RED AND HOT RIGHT NOW....
THE DELIGHTFUL UPSWING OF ROBERT DOWNEY JR.
By Kirk Honeycutt
With wanton days behind him, a wild action hit--costarring Mel Gibson--heating
up his career, this do-it-all actor's making a dramatic break from Brat Pack
beginnings!
This is the way rich film stars are supposed to live, isn't it...? The pink
Spanish-deco house hugs one of the famed Hollywood Hills above the Sunset
Strip. Expressionist paintings and red-and-black art-deco furniture line the
stark white walls. The multilevel home was originally built for Charlie
Chaplin in 1927 by a set designer. "This was probably Chaplin's
floozy-of-the-week pad," jokes its current rent owner, Robert Downey Jr.
Yet Robert, who does a quick soft-shoe before settling into a comfy chair
surrounded by Persian cats, swiftly dispets any notion about the wild
life-style of at least this young and wealthy film star. There is no floozy of
the week. For six years, Downey has lived with actress Sarah Jessica Parker
(who stars in the ABC-TV series Equal Justice. The wild times--the booze and
drugs--are behind him; he's been sober for a year and a half. And in
discussing his life and career, Robert displays maturity and modesty.
At twenty-five, he is already a veteran of a dozen films--not including his
appearances as a youngster in works by his father, Robert Downey, the maverick
director of Putney Swope and Greaser's Palace. And while his movies haven't
always raked in high receipts, critics have celebrated the vigor and emotional
depth Downey Jr., gives his characters, especially the scary Beverly Hills
cokehead he played in Less Than Zero. Now, however, a hit looms. In Air
America, an action movie laced with black comedy, he and Mel Gibson become
embroiled in bizarre adventures while flying in Southeast Asia for the CIA's
secret airline.
What really excites him, though, is his recent and sudden burst of creative
energy. He's taken up painting. He is writing a screenplay. He has even
composed and recorded a heavy-metal rap song for Too Much Sun, a movie he made
with his father earlier in the year.
A major reason for his exuberant outlook on life is the love and stabilizing
influence of the woman he affectionately refers to as Parker. "It's a funny
phrase, 'taking someone for granted.' It's something you're not supposed to
do. Yet you can take the primary aspects of what you need from a relationship
for granted: that this person loves you unconditionally, that this person
knows you better than your mom does, that you can trust her to mirror things
to you that you're blind to."
Robert was eighteen when he met and fell in love with Sarah Jessica in New
York, where both had been cast in a film called Firstborn. During the ensuing
years, years of both personal and professional change, she provided what
Robert says he needed most--"a physical and emotional lifeline to someone."
"I'm really starting to gain an understanding of what a relationship is. That
shifting of two people to a third thing--not me, not you, but us--that concept
of sacrificing toward an intangible, higher good. 'Us' is magical."
"We literally grew up together," notes Sarah Jessica when I talk to her later,
"so we know one another so well. If he's exposed to success or beautiful
leading ladies--the thing that make a lot of people stray--we can work through
that because we love one another and want to be together."
As for marriage, Robert says this: "I misinterpreted marriage until recently.
It was what was continually going wrong all around me. With my parents, I
thought, 'They'll never break up.' Then they did. So I had these old tapes in
my head about what marriage meant. And now I think that whether or not we
actually do it, after you've been with someone a certain amount of time, it
happens--a marriage of selves."
The other major influence in his life is his father. "Lately, I've realized
how, more and more, I'm picking up a lot of Dad's qualities. Especially in
letting spontaneity and humor be threads that hold together aspects of my
life."
Relaxed spontaneity is a hard lesson to learn though. "I found myself needing
some loosening up on Air America. Mel [Gibson] finally said, 'Listen, you
can't really give that much of a s** in the end. Because you'll get too
married to your perception of what something is supposed to be. You've got to
let it go.'"
Downey's been absorbing instruction--formal and informal--about acting since
he dropped out of Santa Monica High in California to pursue the craft. He
headed for New York, where he found work off Broadway and in regional theater.
"Theater gave me a sense of the gypsy energy behind being an actor. So I have
a summer-stock vibe: I can do drama, I love comemdy and improviation," he
says. There was even a stint on Saturday Night Live, from 1985 to 1986. If
anything threatened the career burgeoning in such films as Back to School,
Weird Science, and The Pick-Up Artist, it was his growing abuse of drugs and
alcohol.
"I don't blame L.A. or having money or access to drugs. Some part of that
addicted behaviour was serving me, but fire can cook for you or burn you and I
was getting burned. I was lucky to have people who cared enough to bring it to
my attention." "There were no ultimatums," Sarah Jessica says. "But our
relationship couldn't have gone on if he hadn't made the choice to stop." Says
Robert, "The hardest thing wasn't admitting to a problem but accepting that it
was time to do something about it. I feel now very much back at ground zero.
The biggest danger in taking alcohol and drugs is that they inhibit your
body's ability to create superior feelings to those created by chemicals or
spirits. Part of me really likes that bacchanalian vibration supplied by
drugs. But life should be about empowerment. Instead of feelings like you're a
victim of your past, you should feel like you're completely the captain of
your present."