Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

Perhaps, wondered Welsh, the children of executives learn to be resigned about their transient way of life and avoid getting attached to their surroundings, just like army brats—“the kids who’ve been moved from one military post to another,” he said. “It’s sort of like an early intimation of death. Here today and gone tomorrow. We all internalize it, one way or another.” In fact, Robin had been hurt by his family’s relocations, and had to train himself to be ready for whenever the next move might come. Each time he arrived in a new city or a new school, he felt awkwardly on display. “I was always the new boy,” he once said. “This makes you different.”

And it was where he—a not-especially-observant member of an Episcopalian family—attended as many as fourteen bar mitzvahs a year and made some of his first Jewish friends, whose funny customs and fatalistic attitudes would imprint themselves on his mind, and whose crackling, phlegm-filled Yiddish words, instantly hilarious in their enunciation, would live forever on his tongue. “My friends made me an honorary Jew,” he said later, “and used to tell people I went to services at Temple Beth Dublin.”

Once more, Rob’s career choice was going to uproot the Williams family, and his decision would require that Robin leave behind the home and the school he had gotten to know, the friends he had made and the identity he had created for himself, to live in another part of the country that was thousands of miles away and utterly unknown to him. The relationships that Robin had started to develop here, the achievements he had earned, the coping mechanisms he had pieced together, and the sense of self-worth that had taken years to accumulate—all of that was gone, and he would have to rebuild them from scratch, as he’d done before, when they arrived on the West Coast. It was time to start all over again.

Tiburon, the prosperous peninsula town where the Williamses had relocated, sat safely on the northern side of the Golden Gate Bridge, far enough from San Francisco, where the bohemian circus that was the Summer of Love had pulled up its stakes and left town. Rob and Laurie acclimated easily, taking a home on Paradise Drive, a looping stretch of road that snakes along the town’s rangy coastline.

Morse’s students felt she provided them with more than just a new way of looking at the stage—she was teaching them how to engage with their lives. Her lessons, Bob Davis said, were “not only a way to do theater, but a way to channel your energy, a way to think about the universe.”

Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle

“He always had that tinge,” Valerie said. “I had come from that way of thinking, that anything is possible and the world is bright and beautiful. And he made it even brighter and more magical.

One of Pryor’s routines that stuck with Robin was a bit about God coming back to earth to pick up his Son, only to find out that Jesus has been crucified. “You could see the entire audience going, What?” Robin said. “The most strangely beautiful piece. That wasn’t a character. That was just him.”

Robin believed that Mork & Mindy was a hit because of its simplicity. “It was about this cheerful little man doing very simple things—‘Mork buys bread’ or ‘Mork deals with racism,’” he explained. “Mork and Mindy were both very straitlaced and the charm of the show, I think, was in having Pam Dawber deal with me in normal, everyday situations—to which I would react in bizarre ways.” Comparing it to the classic 1950s sitcom The Honeymooners, Robin said, “You know who Ralph Kramden was and you know who [Ed] Norton was; they were at their best in everyday situations and the simpler the better.” If the stories ever became too complicated, he went on, “the show wouldn’t have been nearly as effective.”

As Dawber saw him, Robin tried to portray himself as unconcerned about his emerging celebrity, when in fact he was desirous of it, and, on some level, certain that it would come his way. “Somewhere in his soul, he knew he had this destiny,” she said. “He knew where he was going. He would talk about, ‘When I get my star on Hollywood Boulevard…’ I didn’t know how that worked anyway. But I remember thinking, he knows he’s really going somewhere. Did Robin ever go fight for me, that I’m aware of? No. But not because he was a bad person. 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.”

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.

“You see, my dad used to have this job where he had to move around a lot, and sometimes he’d leave the forwarding address”—and that he created his outrageous voices and characters as a way to keep himself entertained. “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. This Robin confesses to them that he has a hard time saying no to people, whether friends who ask him to spend time with them or strangers who ask him to participate in their benefit shows, for fear of letting anyone down. “You know,” Mindy tells him, “if you learned to say no, you’d probably have a lot more time to yourself.”

an autographed picture of Albert Einstein—a man, he explains, who used to say, “My sense of God is my sense of wonder about the universe.” The newsboy asks Robin to pass it on to his unborn child. “It’s yours now,” the newsboy says. “You’re going to be the keeper of the flame.… You’re a crazy bastard.

In the eyes of his lifelong friend Christopher Reeve, the bond between Robin and Zak was crucial in helping Robin reconnect to his own childhood. “When you see Robin play with any child, you see the child immediately understand him,” Reeve said. “The child in Robin is so open and approachable and immediately apparent.” As Reeve observed, Robin’s humor was rooted in his youth, the sense of solitude he felt and the voices and stories he created to entertain himself.

“It’s weird. Everyone always thinks of their dad as invincible, and in the end, here’s this little, tiny creature, almost all bone. You have to say goodbye to him as this very frail being.” Alluding to The Wizard of Oz, Robin added, “There was this little man behind the curtain, going, ‘Take care of your mother and I love you and I’ve been very worried about certain things. And I’m afraid, but I’m not afraid.’ It’s an amazing combination to exhilaration and sadness at the same time, because the god transforms to a man.”

Ennio Morricone’s main theme from The Mission, the Roland Joffé film about a Jesuit evangelist in eighteenth-century Central America. It is a gentle and elegiac score,

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).”

Sacks said. “It was like suddenly acquiring a younger twin. This disquieted both of us a bit, and we decided that there needed to be some space between us so that he could create a character of his own—based on me, perhaps, but with a life and personality of its own.” Sacks could not help but talk about Robin in neurological and somewhat esoteric terms. “Robin has an almost instant access to parts of the mind—dreamlike parts, with phantasmagoric associations—that most of us don’t,” he said. He compared Robin to Theodore Hook, a nineteenth-century British writer and artist whose talents included the ability to improvise entire operas in which he would sing all the roles.

With men, especially, LaGravenese said, “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.” It was obvious to Terry Gilliam that Robin should play the role of the wildly imaginative but deeply wounded Parry;

Robin began to slip into one of his spontaneous characters: he spoke in a Southern rustler’s accent and started off calmly, speaking of what a good, loving person he was—“And then there was the time in the bathtub—well, I held a person underwater a little bit—and uh, okay, I mean they died—but it wasn’t my fault.” “He was, in fact, a total, psychotic, probably serial killer,” Gilliam said. “But he was the most sweet, charming, voluble character you’d ever want to talk to. I just was in tears, it was so funny.”

It was just jokes, as opposed to a brilliant character realized. Those are two different things.”

Mrs. Doubtfire, in which Robin played a struggling, soon-to-be single father who assumes the disguise of a golden-haired female housekeeper so he can spend more time with his children, was perhaps the perfect distillation of his life up to that point. It was the cinematic embodiment of the philosophy he’d learned from his own upbringing, through two marriages, and now his own experiences as a husband and father: family is where you find it; all are welcome and no one ever loses their membership.

Family is where you find it; All are welcome, and no one ever loses membership

As Robin said of one such part he would play in this period, he was not interested in purely good or bad guys. He wanted to take on figures of elastic morality and see how much further he could stretch it. “It’s not black and white,” he explained. “There is this gray, going on constantly. A confusion, a doubt. A conscience being tweaked and pushed, back and forth. A man making a decision, going against his conscience and, in the end, hoping that he can find his way back.”

Think young and you’ll never grow old, The years will pass you by, Birthdays are for merrymaking, Present giving and birthday caking, Age is the state of your mind As the days of your years unfold, Don’t live in the past, Right up to the last Think young and you’ll never grow old

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.

I realize, no, it’s not Robin.” Instead, Bridges realized he was looking at Radioman, the transient photographer and film-set loiterer he and Robin had often crossed paths with during the making of The Fisher King. The fact that he had encountered Radioman on this particular night, Bridges felt, was a sure sign that Robin was trying to reach out to him from whatever part of the cosmos he now occupied.

Gilliam said. “Robin dealt with forces far greater than most of us understand, and he controlled them in weird ways. In the moment he was thinking, ‘Nobody loves me anymore,’ another side of his brain was getting Family Guy on the air in England, where everybody becomes Robin Williams.” 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.

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people

to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived here. This is to have succeeded.

“I used to think the worst thing in life is ending up all alone. It isn’t. The worst thing in life is ending up with people that make you feel all alone.” As Goldthwait now explained, “That was just a movie. That couldn’t be farther from the truth in regards to Robin. You loved Robin and he loved you.”

“I’m not a doctor,” Goldthwait said, “but something happened to Robin a few years back. Again, I am not a doctor. But something affected his brain.”

She closed with a quotation from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, just before the title character—a wandering, innocent space traveler—allows himself to be bitten by a poisonous snake. A portion of it read: In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night.… You—only you—will have stars that can laugh! Zak

their mental acuity can flicker on and off, like a light switch. “They’ll just shut down for an hour a day,” Dr. Scharre said. “They’re not asleep—they’re awake. They’re just staring off and not doing much. It’s not that they’re comatose or anything. But they sit there, and then all of a sudden, they’re back with it.”

“People can appear drowsy or sleeping, have staring spells, think illogically and incoherently—and these episodes wax and wane, lasting seconds or minutes or hours. And they’re unpredictable.” The symptoms of Lewy body disease are distinct from those of other disorders. Unlike people with Alzheimer’s disease, who have difficulty forming memories, people with Lewy body disease can store memories but have difficulty retrieving them. Unlike Parkinson’s disease, which damages the motor-control portions of the brain, Lewy body disease goes on to attack parts of the brain that govern visual and spatial control as well as decision making.

Certain drugs, including medications prescribed for Parkinson’s, can help treat some of the symptoms associated with Lewy body disease, such as the movement problems, aberrant behaviors, and sleep disruptions. “The medications help a little bit, but not a whole lot,” Dr. Scharre said. “We give them in low doses, but if you go up higher, more often they’re going to get side effects,

‘Robin was very aware that he was losing his mind and there was nothing he could do about it.’” Eric Idle mourned him as a man “misdiagnosed with Parkinsons” and “an undiagnosed victim of dementia with Lewy bodies,”

“He died from Lewy body dementia,” Goldthwait said, “but the world wants it to be about something else, depression, drugs, career, relationships, etc. He had a disease that attacked his brain. “My own opinion is that that’s what actually changed his perception of reality,” he said.

As I would later write about that night, the mechanical key hidden in his back was winding down, and the flow of free associations and zany voices was slowing to a trickle.