Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

All of a sudden, I look at the window, and I fucking see Robin. And he’s coming towards me. I get out of the car, I can’t believe it, and then I realize, no, it’s not Robin.” Instead, Bridges realized he was looking at Radioman, the transient photographer and film-set loiterer he and Robin had often crossed paths with during the making of The Fisher King.

The fact that he had encountered Radioman on this particular night, Bridges felt, was a sure sign that Robin was trying to reach out to him from whatever part of the cosmos he now occupied. “Radioman is crying, and I’m crying, and we just hug each other,” he said. “Robin’s spirit was there with us.”

Beneath his grief for his fallen friend, Gilliam could not deny the presence of another emotion he had not expected to feel, and that was anger. “I’m really pissed off at Robin,” he said, half joking and half serious. “I’m getting more and more angry at him. He’s such a selfish bastard, solving his problem, but what about the rest of us?”

His suicide seemed to cast everything he had done previously in a newly foreboding light; the serious roles were suddenly more urgent and the comic roles were now irreparably tinged with melancholy.

As the film critic Bilge Ebiri tweeted with uncommon precision that day, “You start off as a kid seeing Robin Williams as a funny man. You come of age realizing many of his roles are about keeping darkness at bay.”

As they passed through the airport in Rome, Crystal was struck by the tableau presented by the international newsstands, where every cover of every publication bore a picture of Robin’s face. “For that moment,” Crystal said, “there was no war in Iraq or Afghanistan. There were no terrorist threats. There was no trouble in the world, except that Robin had died. Every paper, everywhere, the front page. He was a joyous spirit that people loved and trusted. It didn’t make sense.”

Steven Haft, who produced Dead Poets Society and Jakob the Liar, was among those who felt certain that, no matter how much agony Robin was in, he would never have knowingly inflicted such pain on his own children. “I don’t, to this day, believe he intended to never see his children again,” he said.

By the time these statements were released to the news media, Robin’s body had already been cremated and, like his parents before him, his ashes had been scattered in the San Francisco Bay in a private ceremony earlier that day.

There would be no gravestone or monument for Robin; as Zak would later say of him, “Only a passing of state has occurred. My father’s vastness is no longer contained in his body. But his soul, his being, is everywhere.”

It is our hope in the wake of Robin’s tragic passing, that others will find the strength to seek the care and support they need to treat whatever battles they are facing so they may feel less afraid.

“For almost forty years,” he said, “he was the brightest star in a comedy galaxy. But while some of the brightest of our celestial bodies are actually extinct now, their energy long since cooled, but miraculously, because they float in the heavens, so far away from us now, their beautiful light will continue to shine on us forever. And the glow will be so bright, it’ll warm your heart, it’ll make your eyes glisten, and you’ll think to yourself: Robin Williams, what a concept.”

Every morning since he had returned home after Robin’s death, Crystal had noticed a small green and yellow bird waiting at his window, trying to get his attention by tapping at the glass with its prominent beak or by flying up and hovering ostentatiously. “It keeps pecking at the window and it wouldn’t fly away,” Crystal said. “It wasn’t scared. And I’d hit the window back and it would do it back to me, and then it would fly up and land on this little leaf. Over and over again. It’s weird.”

“Jews have this belief when someone dies,” he explained. “The thought is that they have thirty days before the soul settles in heaven. I definitely felt it when my mom died. You feel a presence, whether it’s there or not, and then you feel it go.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson: To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived here. This is to have succeeded.

It was only in their phone conversations of the past few years that he and Robin were truly opening up to each other, Crystal said, and “you can only do that with someone that you totally trust. And isn’t that really the measure of a friend? That he not only rejoices in your success but is there with a shoulder to cry on, when things get a little—as he called it—crispy? I’m sorry, folks. I’m a little lost without him.”

Eric Idle, who said he was too overwhelmed to write a proper speech, instead performed a short, Monty Python–esque song in Robin’s honor, affectionate and humorous with a tinge of exasperation that he did not try to hide. Its lyrics ran, in part: Good night, Robin It’s hateful that you’ve gone But we’re grateful for that fateful day you came along

Cody said. “I would drift into a universe of dreams and he was the captain of the ship.… He gave my imagination rocket fuel, as he did for so many other people.”

Crystal added, “My heart breaks that he suffered and only saw one way out.”

The coroner’s findings raised a new mystery about Robin’s final hours. Was he cognizant of who he was, and was he aware of what he was doing when he committed suicide? Or could he have been in the grip of a dissociative state brought on by his disease when he took his own life? The official reports held no answers to these questions, and perhaps they were impossible to solve.

As far as Susan’s contention that she might need more money than the trust instructions promised her to pay for the upkeep of the house, the children’s legal filing said: “It is telling indeed that Petitioner appears to be arguing for additional funds for her trust before her trust has even been funded.”

For some of Robin’s friends and colleagues, the estate dispute reinforced for them a long-standing discomfort they had felt about Susan, and whether she fully shared the values of her husband and his family on the proper applications of wealth and celebrity.

The producer Steven Haft echoed the sentiment that while Susan was entitled to share in the grief and sadness that the other members of the family felt, she had overstepped her bounds.

“It’s interesting when I hear Susan described as the widow Williams,” he said. “There are only three people on the planet who can be described as the widow Williams, and Susan isn’t one of them. There’s Marsha. There’s Billy. And there’s David [Steinberg, Robin’s manager]. I have not heard accounts by which Susan deserves the accolade.”

When asked what had driven her father to take his own life, she answered, “It’s not important to ask.”

In March 2016, the California Department of Transportation officially renamed the tunnel that connects Marin County to the Golden Gate Bridge in Robin’s honor; locals had already been referring to it as the Robin Williams Tunnel for many years, because its arching entries and exits were painted with rainbows, evoking the colorful hues of the suspenders he wore on Mork & Mindy.

In October, the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, operated by the labor union that represents professional film and television actors, christened its Robin Williams Center in New York, an educational space and theater. The space was opened with a gala ceremony where the guests included Zak and Zelda, Billy and Janice Crystal, and Whoopi Goldberg. Susan did not attend the event.

Among the provisions of Robin’s trust that were revealed in the legal dispute between Susan and his children was a curious stipulation that read as follows:

All ownership interest in the right to Settlor’s name, voice, signature, photograph, likeness and right of privacy/publicity (sometimes referred to as “right of publicity”) to the Windfall Foundation, a California Nonprofit Corporation … subject to the restriction that such right of publicity shall not be exploited for a twenty-five (25) year period commencing on the date of Settlor’s death.

Aside from his animated features like Aladdin and the Night at the Museum franchise, Robin had never made a sequel to any of his movies; with the exceptions of those films and his television series, he had never played the same character more than once—as much as his critics loved to accuse him of playing the same character every single time.

He had admirers but no imitators; no one combined the precise set of talents he had in the same alchemical proportions.

Maybe they had the intellect, but not the sheer enthusiasm for the variety that the world could offer; the speed, but not the supernatural ability to invent and surprise; the wonderment, but never the purity of heart that came from a genuine empathy for his fellow man.

Robin Williams was once in a lifetime, and his lifetime was ...

If he could give you some of his time to help you enjoy your day or feel better about yourself, he would, and he gave pieces of himself to many people.

Robin still had this effect on people, even after having been in the public eye for decades. They could not believe that he was flesh and blood, like they were, and not just an image on a screen; the notion that he was someone who could be encountered and interacted with was almost too much to comprehend.