Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  Just as he did in this short bio, in which he tried to strike a balance between a proper amount of modesty and pride in his accomplishments, Robin strained in his Off the Wall performances to temper vanity with restraint—to juggle the communal spirit of improv theater and the solitary impulse of stand-up comedy.

  In one scene they created together, Goldberg recalled, “We were little kids playing baseball, and he went behind the audience and played the scene from there—which none of us had ever done before. We kept our performance on the stage, because that’s where the lights were and that’s where the audience was looking. So then the whole audience turned around and they’re watching him riff behind them.

  “There were times like that,” Goldberg said. “I’m not saying it was malicious or intentional or anything like that. That’s just who he was.”

  As he worked to situate himself in Los Angeles and had little to call his own, Robin was also capable of acts of kindness, compassion, and charity. Jamie Masada, who would later establish the Laugh Factory comedy-club franchise, was a young recent immigrant from Iran when he first encountered Robin at the Bla-Bla Café, a restaurant and nightspot in Studio City. Masada, who was living out of a garage while he tried to earn a steady income, had recently stumbled his way into a few stand-up and hosting spots; he spoke Farsi and Hebrew but was still learning to master English, and when he saw Robin was having his lunch, he was too ashamed to ask if he could join him.

  “He was eating a tuna sandwich on whole wheat, and I was starving,” Masada recalled. “He said, ‘Come on,’ and I sat down with him and he ordered me one. He said, ‘What are you doing with your act? You should do this.’ He gave me the name of a teacher, I should call him and study with him for acting.” In exchanges like these, Masada said Robin never talked down to him or treated him as an inferior. “He said hello and how are you, like he genuinely cared for you,” he said. “And I genuinely connected with him.”

  On another night at the Bla-Bla Café, Masada was emceeing a show where Robin was on the bill. “I brought him on the stage,” Masada said, “and he went, ‘Did you ever do Shakespeare?’ I didn’t know Shakespeare. Who the fuck is Shakespeare? What’s Shakespeare? He’s trying to describe it, and he starts teaching me the lines. ‘To be, or to not be. That is the question.’ I said, ‘What is the question?’ And people, they start laughing. I didn’t know what I was doing right. People are rolling because I’m fucking it up, and I’m not doing it purposely. But I felt secure being around him.”

  By now, Robin’s routine had grown into an overstuffed grab bag of outrageous voices and exaggerated characters, drawn from people he’d encountered in his travels, facets of himself, and his far-reaching imagination: the haughty aristocrat and the Southern good-ol’-boy; the mumble-mouthed codger, the TV evangelist, and the heavily accented Russian; stray impersonations of pop-culture figures familiar and obscure, whether a Wizard of Oz Munchkin or the whining protagonist of The Fly, the sinister, mewling Peter Lorre, or the folksy vaudevillian George Jessel; and, perhaps closest to his heart, a classically trained actor who speaks in a seamless blend of elevated Elizabethan language and crude anatomical references.

  Robin began to draw comparisons to the eccentric Andy Kaufman, who seemed to be perpetually leaping from one persona to the next, even when he wasn’t performing. As Robin would later recall, “I only had one conversation with Andy where he wasn’t talking to me as a character. He just went, ‘Hi, Robin, how are you?’ I went, ‘Good, Andy, how are you?’ ‘Really good, I’m just here buying something.’ It was at some health-food store. Then by the end of the conversation”—he switched into Kaufman’s soft-spoken Foreign Man accent—“slowly but surely he went back to theees. And I went, ‘I’ll see you. Take care.’”

  Bennett Tramer, an aspiring screenwriter, heard from a friend that he’d seen a comic at the Improv who was even better and more nimble than Kaufman. With some skepticism, Tramer went to the club a few nights later and was astounded to see Robin riffing in his Shakespearean voice with a cocktail waitress who had unknowingly become part of the act. “Whatever she would say or do, he had the ability to incorporate that as if they’d rehearsed it earlier in the day,” Tramer said. “He asked her for a drink: ‘My lady, I hear yon Perrier sparkling in a bottle.’ Someone heckled him and he said, ‘First time heckling?’ Just destroyed the guy.”

  When Robin got his chance to audition for the Comedy Store and the mighty Mitzi Shore, he did not squander the opportunity. Appearing in performance one Monday night at the chain’s principal location on Sunset Boulevard, he took the stage in bare feet, a T-shirt, and a pair of overalls and delivered a line in the sassy persona of his ribald Shakespearean thespian: “Now, a reading from Two Gentlemen of Santa Monica, also known as As You Lick It.” Then, while his ecstatic audience was still recovering, he hit them with another punch to the gut: “Hark, the moon, like a testicle, hangs low in the sky.” Shore immediately called Argus Hamilton, a comedian who hosted her shows at the Comedy Store’s satellite club in Westwood, and told him: “I’m coming over right now with this new comic so he can do there what he just did here.”

  As the newest hire of the Comedy Store, Robin was given a rare salaried position that paid him $200 a week and an elevated status at one of the city’s most visited venues for stand-up talent. The gig conferred on him an aura of legitimacy, and it ensured that anyone in Hollywood looking for employable, exploitable new performers would be seeing his show in the months to come.

  Other comics had to check out Robin, too, and they came away from his shows feeling awestruck and—if they were being honest—jealous and unnerved. David Letterman, an acerbic stand-up and writer who had recently arrived from Indiana, and a friend, the comedian George Miller, watched Robin play several sets at the Comedy Store in Westwood, where they developed a kind of masochistic obsession with him. “We were just guys who stood behind the microphone and told jokes,” Letterman said. “Robin comes in, and my memory of him is that he actually flew in—the energy gave one the impression that he was levitating. He seemed to be hovering above the stage and the tables and the bar. George and I would discuss Robin Williams endlessly, like, What did we just see? How did he do it? Because he didn’t seem to have an act. And George and I would think, well, now, does that mean things have changed and we should leave the business?”

  Robin became a member of the Comedy Store Players, the club’s in-house ensemble of improv performers, who delivered a mix of ad-libbed sketches and character pieces, as well as more experimental fare, like late-night sets that were accompanied by a blues band. “We were trying to be pure,” said Jim Staahl, another member of the Comedy Store Players. “The rules of improvisation were sacrosanct: Give and take—it’s the scene that’s important. And then Robin came in and was a bull in a china shop. He was doing six jokes and the audience is wetting their pants by the time the other person speaks. And then when they say something, he’d switch the location. He’d Pirandello on it: ‘Now I’m in a bank.’ I thought I was in a car wash!”

  Robin continued to play with other groups he belonged to; on some nights he would go directly from an Off the Wall show to a stand-up set at the Comedy Store or the Improv, with some of his troupe members in tow. Valerie would often sit in the crowd at his stand-up shows, helping to catalog his material and to steer him if he got offtrack. As audiences were first getting to know Robin and his unfamiliar style, Valerie acted as an audience plant, helping him and the crowd adjust to one another. When she saw Robin hesitate in his stampeding delivery, she would call out to him: “Robin, what’s going on in your head?” Hearing this familiar voice, he would make a slow, creaking noise and pretend to lift off the top of his cranium, giving him a moment to catch his breath before letting a new stream of insanity pour forth.

  The Comedy Store also offered Robin a conduit to Richard Pryor, one of his idols, whom he studied and later befriended. Pryor was a regular performer at the club, and he came there to lay everythin
g on the line, to joke about his brutal upbringing in Peoria or his recent battles with cocaine abuse. Multiple times a week, Robin would watch Pryor slip into the slurred Mississippi patois of his inebriated alter ego, Mudbone, or riff on the latest misfortune to befall him in real life. “He would go on last,” Robin said. “Everyone would come and watch. It was like an audience for the pope. I saw him do stuff that he would never do again. People would yell out, ‘Do Mudbone!’ and he’d say, ‘You do Mudbone, motherfucker. You know it better than me.’ It was a kind of a transformative thing, seeing him just trying stuff and going so far out, the most personal, painful stuff you could ever see.”

  One of Pryor’s routines that stuck with Robin was a bit about God coming back to earth to pick up his Son, only to find out that Jesus has been crucified. “You could see the entire audience going, What?” Robin said. “The most strangely beautiful piece. That wasn’t a character. That was just him.” And then there were the evenings when you just couldn’t predict Pryor at all.

  “There’d be these weird nights where you’d just watch him,” Robin said, “and then sometimes you’d get to go on after him, once in a while, like he would have people come on stage with him, and then there would be people in the audience, like Willie Nelson would play music at the end, after everyone split. It was like jazz, it was pretty wonderful.”

  Pryor did not disguise his rampant drinking and drug use—not from his audience and not from the comics who sought his guidance—and Robin saw the effects that substance abuse had on his performance. “Coke would get him going,” Robin said, “but alcohol would give him just enough buffer between him and the audience to kind of let it out. You could see when he was off of it. Then it was hard because he was getting too much feedback. The fear would kind of take over. But when he had a couple of Courvoisiers, he was like fuckin’ flyin’.”

  Drugs had begun to insinuate themselves into Robin’s life, too. Cocaine had already gained acceptance in Hollywood, earning a reputation as the “Champagne of drugs” for its powerful but “clean” high, without the messiness or apparatus of harder drugs like heroin. Cocaine was in the city’s bloodstream and it was traded like currency, especially by those who wanted access or proximity to fame, who wanted to keep that night’s party going just a little bit longer.

  When Bob Davis, one of Robin’s friends from Claremont College, came to see him at the Comedy Store, he was stunned to find his old classmate after the show, casually doing cocaine with other people in the parking lot of the club. “Some guy just walked up to him with a spoon full of cocaine, and held it up to his nose, and—whoosh,” Davis said. “That’s the way it was. It seemed startling to me.” Davis did not use cocaine himself but said he expected to find it around the comedy scene. “Even so,” he said, “that just seemed like, that’s not what you did. This wasn’t a friend of his—this was a fan who just walked up. It was such an odd thing.”

  Davis had not seen Robin much in recent years, but he could tell that some of the people who orbited him, drawn into the gravity of his nascent celebrity, were not intimate confidants either. When one of Robin’s stand-up sets ended, Davis said, “Instead of just four or five of us, there’d be like twenty. Mostly people I didn’t know. They were just sort of glomming onto him.”

  Later in his life, when Robin was open about his drug habit, he said that cocaine was so readily available to him that he almost never had to pay for it. “They give it to you for free,” he said. “‘You have a drug problem?’ ‘No problem. Everybody’s got it.’ Everyone will pump you up if you’re ready, because it also gives them some control over you. You’ll tolerate conversations with people you wouldn’t even talk to in daylight.”

  Robin’s acceptance into the Comedy Store crowd ushered him further into a tight-knit community of stand-ups and industry figures who also drank heavily and did cocaine, and who then brought their revelry back to Mitzi Shore’s house for further hours of closed-door depravity. If the night did not end there, it might take Robin and his fellow performers on a sweeping party circuit—to Canter’s Deli on Fairfax to swap sandwiches and war stories, or to an out-of-town club like the Show Biz in the San Fernando Valley, the Ice House in Pasadena, or the Comedy & Magic Club in Hermosa Beach, where there would be more antics onstage, followed by more drinking and drugging behind the scenes. At a formative moment in his career, Robin was establishing what would become an enduring pattern of behavior, where an evening’s performance at a club did not end with a handshake at the exit door and a car ride home. One set somewhere would be followed by drinking and drugs, or it would lead to more sets at more clubs, followed by more drinking and more drugs. Once the night began, there was no way of knowing how it might end and no clear signal, not even the rising sun, that indicated it was over.

  The Los Angeles comedy community received a shocking wake-up call on the morning of January 28, 1977, when Freddie Prinze, the dazzling young comic and star of Chico and the Man, put a loaded .32-caliber pistol to his head and fired a bullet into his temple. He never regained consciousness and died at a Los Angeles hospital the following afternoon, at the age of twenty-two. Prinze, who had only a week earlier performed at the inaugural ball for President Jimmy Carter, seemed to be on top of the world, but within the stand-up scene it was known that he had been keeping himself steady by taking quaaludes, which he washed down with cognac, and then perking himself up with cocaine. Prinze suffered from depression and had recently learned that his wife had filed for divorce; though a coroner initially declared his death a suicide, a jury would later rule that it had been an accident.

  Hollywood’s comics should have taken the lesson that substance abuse posed a perilous threat to them. But the conclusion that many drew from Prinze’s death was that he had gone too far in his decadence, while they might be spared if they just reined in their excesses, even slightly. For this fraternity of performers that Robin was now a part of, drugs and alcohol were a means of celebrating success and prolonging the uniquely exquisite ecstasy of a good night on the stage. They were also a last line of defense against that most terrifying fear of failure—the dreaded sense of uncertainty that came with every stand-up set.

  Valerie, who had started teaching modern dance classes at Pepperdine University, was hardly oblivious to what Robin was getting up to in his after-hours antics. But at the time she felt it was something she had to allow him—a toll to pay so that he could be doing what made him so genuinely happy.

  “He wanted to be with his friends, and he wanted to be with like-minded souls who could keep up with him,” Valerie explained. “He sought them out. His incentive was to play. And he liked playing in front of audiences—the bigger the audience the better. So in that respect, he was happy that he was moving forward, because he was getting the audience in prime time with the prime people.”

  There are some disagreements about their relationship in this period. Both Robin and Valerie have said that they arrived in Los Angeles together. But some friends who knew the couple at this time say that it was Robin who came first, alone, and Valerie who followed sometime after, once Robin had gotten himself established. Wendy Asher, who met Robin as a young employee of the William Morris Agency and remained a friend for decades after, said that Robin had already pursued another romantic relationship, waged from start to finish, before Valerie came to town. “One of my friends was going out with him, because he had broken up with Valerie,” Asher said. “He had been dating her, and he broke up with her.”

  The comedian Elayne Boosler had been seeing Andy Kaufman when the two of them moved to Los Angeles from New York; after their amicable breakup, she began dating Robin. “I had never been so pursued,” Boosler said. “Even though he had an apartment, which I never saw in all that time, he came to my place every night.” Robin called her “Punk” or “Punky,” just as his mother, Laurie, had been called since her childhood. When Boosler asked him if she was the first girlfriend to whom he’d given this affectionate nickname, she said Robin tol
d her, “Just the last 14.”

  On top of his relentless stand-up schedule and his involvement in the professional improv troupes, Robin also trained at instructional comedy workshops to keep his edge and to schmooze with other strivers. One of these classes was taught by Harvey Lembeck, a Brooklyn-born actor who had appeared in Stalag 17, played the conniving Corporal Barbella on The Phil Silvers Show, and costarred in a series of 1960s teen comedies that included Beach Party, Bikini Beach, Beach Blanket Bingo, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, and The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini.

  Despite his whimsical résumé, Lembeck was a stern master of his studio and did not admit students without at least a few serious professional credits. “You had to have a lot going for you, to just get in there,” said Joel Blum, one of Robin’s classmates at the College of Marin, who was also enrolled in one of Lembeck’s seminars. “You had to be in something to be in the class.” Lembeck was officious in dictating the scenes his students would play in class and the punch lines they were expected to arrive at, but Robin, as always, found ways to innovate. At one session, Blum recalled, Lembeck instructed Robin and another student to play out a very specific scene: “Two people who don’t know each other, watching a movie sitting right next to each other. Robin wound up doing this homeless person who was rubbing his armpits and smelling them. It was just out-there, crazy stuff.”

  The class was populated with an assortment of actors already in their first flushes of stardom, including Penny Marshall, who was starring in the ABC sitcom Laverne & Shirley, and John Ritter, who played a lucky bachelor living with two female roommates on Three’s Company, another ABC comedy. Ritter, whose own comic sensibilities were considerably less ribald than those of his TV show, became a fast friend to Robin, whom he regarded as a delightfully perverse virtuoso.