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Cathedral City lies 120 miles east of Los Angeles, in the heart of the Coachella Valley, a vast oblivion of sand, irrigation projects, golf courses, cinder-block resort motels and desert suburban developments. It was here in a strip club called Showgirls, in a minimall next to a head shop, that Robert Downey Jr. came in at about nine o'clock last Thanksgiving. Dressed in a beat-up blue corduroy Nike cap, a rumpled jacket, baggy black pants and white sneakers, Downey blended in with the few customers in the club. Within minutes, one of the dancers recognized him, and before long his table was surrounded by fans. Among the autograph seekers was a young woman named Kiley Ridge. Though she had just turned twenty-one a few days earlier, Kiley had briefly worked at the club as a cocktail waitress. She had come into Showgirls that night with her thirty-three-year-old brother, Mike, to pick up her final paycheck.
Before going out to the club, Kiley had changed out of the skirt and stockings she'd worn earlier that evening at Thanksgiving dinner with her mother and brother. She was dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, and her strawberry-blond hair was styled with almost ironed-looking bangs that had earned her the nickname Dharma, after the TV character with a similar hairstyle.
Kiley pushed through the cluster of fans buzzing around Downey, leaned her face close to his so their eyes were level and said, "Excuse me? Mr. Robert Downey Jr.?" She then asked for two autographs, for her and her brother. When Downey handed them to her, she swiped the Nike cap off his head and put it on. Kiley is a pretty girl. Nearly five feet ten, with a thin yet shapely figure, she has blue eyes and freckles that make her appear slightly younger than her years. For whatever reason, she says, Downey looked at her and said, "I want to leave with you right now."
All Kiley could think about were her unshaved legs. "I was like, 'Oh, my God! Robert Downey Jr. wants to leave with me, and I forgot to shave my legs.' " Today, Kiley has far more serious matters on her mind. She feels "really, really bad" that Robert Downey Jr. is possibly facing almost five years in prison, more or less as a result of meeting her.
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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."
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Downey's friends brand Miller an "enabler," someone whose efforts to soften the consequences of the addict's drug tend to do more harm than good. Sizemore says, "A friend like Mark is a blessing to the disease and a curse to the person who has it." And Miller now admits that perhaps he may have hurt his friend. "There may be some truth I was an enabler," he says. But in almost the same breath, he adds, "I love Robert with all my heart. Why weren't Robert's other friends with him at a time when he was alone, going through a divorce? Why were they ignoring him and letting him fall apart?"
As Thanksgiving rolled around, and, according to Miller, Downey grew increasingly depressed about the legal proceedings relating to his divorce, he asked Miller to spend the holiday weekend with him at the Merv Griffin Resort Hotel — a resort where rooms go for $600 a night. Miller says he told Downey a trip to the resort sounded like a "boring Thanksgiving," but he relented after Downey waved a glossy brochure and said, "Dude, just come."
Miller agreed to go, hoping that he and Downey might work on some screenplay ideas that they'd been talking about for years. "We might have been the Matt Damon and Ben Affleck of our time," says Miller, "if we'd done it ten years ago when we were in London."
On November 22nd, the day before Thanksgiving, Downey and Miller checked into Room 311 at the Griffin Resort, a French bungalow nestled behind a topiary maze. It offered a large bedroom and a spacious living room with a wet bar. Miller brought his laptop, and the two settled down to work on their screenplay. Miller says he and Downey made excellent progress, but by the next afternoon, Thanksgiving, Downey was becoming restless.
They decided to go to a strip club. Miller believed "sex would be the best alternative to drugs. I don't mean that we were going to find sex, but to be in the environment of sex might take his mind off drugs." Miller originally hoped to take Downey to a fully nude strip club, where in California no alcohol can be served. "I didn't want him being around alcohol," he says. "It's too tempting."
Miller placed a call to Pope's Bar, a fully nude club located in an industrial back alley south of downtown Palm Springs. The club was closed for the holiday, but its owner, Arthur Pope, happened to be in the office feeding his Rottweilers when the phone rang. Pope suggested Miller take Downey to Showgirls, the strip club in Cathedral City, about twenty minutes away. Cat City, as locals call it, isn't on most tourist maps. It is more a place you live if your job is to take care of the rich people in Palm Springs.
Miller and Downey had their limousine drive them to the strip mall in Cathedral City where Showgirls is located. Miller dressed up for the occasion in bright-green leather pants and a green turtleneck; Downey, dressed down, blended in well with the mostly blue-collar clientele. At first, it was Miller, not Downey, who caught the attention of the dancers in the club. Three showed up at the table, drawn by Miller's outfit. One of them, Laura Burnett, 25, initially spoke to Miller, complimenting him on his eye-catching get-up. "Mark was the stuck-up one," says Burnett. "Robert was down-to-earth. He asked us how we liked our work and what we did for the holiday. He told me that he missed his son."
Kiley Ridge Lives in a Cathedral City housing development with her mother Carol. Out here, green lawns and concrete driveways give way to a desert landscape so harsh and white that it almost looks like snow. Kiley points to a mountain on the horizon and says it is actually a huge pile of sand in the shape of a mountain, and when the wind blows, the neighbors' lawns, swimming pools and swing sets are covered in sand, which is why some back yards are walled off with eight-foot-high Plexiglas fences. "This is the most boring place you can imagine," Kiley says.
A couple of months before her encounter with Downey, Kiley moved to Cathedral City from Florida to get away from an ex-boyfriend whom she claims had stalked her, vandalized her carcarving "bitch" and "slut" into the paint — and attacked her with a stun gun. The first job she found when she got to California had been her brief cocktailing stint at Showgirls. There, she met a coworker who came on to her and quickly displayed what she felt was a troubling obsessiveness that reminded her of her ex-boyfriend. His name was Levi Castleberry, and he worked at Showgirls as a bouncer and DJ. In his first encounter with Kiley, Castleberry turned on the charm. He gazed at her meaningfully and said things like, "You must have a mirror in your pants, because I see myself in them." Within a few days, Castleberry began phoning Kiley and telling her she was "his girl." His behavior freaked her out, and she quit working at Showgirls to get away from him.
On Thanksgiving, Kiley invited Castleberry to join her mother and brother, Mike, who had flown in from Boston, for the family supper. "He didn't have any other place to go," she says of Castleberry. The supper ended by sundown. Castleberry went home by himself. At nine o'clock, Kiley and her brother decided to go to Showgirls. Kiley says they were going crazy from boredom, explaining, "Our house is like a constant rerun. My mom's always in her pajamas watching TV. She's on disability. She had a car accident before I was born and hit a telephone pole. She doesn't have any short-term memory and can only see straight ahead."
Mike, a thirty-three-year-old painter and musician who lives in Boston, says he wanted to see his little sister's former workplace to ascertain whether it was "classy." He was concerned about Kiley because while living in Florida, she had become seriously depressed. Before Thanksgiving dinner, Kiley had told Mike that Castleberry was a cokehead and frequently invited her over to his apartment, telling her, "I've got a mountain of cocaine; let's go skiing."
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Mike and Kiley were at Showgirls only long enough to have one drink and for Kiley to pick up her paycheck. By the time they approached Downey, he, too, was drinking. He told Kiley he wanted to leave with her, and the three of them headed for Mike's car, leaving Mark Miller at Showgirls. On the way out, Downey tried sneaking a cocktail, but it was taken away from him by a bouncer. Kiley says Downey's limo driver ran over to her and said, '"You guys aren't going to beat him up or anything?'" She eased his fears, saying, "Look at my angel face." The driver replied, "Just be careful with him."
For Kiley, the highlight of the evening came when they drove out of the strip-club parking lot with Downey in the back seat. "I was like, 'Oh, my God! Robert Downey Jr. is in my car! He's rich and he's on TV!' My brother was like, 'Calm down. Put your seat belt on.'" Kiley says she turned around, grabbed Downey's hand and started slapping it, saying, "Yo! Bobby D! Hook me up, I want to be on Ally McBeal."
As they drove off, Kiley noticed Downey's appearance for the first time. "He looked awful," she says. "His hair was all greasy." Still, Kiley wanted to show off her new celebrity friend to the only person she knew in town. She phoned Levi Castleberry and said, "I've got Robert Downey Jr. in the car with me. Do you mind if we come over?"
Levi Castleberry lives in a two-bedroom apartment off Dinah Shore Drive in Cathedral City. His Rottweiler Sable lives on the balcony. Castleberry has worked at Showgirls for two years. In a good month, he can make five grand, considerably better than he did when he was in business with his dad in Texas installing gymnasium floors.
Before Robert Downey Jr. stumbled through his door at about 10 o'clock on Thanksgiving, he'd already met his share of celebrities at Showgirls, among them Mötley Crüe singer Vince Neil, whom Castleberry "admires as a performer," and Neal Schon, the guitarist for Journey, who Castleberry says "is the coolest celebrity I've ever met." Castleberry has preserved the bar glass that Schon drank from, as well as a chit Schon autographed, in a Tupperware container he keeps in his sock drawer.
Castleberry is compactly built, with a round, pink face and a chin that recedes slightly. Three days of stubble covers his face and shaved head. As he gets ready for work, he splashes cologne on his face and shaved armpits. "Bitches love this shit," he says. He points to his Steve Vai-autographed guitar and says, "When Downey came in here, he picked up that guitar and played 'Message in a Bottle.'"
Castleberry says Downey was a pretty good guitar player, but other than that, he has few kind words for him. "The thing with that guy, he was awfully cocky," he says. "And everything he wore could be no further from matching. And his hat — I usually have my bill round and tailored-out looking. His was all fucking flat, like he'd been sleeping on it."
Castleberry, who insists he has sworn off drugs since his encounter with Downey, claims that Downey first broached the topic of doing cocaine. Castleberry obliged him, offering him a line on a pane of glass he kept for special visitors in the bathroom. "[Downey] started talking about soda," he says. He initially thought Downey wanted a beverage, then figured out he was inquiring about baking soda, which is used to turn cocaine into crack. As soon as this misunderstanding was cleared up and Castleberry produced baking soda, he says Downey cooked a small quantity of cocaine into crack in his microwave oven, then told him, "You shouldn't do lines. You should smoke crack. There are impurities in cocaine."
According to Mike, Downey held a piece of tin foil for him with crack on it and lit it: "Robert told me to breathe in the smoke and hold it." A couple of minutes later, when Downey picked up Castleberry's guitar, Mike joined him in singing "Message in a Bottle." Mike says he couldn't believe where the night had taken him. "I kept thinking, 'I just took a hit of crack, and here I am singing a duet with Robert Downey Jr.'" When Downey put the guitar down, Mike says he looked around the smoke-filled room at his sister, at Castleberry and at Downey, and his initial excitement was overwhelmed by sadness. He says that, for some reason, "I almost cried."
At around midnight, the festivities broke up at Castleberry's apartment when the cocaine ran out. Downey and Mike hopped in Downey's limp. Castleberry went with Kiley in Mike's car and headed over to their mother's house to get some Valium, which Downey said he needed. Kiley had a stash at home because she had recently cracked a tooth on a tongue piercing and, unable to afford a dentist, had been numbing the pain with Valium she had bought off "some Mexican dude" for two dollars apiece.
Mike was especially eager to lure the jonesing movie star to their house, where he wanted to show Downey his portfolio of psychedelic space-alien paintings. "Maybe I can sell him a painting," Mike told his sister.
After they tumbled noisily through the front door and went into Kiley's room to hunt for her Valium, Kiley's mother stormed out of her bedroom and yelled at them for waking her up. Kiley says she turned to her and said, "Look, Mom, it's Robert Downey Jr."
Downey sat on Kiley's bed, and Castleberry observed him with growing suspicion. "He was staring at my girl," says Castleberry. According to Kiley, the enmity between Castleberry and Downey was mutual. "[Downey] kept telling me he thought Levi was 'dirty,'" she says. Eventually Downey called for his limo and left alone. Kiley, Levi and Mike followed in Mike's car. Kiley had the impression that the limo driver, speeding down the broad, empty desert highways, may have been trying to shake them. But the group reunited at the entrance to the Merv Griffin, and Downey led them to the topiary maze, sprinting through the hedges as if he were in a movie, shooting at imaginary helicopters before tripping over some bushes and falling on his ass. He stood up laughing, then spoke in an English accent, quoting lines from movies that no one among his new friends recognized.
When they reached his room, Castleberry and Downey forgot whatever misgivings they had about each other and discussed obtaining an ounce of cocaine. Castleberry said he could make some calls. Downey had no money on him and babbled about getting a cash advance on his credit card. Castleberry told him not to worry. "I told him I'd take care of it," he says. "Everything's on the DL."
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On a clear December afternoon, Levi Castleberry offers to drive to the home where he says the cocaine that led to Downey's arrest was purchased. Castleberry says he left the Merv Griffin resort at about 1:30 in the morning and picked up his friend Nick, the other DJ at Showgirls, who was just getting off work. They went together to a house in Cathedral City to buy the coke.
Retracing his trip there, Castleberry gives directions to a street behind the main commercial drag, Highway 111. He turns into an alley and points to a small house. "Nick went inside and paid for it — $1,200 for an ounce," says Castleberry. "Usually the coke you get around here smells like gasoline, because they bring it over the border in gas tanks. But this didn't. It was good."
Back in Room 311, Downey made a show of ordering room service, putting on his British accent and telling the hotel employee on the other end of the phone, "I hope your pen has a lot of ink in it." He ordered four bottles of champagne, a bottle of Hennessy, turkey dinners and, for Castle-berry, a hamburger.
At around two in the morning, Mark Miller showed up, followed a few minutes later by the three strippers from Showgirls. One of them, like Kiley, was nicknamed Dharma, since she also wore her hair like the TV character. The similarity in their hairstyles would subsequently result in a fateful confusion. After room service arrived, Kiley says Downey poured Dom Perignon into a hollowstem glass and handed it to her, explaining that the bubbles in good champagne rise straight from the bottom of the stem. Kiley, who had never tasted champagne before, took one sip, decided she didn't like the fizziness and poured it down the sink. Downey laughed at her.
Castleberry returned at around two-thirty or three, bringing along Nick and the ounce of cocaine. He says the party then divided into two camps: "The drinkers stayed in the front room, and the druggies hung out in the back, by the bathroom."
"Everybody was drunk or coked up," Kiley says. "Levi sat next to me on the bed, and I could feel his heart beat a couple of inches away. He kept putting his hands on his chest, trying to count his heartbeat."
Spying Downey momentarily alone in the bathroom, she swooped in and finally obtained what she'd set her sights on from the moment she'd met him: his Nike hat, autographed and inscribed to her. Downey asked her to stay the rest of the night. Kiley says she made him "pinkie swear" (locking pinkies with her and giving his solemn oath) not to touch her. But at 4:30, she decided to leave anyway. Castleberry, Mike and Nick left, too.
The three dancers stayed for a couple of hours. Downey lit aromatherapy candles in the bedroom and invited them to lie on the bed with him, and the four of them watched The Nutty Professor on TV until dawn.
By late Friday morning, in the wake of the previous night's blowout, Mark Miller says he had a growing feeling of "imminent danger." He called a friend of his in Los Angeles, a twenty-six-year-old performance artist who calls herself Cholla. He told her, "I'm having trouble keeping [Downey] in check."
Cholla — described by Miller as "extremely sweet and versed in the ways of the gentle warrior" — drove 120 miles to Palm Springs that afternoon. When she arrived, Miller enlisted her help in isolating Downey from the local hangers-on. Miller says, "We thought it was best for him to settle down and think about what he wants to achieve, to think about staying sober, to think about being productive, to think about [his mediation meeting with his estranged wife] on Monday. We told him we would fight this together."
Their inspirational seminar was interrupted when Laura Burnett and another stripper showed up. Burnett even joined in the effort to help Downey, saying, "I preached to him about doing what's right and what's wrong." The group went to dinner at Las Casuelas, a Mexican restaurant in the heart of Palm Springs. The dancer with the Dharma hairstyle like Kiley's showed up, too. At dinner, Cholla told Burnett that she was hoping to act in one of Downey's films. Autograph seekers and well-wishers from around the restaurant set upon Downey, even following him into the men's room. At one point, Miller found his friend standing by a urinal surrounded by four young men offering to provide him with drugs.
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Back at the hotel, Miller and Cholla finally persuaded all of the dancers to leave. Miller says Downey slept on Friday night. On Saturday morning, Miller approached the hotel manager and asked her not to allow room service to send any more alcohol to Room 311. He also requested that the hotel not permit Downey to receive cash advances from the credit card that was covering the room. Confident that he had helped Downey avoid a major crash and burn, Miller headed to back to Los Angeles at 5:30 that evening, leaving him in the care of Cholla.
Levi Castleberry had awakened on Friday afternoon hurting from the previous night's abuse. He was pissed off at Downey, too. On the ride home from the Merv Griffin Resort, Kiley had told him that Downey asked her to stay the night. "If I'd known he was hitting on my girl," he says, "I would have kicked his ass." Castleberry unsuccessfully tried calling Kiley several times that evening. His suspicions grew that Kiley was with Downey, but he could do nothing about these fears, because he had to be at work that evening.
On Saturday, Castleberry tried reaching Kiley again. That evening, when Castleberry showed up for his shift at Showgirls, he was greeted by bad news. The bartender told him that a friend of his had been at Las Casuelas the night before and had seen Kiley eating dinner with Robert Downey Jr. What Castleberry did not know was that the bartender's friend had mistaken the dancer with the Dharma haircut for Kiley.
Kiley says she never saw or heard from Downey after she left the Merv Griffin Resort on Friday morning. But Castleberry insists, "She was with him. I know it."
He swears he did not make the 911 call that sent police to Downey's room. At the same time, he professes to have special inside knowledge regarding the call. "Nick made the 911," he says, referring to his friend and co-worker from Showgirls. Castleberry says the call was made simply to "wreak havoc, be notorious."
That 911 call was made at about 7:30 from a pay phone in a Cathedral City parking lot approximately five minutes from Showgirls. The caller warned police "that in Room 311 of the Merv Griffin Resort there is a man that is with an ounce of cocaine and [he has] a couple of guns and is pretty upset." When four officers showed up at Downey's room at about nine, he allowed them to look around. After digging through closets and waste cans, they found nearly four grams of heavily cut cocaine, sixteen diazepams (Valium) and no guns. Blood tests taken after his arrest revealed cocaine in his system. Cholla had left minutes before the police came and has refused to speak on the record about the incident.
When a recording of the 911 call was later replayed on television, Laura Burnett and others recognized the voice of Nick the DJ. Nick has never come forward to admit making the call. The day after Downey's arrest, he quit his job at Showgirls and moved out of town. He has refused to make any comment.
On December 27th, Downey was formally arraigned in a dimly lit courtroom in Indio, California, a small desert town thirty miles east of Palm Springs. He was charged with two felony counts and one misdemeanor, for possession of cocaine and of diazepam and for being under the influence of a controlled substance. The arrival of a Hollywood star created near-pandemonium at the courthouse. Deputies herded paparazzi into the jurors' box to maintain order. When Downey stood before Judge B.J. Bjork to hear the charges, cameras and flash guns began to pop, drowning out the voices of the judge, the lawyers and Downey himself.
When the fifteen-minute proceeding ended, his three lawyers hustled him out a side door. Downey sprinted to a rented Chevy Monte Carlo and hopped into the driver's seat. At the first intersection where he stopped, a scrum of paparazzi and fans swarmed his car, blocking traffic. Among them was a fifty-five-year-old man with hair plugs and a greasy Members Only jacket. He dived through the crowd and shoved an envelope through the car's open window onto Downey's lap. Downey tossed the envelope out to the street. The man picked up the envelope and gave Downey the finger. He said the envelope contained a poem. "I just wanted to help him," he said. Then he admitted, "I thought maybe we could work on a screenplay, too. I didn't realize what a little shit that guy is." When the light changed, Downey gunned the engine, weaving through paparazzi, screeching his wheels, searching for an escape.
[From Issue 868 — May 10, 2001]