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. Behind all the artifice, all the accents and characters, all the blurs of motion and flashes of energy, there was just a lone man facing the crowd, who decided which levers to pull and which buttons to press, which voices and facades to put on, how much to reveal and how much to keep hidden.

The real Robin was a modest, almost inconspicuous man, who never fully believed he was worthy of the monumental fame, adulation, and accomplishments he would achieve. He shared the authentic person at his core with considerable reluctance, but he also felt obliged to give a sliver of himself to anyone he encountered even fleetingly. It wounded him deeply to think that he had denied a memorable Robin Williams experience to anyone who wanted it, yet the people who spent years by his side were left to feel that he had kept some fundamental part of himself concealed, even from them.

And when he was gone, we all wished we’d had him just a little bit longer.

The episode ends with Mork delivering his regular weekly report back to Orson. Standing in total blackness, dressed in his red spacesuit, Mork explains what he has learned about the cost of fame and the loss of privacy that comes with it. “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.” The unseen Orson responds, “I’m not buying it, Mork. It sounds to me like they have it made.” “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.

This is the real Robin Williams.

Robin still had this effect on people, even after having been in the public eye for decades. They could not believe that he was flesh and blood, like they were, and not just an image on a screen; the notion that he was someone who could be encountered and interacted with was almost too much to comprehend.

Nearly everyone I have spoken to who knew Robin—and most knew him far better than I did—has described experiencing something akin to what I felt when I wasn’t allowed into his dressing room. They believed there was some part of himself that he withheld from them; everyone got a piece of him and a fortunate few got quite a lot of him, but no one got all of him.

Robin moved quickly in his courtship of Susan Schneider, a graphic artist and designer he met in 2007, and the two were married in 2011. Some of Robin’s friends regarded Susan, who was herself a recovering alcoholic, as a positive influence in his life, but unlike Marsha, she was more focused on her own work and was not interested in being Robin’s professional collaborator or managing him on a day-to-day basis.