Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  Laurie was more enthusiastic about Robin’s desire to become an actor. “Mom said, ‘Your grandmother would be very proud,’ and wished me good luck,” Robin said. But Rob, who had just paid amply for Robin to indulge in what he felt was a fruitless year at a private university, did not want to repeat this mistake; as a compromise, Robin lived at home while he studied at the College of Marin, a public community college not far from Tiburon.

  Though the school did not possess brand-name status, its drama program, which it had only just established in 1964, had nimbleness and innovation on its side, and it was already drawing favorable comparisons to the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. It also had an unlikely program director in James Dunn, a San Rafael native and Marine Corps veteran who had served as a drill instructor during the Korean War. Despite those daunting credentials, Dunn took a playful and broad-minded approach to the stage, casting students in offbeat productions of classic texts, like Twelfth Night set in a California hacienda, and The Comedy of Errors recasting Shakespeare’s mismatched twins as the Marx Brothers.

  Dunn was well aware of the other forms of exploration going on around him; though the school had a no-tolerance policy for drug or alcohol use during its productions, he said, “You couldn’t walk across our campus in the daytime without getting a contact high.” He also believed in orderliness and applied boot-camp tactics when needed. The actor Dakin Matthews, who worked professionally as a guest artist at the College of Marin during the 1960s and ’70s, recalled Dunn directing him in a production of Othello that emphasized soldierly obedience. “We had to march,” Matthews said. “We had to learn how to salute. And he would get in our faces and scream at us, just like a good D.I. would.”

  Dunn’s military training and desire for discipline made him a powerful influence on Robin. “Knowing that his own talents tended to the nondisciplined, that was exactly what Robin loved about him,” Matthews said. “And after a couple of years there, he was clearly the star of the program. He was something special, absolutely.”

  When Robin arrived in the fall of 1970, he discovered that a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream had already been cast. But he was determined to participate and talked his way into a minor part as a spear-carrier. “He said, ‘I would really like to get into the play—is there anything I could do?’” Dunn recalled. “I said, ‘Well, I’ve already cast it. But I need some walk-ons.’ He said, ‘I’ll do that.’”

  As his roles and stage time grew, Robin stretched the boundaries of his characters without violating the sanctity of his texts. When he played the Reverend Canon Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest, “every night it was a different Chasuble,” said Ronald Krempetz, a theater instructor and set designer at the college. “He didn’t change the words, but sometimes it was accents, or how he emphasized a line or two, the looks, the facial expressions.” And as Malvolio in Twelfth Night, imprisoned alone in a cell with only a wooden staff, he only had to remember the TV teachings of Jonathan Winters. “He just had his hands and his staff, and the staff became a second character,” Krempetz said.

  Robin received many of his earliest professional reviews in the Daily Independent Journal, a local newspaper in San Rafael, and over a three-year span they grew increasingly appreciative. His first notice came in December 1970 with a college production of Ionesco’s absurdist play The Bald Soprano, for which the paper observed, “Most enjoyable of the hard-working cast was Robin Williams as Mr. Martin, whose timing was almost perfect.” The paper also gave him strong marks for his work as Banquo in Macbeth, and in You in Your Small Corner and I in Mine, a melodrama by Carol Roper, for which he was described as “really one of the fine young talents in the college’s theatrical stable.” Even in a mixed review of Fiddler on the Roof, Robin was described as being among the cast members who “add strength to the musical, playing the progressive intellectual Perchik.”

  Robin’s breakout role came at the end of 1972, when he was cast as the master pickpocket Fagin in the college’s Christmastime production of Oliver! The days leading up to its opening had been a slog, Dunn said, “because we had a new lighting board and it was doing all kinds of strange things, and it had held up the rehearsals.” One particular run-through had stretched all the way to midnight, and “everybody was very uptight, especially me,” he said. Then Dunn noticed Robin offstage: “He was standing by the piano, and he had a baton in his hand, like a drum major’s baton, and he began talking to it. And it began talking back.” For what felt like twenty minutes, Dunn said, Robin and the baton conversed, kidded, and argued with each other—with Robin providing both of the voices of course, and a crowd of actors and crew members supplying a grateful audience. When Dunn at last got home at two a.m., he woke up his wife to tell her, “I saw a young man do something tonight that I have never seen before. And this kid is going to go somewhere.”

  In its own assessment of Oliver!, the Daily Independent Journal wrote, “The big star of the evening is Robin Williams as an unforgettable Fagin. It’s a real tour de force performance.… It’s been a great pleasure over the past year to watch this young collegian develop his talents into such a professional status.”

  While he lived with his parents, Robin always seemed to be broke and asking to borrow money from colleagues. “It was a running joke, whenever you’d see him,” Krempetz said. “‘Hi, Robin. How are you? Where’s my five dollars?’”

  Not everyone was entirely won over by his unruly magnetism. As Joel Blum, an actor and classmate of Robin’s, described him, “He was such a nice guy, such a sweetheart. At the same time, he was a total show-off, but in a very endearing way.” Overall, he said, “It was hard to tell who he really was.”

  To Blum, Robin appeared to lack some basic social skills, whether making simple chitchat or engaging in “the bullshit that everybody would talk about when they were stoned.” “When I would talk to him,” Blum said, “I’d try to have a conversation with him and it would go okay for about ten seconds. And then he would go into a character voice, he would do a bit. He would almost literally bounce off the walls with craziness. And then he would be gone.”

  In 1971, he and Robin were among the College of Marin students invited to perform Dunn’s Western-style production of The Taming of the Shrew at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where it won a first prize and played a command performance for Princess Margaret, the sister of Queen Elizabeth II. On the flight from San Francisco to Scotland, Blum said he and Robin were seated next to each other, “and we didn’t say a word to each other the whole time. Like twelve hours of it. It’s not that he didn’t like me or I didn’t like him. He was just a quiet guy, personally. There wasn’t much to talk about.”

  In his summers off, Robin returned to Southern California, where he performed at the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts in Orange County. He appeared in a production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle and in The Music Man, playing the reformed con man Marcellus Washburn as he sang and danced his way through the nonsensical crowd-pleaser “Shipoopi.”

  Shelly Lipkin, an actor who also performed in these shows, said that Robin’s audition for The Music Man was a notable near disaster that nonetheless showcased his talent for ad-libbing his way out of dire situations. Prior to the tryouts, Lipkin said, a prideful James Dunn had told the other directors at the program to pay particular attention to Robin, “that this is a guy to watch out for—this guy is talented.” Each prospective player had been told to prepare a monologue and a song, and Robin began with some of his Malvolio material that he’d previously recited in Twelfth Night. But when it came time to sing his song, Robin was stumped; he had nothing he felt confident in, so he began to sing a portion of Danny Kaye’s “The Lobby Number,” from Up in Arms:

  When it’s cherry-blossom time in Orange, New Jersey,

  We’ll make a peach of a pear

  I know we cantaloupe, so honeydew be mine …

  “Sitting way in the back of the audience,” Lipkin said, �
�you saw a little figure, which was Jim Dunn, starting to shake. And then he stood up and was shaking a little bit more.” Afterward, Dunn angrily confronted Robin, believing that his star pupil had made a mockery of his endorsement. “How could you do that to me?” he demanded to know. “You did this silly, stupid number.” Robin was chastened and believed he had thrown away his audition. But instead he got the role and, Lipkin said, “He walked away with the show. He was the best thing on that stage.”

  Yet for all of Robin’s growth as an artist, it was not clear that his accomplishments had earned him any further esteem at home, particularly with his father. When Bob Davis, one of Robin’s former classmates at Claremont, came with some friends to stay with him in Tiburon, he said that they had to keep their visit a secret, so that Rob would not know his son was hanging out with other actors. “We had to sneak into the house,” Davis said. “We slept in his bedroom but we came in through a back window or something, because we were theater people and that was forbidden.”

  After nearly three years at the College of Marin, a school from which most students moved on after two years, Robin was craving further instruction. Dunn had a next step in mind. Some summers earlier, Dunn had befriended John Houseman, the distinguished British-American actor and collaborator of Orson Welles, who was now in charge of the newly established Drama Division of the Juilliard School in New York. At Dunn’s recommendation, Robin performed an audition for Houseman and two colleagues from the Juilliard faculty, Michael Kahn and Elizabeth Smith, as they evaluated candidates in San Francisco in 1973. His father reluctantly gave him $50 so that he could take part in the tryout.

  Robin’s audition consisted of two monologues. One was Malvolio’s famous soliloquy from Twelfth Night: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.” The other, adapted from John Knowles’s A Separate Peace, was spoken by Elwin “Leper” Lepellier, an emotionally fragile prep-school student who enlists in the army during World War II. In the forceful and unsettling scene that Robin chose, Leper recounts how he lost his mind during basic training and, in doing so, he starts to go mad all over again.

  Smith, a voice and speech teacher, recalled Robin’s tryout as somewhat clumsy but also irresistible. “I remember thinking he didn’t speak very well,” she said. “By that, I mean sort of carelessly. But he certainly had a personality. He seemed funny and very bright.” Most important, his audition was successful, and Robin was offered a place at Juilliard that fall. He was also provided a full scholarship, which meant that, for once, he would not have to rely on handouts from his father to advance his education. But Rob would not bankroll Robin, either, while his son continued to pursue a passion Rob didn’t support.

  Living in New York required a whole new series of readjustments. Robin had spent the past five years attuning himself to California’s alternating currents of tranquillity and intensity, and now he had landed in a city that moved only at maximum velocity. New York’s grit, its indifference, and its ruthless fervor for self-preservation were yet more unfamiliar conditions to which he had to adapt, but there was also an allure he could not deny. “I’d been in danger of becoming terminally mellow,” Robin said, “and it peeled away that layer very quickly.” When he arrived in the city in September 1973, he still dressed in Hawaiian shirts and yoga pants and walked around in thong sandals that proved a sartorial mistake for sidewalks spattered in dog shit.

  During his first week in Manhattan, he was riding a public bus, when, a few rows ahead of him, he saw a man slump over onto the woman he was sitting next to. “Get off me!” she shouted as she changed seats. But the man was dead. The driver stopped the bus and told everyone to exit the vehicle. Robin, still an altruistic transplant from the West Coast, said he wanted to stay and help out, but the driver replied: “He’s dead, motherfucker, now get off! You can’t do shit for him, so take your raggedy California ass and get outta my bus!”

  Like the city that provided its home, Juilliard had its own complicated profile. It was revered, it was feared, and it was fearsomely competitive; on some days it took what was good about you and made it better, and on others it did not care whether you flourished or floundered. Its Drama Division had been established in 1968, and in its first five years the program had helped launch rising stars like Kevin Kline, Patti LuPone, and David Ogden Stiers. The students who followed them at Juilliard could not help but get swept up in the romance of the institution and the possibilities that awaited them. “It had a very monastic, religious feeling about it,” said Richard Levine, who was a student there with Robin. “That had partly to do with the structure itself, which was white stone, very precious and secluded. It had a certain forbidding toughness about it, but you were very protected from the temptations of commercialism and it really did encourage you to just delve into the training.”

  The heady atmosphere could also give students an inflated sense of their self-worth. “Juilliard actors were considered first-rate,” said Paul Perri, another of Robin’s classmates. “They were also considered pains in the ass, and snooty—which was a wonderful edge if you were a young actor. The business is the business, and the business is horrible. Being thrown to the wolves is how you get out of drama school.”

  Days generally started at eight or nine a.m. and could go until as late as ten or eleven p.m., and the long working hours, spent almost exclusively in the company of classmates, gave rise to many passionately forged, rapidly depleted relationships over the span of a semester. “We were completely under each other’s butts and we were completely involved with each other, and everybody slept with everybody else, which happens in college anyway,” Perri said. “It’s very incestuous.”

  Like Juilliard’s music and dance programs, its Drama Division operated as a conservatory. The four-year curriculum emphasized long days of studio training in its first two years (the “discovery” and “transformation” years), with upper-class students (in their “interpretation” and “performing” years) going on to audition for and act in stage productions that they performed throughout New York. It was understood that of the twenty-five or thirty pupils who entered as freshmen, only half would still be enrolled by the time they were juniors, having dropped out or been cut systematically by the school’s staff. This Darwinian system operated under the auspices of Houseman, who emphasized the classics—ancient Greek drama and Shakespeare plays—while he basked in the glow of late-career celebrity. In 1973, when Robin arrived at Juilliard, Houseman, at the age of seventy-one, was starring in The Paper Chase as the imperious law professor Charles W. Kingsfield Jr., a role for which he would win an Academy Award.

  To his students, Houseman could be a pleasing, perplexingly contradictory figure, at once avuncular and austere. As Robin recalled, “He gave a speech one day in which he said, ‘The theater needs you. Don’t be tempted by television or the movies. The theater needs new plasma, new blood.’ And then, a week later, we saw him in a Volvo commercial.”

  Robin, who came to Juilliard with undergraduate training and stage experience, was admitted as an advanced student. The expectation was that he would graduate in two years, and he was considered a member of Group IV, rather than Group VI, as other incoming students were ranked. (As the New York Times has said of Juilliard, “Classes are designated not by year but by Roman numerals, like royalty and the Super Bowl.”)

  Other students training at Juilliard at this time included Mandy Patinkin, the future Broadway and television star, who was a member of Group IV; the film actor William Hurt, who was in Group V; and Kelsey Grammer, who would have a decades-long sitcom career, in Group VI. One peer in particular would become an important confidant and source of moral support for Robin: a staggeringly tall, boyishly handsome young man who had recently come from Cornell to enter Juilliard as a member of its advanced training program. His name was Christopher Reeve.

  Reeve, who was raised in Princeton, New Jersey, had, like Robin, spent some formative years in the cloistered world of sub
urban prep schools, then continued to try his hand at regional theater companies and had traveled to Europe to sample its stage productions before he arrived at Juilliard. When the two met—Reeve said Robin was the first student he encountered there—all Reeve saw was “a short, stocky long-haired fellow from Marin County, California, who wore tie-dyed shirts with track suit bottoms and talked a mile a minute.” But like others before him, he found himself swept up in the force of his new friend’s vitality. “I’d never seen so much energy contained in one person,” Reeve said. “He was like an untied balloon that had been inflated and immediately released. I watched in awe as he virtually caromed off the walls of classrooms and hallways. To say that he was ‘on’ would be a major understatement.”

  In classes, Reeve occasionally saw Robin baffle and bemuse his orthodox instructors. When they studied with Edith Skinner, the venerated speech and voice teacher, Reeve said, “She had no idea what to make of him.” While Skinner worked methodically to teach them about the phonetic alphabet and vowel changes that occur from one dialect to another, and Reeve diligently annotated his texts to teach himself each new accent, “Robin didn’t need any of this,” he said. “He could instantly perform in any dialect—Scottish, Irish, English, Russian, Italian and many of his own invention.”

  Some courses seemed to connect with Robin at a visceral level, like a class led by the French English acting teacher Pierre Lefèvre on the use of masks, requiring students to focus on body language and sometimes work without speech entirely. As Margot Harley, the Drama Division administrator, explained the training, “There were neutral masks, which covered the face—they were young, middle-aged, and old; male and female—and you couldn’t speak. Then you graduated into comedy masks—character masks—and you could speak.”