by Dave Itzkoff
Many people who had been close to Robin before his upsurge of fame were realizing that their relationship with him could never be the same as it was before. “It really changed,” said Sonya Sones, a friend who had started dating Bennett Tramer. “It’s like the Big Bang, when a universe suddenly springs into being.” If she and Tramer happened to be out on a date together with Robin and Valerie, Sones said, “People were completely starstruck. They were coming at him, asking for autographs and saying, ‘Nanu, nanu’ and wanting pictures taken. But as a result of his meteoric rise, other people who were also meteors in their own right began seeking him out. It’s as though people who are at that level of talent and fame, they’re almost like in a club together. Only they can understand what it’s like to have that happen to you.”
Often these fellow celebrities seemed to have no use for Robin’s civilian friends. “Since Bennett and I were not famous, some people would just look through us and move on,” she said. How Robin was adjusting to this abrupt elevation of status wasn’t clear, either. “I think he was loving it,” she said. “But I think it was in some ways overwhelming.”
Robin’s first album, titled Reality … What a Concept, was released in the summer of 1979. It was sloppier, less intimate, and less personal than the routines he had delivered onstage and on TV. His now familiar lineup of characters had been steered hard toward delivering punch lines and eliciting laughter, at the cost of their underlying humanity. There was nothing sentimental anymore about Grandpa Funk, who is no longer implied to be an aged version of Robin himself, and who says things like, “Come here, I’ll gum you. Because that’s about all I can do with this.” The televangelist, now called Reverend Earnest Angry, offers this homily: “You know, friends, comedy can help you. You know, life’s like a big fan. And sometimes the ca-ca hits it. But comedy can be your shield. It can help you laugh it away.”
The only time that Robin is really heard speaking as himself is when he is setting up his Shakespearean actor routine and asks his audience to suggest a topic from the news that he can improvise off of; someone is heard shouting out, “Robin Williams!”
“Robin Williams? Who’s he?” he asks.
“Mork,” comes the reply.
“No, no, no, my child,” Robin answers. “We are not doing that tonight, man. No, no, I’m free from that now, Massa Bob. No, I don’t have to ‘nanu’ for a while. We’re doing something different. Five months ago he couldn’t say his own name. Thanks to your dollars, he’s learned to go ‘nanu, nanu.’ And you could have your very own series.”
By now, audience members are heard chanting, “Mork! Mork! Mork!”
“An angry mob!” says Robin. “Shh, wait, time-out. I have to explain one thing. I ain’t doing Mork, because this is why I perform here. To do something different.” The crowd applauds and he continues with the routine.
The cover of Reality … What a Concept was a fuzzy portrait photo of Robin, caught in mid-expression, with a seeming smirk or a look of surprise on his face, while the interior record sleeve offered multiple depictions of him as his various alter egos: the reverend, in a seersucker suit with a Bible in hand; Nicky Lenin, in a Soviet T-shirt with a duffle bag at his feet; Grandpa Funk, wearing a trench coat and eyeglass frames with no lenses. The sleeve also carried a modest personal inscription from Robin: “This album is dedicated to Laura Berry Smith,” though he gave no indication that this was his mother. He was equally cryptic about the series of people he offered thanks to by their first name only, including “Rob, Miss V., Todd, Laurin.” More explicitly, he offered special thanks to Jonathan Winters “for giving me the spark.”
Like the live shows that had spawned it, Reality … What a Concept received glowingly positive appraisals. People magazine declared, “If nothing else, this LP of live nightclub routines proves that Robin Williams is like a butterfly in harness on a network sitcom. For while he is a delight as Mork, TV inevitably constrains his dizzyingly bountiful imagination. It’s no loss that he doesn’t do Mork here.” The review added, “Comedy LPs are frustrating—Williams’ ‘Death of a Sperm Ballet’ is obviously a visual bit and he takes easy laughs by imitating a drunk or just mentioning the word ‘drugs.’ That doesn’t prevent his stand-up stuff from being as good as the best of Hope, Bruce, Cosby, Carlin or Pryor.” By that fall, Robin’s album was in the Billboard Top 10 (alongside rock albums like Led Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Door and Supertramp’s Breakfast in America) and had sold more than half a million copies.
Everything seemed to be going Robin’s way; there was almost nothing to which he applied himself that did not result in immediate, staggering success. When Robin got his Time magazine cover, his friend Bennett Tramer extended his congratulations to Robin’s publicist, Estelle Endler, telling her, “Isn’t this great?”
To Tramer’s surprise, Endler answered, “Not really.”
“Why?” Tramer asked.
“I helped get him there,” she replied.
“So why isn’t it great?”
“Well,” she answered, “don’t you realize you have to build up these big stars so they can tear ’em down?”
6
MORK BLOWS HIS CORK
It was just another night at the Improv in Manhattan until Robin dropped in for a guest set. He liked to come to the city when he could get away for a weekend, to catch that fix he could find only in the New York clubs. The crowds there were unforgiving and the possibility of failure felt like a dangerous proposition, not like in Los Angeles or San Francisco, where audiences had been conditioned to anticipate his surprise performances.
Rich Shydner, a friend and fellow comedian, was emceeing when Robin made his unannounced appearance, and it was one he would always remember. “Of course the place goes crazy,” Shydner said. “He just destroyed for like forty minutes. Everything he did got a laugh.” Afterward, Shydner was backstage with Robin, watching other performers get washed away in his wake—“The next two acts just died, it was a wasteland to have to follow that, it was nuclear”—when Robin said something unexpected. “He didn’t say it to me, in particular,” Shydner recalled. “He just said it to himself. He had this worried look on his face. He just went, ‘I don’t even know what’s funny anymore.’ I’d never experienced that. There might be some guys that would go, ‘I’ll just take whatever I do for a laugh, and just run with it, and that’s great.’ He was concerned that he was losing a grip on what’s funny and what’s not. Which is, I think, every true comic’s concern.”
For nearly a year it seemed as if Robin could do no wrong. His sitcom was a smash hit and his record album had become a best seller. His beaming face adorned all kinds of Mork & Mindy merchandise, including T-shirts, trading cards, board games, and action figures. He had become so recognizable that he no longer went out in public wearing his rainbow suspenders—a formerly inseparable piece of his personal identity that had been commandeered by his TV alter ego—so that children would not approach him to ask if he would take them into space with him. His outsize stature did not make him invulnerable; instead, it forced him to confront a range of problems on a scale he had never previously experienced. And there were very real problems for him to worry about.
In the March 1979 issue of Los Angeles magazine, atop a gossipy column called The Insider, there appeared a one-paragraph item alleging that Robin had plagiarized some of his material from other stand-up comics. The item said that a “group of young L.A. comedians”—no names were given—claimed that Robin had been coming to their shows at the Comedy Store and stealing their lines for later use on Mork & Mindy. Some of these comedians, the item said, would not play at the club if Robin was there, and one unnamed performer was said to have thrown Robin against a wall and ordered him to pay him $300 for the parts of his routine he believed had been lifted, a shakedown that Robin supposedly agreed to. The item concluded by saying that this group of comedians was too intimidated to defy Robin’s powerful managers at Rollins Joffe but added that they “also realize tha
t national air play can kill their best jokes.”
A few days later, this story was carried to the East Coast when it was picked up by Liz Smith in the New York Daily News. Again, no names or specifics were given, though Smith’s account repeated the story of the anonymous accoster who “threw TV’s brightest talent up against a wall and demanded payment for some bits,” adding that “club regulars claim that Williams paid up.”
Then in April, the Chicago Tribune weighed in with a lengthy feature story that explored these claims in greater detail, and the picture it painted was deeply unflattering. While it noted the enviable challenges that Robin faced for having a massive television audience, an army of fans, and a lexicon of signature lines that “are thrown back at him like half-eaten jelly beans,” the paper said that he had a more significant problem: “In the close-knit West Coast comedic community, he is becoming known for ‘borrowing’ lines and concepts from other performers—stealing material, to put it bluntly.”
The Tribune cautioned that, historically, performers like Milton Berle, Lenny Bruce, and Freddie Prinze were also “notoriously light-fingered,” and it revisited some possibly apocryphal stories about W. C. Fields, who was said to have had a vaudeville rival’s legs broken for stealing one of his routines, and Shecky Greene, who refused to play a Las Vegas show until a thieving comedian was thrown out of his audience.
The story went on to catalog several jokes that Robin had used, either in his live act or on Mork & Mindy, that were the likely property of other comics. The recurring bit in which Robin would announce, “I’d like to show you something I’m extremely proud of,” and then start to unzip his fly, was said to have originated with Charles Fleischer; and the line “Reality, what a concept,” which became the title of Robin’s landmark record album, supposedly belonged to Biff Manard. The article also made the case that one of Mork’s lesser catchphrases, “What’s happening, plasma?”—a line he would often address to his young friend Eugene (Jeffrey Jacquet), and a deliberately comic misinterpretation of “What’s happening, blood?” a bit of black slang—had been taken from John Witherspoon, an actor and comedian who had appeared with Robin on The Richard Pryor Show, and who had a years-old routine about a friend who had moved to Beverly Hills and started saying, “What’s happening, plasma?”
Witherspoon told the Tribune that he had confronted Robin about the alleged theft. “His answer was, ‘Well, I ad lib a lot. If I used your line, I’ll pay you,” Witherspoon recalled. “And I said, ‘You can’t pay me because 40 million people saw that show. If you gave me a dollar for every one of those people, that would be great. But otherwise it’s not even worth it.’” The story also quoted veteran comics like Tom Dreesen, who vouched for Witherspoon’s authorship of the line, and Tim Thomerson, who said he had been threatened by Robin’s managers for performing a bitingly satirical impersonation of Robin in his stand-up act. (“I took his stance, with my hand on my hip, and said, ‘Oh, I’ll use that,’” Thomerson explained. “It got a big laugh from the comics in the audience who knew what I was referring to.”)
Robin, while wounded by these personal indictments, flatly denied them. “There’s no truth in it,” he said. “Those are all my friends and I don’t want to bad-mouth any of them.” Several of his colleagues rallied to his defense. Howard Storm, his director at Mork & Mindy, said the less prosperous comedians were jealous of Robin’s accomplishments. “When you’re a success, it’s the same old charge,” he said.
Other performers who knew Robin in this era say there is no easy answer to these allegations. Few if any of them believe that he acted with malice or that he ripped off other people’s jokes with the deliberate intention of trying to pass off their original work as his own. However, several say that they saw a pattern of behavior that, if it did not amount to outright plagiarism, still resulted in his repeating bits, lines, characters, or tropes that previous performers had originated, sometimes without his realizing that he was doing it.
Some comedians say that Robin’s borrowing fell into a gray area that was considered tolerable by the ethical standards of the industry. “Robin would see something and he’d appreciate it for what it was and how good it was,” said Jim Staahl, who performed with Robin in the Comedy Store Players and joined the cast of Mork & Mindy in its second season. “And then he would incorporate it and do it his way, and add something to it. We used to call it the ‘sweet steal.’ You’d see somebody’s bit and you’d go, ‘They’re doing it wrong. Here’s my variation of it.’ There were times he could do a variation of somebody else’s material and the audience wouldn’t know.”
Not everyone agrees that even this much replication is permissible. Richard Lewis, a friend and fellow comedian, said he could understand if some comics considered this unforgivable. “Robin could take a premise or a joke and then go off on it and make it better, because he was a genius,” Lewis said. “But a premise is gold. If a young comic has four, five minutes and he’s going to go on The Tonight Show, and all of a sudden, Robin does three of his jokes, he’s fucked. So yeah, there’s real reason for some of these people to have tremendous hostility.”
But there was also a part of Robin, friends said, who repeated other people’s words and ideas unknowingly and unconsciously—the result of a rapidly firing mind that absorbed nearly everything and resurfaced old ideas that he believed were his own inventions.
There would be times when Robin realized, after the fact, what he had done, and he would be filled with regret and a desire to make amends. “Something would be in his head, and then it was like, pop, his synapses would go so fast,” said Staahl. “Something would come up. And later he would go, ‘Oh, crap, that was so-and-so’s line. I swear to God, it was innocent.’”
While Robin was performing at the Copacabana in New York, he went shopping one afternoon with Monica Ganas and Joshua Raoul Brody from the Rick and Ruby band, then got in a cab to head back to the theater. “It was rush-hour traffic, so it was a slow cab,” Brody recalled. “As they were getting into the cab, Monica told Robin a story about something that had happened to her cousin. And by the time they were getting out of the cab, Robin was telling the same story back to Monica, as if it had happened to somebody else. In the course of a cab ride, he had forgotten where he had heard the story.” As to any accusations of misappropriation that Robin may have faced, Brody said, “I offer guilty with an explanation, your honor. It was a disease, it wasn’t theft.”
Much later in his career, Robin would take a more defiant stance on these allegations. “If you hang out in comedy clubs, when I was doing it, almost 24-7, you hear things,” he said then, “and then if you’re improvising, all of a sudden, you repeat it, going, ‘Oh shit.’ My brain was working that way.” For a time, he said he simply stopped going to clubs, for fear that he would be accused of trolling for other people’s material. “I was also like the bank of comedy,” he said. “I went, ‘Oh shit, here, here you go, here’s money, I’m sorry. I didn’t know that. Oh shit.’ … And then after a while, I went, ‘I bought that line already. I’m sorry.’ And then you have to pay again.”
But as long as he was giving audiences something that no other comic could provide, Robin felt he had nothing to worry about: “The truly unique guys don’t give a fuck,” he said.
Whatever Robin may have done deliberately or accidentally, Jamie Masada, the owner of the Laugh Factory, said he was motivated by a worthwhile goal that eventually got out of hand. “He had an addictive personality,” Masada said. “He became so addicted to laughter. Sometimes he wanted to make everybody laugh so bad. He didn’t need to steal material.”
But now that Robin had been labeled a joke thief, he was going to find that, whether he fought back vehemently against the accusations or did not respond to them at all, a cloud was now hanging over his head and there was nothing he could do to make it go away.
Home could still be a refuge for him, when Robin was there. In a TV Guide profile from this period, he tenderly declared that
he had Valerie to thank for whatever he had accomplished or amassed to this point. “Valerie is my inspiration,” he said in the interview. “She is my grounding point to keep me centered.”
But friends who knew the couple could see that they were struggling with the rapid acceleration of Robin’s fame. “He was young, and it’s a strange thing to go from being known as this real funny guy in the clubs to being a huge star,” said Bennett Tramer. “And you can imagine, it’s a strain on a marriage. You just get married, and then literally, two or three months later, your husband is the biggest star in the country: ‘It was just my husband and me, and now the whole world wants a piece of him.’ Marriage is a great thing, but you don’t want to have it exposed to the whole world a month or two after it happens. They were great together, but she certainly paid her dues.”
At times, Robin could be unexpectedly cutting or callous in how he spoke about Valerie. At a press conference for Mork & Mindy, when he was asked how his wife was handling his “skyrocketing success,” Robin answered, “Pretty well, I think. She lives in Louisiana now—but she keeps in touch by mail. ‘Our boy is growing up,’ she writes.”
One night, Valerie was in the audience at the Comedy Store with Brian Seff, their friend from Rick and Ruby, as they watched Robin finish up a set. Robin was holding forth on the strangeness of being famous, and he said to the audience, “There’s girls that just come up to me. I’ve never seen them before, and they’re like, ‘Excuse me, would you—?” At this point in the riff, Robin pointed at his crotch.
“He’s saying it like it’s a hardship,” Seff recalled. “And Valerie yells, ‘Oh, you love it.’” There was no question that Robin had heard her remark from the audience because he reacted to it: “Oh, now my wife’s heckling me,” he responded.