Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

His routines seemed entirely off-the-cuff and different each time you saw him, 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 was not an easy person,” said Don Stevens. “He was either very quiet, or he was in a monologue. There was really no discussion. I’m sure he had friends he could talk to, but he was just on.”

Brezner said that Robin was “like Holden Caulfield, a guy walking around with all his nerve endings completely exposed.”

“There was a rule of thumb that they liked shows that you could name your pets after. So I said, I know what you want. You want Mork & Mabel. Mork & Somebody, right? Finally I said, how about Mork & Mindy? They said, ‘Mork & Mindy! We love it.’”

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.

Later, during the live tour, Robin met Bruce Springsteen, expecting that the young rock musician would share his secrets to navigating fame and its pitfalls, and finding that Springsteen hoped to hear the same from him. “Robin went out in Bruce’s Corvette,” Tramer said, “and he asked Robin, ‘How do you handle it?’—meaning, how do you handle stardom? Like they had a disease or something.”

“Then it got to the point where I realized that the characters could say and do things that I was afraid to do myself,” he says.

“I realized when I became a reformed alcoholic—I said, hey, ‘I’m the same asshole. I just have fewer dents in my car.’

“We lose that innocent part of ourselves, that just takes risks and leaps forward with faith that we’ll find our way, as opposed to being sick with experience—being paralyzed by knowing too much how things work.”

Stephen Hunter wrote that the film “represents a typical movie victory, the triumph of literalism over interference, the conviction that more is always much better than less, the crushing idea that spectacle trumps imagination every time.”

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.

“He was very modest about his career,” McLaurin said. “We were having lunch somewhere and he said, ‘You know, that waiter, he has as much talent as I do.’ He said, ‘I just had a bunch of breaks.’ And that was his attitude: I don’t know why I’m so famous. I don’t do anything particularly special. He actually thought that.”

The bottom line is, I am one of the luckiest fucks in show business. I’m so goddamn lucky. The only difference between me and a leprechaun is, I snorted my pot of gold.”

“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.”