The man who wasn't there

At a restaurant called Craft, in Los Angeles, near the new CAA building, outside, under sunlight, not on a couch but on the warm, warm ground, Robert Downey Jr. lights a cigarette, takes a sip of his double espresso, listens politely to a waitress extolling the virtues of the halibut, orders the halibut on her recommendation, regards her through the dark bubble of teardrop shades, remembers then what his first thought of the day was ("Obligation is the mother of deformity") and says to her, "Look, I don't want to be an asshole here, but I've had a change of heart on the halibut. I'm now going Scottish salmon well-done." After that, breathing easier, he goes on talking, almost to himself as much as to anyone else present.

 

"I'm between two phases right now, pre-Iron Man and post-Iron Man, and the transition can be tricky," he says, shifting and smoking. "It used to be, I'd drive onto a studio lot, and the guard was like, 'Less Than Zero dude, I loved Chaplin!' Now it's, 'Iron Man!' It's not an algorithm anymore. It's a fixed number. Things have been zeroed out; it's the beginning of something. But right now, it's still a void, and we tend to think of the void as an abyss or a vacuum with nothing there. In fact, it's a new road, and what you should do on this new road is close for repairs -- close right away, because that old vehicle is not going to work on that new road. I mean, if the cosmos is a loving, healing thing that also spins real fast and erupts and does violent stuff, and if there really is some kind of order to the whole thing, then everything that's led up to this moment has to be part of it, or the math doesn't work. But in this transition phase, I really am trying to live as much like a lizard as I can. Hot, rock, sun, fly, tongue."

 

Which really is supergreat for him. His per-movie quote has gone into the multimillions. He's moving into a different, bigger, better house. He's driving a shiny black Bentley, a gift from Marvel Studios, which made Iron Man. He's been resplendent on Leno, Letterman and The View; stellar pretending to be one of Gladys Knight's Pips on American Idol (although he hated it: "dreadful, awful, depressing and disquieting to my integrity"); and the only debonair presenter to take the stage at this year's MTV Movie Awards. All good stuff. But there is the void to think about, and this particular void may last longer than most, because he's got two more movies coming out soon, and both of them are likely to be big.

 

"When did I say that?" he says today, picking through his Scottish salmon. "Was it more than three weeks ago? Puh-leaze! That guy is someone who is a foulmouthed liar who thinks he sounds really hip. As far as faking and a hustle, how could I bring I-want-to-say depth to my work if that's all it was? How could I do that?"

 

The answer is, it all depends on how good your grift is when you get it on. But let's give the guy a break and take him at his word. It's the summer of Downey, after many long, hard, cold winters, and he deserves it. Like his old friend Mel Gibson says, "He's ebullient and mercurial, up and down like a yo-yo, but he's grown, and he's going to move forward and conquer the world. And you know what? He's a good guy. That's what he is. He always is, always has been, always will be, no matter what kind of hot water he gets in."

 

One evening at a party, for example, he was supposed to be living it up; instead, he was studying a message on his BlackBerry with a frown. "It just never ends," he said to Susan. "Basically, what it says I've got here is a whole new invented Tropic Thunder press day." He started reciting the lineup but she cut him short. "Let me tell you," she said, putting her hands on the table. "You can complain all you want, but it's Ben, and you're going to do it. So if it feels good to build up a lot of resentment and rage, fine. But with all due respect, it's not that big a deal. You're not performing surgery during each of those events. You're standing there f--king looking hot." He sighed and rested his head on her hands, hibernating there for a good five minutes.

 

Faith rewarded: It's a beautiful thing, almost enough to make you weep. At the same time, though, it's a little cornball and a little too mythoheroic Hollywood pat. It's also the kind of thing that makes Downey extremely uncomfortable, mainly because he knows that he hasn't, in fact, been reborn yet. It may happen. But at the moment, he's still somewhere in the birth canal, drifting along, amazed at what's going on inside and around him, and sometimes quite alarmed.

 

Forget that his dad introduced him to pot as an eight-year-old kid. It was the early Seventies; they were living in Greenwich Village; the father, Robert Sr., was an avant-garde filmmaker who made the seminal underground film Putney Swope; the mother, Elsie, an actress; and that's how it goes, the pieces to be picked up later, the dad full of regrets, which is how that goes too. But life among the Downeys was passingly odd anyway. At age five, Junior went to work for Senior in a movie called Pound, playing a puppy who is on the verge of being gassed. His big line, which he spoke with an actorly lisp: "Have any hair on your balls?" Two years later, in a religious parable called Greaser's Palace, he had his throat cut by God and then watched as God repeatedly struck down his mom, who was also in the cast. "It could have been too much to expose him to," the father mused a while back. "It was traumatic for him to see that kind of violence. He didn't comprehend that everybody comes back again."

 

Instead, he hops up suddenly, grabs a plastic bag and starts chasing the bee. Never at rest, never at home, the bee heads crazily for the curtains, then for the ceiling, then for a window, then for a wall. That's where Downey traps it in the bag. He steps outside onto the balcony and begins shuffling the bag around in the air. Ever so briefly, he hesitates, peering into the darkness and void. Then he turns around smiling, with his chest puffed up, triumphant, all doubts and fears banished and a new certainty in place. "Dude, he made it," he says. "I gave him a nice inertial push. He's good. I saw him go. I saw him fly free." Maybe that's what happened, maybe he made the whole thing up. He is Downey. But you really do have to hand it to him. He sure played the moment well.

 

For a full version of this article, see NOX27.