Susan Downey: Iron Woman

In the beginning, Susan Downey was not interested in Robert Downey Jr. She did not find him devastatingly sexy or fascinating in a tragic-brilliant-bad-boy-train-wreck sort of way. She did not long to save his tortured soul. "Not even a little bit," she says, laughing as she remembers their first meeting on the set ofin 2003, which Susan was producing for Joel Silver's company Dark Castle Entertainment and in which Robert starred. "The main thing I remember about meeting him was thinking how strange he was."

We are sitting on the roof of the spacious modern stone-and-glass home that the Downeys bought recently in California's Venice Beach (along with a jaw-dropping seven-acre oceanfront ranch on a bluff up in Malibu) with their many, many Iron Man dollars, and it must be said that these days, life in Downeyland seems not so much strange as flat-out splendid. Wearing big Tom Ford sunglasses, with her long, tawny hair glinting in the sun and her pale, pretty face lifted toward the sky, is Susan herself, the 36-year-old producer who's responsible for her husband's newest action spectacular, Sherlock Holmes (out Christmas Day and costarring Jude Law and Rachel McAdams).

Unofficially known around Hollywood as the Miracle That Saved Robert Downey Jr., Susan waves off the title with a good-natured shrug, but her impossibly candid husband seems happy to elaborate. "I guess the only way to explain it is that I've become more like her. I'm still trying to figure out what happened," says Robert. "Whatever I was hungry for when I met Susan, I couldn't have known how much more satisfying what I got would be."

Mrs. Downey — who married Robert in New York in a large, glamorous Hamptons wedding complete with serenades by Sting and Billy Joel in 2005 — clearly agrees. Almost seven years after their first meeting, she still thinks her husband "is very strange," but her face lights up and her hazel eyes shine when she says it. "He's this incredible amalgam of contradictory traits that is never boring," she continues. "He's completely eccentric but grounded. He's someone who has lived so much life yet has almost a Peter Pan kind of never-grow-up quality."

For a long time, however, it seemed as if that never-grow-up quality was going to land Robert in an early grave. After sauntering into our hearts as the doomed rich kid Julian in 1987's Less Than Zero and proving himself a comic genius with his Oscar-nominated performance in 1992's Chaplin, Robert spent roughly five years (from 1996 to 2001) in a long, heavily publicized death dance with crack cocaine, heroin, gunplay, and prison — at one point, even wandering into a neighbor's home and passing out in a child's bedroom. By the time he was released from court-ordered rehab in 2002, he was largely considered unemployable in Hollywood and was able to convince producer Silver to hire him for Gothika only by agreeing to have a good chunk of his salary withheld until the film wrapped.

Enter Susan Levin, a cheerful, marathon-running young producer from the suburbs of Chicago. "I honestly didn't know anyone who had drug problems," says Susan, who was valedictorian of her high school class and describes herself as "very structured, with firm boundaries." She studied filmmaking at the University of Southern California because she knew, "pretty much from age 12," that she wanted to work in the movie business. "I was never a girl who thought about getting married," she says. "Being in a relationship wasn't my priority."

Robert clearly felt the same way. "When I used to hear, like" — he puts on a high falsetto goody-two-shoes voice — "'It's my parents' 175th wedding anniversary,' I used to think, 'No. I can't. I just can't.' I used to have a bit of disdain for partnership, and I thought that I had carved my path in the other direction, but..." He bursts out laughing.

And Susan was too busy rapidly climbing the Hollywood ladder to have time for husband hunting. In 1999, Silver hired Susan as vice president of production at Silver Pictures, where she worked pretty much nonstop on films like Ghost Ship and Cradle 2 the Grave. (She recently stepped down from running both Silver Pictures and its Dark Castle Entertainment division to create a production company of her own with her husband — a development so intoxicating to Hollywood that Warner Brothers offered them a first-look deal, in an economy in which pretty much nobody is offering first-look deals.)

Though there were no initial sparks when Susan met Robert ("I thought he was a brilliant actor, but it didn't go beyond that. I saw him more like a professor or someone's older brother"), after a few weeks of working with him, she began to have second thoughts. "Four of us would work out together after the shoot, and one day, when we were on the treadmills, Robert goes, 'Levin, you wanna go to dinner?' and I said, 'Eh, I'll grab something to eat,' so we agreed to go change and meet in the lobby. And as he walked down the stairs toward me, I remember looking up at him and suddenly thinking, He's really cute."

The romance bloomed quickly after that — partly, Susan says, because of her "extreme naivete and ignorance" about drug addiction. "There were a lot of things that I was ignorant about that I have since become educated on."

Though they seemed an unlikely match on the surface, Susan explains, "I think there's something about running toward what scares you." So, despite her clean-cut history ("I was never a partier. I used to enjoy some red wine, but now I don't do anything"), she trusted her instincts and took a leap of faith. "I don't have a history of making bad choices," she says. "And if my parents had any reservations — whether they were scared about [his being] an actor or an addict or that he'd gone to prison or had a kid and an ex-wife, the whole shebang of things I claimed I would never want in a guy, and add some new things to it — they never shared them with me. They saw how happy I was.

"Also, the guy I met was not that person," she continues. "He was clean and sober — completely professional when he was working, and then, in the off hours, he was just a fun guy." She pauses, glancing at the African sapphire-and-diamond engagement ring that Robert gave her six months into the relationship. "More than anything, I never doubted it. There was something in my gut that knew really quickly. I knew three months in that this was it."

But Robert was not quite finished with what he refers to as his Darth Vader side. "I did meet Darth Vader, for like a minute," Susan acknowledges, "right after the movie wrapped, and I said immediately, 'This isn't gonna work.' I made it clear that to stay with me, nothing could happen."

Something about Susan's ultimatum clicked. Around July 4, 2003, Robert stopped at a Burger King on the Pacific Coast Highway, threw his drugs in the ocean, and decided that he was done for good. "I think he saw what we had," Susan says. "There was something magical there, something we couldn't put our finger on. He always says that we became this third thing when we got together — something that neither of us could have become by ourselves — and I think that's true."

Indeed. Talking to Robert, you can actually feel what a tremendous kick they get out of each other. "There's something about her that is so pure and ... right," he says. "But then there's the other stuff too, the shadowy side of her that is delightful and that she shows only to me."

Sherlock Holmes director Guy Ritchie describes the couple as "the greatest illustration of a symbiotic marriage that I've ever seen." He continues, "It's a real yin and yang, and it's made him a joy to work with. Robert would be a pain in the ass if he didn't have Susan to police him." It's not, Ritchie explains, that Susan has erased his dark side; she has simply helped him own it. "He battles with it now; there's no denial or suppression going on. He's fully engaged in life."

In 2004, the couple made their second film, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and decided to work together as often as possible. "I don't know if I'd say it's easier working with him," says Susan, who regales me with tales of Robert's eccentricities, ranging from his "refusal to ever say a false line" to his recent insistence that they spend the weekend at their new ranch in Malibu, even though there was no furniture in the house.

These days, the fruits of their labors are literally rolling in around them. A navy Bentley shines in the garage; Susan's collection of Louboutin and Yves Saint Laurent shoes is growing rapidly. Susan admits to having developed a fondness for Chanel and Prada and Dolce & Gabbana in addition to her AG jeans and Tory Burch. "I'm getting more and more into it, quite frankly, because I have the means. What you realize is if you are able to spend the money, it's worth it. There's no mystery to it. The clothes just fit better." But, she insists, her main concern when it comes to the red carpet is "not to look like an idiot." "There can only be one rock star in our relationship, and I'm fine with that. I've always been someone who would rather have someone compliment me when I'm out of the room than to my face, whereas Robert is the opposite. So I'm happy to support him."

Even when it means watching him kiss his leading ladies on set. "Oddly, there's nothing strange about it," says Susan, who watched Robert smooch Gwyneth Paltrow in Iron Man. "Gwyneth's so funny because they have great on-screen chemistry, but afterward, she'd be like, 'Ugh, it's like kissing my brother.'"

When she's not busy with Robert's next film, Due Date (which she is executive producing), Susan is stepmother to Downey's son, Indio, 16, whose mother is Robert's first wife, singer Deborah Falconer. "With stepkids, it's hard at first," she says. "But, like anything, my approach was to just be honest about it and not try and force anything — not act like we were a big family right away. What's come from that is a really great relationship with Indio, because I didn't try to make it into something it wasn't...until one day, it was."

Asked whether she and Robert plan to have children of their own, Susan says, "I think so, but we don't have specific plans." Mainly, at the moment, she seems focused on appreciating how far they've come. "For whatever reason, when we came together, there was a sense of hope and excitement and possibility." She pauses, looks around her, smiles, and says, "If there was no Hollywood, no next movie, no deal at Warner Brothers, no place in Malibu or Venice, I would still be really happy."