Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

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.

The attic was the playground of his mind, where he could stretch his imagination to its maximum dimensions.

“I was always the new boy,” he once said. “This makes you different.”

Several weeks went by before he let go of his old school’s dress code and allowed himself to wear blue jeans. Soon after, someone gave him a life-altering article of clothing: his first Hawaiian shirt. At that point, he said, “I was gone; I got into a whole wild phase and I learned to totally let go.”

an invisible revolution was taking place in Robin’s mind, allowing him to see, for perhaps the first time in his life, that he had the ability to choose his own path.

Dunn noticed Robin offstage: “He was standing by the piano, and he had a baton in his hand, like a drum major’s baton, and he began talking to it. And it began talking back.” For what felt like twenty minutes, Dunn said, Robin and the baton conversed, kidded, and argued with each other—with Robin providing both of the voices of course, and a crowd of actors and crew members supplying a grateful audience. When Dunn at last got home at two a.m., he woke up his wife to tell her, “I saw a young man do something tonight that I have never seen before. And this kid is going to go somewhere.”

“I’d never seen so much energy contained in one person,” Reeve said. “He was like an untied balloon that had been inflated and immediately released. I watched in awe as he virtually caromed off the walls of classrooms and hallways. To say that he was ‘on’ would be a major understatement.”

“Everybody got by however they could,” she said. “Everybody’s private life was whatever it was.”

Robin’s Juilliard classmates felt he was straining at the margins of a system designed to break students down and put them back together like new.

One side of you is just a monster onstage—the other is painfully awkward, really. The charisma of Robin came from these battling forces.”

those who worked closely with Robin knew, his true gift was not necessarily in being purely spontaneous but in creating the appearance of spontaneity.

For this fraternity of performers that Robin was now a part of, drugs and alcohol were a means of celebrating success and prolonging the uniquely exquisite ecstasy of a good night on the stage. They were also a last line of defense against that most terrifying fear of failure—the dreaded sense of uncertainty that came with every stand-up set.

As Ritter recalled, “The first bit I ever saw him do was a kiddie-show host, and it was the most demented thing you can imagine. He brought these puppets onstage and did these weird voices, and wound up doing an S&M routine with the puppets that’s indescribable.

“I get the feeling that if Williams were to let it all out, his audience would need a scholastic aptitude test to get in the door.”

Robin and Warhol went shopping at thrift stores.

Robin seemed up for anything, and his appetites and his endurance far exceeded anyone else’s.

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.

Eric Idle, of Monty Python, was in the audience that night, and he said it was “a ruthless crowd. Quite funny people were being booed off and howled off within seconds of going on. And then Robin came on, and he was just breathtaking. 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.”

In Markowitz’s script for Good Morning, Vietnam, a fictional version of Cronauer arrives in Saigon. At his first appearance, as he deplanes from a flight from Greece, he is described as “dazed,” with “a crazed, anesthesia-oriented smile, and wears mirrored sunglasses, sandals, a jacket with a name tag that reads, ‘Hiya,’ a scarf knitted by a grandmother, not necessarily his, Jamaican flour sack pants, a USAF hat, and a Greek peasant shirt stained with juices of many lands.”

“He’s a kind of writer, without a pen,” Weir said of Robin. “He just writes in the air.”

This afternoon—all by myself—I went to see “Dead Poets Society.” It’s a fine film and your performance in it is superb. I admire you greatly and I thank you for enriching the lives of so many through your art. You certainly contribute many verses as “the power of the play goes on.” Gratefully, Fred Rogers

“We were fucking bushed, man,” Bridges said. “It was very hard to smile, and any jokes that were coming out of Robin were dim. I look over and I see a couple of crates under this bridge. And I tap Robin and motion to him, and we sit on these crates. And as soon as our asses hit the crates, a whole bevy of pigeons—there must have been about twenty of ’em up there on the bridge—decide to just unload on us. They shit all over us. And it goes on and on. And then it goes on a little bit more. That was it. And we just looked at each other, and we didn’t smile or laugh. It was like fucking Jack Benny, man. We both looked straight ahead, covered in pigeon shit. “It’s a weird comment to make, but the universe just kind of trumped Robin on this,” Bridges said. It was, he added, “the only time that I remember Robin being at a loss for words.”

Carson introduced Robin with a solemnity and seriousness he did not often exhibit on the air, saying, “In this business, there are comedians, there are comics, and once in a while, rarely, somebody rises above and supersedes that and becomes a comic persona unto themselves. I never ceased to be amazed at the versatility and the wonderful work that Robin Williams does.”

family is where you find it; all are welcome and no one ever loses their membership.

He also claimed to have taken the character out for a test drive in a San Francisco sex shop. “I tried to buy a double-headed dildo,” Robin said. “I was going, ‘That one, right there, the big one. Do you have anything without veins?’ … Finally the guy realized it was me, and went, ‘Get out of here, Robin, you asshole!’”

Robin was in a combative mood. He had something to prove. He wore a short-sleeve Southwestern-style shirt, and the set was sparsely decorated, with a table full of water bottles that he would constantly gulp from. An image of one of his eyes hovered over everything. Despite the setting, Robin told the audience, “This is not going to be your normal night of the-a-tuh. This will be Shakespeare with a strap-on.” What followed was an angry, scattershot performance, uncharacteristic in its lack of focus and its absence of charity.

journalist Lillian Ross, who wrote extensively about Robin for the New Yorker and befriended him and became close with his family, “Robin was a genius, and genius doesn’t produce normal men next door who are good family men and look after their wives and children. Genius requires its own way of looking at and living in the world, and it isn’t always compatible with conventional ways of living.”

Once Robin was discharged from intensive care and returned home for further convalescence, he realized he felt different, too. What he desired most of all was human interaction, in whatever form he could receive it. “That’s the weird thing after the heart surgery is, you appreciate every fucking connection with a person,” he said. “It’s so fucking amazing. Human contact after you’ve had heart surgery is pretty fucking valuable. You appreciate little things, like walks on the beach with a defibrillator.”

Robin didn’t come to the Throckmorton to be idolized, but he did benefit emotionally from his visits.

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.”

Robin’s children had always been a dependable source of some of the purest, most natural joy he had experienced.

As the film critic Bilge Ebiri tweeted with uncommon precision that day, “You start off as a kid seeing Robin Williams as a funny man. You come of age realizing many of his roles are about keeping darkness at bay.”

On the back of the program was an illustration of a hummingbird, similar to the one that had adorned the invitation to Robin’s sixtieth birthday party, only this one was clad in a suit of armor; inside the pamphlet, opposite the list of speakers, was an inspirational quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived here. This is to have succeeded.

“I always wished he would belong more to our family than he did to the world,” he said. “But that’s a selfish notion, I realize. Folks like him don’t just grow on trees. It was only fair for us to share. Everybody deserves to laugh so hard it hurts, and everybody deserves his fairy tales.”

Robin had bequeathed all of his distinguishing qualities—what he looked like; what he sounded like; his signature; his name—to a charitable organization, set up by his attorneys, which would not be allowed to profit off them in any form for twenty-five years. It was an unusually forward-thinking way to contemplate how technology and entertainment might evolve over the next quarter century, optimistic and dystopian in equal proportions. There could be no new movies, TV shows, or advertisements in which he could appear or be digitally inserted; no new stand-up routines that could be created from his voice; no holograms or other as-yet undreamt-of media in which some simulacrum of him could be conjured up and made to perform his best-loved roles and routines—at least not before the year 2039. Until then, the human race would have to be satisfied with the finite amount of Robin Williams content he had produced while he was alive.

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.