Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

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.

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.”

“He wasn’t looking for a place to try out comedic material. I don’t think he looked at it as developing into a career.” But the experience seemed to unlock something in him that had previously gone untapped. “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.”

One peer in particular would become an important confidant and source of moral support for Robin: a staggeringly tall, boyishly handsome young man who had recently come from Cornell to enter Juilliard as a member of its advanced training program. His name was Christopher Reeve.

Other classmates regarded Robin as a hardworking, quietly bookish artist in training.

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 up.

“You could turn on a faucet and cocaine would come out,” said Steven Pearl, a fellow comic and friend of Robin’s.

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.”

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.

“I knew he could pirouette on a needle,” Smiley said. “I didn’t know that no one else could.”

“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.”

When Morra told him he’d be paid $1,500 a week, Robin, in his innocence, screamed excitedly on the other end of the phone, “Wow!” To which Morra, the old showbiz hand, replied, “Schmuck, it’s $15,000 a week—I was just teasing you.”

“Come inside my mind and see what it’s like when a comedian eats the big one.”

And the Boston Globe wrote that Robin “soon may be known as the funniest man on television.”

“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.

Just before he sat for a New York Times profile, she instructed him, “Please bring some toys and improvise. PLEASE try to stay in your clothes and out of your glasses. When the interview itself starts at 1 P.M. in your trailer, I’m not allowed in. This does not mean that you forget you’re being interviewed. The Times is the best newspaper because their reporters are the roughest. If you don’t want to see it in print don’t say it.”

“Robin loved cocaine and we loved Robin, so we went with Robin to parties with sniff in the air. I did not enjoy cocaine. It made me want to vacuum every hallway in every apartment building in the world.”

“He’s just an ordinary human being that’s been hyped by an advertising campaign.”

“When you’re a celebrity, everybody wants a piece of you, sir. Unless you can say no, there’ll be no pieces left for yourself,” he says.

“To get that, you have to pay a very heavy price. You have responsibilities, anxieties, and to be honest, sir, some of them can’t take it.”

“Most of them do, sir,” Mork answers in a quavering voice, “but some are victims of their own fame. Very special, intelligent people. People like Elvis Presley. Marilyn

Monroe. Janis Joplin. Jimi Hendrix. Lenny Bruce. Freddie Prinze. And John Lennon.” By now his eyes are visibly full of tears. There is no laughter, nor any other response from the audience as the screen fades to black.

Whatever blithe expression crossed his face and whatever character he imagined himself to be playing, he always carried in his wallet a meaningful Ralph Waldo Emerson quotation: “Humor is the mistress of sorrow.”

At its core, The World According to Garp was about how the things we fear most in life are determined at an early age and amplified, not overcome, as we grow older.

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.

And the broadcast had raised nearly $2.5 million in donations, an outright success that would make Comic Relief an ongoing HBO tradition. The experience had helped fan the flame of a humane ember that was already inside Robin, and for years afterward, he would even try to find jobs for homeless people on the sets of his films.

As the boys dutifully follow his instructions, Keating whispers to them, “Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.”

But to these young men, Robin seemed very different from the persona he had cultivated in his acting work and stand-up appearances. “I expected him to be completely manic and all over the place and funny, a little edgy,” Weltman said, “and he wasn’t that way at all on our film. He was very quiet and self-effacing and generous. I remember there was one time he said to me, ‘I’m just here to introduce the world to these boys.’”

don’t want to do it,” Robin maintained. “I’m just going to stay here.” So Reeve and Schulman went without him to find a theater, where they were let into a screening of Dead Poets Society and they waited at the back. “It was the last scene of the movie,” Schulman recalled, “and after the boys stood on their chairs, when the music started, the audience got up and applauded, gave it a standing ovation. And I went, ‘Whoa. I’ve never seen this before.’ Chris turned to me and was crying. He said, ‘I’m so happy for Robin.’ It was so sweet. So I had some sense that something interesting was happening. And certainly, as a writer, that was a thrill.”

Meanwhile, the animators were hard at work trying to decode Robin’s auditory output and translate it for a visual medium. In one scene, Goldberg said, “One of Robin’s riffs was the Genie didn’t believe that Aladdin was going to use his third wish to set him free, so he goes, ‘Uh, yeah, right. Booo-wooop.’ John and Ron didn’t know what Booo-wooop was. So I said, ‘Well, that’s Robin’s shorthand for telling a lie. It’s Pinocchio’s nose growing. Can I turn the Genie’s head into Pinocchio? We own the character.’ And so we did!”

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.

“Everybody got a great tan from your sunshine.”

To promote the film’s release in May 1997, Robin and Crystal were awkwardly shoehorned into an episode of Friends, doing shtick on a coffee-shop couch while the sitcom’s principal cast members looked on. They also made a joint appearance on The Tonight Show, where the host, Jay Leno, broke into laughter as he described the plot of Fathers’ Day to his audience.

“When Robin chose to do something,” Crystal added, “he chose it for a particular reason. It was never a money decision, he had plenty of that. It was: Did it connect with his heart?”

The film did poorly, but Robin was unbowed. “I don’t need the coin,” he said. “I keep working because projects are interesting or very bizarre, which I like. I’m exploring, finding humanity. I’m trying to play characters that allow us to look at who and what we are as a species.”

To this day it is regarded as one of the worst films of its year and decade, and derided, as one typical assessment reads, for pandering “so shamelessly in an effort to manipulate every conceivable human emotion” as it “trots out every hoary plot device, no matter how improbable, exploitative or downright moronic.” Even the industry trade paper Variety called it “shamelessly sappy and emotionally manipulative” and said that it “pulls out all the stops in a lead role that gives him carte blanche to careen between extremes of silliness and sentimentality.” “Even so,” its review cautioned, “it’s unwise to underestimate the appeal of a popular star doing crowd-pleasing shtick in slickly packaged Hollywood hokum.”

Sure enough, Patch Adams was a number one film at the box office when it opened on Christmas Day 1998, but the damage was done.

This was payback of a sort from Spielberg, who had often phoned Robin during the making of Schindler’s List when his spirits needed lifting.

He was more circumspect about making reference to his divorce, never mentioning Marsha by name and quipping only obliquely, “In marriage, I’ve learned this: There’s penalties for early withdrawal and depositing in another account. Remember that.”

On the play’s official opening night of March 31, 2011, Robin was showered with notes of celebration and good wishes, sent by his friends and representatives, that ran the gamut from formal sincerity to inappropriate silliness. His CAA agents passed along a card saying they had symbolically adopted a tiger through the World Wildlife Fund, while his managers sent a phony autographed picture of the stage-magic duo Siegfried and Roy, whose cofounder Roy Horn had been mauled in a 2003 tiger attack. The fake inscription read, “To our big cat, We would love to give you a kiss on your opening, but we are in Las Vegas.” It was signed, “Siegfried + What’s left of Roy.”

“Robin was losing his mind and he was aware of it,” she said.