by Dave Itzkoff
DePaul said that when he would do his own stand-up at the Zoo, “I didn’t have enough time to rehearse, so I would write all my stuff down on a napkin and take it up onstage with a drink. I’d pretend I’m going to get a drink, and I’d look at what I had to do next. Robin almost perfected it. He could go out and they would not even know he was looking at a napkin with a clue on it. You just need one or two. When you jump around like he did, I don’t think he ever did the same act twice. He might have done the same material but not in the same order. You’ve got to mix and match stuff because you’re making it up as you go through.”
Yet many comedians who performed with Robin at the Zoo did not feel they’d gotten to know the man on the stage. “He was not an easy person,” said Don Stevens. “He was either very quiet, or he was in a monologue. There was really no discussion. I’m sure he had friends he could talk to, but he was just on.”
Bob Sarlatte, a comedian and broadcast announcer who often worked alongside Robin in this era, said he could not tell which stand-ups Robin regarded as true confidants and which he considered mere acquaintances. “I don’t know who was his best friend,” he said. “Everyone claims to have been, because they’re sort of smitten with his success. But I came up with him and I knew him. I liked him and he liked familiar people. But he wasn’t a guy I could even talk much with, without him being distracted.”
Many of the relationships forged in these clubs had been facilitated by the steady flow of alcohol they provided. Though the Zoo served only beer and wine, the club offered irresistible incentives to stick around for hours on end. “If you were a comic you pretty much drank for free there,” said Will Durst, a comedian and humorist who later took ownership of the club. “They might charge you for one out of every three or four drinks. Which was one of the reasons why it went under.”
Those willing to make the slightest extra effort could obtain even more potent diversions. Cocaine had taken up residence in San Francisco’s booming nightlife scene, and it was not yet stigmatized like the marijuana and psychedelics with which the city had already gratified itself. “You could turn on a faucet and cocaine would come out,” said Steven Pearl, a fellow comic and friend of Robin’s. “It was everywhere. We were having fun. We were locally famous. We were making money. Why not spend some of it on something you shouldn’t have, really? Everybody did more than they should if you did it once.”
Dana Carvey, who started performing stand-up a few months after seeing some of Robin’s shows, did not use the drug but agreed it was ubiquitous. Of all the drugs available to comedians in this era, Carvey said, “The only thing I remember is cocaine. I don’t remember anything else, really. But it was even kept from me, because I was clearly not in the club. Like, ‘Hey, we’re back there, if you want, we’re doing a line.’ I just was out of that loop. It wasn’t in my wheelhouse. But I know it spoke to Robin.”
Still, other colleagues of Robin’s felt certain he had not been turned on to cocaine at this time. “He wasn’t doing drugs in those days,” said DePaul.
And not everyone agreed with the generous word of mouth his comedy act was generating. “You could see his acting skill, more than his being anything revolutionary as a stand-up,” said Joshua Raoul Brody, a pianist and musical director who performed with Rick and Ruby. “He didn’t tell jokes—he did bits. And his characterizations were absolutely crisp and spot-on. His transitions didn’t hold the viewer’s hand—he just went to the next thing and trusted that the viewer was going to follow you. That was exciting to watch. But the things that you were laughing at were things that you had laughed at in other people’s acts. It wasn’t that original.”
In one of the first major reviews of his stand-up comedy, Robin was hardly greeted as the standard-bearer for a new era. In an August 1976 review, John Wasserman of the San Francisco Chronicle chided him for a dirty mouth and a juvenile mind. “Motherf— can be funny if used in the right place at the right time,” his assessment read, “but there is nothing amusing about the word per se, and the sooner Williams perceives this, the more effective he’ll be with any audience old enough to dress themselves.”
Robin would later acknowledge that being described as a “scatological pubescent” got deeply under his skin because he felt it was true. “It hit me right on the nose,” he said. “In the beginning, you’re imitating everybody you’ve ever seen.… But all of a sudden, you get to a point where you go, ‘Ah, I can be me. I can develop my own stuff.’ And you do.”
In April 1976, Frank Kidder, Robin’s comedy tutor at the Intersection, held a rudimentary stand-up contest in which a dozen amateur performers faced off in a single night, vying to meet the benchmark of three to four laughs per minute, with a “laugh” defined as “three seconds of sustained laughter and/or applause.” The $50 prize for first place went to Lorenzo Matawaran, with second place a three-way tie among Robin and the comedians Mark Miller and Mitch Krug. That September, Kidder organized a more ambitious version of the tournament, establishing the first annual San Francisco Comedy Competition and inviting about twenty comics to perform over a nine-night span at four different clubs, where eighteen judges would rate them in seven different categories. At the final round, Robin, Krug, Miller, Bob Sarlatte, and a fifth comedian, Bill Farley, were all still in contention. With one conclusive, fifteen-minute set standing between each man and his destiny, Robin was in first place by a narrow margin, and “that’s probably how it should have ended,” Sarlatte said.
“At that time,” Sarlatte said, “people didn’t know that much about stand-up.” Robin, he said, “didn’t have a very traditional kind of act. It was a little hit-and-miss. It wasn’t like it was that great. He was still developing, just doing little bits and sketches that were funny and could tear the house down, but they didn’t have a lot of symmetry to them.”
Paul Krassner, the counterculture journalist and editor of the Realist, who was one of the jurors at the competition’s final round, said that he remembered Robin’s set for “his energy and his obvious presence. He wore a cowboy hat, had a hairy chest and sweated a lot.”
But when Farley came up for his final set, Sarlatte said, “he gets about five minutes into his act, and all the lights go out.” The club had suffered a momentary power outage and no one knew quite what to do, but Farley, still onstage, made the most of his opportunity. “While the lights are out,” Sarlatte recalled, “Bill Farley–with no live mic—says, ‘Okay, now when he comes in, let’s all sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ Which was a tremendous ad-lib. And that’s what turned it to him. So he ended up finishing in first, Robin was in second, and I was in third.”
That, at least, was the story that the judges’ scorecards told, and Sarlatte said he could respect the outcome. “Robin’s act was so different than everybody else’s,” he said. “He hadn’t become the fawning phenomenon yet. But based on the happenstance of Bill Farley’s remarks, it probably ended up the way it should’ve ended up.” But as Krassner recalled it, “People in the audience were angry he didn’t win.” It was perhaps the last time Robin Williams would be deemed second-best to anyone for a very long time.
* * *
ONE NIGHT WHEN Robin was not scheduled to perform at the Holy City Zoo, he was working behind its bar, serving drinks and sneaking a few on the side for himself, when his attention was suddenly consumed by one particular patron. Valerie Velardi, a dancer and movement instructor, was on a break from a nearby tavern where she worked as a cocktail waitress when she stopped into the raucous neighborhood comedy club she had heard so much about. Robin was transfixed by this self-assured woman, who stood a couple of inches taller than he was, and by her classical features. He later explained that what he experienced in this moment was not so much love at first sight: “More like lust,” he said. “She was this Italian woman, a Napoletana girl. She wasn’t dressed especially sexily; she just looked … hot. Caliente.” Valerie, for her part, was charmed by this small, stocky, animated man in a striped shirt and rainbow suspender
s. Robin, whether trying to amuse her or to hide some undesirable part of himself, decided to talk to Valerie in a feigned French accent.
“He kept it, all night,” said Valerie, who never thought to wonder if she was being duped. “No, I thought he was French.” With the self-deprecating laugh of someone who should have known better, she added: “I know. I know.”
While maintaining his false front, Robin asked Valerie for a ride home at the end of the night, and she, intrigued, took him in her car across the Golden Gate Bridge, around the bay, and into Tiburon. Throughout the ride, Valerie said, “He was very funny. My goodness, he just made me laugh. We got on really well and he was enjoying himself immensely.” When they reached a familiar house on Paradise Drive, she said, “I thought I was driving him home, but he said, ‘Drop me off here,’ which was not his home, it turned out. He said he was living with his parents.”
The next time Robin ran into Valerie after this encounter—which the couple would later regard as their first date—he walked up to her and addressed her in a Western twang: “Hi, honey, how are ya?” The two began to see each other regularly after that, and Valerie would soon discover what he really sounded like. “He continued to be delightful in many ways,” she said. “I didn’t make any distinction between him and his voices. He would just pull them out, and always did.”
Valerie, who was a year older than Robin, had grown up in an Italian family in New Haven, Connecticut. She was the oldest of four children and became a de facto parent to her three younger siblings after her mother and father divorced when she was twelve years old. As she learned about Robin’s upbringing, she saw the contrasts in their experiences and believed she understood his psychology. “Since he didn’t grow up with other children, he was an only child, as far as I’m concerned,” she said. “The result is that he has a very rich private life and it’s hard to filter in. It’s hard to get in deep with someone who’s used to taking care of himself only. It’s such a cliché, but they make their own worlds.”
After attending Goddard College in rural Vermont, Valerie had moved to the Bay Area to study for a master’s degree at Mills College in Oakland. By day she attended classes, and by night she went out with Robin and learned about his history in Marin, his frustrations at Juilliard, and his latest, hazy dreams of becoming a stand-up comic. Within weeks the two had fallen in love.
“He always had that tinge,” Valerie said. “I had come from that way of thinking, that anything is possible and the world is bright and beautiful. And he made it even brighter and more magical. We were living a lovely existence. We were very young.”
When Valerie attended Robin’s stand-up shows, she was stunned by how zealously he committed to his craft and how naturally he fit on a stage. “This really was his passion,” she said. “And I noticed, immediately, that he was very facile. He had the gift of mimicry. I’d never really seen anything quite like that, and I was quite delighted by that. It was clear that he was quicker than his peers, and it became very apparent, the more I hung with him.”
The couple soon came to wonder if Robin had reached the limit of what San Francisco could offer him. To the south there was Los Angeles, which not only had a stand-up circuit of its own; it also had pathways for progress and ladders to ascend—television networks, movie studios, and platforms for national exposure like The Merv Griffin Show and The Tonight Show.
Robin felt he had to convince Valerie to make the move with him, fearing that she would find fewer opportunities outside of San Francisco to perform and teach modern dance. “There isn’t too much of a call for that in Los Angeles,” he said. “I mean, Twyla Tharp doesn’t choreograph the June Taylor Dancers.”
But Valerie believed that she had been the more enthusiastic advocate for their move. “It was very clear to me,” she said. “I might have been a bit of a noodge on the subject. He was game, certainly, and I just thought, let’s go down and see what happens.”
When Robin and Valerie entered into this plan, they had no specific ambition, no timetable, and no set date to take stock of whether it was working. Soon they’d have results faster than either of them could have imagined was possible.
* * *
ROBIN ARRIVED IN Los Angeles in the fall of 1976, finding an amplified version of everything he had experienced in San Francisco. The talent was more plentiful and more polished, and the opportunities were greater; the competition was more formidable and the distractions were more seductive. No other city, it seemed, could beat L.A. for the irresistible promise of its rags-to-riches stories or for the rock-bottom devastation of its cautionary tales.
Los Angeles had been an entertainment capital for decades; amid the constellation of comedy clubs that stretched across the city, there were just two where Robin needed to break through, both situated in the boisterous crucible of West Hollywood. The Improv was the marginally more polished establishment of the pair, having already helped launch the careers of performers like Jay Leno, a relentless Boston comic with a rapid-fire delivery and a thick mane of black hair; Andy Kaufman, a Long Island transplant who encased his authentically shy, soft-spoken self in the armor of outspoken, over-the-top stage characters; and Freddie Prinze, the half–Puerto Rican, half-Hungarian sensation from New York who, within a year of moving to Los Angeles, had been snapped up to star in his own NBC sitcom, Chico and the Man.
The Improv’s rival, the Comedy Store, sat a few blocks north on the rowdy strip of Sunset Boulevard. With multiple showrooms offering more capacity and more debauchery than the Improv, the Comedy Store was the dominion of Mitzi Shore, its booker and owner. All but a few of her favorite performers played the club in return for free drinks and exposure but no money, and those who she felt did not deserve even that much compensation she made work as receptionists, parking attendants, or ushers until she deemed them ready to appear on one of her stages.
As frantic and competitive as the Los Angeles comedy scene could be, its most promising participants found it oddly endearing, and they bonded over the strange aspirations they shared. “It was a hugely romantic period,” said Leno. “You had a bunch of outcasts, people who didn’t fit in their own communities, converge in one place, where they finally met people like themselves.” Comedy, Leno said, is an unusual discipline where “the affirmation of strangers is more important than that of friends or family members. No comic wants his friends or his family in the audience. They’re either going to laugh too hard or they’re not going to laugh at all. You want complete strangers. They’re the only ones that count.”
When a new performer entered into this system—a circuit that tired rapidly of the familiar and hungered for anything fresh and unseen—he was quickly sought out and evaluated. As this process was explained by Mark Lonow, a comedian, actor, and business partner at the Improv, “Word spread in the comedy community—we’re talking about performers, but we’re also talking about a large section of the audience—within hours. Days was a long time. If people came in and they discovered a new comic, all of a sudden, within weeks, they could sell out the room. It was a small, incestuous—in every definition of that word—community. Now, it did comprise probably tens of thousands of people. But you’d be surprised how quickly word spread.”
Robin started at the West Hollywood studios of Off the Wall, a small, year-old improv comedy troupe, arriving in shabby clothes that looked slept in: a rumpled brown suit, a beret, and his rainbow suspenders. The other performers assumed, reasonably, that he was living out of the car he’d driven down from San Francisco. Off the Wall had been started by DeVera Marcus, an early advocate of improvisational theater from Northern California, who chose the members of the troupe from a workshop of improv students she taught. The shows, in which the performers rattled off spontaneous sketches based on audience suggestions, were usually break-even affairs done for fun rather than profit. Even so, Marcus offered Robin a place in the group as well as a small stipend while got himself set up in L.A., because, as she would be among the first in the city to
learn, he was just that good.
Wendy Cutler, one of the charter members of the troupe, recalled that Robin immediately brought a sense of clarity to this group of young people who were similarly brimming with spirit but unsure how to focus it. “I remember Robin bouncing in,” she said, “and he was brilliant from the get-go. He was fun and interesting and fast and surprising. He brought a sense of being able to build something completely unexpected, which was really, really exciting.”
Andy Goldberg, another company member, thought Robin was a foreigner at first. “The guy just showed up, wearing the brown suit and the beret, and he was talking in a Russian accent. And because of the suit and the Russian accent, I thought, oh, he’s Russian. He had this little book in his hand—I don’t know if it was notes that he jotted down for his act—and he opened the book like it was a Russian-to-English dictionary or something, and did a line that I’ve heard him say a billion times since: ‘Get down. Get back up again.’”
In addition to his ability and goodwill, Robin had a magnetic charisma. “I remember being very attracted to Robin’s energy,” Cutler said. “And everybody else in the group, too. He was so committed and his mind was just so wild. You wanted to just go up there and play with it.”
Robin took his gig with Off the Wall seriously enough to have business cards printed up, with the group’s name in big hand-drawn letters meant to look like they were made out of bricks, and his own name in small type, just above the misspelled description, “IMPROVISTIONAL COMEDY THEATRE.” In the program given out at Off the Wall performances, he provided one of his first professional biographies, in which he described himself as follows:
ROBIN WILLIAMS, born in Chicago, spent his prepubescence bouncing back and forth between Detroit and Chicago before finally moving to San Francisco. It was there he discovered his imagination and women. He graduated high school most funny and least likely to succeed. To avoid terminal mellowness Robin left paradise to study in New York at The Juilliard School of Drama. After three years he returned to San Francisco to begin a career in the legalized insanity of stand up comedy. The rest is history. His hobbies are swimming, cross country running and bondage.