THE ACTOR'S ADDICTION

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 27-- Robert Downey Jr. spent Thanksgiving alone. Having
finished work on his eighth episode of "Ally McBeal," he drove two hours
east of Los Angeles to Palm Springs and checked into a $600-a-night luxury
villa with a view of Mount San Jacinto.

By Saturday he was completely wasted.

Police who got an anonymous tip to check out the one-bedroom,
French-decorated unit at the Merv Griffin Resort Hotel & Givenchy Spa in
Palm Springs on Saturday night found a cooperative but somewhat agitated
actor. They say they sought permission to look through his room and that
Downey granted it.

It didn't take long to find the drugs. Stuffed in the bottom of a half-full
tissue box near the bed, the officers discovered, was a bag with some white
powder in it. Downey scowled. "That would be speed," he said, according to
the officers.

That was enough to secure a search warrant, which turned up cocaine and
methamphetamine, and a blood test that confirmed Downey's drugged state.
The incident put the errant Oscar-nominated actor ­ only 3 1/2 months out
of prison after a year of hard time for previous drug offenses ­ off the
screen where his talent thrives, and likely on the road to more prison,
where he gets kitchen duty.

Downey, 35, long considered one of his generation's most brilliant actors,
had signed up to appear in two more episodes of "Ally McBeal." He had also
signed to star in a film with Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones in
January. And he had agreed to play Hamlet in a stage production to be
directed by Mel Gibson next summer.

Those plans have vanished in a cloud of public humiliation of
Hollywood-style proportions. On Dec. 27 he must appear in court to face
charges of drug possession and bail violation, crimes that could land him
in prison for another four or five years.

And like any true addict, Robert Downey Jr. knew just where to put the
blame. As the officers snapped the cuffs on his wrists, he turned to them
and reportedly said, "I just want you to know, you've ruined my career, and
you've ruined my life."

But the actor didn't need much help in accomplishing that goal. Even by the
standards of the overindulged, overexposed celebrity community ­ Melanie
Griffith just checked herself into a rehab facility this month for
addiction to sedatives ­ Downey's self-destructive spiral has been notable
in its resistance to rescue or punishment.

In June 1996 police clocked Downey driving 70 mph along the sinuous Pacific
Coast Highway, and found heroin, crack and powder cocaine in the car ­
along with a .357 magnum (unloaded) under the front seat.

While awaiting trial on that incident, he wandered into a neighbor's Malibu
house the next month and passed out in the empty bed of the family's
11-year-old son. A judge ordered Downey into a live-in rehabilitation
program and, after he pleaded guilty to the drug and weapons charges, into
six more months of the program.

In 1997 Downey skipped a mandatory drug test and was ordered to a Los
Angeles County jail for 113 days ­ but was furloughed to work on the film
"U.S. Marshals," and then again to do postproduction work on "In Dreams."

In June 1999, Downey admitted in court that he had missed a scheduled drug
test, a probation violation. Based on the 1996 guilty plea, the judge then
sentenced Downey to three years in Corcoran State Prison, home to Charles
Manson, Sirhan Sirhan and other hardened felons.

After filing an appeal, his lawyers succeeded in securing his release on
Aug. 2 this year.

"I think he's going to make it. I pray for that," his friend and fellow
actor Tom Sizemore said in April of this year, complaining that Downey was
under threat of attack in jail.

Sean Penn, who had twice tried and failed to stage interventions to get
Downey to seek help for his drug problem, told Vanity Fair in August: "He
said that he hasn't used in prison. I choose to believe him, although I'll
admit I've been fooled before."

Curtis Hanson, who directed Downey in "Wonder Boys," visited the actor in
prison and told the magazine he was a changed man. "There seemed to be an
attitude of acceptance, if you will ­ an acceptance of responsibility,
which made me think that he will get through this situation," Hanson said.

None of these friends had much to say today as the publicity fortress
dropped its iron gates and filled the moat. Neither of Downey's powerful
agents, Ed Limato and Nick Styne, would comment, nor would any executive
from the Fox network, which has seen a small ratings boost with Downey's
appearance on "Ally McBeal" this season.

"We have no comment," said a Fox spokesman. "I can't tell you why we have
no comment."

The shock and disappointment was evident on the "Ally" set, where producers
had gone so far as to sponsor 12-step meetings on the lot to accommodate
the actor. Executive producer Alice Waters quickly cut off questions with a
curt "I have no comment whatsoever. I have nothing to say," and David E.
Kelley spokeswoman Bonnie Winings said merely, "At this point we're taking
it hour by hour."

Many of Downey's most loyal supporters, including Robert Altman, who
directed him in "Gingerbread Man," also declined to discuss the situation.

That left only Alan Nierob, Downey's publicist over the past five years as
the actor has inflicted one public-relations disaster after another, to
face the media mob.

"He was working very hard to maintain sobriety," said Nierob, who confessed
to exhaustion and no small amount of sadness. "He was committed to it."

Downey had been in a recovery program up until a month ago and was subject
to frequent drug testing. He had been clean, Nierob insisted.

But as to what happened after last Wednesday, the publicist said, "we'd all
really like to know."

The relapse is all the more mystifying, since Downey's stay in prison was
obviously harrowing. In his 1997 stint, the actor was cut during a
fistfight with three other inmates and moved to solitary confinement. In
the Vanity Fair article, Downey and his prison mates recount several
incidents in which the actor had to face down threats, and he refused to
respond to repeated questions over whether he had suffered sexual assaults,
finally saying, "I can neither confirm or deny it." (He later said there
had been no sexual assaults.)

He seemed intent on changing past patterns. "I'm proud of the way I've
conducted myself since the incarceration and proud of the choices I've made
since I've been released," he told Details magazine this past September in
his first post-prison interview.

He was on the cover of Entertainment Weekly Nov. 3. He looked a lot
spiffier than in the mug shot taken after his arrest Saturday night, in
which his eyes were intense and bloodshot and his hair an unkempt brown bush.

"I'm very much into organizing," he told the glossy weekly. "I find such
great peace in getting my little clothes out the night before work. I mean,
to watch me, you would think I probably have OCD [obsessive-compulsive
disorder], but it's not really like that. It's meditation."

Whatever. After his release from Corcoran, Downey enrolled in a 60-day
program at the Walden House treatment center in downtown Los Angeles that
involved frequent meetings and drug testing. (He did not live at the
center, as other press reports have said.)

Walden House is no five-star, celebrity-coddling facility. It is run by a
nonprofit organization, the largest in California, catering mostly to
indigent, hard-core addicts.

And if Downey is not indigent, he's certainly hard-core. He was a prime
candidate for relapse, according to experts. "We see relapse happen many
times when a person is going through a reentry phase," says Chris Canter, a
spokesman for Walden House. "Many times what I see is people come out of
treatment, they trip and fall, and realize, 'Wait a minute. What they said
was right, I can't do that.'‚"

But that realization didn't happen to Downey. He finished his treatment
program about a month ago, and had been working 16- to 18-hour days on the
set of "Ally McBeal," typical for the high-tension, fast-paced demands of
television production.

On the show, Downey played Larry Paul, a charming, understated lawyer who
romances the neurotic Ally. In the first episodes she mistakes him for a
therapist and tells him her problems; then she hires him to defend her
(successfully) in a slander lawsuit.

Last week they shared their first kiss. But in last night's episode there
was a dramatic change: Larry refuses to tell Ally why he gets depressed
over the holidays. When he finally relents, she learns that it is because
the lawyer has a son whom he hasn't seen in years.

Which may not be too far from the real-life truth. Robert Downey Jr.'s
wife, Deborah Falconer, is estranged from him and lives with another man.
The actor doesn't have custody of his 6-year-old son, Indio, who looks
exactly like him. And as for his father, film director Robert Downey Sr.,
he has admitted the "terrible, stupid mistake" of handing Robert Jr. a
joint at age 6.

Holidays, says Canter, are a key trigger for falling back into drug use.
"Certainly relapses are more prevalent during the holidays," he says. "It's
called the holiday blues. Our programs are specific in addressing that ­
[addicts] miss their families, their children. But you know what? They
didn't miss those things when they were in the throes of addiction. The
truth can be pretty bad to handle."

On Thanksgiving evening, Downey ate in his room. Perhaps the seductive
power of drugs was undeniable. The resort manager said that Downey was not
making any disturbance when police showed up to his door at 9 p.m.
Saturday, after receiving a call from an anonymous male at a nearby pay
phone saying that "there were drugs and guns" in the actor's room.

"He was sad. He wasn't fighting or anything," says hotel manager Heidi
Geier, who came in after the police showed up. Police searched the room but
didn't find a gun. Downey went to jail for several hours, then was released
on $15,000 bail to a local bondsman.

And as Hollywood contemplates the ongoing saga of a home-grown tragedy, one
last comment the actor made in Details magazine may come to mind:

"The threat of prison has been eliminated for me," Downey said. "I know I
can do time now. I can even go out and do stuff that makes what I did
before seem tame and then go handle my business wherever they would put me.
Practically all the fear about that has been eliminated."