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As Todd, Rob’s older son, later described his father, Rob’s reticence obscured an ability to quietly scan a room, observe the people around him, and retain everything he heard them say.
I do this...
(“I like to fish, that’s one of my hobbies,” he joked. “The rest of them I can’t discuss.”)
“Goldilocks and the Three Bears” as told by William F. Buckley Jr. (“Goldie, an Aryan stereotype, and Lox, a Jewish soul food, combined to form a bourgeois archetype, who in time comes in contact with three bears, dark bears, maybe brown bears, maybe black bears, let’s just call them Third World bears”).
Amazing.
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.”
The episode, titled “Mork Meets Robin Williams,” double-cast Robin as himself, the superstar comedian, who is visiting Boulder for a solar-energy benefit concert, where Mindy is tasked with obtaining an interview with him.
Robin played a street flasher and then Ronald Reagan inside the frame of a TV set: “I understand what it’s like to be homeless because many of my friends are in escrow right now,” he said. “Won’t you please help little Baby Doc Duvalier and Ferdinand Marcos? Because we’re trying to establish a thing called Club Fled.”
“I don’t have it anymore,” says sixty-year-old Robin. “I just can’t do it like I used it to. I’m too old. Besides, nobody cares. Nobody remembers me.”
I have a feeling that this is prescient.
The first was a Lincoln Center Theater revival of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in which he and Steve Martin would play the existentially beleaguered hobos Estragon and Vladimir. The play, directed by Mike Nichols and with a cast that also featured F. Murray Abraham and Bill Irwin, was Robin’s first major theater piece since achieving fame;
Must see.
‘Mauschwitz.’
Brilliant.
She developed a shorthand signal on set, to indicate to Robin when his ad-libbing was getting too shticky: she would curl her hand into a fist and hold it against her crotch. “It meant ‘More balls,’” Marshall explained.
When Hoffman called for a scene to be halted because he’d lost his motivation, Robin hit him with a retort that had supposedly been flung at him by Laurence Olivier on the set of Marathon Man: “When all else fails, try acting.” So when Robin later stumbled over his own lines, Hoffman peered into the camera and asked, “What can you expect from Mork?” After nailing the next take, Robin responded, “Ishtar is on television tonight.”
“The weekend would have been so much harder for me without you there,” Reeve wrote to him afterward. “Everybody got a great tan from your sunshine.”
The Final Cut,
Look up.
Though the nuptials had been meant to end with the release of trained doves, nature intervened with an earlier display. “This white butterfly appears out of nowhere and goes straight down the aisle and flies over, between them and above them, and flies away,” the comedian Rick Overton recalled. “Who pays for that service? Everyone’s getting their phones out, looking on Google—who does that? If I’m the dove guy, I’m going, ‘Oh, well, fuck me. I’ve got the whole dove thing and this butterfly shows up?’ It just happened. We chose to make that a good omen.”
Later in the theater’s green room, Pitta and Robin were mingling with another comedian who had brought his service dog. As Pitta recounted the scene, “I just casually said, ‘Another comedian I know has a service dog. The dog wakes her up when she chokes in her sleep.’ And Robin instantly said, ‘Oh, a Heimlich retriever.’ It got a huge laugh. He just sat there and had a little smile on his face.”
On Tuesday evening, August 12, Robin’s children made their first public remarks, in three individual statements. Zak wrote, “I would ask those that loved him to remember him by being as gentle, kind, and generous as he would be. Seek to bring joy to the world as he sought.” Zelda poignantly joked, “To those he touched who are sending kind words, know that one of his favorite things in the world was to make you all laugh. As for those who are sending negativity, know that some small, giggling part of him is sending a flock of pigeons to your house to poop on your car. Right after you’ve had it
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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.
