Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

Perhaps the biggest fight they had, Laurie said, occurred when they were drinking at a restaurant and Rob leaned across the table to tell her: “You know what? My imagination is better than yours.”

I learned that by being entertaining, you make a connection with another person.”

Rob’s reticence obscured an ability to quietly scan a room, observe the people around him, and retain everything he heard them say. “It all went in and stayed there,” Todd said. “He never forgot anything anybody told him, unless, selectively, he did so.”

“My dad was a sweet man, but not an easy laugh,” Robin explained. “Seeing my father laugh like that made me think, ‘Who is this guy and what’s he on?’”

“My world,” he said, “was bounded by thousands of toy soldiers with whom I would play out World War II battles. I had a whole panzer division, 150 tanks, and a board, 10 feet by 3 feet, that I covered with sand for Guadalcanal.”

It was only fog, but to his inexperienced eyes, Robin was certain it was poison gas. “It scared the piss out of me,” he said later.

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.”

an individualist who kept an eclectic coterie of friends, and a sensitive person for whom this sort of unrest weighed on his conscience. As his classmate Phillip Culver saw him, Robin “was not really extroverted—he was quite shy, and he felt very uncomfortable around large numbers of people.”

you don’t say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never been to Mars.’ You say, ‘Yes, and.’ You say, ‘Wow, I just got here three days ago, and I’ve been drunk ever since I arrived.’”

“He discovered that you could make something of this energy he had,” said Davis. “And he had a lot of energy. I used to say I knew him for six months before I found out what his real voice was.”

and Alice in Wonderland, playing a hookah-smoking Caterpillar.

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.”

so rapidly that the legend still endures at Claremont that Robin was kicked out of the school for driving a golf cart through a dining hall.

“At some point,” Robin said, “my father sat me down and said, ‘Listen, war is not dolce et decorum est, it’s really quite brutal. War isn’t like the movies portray it. People die alone and miserable.’ He was honest with me, because he wanted me to be safe.”

Then, at his second class, the instructor discussed safety guidelines and warned that, without proper precautions, you could accidentally blind yourself. As McLaurin recalled, “He said he heard the word ‘blind’ and he was out of there. He never came back.”

And as Malvolio in Twelfth Night, imprisoned alone in a cell with only a wooden staff, he only had to remember the TV teachings of Jonathan Winters. “He just had his hands and his staff, and the staff became a second character,”

One particular run-through had stretched all the way to midnight, and “everybody was very uptight, especially me,” he said. Then Dunn noticed Robin offstage: “He was standing by the piano, and he had a baton in his hand, like a drum major’s baton, and he began talking to it. And it began talking back.” For what felt like twenty minutes, Dunn said, Robin and the baton conversed, kidded, and argued with each other—with Robin providing both of the voices of course, and a crowd of actors and crew members supplying a grateful audience. When Dunn at last got home at two a.m., he woke up his wife to tell her, “I saw a young man do something tonight that I have never seen before. And this kid is going to go somewhere.”

“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.”

The Music Man, playing the reformed con man Marcellus Washburn as he sang and danced his way through the nonsensical crowd-pleaser “Shipoopi.”

“I’d been in danger of becoming terminally mellow,” Robin said, “and it peeled away that layer very quickly.”

In 1973, when Robin arrived at Juilliard, Houseman, at the age of seventy-one, was starring in The Paper Chase as the imperious law professor Charles W. Kingsfield Jr., a role for which he would win an Academy Award.

“He gave a speech one day in which he said, ‘The theater needs you. Don’t be tempted by television or the movies. The theater needs new plasma, new blood.’ And then, a week later, we saw him in a Volvo commercial.”

While Skinner worked methodically to teach them about the phonetic alphabet and vowel changes that occur from one dialect to another, and Reeve diligently annotated his texts to teach himself each new accent, “Robin didn’t need any of this,” he said. “He could instantly perform in any dialect—Scottish, Irish, English, Russian, Italian and many of his own invention.”

“He used to try very, very hard not to send it up, not to make fun of it. But he couldn’t do it straight. He just couldn’t.”

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.”

“One time, Paul and I had to sit Robin down and tell him that he couldn’t use the word funky anymore, that it was driving us crazy,” Levine recalled with a laugh. “We said every third word out of your mouth is ‘funky’ and you have to stop.”

Just as at the College of Marin, Robin quickly ran through what little cash he possessed and was in debt to nearly everyone. He could always depend on the kindness of administrators:

Robin could think faster than anybody I ever saw.”

However, Perri could not say with certainty that Robin had made up the routine on the spot. “Things that would be extemporaneous in anybody else, he might have been thinking about for a long time,” Perri said.

His life was absurd. He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping. He was roped to a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet. He escaped. He escaped from bank vaults, nailed-up barrels, sewn mailbags; he escaped from a zinc-lined Knabe piano case, a giant football, a galvanized iron boiler, a rolltop desk, a sausage skin. His escapes were mystifying because he never damaged or appeared to unlock what he escaped from. The screen was pulled away and there he stood disheveled but triumphant beside the inviolate container that was supposed to have contained him. He waved to the crowd.

With his San Francisco peers, Robin was helping to develop a mode of comedy called the “riffing style”: as opposed to organized stand-up routines that proceeded in a logical sequence, this anarchic approach meant that any impulse could be explored at the moment that it occurred, without the need for setup or context, and it could be tossed aside as soon as the next good idea popped

Francisco had been a comedy town before, and it was becoming one again. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was famous for nightclubs like the hungry i, where Mort Sahl and Bill Cosby held court; Ann’s 440 Club, where the volatile Lenny Bruce grew into a force of nature during his lengthy residencies; and the Jazz Workshop, where Bruce was arrested for obscenity after using what the abashed local newspapers could only refer to as a ten-letter word. (It was cocksucker.)

Dana Carvey, then a college student at San Francisco State, had been harboring his own secret dream of becoming a stand-up—one that he felt too introverted to act on—when he happened to catch Robin performing a solo set as part of a comedy show at a Berkeley café called La Salamandra. “The fourth guy up blew the room away, and it was Robin,” Carvey recalled. “It was so free-form, I’d just never seen anything like it. His voice didn’t need amplification. He had kind of a British accent. He was very shy and quiet, until he wasn’t.”

when he needed to drum up business he would walk along Clement Street bellowing “Comedy! Comedy! Comedy!” at passersby.

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.

“He continued to be delightful in many ways,” she said. “I didn’t make any distinction between him and his voices. He would just pull them out, and always did.”

Comedy, Leno said, is an unusual discipline where “the affirmation of strangers is more important than that of friends or family members. No comic wants his friends or his family in the audience. They’re either going to laugh too hard or they’re not going to laugh at all. You want complete strangers. They’re the only ones that count.”

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.

As Robin would later recall, “I only had one conversation with Andy where he wasn’t talking to me as a character. He just went, ‘Hi, Robin, how are you?’ I went, ‘Good, Andy, how are you?’ ‘Really good, I’m just here buying something.’ It was at some health-food store. Then by the end of the conversation”—he switched into Kaufman’s soft-spoken Foreign Man accent—“slowly but surely he went back to theees. And I went, ‘I’ll see you. Take care.’”

Someone heckled him and he said, ‘First time heckling?’ Just destroyed the guy.”

Robin would watch Pryor slip into the slurred Mississippi patois of his inebriated alter ego, Mudbone, or riff on the latest misfortune to befall him in real life.

One of Pryor’s routines that stuck with Robin was a bit about God coming back to earth to pick up his Son, only to find out that Jesus has been crucified. “You could see the entire audience going, What?” Robin said. “The most strangely beautiful piece. That wasn’t a character. That was just him.” And then there were the evenings when you just couldn’t predict Pryor at all.

‘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 watched this one kid get up, and no matter what situation was thrown at him, he never got lost,” Brezner said. “In an improv, right before the blackout, you’ve either won or lost; you either hit the big line or it lays there. I watched two hours of this kid never losing, reacting off the top of his head, working off nerve impulses—not intellect at all.”

Comparing him to the disillusioned and achingly sincere young protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye, Brezner said that Robin was “like Holden Caulfield, a guy walking around with all his nerve endings completely exposed.”

They took me out to lunch, and I’ll never forget this. They said, ‘You are going to be very, very rich. You are not going to have to do anything anymore. You can lunch and shop.’ I’ll never forget that. Lunch and shop.

When Garry Marshall asked Hallin what kind of work Robin did, she told him, “He stands on a street corner, does a lot of voices and impressions, and passes the hat.” Marshall was unconvinced. “Are you kidding?” he said. “This is who you want me to hire?” “Well, you’ve got to understand, it’s an awfully full hat,” Hallin replied. “I thought that was a great line,” Marshall recalled. “So I said, all right. Bring in the guy with the full hat.”

“He just was there to audition.” But when he was asked to take a seat, Robin unexpectedly planted himself face-first on the couch and stood on his head. Then he reached for a nearby glass of water and pretended to drink it through his finger. “It went past where the script went, and he was quiet,” Marshall said. “He was only loud when you said go. Before that, he didn’t talk. We hired him.”

Robin was going beyond the boundaries of what had been written for him, but Marshall said these contributions were welcomed. “What helped matters was that the Happy Days actors were very secure,” he said. “Henry Winkler and Ron Howard, they were not flibbertigibbets. So when they saw this talented man, who they didn’t know from Adam either, they both gave him plenty of room to work.”

“You would say something, no matter what the script said, and he absorbed it,” Winkler said. “It was almost as if he sucked it in like a sponge. And then he would spit it back out, but then it would have been Robin-ized. It’s an intangible. All of a sudden, you’re amazed. You’re amazed by the speed. You’re amazed by the clarity. You’re amazed by the originality.”