Even in court he looked high as the Empire State Building. "I don't care who you are, only that there is a life to save," the judge was saying as Robert Downey Jr alternately yawned, grinned and then hung his head in the Malibu courtroom on Monday afternoon. Was any of it getting through?
"I have no excuses, I find myself defenceless," the actor muttered quietly, before giving a sudden, dramatic swing of his fringe.
"I am running out of ways to rehabilitate you," sighed the judge, finally declaring the words Downey's lawyers had warned him to expect.
"I sentence you to 180 days in jail." Like much that has happened to Downey in the past 10 years, Monday's scene could have come straight out of any number of films he's made. Natural Born Killers, where he played a media junkie; Restoration, where he assumed the role of a debauched quack; Heart And Souls, where he shouts memorably, "I'm not drunk, I'm on drugs!" Or Less Than Zero, the barren film based on Brett Easton Ellis's hopelessly nihilistic LA novella, where Downey the actor ends up dead after freebasing a deadly cocktail of cocaine and heroin.
Downey the man has taken much cocaine and much heroin but is still with us. For how much longer is anyone's guess. Not least of all his. As he tells Playboy magazine this month, if you live in Los Angeles, you are only ever 45 minutes away from taking drugs. "I can get anything I need in 45 minutes," he says. As the man who would be Chaplin has discovered, it's not difficult to come off drugs. He's done that many times. What's difficult is staying off drugs.
There can be few things in life more frustrating than watching someone uncommonly talented pissing that talent away. Downey Jr has pissed, vomited and snorted his not inconsiderable acting abilities until they have nowhere else to go. Last year, he was so out of it he even woke up in the bed of a neighbour's child which he'd stumbled into thinking it was his own. Imagine not even knowing your own bed.
As Jerry Stahl, the screenwriter whose book Permanent Midnight chronicled his own demise on heroin, commented: "He's managed the rare feat in LA of making drugs unglamorous. There's something uncool about waking up in a child's bed in a strange person's home. We don't hear about Keith Richards doing that. It's the difference between being the hip, romantic Hemingway figure and the guy who vomits on his shoes."
At another court hearing last year, also for drug abuse, the same judge who sentenced Downey on Monday, asked the actor if he understood quite how serious his situation was. After a long pause, Downey looked up from the cherry-wood defence stand and murmured: "Yes, I do." But, of course, he didn't. Up until Monday, he had always got away with it.
"When I first got turned on to hard drugs as a teenager, I could snort coke and drink all night and still function," he has said. "I was making tons of money and it seemed as if I could do no wrong. It was never easy partying as hard as I did, which was as often as I could. But it was do-able and, as long as it was do-able, I wasn't going to stop."
Until he came across heroin. "As soon as I started smoking heroin instead of smoking coke, everything was different. And I knew it was."
So, too, did his friends who tried everything they could to stop him. Tommy Lee Jones, who played the ambitious prison warden in Natural Born Killers, begged him to see a counsellor. Larry Hagman, who played JR, refused to let him rent his Malibu apartment, but offered to pay for rehab. Jodie Foster, who insisted Downey star in her film Home For The Holidays, in which he played Holly Hunter's gay brother, wrote him a note telling him she wasn't worried about his drug-taking as far as her film was concerned, but she was worried for future projects. "You just want to put your arms around him and say, `It's okay'," she told a friend later.
And one night last summer, Sean Penn literally battered his door down, scooped him up and dragged him to a rehab centre in southern California, where seven years before, Downey had previously wrestled with the demon drugs. "When you see Sean in a bad mood, you don't argue with him," he grinned, recalling the event some time later.
But even Penn's notorious temper was not sufficient deterrent. The very next evening he checked himself out. Six days later, he was pulled over on a Malibu highway by the sheriff's department, who discovered a stash of heroin and cocaine in the glove compartment. Oh, and a .357 Magnum.
It's not an excuse, but the fact that Downey started early, and with parental permission, probably goes someway to explaining his drug habit. The son of avant-garde film-maker Robert Downey Senior, he took his first drag of marijuana aged eight. It was his father's idea. As it was to cast Downey Jr as a puppy in his canine satire, Pound. "Well, it was easier than finding a babysitter," Downey Senior explained to critics at the time.
His son remembers growing up in hippie Greenwich Village in a haze. "There was always a lot of pot and coke around," he says. And, as his parents divorced when he was 13, drugs became an emotional bond between father and son. "When my dad and I would do drugs together, it was like him trying to express his love for me in the only way he knew how." He told People magazine shortly after last summer's arrest that he embarked on his teenage years "seeing no reason not to drink every night and make a thousand phone calls in pursuit of drugs".
Sufficiently talented and disciplined to turn up and produce the goods on set (he has just finished shooting Neil Jordan's thriller, In Dreams, in Massachusetts with Annette Bening and Aidan Quinn), Downey was not rumbled for some time. After all, this was LA where everyone does drugs. But by the mid-1980s, his red-eyes and weight loss were beginning to show. Rehab beckoned. Lori Rodkin, his former manager, was desperate. "I couldn't stand to see him demolish himself," she says. Her persuasion worked and he checked into his first clinic in 1988 - only to check out again shortly afterwards and fire Rodkin for caring. "Relax," he told a friend, who refused to lend him money. "I've got everything under control."
But the more wildly successful he became, chalking up an Oscar nomination for his title role in Richard Attenborough's Chaplin, the wilder his personal life became. In The Hollywood Connection, Royce Newman recalls cruising through LA in a car accompanied by a very cheerful Downey. "I had a gun, freebase cocaine, powder cocaine and ecstasy," he writes. "I'm holding the wheel doing 100mph, high as a kite, and he's taking a hit of a cocaine pipe." It didn't last.
Neither work nor drugs could halt Downey's descent. Shortly after finishing his latest film One Night Stand, he was arrested for the incident in the child's bed. "I thought my son had gone to sleep early," said Betsy Curtis, after hearing a noise in the bedroom. Failing to recognise Downey, who could not be roused, she called 911.
Arrested and booked on July 16th, he spent the night in hospital before leaving with a T-shirt on his head and his middle finger raised to the gathered press. Forty-eight hours later, he was accompanied under court order by two guards to the Exodus Recovery Centre. Another 48 hours later, he escaped by crawling out of the bathroom window. Four hours later, he was forcibly returned. "I'm back," he declared to no one in particular.
Eighteen months on and he is not back. The rehabilitation programme did not work, though Downey has managed to tot up another brace of films on his personal clapperboard since then. Nine years after Rolling Stone magazine proclaimed him Hottest Actor of the Year aged just 22, he will spend the next six months in jail where drugs are easier to find than a film without John Travolta.
"I think everyone will be rooting for him when he comes out," says Ted Casablanca of Entertain On Line. The casting director MaryJo Slater, mother of the actor Christian, agrees. "I think people will root for him because of his talent," she echoes.
The predictions aren't great. No matter how impressed they are by his talent, future directors may be put off hiring him because insurance restrictions now make Downey an unattractive risk. But for now, he's too bombed to care. "I don't need a f**king acting career," he tells Playboy.
"If I have one that's great. If things crash and I never do another movie again, I don't give a f**k." But, of course, he does. And just to prove it, his next two movies, A Gingerbread Man and Two Girls And A Guy, will be out before he is.