Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

Who is Mindy? As Marshall saw it, she had to be a counterbalance to what Robin would bring to Mork: “It needs a Waspy, all-around, very American girl to go against this lunatic,”

“This guy doesn’t stay on book. It’s going to be totally different. It’s going to be wonderful. ‘See this, it’s fahny.’”

And when she saw the episode for herself, Dawber was completely won over by Robin. “It was like, Sign. Me. Up,” she said. “He was cu-ute. He was sexy. He was funny. He was so different. Not that I was anybody. But you hadn’t seen anything like him. He was just shot out of a cannon.”

“It was electric, and we all just sat there and went, ‘Oh my god, what is this?’” Crystal later recalled. “It was like trying to catch a comet with a baseball glove.”

The closest I could make to it was Jonathan Winters, but it was at warp speed.

And Thursday morning, he walked in at nine o’clock and he knew every line. Knew all his marks. What I realized is, he finally read the script that night. He had a photographic memory. He just looked the script over and had it. When he did, I thought, ‘Oh, thank God, my job is safe. I don’t have to become a shoe salesman.’”

He’s fantastic—wild, inventive, unpredictable. He’s a major comedic talent with an arsenal that includes crazy voices, credible imitations, excellent timing and a zany spontaneity that makes him refreshing and immensely likable.”

their parrot, Cora, who spoke three phrases: “Hello,” “Buzz off,” and “Birds can’t talk.”

“One week the writers sent down a blank script that said ‘Robin does his thing,’” Garry Marshall said. “Robin quickly came up to the offices to say, ‘That wasn’t me! I don’t say that!’ A big fuss. We always gave him a script.”

Pam Dawber was the most frequent target of these sexualized outbursts. “He would get bored,” Storm said. “He’d be doing a whole paragraph, and in the middle of it, he would just turn and grab her ass. Or grab a breast. And we’d start again. I’d say, ‘Robin, there’s nothing in the script that says you grab Pam’s ass.’ And he’d say, ‘Oh, okay’” “When he would finish his moment and he’d go offstage, she would be there, continuing the scene,” Marshall said. “He would take all his clothes off, he would be standing there totally naked and she was trying to act. His aim in life was to make Pam Dawber blush.”

“I had the grossest things done to me—by him,” she said. “And I never took offense. I mean, I was flashed, humped, bumped, grabbed. I think he probably did it to a lot of people. But he certainly did it to me, because I was with him all the time for eight months out of the year. But it was so much fun. Somehow he had that magic. Even though, if you put it on paper, you would be appalled. But somehow, he had this guileless little thing that he would do—those little sparkly eyes. He’d look at you, really playful, like a puppy, all of a sudden. And then he’d grab your tits and then run away. And somehow he could get away with it. It was the seventies, after all.”

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.

Margolis didn’t find the tale funny; he explained to Robin that one of the gang members who had accosted him was also charged with and later acquitted of murdering a concertgoer at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival. The Hells Angels joke was excised from future showings of the HBO performance.

So far as Tramer could tell, Robin’s attraction to these groups seemed to stem from their marginalization—his understanding that in the upside-down hierarchy of comedy, their otherness gave them power he would never possess.

but more crucially, they articulated how Robin Williams was a different person from Mork, who was by far the better known of the two. Robin shared Mork’s sweetness and his compassion, but behind the character was a man of estimable intelligence and a full understanding of the power it gave him.

“Isn’t this great?” To Tramer’s surprise, Endler answered, “Not really.” “Why?” Tramer asked. “I helped get him there,” she replied. “So why isn’t it great?” “Well,” she answered, “don’t you realize you have to build up these big stars so they can tear ’em down?”

He had this worried look on his face. He just went, ‘I don’t even know what’s funny anymore.’ I’d never experienced that. There might be some guys that would go, ‘I’ll just take whatever I do for a laugh, and just run with it, and that’s great.’ He was concerned that he was losing a grip on what’s funny and what’s not. Which is, I think, every true comic’s concern.”

But when the series returned in September, it was not the same wholesome comedy it had been in its first year. Several important cast members had been written off the show,

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.

The goodness and integrity that audiences perceived in Mork were fundamental to the role, giving Robin the license to be innocent and unsophisticated. But when he was set against new sparring partners who were more knowing and worldly, Robin had to change how he responded to them. Mork became less virtuous, more self-aware, more overtly libidinous and attuned to his own double entendres.

“A god at twenty-seven, a washout at twenty-eight,” he said of himself in the spring of 1980, not long before he turned twenty-nine.

He was being heckled and got the whole audience to pray for the death of the heckler. He was merciless, the way he went after him.

“It was just a simple, effortless thing,” Idle said of Robin’s most identifiable talent. “I’ve always felt that Robin’s blinding speed and flash of wit was an effort at concealment, rather than revealing. He would ostensibly be talking about something personal or sexual, but it was always not close to him. He would be general.”

Robin spent a week at the couple’s house, sometimes doing nothing more than sitting at the window and looking longingly at children playing hockey in the street. Then he’d turn to his host and say—in what Short described as a “vaguely Irish-sounding, wonderment-tinged lilt”—“Ohhh, they’re so won-derful, Marty. So utterly carefree. I wish I could stay here and watch them all day!” As Short would later observe, “He reminded me of Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince: wistfully surveying a world to which he felt he didn’t quite belong.”

With Robin at his side, Winters improvised twenty-two minutes of material. “And the show only ran twenty-two minutes,” Storm said. “So we had to cut it down to about six or seven minutes.”

On one night when she and Robin were out together, Valerie was taken aside by Richard Pryor, who warned her that they were headed for serious calamity. “You’ve got to get out of town,” Pryor told her. “You guys are not like this. You’re not them”

Belushi took him on a tour of the city’s punk rock clubs. Robin said the experience was “like being on a tour with Dante, if Dante were James Brown. I was like Beaver Cleaver in the underworld.”

As Belushi grew groggier—he said he’d taken some quaaludes earlier—Robin realized it was time to go. He told Belushi he was welcome to visit him at his new ranch in Napa Valley, then he made the drive alone to his home in Topanga Canyon, where Valerie was waiting for him. He told her that he’d just been to see Belushi but could not put the image of Cathy Evelyn Smith out of his mind. “God, man,” he told Valerie. “He was with this lady—she was tough, scary.” Sometime later that morning, Smith prepared two speedballs—powerful mixtures of cocaine and heroin—injecting herself with one and Belushi with the other. He complained of feeling cold, so she turned up the thermostat and tucked him into bed, where he fell asleep. In his sleep, he died of an overdose, from the toxic quantity and combination of drugs he had taken. His physical trainer discovered his lifeless body just after twelve noon. He was thirty-three years old.

“That’s never going to happen to me, Dawbs.” As he grieved for a friend who could have had decades of great work ahead of him, Robin did not need any assistance to see how Belushi’s death communicated an unmistakable message, addressed directly to him and all but hand-delivered to his doorstep.

The two men talk as the Great American Music Hall is being cleaned up, and the newsboy gives Robin a personal memento: an autographed picture of Albert Einstein—a man, he explains, who used to say, “My sense of God is my sense of wonder about the universe.” The newsboy asks Robin to pass it on to his unborn child. “It’s yours now,” the newsboy says. “You’re going to be the keeper of the flame.… You’re a crazy bastard. Good to see the lights are still on.”

Like many of his colleagues, Phillips believed that Robin had a photographic memory. “Even though I insisted that he learned to read music,” he said, “his mind was so fast that we would—I thought—be reading a piece, and he would memorize it as quickly as we had played through it. So then, when I would say to Robin, why don’t we go back to Bar 15 or 16, he would go, ‘Uh, yeah, where’s that?’ Because he had it in his head, but he couldn’t tell on the music where it was.”

“You want to be proud?” the father snarls at him in one brutal confrontation. “Have enough money in your checking account.… Let me tell you something, Wilky. You know what you are in this world without money? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

even if they did not accurately reflect the real Cronauer, a mellifluous and even-tempered broadcaster who was not exactly a desperado of the airwaves.

“But he did play rock & roll, he did do characters to introduce standard army announcements, and ‘Goooood morning, Vietnam’ really was his signature line,” Robin explained. “He learned whenever soldiers in the field heard his sign-on line, they’d shout back at their radios, ‘Gehhhhht fucked, Cronauer!’”

and the science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison (“Paul Muni and I are delighted you got nominated. He told me so today, in a burning bush. I’d tell you myself, but whoever hears from you? Don’t let the guilt make you crazy. Go, be a star.”)

Waiting for Godot in which he and Steve Martin would play the existentially beleaguered hobos Estragon and Vladimir.

He also heard from people who had no connection to him, yet who felt as if they knew him from his compassionate portrayal of Keating. Among the more unexpected letters of congratulations was one from Fred Rogers, the gentle broadcaster and educator who hosted the PBS children’s program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. His note to Robin read: This afternoon—all by myself—I went to see “Dead Poets Society.” It’s a fine film and your performance in it is superb. I admire you greatly and I thank you for enriching the lives of so many through your art. You certainly contribute many verses as “the power of the play goes on.” Gratefully, Fred Rogers

Robin, he said, had an “instant power of apprehension and playback, a power for which ‘mimicry’ is too feeble a word (for they were imitations full of sensitivity, humor and creativity).”

Playing intensive or modulated versions of himself in Good Morning, Vietnam and Dead Poets Society won him two Best Actor nominations. But they didn’t lead to Oscars because the Academy won’t give them to actors who are playing themselves.

explores the male mind through mythological figures like the Fisher King: a character who has been mortally injured but cannot die,

“He’s a comic, and all comics want to be Hamlet, come on. You want to show that you’re not just a clown—that inside that clown is a profundity, a deepness, a darkness. You suffer. And I think all comics always end up writing their autobiography, and trying to show how much pain they went through in their life.”

Hoffman had decided to base his portrayal of Captain Hook in part on William F. Buckley Jr., whose clenched, effete voice was a longtime staple of Robin’s routine. “He’s bright and educated, but there’s something scary there,” Hoffman said of Buckley.

Rolling Stone called Toys “a gimmicky, obvious and pious bore, not to mention overproduced and overlong.” It awarded zero stars to the film and added, “No amount of brilliant production design … can disguise the smug hypocrisy of an antiwar tract that decries the killing games of vid-age children and then offers up a climactic battle between hawk toys and dove toys for their movie delectation.”

It was the cinematic embodiment of the philosophy he’d learned from his own upbringing, through two marriages, and now his own experiences as a husband and father: family is where you find it; all are welcome and no one ever loses their membership.

This grown-ups’ playroom was also where Robin kept his Hook pinball table, a personal gift from Steven Spielberg, on which Marsha held the top score of 175 million

period. 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.

After boasting publicly that he expected to play the villainous Riddler in an upcoming Batman sequel and then passing on the role, Robin was chagrined to find that the part had gone to Carrey.

he tells Will that his book learning is no substitute for Maguire’s life experience. (“I’d ask you about love, you’d probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable.”)

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.”

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.