Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

he just wants this audience to like him so badly, and he will assume as many identities as it takes until he has achieved this goal.

He was more like an illusionist, and his magic trick was making you see what he wanted you to see—the act and not the artist delivering it.

The real Robin was a modest, almost inconspicuous man, who never fully believed he was worthy of the monumental fame, adulation, and accomplishments he would achieve.

He shared the authentic person at his core with considerable reluctance, but he also felt obliged to give a sliver of himself to anyone he encountered even fleetingly.

It wounded him deeply to think that he had denied a memorable Robin Williams experience to anyone who wanted it, yet the people who spent years by his side were left to feel that he had kept some f...

And when he was gone, we all wished we’d had him just a little bit longer.

They required the careful planning of menus and seating charts, and the hiring of large numbers of household staff, including a seamstress who would sew fresh napkins and tablecloths for each gathering.

The school was engineered to groom its students for prestigious colleges and future leadership roles, and Robin thrived on the rigor. He even started carrying a briefcase to class.

“When I pull up to that building in the eastern suburbs and drive into the parking lot, I look up and I know there are fifteen young hotshot kids in there, all with MBAs, and they want my job. I’m the big boss. They know I don’t have a college degree and they really want to show me up. When I walk in the door, I take a big, deep breath of fresh air and it’s just like stepping into the Coliseum.”

When Robin began attending classes at Redwood, he arrived each day dressed in a blazer and tie and carrying a briefcase, just as he used to at Detroit Country Day. Only now his formal manner and attire drew stares and teasing from his classmates, who called him a geek and told him he was “creating negative energy.”

Soon after, someone gave him a life-altering article of clothing: his first Hawaiian shirt. At that point, he said, “I was gone; I got into a whole wild phase and I learned to totally let go.”

he continued to use it recreationally, even on a training run with other members of his cross-country team. While under the influence on that run, Robin said he saw a turkey vulture and tried to shoo it out of his path. “When I got close, it went hsssssss and spread its wings, and I turned to the rest of the guys and said, ‘Oh, Jesus, I knew this would happen if I got stoned. I can’t deal with it!’”

They began to wonder if there was any character Robin could not play on the spur of the moment. “We started challenging him,” said Dauber. “‘Do a bohemian priest. Do an orthodox rabbi. Do a peasant out on the farm with his crops.’” Robin came through every time, he said: “You couldn’t keep up with his mind, it was going so fast. He was going off on all these tangents.”

As Joel Blum, an actor and classmate of Robin’s, described him, “He was such a nice guy, such a sweetheart. At the same time, he was a total show-off, but in a very endearing way.” Overall, he said, “It was hard to tell who he really was.”

“When I would talk to him,” Blum said, “I’d try to have a conversation with him and it would go okay for about ten seconds. And then he would go into a character voice, he would do a bit. He would almost literally bounce off the walls with craziness. And then he would be gone.”

Other students training at Juilliard at this time included Mandy Patinkin, the future Broadway and television star, who was a member of Group IV; the film actor William Hurt, who was in Group V; and Kelsey Grammer, who would have a decades-long sitcom career, in Group VI.

One peer in particular would become an important confidant and source of moral support for Robin: a staggeringly tall, boyishly handsome young man who had recently come from Cornell to enter Juilliard as a member of its advanced training program. His name was Christopher Reeve.

“I’d never seen so much energy contained in one person,” Reeve said. “He was like an untied balloon that had been inflated and immediately released. I watched in awe as he virtually caromed off the walls of classrooms and hallways. To say that he was ‘on’ would be a major understatement.”

Through good news and bad, Robin came to depend on his friend Reeve. They affectionately called each other “brother,” and they would sit together on the roof of Reeve’s building to indulge in cheap wine and war stories about the women they had pined for.

“Many of our classmates related to Robin by doing bits with him, attempting to keep pace with his antics,” Reeve later said. “I didn’t even try. Occasionally Robin would need to switch off and have a serious conversation with someone, and I was always ready to listen.”

On February 10, 1976, Robin and the Juilliard faculty came to the mutual agreement that he should withdraw from the school.

His talent was to be Robin.”

“People always said he could get away with anything,” Carvey said. “He’d do an improv and touch a woman’s breasts—‘Oh, titties’—and somehow it was fine when he did it.

That was his explosive thing. Offstage, in a small group, he’d be so shy and so quiet. One side of you is just a monster onstage—the other is painfully awkward, really. The charisma of Robin came from these battling forces.”

His routines seemed entirely off-the-cuff and different each time you saw him, but as those who worked closely with Robin knew, his true gift was not necessarily in being purely spontaneous but in creating the appearance of spontaneity.

ROBIN WILLIAMS, born in Chicago, spent his prepubescence bouncing back and forth between Detroit and Chicago before finally moving to San Francisco. It was there he discovered his imagination and women. He graduated high school most funny and least likely to succeed. To avoid terminal mellowness Robin left paradise to study in New York at The Juilliard School of Drama. After three years he returned to San Francisco to begin a career in the legalized insanity of stand up comedy. The rest is history. His hobbies are swimming, cross country running and bondage.

Robin never talked down to him or treated him as an inferior. “He said hello and how are you, like he genuinely cared for you,” he said. “And I genuinely connected with him.”

People would yell out, ‘Do Mudbone!’ and he’d say, ‘You do Mudbone, motherfucker. You know it better than me.’

“I saw the way this dude was dressed,” said Ritter, “in baggy pants, suspenders, a beaten-up tux over high-topped sneakers, a straw hat with the brim falling off, John Lennon glasses with no glass in the frames, and I thought, ‘Well, this guy is definitely going for the sight gag.’ I was almost a bit suspicious. So I watched carefully and he turned out to be the funniest guy I’ve ever seen.”

“I knew he could pirouette on a needle,” Smiley said. “I didn’t know that no one else could.”

he’d pitched many outlandish characters (including Edsel Ford Fong, the master of a cowardly form of kung fu called the “School of Flaming Chicken”; Rev. Oral Satisfaction, a Hollywood evangelist from the “Church of the Multiple Comings”; and an automated joke-generating robot called Comediatron) before being cast in the role of Jason Shine, a professional escort.

ABC hated what it had for the fall and wondered if Marshall had anything new in the works. (As Marshall recalled the conversation, Eisner said, “They like you, so what else you got? Make up something.”) In fact, Marshall had nothing in the pipeline, but he remembered Robin’s performance on “My Favorite Orkan,” and the audience’s euphoric response to it:

“I said, well, we had a kid on the show—and of course Eisner and the network never watched the show. It’s been on for years. Why would they watch Happy Days? It’s a hit? Good, fine, enough—this kid was on, who was really brilliant, and deserves his own show. He says, ‘Good—it’s a spin-off.’”

The Mork Chronicles, “because he comes to Earth and he observes and he reports back.” The response he received from ABC was, “Nobody knows what chronicle means.” But, Marshall said, “There was a rule of thumb that they liked shows that you could name your pets after. So I said, I know what you want. You want Mork & Mabel. Mork & Somebody, right? Finally I said, how about Mork & Mindy? They said, ‘Mork & Mindy! We love it.’”

Out of nowhere and through no further effort of his own, Robin was being sought to star in his own network sitcom.

Buddy Morra, Brezner’s partner, was tasked with telling Robin he was being offered a TV show on the number one television network, produced by the studio responsible for the number one and number two sitcoms, with a guaranteed order of twenty-two episodes, rather than the thirteen that most first-season shows customarily receive.

When Morra told him he’d be paid $1,500 a week, Robin, in his innocence, screamed excitedly on the other end of the phone, “Wow!” To which Morra, the old showbiz hand, replied, “Schmuck, it’s $15,000 a week—I was just teasing you.”

He could say things that weren’t really funny, sometimes, but there was a commitment to the mania that they would go nuts for. And you’d go, That’s not really funny. But it would go over huge because he was doing it.”

Valerie said. “He was always delighting his mother, who adored him. His father was stern—he was a very serious, serious person. And I loved the Rob in him so much. I think that acceptance is what bonded us. I allowed and accepted him to be Rob. When he came home, he would sit and be quiet. He was very quiet, a lot, with me. And I liked that. I like a quiet person around the house. He was percolating.”

When it was just the two of them, Valerie said, “We had a very rich life together, alone. I was his family life.”

Robin Williams was twenty-seven years old, and he hardly carried himself like a young man who had just won the Hollywood lottery.

He still lived in the same modest apartment, decorated with oversize Japanese sci-fi posters, that he shared with Valerie and their parrot, Cora, who spoke three phrases: “Hello,” “Buzz off,” and “Birds can’t talk.”

He still shopped in used-clothing stores, dressed himself in silk-striped tuxedo pants that he’d bought for fifty cents, a Brazilian figa charm, and a 1940 “Win with Willkie” button, and glided around ...

He and Valerie moved into an eight-room, $200,000 house in Topanga Canyon, joined by a menagerie that included Cora the parrot, an Alaskan malamute named Sam, some Polish chickens, and two iguanas named Mr. I and Truman Capote.

From me to you. You got to be crazy. You know what I’m talking about? Full goose bozo. ’Cause what is reality? You got to be crazy. You got to! ’Cause madness is the only way I’ve stayed alive. Used to be a comedian. Used to, a long time ago. It’s true. You got to go full-tilt bozo. ’Cause you’re only given a little spark of madness. If you lose that, you’re nothing. Don’t. From me to you. Don’t ever lose that, because it keeps you alive. Because if you lose that, pfft. That’s my only love. Crazy.

Though Robin tried not to take his increasing visibility too seriously, he could not avoid giving in to certain fundamental rules that governed Hollywood media.

“When I said I had a collection, he really freaked out,” Tramer said. “He came to my apartment, and said, ‘Where are the toy soldiers?’ I had to dig out these boxes that I hadn’t opened up—big bags of soldiers, cowboys and knights, and he really got off on all that stuff. You’re so powerless as a kid. The adults have power, and you’re told children should be seen and not heard. But his imagination was so great.”

On January 27, 1979, Robin won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Comedy Series, besting a field that included his friend John Ritter from Three’s Company, Alan Alda from M*A*S*H, and Judd Hirsch from Taxi. Though that year’s ceremony was not broadcast on TV, the Los Angeles Times reported that Robin accepted his trophy “by turning to the audience and grabbing himself.”

Goldilocks and the Three Bears” as told by William F. Buckley Jr. (“Goldie, an Aryan stereotype, and Lox, a Jewish soul food, combined to form a bourgeois archetype, who in time comes in contact with three bears, dark bears, maybe brown bears, maybe black bears, let’s just call them Third World bears”).

It’s extraordinary that anyone as funny as Robin Williams can also create the impression of being so nice.… Mr. Williams doesn’t need sex, malice or self-deprecation to round out his repertory. He doesn’t even need real experience, or even real jokes. Mr. Williams simply assumes the manner of a small boy impersonating a stern, grown-up hero and whizzes from one crazy proposition to the next with cheerful aplomb. When the crowd responds appreciatively … he seems to beam with sweet, uncomplicated pride.