Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  Almost immediately, Robin and Altman clashed over Popeye’s dialogue, which, even as it was written, was a complicated mouthful of malapropisms and mispronunciations. In an early soliloquy, the character recounts a sea journey spent with “nuttin’ on board t’eat but carroks”:

  After six weeks o’ carroks me eye sike got so good I could see through walls. See the fishes on the bottom o’ the oceang. After ten weeks o’ carroks I could see through flesh—look a man through to his bare bones. Ya can go too far wit’ a good t’ing. Even eye sike.

  Robin would deliver these lines out of the side of his mouth, sometimes with a corncob pipe clenched in his teeth; he wanted the flexibility to improvise from time to time, but Altman wanted everything performed as written in the script. Feiffer said he had no strong preference: “While I loved the improvisation, I thought I had written this as a Popeye and Olive Oyl romance, thinking of Tracy and Hepburn in Adam’s Rib and things like that.” But as Altman saw it, Feiffer said, “Robin was kind of trashing the character by making jokes here and there. We got past that. It was his first movie, working out some kind of nervousness, which he got under control.”

  “Bob said I could ad lib the mumbles—they’d be for me,” Robin explained. “On one or two occasions when I went too far, they simply lowered the sound.”

  When night fell on Malta, the collaborative spirit of the Popeye cast and crew gave way to something darker and more primal. Feiffer, who had come there alone, was living out of a motel and indulging in the melancholy of a collapsing relationship he’d left behind at home.

  “I was deeply gloomy and drinking just a little bit,” Feiffer said. “And I got awakened in the middle of the night by somebody in the company, saying, ‘Robin’s coming to beat you up. He heard you’re sleeping with Valerie, his wife.’”

  Still in a groggy state of disbelief, Feiffer asked his caller to repeat himself. “He told me again,” he said. “And I said, ‘That’s nuts.’ And he said, ‘Well, you’d better get out of here. He’s going to beat you up.’ And I got up, in my pajamas, and I walked down the street.”

  He came out of his room to find Robin standing in the road, gradually making his way toward him, as if preparing to challenge him to a duel. Feiffer stood his ground, holding out his arms, and crying, “Robin!” And when Robin had shambled up close enough to him, he reached out his arms and hugged him. “We announced our love for each other and that was the end of the evening,” Feiffer recalled with a laugh. “I know what I was on, but I don’t know what he was on. He was doing a lot of stuff.” (“Besides which,” Feiffer added, “I was a hundred years older than everybody else there. That notion of me sleeping with his wife was nuts.”)

  Beneath its bluster and roughhousing, Popeye was ultimately a tender film, providing an origin story for his romance with Olive Oyl, a score filled with off-kilter musical tributes to daily rituals (“Everything Is Food”) and oversize boyfriends (“He’s Large”), and presenting its hero as an introspective existentialist who’s just looking for a family wherever he can find it.

  But bit by bit, the production began to fall apart. Feiffer had a falling-out with Altman over a musical number called “I Yam What I Yam,” which the screenwriter had wanted to be staged like “Singin’ in the Rain.” “I wanted it to be his announcement of self, this take-charge number for Robin to just dominate the screen,” Feiffer said. But when he saw the lackluster version that Altman had shot, he said, “I was in a state of horror. Because this number essentially made Popeye an extra in his own song.” Feiffer left the set and did not return.

  Then, at the conclusion of the shoot, in the midst of a grand finale where Popeye and Olive Oyl fought a giant octopus, the production ran out of money. “That was literally where they pulled the plug,” Robin later recalled, “at a point where, if ever we needed special effects, it was like, now!” Some of his last days on Malta, he said, were spent watching Shelley Duvall “in a pool, going, ‘Oh, help!’ with an octopus with no mechanical devices inside, because the special effects guys had left. At the end it was like Ed Wood.”

  So dire were the circumstances that just about any suggestion for how to finish the movie was taken seriously. As Robin recalled, “I joked to Robert Evans, who was coked out of his tits, and I said, ‘Maybe I should walk on water.’ He said, ‘Yes!’” Thus, Popeye ended with its title hero dancing atop the sea to the tune of “I’m Popeye the Sailor Man.”

  When Robin returned to the United States that summer, he came home to the Grammy Award he had won in absentia for Reality … What a Concept, and to steep expectations for the movie that he sensed would not be fulfilled. Still, he tried to put a good face on the experience and spoke about Popeye as if he were a kindred spirit. As he said in one interview, “He’s a simple man. He’s kind of bittersweet, he’s got a lot of pain, and he’s been through a lot. He’s kind of an outsider—nobody you’d notice until he turns on his talent when he really has to prove himself.” Robin also began wearing a button on his pants that read EXPECT A MIRACLE.

  But it was clear at the film’s gala premiere, which was held at Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood and which Robin attended wearing a top hat and a boutonniere of spinach, that the movie was not going to be well received. Audiences could hardly make out Robin’s garbled blow-me-down dialogue, let alone much of what anyone else was saying in the murky audio mix, and Altman’s shambling directorial style was not well suited to musical comedy. “People didn’t know what to make of it,” said Tramer, who attended the premiere with Robin. “It was an unusual movie, because it was very stylized, and people were like, ‘I don’t quite get it.’”

  The major film critics were similarly dubious, neither praising it nor condemning it entirely when it opened on December 12, 1980. Vincent Canby, in the New York Times, said that Popeye was “a thoroughly charming, immensely appealing mess of a movie, often high-spirited and witty, occasionally pretentious and flat, sometimes robustly funny and frequently unintelligible. It is, in short, a very mixed bag.” Gene Siskel, in the Chicago Tribune, called the film “an apparent big-budget bomb in a year full of overproduced stinkeroos,” but he did hail Robin for “a performance that only a major artist could bring off,” comparing him to a “young Peter Sellers.”

  Audiences saw the movie in large numbers, and it sold nearly $50 million in tickets for its US release, making it the twelfth-highest-grossing film of the year. But there was no sense that viewers were enjoying Popeye or embracing Robin’s performance, and the film did not become his springboard to motion-picture stardom. Though in time he came to admire it as “a nice fairy tale with a loving spirit to it,” Robin carried the wound of Popeye with him, as if its failure to become an out-and-out blockbuster were his fault alone. It would sting him even to hear its title called out at his stand-up shows, though eventually he crafted a couple of one-liners for when he got heckled about it:

  “For your information, it’s playing in Hollywood on a double bill with Heaven’s Gate.”

  “If you watch it backward, it really does have an ending.”

  Other concerns were weighing on Robin’s mind, more immediate than his box-office results. A few days before the film’s opening, John Lennon was shot and killed by a disturbed fan who had waited outside his home in New York. Robin did not personally know Lennon, but the shooting left him feeling shaken and vulnerable. “When that happened, I saw a change in Robin,” Brian Seff recalled. “There was some paranoia.” One night that winter, Robin was coming off the stage at the Comedy Store when he was approached by a member of the audience. “And he says, ‘Hey, man, I know where you live, because I’ve seen you coming out of there,’” Seff recalled. “I never saw him be so paranoid. Really, he just thought, okay, here’s a stalker who’s going to shoot me.”

  Robin worked through some of these feelings in an unusual episode of Mork & Mindy that aired at the start of 1981, in the middle of the show’s third season. The episode, titled “Mork Meets Robin Williams,” double-ca
st Robin as himself, the superstar comedian, who is visiting Boulder for a solar-energy benefit concert, where Mindy is tasked with obtaining an interview with him. The story treats it as a given that Robin is chased by adoring fans wherever he goes; one of its running jokes is that Mork is frequently mistaken for Robin, though neither of them can quite see the resemblance. Mork, in his alien naïveté, cannot understand why Earthlings prize celebrity or this Robin Williams person. “Don’t you understand that a star is just a big ball of glowing hot gas?” he asks Mindy at one point. “He’s just an ordinary human being that’s been hyped by an advertising campaign.”

  When he and Mindy finally meet Robin in his dressing room—“You’re not from the Enquirer, are you?” Robin asks them—he is soft-spoken and mildly ashamed of the status afforded him. With a mixture of self-deprecation and surprising truthfulness, he explains that he got into comedy as the result of a lonely childhood—“You see, my dad used to have this job where he had to move around a lot, and sometimes he’d leave the forwarding address”—and that he created his outrageous voices and characters as a way to keep himself entertained. “Then it got to the point where I realized that the characters could say and do things that I was afraid to do myself,” he says.

  This Robin confesses to them that he has a hard time saying no to people, whether friends who ask him to spend time with them or strangers who ask him to participate in their benefit shows, for fear of letting anyone down.

  “You know,” Mindy tells him, “if you learned to say no, you’d probably have a lot more time to yourself.”

  “Maybe that’s the last thing I want,” he answers quietly.

  The episode ends with Mork delivering his regular weekly report back to Orson. Standing in total blackness, dressed in his red spacesuit, Mork explains what he has learned about the cost of fame and the loss of privacy that comes with it. “When you’re a celebrity, everybody wants a piece of you, sir. Unless you can say no, there’ll be no pieces left for yourself,” he says. “To get that, you have to pay a very heavy price. You have responsibilities, anxieties, and to be honest, sir, some of them can’t take it.”

  The unseen Orson responds, “I’m not buying it, Mork. It sounds to me like they have it made.”

  “Most of them do, sir,” Mork answers in a quavering voice, “but some are victims of their own fame. Very special, intelligent people. People like Elvis Presley. Marilyn Monroe. Janis Joplin. Jimi Hendrix. Lenny Bruce. Freddie Prinze. And John Lennon.”

  By now his eyes are visibly full of tears. There is no laughter, nor any other response from the audience as the screen fades to black.

  7

  BUNGALOW 3

  At every step of his Hollywood career—the one that had started not quite three years earlier—Robin was reminded how fantastically rapid his rise had been. Things just did not happen this way. Now he would have to agree this was true: things didn’t happen this way, and things were no longer happening for him the way they used to. Maybe it was already over for him. He tried, of course, to laugh it off, applying an unsentimental and sardonic humor to the wild whiplash of his up-and-down trajectory. “A god at twenty-seven, a washout at twenty-eight,” he said of himself in the spring of 1980, not long before he turned twenty-nine. “After you hit thirty, you’re just flab, failing hair and old drug flashes.” “Besides,” he added “there’s the future.” But with his once popular television series running out of steam and his marriage in peril, what kind of future could he hope for?

  New and valued friends were still coming into his life, and a barnstorming trip to London, just after he finished filming Popeye, turned into a chain of unexpected encounters with several of his British comedy idols. When he visited London’s Playboy Mansion to immerse himself in cotton-tailed models, he ran into Peter Cook, the pioneering screen satirist, who introduced himself and hailed Robin as a hero before Robin had the chance to do the same; by the end of the night they were watching films together back at Cook’s apartment.

  On that same vacation, Robin spent another evening sweating through a performance at a London venue called the Comic Strip—so named because it sat above a Soho strip club—fearing that the locals wouldn’t appreciate his riffs on Ronald Reagan, the Republican presidential candidate. (“This is Ronald—,” he would say, pausing as someone whispers the name “Reagan” into his ear, “—Reagan!”) Eric Idle, of Monty Python, was in the audience that night, and he said it was “a ruthless crowd. Quite funny people were being booed off and howled off within seconds of going on. And then Robin came on, and he was just breathtaking. He was being heckled and got the whole audience to pray for the death of the heckler. He was merciless, the way he went after him. And it was just great to see a real professional, totally comfortable at dismissing these drunken louts who thought they had something to say.”

  When Robin finished his set (which included a spontaneous one-man interpretation of a furious Wimbledon championship match between Björn Borg and John McEnroe), Idle gave him a standing ovation. “I haven’t laughed this hard in years,” he told Robin after the show, then rewarded him with an outing to a private gentlemen’s club, where they spent the night in the company of even greater luminaries like Michael Caine and Sean Connery.

  Idle, who was about eight years older, was a creative hero to Robin; they both loved a style of incongruous comedy informed by a wealth of intellectual and literary references. Idle had little use for banal euphemism; he was a rare ally who could cut through the bullshit and say, in his own unsparing but humorous way, exactly what he was thinking, even when it came to assessing Robin. And while he was impressed by his new friend’s unparalleled ability for improvisation, he also suspected that it was in some way compensating or covering up for other ways in which Robin was unable to share himself with his audience.

  “It was just a simple, effortless thing,” Idle said of Robin’s most identifiable talent. “I’ve always felt that Robin’s blinding speed and flash of wit was an effort at concealment, rather than revealing. He would ostensibly be talking about something personal or sexual, but it was always not close to him. He would be general.”

  Later that summer, Robin made a spur-of-the-moment trip to Toronto, following through on an invitation he’d received a few weeks earlier from Martin Short, a cast member of the Second City comedy troupe and the SCTV program. During a brief strike by the Screen Actors Guild, Short had told Robin he planned to spend his downtime performing with the Toronto company of Second City; when Robin asked if he could drop in for a set or two, Short answered, “Absolutely,” never expecting that Robin would take him up on the offer.

  But then, one August night at the Old Fire Hall, there was Robin, by himself, carrying no money and bearing no luggage. He and Short riffed their way through a series of improvisations, playing “Shakespearean father-and-son haberdashers, competing drunken choreographers with a bitter interpersonal history, and a two-headed man from Newfoundland singing gaily about the glories of Canada,” as Short described the set. He also said that, at one point in his exuberant routine, Robin, “being unfamiliar with the dimensions of the stage, tumbled right off and onto some delighted patrons.”

  Short and his wife, Nancy, let Robin stay over at their home; Nancy even washed Robin’s linen pants while he slept late the following afternoon. When Robin discovered that Nancy had accidentally shrunk his pants to the size of culottes, he said he’d tell Valerie, “I swear, I didn’t fuck anybody! I have no idea why my pants are four inches shorter!” Robin spent a week at the couple’s house, sometimes doing nothing more than sitting at the window and looking longingly at children playing hockey in the street. Then he’d turn to his host and say—in what Short described as a “vaguely Irish-sounding, wonderment-tinged lilt”—“Ohhh, they’re so won-derful, Marty. So utterly carefree. I wish I could stay here and watch them all day!” As Short would later observe, “He reminded me of Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince: wistfully surveying a world to which he felt he didn’t quite be
long.”

  There wasn’t much waiting for Robin back in Los Angeles. Mork & Mindy had taken a precipitous tumble in its third season, falling to forty-ninth place in the ratings, even though the show had reinstated banished cast members like Conrad Janis and Elizabeth Kerr and had moved back to its eight p.m. Thursday night time slot. “The third year was groping,” Garry Marshall said. The character of Mork could no longer pretend to be baffled by a telephone or a toaster or otherwise uninitiated in the ways of humanity, nor could the show’s writing staff disregard that he and Mindy had lived under the same roof for three years and only ever conducted a platonic relationship. In the fourth-season premiere, Mork proposed to Mindy and the following week, in defiance of a two-million-year-old Orkan ban on weddings, the two of them were married. (As punishment, Mork was temporarily turned into a dog by Orson.)

  The TV couple clearly waited no time in consummating their nuptials, because two weeks later, they were pregnant: Mork gave birth, through his navel, to an egg that then grew massively in size and hatched a fully grown (if not fully mentally developed) man he and Mindy named Mearth. To play a character with the physical makeup of an adult but the mind-set of a child, the producers of Mork & Mindy cast Jonathan Winters, a truly inspired choice. Robin had idolized Winters since childhood, and he was an even more unpredictable and unruly improviser.

  Winters had been briefly considered to play Mork in the Happy Days episode that introduced the character, and he had guest-starred in the third season of Mork & Mindy, playing Mindy’s uncle Dave, a domineering multimillionaire. Even then, the show’s staff knew he did not always play according to the rules. As director Howard Storm recalled, “When he’s introduced to Pam, he looks at her and he says, ‘What a pretty little girl you are.’ Well, Johnny looked her up and down and he was so lascivious. ‘What a pretty little girl you are.’ I said, John, she’s your niece. You can’t come on with her like that. It’s not like you want to jump her bones. I don’t know whether he didn’t want to or he just couldn’t, but he would never say a line in the script. He would change it all the time.”