Bad Weekend in Palm Springs

Robert Downey Jr.'s drug bust on Thanksgiving weekend at the Mery Griffing Resort Hotel and Givenchy Spa in Palm Springs did not come as a total surprise. His tumultuous path through the criminal-justice system had made headlines since his first arrest, in June 1996, when he was pulled over for speeding and then busted for possession of heroin, cocaine, crack and an unloaded. 357 Magnum. In the following four and a half years, Downey alternated between ever more harrowing personal ordeals: a bizarre escape in a Hawaiian shirt and pajamas from a lockdown rehab; his arrest for entering a neighbor's house and passing out in their child's bedroom while on drugs. All of these incidents culminated in nearly eighteen months of incarceration in California's Corcoran State Prison.

The events leading to his arrest in Palm Springs reveal another, lesser-known dimension of his private torment: the strangely coddled, deceptively nightmarish world of the celebrity drug addict. Downey's close friend Tom Sizemore, the character actor and a self-described one-time "Hollywood dope fiend," says that he could always rely on strangers to help him cop drugs: "After Natural Born Killers came out, I could go into restaurants and get waitresses to give me money, and I would go and buy dope." He adds, "For people of average means to be around a guy like Robert, it can be dizzying. Like doing dope. If he told them to get him an elephant, these motherfuckers would get him an elephant."

In the days prior to his Palm Springs misadventure, says his friend Mark Lawrence Miller, who accompanied him there, Downey was "on the brink of destruction," distraught over the dissolution of his eight-year marriage to Deborah Falconer, the mother of his seven-year-old son, Indio.

Less than four months earlier, Downey had been released from Corcoran. In legal terms, he walked out of prison on August 2nd a winner. His lawyers had scored a surprise ruling on appeal, successfully arguing that Malibu Municipal Court Judge Lawrence Mira had blundered in imposing his three-year prison sentence. Downey was sprung from the state penitentiary four months sooner than expected. It was a personal victory over Mira, who had once vowed from the bench, "I'm going to incarcerate you in a way that's very unpleasant for you."

In the week after Downey's release, he signed a deal worth more than $500,000 for him to appear in eight episodes of Ally McBeal. Offers to co-star with Julia Roberts in the romantic comedy America's Sweethearts and to play the lead in the Mel Gibson-directed stage production of Hamlet quickly followed. Publicly, Downey spoke of his drug problems as a thing of the past. Utilizing the language of recovery, he talked about overcoming his "bloated dysfunction" to discover the "Joy of living" and said, "I'm coming from a place of total strength and humility now."

Downey, whose often-told first experience with drugs occurred at the age of six, when his 1960s underground-filmmaker father handed him a joint, first entered rehab at age twenty-three in 1988. His current lawyer, Robert Waters — who orchestrated Downey's release from jail and who will be overseeing his defense in the Palm Springs case — says that Downey could write a "Zagat's guide to drug-treatment centers in California." In the past dozen years, he has attended hundreds of twelve-step recovery meetings and has hired sober-living assistants — who function sort of like sobriety baby sitters, following him around to keep him out of trouble. Chris Canter, a spokesman for the Walden House Foundation substance-abuse program that Downey attended while he was in Corcoran, says, "Addiction is almost defined by a series of relapses. No one knows why some people become sober in their first contact with treatment and others take years or decades of trying."

While no single treatment method offers a surefire cure, doing nothing at all usually yields even worse results. Strangely, that option — doing nothing — was given to Downey when he left Corcoran on August 2nd. And though most other "graduates" of the Walden House program in Corcoran are released into halfway houses and are required to attend twelve-step recovery meetings, take drug tests and report to a parole officer, Downey was released into a legal limbo, with no special restrictions.

After getting out, Downey voluntarily checked into an outpatient treatment center in Huntington Beach, but he left after two months and moved into a modest two-bedroom apartment in Hollywood. When Ally McBeal began production in late August, Downey had no problem showing up for his 6 A.M. call at the Raleigh Studios soundstage in Manhattan Beach, attending weekly twelve-step meetings held on the lot, which the show's producers had arranged, and turning in a performance for which he would end up winning a Golden Globe. Still, Downey's after-hours activities during this period would become the subject of intense rumor-mongering following his Palm Springs arrest. Tabloid stories blamed a female movie star for getting him strung out on hard drugs.

Tom Sizemore has been down this road with Downey before and knows exactly what it's like. Sizemore became friends with Downey in 1990 and often joined him for lost days and nights doing "punk speedballs" — smoking crack and black-tar heroin — before he got sober in 1996. "We did [drugs] basically by ourselves or with each other," Sizemore says. "It wasn't glamorous. It wasn't out in the open. It was quiet and kind of desperate." By the time of Downey's release from Corcoran, he had very few friends left from his old life, most of whom had gotten sober. "It's really sad," says a friend who has known him since the early Nineties and who has distanced himself from Downey. "He'll call and invite me to a screening, and I tell him, 'Bob, I'll catch your movie on video. But if you want to go to a twelve-step meeting, I'm there.' "

Mark Miller is one of the few Downey friends who has remained with him through thick and thin. Miller, who describes himself as Downey's "palace guard," met him on the set of the 1985 film Tuff Turf, a forgettable B-movie. "It was our first movie," says Miller. "I was a PA [production assistant], he was an actor. My job was to watch him and get him to the set on time and things like that." Their early acquaintance formed the basis of a relationship, common in Hollywood circles, in which Miller's role is best described as "assistant friend." While Downey's career skyrocketed, Miller's hopes of becoming a successful screenwriter never quite materialized. When Miller found himself without means, Downey always helped him out. In the early Nineties, he lived for a while in Downey's London hotel room when his friend was filming Chaplin.

As Downey fell deeper into drug use and his legal woes mounted, Miller was there to stand by him. He accompanied him to court, schmoozed deputies at the L.A. County Jail on his behalf and even helped Downey record a speech from his prison cell at Corcoran that was played at the Moving Picture Ball's tribute to Jodie Foster in 1999. All the while, Miller, who is not a substance abuser, says he lectured Downey about drugs. But, he says, "Robert will excommunicate you if you are just ragging on him like people in the AA program do."