Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  Todd and McLaurin met each other, too, and they and Robin all accepted one another as brothers. “It used to amaze Rob,” McLaurin recalled. “He said, ‘They all get along so well. I don’t understand it.’ I’d say, ‘Well, we didn’t grow up together—that’s why.’”

  Yet it remained something of a bewilderment that, throughout his life, Robin seemed to acknowledge the existence of his siblings inconsistently. As Todd’s wife, Frankie Williams, said many years later, “Robin would say, occasionally, that he was brought up as an only child. And then, of course, we would have to deal with somebody saying, ‘Well, Todd, we heard that Robin’s an only child.’ And it’s like, no, he has two half brothers. And Todd would spend time with him and his dad and his stepmom, for holidays, summer vacations, that kind of thing.”

  As an adolescent, Robin had little difficulty expressing his interest in girls—one that was happily matched by their interest in him—though his earliest relationships were largely chaste affairs. Christie Platt, a neighbor of his in Lake Forest, became one of his first girlfriends, when she was thirteen and he was twelve, and she remembered him as a conspicuously handsome boy. “I always thought he looked a little British,” she said. “He had that thatch of thick hair, and long legs and a husky little body.”

  Their affection at this age was expressed by trading dog tags, “which was the thing to do,” Platt said with a laugh, “or you wrote the other person’s name all over your notebook. I’m pretty sure we never kissed each other or did anything like that. I think we just stood and talked shyly to each other and then went home.” On nights and weekends, they might ride their bikes together through the woods, or engage in Kick the Can or Capture the Flag with other friends. Occasionally she would see Robin playing with his toy soldiers with other boys, but she stayed out of such pastimes. “Those looked like very serious games,” she said. “They looked extremely boring to me.”

  And then their brief entanglement unwound: Robin was a sixth grader at the Gorton School, but Christie, a year older, was a seventh grader at the Deer Path School, and knew she, a junior high student, risked social oblivion if she admitted to dating a younger, elementary school admirer. “I was kind of shy about it,” she said. “You’ve got people going, ‘I don’t know him. Does he go to Deer Path?’ And I’d go, ‘Welllll, he goes to Gorton.’ Try to make it sound cool. But it was completely uncool. There was nothing cool about that.”

  While Robin was still in the fifth grade, his classmates started becoming targets for bullies, usually older children they encountered on the playground, although Robin himself proved more adept at escaping their attacks. His friend Jeff Hodgen recalled that “the bullies wanted to put me in my place, because I was as big as the sixth graders if not bigger, a lot of them. So they would actually hold me and hit me in the stomach, to knock the breath out of me. Robin was the one saying, ‘When the whistle blows, get back in the classroom.’ I think he was just being smart. ‘You want to avoid this pain? Get in quicker.’”

  Between the fifth and sixth grades, friends saw a subtle difference in Robin. Hodgen said he noticed “just a year later, just the change in him, the maturity and the look on his face. He went from smiling and kind of shy in fifth grade, to almost—not a sneer, exactly. Almost like he’s ready to say something.”

  As a seventh grader at Deer Path Middle School, Robin found it necessary to speak up, if only to save his own skin. “I started telling jokes in the seventh grade as a way to keep from getting the shit kicked out of me,” he said. By now, at school, many kids there “were bigger than me and wanted to prove they were bigger by throwing me into walls. There were a lot of burly farm kids and sons of auto-plant workers there, and I’d come to school looking for new entrances and thinking, if only I could come in through the roof. They’d nail me as soon as I got through the door.” Robin dismissed the notion that he might have been singled out because his family was wealthy. “How could they know I was rich?” he said. “Just because I’d say, ‘Hi, guys, any of you play lacrosse?’ They thought lacrosse was what you find in la church.”

  But Robin did not have much time to hone his social skills. A few months into the school year, the Williams family was gone, having moved from Lake Forest to Bloomfield Hills. As best as Robin’s friends could tell, there was no forewarning that he was about to leave; one day, Jon Welsh said, “He just wasn’t in school. ‘Where’s Robin?’ ‘Oh, his family moved.’ He was just gone. You get used to it, because in that time, people did come and go, just like anyplace else.”

  “He left without much of a ripple,” Christie Platt said.

  Perhaps, wondered Welsh, the children of executives learn to be resigned about their transient way of life and avoid getting attached to their surroundings, just like army brats—“the kids who’ve been moved from one military post to another,” he said. “It’s sort of like an early intimation of death. Here today and gone tomorrow. We all internalize it, one way or another.”

  In fact, Robin had been hurt by his family’s relocations, and had to train himself to be ready for whenever the next move might come. Each time he arrived in a new city or a new school, he felt awkwardly on display. “I was always the new boy,” he once said. “This makes you different.”

  This latest move to Bloomfield Hills, and to the peculiar and secluded Stonycroft mansion, was particularly tough on Robin. It ushered in the beginning of a strange period spent partly in freedom and partly in banishment in the third-floor attic, searching for ways to stimulate his ravenous imagination. It wasn’t that he was unpopular with other kids in the neighborhood—“there were no other kids in the neighborhood,” he said. “I made up my own little friends. ‘Can I come out and play?’ ‘I don’t know; I’ll have to ask myself.’” He spent his time with Susie, the nurse and maid who had helped raise him as a baby back in Chicago and who continued to work for the Williams family at Stonycroft; with John and Johnnie Etchen, a black husband and wife who also worked as servants on the estate; and with their son Alfred, who was a few years older than Robin and would sometimes play with him there.

  Robin endured long periods of heartache while Rob traveled for business or relaxation, and Laurie went with him, not appreciating how this detachment was affecting their son. “I didn’t realize how lonely Robin had been,” Laurie said many years later. “But I had to be with Rob. I didn’t trust him. Come on, don’t be stupid. But Robin suffered and I didn’t realize that. He had some very lonely years. You think you’re being a wonderful mother, but maybe you aren’t.”

  Robin was not entirely alone in his upstairs exile. His inexhaustible collection of toy soldiers had made the move to Stonycroft with him, and now that he had vast new amounts of space in which to deploy them, and no one else to judge or dictate how they were to be used, his fantasy battles became more byzantine and ornate. In his third-floor hideaway, Confederate generals could take on GIs armed with automatic weapons, and knights on horseback could do battle with Nazis. “My world,” he said, “was bounded by thousands of toy soldiers with whom I would play out World War II battles. I had a whole panzer division, 150 tanks, and a board, 10 feet by 3 feet, that I covered with sand for Guadalcanal.”

  He also found refuge in the routines of his favorite late-night comedians, which had become much more than a shared source of entertainment between his father and him. By holding a cassette recorder up to the television set, Robin had hit upon a rudimentary method to preserve these performances and make them portable. He diligently listened to these tapes, teaching himself to imitate the stand-up sets, paying close attention not only to their content but also to tone and tempo, to cadence and inflection. Comedy was a science to be studied, like chemistry; from some calculable combination of language and technique, an audience’s explosion into laughter could be guaranteed. If Robin had no one else to share these pleasures and insights with, he didn’t need them. “My imagination was my friend, my companion,” he said.

  By day, Robin was enrolled in the Detroit C
ountry Day School, an elite multicampus institution that had been founded in 1914. It was the most rigorous school he had attended to this point, with a dress code that required its students to wear sports coats, sweaters, ties, and slacks in the school’s navy and gold colors; it had an austere Latin motto, mens sana in corpore sano, meaning “a sound mind in a sound body.”

  The school allowed only male pupils in its upper grades, which created some tensions for the postpubescent boys who roamed its halls. To placate the surging tides of testosterone, Robin said, “They’d bring in a busload from an all-girls’ school and dangle them in front of us at a dance. Then, just when you were asking, ‘Was that your tongue?,’ they’d pack the girls back up on the bus. I’d be chasing it, shouting, ‘Wait, come back—what are those things? What do you use them for?”

  The school was engineered to groom its students for prestigious colleges and future leadership roles, and Robin thrived on the rigor. He even started carrying a briefcase to class. His grades were good and he blossomed as an athlete, trying his hand at football for about a week before turning to soccer and wrestling. With his dense, compact, and hairy body, Robin proved an especially proficient wrestler and went undefeated in his freshman year—until, by his own account, he reached Michigan’s state finals and was pitted against “some kid from upstate who looked like he was twenty-three and balding.”

  A dislocated shoulder eventually required Robin to withdraw from the squad, but he came away transformed by the overall experience, having finally been allowed, as he put it, “the chance to take out your aggressions on somebody your own size.” He was also grateful for his interactions with the team’s coach, John Campbell, an outspoken iconoclast at Detroit Country Day who was also the chairman of its history department and adviser to its Model United Nations and Political Simulation teams. As his daughter Sue described him, John Campbell was an unapologetic liberal—“really idealistic, really left-leaning, really believed in democracy”—who loved to tangle with his students and force them to scrutinize their unexamined beliefs.

  “Republicans especially,” Sue Campbell said. “A lot of his students were coming from families that were super-conservative and he just loved to needle them and challenge them. ‘Are those your views or your parents’ views?’” Though they might not manifest themselves in Robin right away, the values that Campbell espoused—and the confrontational manner in which he taught them—would reveal their impact in time.

  At Detroit Country Day, Robin continued to slip one-liners into the otherwise sober speeches that students were required to give at lunchtime, a strategy that worked until he added a Polish joke into one such oration, to the displeasure of the school’s Polish American assistant headmaster. And it was where he—a not-especially-observant member of an Episcopalian family—attended as many as fourteen bar mitzvahs a year and made some of his first Jewish friends, whose funny customs and fatalistic attitudes would imprint themselves on his mind, and whose crackling, phlegm-filled Yiddish words, instantly hilarious in their enunciation, would live forever on his tongue. “My friends made me an honorary Jew,” he said later, “and used to tell people I went to services at Temple Beth Dublin.”

  As he approached the end of his junior year at Detroit Country Day in the spring of 1968, Robin was flourishing. He was a member of the school’s honor roll; he had served on its Prefect Board, an elected student council; and he had been voted class president for the following senior year. “I was looking forward to a very straight existence and was planning to attend either a small college in the Midwest or, if I was lucky, an Ivy League school,” he recalled. But none of this would come to pass.

  For many years, Rob Williams had prospered at Ford. He was a military veteran with a high school diploma who relished the chance to go toe-to-toe with a management staff that was increasingly younger, more educated, and less experienced than he was. As he once told his son Todd, “When I pull up to that building in the eastern suburbs and drive into the parking lot, I look up and I know there are fifteen young hotshot kids in there, all with MBAs, and they want my job. I’m the big boss. They know I don’t have a college degree and they really want to show me up. When I walk in the door, I take a big, deep breath of fresh air and it’s just like stepping into the Coliseum.”

  But by the late 1960s, Rob could no longer fight this generational change in the company’s operations. As he saw it, Ford was ignoring his recommendations on its most prominent product lines, and it was time for him to leave. He parted ways with the company in 1967 at the age of sixty-one and took a pension; though Robin would later characterize his father’s departure from Ford as an early retirement, the arrangement, according to Laurie, did not allow her husband to collect the full benefits he would have received if he’d stayed on a few years longer. Rob wanted to move to Florida, but Laurie said she had no wish to live in “an elephants’ graveyard” with “a lot of old rich people.” Instead, she steered the family to California, and the town of Tiburon, on the San Francisco Bay. Rob accepted a job at First National Bank, a Detroit bank for which he was named western region representative.

  Once more, Rob’s career choice was going to uproot the Williams family, and his decision would require that Robin leave behind the home and the school he had gotten to know, the friends he had made and the identity he had created for himself, to live in another part of the country that was thousands of miles away and utterly unknown to him. The relationships that Robin had started to develop here, the achievements he had earned, the coping mechanisms he had pieced together, and the sense of self-worth that had taken years to accumulate—all of that was gone, and he would have to rebuild them from scratch, as he’d done before, when they arrived on the West Coast. It was time to start all over again.

  2

  THE ESCAPE ARTIST

  In the summer of 1968, as Rob and Laurie Williams were nearing the end of their cross-country car ride to California—they were still, after all, an automobile family—their seventeen-year-old son looked out the window to behold something he had never seen before, and it terrified him. A gray mist was tumbling down the hills and across the San Francisco Bay, and it was coming directly for his parents and him. It was only fog, but to his inexperienced eyes, Robin was certain it was poison gas. “It scared the piss out of me,” he said later.

  When the fog cleared, Robin got his first glimpse of the bay and of Marin County, its mighty redwood forests and its mellow network of interconnected suburbs. Tiburon, the prosperous peninsula town where the Williamses had relocated, sat safely on the northern side of the Golden Gate Bridge, far enough from San Francisco, where the bohemian circus that was the Summer of Love had pulled up its stakes and left town. Rob and Laurie acclimated easily, taking a home on Paradise Drive, a looping stretch of road that snakes along the town’s rangy coastline. Outside his duties for First National Bank, Rob started a management consulting business and amused himself with fishing trips. He even bought a couple of Monterey Clipper fishing boats, one with a noisy Hicks engine whose rumbling report delighted him so much that he made recordings of it so he could listen to it on land. Laurie began to attend services at a Christian Science church in the nearby island city of Belvedere. “I’d go to church on Wednesday night,” she said, “and when I’d get home, my husband would say, ‘How were the “smilies” tonight?’” The church’s most famous tenet, which teaches reliance on prayer rather than modern medicine, did not dissuade Laurie from using doctors from time to time, nor from getting a face-lift at a later age. As an adult, Robin would affectionately describe her as a “Christian Dior Scientist.”

  The teenage Robin, however, was utterly baffled by the transition from a regimented and comfortably conservative Midwest upbringing to this calm, coastal haven where everything seemed permissible. “It probably would have been easier for me to move to Mexico,” he later said. “I had total cultural shock.” Nowhere were these differences more striking for him than at Redwood High School, where he enrolled as a seni
or that fall. Redwood may not have appeared much different from Detroit Country Day at first: it was a public school, but its students were mostly affluent and mostly white, its athletics department was well funded, and its aptitude for placing its seniors at top-tier colleges was estimable. (One significant difference, however: Redwood was coed.) Beneath the surface was a student body that, like much of the country, was in conflict with itself, a generation fighting for the right to decide its destiny while struggling to figure out what it wanted to be.

  When Robin began attending classes at Redwood, he arrived each day dressed in a blazer and tie and carrying a briefcase, just as he used to at Detroit Country Day. Only now his formal manner and attire drew stares and teasing from his classmates, who called him a geek and told him he was “creating negative energy.” 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.”

  Unlike the straitlaced school he came from, Redwood offered courses in psychology, 16-millimeter filmmaking, and black studies, despite having no black students in its senior class. Encounter groups, a form of sensitivity training that flourished in the 1960s, still held sway here, and, as Robin recounted, it was not uncommon for his seminars to end in a group hug or with other unconventional rituals. “One teacher would sometimes just stop what he was doing and then a few kids would start pounding out a beat and everybody would get up and dance around the room,” he said.