'YOU'VE RUINED MY LIFE'

Treatment at Betty Ford, breakups, incarceration, the humiliation of
driving a Monte Carlo instead of a Range Rover. HEATHER MALLICK wonders
whether anything can stop Robert Downey Jr. from destroying himself

TORONTO -- Which is the more pathetic fact about newly rearrested American
actor Robert Downey Jr.?

That he actually thought the lower half of a Kleenex box was a place Palm
Springs police wouldn't find his stash? ("They'll never look there," he
must have thought, in the throes of either a wildly self-confident high or
a paranoid low, as he decided against the space behind the toilet tank or
the heel of his shoe phone.) Or that when he told the officers, "I just
want you to know, you've ruined my career, and you've ruined my life," he
really thought they felt his pain?

The comedy is low, as it always is when rich and comely people do things
that they have been repeatedly told will lead them to poverty, a wardrobe
of bright orange overalls and squalid, painful blind dates in the communal
shower room. It is hard to sympathize, and many didn't.

The novelist and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, himself a former junkie,
wrote that since Downey was not a stupid man -- i.e., he was drug-stupid,
but not blind-stupid -- it must have been the humiliation of doing eight
episodes in a row of the sitcom Ally McBeal that drove him to snort
cocaine. All that "mugging and lip-locking on that silly, faux-heartwarming
exercise in cynicism," Bourdain snapped. "The guy's right out of the joint!
Who let him work a job where he's going to have damn good reason to hate
himself?"

The press made much of the fact that Downey, 35, had spent Thanksgiving
alone (this is apparently verboten in the United States, although Downey
once co-starred in a very funny Jodie Foster comedy called Home for the
Holidays about the sheer horror of families at Thanksgiving), and had then
driven two hours east of Los Angeles to a hotel. Although Downey had
professed in a recent interview to be thrilled by simple non-slammer things
like hair dryers and toilets with lids (and a "nice" shower," he specified,
worryingly), he chose to go on his drug bender in a $900-a-night
faux-French villa at the Merv Griffin Resort Hotel & Givenchy Spa. He had
only been out of state prison -- the one that is also home to Charles
Manson and Sirhan Sirhan -- for four months. In that time, he had earned
more than $1-million.

But Downey's uncle denied that his nephew was depressed at being away from
his estranged wife and their son, seven-year-old Indio. The family isn't
known for its "Norman Rockwell Thanksgivings" in the first place, the uncle
told reporters. The actor's own father, a movie director, had introduced
the boy to pot smoking when he was six. Drugs were a family affair for the
Downeys. Junior would hardly have been sitting alone "with a Colonel
Sanders chicken breast," his uncle said, and bemoaning his fate. Like a
regular non-movie-star schmuck, was the implicit message.

Trying to figure out why Downey would guarantee his return to jail is about
as productive as speculating about why actor Harrison Ford would blow his
carefully built image as a devoted family man and party with strippers in
Lincoln, Neb., and dance on a bar with a bra on his head, as he allegedly
did recently. Why was Goldie Hawn's husband Kurt Russell spotted coming out
of an L.A. massage parlour? Why did baseball all-star Darryl Strawberry, in
the midst of trying to get his playing ban lifted, leave his Fort
Lauderdale rehab clinic this fall, join a swingers' club down the street
and be photographed drinking crantinis with a new friend, a naked woman?

Why, for that matter, did Bill Clinton fall for Monica Lewinsky, or
Napoleon march on Moscow? Presumably because it seemed a good idea at the time.

All Ford and Russell have to lose is a wife, a lot of replaceable money and
the respect of their children. They will not be jailed and may be making a
good career move. But Strawberry and Downey have much more at stake. They
are celebrities who have "transgressed the unwritten law," as Monty Python
put it ("What's that?" Eric Idle was asked in the now-famous sketch. He
didn't know, but he knew he fully deserved to have his head nailed to a
coffee table for having done so.)

The unwritten law of American celebrity is that you can use drugs, nudge
nudge, wink wink, but not in a way that interferes with profitable work.
And you'll be a celebrity forever, no matter how grotesque your behaviour,
and still earn huge fees.

It's a crackpot law. O. J. Simpson may not even have broken it. He is still
a celebrity, as TV's Entertainment Tonight proves when it runs an interview
with his waitress girlfriend who broke up with him, she said, because he
forgot that it was her second abortion with him, not her first, like some
kind of demented topaz anniversary.

The point the Ally McBeal people keep skating around is that they can't say
if they'll fire Downey until they find out if his jail sentence will
interfere with filming.

The matter has arisen before. Downey lost his chance at a role in the movie
The Cradle Will Rock because the shooting conflicted with probation
restrictions. Neil Jordan, the director of 1999's In Dreams, was fortunate
in that Downey was allowed out of jail to rerecord dialogue.

But will he be free to start filming a movie with Julia Roberts in January
as scheduled? Can he act on-stage in a Mel Gibson production of Hamlet next
summer, or will he be doing a real-life version of the TV prison drama Oz?

At one time, notoriety helped Downey's career. The director James Toback
cast Downey in his first starring movie, and more recently wrote the script
for the chatty Two Girls and a Guy, after seeing him on TV being handcuffed
after an arrest. Two Girls had Downey playing a man, trapped by the two
women he's cheating on, who stares into a mirror and delivers lines like,
"I don't believe a word you say. This is your last chance," without much
conviction.

Downey has managed to avoid two attempts by his friend, the notorious Sean
Penn, to stage drug interventions. Just before this last arrest, he was
visited in prison by his colleagues who speak of it in the passive voice.

"There seemed to be an attitude of acceptance," director Curtis Hanson said.

"Right now, he's in a state of ignorance about himself and his future,"
said Toback.

"I found myself not having my priorities straight. . . . Chemicals were the
last addition to an entirely bloated dysfunction," Downey himself explained.

Self-destructive employees are a highly paid and ultimately disposable
irritant for companies like baseball teams and film studios. And Downey has
irritated his employers for many years now.

In 1992, he starred in a movie about Charlie Chaplin, for which he was
nominated for an Oscar. But in 1998, he watched the Oscar ceremony from
jail, and didn't even see James Cameron's bombastic speech. Embarrassingly,
Titanic won after prison lights out.

Downey, who became a fringe part of the 1980s Brat Pack of actors, has made
37 films in his career, several of them, in particular Less Than Zero,
about the downside of drug use. He lived with the actress Sarah Jessica
Parker for seven years until she tired of his addiction and its attendant
problems.

Ironically, only a few days before Downey's latest arrest, California
citizens voted "yes" in a referendum that backtracked on the draconian laws
passed in the so-called "war on drugs" that began in 1968 and is now
hesitantly being called the new American Vietnam. Laws that mandated
lengthy jail sentences for repeat offenders caught with even the smallest
amount of drugs were repealed in favour of government-paid treatment for
addicts.

Not that it would have made the slightest difference to Downey. Treatment
at Betty Ford, breakups, nagging, incarceration, promises, a beating,
solitary confinement, the threat of jail rape, the humiliation of driving a
Monte Carlo instead of a Range Rover, nothing has altered his fondness for
crack and cocaine.

It rarely does. Take Danielle Westbrook, a star of the TV soap EastEnders
and a star in Britain. She has been addicted to cocaine for the past 13
years to the point where her nose has rotted. The Telegraph reports that
she can't quit drugs long enough to get a plastic surgeon to rebuild her
nasal passages. Her addiction is so bad that disgusting close-up
photographs of her Swiss-cheese septum are being used in a government
antidrug campaign. She is now reduced to being a celebrity nose, or "Just
Say Nose," as Nancy Reagan might call it.

Downey, ingesting coke through what is still an attractive Cybill
Shepherd-type nose, is approaching the level of Westbrook and Strawberry.
His drug use is unstoppable. Strawberry, father of five, broke his wife's
(yes) nose, fathered at least one child out of wedlock, hit his girlfriend
and threatened her with a gun, evaded child support, skipped $350,000 in
back taxes, had career-limiting knee surgery, was arrested for soliciting a
prostitute and was sued by his own lawyer, but he hadn't transgressed the
unwritten law and got into terminal professional trouble until he was
repeatedly arrested for cocaine possession.

Even after the courts placed him under house arrest, he was still allowed
breaks to play professional baseball. It was only after he developed colon
cancer, said he didn't want to have any more chemotherapy in jail and
declared that he wanted to die that Strawberry's career was truly over.
Wrong, it's not. Even now, an independent minor-league team is considering
hiring him to speak to young players about the evils of drug abuse and
teach them baseball.

It's that unwritten law again. There is almost nothing that will kill the
career of a celebrity, not violence, not jail time, not repeated jail time.
Like Westbrook's nose, the only thing that will finish off Strawberry
appears to be death.

In September, just out of prison, Downey gave an interview to Details
magazine in which he sounded simultaneously stoned, resentful, self-hating
and not a bit sorry. "You might think I'd be embittered or that I could
say, 'It's terrible what they did to me, this country.' But instead, I'm
like 'Fresno Rocks!' It's all good."

He said, whether truthfully or with bravado, that he had learned one thing
from jail. "The threat of prison has been eliminated for me. I know I can
do time now."

So that's all right, then.