Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 194

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Robin," by Dave Itzkoff.



No one knows quite how to describe what they have just seen, and the precise words will elude them for months to come. Sure, it was a comedy routine, but the performer didn’t tell identifiable jokes with setups and punch lines. He wasn’t a monologist or a put-down man, an impressionist or a close observer of quotidian detail. 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. 

But who was he? Except for that one stray moment when he had spoken a few tentative words in his surprisingly stately voice and then metamorphosed into a French undersea explorer, Robin had never let the audience see his true self. Some part of him would be present in every role and stand-up set he would play over the next thirty-five years, 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. 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. 

Everyone felt as if they knew him, even if they did not always admire the work he did. Millions of people loved him for his generosity of spirit, his quickness of mind, and the hopefulness he inspired. Some lost their affection for him in later years, as the quality of his work declined, even as they held out hope that he’d find the thing—the project, the character, the spark—that had made him great before, as great as he was when he first burst into the cultural consciousness. And when he was gone, we all wished we’d had him just a little bit longer.

The attic was the playground of his mind, where he could stretch his imagination to its maximum dimensions. It was his sanctuary from the world and his vantage point above it—a place where he could observe and absorb it all, at a height where nobody could touch him. It was also a terribly lonely refuge, and its sense of solitude followed him beyond its walls. He emerged from the room with a sense of himself that, to outsiders, could seem inscrutable and upside down. In a room full of strangers, it compelled him to keep everyone entertained and happy, and it left him feeling utterly deserted in the company of the people who loved him most. 

These fundamental attributes had been handed down to Robin by his parents long before the Williams family arrived at Stonycroft. His father, Rob, was a fastidious, plainspoken, and practical Midwesterner, a war hero who believed in the value of a hard day’s work. His approval, awarded fitfully and begrudgingly, would elude Robin well into his adulthood. His mother, Laurie, was in many ways her husband’s opposite: she was a lighthearted, fanciful, and free-spirited Southerner, adoring of Robin and attentive to him. But with her frivolity came unpredictability, and her affirmation, which was just as vital to Robin, could prove just as hard to come by. 

On some level, Robin understood that he was the perfect blend of his parents, two drastically different people who, after earlier missteps, had found their lifelong matches in each another. As he later acknowledged, “The craziness comes from my mother. The discipline comes from my dad.”

In March 1976, Robin made his professional San Francisco theater debut in Harold Pinter’s The Lover, about a husband and wife in a role-playing relationship, at the Gumption, a fringe theater in the city’s Haight-Ashbury district. When its director, Cynthia “Kiki” Wallis, first encountered Robin, she found him so destitute she gave him $100 for his wardrobe. As an actor, he seemed to care more about making the role interesting for himself each night than delivering a consistent performance from show to show. “Serious was very difficult for Robin; to remember what it was he had just done and repeat it, wrenching,” Wallis said. “He did it every performance beautifully, differently—close enough, but fresh.” And sometimes he took it too far: “He had gotten used to getting a laugh and one night he didn’t,” she said. “So then he did a Tarzan thing with his voice, and he got the laugh. I told him after, ‘You got the laugh, but you broke the show rule.’”

Comedy offered Robin a personal outlet, a release valve that could help him get past his demoralizing breakup. And it paid just enough that Robin felt he could support himself; if he pushed himself and hustled hard, he could scrape together as much as $25 a night. “I was self-sustaining,” he explained, “and I could say, ‘No, Pop, I don’t need that check, but thanks.’” Yet he couldn’t seem to gauge for himself how naturally he took to this strange new discipline. Lorenzo Matawaran, another aspiring comedian who also studied with Kidder and became a friend of Robin’s, recalled, “Robin got up and blew everyone away, but he was meek.… He’d do a monster set and then come sit down and ask us in that little voice, ‘Did I go over?’”

Robin worked through some of these feelings in an unusual episode of Mork & Mindy that aired at the start of 1981, in the middle of the show’s third season. 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. The story treats it as a given that Robin is chased by adoring fans wherever he goes; one of its running jokes is that Mork is frequently mistaken for Robin, though neither of them can quite see the resemblance. Mork, in his alien naïveté, cannot understand why Earthlings prize celebrity or this Robin Williams person. “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.” 

When he and Mindy finally meet Robin in his dressing room—“You’re not from the Enquirer, are you?” Robin asks them—he is soft-spoken and mildly ashamed of the status afforded him. With a mixture of self-deprecation and surprising truthfulness, he explains that he got into comedy as the result of a lonely childhood—“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.” 

“Maybe that’s the last thing I want,” he answers quietly. 

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.

That morning, Robin had come to work a little late and a little bleary, as usual, and he told Dawber about his unusual night. “He said, ‘Wow, I was with Belushi last night, and boy,’” Dawber recalled. “First of all, Robin never had judgment, because he was doing a lot of the same stuff, but certainly not what Belushi was doing.” He recounted for her his missed connection with De Niro, his uneasy visit to the bungalow, and how magnificently Belushi had played his guitar, as stoned as he was. “‘He could hardly stand up, and yet he could play the guitar to perfection,’—that’s what he was saying,” Dawber said. “There was some girl there and John was just so stoned. That’s what Robin told me about that, and I went, ‘Wow. Okay.’” 

Just as the cast and crew were preparing to break for lunch, they received the news that had been rippling across Hollywood that day: Belushi had died in his bungalow at the Chateau. The producers knew that someone had to tell Robin, but fearing that the information would devastate him, they felt that it was best delivered by a trusted friend like Dawber. “They said, ‘Will you tell Robin?’” she recalled. “I said, ‘Oh, God, Robin was with him last night.’ And they said they knew. I don’t know how they knew.” 

Dawber waited for a discreet moment when she and Robin were walking back from the Paramount commissary: “I said, ‘I’ve got something really terrible to tell you, Robin. He went, ‘What? What?’ And I said that John Belushi was found dead last night.” Robin found it incomprehensible to hear this about someone he had seen only a few hours earlier. “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.’” 

By now, she and Robin had made their way back to Stage 27, and they could hear the growing clamor of the studio audience being let in for the taping of that night’s show. Dawber started looking for her script when she saw Robin standing with his hands cupped over his crotch, which for him was a sign of pensive contemplation. He was looking down at the ground, still processing the ultimatum that she had just given him. In a soft, solemn voice, he answered, “That’s never going to happen to me, Dawbs.” 

As he grieved for a friend who could have had decades of great work ahead of him, Robin did not need any assistance to see how Belushi’s death communicated an unmistakable message, addressed directly to him and all but hand-delivered to his doorstep.



It would have been easy and understandable for Robin to say that his heartache had driven him back to drinking, but he denied that this was the case. “It’s more selfish than that. It’s just literally being afraid. And you think, oh, this will ease the fear. And it doesn’t.” His list of fears consisted of a single entry: “Everything,” he said. “It’s just a general all-round arggghhh. It’s fearfulness and anxiety.”