Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  At eight p.m. the following Monday, September 18, Mork & Mindy made its debut on ABC. It was watched in 19.7 million homes, making it the seventh-most-popular show of the week and an instant nationwide hit. Robin was no longer just another striver peddling his comedy act at the Los Angeles clubs; he was a bona fide star, and soon everyone in the country would know exactly who he was.

  5

  THE ROBIN WILLIAMS SHOW

  A fledgling comic with ruffled hair and shimmering eyes, wearing a pair of rainbow suspenders to hold up his baggy pants, wandered around Stage 27 on the Paramount studio lot, where a set had been built to look like the living room of a home in Boulder, Colorado. This was his personal comedy laboratory, a space for him to riff and ramble, and to mock everything that crossed his field of vision. Maybe he’d pick up a stack of bologna sandwiches and pretend to feed them to a coleus plant—so that, he said, it will “grow up strong and have hairy pistils like its father.” Or maybe he’d pick up a bric-a-brac statue and speak into it like a microphone, singing an extemporaneous song he called “The Beverly Hills Blues”: “Woke up the other day / Ran out of Perrier / I’ve really paid my dues / Had to sell my Gucci shoes.” The cameras weren’t even rolling, but the studio audience was there, and he wanted them to have fun.

  Robin Williams was twenty-seven years old, and he hardly carried himself like a young man who had just won the Hollywood lottery. He still lived in the same modest apartment, decorated with oversize Japanese sci-fi posters, that he shared with Valerie and their parrot, Cora, who spoke three phrases: “Hello,” “Buzz off,” and “Birds can’t talk.” He still shopped in used-clothing stores, dressed himself in silk-striped tuxedo pants that he’d bought for fifty cents, a Brazilian figa charm, and a 1940 “Win with Willkie” button, and glided around the Paramount campus in a pair of black roller skates.

  Though he tried to hang on to the bohemian life he’d been living, Robin was the biggest success story that the 1978–79 television season had produced. Mork & Mindy was on its way to becoming the third-most-popular program on the air—even more popular than Happy Days—and it was largely due to Robin’s irresistible performance as the cosmically naïve title character.

  “It was a good show because we were so unlimited,” said Dale McRaven, Mork & Mindy’s cocreator. “Somebody would come in with an idea that they wouldn’t dare pitch to another show—because they’d just be thrown out of the office—and they could pitch it to us and it would work fine, because the character and the situation were so unorthodox.”

  Most story lines focused on Mork’s misunderstandings about Earth society, giving him a chance to comment on human nature and Robin the opportunity to show off his range as a comic actor. Mork might fall in love with a mannequin, accidentally get drunk on ginger ale, or use his Orkan abilities to shut off his emotions, only to have them come surging back with greater intensity. He would share a few meaningful moments with Mindy, her father, Fred (played by Conrad Janis), and her grandmother, Cora (Elizabeth Kerr), before ending each episode with a thinly disguised comedy routine, presented in the form of a dialogue with Orson where he’d share a newly learned lesson about life on Earth.

  The formula was gentle enough that Mork & Mindy could be considered a family show, befitting its eight p.m. time slot, yet porous enough for Robin to slip in a few adult innuendos each week. When, after returning from a party, Mindy asks Mork why he described one of the guests as a hide-and-seek champion, he replies, “Isn’t hiding in a closet for twenty-six years some sort of record?”

  Robin believed that Mork & Mindy was a hit because of its simplicity. “It was about this cheerful little man doing very simple things—‘Mork buys bread’ or ‘Mork deals with racism,’” he explained. “Mork and Mindy were both very straitlaced and the charm of the show, I think, was in having Pam Dawber deal with me in normal, everyday situations—to which I would react in bizarre ways.” Comparing it to the classic 1950s sitcom The Honeymooners, Robin said, “You know who Ralph Kramden was and you know who [Ed] Norton was; they were at their best in everyday situations and the simpler the better.” If the stories ever became too complicated, he went on, “the show wouldn’t have been nearly as effective.”

  Robin’s reputation as a one-of-a-kind talent was spreading around the country and throughout the Paramount lot, where other stars would visit Stage 27 just to watch him rehearse and tape the show. One day it might be Henry Winkler and Ron Howard from Happy Days or Melissa Gilbert from Little House on the Prairie; another day it might be Ginger Rogers.

  Whether or not Robin understood it or was willing to acknowledge it, he was the center of this universe. As Howard Storm, the director of the series, explained, “The other actors on the show were chosen for their abilities to respond to his improvisations and not be thrown by them. Everybody here is aware that this really is The Robin Williams Show. My job is to make sure Robin doesn’t go so far off the wall that only seven people in the audience understand what he’s doing.”

  Pam Dawber understood that her responsibility was to play the straight woman, a cheerful, smiling springboard for Robin to bounce off of. And she was happy to do it for Robin, she said, because he never behaved arrogantly toward her and they genuinely got along. “It was the greatest acting class I’d ever had,” she said. “Because, lucky for me, Robin was such a nice person. He had such a gigantic heart. And I really loved Robin, and Robin really loved me. We just clicked.”

  But Dawber found it difficult to find her own place on the program. “I was hanging on by my fingernails at the beginning,” she said. “I don’t think they even understood where I fit into that show, probably until the fourth or fifth episode, when I realized the formula: I had to be the sane person. I was the eyes of the audience. And I need to be real, because he’s so unreal. You’ve got to have some place, a platform where the audience can view the craziness. So I calmed down and figured out how to memorize lines and not get eaten alive. Not that I ever felt that he would, because he was so kind.”

  “We could be in the middle of doing a take,” she said, “and if he thought I was upset or lost, he would chase me all over the set, going, ‘Dawber, are you okay?’ ‘Dawbs, are you okay?’ ‘Dawber-dog, Dawber-dog, what’s going on?’ He’d improvise stuff for the audience that never would end up in the show. But a couple times he burned me, and he didn’t mean to, but he did. He’d toss me a ball all of a sudden and I didn’t know what to do with it. He once made a comment, saying, ‘What, do I have to improvise everything around here?’ And I just shot him a look, and he chased me all over the set: ‘Dawbs, are you all right? What’s wrong, are you mad?’ Shut up, leave me alone!”

  Like Robin, Dawber had grown up in the Detroit area, and though she was three months younger, she became the big sister he never had, who scolded him when he showed up late to work (which was often) and berated him for his poor hygiene and crass behavior.

  “He would just fart,” Dawber said. “He would just sit on me and fart. ‘God, Robin!’ And it makes me sound like an elitist to even admit that I said this—but I did, because I was in my twenties, too—I said, ‘God damn it, didn’t anybody teach you manners? Were you raised by the help in the kitchen?’ And he went: ‘Yeah.’”

  By and by, Dawber came to understand the alienated life Robin had led and how significantly it had been shaped by his parents. “He definitely was buttoned-down,” she said. “They were very wealthy: He was a big executive and his mom was a socialite, and she was a lot of fun. I’m quoting Robin: ‘She had her ladies’ things.’ And she was out and about. And Robin was this little genius boy in this big house in Bloomfield Hills.”

  Howard Storm understood that he would never be completely in charge of Robin at Mork & Mindy. “You couldn’t harness him totally,” he said. “It’s like a great horse, and you can’t just run that horse at top speed all the time. You’ve got to somehow pull it back. With Robin, that’s basically what happened.”

  Storm, a former stand-up comedian wh
o had directed sitcoms like Laverne & Shirley, recalled that when he would give Robin a note or a suggestion for a scene, “He would take it twenty times further than you’d expect. ‘Robin, to fill that moment, why don’t you pour yourself a drink of juice?’ Forget about that. He would juggle the juice, pour it from a distance, whatever. Something that no one else would do.”

  Viewers were left with the impression that Robin was making up whole portions of episodes—on the spot, while the cameras rolled—a false perception that Robin was often all too happy to indulge. During a press conference early in the show’s first season, he led reporters to believe that each script contained large sections that were blank save for a single instruction: improvise. “It’s about one-third of each show,” he said at the press conference. “On Mondays and Tuesdays we work out all the shticks, and then we have to spend Wednesday trimming it all down because we have too much material.” All that ingenuity, Robin explained, created a lot of pressure—on him. “Going from standup to situation comedy was no problem,” he said. “But after a while I realized that falling into the same pattern each week could be a danger. So I had to work harder at keeping my material fresh and different.”

  Storm said that it was “not true at all” that Mork & Mindy writers would simply provide their star with generic stage directions like “Robin does his thing.” “The show was scripted,” he said. “His brilliance added to it.” There were, of course, instances where he and Robin would work through a scene as written and then revise it to better suit their needs. While watching one sequence in which Mork was called upon to portray five different poker players sitting around a card table, Storm said Robin “would jump from seat to seat, and I realized that it was going to be too confusing for the audience, in a two-minute span, to remember who the characters were.” Instead, Storm suggested to Robin, “Why don’t we try doing an old Wasp and an old Jew, sitting in a park, playing chess? And so he loved that.”

  When Robin wasn’t pleased with what was written for him, he found it hard to express his opinion constructively. Pam Dawber observed that when Robin was frustrated, he would mutter, under his breath, “This sucks! This sucks!” But the realization that he was unhappy could tear him in two, between a person who felt legitimately dissatisfied and one who felt guilty for simply feeling that way.

  Storm said that in those instances when he offered Robin a note that he didn’t agree with, “he was so shy and childlike that he wouldn’t question me. But as he walked away, out of the side of his mouth he would always say”—here Storm imitated Robin’s clenched voice—“‘A bullshit note. Who gives a shit about that?’”

  One day, Storm pulled Robin aside and told him, “Listen, Robin, I know there are two of you, and I don’t like the other guy. I don’t like him at all. So from now on, when I give you a note, if you do the other guy, I’m going to stop giving notes. If you don’t like the note, just tell me. Or I’ll give you notes in private. Or if you don’t want any notes, I won’t give you notes.” The response he got from Robin was, “Oh, okay, Papa, I’m sorry.” (“Papa” was Robin’s nickname for the director, who had a woolly beard like Ernest Hemingway’s.)

  “All sitcoms do changes,” Dale McRaven explained. “The script is a starting point. If they come up with something that works better, we always include it. Robin would always try something. And if it worked, we used it. Unfortunately, Robin’s publicity people made it sound like Robin was just ad-libbing the show and there was no script. And that just wasn’t true. Other people have to know what’s being said so they can do their lines.”

  In one instance, McRaven recalled, “Robin came out and he ad-libbed a joke in front of the audience. The joke died. And he said, ‘Stop, I want to do that one again.’ And he ad-libbed another joke, and that one died even worse. I’ve got to say this didn’t happen often, but it happened this time. So he said, ‘I’ve got to do that again, that was just dreadful.’ And he came out the third time and he did the line that was originally in the script. And it got screams. Everybody thought he made it up.”

  The mythology of Robin’s improvisational skills began to grate on the Mork & Mindy writing staff. When they could no longer hide their annoyance, they delivered a symbolic message to Robin, to remind him that he needed them as much as they needed him. “One week the writers sent down a blank script that said ‘Robin does his thing,’” Garry Marshall said. “Robin quickly came up to the offices to say, ‘That wasn’t me! I don’t say that!’ A big fuss. We always gave him a script.”

  Often, Robin’s improvisations were of a sexual nature, directed at the women in the cast. In one episode, Mork takes pity on Mindy’s grandmother, Cora, who is growing old and seeing her close friends die, and he decides to turn himself into an elderly man so he can provide her with companionship. As Storm recalled the scene, “He goosed her with the cane. Now I’m standing there, watching this, and I’m thinking, oh, my God. And I just laughed. I thought she was going to turn and say, ‘How dare you?’ If I did that, the grips would probably come off the set and beat the shit out of me. ‘How dare you stick a cane in a woman’s ass? That sweet old lady.’ There was nothing lascivious about it, in his mind. It was just Robin being Robin, and he thought it would be funny. He could get away with murder.”

  Pam Dawber was the most frequent target of these sexualized outbursts. “He would get bored,” Storm said. “He’d be doing a whole paragraph, and in the middle of it, he would just turn and grab her ass. Or grab a breast. And we’d start again. I’d say, ‘Robin, there’s nothing in the script that says you grab Pam’s ass.’ And he’d say, ‘Oh, okay’”

  “When he would finish his moment and he’d go offstage, she would be there, continuing the scene,” Marshall said. “He would take all his clothes off, he would be standing there totally naked and she was trying to act. His aim in life was to make Pam Dawber blush.” In the service of that goal, Robin would sometimes blurt out risqué riddles instead of his scripted dialogue. On one occasion, Marshall and his writers found out in advance what riddle Robin was going to pose to Dawber and secretly supplied her with its solution.

  “The riddle that Robin was doing that week was, ‘What do you get when you cross an onion with a donkey?’” Marshall said. “The punch line was, ‘You get a piece of ass that makes your eyes water.’ So we told Pam the punch line. So Robin goes, ‘What do you get…’ And she slammed him. She delivered it perfect. And he just stood there, startled. ‘You had help!’ All the writers applauded her. One of the first times I saw him totally startled. And Pam loved that.”

  Dawber said she was never bothered by Robin’s dirty behavior, and considered it his way of acting out gentle feelings of affection for her. “I had the grossest things done to me—by him,” she said. “And I never took offense. I mean, I was flashed, humped, bumped, grabbed. I think he probably did it to a lot of people. But he certainly did it to me, because I was with him all the time for eight months out of the year. But it was so much fun. Somehow he had that magic. Even though, if you put it on paper, you would be appalled. But somehow, he had this guileless little thing that he would do—those little sparkly eyes. He’d look at you, really playful, like a puppy, all of a sudden. And then he’d grab your tits and then run away. And somehow he could get away with it. It was the seventies, after all.”

  Just weeks after Mork & Mindy went on the air, Robin was the subject of major profiles in Time, TV Guide, and the New York Times, among other publications, and in the spring of 1979 he appeared on the cover of Time, giving an odd wink to the camera while he sat with a small TV set in his lap, one with his own face on its screen. (When he joked that the only publications that had not yet featured him were Popular Mechanics and Ebony, a friend, Ernie Fosselius, created mock-ups of those magazines with Robin on their covers.) He and Valerie moved into an eight-room, $200,000 house in Topanga Canyon, joined by a menagerie that included Cora the parrot, an Alaskan malamute named Sam, some Polish chickens, and two iguanas named Mr. I and Truman C
apote. For convenience, Robin continued to keep an apartment in Hollywood to be near the Paramount lot, and he bought himself a vintage Austin-Healey sports car to drive around Los Angeles, until it was stolen, at which point he replaced it with a silver BMW. Told by his landlord that he had witnessed the theft in progress, Robin asked why he had done nothing to stop it. The landlord replied, “Well, I saw them pushing the car down the street and I thought it was your comedian friends just borrowing it.”

  Any time Robin ventured beyond the Paramount lot, he was reminded how his celebrity had exploded. At a celebrity charity softball tournament held near the studio, he and his Mork & Mindy colleagues were making their way onto the field, while the stars of Happy Days were coming off. Fans were running up to Henry Winkler, seeking photos and autographs, until they noticed Robin getting out of his car and heading into right field.

  “Everybody in the stands ran to right field,” said Storm, who was playing for the Mork & Mindy team. “It was frightening. There were forty or fifty people at the most, but they started to run at him. And we all ran to right field to protect him, because we didn’t know what the hell was going on. And then we had to beg them to please stay on the other side of the foul line and let him play. I kept thinking, Don’t hit to Robin. Or if it is, make it a simple pop-up or whatever. Then when the game was over, we had to make a wedge around him and get him back to his car. We literally ran him back to his car, like the police make a wedge around somebody they’re protecting.”