over it. Even just the brain effort to do it. I can't be bothered anymore. The clothes that I wore for the photo shoot were probably the coolest fucking clothes I've ever put on, let alone do a shoot with."
It's past two in the morning and Deborah strolls through the door. Robert tells her he'll be in in a minute. She smiles, and walks back into the house. I walk to the limousine, climb inside, and Downey closes the gate. The rain continues. 