Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  Looking back on her childhood, she would recognize a strain of alcoholism that ran through her family, which made her mother volatile and her own life unstable. “Growing up,” Laurie said, “I never knew when I woke up each day whether I was going to be Queen of the May or Little Orphan Annie.” Her natural father, too, had a drinking problem: “It made me realize that we cannot drink,” she said. “There were people in the family who rose to great heights and then BOOM! just like that, and it was from alcohol. If you can’t handle it, just stay away from it.… It’s poison for our family.”

  When the Great Depression nearly wiped out Robert Smith, it led to more than a decade of wandering for Laurie’s family, a time they spent shifting back and forth between New Orleans and Crowley, Louisiana. At one point, her stepfather considered running an ice-cream business, and, “for the first time in my life,” she said, “we didn’t have a colored servant. I thought that was the end.” In her late teens, she moved to Pass Christian, Mississippi, then back again to New Orleans, and in 1941 Laurie took up residence in a boarding house there while her parents went on to Mobile, Alabama. For a time she performed as an actress in the French Quarter. At the start of World War II, she was working for the Weather Bureau in New Orleans when the Pentagon inquired if she spoke French. “Fluently,” she lied, and she was transferred to an office in Georgetown. There in Washington she met a young naval officer named William Musgrave, and the two were married shortly before he shipped out to the South Pacific.

  Now known as Laurie McLaurin Musgrave, she spent part of the war living in San Francisco, taking lithography classes and crossing paths (by her account) with the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright and Henry Miller. When the war ended and William Musgrave returned home, the couple lived briefly in San Diego and then moved to Chicago, where he found work as an electrical engineer. In 1947, Laurie gave birth to their son, Laurin McLaurin Musgrave, who would later be known as McLaurin. In his infancy, he developed pneumonia, and Laurie was fearful of the effects that a worsening Chicago winter might have on the child. So she sent the baby McLaurin to live with her mother and stepfather in Mobile. Laurie and William separated and divorced soon after. She was on her own, but she was unbowed and excited for all that lay ahead of her. “I just married too young,” Laurie would later explain. “I just thought I wanted to go out and try my wings.”

  Two years later, Laurie was working as a model for the Marshall Field’s department store when she met Rob Williams, who touched her nonconformist’s heart to such a degree that she bought him an engagement ring and proposed that they get married. On June 3, 1950, they were wed by a justice of the peace in Omaha, Nebraska, and they took their honeymoon at a fishing lodge in Hayward, Wisconsin. Afterward, Laurie told Rob, “That was the lousiest honeymoon I ever had.”

  The newlyweds moved into an apartment on Chicago’s north side, and on July 21, 1951, Laurie delivered their son, Robin McLaurin Williams, at Wesley Memorial Hospital. Though Robin would later joke that his mother’s concept of natural childbirth was “giving birth without makeup,” Laurie recalled his arrival as an easy one, nearly occurring in the hospital’s lobby. While the medical staff there peppered her with questions and requests for personal information, Rob scolded them: “Get this woman to a room. She’s going to have the baby right here.” As Laurie told the story, “They finally got me up to the room, gave me a shot, and, when I woke up, they said, ‘You have a wonderful baby boy.’ That was it.”

  Unlike the difficulty Laurie had experienced following the birth of her son McLaurin, she had no such trouble with Robin, who was joyous and healthy, and who was raised principally by a black nurse named Susie. (Decades later, Laurie would still unhesitatingly describe Susie as “colored.”) “She wouldn’t put up with anything—wouldn’t take it,” Robin later said of Susie. “If you try and go, ‘I won’t do that.’ ‘Mm-hmm, I think you will. I think you’ll get your sweet self UPSTAIRS!’ She was a very strong force.”

  Shortly after Robin’s birth, the family moved from Chicago to a rented house in Lake Forest, a suburb about thirty miles north of the city, beginning a migratory pattern for the Williamses that would persist for many years. Rob, an astute negotiator, would usually find the family’s homes, while Laurie was responsible for decorating and entertaining; these were crucial skills while Rob worked for Ford, which still considered itself a family business whose executives expected to be invited to frequent dinner parties.

  After spending her days shopping and attending society luncheons, Laurie approached these formal, sit-down dinners as exciting opportunities to exercise her creativity. They required the careful planning of menus and seating charts, and the hiring of large numbers of household staff, including a seamstress who would sew fresh napkins and tablecloths for each gathering. Laurie was immersed in these events while Rob was consumed by his work; the family almost never took vacations, and the only indulgences Rob permitted himself were an occasional round of golf or a fishing trip. It seemed not to leave them very much time for child rearing at all.

  Still, Robin grew up enthralled with his parents, captivated by their moods and desirous of their attention. In many family photographs from this period, his gentleness and humility radiate right off the page; he was a small boy, often with a crew cut, a ruddy complexion, his father’s pointed facial features and his mother’s iridescent blue eyes. (Aptly, one of his childhood nicknames was “Leprechaun.”) If Laurie is in the picture with him, she is usually beaming at her baby boy, mirroring his ear-to-ear smile as they share an embrace or, in at least one such photo, she faces off against him in a mock-combative pose while Robin, in a martial arts outfit, appears ready to deliver a devastating finishing move.

  Robin was deeply enamored of Laurie, with her picaresque tales from New Orleans and unsqueamish sense of humor, exemplified by a beloved sight gag for which she would cut apart a rubber band, wad it up inside her nose, pretend to sneeze, and let it dangle flagrantly from her nostril. She also delighted in telling her son of a book, supposedly written by an English princess of the nineteenth century, about the many parties she had organized, titled Balls I Have Held. And she shared with Robin her affinity for strange poems that did not quite rhyme and which were not quite jokes, but which dared him to figure out the mystery of why they were funny. As one ran:

  Spider crawling on the wall,

  Ain’t you got no sense at all?

  Don’t you know that wall’s been plastered?

  Get off the wall, you little spider.

  Another one went:

  I love you in blue,

  I love you in red,

  But most of all,

  I love you in blue.

  Wherever their power came from, Robin understood that these verses could make his mother laugh, and he became determined to do the same. “At that point, I went, okay,” he said. “And then I tried to find things to make her laugh, doing voices or anything that would get a response out of her.”

  “What drives you to perform is the need for that primal connection,” he later explained. “My mother was funny with me, and I started to be charming and funny for her, and I learned that by being entertaining, you make a connection with another person.”

  But where Robin saw Laurie as a convivial and essentially optimistic figure—“my mother has never met a stranger,” he would later say—Rob was enigmatic and impenetrable. He regarded his father as ethical but stern, and the nicknames he had for Rob, like “Lord Stokesbury, Viceroy to India,” “Lord Posh,” or simply “the Pasha,” reflected his respect for his father and the authority he wielded, his aura of infallibility and the distance between them. Needless to say, Robin did not call his father these names to his face.

  In one emblematic story from his upbringing, Robin recalled returning home from school with an envelope that he presented to his father. “What’s that, my boy?” Rob asked.

  “My report card, sir,” Robin answered.

  Rob opened the envelope and ran his eyes down a li
st of As, smiling as he reviewed the grades. “Well done, son,” he said. “Now let’s get ready for dinner.” Robin was eight years old.

  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. “It all went in and stayed there,” Todd said. “He never forgot anything anybody told him, unless, selectively, he did so.” Todd knew of one other person who shared this apparent modesty and also possessed this faculty: his half brother Robin. He “can be in a room full of people where there are ten conversations going on,” Todd said. “He will be talking to you and focused on you, but everything around him goes into that file.” It was a trait that Todd said Robin took with him into adulthood: “He’s very shy, very quiet. A lot of folks can’t believe that, but you have to recharge those batteries or you’re going to wind up in the loony bin.”

  At a very early age, Robin noticed that alcohol could get his father to lower his protective shell. After “a couple of cocktails,” he later said of Rob, “he got very happy. He would just get very much, ‘What do you want, a car?’ I’m five.”

  There was at least one other activity that could pierce Rob’s defenses and reach him at his soul, and one that he allowed Robin to share in. On those late weekday nights when Rob was looking for a way to unwind, he turned on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show. And when the droll, sophisticated host was joined by Jonathan Winters, the chubby-cheeked, rubber-faced deadpan comedian, Robin was allowed to stay up past his bedtime, join his father in the consoling glow of their black-and-white TV set, and watch Winters’s latest unpredictable routine.

  In the first such appearance that Robin could remember, Winters came strolling onto Paar’s stage dressed in a pith helmet and declared himself a great white hunter. “I hunt mostly squirrels,” he said.

  “How do you do that?” Paar asked.

  Winters replied, “I aim for their little nuts.”

  In a rare moment of father-and-son synchronicity, Rob and Robin burst out laughing. The effect on the child was galvanic: “My dad was a sweet man, but not an easy laugh,” Robin explained. “Seeing my father laugh like that made me think, ‘Who is this guy and what’s he on?’”

  Robin said he was also watching Paar some months later when Winters gave his legendary performance in which the host offered him a stick (after slapping him on his shin with it) and Winters proceeded to fill the next four minutes relying solely on his improvisational instincts, metamorphosing from a fly fisherman to a circus animal trainer to an Austrian violinist; the stick became an oar in the grip of a chanting native canoeist, a spear in the chest of an unfortunate United Nations parliamentarian, and a golf club in the hands of Bing Crosby, whose trademark croon the showboating Winters could reproduce flawlessly.

  Other TV comedians thrilled Robin, like Danny Kaye, the maestro of seemingly a million nonsense songs and a million more invented foreign accents. But no one lit him up quite like Winters, who concealed an impish sensibility in a seemingly button-down package. Winters did not apologize for his squareness, and instead made it a part of his stage persona. (“I like to fish, that’s one of my hobbies,” he joked. “The rest of them I can’t discuss.”) Also, like Rob, he had served in the Pacific during World War II. When Winters, a US Marine, returned from combat, he discovered his mother had given away his prized collection of toy trucks. “I didn’t think you were coming back,” she told him.

  Unlike most stand-up comics, who wanted to stand out for having a particular persona, routine, or shtick, Winters was the rare performer who didn’t play by those rules. In Robin’s eyes, he was a master comedian who could make any stage his canvas, needing nothing more than a microphone and his boundless ingenuity. “He was performing comedic alchemy,” Robin said later. “The world was his laboratory.”

  Before Bloomfield Hills and Stonycroft, the Williams family lived on Washington Road in Lake Forest, not far from Lake Michigan, in “a big house, in a neighborhood of fairly big houses,” said Jeff Hodgen, one of Robin’s school friends. “The house was set back, off a shared driveway from another road, so it was almost mysterious. You would walk through the trees and get to his house and go, ‘Wow—you live here?’”

  Robin had the usual penchants for mischief. He became known around the neighborhood for possessing an enviable collection of toy soldiers—not the cheap plastic type, but the costlier kind made from metal—and for delighting in their destruction. “We’d go up on the garage roof with a book of matches and hold these soldiers over a match, and the lead would melt and drop off,” said Jon Welsh, a classmate. “I am amazed that neither one of us fell off the garage roof and broke an arm or a leg, or set the garage on fire.”

  Other real-life implements of combat, like a silk parachute that his father had brought home as a war souvenir, became toys in Robin’s hands. “We’d take it out on the lawn and tunnel under it,” Welsh said. “And being silk, it would collapse around you. We would get in at opposite sides of the parachute and try to find each other, play games of tag or hide-and-seek. You couldn’t see underneath it, so you would be completely isolated. Anybody with claustrophobia would just freak out.”

  In the presence of his parents, however, Robin suppressed his rebelliousness. “He always had an almost artificial, squared-up, shoulders-back thing” when Rob and Laurie were in the house, Welsh said. “It was ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘Yes, ma’am.’ They weren’t martinets, as far as I saw. They were always very pleasant and social. But their rules in the house were, you call us sir and ma’am. And he was like, ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘Yes, ma’am.’ Straight spine and shoulders back, son.”

  Around the age of ten, Robin was introduced to his half brothers. Both had very different upbringings from his, and though their lives would intersect only intermittently, they would have a profound impact on Robin’s understanding of what constitutes a family. Todd, who was Rob’s older son, was now twenty-three years old and living in the Chicago area. He had grown up with his mother in Versailles, Kentucky, then ran away from home at the age of fifteen, making his way through Florida and working as a busboy in Naples. (“I was a dumb kid,” he later explained.) Todd’s rowdy streak did not dissipate after he returned to Versailles to finish high school, so he moved to Chicago to be nearer to his father and attend college at Lake Forest. It did not stick. “I played too much,” Todd said. “So much for higher education.”

  Todd may have had a strained relationship with Rob, but he enjoyed an unexpected kinship with Laurie, his father’s new wife. “I was determined not to like her out of loyalty to my mom,” Todd said. “Laurie had married my dad and who did she think she was? But in a short period of time we became pretty good buddies.” When Todd misbehaved—which was often—Laurie looked after him. “I’d do something bad, Pop would be mad, and she would always manage to get in the middle and keep me out of too much trouble,” Todd said.

  Todd believed he was held up to Robin as a living illustration of how he should not want to grow up. “He was reserved,” Todd said. “I was the other way and just full of hell. My father raised Robin saying, ‘Don’t do that. Your brother did that. See what happened to him?’”

  But Todd became for Robin a model older sibling that he’d lacked until now, a rowdy harbinger of what adulthood might look like, as well as an occasional tormentor. As Robin recalled, “Todd always extorted all my money. He’d come into my room and say he needed some beer money, and I’d say, ‘Oh, gosh, yes, take it all.’ My mother would get furious, because Todd would get into my piggy bank and walk out with $40 worth of pennies.”

  Meanwhile, McLaurin, who was Laurie’s older son, had been living in Alabama with Laurie’s mother and father, believing that they were his own parents. When Laurie would visit from time to time, they let him think that she was his cousin. However, when McLaurin was around thirteen or fourteen, they shared a startling truth with him: “They tell me that my very beautiful and drop-dead gorgeous cousin,
Punky, is not my cousin,” he said. “She’s their daughter and my mother.” McLaurin could now decide whether he wished to live up north with Laurie, Rob, and Robin or to stay in Alabama and let his grandparents adopt him. Rob invited him to spend time with the Williams family while he weighed these options.

  The discovery that he now had Robin in his life was one that McLaurin had longed for and welcomed wholeheartedly. Before this point, McLaurin said that he had been “growing up as a quote-unquote only child, and always hoping to have a brother. And then, all of a sudden—oh, boy, I do! I do have brothers, that’s wonderful. All our personalities seemed to blend very nicely together.”

  McLaurin identified with Robin in a particular and meaningful way. “We were both very private, solitary-type individuals,” he said. “Both of us had this thing where we sometimes just liked to be in our own heads. And he was very much that way. He was a wonderfully kind, gentle, sweet soul.” He was also impressed with Robin’s vivid imagination, and how he expressed it through his collection of toy soldiers.

  McLaurin admitted to some tensions with his mother, having been brought up by the same people who had raised her. But he was fascinated with Rob, who regaled him with stories about the reputed Chicago mobsters who would come to his old Lincoln dealership to buy their cars entirely in cash. “Two weeks later, they’d fish the car out of the river full of bullet holes,” Rob would claim. Where others regarded Rob as cold and uncommunicative, McLaurin was impressed with the tough but fair way he meted out his discipline. “He had a very strong personality and he would have his own way,” McLaurin said. “But if you messed up, the next day, you’d hear, ‘Well, bub.’ Uh-oh—okay, what did I do? And then he’d always explain the reason to you why this or that should have been done differently. He was a wonderful, wonderful gentleman.” In the end, McLaurin chose to remain in Alabama with his grandparents, who then legally adopted him. “It was kind of the devil you know versus the devil you don’t, as far as my decision to stay,” he explained. “But I deeply, deeply loved Rob.”