Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  Robin was sufficiently unfamiliar to the staff at The Richard Pryor Show that some early call sheets and script drafts mistakenly refer to him as “Robert Williams,” and he was not even given a speaking role in the pilot episode. But later installments provided him with extensive opportunities to shine, particularly a twelve-minute sketch satirizing a trial similar to the one depicted in To Kill a Mockingbird, where Pryor plays a rural Southern district attorney prosecuting a black man accused of attacking a white woman and Robin plays the man’s Atticus Finch–like defense lawyer.

  Dressed similarly to the attorney he played in Can I Do It … Til I Need Glasses?, Robin gives a closing argument on behalf of his railroaded client and what he unhesitatingly calls “the colored species”: “How soon we forget what the Negro has done for you,” he intones. “Who picked your cotton? Who tied their hair up in neat little bandannas and sang softly as they wet-nursed your little miserable children? Who taught you the meaning of doo-dah? How soon we forget, but I’m not going to let you forget.” It is an uncomfortable speech, one aimed at the well-intentioned liberals of the 1920s as well as those of the 1970s, but Robin’s delivery is stirring and sincere; for his troubles, he succeeds in freeing the defendant, but the jury finds the “carpet-bagging, Communist pinko Jewboy lawyer guilty of getting him off,” and he is hauled out of the courtroom to be hanged.

  In another satirical bit of button-pushing, Robin plays one of several passengers on a lifeboat from the Titanic, and the only one who defends Pryor’s character from his fellow survivors who assail him with racial slurs—that is, until Robin learns that the overweighted lifeboat is sinking, at which point he declares, in his most dignified tones: “Ah, I see. Well, throw the nigger overboard, then.”

  The sketch mirrored a toxic behind-the-scenes environment at The Richard Pryor Show, where its volatile leading man was in danger of being tossed into the icy deep. From the moment that Pryor and NBC struck the deal that created the program, there was disagreement as to whether the comedian was going to star in an intermittent series of specials (his belief) or a weekly show (the network’s); Pryor was further frustrated that the show would be broadcast at eight p.m., when it would have to be more family-friendly, and he was incensed that NBC made him eliminate the opening sketch from the first episode, in which he would have declared to the audience, “I’m on TV—me, Richard Pryor—and I didn’t have to give up a thing,” at which point the camera would pan down to show him nude below the waist (while actually wearing a body stocking).

  In his anger, Pryor descended further into alcohol and cocaine abuse, and it amplified his paranoia and wrath. “It was a fraught setting,” Sandra Bernhard said. “Fun, but there was drama going on every five minutes. Pryor would go to his dressing room, and because we were young, that was exciting and glamorous to see such a superstar talented person be in that state of mind. It wasn’t boring. We would quickly do as much shooting as possible before we lost Pryor for the day, or he just went home, got in his Bentley and drove off.”

  As the program imploded, NBC allowed Pryor and his cast one final episode that featured a Friars Club–style comedy roast of Pryor. “Richard was relapsing and NBC just betrayed him and all of us, and so it didn’t go that well,” John Moffitt said of the overall experience. “But in terms of Robin, he got a chance to do his stand-up.” When it was his moment at the lectern, Robin began with a few familiar jokes: “Look at me, I’m on national TV,” he said in his fake-yokel accent. “I’m so happy I could drop a log.” In his own voice, he added, with seeming solemnity, “This man’s a genius. Now, who else can take all the forms of comedy—slapstick, satire, mime, stand-up—and turn it into something that’ll offend everyone. No, this man doesn’t want any frills on his show. All he wants is a loose director, a tight script and a warm place to rehearse.”

  Thus ended Robin’s time on The Richard Pryor Show, along with the program. Its first episode was broadcast on NBC on September 13, 1977, pitted against ABC’s unstoppably popular comedies Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, and its last installment was shown three weeks later, on October 4. “It was sad,” Robin said of the whole experience, “because he went into it with so much hope. That was the first chance I ever had to uncork on TV.”

  Laugh-In, which had debuted on NBC just a week earlier, on September 5, fared no better, never capturing the zeitgeist the way its predecessor did. However, under Robin’s contract with George Schlatter, he was featured in The Great American Laugh-Off, an NBC comedy special that Schlatter produced later that fall. Recorded at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall and shown on October 20, the special was largely a clearinghouse for the performers who had never gotten their due on Laugh-In, and it became one of the first places that TV viewers got to see Robin perform his full stand-up act.

  As Robin spins and sweats his way through his repertoire of characters and voices, at one point he gets tangled up in his own microphone cord, but without flustering, he ad-libs, “It likes me.” (He also points to a sweat stain under his armpit and describes it as a “Soviet no-pest strip.”) Then he flips through a notebook and, in his ersatz Russian accent, reads what he says is a love poem, but it is in fact a familiar and personal piece of family verse:

  I love you in blue,

  I love you in red,

  But most of all,

  I love you in blue.

  Pivoting off the crowd’s laughter he says, “I take you this way, then that way. Is old Soviet custom!” Then, before adopting the persona of his lewd Shakespearean actor, he adds, in the voice of a far-out California dude: “I know, wow, reality, what a concept.”

  In no time at all, Robin had already been involved with two failed television shows, and while The Great American Laugh-Off brimmed with tantalizing potential, it had not done much to further his career. In the weeks that followed, Robin’s only other TV roles were a nonspeaking part on an episode of the ABC comedy-drama Eight Is Enough, as a member of a punk-rock band that considers buying the family home of Dick Van Patten and his children, and a nebbishy college student in a failed TV pilot called Sorority ’62.

  By this point, Robin had signed with Rollins Joffe, where one of the firm’s responsibilities was to rein in some of this wildness. But Robin didn’t make it easy for his managers. When they began dispatching him to auditions, they would sometimes get quizzical responses asking why they had sent a Welshman for the role; Robin was putting on foreign accents for his own amusement in these casting sessions. “Sometimes in those days I would sound almost English or Scottish,” he later recalled. “Maybe after coming from Juilliard, my voice had a certain precision about it.” When Stu Smiley prepared a short biographical summary that was kept in his client file, Robin told him that he was originally from Edinburgh; the Associated Press once reported unskeptically that Robin was “an Edinburgh, Scotland native whose folks moved to the United States when he was a tot.” All his high-powered representatives could do was laugh and shrug.

  And then, unexpectedly, Robin was handed the biggest break of his life—one that would call upon every skill he had developed and would require the alignment of all the planets in our solar system and beyond.

  Midway through its fifth year, Happy Days, the second-most-popular series on television, was running low on ideas. The nostalgic ABC comedy about a wholesome group of friends in the 1950s had started the season with a clumsy multipart story line about Fonzie, its leather-jacketed rebel, traveling to Hollywood and accepting a dare to put on water skis and jump over a shark. And now, with just the slightest bit of desperation, Garry Marshall, the series creator, was turning for inspiration to his nine-year-old son.

  Marshall, the avuncular TV mogul whose portfolio also included The Odd Couple and Laverne & Shirley, had reached the conclusion that the Fonz lacked worthy adversaries, and he sought the counsel of his son, Scott, who like most boys of the era was a rabid fan of the blockbuster science-fiction film Star Wars, which had opened the previous summer. “When I asked him, he
wanted space people,” Marshall said. “I remember going to the writers and saying, ‘Let’s get Fonzie an alien.’ They mostly stared at me and rolled their eyes, but I was the boss. When I told my son that I couldn’t have space people—there’s no space people in the ’50s—my son, because he watched a lot of TV, said, ‘You’ll make it a dream.’ And that’s what I told the writers. Make it a dream. And that was the episode.”

  As its title suggests, “My Favorite Orkan” was less a tribute to the intergalactic dogfights of Star Wars than an homage to the simple charms of bygone shows like My Favorite Martian. The episode, credited to the writer Joe Glauberg, tells the story of a friendly humanoid alien named Mork, from the planet Ork, who possesses supernatural abilities and is repeatedly confused, to comic effect, by Earth customs, language, and technology. His search for a perfectly average human specimen to take back to Ork initially leads him to Richie Cunningham (played by Ron Howard), but he is sidetracked into a series of contests with Fonzie (Henry Winkler), which Mork wins. As Mork prepares to claim the Fonz as his prize and kidnap him to outer space, Richie wakes up and realizes he has dreamed the whole incident.

  The teleplay was not particularly beloved on the Happy Days set. When it was first reviewed at a table read in January 1978, about a week before production was to begin, costar Anson Williams said, “We got this script that was horrid. Horrible.… We were all embarrassed. We were used to great material. Garry says, ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry—we got a week to fix it. It’ll be better.’ … So the next week we come in, we got the new script. It’s worse. And we’re going, all right, gotta do it.”

  The show was also having trouble finding an actor to play the role of Mork. Marshall himself had wanted either John Byner or Dom DeLuise, both of whom passed on the role. Jerry Paris, the episode’s director, had reached out to Jonathan Winters, but he was about to leave for a tour of Australia. Instead, the actor Roger Rees, an alumnus of the Royal Shakespeare Company, signed on for the part, only to withdraw early in the week. (“I can’t do this role,” he said. “He’s not a real person.”) With the show set to tape at the end of the week, Marshall visited the set and asked his cast: “Does anyone know a funny Martian?”

  Al Molinaro, who played the show’s kindhearted diner owner, had studied in the Harvey Lembeck workshop, and he proposed Robin as a candidate. Robin was also familiar to Ronny Hallin, a producer and casting associate who was Garry Marshall’s sister, who had heard about him from their other sister, Penny Marshall, who was one of Lembeck’s students as well.

  When Garry Marshall asked Hallin what kind of work Robin did, she told him, “He stands on a street corner, does a lot of voices and impressions, and passes the hat.”

  Marshall was unconvinced. “Are you kidding?” he said. “This is who you want me to hire?”

  “Well, you’ve got to understand, it’s an awfully full hat,” Hallin replied.

  “I thought that was a great line,” Marshall recalled. “So I said, all right. Bring in the guy with the full hat.”

  That Wednesday, Marshall and Paris auditioned Robin in a marathon casting session of about fifty actors to fill the Mork role. On his way into their office, Robin encountered the comedian Richard Lewis coming out: “I told them I don’t speak Norwegian,” a dejected Lewis told him.

  Robin didn’t make any small talk when he came into the room. “He didn’t say, ‘Hi, you play golf?’ or any of the nonsense most actors talk to you about,” Marshall recalled. “He just was there to audition.” But when he was asked to take a seat, Robin unexpectedly planted himself face-first on the couch and stood on his head. Then he reached for a nearby glass of water and pretended to drink it through his finger. “It went past where the script went, and he was quiet,” Marshall said. “He was only loud when you said go. Before that, he didn’t talk. We hired him.”

  On Thursday, January 19, Robin showed up to the Paramount lot to begin work on “My Favorite Orkan.” Bobby Hoffman, the casting director, introduced the shy young stand-up comedian to the actors he would be working with, and they quickly said hello as rehearsals began for an episode that would begin shooting at seven p.m. on Friday night.

  Robin carried with him a script that he had marked up with brief notes and pointers. On its ninth page, the stage directions described Mork’s arrival at the Cunninghams’ home and his entry into the pop-cultural consciousness:

  The door opens and Mork, a spaceman wearing a very ominous-looking black helmet with face mask and silver space suit, is standing in the doorway. Richie doesn’t look at him. Mork makes some rapid, high-pitched noises. He’s speaking in his native tongue.

  In his scribbly cursive handwriting, Robin wrote: “close encounters.” The stage directions indicated that Mork “speaks in a weird, high-pitched voice whenever he’s alone with Richie and a normal voice when other people are present,” and following his brief opening lines—“I am Mork, from Ork”—Robin noted: “hand shake (vulcan).” That was his reminder to himself to extend a split-finger greeting, à la Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, to Howard. In the take used in the episode, he went a bit farther, adding in an adenoidal, rapidly spoken “¿Qué pasa?” then locking his hand with Howard’s as he babbles alien-sounding gibberish.

  Robin was going beyond the boundaries of what had been written for him, but Marshall said these contributions were welcomed. “What helped matters was that the Happy Days actors were very secure,” he said. “Henry Winkler and Ron Howard, they were not flibbertigibbets. So when they saw this talented man, who they didn’t know from Adam either, they both gave him plenty of room to work.”

  Winkler, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama who had become one of television’s best-known stars, said that there was no jealousy from him or Howard if Robin happened to be commandeering the spotlight. “It didn’t matter,” Winkler said. “That wasn’t even in my mind. It was: if the show was successful, we have a job. If it’s not, we’re back on the unemployment line. So it never dawned on me that it was anybody’s show. No one talked about fan mail, or fame, or status. We were an ensemble, and if you just gave yourself over to what he was doing, you would be where you were supposed to be.”

  From what he and Howard saw of him, Robin—who had been outfitted in a red jumpsuit with a silver triangle on the chest, silver gloves, and silver boots—was very clearly running away with the episode. “You would say something, no matter what the script said, and he absorbed it,” Winkler said. “It was almost as if he sucked it in like a sponge. And then he would spit it back out, but then it would have been Robin-ized. It’s an intangible. All of a sudden, you’re amazed. You’re amazed by the speed. You’re amazed by the clarity. You’re amazed by the originality.”

  Marshall, too, sensed that Robin was different from the other guest stars who came and went on Stage 19. “I’m not deaf and I’m not blind,” he said, “and at the end of the show, when I introduced the cast, and I brought out Robin, who was the day player, the audience—three hundred people—stood up and gave him a standing ovation. I saw that and I heard that, and I said, ‘Ooh, he’s pretty good.’”

  “My Favorite Orkan” was broadcast on February 28, 1978, and it was as popular as Happy Days had been all season; it was seen in about 23.8 million households, making it the second-most-watched show of the week, just behind the latest episode of Laverne & Shirley. It had been a great showcase for Robin, putting him in the guise of a character who shared his endearing innocence and his curiosity about a planet that its inhabitants took for granted.

  At first, the episode’s success seemed to pay no further dividends to Robin, beyond the satisfaction of a job well done. After the show aired, he resumed his stand-up comedy club work and appeared on America 2-Night, the TV talk-show parody with Martin Mull and Fred Willard, to whom he’d pitched many outlandish characters (including Edsel Ford Fong, the master of a cowardly form of kung fu called the “School of Flaming Chicken”; Rev. Oral Satisfaction, a Hollywood evangelist from the “Church of the Multiple
Comings”; and an automated joke-generating robot called Comediatron) before being cast in the role of Jason Shine, a professional escort.

  But behind the scenes, Robin was about to be rewarded by a serendipitous convergence of events he didn’t even know was taking place. It started that spring, when ABC’s programming team looked at the new shows being developed for the coming fall season and concluded that the cupboard was bare. “They look at all their pilots, and after they look through all the pilots, they say, ‘We got nothing!’ and they panic,” Marshall said. “This is the modus operandi of television.”

  Marshall was getting ready to leave for a vacation when he was contacted by Michael Eisner, the top executive at Paramount, the studio that produced Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley. Eisner told him that ABC hated what it had for the fall and wondered if Marshall had anything new in the works. (As Marshall recalled the conversation, Eisner said, “They like you, so what else you got? Make up something.”) In fact, Marshall had nothing in the pipeline, but he remembered Robin’s performance on “My Favorite Orkan,” and the audience’s euphoric response to it: “I said, well, we had a kid on the show—and of course Eisner and the network never watched the show. It’s been on for years. Why would they watch Happy Days? It’s a hit? Good, fine, enough—this kid was on, who was really brilliant, and deserves his own show. He says, ‘Good—it’s a spin-off.’”

  Making up the show on the fly, Marshall decided to set it in Boulder, Colorado, where he had a niece who was attending the University of Colorado. Asked for a title, Marshall said he wanted to call it The Mork Chronicles, “because he comes to Earth and he observes and he reports back.” The response he received from ABC was, “Nobody knows what chronicle means.” But, Marshall said, “There was a rule of thumb that they liked shows that you could name your pets after. So I said, I know what you want. You want Mork & Mabel. Mork & Somebody, right? Finally I said, how about Mork & Mindy? They said, ‘Mork & Mindy! We love it.’”