by Dave Itzkoff
Robin was not quite the class cut-up, as he had been at Detroit Country Day, but he was not a total outcast either. Despite his fellow students’ lack of familiarity with him, he boldly ran for senior president at Redwood and drew a respectable second-place showing, with sixty-one votes. He continued to immerse himself in athletics, playing for Redwood’s varsity soccer team and running cross-country. Sports were, perhaps, “his only thing that brought him into the groups,” said Douglas Basham, who was one of Robin’s track coaches and a math teacher at Redwood.
Like his classmates, Robin began to experiment with drugs. Although he was at first too timid to try smoking pot, fearing that it would affect his performance as a runner, he said that he did eventually try it on “an astrological scavenger hunt,” where “people who had the same astrological sign would pile into a bus and they’d drive all over the country searching for things like lost mandalas.” He would later say he felt that marijuana made him feel too sleepy and he “didn’t get into it,” but he continued to use it recreationally, even on a training run with other members of his cross-country team. While under the influence on that run, Robin said he saw a turkey vulture and tried to shoo it out of his path. “When I got close, it went hsssssss and spread its wings, and I turned to the rest of the guys and said, ‘Oh, Jesus, I knew this would happen if I got stoned. I can’t deal with it!’”
The cross-country team was an important social hub for Robin and a place where he felt he genuinely fit in. He and a friend and teammate, Phil Russell, would sometimes pretend that they were the Olympic long-distance runners Frank Shorter and Jack Bacheler. The squad’s outdoor exercises strengthened his sense of inclusion, and the exposure to San Francisco’s natural beauty offered him an atmosphere of peacefulness and well-being. On another training run, Robin remembered ascending the heights of Mount Tamalpais and looking down onto Stinson Beach, where he once again saw the fog. Only this time, the now-familiar sight did not fill him with dread but rather with “a beautiful Zen-like feeling of satori” that compelled him to run down the hillside and into the waters of the Pacific Ocean.
The athletes at Redwood were not spared from the social turmoil sweeping through the school. That year, Redwood’s head track coach, Gary Shaw, instituted a rule requiring that male runners keep their hair at a “reasonable length” or else be dropped from the team. “Everybody that was rather conservative thought, ‘These are communists that are doing this, just to screw us up,’” said Basham, who did not agree with Shaw’s decision. “How that got related to the length of hair, I’ll never know.” Many students objected to this arbitrary exercise of authority, including Robin—who nonetheless kept his hair short—and nearly all members of the Redwood track team signed a petition objecting to the rule. The dispute roiled the school for months. “We went through a period of time where people were throwing things at the kids running at the track and shouting, ‘Get those hippies out of there!’” Basham recalled. “Some of the guys on the football team beat up a couple of the track guys, caught ’em after a dance and beat them up pretty badly. A lot of stuff like that went on and it was pretty hard to do anything about.”
Robin was no stereotypical jock: he was a diligent student and a member of the school’s honor society, a performer in its satirical senior farewell play, an individualist who kept an eclectic coterie of friends, and a sensitive person for whom this sort of unrest weighed on his conscience. As his classmate Phillip Culver saw him, Robin “was not really extroverted—he was quite shy, and he felt very uncomfortable around large numbers of people.”
When Culver hung out with Robin in his basement-level dwelling in the Williams family home on Paradise Drive, Robin’s formidable collection of toy soldiers was there, too. “He would tell me the conversations that were going on in each little section of the battlefield, like he could hear it,” Culver recalled. “For me, I’m just seeing these toy soldiers on a huge board. But for Robin, he was hearing the voices in his head and putting them into the minds of these soldiers on this really large battlefield board. I thought, ‘This guy is really interesting.’”
Robin’s half brother Todd was back in his life again. Todd had recently been discharged from the air force, where he had spent four years bouncing around posts in Greenland, Panama, Oklahoma, and Mississippi; he then worked as a soil engineer in Ohio and had now come to California to become a proprietor of bars and restaurants. “I drank,” Todd explained, “and having a saloon was the easy way to handle that.”
When Todd revived a San Francisco nightspot called Mother Fletcher’s, he had assistance from seventeen-year-old Robin, who, for minimum wage, helped him tear down the old club and set up its new incarnation. Robin also spent part of the summer after his high school graduation working at the Trident, a restaurant and music club in Sausalito that was owned by the members of the Kingston Trio, decorated in kaleidoscopic murals and staffed by servers who were as esoteric as its menu of organic cuisine. The waitresses there, Robin said, “wore spray-on two-piece macramé outfits that looked like a pair of socks. It was like, ‘Sonja, your nipple’s hanging out.’ And she’d say, ‘I know; I’m trying to get tips.’”
That fall, Robin began his freshman year at Claremont Men’s College, on the eastern edge of Los Angeles County, where he planned to study to become a foreign-service officer. The occupation neatly split the difference between Robin’s desire to do something exotic and his father’s insistence that he choose a respectable profession. Claremont was a school whose students were expected to follow traditional white-collar career paths.
“Anybody that went to Claremont was expected to go into business or law or politics,” said Dick Gale, a friend who was two years ahead of Robin. “That was the raison d’être of the Claremont Men’s College. You were expected to take that shit seriously, and do something with it. If you weren’t a political-science or econ major, somehow you were missing the boat.” Few students saw Robin as a quintessential candidate for Claremont; no one believed that his path would bring him to a law firm, a chief executive officer’s office, or the governor’s mansion. The wider assumption was that he did not quite have the courage to tell his father that his true ambitions lay elsewhere. “It was a time when everyone was being told: question authority,” said Mary Alette Davis, who knew Robin at Claremont while she studied at Scripps College, an affiliated school. “Everyone was on that wave. And Robin wasn’t in rebellion.”
But 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. “It was this weird catharsis,” he later said of Claremont. “Total freedom. Like going from Sing Sing to a Gestalt nudist camp. Everything opened up. The whole world just changed in that one year.”
At Claremont, Robin played soccer and lived in Berger Hall, whose residents proudly identified themselves as Sons of Berger—abbreviated, by design, as SOBs—and where he found himself among lusty, like-minded young men who were not too sophisticated to appreciate a good dick joke. Across the hall lived his friend Bob Davis, a sophomore who was one of several members of an intramural squad that called themselves the Nads so that during various sports competitions, Davis explained, “We could yell ‘Go Nads!’”
Here Robin also reencountered Christie Platt, his former middle school girlfriend, who was now a sophomore at Pitzer College, another affiliated school. “I saw this really cute boy in the stairwell,” she recalled, “and he had these sun-bleached blond eyebrows, and he was really tan because he had been running a lot in high school. He goes, ‘Christie!’ And I go, ‘Yes?’ He goes, ‘Do you know who I am?’ And I go, ‘Oh my God—Robin.’”
The two resumed dating, but Robin never made any promises of exclusivity. He was discovering just how much he liked women and how much they liked him, and he was enjoying every moment of it. “I had one or two steady girlfriends in high school, but then in college, it was three, four,” he later explained. “I went crazy. At on
e point I had three separate girlfriends, running around mad. ‘Let’s make love in a car! I’ve got to have a bed with a stick shift right here!’” Women, he said, were “amazing creatures”: “You can never learn enough! They’re addicting in the most amazing sense.”
Perhaps the most significant decision that Robin would make at Claremont was undertaken without much forethought, almost impulsively. As one of the eight freshman classes he was required to take, Robin chose a theater elective offered at Scripps, “and after my first day,” he said, “I was hooked.” This was no traditional stage-acting seminar that he had signed up for: the course was for improvisational theater, and it was taught by Dale Morse, who had previously trained at some of the leading improvisation groups that had come to prominence during the 1960s, including The Committee, a San Francisco spin-off of Chicago’s Second City.
Morse’s students felt she provided them with more than just a new way of looking at the stage—she was teaching them how to engage with their lives. Her lessons, Bob Davis said, were “not only a way to do theater, but a way to channel your energy, a way to think about the universe.”
Among the basic principles of Morse’s instruction, which were used to construct comedic as well as dramatic scenes, was the improv imperative of the “yes and”: the directive to always affirm the choices made by your onstage partners and build upon them rather than negate them. As Paul Tepper, another friend who studied with Robin in Morse’s class, explained, “It’s actually quite a good life theory. When someone says something to you—‘When did you get here from Mars?’—you don’t say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never been to Mars.’ You say, ‘Yes, and.’ You say, ‘Wow, I just got here three days ago, and I’ve been drunk ever since I arrived.’”
Eventually, Morse told her students that it was not enough to take her class as an academic exercise; they had to form a company of their own and start performing for audiences. Thus, Robin and eighteen of his classmates came together to create Claremont’s earliest improv group, known as Karma Pie. Twice a week, the group would gather at the Strut and Fret Theater on the Scripps campus and put on free shows whose unscripted contents were built from simple improvisational games.
“We’d stand in a line in the back, and if you had an idea you would step out and start, or maybe you’d try to save the other actor,” Bob Davis said. “It made for such a camaraderie, because you were out onstage with absolutely nothing to help you except the other person. It’s high-risk theater. We weren’t necessarily like other companies, where it’s all about finding a funny bit and then repeating that funny bit. We might go for twenty minutes, all unified around a question from the audience or some kind of theme. We disdained being funny, in a high-tone way. ‘We’re doing art here.’”
A local newspaper critic who attended one of their performances in January 1970 was not entirely amused. He described the troupe as “a gaggle of talented and imaginative youngsters zealously tackling the problem of ‘What will we do when the curtain goes up and we’ve forgotten our lines?’” The review glumly observed that, for the performers, “It generally seems that they are having more fun than the audience,” comparing the experience to “watching football practice.”
Yet to several members of the company, it was soon clear that Robin was funnier—and just plain better at this—than the rest of Karma Pie. “He was doing it the same way all of us were doing it,” Bob Davis said. “He wasn’t looking for a place to try out comedic material. I don’t think he looked at it as developing into a career.” But the experience seemed to unlock something in him that had previously gone untapped. “He discovered that you could make something of this energy he had,” said Davis. “And he had a lot of energy. I used to say I knew him for six months before I found out what his real voice was.”
Robin’s talent did not always mesh well with the communal spirit of improvisational theater. As Mary Alette Davis recalled, “I remember Dale saying once, ‘You guys think Robin is amazing, but I’ve got to say that he doesn’t really follow the rules of improv. He’s not always going out there and supporting people.’” The advantage of having Robin in your scene, Davis said, was that “he could take it to so many places that you weren’t imagining. But if you weren’t on that particular journey, you just sat in the back and you figured out how to fit in.”
Around the Claremont campuses, Robin started to become a kind of minor celebrity, renowned for his sense of humor and quick onstage wit. Some friends began calling him Ralph Williams, after a shifty, almost incoherently fast-talking used-car pitchman whose TV advertisements were ubiquitous in Southern California at the time. (Naturally, Ralph Williams ran a Ford dealership.) When he and Christie Platt would go to parties, she said, “People would just start clapping when we came in. It definitely wasn’t because of me—he just had charisma and an original sense of humor.” Occasionally, his motor-mouth charm could be too much: “When he came to my dorm, people went a little nuts,” Platt said. “They’d go, ‘Can’t we get him to be quiet?’ I used to have a blanket that I’d put over his head to tell him to be quiet. And of course he was completely irrepressible and it didn’t work at all.”
Outside of Karma Pie, Robin honed his stage skills by performing in campus productions of Under Milk Wood, playing the blind sailor Captain Cat in Dylan Thomas’s drama about a fictional Welsh fishing town, and Alice in Wonderland, playing a hookah-smoking Caterpillar. He also came to the attention of some upperclassmen, including Al Dauber, a senior who was organizing a college comedy show. Though Dauber and Dick Gale had spent several weeks preparing jokes and sketches for the event, Gale felt the show might benefit from the addition of a particularly funny freshman he knew from his improv theater class. “We were trying to build the audience,” said Gale, who had previously performed with Dauber at some campus antiwar rallies. “Robin brought a bunch of the people that he knew. But more importantly, he brought the kind of certifiable talent that Al and I probably lacked.”
When Dauber and Gale sat down with Robin in their dorm room one night, over a lengthy period of what Gale later described as “much libation, inhalation and conversation,” they found someone with a unique creative spark. He had in his possession a whole arsenal of comic accents and voices that included the squeaking title character from The Fly—“help meeeeee, help meeeeee”—and although their act already included a send-up of The Ed Sullivan Show, Gale said, “when Robin came in, all of a sudden, we had Topo Gigio.”
They began to wonder if there was any character Robin could not play on the spur of the moment. “We started challenging him,” said Dauber. “‘Do a bohemian priest. Do an orthodox rabbi. Do a peasant out on the farm with his crops.’” Robin came through every time, he said: “You couldn’t keep up with his mind, it was going so fast. He was going off on all these tangents.”
On the evening of February 21, 1970, the trio put on what was officially billed as “An Evening with Al Dauber, co-starring Dick Gale & Rob Williams,” as a free show at the McKenna Auditorium. The ninety-minute program opened with a parody of To Tell the Truth and featured a sketch called “How to Remove a Rhinoceros from Your Bed” as well as the parody of Ed Sullivan and Topo Gigio. “When Robin came,” Gale said, “it brought about a holistic change—this became actual entertainment.”
But all the hours that Robin devoted to this newfound interest were adding up. For perhaps the first time in his educational career, he was flunking, and in spectacular fashion. Classes (other than his improv theater elective) went unattended, coursework was neglected—he would later claim that his final paper in a macroeconomics course contained the single sentence “I really don’t know, sir”—and his own teachers did not recognize him. According to Robin, when one professor asked at the end of the term, “Who is this man?” a second professor replied, “If I knew who he was, I could give him a failing grade.”
Robin could not hide his academic failure from his father, and Rob made little effort to conceal his dis
appointment. “I’m not paying all that tuition for this,” he told his son bluntly. Once more, Robin was forced to withdraw from a school he was just getting accustomed to, and so abruptly that few of his friends knew what had happened—so rapidly that the legend still endures at Claremont that Robin was kicked out of the school for driving a golf cart through a dining hall.
What would he do now? Robin was nearing eligibility for the military draft, but he had little reason to worry that he would be conscripted into the Vietnam War. The draft number for his birthdate was a comfortable 356, meaning, as Robin later put it, “the Viet Cong had to be coming from Kansas for me to be drafted.” Nor did Rob, a World War II veteran, suggest that he seek a career in the armed services. “At some point,” Robin said, “my father sat me down and said, ‘Listen, war is not dolce et decorum est, it’s really quite brutal. War isn’t like the movies portray it. People die alone and miserable.’ He was honest with me, because he wanted me to be safe.”
In fact, Robin told his father, he’d already discovered his calling. “I’ve found what I really love to do,” he said to Rob. “I’ve decided I want to be an actor.”
The response from his father was hardly inspiring. “It’s fine to have a dream,” Rob told his son, “but you’d better learn a skill, like welding, just in case.”
It is a tale that Robin would go on to tell about himself many times after—so frequently that one might wonder if his telling it was an act of self-mythologizing. But the story appears to be truthful. According to his half brother McLaurin, Rob did more than give this piece of advice to Robin. “He made Robin go down and sign up for a course at the local trade school to learn how to weld,” McLaurin said. Robin attended a first class, where a trained technician demonstrated how the process worked, and he found it more interesting than he expected. Then, at his second class, the instructor discussed safety guidelines and warned that, without proper precautions, you could accidentally blind yourself. As McLaurin recalled, “He said he heard the word ‘blind’ and he was out of there. He never came back.”