Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

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  For Max, who opened my eyes

  The creative adult is the child who survived.

  —provenance unknown

  his mother called him “WILD THING!”

  and Max said “I’LL EAT YOU UP!”

  so he was sent to bed without eating anything.

  That very night in Max’s room a forest grew

  and grew—

  and grew until his ceiling hung with vines

  and the walls became the world all around.

  —Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

  PROLOGUE

  It is the late summer of 1977, and no one in the Great American Music Hall feels like laughing anymore. For hours now, this old, ornate San Francisco theater, which even its admirers have been known to compare to a Barbary Coast whorehouse, has been filling with cigarette smoke. The fetid air has been baking under the lights supplied by a camera crew. The crowd, some six hundred locals dressed in leisure suits and floral prints, are gathered around oak tables, at balconies, and beneath electric chandeliers. They have been sitting here all evening, lured by the promise of free entertainment and the spectacle of a television taping. These are culturally adventurous people in a freethinking city that has lately exploded with comic talent; they’ve seen and heard a lot of stand-up already, over the years and on this particular bill, packed with performers whom some of them recognize from the nearby clubs. But the electricity at the top of the show has dissipated as the sweltering night has dragged on. No one has been permitted to leave their seats, not even to go to the bathroom; the atmosphere has gone from stuffy to insufferable in this vast and windowless auditorium. It’s hard to imagine a room less receptive to another stand-up comedy act.

  Onto the stage strides a handsome, compact man of twenty-six, unfazed by either the steamy temperature or the irritable audience. Dressed in a brown suit, he is a bizarre sight against the gold velvet curtain of the music hall; a battered white T-shirt is visible beneath his suit jacket, its collar barely holding back a generous tuft of chest hair similar to the shaggy patches spreading up his arms and over his hands. He wears an uncomfortable-looking Russian fur hat on his head, and he is dabbed with sweat as a wide, earnest smile unfurls across his face. To anyone watching, he might as well be Russian, a suspicion seemingly confirmed when he speaks for the first time, over the diminishing applause, and says to the audience in a heavy accent, “Thank you for the clap, thank you very much.” A roar of laughter erupts from the still-puzzled crowd. The comedian’s act has not even started, and he already has them in his hands.

  Over the span of his set, this young man, Robin Williams, will transform himself into any number of characters: in one moment, he is a fidgety, eager-to-please Soviet stand-up comic; the next, a stoned-out Superman, flying backward and upside-down while under the influence of drugs; in still another, the contorted Quasimodo, as portrayed by Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He pauses briefly to talk in his natural speaking voice—its cadence so oddly formal that it sounds like he is playing another role—so he can introduce a mid-act commercial in which he is Jacques Cousteau. Peeling off his coat to expose a pair of well-worn rainbow suspenders, Robin is soaked in his own perspiration by the end of his four-minute presentation. Like the needy alter ego he adopted at the start of the routine, he just wants this audience to like him so badly, and he will assume as many identities as it takes until he has achieved this goal. It is a mission he has certainly accomplished by the end of his act, when every member of that exhausted audience is standing on his or her feet, clapping, whistling, and cheering for more. Many of them ask themselves the same question that millions of TV viewers will wonder when this strange, silly, sweaty man’s performance is broadcast a few weeks later: Who was he?

  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.

  PART ONE

  COMET

  1

  PUNKY AND LORD POSH

  The house, on the northeast corner of Opdyke Road and Woodward Avenue, was unlike any other. The giant old mansion, nearly seventy years old, stood lovely and lopsided in its asymmetrical design, with its roofs and lofts of varying heights and chimneys that reached into the sky. Here in Bloomfield Hills, a wealthy northern suburb of Detroit where top executives of the automobile industry spent their evenings and weekends in rustic comfort with their wives, children, and servants, the unusual dwelling was more home than a family needed. It sat on a country estate that spanned some thirty acres of former farmland, with a gatehouse, gardens, barns, and a spacious garage that could hold more than two dozen cars. It even had its own name, Stonycroft, a harsh and daunting moniker for a tranquil, out-of-the-way setting. There were few neighbors for miles around and no distractions to disturb its residents from their serenity, aside from the occasional slicing at golf balls that could be heard from a nearby country club. More often, the chilly residence echoed with i
ts own emptiness while its current tenants left many of its forty rooms mostly unoccupied, unheated, and unused. But on its highest floor, spanning the vast width of the house, was an attic. And in the attic there was a boy.

  The sprawling manor was one of several places where Robin Williams had lived before he became a teenager, just the latest stop in an itinerant childhood spent shuttled between Michigan and Illinois as his father worked his way up the corporate ladder at the Ford Motor Company, and there would be more destinations on this lifelong tour, each of which would be his home for a time, but never for good. He and his parents would leave Stonycroft after a few years, but in a sense Robin would never leave its attic. It was his exclusive domain, where he was left by himself for hours at a time. Given this freedom, he shared the space with fictional friends he created in his mind; he made it the staging ground for the massive battles he would wage with his collection of toy soldiers, a battalion that ran thousands of men deep and for each of whom he had created a unique personality and voice. He used it as his private rehearsal space, where he taught himself to masterfully mimic the routines of favorite stand-up comedians he had preserved by holding a tape recorder up to his television set.

  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.”

  But in the melding of their traits, behaviors, quirks, and shortcomings, they laid the foundation for a son whose life was filled with paradoxes and incongruities. As an adult, Robin would describe himself as having been an overweight child, only to have Laurie knock down this disparaging self-analysis, sometimes straight to his face and with photographic evidence to the contrary. He grew up aware of the luxury he was raised in, and even made humorous grist of it—“Daddy, Daddy, come upstairs,” he would later joke, “Biffy and Muffy aren’t happy. We have only seven servants. All the other families have ten”—yet when pressed on the subject, he could not always bring himself to admit his family was wealthy. He would describe himself as an only child, yet he had two half brothers, both of whom he loved and received as full siblings. He would call himself isolated, even though he had friends at every school he attended and in every city where he was raised.

  For all the loneliness he experienced as a child, and the unsettled emotions that came from a youth spent in a state of perpetual transition—in an eight-year span, he attended six different schools—Robin concluded that his upbringing had been blithely uncomplicated. “It’s the contradiction of what people say about comedy and pain,” he would say many years later. “My childhood was really nice.” As he had spent his whole life learning, he could define himself however he wanted, picking and choosing the pieces of his history that he found useful while discarding the rest. Not all contradictions had to be detrimental. Some of them could even be productive.

  In a portrait photograph of Rob and Laurie Williams taken early in their relationship, the two make for a deeply contrasting pair: “Picture George Burns and Gracie Allen looking like Alastair Cooke and Audrey Hepburn and that’s what my parents are like,” Robin later said. His father’s facial features are handsome but sharp, severe, and angular; he is clean-shaven and his dark hair is close-cropped and precisely set in place. His mother’s face is round, warm, and inviting, and even in this black-and-white image, the soft sparkle of her blue eyes is unmistakable. Her dimpled smile reveals a gleaming top row of teeth; his pleasant expression is thin and tight-lipped, giving away nothing. They are clasping each other, his arm wrapped around hers just below the lower border of the image, and for all that sets them apart, there is also plainly love between them.

  Robert Fitz-Gerrell Williams, who was known as Rob, came from a background of privilege and had been taught the repeated lesson that adversity could be overcome through labor and perseverance. He was born in 1906 into a well-to-do family in Evansville, Indiana, where his father, Robert Ross Williams, owned strip mines and lumber companies. The younger Rob had a covert streak of playfulness, and he sometimes teasingly told people that his mother was an Indian princess. While he studied at prep school, his father would go on what Laurie would later describe as “periodic toots,” taking a suite at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago where he’d grab a chorus girl or two and “just whoop it up.” Sometimes it fell to Rob, when he was as young as twelve, to travel the three hundred miles north to Chicago with the family’s black servant, get his father sober, and bring him home. Rob later enrolled at Kenyon College in Ohio, but when a stock market crash in 1926 nearly wiped out the Williams family business, he had to quit school, come back to Evansville, and take a job as a junior engineer in the mines. A few years later, when Robert Ross became gravely ill, Rob unquestioningly offered his blood for transfusions, until his father finally pulled the needle out of his own arm and told his son, “I don’t want you to do this anymore—you’ve done enough.” Robert Ross died a short time later.

  Rob and his first wife, Susan Todd Laurent, had a son in 1938; they named him Robert Todd Williams, and he would be known as Todd. But by 1941, Rob and Susan had separated, and Susan took Todd to live with her in Kentucky. Rob was working for Ford as a plant manager when the United States entered into World War II, and he enlisted in the navy, eventually becoming a lieutenant commander on the USS Ticonderoga, an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. On January 21, 1945, while at sea near the Philippines, the Ticonderoga came under attack from Japanese kamikaze pilots, one of whom crashed through the carrier’s flight deck and managed to detonate a bomb in its hangar, destroying several stowed planes. More than one hundred sailors were killed or injured in the attack, and Rob was wounded when he leapt in front of his captain to protect him from an explosion, taking shrapnel in his back, legs, and arm.

  Rob could not be redeployed in combat because of his injuries, so he reluctantly took a government desk job in Washington. But he soon returned to work at Ford, gaining a management position and eventually ascending to national sales for the company’s Lincoln Mercury division in Chicago. It was there in 1949 that Rob met an effervescent young divorcée named Laurie McLaurin Janin on a blind double date at an upscale restaurant. Laurie arrived with Rob’s receptionist while Rob showed up with the man who was supposed to be Laurie’s date, but it was very quickly clear that Rob and Laurie had eyes for each other. Rob told his receptionist to take some wild duck from the restaurant’s freezer and go home, while Laurie similarly dispatched her intended suitor. “I figured, hey, let the fun begin,” she said.

  Laurie was attracted to Rob physically, drawn in by his confidence and captivated by his intense, understated charisma. As she described him:

  He could walk in a roo
m, anywhere, and the minute he walked in, people were at attention. We could go to any restaurant, anywhere, the finest. The maître d’ would come and up and say, “Sir, do you have a reservation?”

  He would say very politely, “No, I don’t.”

  “Right this way.”

  “He definitely had ‘IT,’” Laurie said of Rob. “With a capital I and a capital T.” He also had a darker side that was activated by alcohol. When the couple miscommunicated over a canceled date and Rob thought he had been stood up, he was devastated. He told Laurie, “I went out and got so drunk.” She responded, “What are you talking about? You had drinks every night.” Perhaps the biggest fight they had, Laurie said, occurred when they were drinking at a restaurant and Rob leaned across the table to tell her: “You know what? My imagination is better than yours.”

  “Oh man,” Laurie recalled. “The stuff hit the fan.”

  Laurie was born in 1922 in Jackson, Mississippi, and raised in New Orleans, where she was immersed in the city’s epicurean culture and the lively parties thrown by her parents. Her parents’ marriage was mildly scandalous in the largely Catholic Crescent City: her father, Robert Armistead Janin, was Catholic, but her mother, Laura McLaurin, was Protestant. The couple had separated by the time their daughter was five years old and divorced soon after, leaving Laurie to live with her even more ostracized mother.

  The McLaurin family was descended from the MacLaren clan of Scotland, and Laurie’s great-grandfather Anselm Joseph McLaurin had served as a captain in the Confederate army during the Civil War and was later elected a US senator and governor of Mississippi. But Laurie was essentially cut off from this aristocratic heritage when her mother remarried in 1929; her new husband, Robert Forest Smith, adopted Laurie and nicknamed her “Punky,” to her dismay. “Doors that would have been open to Laurie McLaurin Janin were slammed shut to Punky Smith,” said Laurie, who would nevertheless take ownership of the nickname and ask friends to call her Punky in her adult years.