Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

The creative adult is the child who survived. —provenance unknown

his mother called him “WILD THING!” and Max said “I’LL EAT YOU UP!” so he was sent to bed without eating anything. That very night in Max’s room a forest grew and grew— and grew until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around. —Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

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 fundamental part of himself concealed, even from them. Everyone felt as if they knew him, even if they did not always admire the work he did.

In a room full of strangers, it compelled him to keep everyone entertained and happy, and it left him feeling utterly deserted in the company of the people who loved him most.

“What drives you to perform is the need for that primal connection,” he later explained. “My mother was funny with me, and I started to be charming and funny for her, and I learned that by being entertaining, you make a connection with another person.”

Pam Dawber understood that her responsibility was to play the straight woman, a cheerful, smiling springboard for Robin to bounce off of. And she was happy to do it for Robin, she said, because he never behaved arrogantly toward her and they genuinely got along. “It was the greatest acting class I’d ever had,” she said. “Because, lucky for me, Robin was such a nice person. He had such a gigantic heart. And I really loved Robin, and Robin really loved me. We just clicked.”

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.

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.”

The Tribune cautioned that, historically, performers like Milton Berle, Lenny Bruce, and Freddie Prinze were also “notoriously light-fingered,” and it revisited some possibly apocryphal stories about W. C. Fields, who was said to have had a vaudeville rival’s legs broken for stealing one of his routines, and Shecky Greene, who refused to play a Las Vegas show until a thieving comedian was thrown out of his audience. The story went on to catalog several

At a press conference for Mork & Mindy, when he was asked how his wife was handling his “skyrocketing success,” Robin answered, “Pretty well, I think. She lives in Louisiana now—but she keeps in touch by mail. ‘Our boy is growing up,’ she writes.”

Valerie was quoted on the record as saying, “I’ve had enough. It’s very embarrassing when your husband is seen all over the place with another woman. I hate the thought of losing him forever but what else can I do?”

“I just loved that man to pieces,” Valerie said many years later. “And I wanted him to be happy and this was making him happy, so I moved over a lot. And the more I moved over and created space, it left a vacuum. And you know about vacuums. There were a lot of people who really jumped in to fill that vacuum.”

“I didn’t get respect, no,” she said. “People wanted him, on his own. It’s unfortunate, but it happens in L.A. There were certain people that were taking him off on rides that I didn’t think were serving him. It didn’t serve us as a couple, and it certainly didn’t serve his health or his talent. He was being dummied down by the drugs and the women. And that was a problem.”

In observance of a long-standing television tradition, ABC executives saw that they had a hit show and determined that the best way to preserve it was to change it, making alterations based on the advice of focus groups as well as their own unfathomable caprices.

“Basically, the network felt that the older people were dead weight, that they weren’t adding to the show,” said Dale McRaven. “I thought that was a terrible idea. You just don’t get rid of your dad, or your grandmother. And they did. We had to go along with it, and they ate their words and brought some of them back, but it was a little late and the damage had already been done.”

Mork became less virtuous, more self-aware, more overtly libidinous and attuned to his own double entendres.

Eventually ABC realized that the lovable Mork had gained some sharp edges. But by now the network was too intimidated by Robin to tell him to do anything differently, and so they asked Dawber to deliver the note. “They were all, ‘Talk to Robin, he’s not playing the character naïve anymore,’” she said. “They just double-whammied it. They destroyed it themselves and then were mad that Robin was playing it a little differently.”

At the same time, Robin’s managers had been trying to move him beyond a television career and establish him as a film star.

Popeye is enough to sell a movie, there’s no story here,’” Tramer recalled. “He said, ‘Yeah, I don’t know.’ But how do you turn down Robert Altman on your first movie?” On the other hand, among those encouraging him to embrace the challenge was his friend Christopher Reeve, who had recently triumphed in the hit film adaptation of Superman.

After the first day on Popeye, I thought, Well, maybe this isn’t it, and I finally wound up going, Oh, God, when is it going to be over?”

The major film critics were similarly dubious, neither praising it nor condemning it entirely when it opened on December 12, 1980. Vincent Canby, in the New York Times, said that Popeye was “a thoroughly charming, immensely appealing mess of a movie, often high-spirited and witty, occasionally pretentious and flat, sometimes robustly funny and frequently unintelligible. It is, in short, a very mixed bag.” Gene Siskel, in the Chicago Tribune, called the film “an apparent big-budget bomb in a year full of overproduced stinkeroos,” but he did hail Robin for “a performance that only a major artist could bring off,” comparing him to a “young Peter Sellers.”

“For your information, it’s playing in Hollywood on a double bill with Heaven’s Gate.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson quotation: “Humor is the mistress of sorrow.”

Some colleagues suspected that Robin was chasing not the high of cocaine so much as the comforting sense of belonging he got from being around other working comics.

Belushi had died in his bungalow at the Chateau. The producers knew that someone had to tell Robin, but fearing that the information would devastate him, they felt that it was best delivered by a trusted friend like Dawber. “They said, ‘Will you tell Robin?’” she recalled. “I said, ‘Oh, God, Robin was with him last night.’ And they said they knew. I don’t know how they knew.”

That fall, Robin testified before a Los Angeles grand jury looking into Belushi’s death, and though he did so voluntarily, it drew more unwanted attention from the tabloids and the paparazzi. (“Your lens is not properly focused,” he wisecracked to one photographer who caught him outside the courthouse.)

“I know why the show’s shaky,” the script had him say at the outset. “It’s my fault. I speak too fast and they can’t understand me. I should talk more like you—like a Walkman with dead batteries.”

publications and daily newspapers, at a time when he was filming an episode of Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre, a Showtime children’s series hosted by his Popeye costar. Playing the lead role in an adaptation of “The Tale of the Frog Prince” for an installment directed by Eric Idle, Robin was in full costume when the news was offhandedly relayed to him, and despite his lack of surprise, he did not handle it well. “I was so angry and hurt,” Robin said, “and I was dressed as a frog. It hit me hard.”

“Let’s face it,” she added, “Robin is a stimulus junkie.”

Valerie was glad to have stood by her husband. “If I had jumped the gun and divorced him,” she said, “I would have lost the most precious thing in my life and it would have curtailed our experience together, which is a lot richer than anything he can get off the street.” After John Belushi’s death, their lives became more complicated but their objectives were clarified; Valerie said the rules by which she and Robin operated from there on could be reduced to a single word: “Enough. Enough. Enough.”

“One really good thing about this film was tapping into that, working with all those children,” he said. “After doing this movie, I want a family—real bad.”

Robin made no secret of his revulsion for the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whom he mocked relentlessly in his stand-up, and the tone-deaf, inhumane lack of empathy that the Republican government represented to him.

Carson chose him to be one of his final guests before he retired from a thirty-year career in late-night television. On May 21, the last night when any guests were booked on the program, Robin was the first of two celebrity visitors to sit across from him on his fabled couch. Carson introduced Robin with a solemnity and seriousness he did not often exhibit on the air, saying, “In this business, there are comedians, there are comics, and once in a while, rarely, somebody rises above and supersedes that and becomes a comic persona unto themselves. I never ceased to be amazed at the versatility and the wonderful work that Robin Williams does.”

“He depended on her,” said their friend Lisa Birnbach. “Anything indie, basically, was something that she recommended he do. Marsha had his back in every way. It also made Marsha have to play the tough guy with everyone who wasn’t family. There were times I was a little scared of Marsha. And she was very protective.”

Given the spate of suffering that Robin had experienced in recent years—the descent into alcoholism, the divorce from Marsha, the openheart surgery—Idle said, “If you come out, you realize you’ve been given a gift, and that it can’t all be about you. He’s always been a good dad, a loving dad, tried hard to be a good father, a good husband. It’s not easy.”

“Robin wasn’t a guy that entertained,” Billy Crystal said. “As a couple, Marsha did all that—Thanksgivings and big functions—so it was different with Susan. It was an adjustment to get to know her, because we were and still are so close with Marsha. What do you do in those situations? We got to know her a little bit.”

“He died from Lewy body dementia,” Goldthwait said, “but the world wants it to be about something else, depression, drugs, career, relationships, etc. He had a disease that attacked his brain.

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. From the moment she was first introduced to Robin’s children, in the days before his open-heart surgery, there were concerns about how smoothly she meshed with the rest of the family—whether she respected Robin’s relationships with Zak, Zelda, and Cody, as well as with their mothers, Valerie and Marsha. When Susan decided to pursue the matter in court, they felt their suspicions had been justified.