Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  Dawber was also getting her first taste of fame, and she felt that her life was not all that thrilling when she stepped outside the studio. “It was really a happening place,” she said, “and so you got used to that. And then you’d go home. I wasn’t even dating. I was so lonely. I was there, really, just to do Mork & Mindy. I didn’t even have a boyfriend.”

  “Honestly,” she added with a laugh, “I’d go home and watch TV. It wasn’t all that cool.”

  But any time she looked at a magazine rack, she saw Robin’s face smiling back at her, often in photos that did not include her. “Listen, I was just fighting for my life,” she said. “Robin had management and I just had an ABC contract. So I realized I’m going to get pushed off of things. They were trying to build Robin, and we weren’t a comedy team. I was the girl. It got real ugly there for a while. We’d hear: ‘People magazine wants to do a cover of you and Robin!’ And then: ‘Robin doesn’t want to do it if you’re on it.’ TV Guide: ‘No, it’s got to be Robin alone.’ Fortunately for me, people said, ‘No, it’s called Mork & Mindy, it’s got to be both of them.”

  In those times when she learned she’d been denied a significant publicity opportunity, Dawber said, “I’d go to Robin, just absolutely distraught. And he’d go”—in his muttered voice—“Ah, those motherfuckers. I don’t know anything about this.”

  But Robin found it unbearable to think that he might upset Dawber. “Oh, he couldn’t stand it,” she said. “My personal opinion of it was that he probably didn’t get enough of his mother. We all are scarred growing up, and in high school. He blossomed once he got to the West Coast and became this wonderful crazy person. But a lot of damage is done to all of us. Kids are mean. And so he probably saw himself as this little nebbishy boy. He’d make jokes about himself, like that. Women were very important in Robin’s life, on many levels.”

  As Dawber saw him, Robin tried to portray himself as unconcerned about his emerging celebrity, when in fact he was desirous of it, and, on some level, certain that it would come his way. “Somewhere in his soul, he knew he had this destiny,” she said. “He knew where he was going. He would talk about, ‘When I get my star on Hollywood Boulevard…’ I didn’t know how that worked anyway. But I remember thinking, he knows he’s really going somewhere. Did Robin ever go fight for me, that I’m aware of? No. But not because he was a bad person. Robin was just hyperactive and everywhere, and didn’t like conflict. He didn’t want to be in trouble with me. He didn’t want to be in trouble with anybody. But he wasn’t going to go lobby for me, because he’d probably forget ten minutes after he walked away from me.”

  While Mork & Mindy was enhancing Robin’s status as a gifted comic actor, his reputation as an equally inventive stand-up comedian was boosted by a television special called Live at the Roxy, recorded at that Sunset Boulevard nightclub and shown on HBO, a pay-cable network that had only recently become available on a nationwide basis. Unlike his ABC sitcom, which had to play to viewers of every age and where Robin’s every ad-lib or errant gesture got scrutinized by a standards-and-practices department, he faced no such constraints on this hour-long broadcast, which made its debut in October 1978.

  In a pre-taped opening segment, Robin played every role in a parody of To Tell the Truth, a game show where celebrity panelists try to pick out a noteworthy contestant from a group of imposters who also claim to be this person. One by one, each character—a redneck in a cowboy hat; a Hispanic man in a mustache and fedora; a Russian in a blazer and T-shirt—makes an identical and mutually contradictory assertion: “My name is Robin Williams.” That is, except for the Russian, who at first accidentally identifies himself as Hank Williams.

  His routine proper commences with Robin striding through the audience and onto the stage, making a few startled remarks of wonder and gratitude (“Everyone I’ve ever known! There are people here I’ve slept with twice!”) and throwing out one-liners that the dedicated fans of his comedy were starting to recognize as familiar—“I’m so happy to be here I could drop a log” and “reality, what a concept” among them.

  After climbing up into the theater’s balcony and back to the stage, Robin settles into a series of oddball celebrity impressions—George Jessel on acid; Laurence Olivier delivering an endorsement for Ripple fortified wine—while the cameras in the theater show his famous friends in the audience, including Henry Winkler, Tony Danza, and John Ritter. These are followed by several of his well-honed character pieces, including the faith-healing televangelist Reverend Ernest Lee Sincere; the Soviet stand-up Nicky Lenin; and his Shakespearean actor, who does not miss a beat when a clubgoer, loudly and for no apparent reason, yells out the name “Mork!” Remaining in character, Robin answers, “Nay, not Mork. Nay, speak not to that TV or not TV. Whether it is nobler to do crazy shit at eight o’clock, and take up arms against the god Nielsen who will dare to put down taste, or sweat your ass off in a small club.”

  Late in the special, Robin steps offstage and returns as his old man character, wearing a beret and a pair of glasses while he pretends to be feeding some unseen pigeons. “I give the pigeons my methadone so they come back,” he explains in a quavering voice. But by and large, this is not really a comic routine; it is a bittersweet character piece in which Robin plays a geriatric and enfeebled version of himself, some forty years in the future, when space aliens who are not as kind as Mork have overtaken the planet and have driven humanity into hiding. Addressing his audience as if they are fellow survivors of this invasion, he offers them some advice on how to live through incomprehensible times:

  From me to you. You got to be crazy. You know what I’m talking about? Full goose bozo. ’Cause what is reality? You got to be crazy. You got to! ’Cause madness is the only way I’ve stayed alive. Used to be a comedian. Used to, a long time ago. It’s true. You got to go full-tilt bozo. ’Cause you’re only given a little spark of madness. If you lose that, you’re nothing. Don’t. From me to you. Don’t ever lose that, because it keeps you alive. Because if you lose that, pfft. That’s my only love. Crazy.

  Then in the show’s final segment, Robin pulls John Ritter onto the stage for what is supposed to be a round of Second City–style improv; an audience member shouts out a suggested scene about a waiter serving a lonely man in a restaurant, but the bit gradually degenerates into Robin and Ritter exchanging dick jokes and platonic ass-grabs.

  That November, on the kind of whim that occurs to someone who can suddenly have his every whim fulfilled, Robin decided to fly across the country and attend a broadcast of Saturday Night Live in New York. Traveling with Valerie and Stu Smiley, he was there to take in the performances of cast members like John Belushi, who were starting to become his friends; the deadpan comedy star Buck Henry, who was hosting that episode; and the Grateful Dead, that week’s musical guest. But there was a complication: along with the Dead’s mellow vibes and meandering guitar solos came members of the Hells Angels, the outlaw motorcycle club that revered and looked out for the band. This created a problem for Robin, who in his stand-up routine had been known to ask his audience, “Are there any Hells Angels here tonight?” And then, when that line invariably yielded no response, he would add: “Those pussy-whipped faggots.”

  So it was not entirely surprising that a posse of Hells Angels, including their brutish, barrel-chested New York chapter president, Vincent “Big Vinny” Girolamo, confronted Robin backstage, crowding around him and Smiley and preventing them from leaving. Smiley, who was morbidly transfixed by the tattoos running up and down Big Vinny’s arms, got a leather-clad finger buried squarely into his sternum and could just barely stutter out the words, “Can I help you?” The bikers made clear, in varying tones and degrees of bluntness, that they had heard Robin’s joke about the Hells Angels in his recent HBO appearance and wanted him to take it out of his routine. Then the horde dispersed, leaving Smiley quaking while Robin was seemingly unaffected. Back in Los Angeles, Robin excitedly related the story to his lawyer, Gerry Margolis, chuckling at t
he narrowness of his escape. Margolis didn’t find the tale funny; he explained to Robin that one of the gang members who had accosted him was also charged with and later acquitted of murdering a concertgoer at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival. The Hells Angels joke was excised from future showings of the HBO performance.

  Though Robin tried not to take his increasing visibility too seriously, he could not avoid giving in to certain fundamental rules that governed Hollywood media. He hired a prominent publicist, Estelle Endler, who also represented Rodney Dangerfield and Andy Kaufman, to help manage and cultivate his press coverage. Her memos to him were often methodically detailed do-and-do-not lists of behavior for his interviews. Just before he sat for a New York Times profile, she instructed him, “Please bring some toys and improvise. PLEASE try to stay in your clothes and out of your glasses. When the interview itself starts at 1 P.M. in your trailer, I’m not allowed in. This does not mean that you forget you’re being interviewed. The Times is the best newspaper because their reporters are the roughest. If you don’t want to see it in print don’t say it.”

  That December, Robin signed up to record his first comedy album with Casablanca Records, a label that was flying high from the success of acts like Donna Summer, Kiss, and the Village People. Buddy Morra, at Rollins Joffe, oversaw the record project and decided to pair Robin with Bennett Tramer, a screenwriter who had previously helped Robin write the parody of To Tell the Truth that had played at the start of Live at the Roxy.

  “Normally, he wouldn’t have needed me,” Tramer said, “but his schedule was such that he was doing Mork & Mindy all the time, and his material was so visual, they were worried he needed someone to make the act more verbal. In terms of a club performance, it was great how all over the place Robin was. But on a record album, you’re so used to beginnings, middles, and ends. So I was there to do that. We’d sit in my apartment and work stuff out, and go right to the Comedy Store or the Improv and do it.”

  Tramer and Robin bonded over their love of vintage Hollywood and character actors like George Jessel and Peter Lorre; repeated listenings to a bootleg recording of Jonathan Winters improvising a brutally ribald coupling between his characters Maude Frickert and Lenny the Hired Hand; and a shared passion for toy soldiers. “When I said I had a collection, he really freaked out,” Tramer said. “He came to my apartment, and said, ‘Where are the toy soldiers?’ I had to dig out these boxes that I hadn’t opened up—big bags of soldiers, cowboys and knights, and he really got off on all that stuff. You’re so powerless as a kid. The adults have power, and you’re told children should be seen and not heard. But his imagination was so great.”

  From their discussions about Robin’s stand-up material, Tramer learned that there was often a thought-out structure underpinning what looked like his scattershot and impulsive actions. “Even someone like him, where you think it’s just lightning-fast, there was a real logic to it,” Tramer said. “It seems scattered and grab-bag, but it’s very coherent, organized thinking.”

  He also noticed the way that stock characters and voices crept into Robin’s act—caricatures of blacks, Jews, gays, Asians, and others, that were not meant to be derogatory but were caricatures nonetheless—as throwaway accents that would occasionally supersede his own natural, elegant intonations. So far as Tramer could tell, Robin’s attraction to these groups seemed to stem from their marginalization—his understanding that in the upside-down hierarchy of comedy, their otherness gave them power he would never possess. “So much of comedy is standing on the margins, looking at the majority and poking fun at them,” Tramer said. “He was a Wasp, and he was a wealthy Wasp. It’s not that funny being a Wasp. That might be the fascination, not only with Jews, but with black culture, which he would love to do.”

  On January 27, 1979, Robin won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Comedy Series, besting a field that included his friend John Ritter from Three’s Company, Alan Alda from M*A*S*H, and Judd Hirsch from Taxi. Though that year’s ceremony was not broadcast on TV, the Los Angeles Times reported that Robin accepted his trophy “by turning to the audience and grabbing himself.”

  In the spring, as Mork & Mindy was hitting number one in the Nielsen ratings and reaching nearly twenty-six million homes nationwide, Robin set out on a series of short tours to record and perform material for the album, accompanied by the members of Rick and Ruby, the comedy music act for whom he had previously opened in the avant-garde clubs of San Francisco and which was now opening for him. The tour started at San Francisco’s Boarding House and reached its zenith with a five-day run at the Copacabana in New York. Robin would take home about $35,000 from these shows, which were immediate sell-outs.

  The Copa was no longer a top-flight venue for live performance—one writer described it as a backdrop of “chrome-and-plaster palm glitz” against which Robin himself played like a “hilarious sight gag,” dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, ill-fitting pants, and his trademark rainbow suspenders. By now, the identities of the characters he played, the trajectories of their monologues, and the divisions between them had been cleanly worked out: Nicky Lenin, the Soviet stand-up; the televangelist Reverend Ernest Lee Sincere; the postapocalyptic old man, who now had a name, Grandpa Funk. In between these longer bits were Robin’s freely associative non-sequitur scenarios: Truman Capote as a first-grader, offering a savage assessment of See Dick Run (“This isn’t writing, it’s typing”); “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” as told by William F. Buckley Jr. (“Goldie, an Aryan stereotype, and Lox, a Jewish soul food, combined to form a bourgeois archetype, who in time comes in contact with three bears, dark bears, maybe brown bears, maybe black bears, let’s just call them Third World bears”).

  Anyone who had seen Robin’s stand-up would have been familiar with these routines, and those who watched him do it in successive shows were becoming well versed in how the magician assembled his illusion. “It wasn’t a work of improvisational genius—90 percent of the show was the same from night to night,” said Joshua Raoul Brody, a band member with Rick and Ruby. “His genius was making it seem fresh and having a catalog of one-liners to respond to just about any situation, and made it look like he was making stuff up on the spot.”

  The reviews for his Copacabana shows were almost universally ecstatic, but more crucially, they articulated how Robin Williams was a different person from Mork, who was by far the better known of the two. Robin shared Mork’s sweetness and his compassion, but behind the character was a man of estimable intelligence and a full understanding of the power it gave him. As one critic observed, “I get the feeling that if Williams were to let it all out, his audience would need a scholastic aptitude test to get in the door.”

  These themes were picked up in the New York Times’ review of Robin’s opening night:

  It’s extraordinary that anyone as funny as Robin Williams can also create the impression of being so nice.… Mr. Williams doesn’t need sex, malice or self-deprecation to round out his repertory. He doesn’t even need real experience, or even real jokes. Mr. Williams simply assumes the manner of a small boy impersonating a stern, grown-up hero and whizzes from one crazy proposition to the next with cheerful aplomb. When the crowd responds appreciatively … he seems to beam with sweet, uncomplicated pride.

  As Robin was enjoying the embrace of the critics, he was also being accepted into an elite society of celebrity. Following his opening night at the Copacabana, at an after-party at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, he was welcomed by the Saturday Night Live stars Bill Murray and Gilda Radner, Dick Cavett, Andy Kaufman, Gene Simmons, Robert Klein, Lucie Arnaz, Peter Allen, and Andy Warhol. (As Bennett Tramer recalled, “I remember Bill Murray delivering one of the all-time great lines: ‘Mom, meet Andy Warhol.’”) The following day, Robin and Warhol went shopping at thrift stores. The comedy tour continued through the Midwest, where Robin’s shows in Detroit drew the likes of Diana Ross and the Jackson 5, before concluding at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles.

  The itinerary
was not always an unending procession of glamour. Brian Seff from Rick and Ruby said that after many performances, they were likely to be welcomed by “this complete throng that was hanging around Robin, of press and media and hangers-on. They’re all bothering Robin who, incidentally, when he would get offstage, you could smell him from twenty feet away. He had the world’s worst b.o. of anybody I’ve ever encountered. Because he’s hairy, and he’d work up such a sweat onstage. You could not get anywhere near him. But that didn’t seem to bother the people that were just wanting to hang. They didn’t really want to give him time to freshen up. It was just like, we want to see him as soon as he gets offstage—don’t allow him a moment to just chill for a minute or two.”

  Other distractions abounded as well. “He was famous, so women were throwing themselves at him,” said Seff. “But also, every drug dealer was giving him stuff.”

  The adulation, coming so quickly at Robin and from seemingly every direction, was not always easy for him to process. A few months into his run on Mork & Mindy, Robin was in Beverly Hills, where Jack Lemmon stopped him on the street and told him, “I think you’re the most talented guy to come along in the last five years.” When Robin later told Tramer about this encounter, he was plainly torn between wanting to accept the compliment and worrying that he could not meet such outsize expectations. “It was part, ‘Isn’t that fantastic?’ and part, ‘Do I really deserve that?’” Tramer said. “His reaction was not self-deprecating, necessarily, but, ‘How do I live up to that?’ ‘This is happening too fast.’ Not, ‘Isn’t that the greatest thing?’ It threw him a little.”

  Later, during the live tour, Robin met Bruce Springsteen, expecting that the young rock musician would share his secrets to navigating fame and its pitfalls, and finding that Springsteen hoped to hear the same from him. “Robin went out in Bruce’s Corvette,” Tramer said, “and he asked Robin, ‘How do you handle it?’—meaning, how do you handle stardom? Like they had a disease or something.”