Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

but in their totality these things did not add up to him. 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.

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.”

In exchanges like these, Masada said Robin never talked down to him or treated him as an inferior. “He said hello and how are you, like he genuinely cared for you,” he said. “And I genuinely connected with him.”

Later in his life, when Robin was open about his drug habit, he said that cocaine was so readily available to him that he almost never had to pay for it. “They give it to you for free,” he said. “‘You have a drug problem?’ ‘No problem. Everybody’s got it.’

“I saw the way this dude was dressed,” said Ritter, “in baggy pants, suspenders, a beaten-up tux over high-topped sneakers, a straw hat with the brim falling off, John Lennon glasses with no glass in the frames, and I thought, ‘Well, this guy is definitely going for the sight gag.’ I was almost a bit suspicious. So I watched carefully and he turned out to be the funniest guy I’ve ever seen.”

When Garry Marshall asked Hallin what kind of work Robin did, she told him, “He stands on a street corner, does a lot of voices and impressions, and passes the hat.” Marshall was unconvinced. “Are you kidding?” he said. “This is who you want me to hire?” “Well, you’ve got to understand, it’s an awfully full hat,” Hallin replied.

“What helped matters was that the Happy Days actors were very secure,” he said. “Henry Winkler and Ron Howard, they were not flibbertigibbets. So when they saw this talented man, who they didn’t know from Adam either, they both gave him plenty of room to work.”

“There was a level of jealousy, but it wasn’t about his gifts,” Crystal said. “It was that I was going to be confined to one character, and he walked around with a million in his mind, and had a character that would let him do all of them.”

Robin was just hyperactive and everywhere, and didn’t like conflict. He didn’t want to be in trouble with me. He didn’t want to be in trouble with anybody. But he wasn’t going to go lobby for me, because he’d probably forget ten minutes after he walked away from me.”

One night, Valerie was in the audience at the Comedy Store with Brian Seff, their friend from Rick and Ruby, as they watched Robin finish up a set. Robin was holding forth on the strangeness of being famous, and he said to the audience, “There’s girls that just come up to me. I’ve never seen them before, and they’re like, ‘Excuse me, would you—?” At this point in the riff, Robin pointed at his crotch. “He’s saying it like it’s a hardship,” Seff recalled. “And Valerie yells, ‘Oh, you love it.’” There was no question that Robin had heard her remark from the audience because he reacted to it: “Oh, now my wife’s heckling me,” he responded.

As hard as she tried to put on a diplomatic face, Valerie had no illusions about Robin’s escapades: he was drinking, he was using drugs, and he was committing acts of infidelity.

“I just loved that man to pieces,” Valerie said many years later. “And I wanted him to be happy and this was making him happy, so I moved over a lot. And the more I moved over and created space, it left a vacuum. And you know about vacuums. There were a lot of people who really jumped in to fill that vacuum.”

Robin did not personally know Lennon, but the shooting left him feeling shaken and vulnerable. “When that happened, I saw a change in Robin,” Brian Seff recalled. “There was some paranoia.” One night that winter, Robin was coming off the stage at the Comedy Store when he was approached by a member of the audience.

“Don’t you understand that a star is just a big ball of glowing hot gas?” he asks Mindy at one point. “He’s just an ordinary human being that’s been hyped by an advertising campaign.”

“You know,” Mindy tells him, “if you learned to say no, you’d probably have a lot more time to yourself.” “Maybe that’s the last thing I want,” he answers quietly.

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.

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. And it was just great to see a real professional, totally comfortable at dismissing these drunken louts who thought they had something to say.”

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.”

By now, Robin’s cocaine use had become an ingrained part of his nightly post-work routine at Mork & Mindy, as much a part of this ritual as his stops at the Hollywood comedy clubs.

“He was so good that he could just phone it in, and the audience bought it,” said Storm, who eventually confronted Robin about his out-of-control conduct.

The problems created by Robin’s misconduct spilled out of his private life and into his workplace, eroding the boundaries between them. The gossip columns were again taking note of Valerie’s public feuds with other women, and Robin’s coworkers found themselves in the awkward position of having to cover for him. “When we’d find out Valerie was coming to the set, we’d hide the woman that was dating him,” Storm said. “We’d have to say, ‘Get her out of here.’ To protect Robin.”

“He went, ‘What? I was with him last night! I was with him last night!’” Dawber said. She could see that Robin was in pain but wanted to make sure he did not ignore the larger lesson in all of this. “I said, ‘Robin, if that ever happens to you, I will find you and kill you first.’”

“Let’s face it,” she added, “Robin is a stimulus junkie.”

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.

“He had never played a musical instrument at this point,” said Phillips, who also traveled with Robin to Munich and to New York. “The only thing he’d ever done was dabble on the harmonica.”

“I think I chose them because I didn’t want to do what was easy.” Then, almost immediately, he added: “I’ll probably end up, next day you’ll see, ‘Look, it’s Mork & Mindy! He’s back and he’s crazier than ever!’”

“Eddie is ideal—he knows exactly what he does and how to get it out on film perfectly,” Robin said. “I don’t—I keep trying different things.”

“It wasn’t like he rooted for other people to fail—he was a classy guy,” Tramer said. “But it was kind of weird. Maybe not weird. Maybe it makes total sense. He was very happy for them and really liked them, but it was like, When’s my turn coming? When’s my turn going to come to have a hit movie?”

When one person in the crowd is heard calling on Robin to do some improv, he teasingly shouts back, “What do you think the fuckin’ last thirty minutes has been?”

Over the course of these shows, Marsha said, “Robin was complaining, in a joking way, about the bimbettes who knocked on his door at the hotel. I asked him, ‘Why are you so surprised? If I weren’t working with you and I didn’t know how screwed up you are, I’d be interested in you!’ And he said that gave him a feeling that he could be really loved.”

was hardly a secret to their colleagues on Good Morning, Vietnam that Robin and Marsha had become romantically involved.

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).”

Marsha, Robin said, was teaching him to separate his life from his work, “like church and state. Marsha makes me happy—she’s an amazing woman, a gentle, great soul, with a deep intelligence. Look how she’s helped my career.

The appeal of The Fisher King was undeniable to Robin: he was eager for another opportunity to collaborate with Gilliam, and he understood clearly why the material resonated with him. “It is about damaged people, trying to find redemption and connection,” Robin said.

“Before I knew him better, I thought, oh, shit, here’s this crazy comic,” Bridges said. “While I’ve got this serious monologue, he’s going to try to crack me up and wink at me. And it turned out to be the antithesis of that. He had no words or anything. He just gave me this quiet, meditative support, the way you imagine someone who you love being in a coma, and you’re talking to them. You imagine that, in some way, you know they can hear you.”

But what Robin wanted more than anything else was time: time to appreciate the fruits of his labor, time to enjoy the home he had back in San Francisco, time to be with Marsha, Zak, and Zelda.

“And then,” he said, “I became involved with Marsha.” Marsha dismissed the idea that she had somehow been Robin’s savior. Still, she said, “He needed stability. I think most people need one person in their life that they know they can rely upon. I’m Robin’s safety net. He knows I’m strong.”

As Robin later explained, “I started doing a voice that sounded like Margaret Thatcher, and I realized that would scare the shit out of a kid. ‘Go to bed or mommy’s going to fire a cruise missile.’”

He had lived in the Castro district when he and Marsha started their relationship, and, as Robin said, “It’s a neighborhood. Yeah, there are a lot of gay men and gay women, but it has the same values as your neighborhood. They want peace and quiet. They want to live their lives, and they do have children—[here he slipped into his redneck voice] ‘It’s a frightening thing. Tell me no!’—from previous marriages, artificial insemination, a hundred different ways. It is family-oriented. People don’t acknowledge it, but that’s the reality.”

“He depended on her,” said their friend Lisa Birnbach. “Anything indie, basically, was something that she recommended he do. Marsha had his back in every way.

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.”

In What Dreams May Come, he was something like a modern-day Dante, “guiding us mortals through the rings of hell” in a story where “death and loss make his characters belatedly understand the gift of life.”

Many of the same qualities that had made his live Broadway set so off-putting—the vulgarity, the fatalism—played perfectly in front of battle-weary troops who had no use for delicacy or euphemism.

By now, it was no secret to these two close coworkers that Robin had started drinking again. It had never been entirely possible for Spencer or Minns to babysit Robin on his location shoots, and the task became a lost cause when he would decide to go out at night, on his own, and make a guest appearance at a comedy club.

Crystal said it was never a question that he would be there to lift Robin up when he fell down. “A sickness is a sickness, which is what his alcoholism was,” he said. “It’s not excusing it. And we were there for Marsha and the kids, too.” “It was a test of our friendship,” Crystal added. “We loved the family, we loved the kids, and they got hurt. That was the darkest time.”

But even in that short conversation, it was unmistakable how gaunt and worn down Robin looked.

“I did that show only because I wanted to see Robin,” she said.

By the time he reached Vancouver, Robin’s weight loss was severe and his motor impairments were growing harder to disguise. Even his once-prodigious memory was rebelling against him; he was having difficulty remembering his lines.

When Robin finished his work on Night at the Museum and returned home to Tiburon in early May, Susan said her husband was “like a 747 airplane coming in with no landing gear.”

May 28, 2014, Robin was finally given an explanation for the tangled lattice of sicknesses that had been plaguing him. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder that attacks the central nervous system, impairing motor functions and cognition, eventually leading to death.