Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

And in a handwritten note, rendered in loopy cursive, Jeff Bridges said, “Dear Rob, Man!!! You won!! How fuckin’ great. I haven’t seen it yet (lost the video), but the clips look great.”

In one far-flung science-fiction film from this period, called The Final Cut, he played a man who uses computers to edit postmortem memories, subjecting himself to lifetime after lifetime of other people’s acts of cruelty, infidelity, and violence. “It’s the way the world looks to me,” his character explains. “The way I see it.” But, as another character tells him, “You were meant to live your own life, too.”

The Washington Post called it Robin’s penance for every “earnest, life-affirming movie he’s done in the past decade” and “a particularly toxic little bonbon, palatable to only a chosen and very jaundiced few.”

By now, it was no secret to these two close coworkers that Robin had started drinking again.

“He was getting drinks. They’re offering him every drug imaginable. Everything, and if he wasn’t sober, he was taking anybody he could up on what they were offering. It was awful.”

It was how Robin had been taught to live since childhood: nothing is permanent, transition is constant. Anywhere can be home and anyone can be family, and you can always start over again in new places, with new people. Though it might seem a strange, even insensitive attitude to some, it reflected the essential way Robin saw the world. Reality was a medium that he could shape and manipulate, not some fixed and rigid thing; the temperament that made him spontaneous and capable of astonishing comic insight also made him unconcerned with traditional boundaries and accepted norms. 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.”

“He had a huge room that was like a safe room—a bunker, no windows—with the most meticulously kept collections of soldiers from every war that soldiers were made.

“Dad was extraordinarily intimidated by the business side of the biz,” Zak said. “That broke my heart. Because he was brilliant. He was a polymath. He could put things together. He could do anything. But I think that he felt that there was a side to the movie business that he didn’t want to touch, that kept him in front of the camera. That was challenging for me, because I always wanted to push him to do more things: Write, direct, produce. He felt that it wasn’t for him. He was an entertainer at heart.”

That kind of adoration flattered Robin, but it frightened him, too—not that he worried these people would want too much from him, but that he would inevitably let them down.

And she also knew how to take care of Robin. Robin needed someone to take care of him, and it wasn’t that difficult, if you’re aware of things. Marsha organized every single thing.

Joseph said that the lack of a Tony nomination for Robin was a bitter blow to the show’s cast and collaborators. “We wanted him to have an EGOT,” Joseph said, referring to the rare show-business achievement of winning an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. “He deserved one. It was a real tough year, but that made me mad, that he didn’t get a nomination. I think he deserved one.”

Later that fall, Robin was in New York making a film called The Angriest Man in Brooklyn,

Unlike Marsha, who saw it as her responsibility to decorate and maintain their house, to organize dinner parties and surround him with intellectual friends who kept him stimulated, Susan had been accustomed to living an independent life of her own. She traveled widely by herself and with her sons, and she did not manage Robin’s day-to-day affairs and did not always accompany him when he worked out of town. “Any time he traveled, Marsha was very good at putting him in touch with Oliver Sacks or Salman Rushdie or Bob De Niro, so that he was constantly stimulated,” their friend Cyndi McHale explained. “Especially when he was on the road, and away from his family, so that he’d have fun and he’d be engaged.

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.

To Robin, it was the realization of one of his most deeply felt and lifelong fears, to be told that he had an illness that would rob him of his faculties, by small, imperceptible increments every day, that would hollow him out and leave behind a depleted husk of a human being.

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 felt as if they knew him.

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.”

“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 relationship with, who took time to be generous and nice about that.”

bag. In the particular episode that Gilliam happened to catch, the show’s protagonist, Peter Griffin, comes to the ironic and uncomplimentary conclusion that Robin is not sufficiently appreciated (“Robin Williams has a manic gift that gladdens a sad world, and all he asks in return is our unceasing attention!” the character declares),

Knowing Robin as well as he did, Gilliam said he could almost appreciate the forces that had driven him to suicide. “Robin had a very big head to be alone in,” he said. “I understand it.

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.

“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.”

and endure the betrayal of false friends;

always wished he would belong more to our family than he did to the world,” he said. “But that’s a selfish notion, I realize. Folks like him don’t just grow on trees. It was only fair for us to share. Everybody deserves to laugh so hard it hurts, and everybody deserves his fairy tales.”

it is important to recognize that Mr. Williams was an avid collector of various items of personal, cultural, or historical interest, including, but not limited to: toys, including but not limited to Japanese anime figurines; watches; rings; pendant necklaces; pendants, brooches and lapel pins; carved figurines, including but not limited to Netsuke figurines; carved boxes; theater masks; rare, first edition and autographed books and related materials; graphic novels; record albums; bicycles; walking sticks; Native American articles; models; movie posters; sports-related memorabilia; Middle East tour-related memorabilia, including but [not] limited to flags and coins; antique and unique weapons, including but not limited to knives; mineral specimens and fossils; and skulls.… These collections were carefully amassed by Mr. Williams over his lifetime and were precious to him. As the Williams Children grew, so did their father’s collections and they shared in their father’s excitement as additions were made to his collections.

They had all been competing for the limited resource of Robin’s attention, and now there was no more of it to give.

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. What this meant in plain English was that Robin had bequeathed all of his distinguishing qualities—what he looked like; what he sounded like; his signature; his name—to a charitable organization, set up by his attorneys, which would not be allowed to profit off them in any form for twenty-five years.