Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

“I never knew he was on borrowed time,” Robin said after Reeve’s death. “Many people told me he lived a lot longer than they thought possible, and I said I never knew he was on the clock—other than the same clock we’re all on. There was a part of him that just seemed so indestructible.”

It would have been easy and understandable for Robin to say that his heartache had driven him back to drinking, but he denied that this was the case. “It’s more selfish than that. It’s just literally being afraid. And you think, oh, this will ease the fear. And it doesn’t.” His list of fears consisted of a single entry: “Everything,” he said. “It’s just a general all-round arggghhh. It’s fearfulness and anxiety.”

When he finally did hit rock bottom, Robin contemplated taking his own life—but only for an instant, at which point he immediately talked himself out of it.

When I was drinking, there was only one time, even for a moment, where I thought, “Oh, fuck life.” Then even my conscious brain went, Did you honestly just say, ‘Fuck life?’ I went, You know you have a pretty good life as it is right now. Have you noticed the two houses? Yes. Have you noticed the girlfriend? Yes. Have you noticed that things are pretty good, even though you may not be working right now? Yes.

Okay, let’s put the suicide over here, on ‘discussable.’ Let’s leave that over here, in the discussion area. We’ll talk about that. First of all, you don’t have the balls to do it. I’m not going to say it out loud. I mean, have you thought about buying a gun? No. What were you going to do, cut your wrist with a Waterpik? Maybe. So that’s erosion. What are you thinking about that? So, can I put that over here in the ‘What the Fuck’ category? Yes, let’s put that over here in ‘What the Fuck.’

Because—can I ask you what you’re doing right now? You’re sitting naked in a hotel room with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Yes. Is this maybe influencing your decision? Possibly. Okay, we’re going to put that over here.… Possibly for therapy, if you want t...

“When I was in rehab,” he explained, “somebody got out of rehab, and shared what I had told to a tabloid. Which was fucked up, and everybody in rehab got angry. I went, ‘Hey man. It’s out there. Somebody’s going to make money off that shit.’ But it was weird.”

Peter Asher. “For whatever reason, Robin was one of those people who, when he fell off the wagon, did it quite dramatically. And also, of course, you have the problem that if you’re a celebrity, inevitably, you end up doing it publicly. You can’t get away with away with a regrettable night on the town without it becoming a thing. Which must be very annoying. We all have indiscretions and they don’t all get blasted all over the place.”

In the words of the journalist Lillian Ross, who wrote extensively about Robin for the New Yorker and befriended him and became close with his family, “Robin was a genius, and genius doesn’t produce normal men next door who are good family men and look after their wives and children. Genius requires its own way of looking at and living in the world, and it isn’t always compatible with conventional ways of living.”

During a commercial break, the host turned to Robin and privately asked him, “You ever get emotional after the open-heart surgery?” Robin felt his eyes welling up with tears once again as he answered, “Fuck yeah.” “It was very much like shorthand between two survivors,” Robin later said. “You really do get weepy, like, ‘Oh, a kitten.’ ‘Oh my God, did you see that flower?’ Butch up, motherfucker.”

“I think, literally, because you have cracked the chest,” he said, explaining that men, in particular, clad themselves in a layer of armor, but once it is pierced—here he mimed his rib cage being broken open—“It’s like, ‘Babies! My babies!’ You are vulnerable, totally, for the first time since birth.

“Most comedians are wired with a sense of self-loathing,” Goldthwait said, and what he and Robin had in common was that neither of them could readily accept “that we are enough that people will be happy with that. We always have to be on, or working. And people are happy when he’s not on, which, with the amount of self-loathing we have, is really hard for us to accept.”

At times, Zak found himself playing the role of guardian and caregiver to Robin, offering him support and encouragement in his moments of insecurity.

“Dad’s happiness was correlated very much to how he was doing, career-wise,” Zak said. “When there were films that would be less successful, he took it very personally. He took it as a personal attack. That was really hard for us to see.”

“I was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge. I was halfway across, and all of a sudden, the car went, ‘Take a right turn.’ What? No can do, HAL. Not that depressed, really. And the car went, ‘Really, Robin? I saw Bicentennial Man.’ Shut the fuck up! Damn you.”

Privately, Robin told Susan that he had been diagnosed with depression and was taking medication to treat it; as he put it to her, he had been on enough Effexor “to cheer up a whole army of elephants.” But he was also working with a psychiatrist to get off of prescription drugs, and over time, she said, “I watched a happy man emerge.”

“We were having lunch somewhere and he said, ‘You know, that waiter, he has as much talent as I do.’ He said, ‘I just had a bunch of breaks.’ And that was his attitude: I don’t know why I’m so famous. I don’t do anything particularly special. He actually thought that.”

In the rehearsal room, the director and the cast observed that the Robin who showed up was not a self-important superstar but a curious craftsman who was eager to put in the hours. “He was interested in the beat of the play and very collaborative,”

In a separate conversation with Rajiv Joseph, the playwright, Moayed said, “I just broke down in tears, because I was like, this is not fair. This wasn’t the point. Robin is so fucking good in this. I was like, he’s a fucking star and he deserves it. When he didn’t get nominated, the whole thing felt like a fuck-you, to be quite honest.”

Though the nuptials had been meant to end with the release of trained doves, nature intervened with an earlier display. “This white butterfly appears out of nowhere and goes straight down the aisle and flies over, between them and above them, and flies away,” the comedian Rick Overton recalled. “Who pays for that service? Everyone’s getting their phones out, looking on Google—who does that? If I’m the dove guy, I’m going, ‘Oh, well, fuck me. I’ve got the whole dove thing and this butterfly shows up?’ It just happened. We chose to make that a good omen.”

Stand-Up Icon Award at the Comedy Awards in New York

“Thank you for this lovely platinum Ambien, this lovely R2-D2 illegitimate child. Thank you.” He spotted Susan in the audience and added, “Tonight, my darling Susan, you’ll be fucking an icon.”

“You start off doing comedy, and it’s a long time ago,” he said. “You have an open-mic night. You sign up. You get on late at night. They give you three minutes. Thirty-seven years later, I come on here, I get this [the award] and three minutes. Thank you. Fuck off.”

“You start off in diapers, you end up in diapers. The bottom line is, I am one of the luckiest fucks in show business. I’m so goddamn lucky. The only difference between me and a leprechaun is, I snorted my pot of gold.”

Starting in October 2013, Robin began to experience a series of physical ailments, varying in their severity and seemingly unconnected to one another. He had stomach cramps, indigestion, and constipation. He had trouble seeing; he had trouble urinating; he had trouble sleeping. The tremors in his left arm had returned, accompanied by the symptoms of cogwheel rigidity, where the limb would inexplicably stop itself at certain fixed points in its range of motion. His voice had diminished, his posture was stooped, and at times he simply seemed to freeze where he stood.

Over dinner afterward, Crystal said, “He seemed quiet. On occasion, he’d just reach out and hold my shoulder and look at me like he wanted to say something.” When the friends said good-bye at the end of the night, Robin burst out with unexpected affection. “He hugged me good-bye, and Janice, and he started crying,” Crystal said. “I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ He said, ‘Oh, I’m just so happy to see you. It’s been too long. You know I love you.’”

Overton came to believe there was something wrong with his friend, even if he did not quite understand what it was. “I saw the eyes dimming,”

I would see that candle flicker brightly when he would do Set List, or come up and do improv. We’d get back to playing like kids. We’d bounce off each other for a little bit, and we’d get access to the old guy again. And then it would start to dim when we’d be hanging out afterwards, at the restaurant. I can’t imagine the weight of it. I can’t even dream of it. I don’t blame him for one damn thing.”

But what proved more powerful than the pleas from his colleagues and from family members like Zak and Alex to slow things down—even more powerful than Robin’s desire to sustain his life with Susan and to be a good earner for his managers and agents—was his own desire to keep working through the pain, the one cure-all that had helped him cope with past troubles.

“He wasn’t in good shape at all,” Minns said. “He was sobbing in my arms at the end of every day. It was horrible. Horrible. But I just didn’t know.”

“I said, ‘Robin, why don’t you go and do stand-up?’” she recalled. Robin broke down in tears. “He just cried and said, ‘I can’t, Cheri.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, you can’t?’ He said, ‘I don’t know how anymore. I don’t know how to be funny.’ And it was just gut wrenching to hear him admit that, rather than lie to me and say something else.

On May 28, 2014, Robin was finally given an explanation for the tangled lattice of sicknesses that had been plaguing him. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder that attacks the central nervous system, impairing motor functions and cognition, eventually leading to death.

“Robin couldn’t understand why his brain was out of control while at the same time he was being told, ‘We’re going to get this Parkinson’s managed and you’ll have another good ten years,’”

Robin’s children had always been a dependable source of some of the purest, most natural joy he had experienced. But when he saw them now, they were also a reminder that he had chosen to end his marriage to Marsha and break up their home; it filled him with shame to think that he had inflicted the divorce upon them, and the shame compounded itself as he came to believe he had taken something perfect and corrupted it.

“I was out on the sidewalk,” Carvey said, “and it was kind of misty and dark.” He heard a voice calling to him, “Hello? Hello?” The speaker was Robin, who came up to him looking very pained. “He wanted to make amends to me, for taking material from me,” said Carvey, who answered that he could not think of anything Robin took from him.

“For years, people had said to him that the phrase ‘Mr. Happy,’ referring to his dick, was mine. But I don’t think it was. I go, ‘Robin, I don’t believe that was mine.’ And I don’t think he ever believed me. So we had kind of an awkward exchange. I said, ‘I kind of accept that, but I tried to be you for four years.’ I realized later, this was not the way it was supposed to go. You’re supposed to say: ‘Thank you.’”

“Somebody that’s that depressed, and on medication for a medical condition, and the medication can cause depression, you just don’t tell them to work the twelve steps,” Cyndi McHale said. “He needed much more.”

Pearl was immediately struck by how much weight Robin had lost and how he did not seem to know who Nina was. “He always gave her a big hug and a kiss,” Pearl said. “He did not recognize her. It took him a minute to recognize me. He didn’t say a word. I knew something was really wrong. I asked Michael Pritchard, ‘Is he okay?’ And he goes, ‘No.’ And that’s all he said. I just thought it was depression and he’d come out of it.”

“I was scared,” Pitta said, “because it wasn’t my friend. I said, this has nothing to do with his TV show being canceled. He had a thousand-yard stare going.

Though his recent months had been suffused with anguish, he had given no explicit indication to anyone that he wished to end his life.

Before anyone had time to mourn his passing, let alone process it, or to begin to seek answers to the questions that would surely be asked of them, they had to tell the whole world that Robin Williams was dead.

The incident offered an unparalleled example of a public figure who was recognized in every part of the globe and whose reputation for joyfulness and humor stood in stark opposition to the shocking and solitary manner in which his life came to an end.

The whole world seemed to know, all at once, that he had died and was reacting to the incomprehensible event in unison. As only a few occasions in history are capable of doing, it had cloaked the planet in a shadow of sadness.

Everyone who knew him experienced it, wherever they were, and everyone fe...

“It was a death of a thousand cuts,” he said. “But these were massive cuts. Each was a sword blow. For a guy who’s known for his freedom and mobility, to find out he may not have that anymore—his facility of speech may not be his anymore; access to a quick thought might not be his anymore. All his trademark things, everything he has identified his personality with—it’s like, holy shit, what are you going to do?

As a fellow survivor of heart surgery, Letterman said, “It just didn’t make any sense to me. After what these guys did for me—they opened me up, they took my heart out, they put me on a heart-lung machine for forty-two minutes. And then they put your heart back in and they stitch you back up. After people have gone to that trouble, the last thing in the world you’re going to do is ruin it by killing yourself.”

Murray was even more visibly stricken. “He couldn’t catch his breath,” Letterman said. “He kept hyperventilating. I thought he was going to have a heart attack.”

Murray shared a story from the 2004 Academy Awards, the year he was considered a strong favorite to win the Best Actor trophy for Lost in Translation but instead was edged out b...

“He said that later that night, Robin came up to him. They certainly didn’t know each other well, and Robin said, ‘Bill, please don’t worry about this. This will happen for you.’ Bill was very touched at this guy, who he did not have that sort of re...

Jeff Bridges was attending the red carpet premiere of The Giver, a science-fiction film he’d been trying to get made since the 1990s, but all that anyone in attendance could think about was Robin. “It was just the most bizarre mixture of deep, deep sadness and celebration for this thing that I’d been trying to give birth to for twenty years,”