Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

As Robin explained, “Sometimes I have this kind of sentimental side that will go for—‘Oh, it’s about a puppy’ or ‘Ahhh, the nice lady died, and the kids…’ and she’d look at it and go, ‘No, it doesn’t work.’ That’s why I need her opinion.”

He also claimed to have taken the character out for a test drive in a San Francisco sex shop. “I tried to buy a double-headed dildo,” Robin said. “I was going, ‘That one, right there, the big one. Do you have anything without veins?’ … Finally the guy realized it was me, and went, ‘Get out of here, Robin, you asshole!’”

Robin became a kind of surrogate father to his on-screen children;

he laughed knowingly when Mara Wilson, the precocious five-year-old who played his younger daughter, boasted to him that she knew what sex was;

he wrote a passionate letter on behalf of Lisa Jakub, who played his older daughter, when she was expelled from her high school for spending too much time making the film. “A student of her caliber and talent should be encouraged to go out into the world and learn through her work,” Robin wrote. The scho...

Robin’s half brother Todd popped up in a bit role as a poolside bartender, getting billed in the closing credits under the pseudonym “Dr. Toad.”

Robin, as always, passed time between takes entertaining the cast and crew members with brief, impromptu stand-up routines: he “readied himself to shoot another painful scene of grief and guilt, and then, in manic desperation, reached out for as much human comedy as ten minutes will allow,” Simon wrote.

Before Simon left the set, he caught sight of Robin in a hallway, “using the few remaining minutes before filming to face the wall and reacquaint himself with whatever horror he was trying to channel. He was sweating, too, as if it had taken all he had to rise to that warm summit and provoke such laughter. To my great surprise, his face was that of an unhappy man, and I retreated, saddened and surprised by the thought.”

As Reeve recounted: At an especially bleak moment, the door flew open and in hurried a squat fellow with a blue scrub hat and a yellow surgical gown and glasses, speaking in a Russian accent. He announced that he was my proctologist, and that he had to examine me immediately. My first reaction was that either I was on way too many drugs or I was in fact brain damaged. But it was Robin Williams. He and his wife, Marsha, had materialized from who knows where. And for the first time since the accident, I laughed. My old friend had helped me know that somehow I was going to be okay.

Robin and Marsha helped the Reeves pay for the costly medical equipment that Christopher would now need to use for the rest of his life, and installed an elevator in their Napa ranch home for his use whenever he came to visit.

“They had a driver, nannies, housekeepers,” McHale explained, “and they would put their kids through school, because public schools in San Francisco are terrible. They would actually pay for their employees’ kids to go to school. Sometimes it would just be a friend—it wasn’t just family members, although they did that as well.”

For Reeve, the good-natured teasing and taunting he took from Robin was just what he needed. “He took the curse off the wheelchair,” he later said.

The following summer, when the Reeve family traveled to Puerto Rico for one of its first vacations since Christopher’s injury, Robin went on the trip, too, to keep his friend entertained and in good spirits. “The weekend would have been so much harder for me without you there,” Reeve wrote to him afterward. “Everybody got a great tan from your sunshine.”

Of the film’s $65 million budget, $15 million went to Robin’s salary, but he said he was drawn to the movie because it reminded him of his lonely, mansion-bound childhood in Bloomfield Hills, and because he believed that it was a necessary film at a time when brutality had become too commonplace in entertainment and in real life.

Though people did not expect stillness from him, Robin had a quiet side, too, and he said it should not be mistaken for sadness. “When people see me that way, they think something’s wrong,” he said. “No. ‘You’re on something.’ No. I’m just recharging. In down times I do things like go for a long bike ride or run. The other thing I’m doing in that quiet time is just observing.”

“He was a great appreciator of people’s work,” Billy Crystal said. “But I think there was a chipping-away, sometimes, and he would feel like he was losing his reign. If, suddenly, there was a new guy, he would be the first to say how great they were. But I could sense the driving question was, ‘What about me? That’s my thing.’”

Robin had been fixated on Jim Carrey, the stand-up comic and actor who had attained some fame for the panoply of wacky characters he played on the TV sketch show In Living Color and was finding unexpected success in films like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.

Cheri Minns, a makeup artist who began working regularly with Robin on The Birdcage, said that he “got completely freaked out about Jim Carrey, that he was going to take over. Marsha had to step in and tell him, ‘There’s room for other people. You don’t have to freak out. There’s room.’ Because he was having a complete mental breakdown about it. Robin had more talent in his little finger than Jim Carrey ever had. But Jim Carrey started making big movies and making a good salary, and then Robin was like, ‘Oh my God.’ Robin did that to himself. He just got himself consumed with worry about things like that. It was total consumption with his career.”

the actors would react very differently when spotted by the tour groups that whizzed by on golf carts. “If Robin saw them, he’d run out to greet the tourists and say hi and sign autographs,” Minns recalled. “Billy said, ‘Oh, crap. Now I have to go over there and talk to those people, or I’m going to look like an asshole.’”

He later described the screenplay as “layered and very moving, but in a very simple way,” and said that he saw the repressed Dr. Maguire, who at times gets so wound up that he threatens and even assaults Will, as a conduit for a type of rage he could not release in other roles.

When Robin first traveled to Boston to begin rehearsals, Van Sant had the now-commonplace discovery that the actor was very different from the man he had expected. “He assumed this personality, which I’m not sure wasn’t always part of him, which was very down,” the director said.

The finished film used Robin’s and Damon’s authentic reactions to this ad-libbed bit, though much of the dialogue that followed was not exactly appropriate for the scene.

Robin also showed an unexpected intensity in a scene where he threatens Damon’s character not to disrespect his dead wife and, in doing so, forcefully grabs him by the throat. The actors performed the sequence so many times that, in the final takes (including the one used in the film), makeup had to be applied to Damon’s neck to cover the skin left raw and bloodied from Robin’s repeated chokeholds.

As Damon recalled that day’s shoot, “We must have done twenty takes. He went into the house, folded the letter up, put it back in the letterbox, shut the door. And on one of the takes, in the middle, he said, ‘Son of a bitch stole my line.’ And went back in the house. I remember grabbing Gus, like, ‘Holy shit! Fuck—what did he just—that is great!’ And then he did like ten more and he never repeated that line again.”

Robin, the critic wrote, “has played a conventionally understanding if eccentric mentor so often that his presence in a film like this has become a tip-off that it’s going to be unremittingly middle of the road.

Billy Crystal personally regarded it as his favorite of all of Robin’s screen roles. “I don’t see him in that part—I just see that guy, Maguire,” Crystal said. “Robin, for all of his joy, had this built-in loneliness about him at the same time that made him so appealing in parts like that. That strength, with a little bit of weakness underneath it.”

(Robin still managed a memorable appearance at the Golden Globe ceremony when Christine Lahti, a winner for the TV series Chicago Hope, was in the bathroom when her name was called, so he crashed the stage and began to riff in mock-Spanish.)

Thank you. Oh, man. This might be the one time I’m speechless. Oh, ah—thank you so much for this incredible honor. Thank you for putting me in a category with these four extraordinary men. Thank you, Ben and Matt, I still want to see some ID. Thank you, Gus Van Sant, for being so subtle you were almost subliminal. I want to thank the cast and crew, especially the people of South Boston, you’re a can of corn, you’re the best. I want to thank the mishpucha Weinstein, mazel tov.

And I want to thank Marsha for being the woman who lights my soul on fire every morning, God bless you. [Here, a TV camera found Marsha in her seat, a tear streaming down her cheek.] And most of all, I want to—I want to thank my father, up there, the man who, when I said I wanted to be an actor, he said, wonderful, just have a backup profession like welding. Thank you. God bless you.

he was able to join in an onstage portrait that gathered seventy living actors who’d received Academy Awards for their work. He found himself standing one tier in front of Shirley Temple Black, who leaned over and said, “Call me,” which so surprised Robin he could only think to respond, “Sure!”

It was just a friendly gesture, but it made Robin realize he was truly part of something now, a pantheon of performers that was synonymous with Hollywood. The occasion bestowed legitimacy upon him and was a moment for reflection and reevaluation—an opportunity to forget about past missteps and wonder if some of his more maligned work was simply underappreciated.

More personal notes came in the next day from Eric Idle (“What a joy to see you in full tears in full shot. Have no fears—all of America was crying too”),

“People expected too much of him,” Billy Crystal said. “They wanted him to plug that burst, that comet, into every movie, and it just wasn’t fair. Then, when he would do a more sentimental piece they would just crucify him as sappy, and it would crush him. He took that personally.

occasionally acclaimed, usually successful

What would be the cumulative effect on a sensitive, deeply attuned actor like Robin when each successive role brought him to further depths of anguish? “Was it following him down a wormhole of personal angst?” Haft wondered. Never mind what effect it had on his bankability or his bottom line—what did it do to his soul?

“Maybe it’s because I want to help people that I play so many doctors. And I like to put on rubber gloves.”

His fans felt particularly empowered to tell him exactly how they felt and what they expected from him. “People will come up to you and say, ‘If you ever make another movie like that, I’ll hurt you,’” he said. “This is interesting feedback. Does it make me deny the validity of what I’ve done? No. Does it make me want to look for other things? Yes.”

As Robin saw it, there were only two movies he’d made up until now in which he’d played characters who could be classified as dark or villainous: one, a discredited ex-psychiatrist reduced to working as a grocery clerk in Kenneth Branagh’s 1991 film noir Dead Again;

the other, a dapper, placid, bomb-building mastermind known only as the Assassin in Christopher Hampton’s 1996 adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Both were small, unbilled roles he’d taken for the simple pleasure of playing against the expectations of audiences—and the film industry—that considered him a milquetoast.

Romanek and Cheri Minns, Robin’s makeup artist, worked together to create a signature look for the Sy Parrish character, which included dyeing Robin’s hair blond, thinning it out, shaving back his hairline, and dressing him in large eyeglasses, to make him look older and more inconspicuous.

On one of the first days of the shoot, Minns said, “We’re walking to the set, in public. So we walked by a few people, and no one recognized him. Then it disturbed him. So the next people that walked by, he’s like, ‘Hi! How are you! Hi!’ ‘It’s me, it’s Robin Williams!’ He wouldn’t say that, but that’s basically what he was doing. He’d be like, ‘Hi!’ I’d say, ‘Jesus, Robin, you can’t stand it that two people don’t know who you are?’ It just really freaked him out, that people didn’t recognize him.”

The set was customized only slightly from city to city: “He would do ten minutes about wherever he was,” Asher said, “which was information he would glean on arrival from the limo driver, from the baggage guy at the hotel, from people at the desk. He would find out about the local sports scandal or the mayor who’d been indicted, whatever the big stories in town were, and incorporate them into a whole new bit.”

The album included a bonus track that Robin and Asher created, called “The Grim Rapper,” in which Robin, playing the personification of Death, delivered rhymes like: You’ve lost all your fluids, your vital sap It’s time to get ready for the big dirt nap

Many of the same qualities that had made his live Broadway set so off-putting—the vulgarity, the fatalism—played perfectly in front of battle-weary troops who had no use for delicacy or euphemism. “I know that this isn’t the end of the world,” Robin told one crowd, “but you can fuckin’ see it from here.”

One day, for lack of anything better to do, Minns and Spencer decided to attend the grand opening of a local drugstore, and when Robin got wind of their plans, he pleaded to go with them. On the drive over, Minns noticed a curious phenomenon: sometimes, when their car was stopped in traffic, pedestrians and passengers in other cars would look over, recognize Robin and get extremely excited; at other times, people seemed not to notice him at all.

“What’s going on?” Minns asked Robin. “He says, ‘I turn it on, and I can turn it off. I can make them see me, or I can make them not see me.’ It was kind of bizarre, but it was really funny, because then I said, ‘Show me.’ So he would do it, and I would be like, ‘Oh, my God, those people totally looked right at you and they didn’t see that it was you.’ And then the next car would be like, ‘Robin Williams, oh my God!’ It was too funny.”

In Robin’s own recounting, his first misstep on the sober path he’d successfully walked for nearly two decades occurred while the production was in Skagway, Alaska. Having nothing but time and empty space to contemplate, Robin had retreated into an unhealthy obsession with his own résumé, revisiting loss after loss, tallying up failure after failure, and convincing himself that this time he was done for good.

“Within a week,” Robin said, “I was buying so many bottles I sounded like a wind chime walking down the street.”

Sometimes Robin cracked jokes because they helped defuse uncomfortable situations. Sometimes he resorted to them when he was angry. And sometimes he told them because he was terrified.

In the nine years since the riding accident that had paralyzed him, Reeve had never given up hope that he would walk again someday, and as he gradually reclaimed control of regions of his body—an index finger; his lungs—he had represented to Robin an embodiment of hope, heroism, and the power of the human brain.