by Dave Itzkoff
At the end of the episode, Mork has his revenge on Uncle Dave by feeding him an Orkan dessert that causes him to hallucinate that he is in the middle of a comical war scene. In this moment, when Winters and Robin were given the freedom to riff and play with each other, something special happened. “Johnny goes wacko and starts doing everyone in the war,” said Storm. “He was a general. He was a sergeant. He was a private. He was a gunner. He was behind the couch, with an imaginary machine gun, shooting everything, and Robin was feeding the belt of bullets into the machine gun. This is how much in tune they were with each other: Johnny decided that the gun jammed, and Robin knew it, ’cause Robin made believe his finger got caught inside. He yelled, ‘Ouch!’” With Robin at his side, Winters improvised twenty-two minutes of material. “And the show only ran twenty-two minutes,” Storm said. “So we had to cut it down to about six or seven minutes.”
It had not been Robin’s idea to bring Winters back to Mork & Mindy in an ongoing role, but the producers thought it might help lift Robin’s spirits. “I don’t think Jonathan had been doing much at that time,” said cocreator Dale McRaven. “We were asked if we wanted to use him, and Jonathan was my hero growing up. And Robin’s even more so. So when Robin heard about it, he said, ‘Get him in, please.’”
Sure enough, casting Winters as Mearth gave the program and its besieged leading man a new burst of energy. “Having him on the show was one of the main reasons I stayed with it,” said Robin—who was contractually obligated to continue, whether he liked it or not. “For me, it was like the chance to play alongside Babe Ruth.” It also paired him with a costar who was almost pathologically unable to stop playing characters, who might suddenly decide he’s a building inspector checking for code violations, a guard who’s been working the Paramount gate for decades, or the emcee of a telethon to keep Lucille Ball off the air.
Winters, now in his mid-fifties, still had an impeccable comedy reputation earned from films like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and his many TV appearances. But he was also a tragic, wounded figure who was open about his struggles with bipolar disorder and had been institutionalized for nervous breakdowns in 1959 and 1961. Whatever blithe expression crossed his face and whatever character he imagined himself to be playing, he always carried in his wallet a meaningful Ralph Waldo Emerson quotation: “Humor is the mistress of sorrow.”
So the crew at Mork & Mindy tended to forgive Winters if he occasionally forgot his lines or ignored his cue cards; they knew that if he started to stumble, Robin would help prop him up. And Winters gave Robin tacit permission to rescue him when he needed saving; he regarded Robin as a kindred spirit who understood, as he did, that comedy could be as light as a feather or as heavy as a suit of armor, and who used it defensively, to protect his personal space.
“I think what Robin and I have is a quality that forces us, when in doubt, to lash out by capturing someone else’s personality when we become threatened,” Winters said. “We are blessed with an extra lens to see with and an extra transistor to hear with.… Robin once said our madness is organized to a finely honed edge over wildness. When we’re performing, we’ve got to get out there and paint a picture. If nobody gets the paintings, then we’re in trouble.”
Yet anyone who was able to glimpse them goofing around—and people on the Paramount lot went out of their way for the chance—did not necessarily see two deeply hurting comedians using their humor to help them work through the pain. They seemed to be a pair of like-minded jokers for whom the whole world was a proving ground to practice their work. As Henry Winkler, who was filming Happy Days a few stages away, described their antics, “He and Jonathan Winters are walking down the street to the commissary. Now all of a sudden, they stop in the middle of the street and start doing bits. And now people are congregating. Now you’ve got two dozen people standing in the street, at lunchtime, watching these two men riff. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. But it didn’t matter. Because they were still better than what was happening in the world.”
That same fall of 1981, just a few days into the fourth season of Mork & Mindy, Robin made his long-awaited debut on The Tonight Show. On October 14, he got to bypass the tryout process that many of his stand-up peers had been subjected to and went straight to the couch to sit by Johnny Carson’s side as his leadoff guest. Following an introduction from Carson, who acknowledged with some astonishment that Robin had never previously appeared on the program, he came onto the stage wearing a tuxedo jacket and vinyl pants but no belt or tie. Appearing nervous and eager to please, Robin quickly cycled through many voices and bits, speaking first in his preacher’s voice—“Believe that comedy can heal you! Praise the power”—then leaping and clapping at the boom microphone as if he were Flipper.
Carson got few sincere answers to his questions and asked few that could have been answered seriously (“Where is home for you? Or did you come from a home?”) but one of Robin’s responses stood out.
“People see you,” Carson said to Robin, “they probably think you”—he paused here to consider the right word—“experiment with, uh, foreign substances in your body.”
“Medication, you mean?” Robin said teasingly as he began to play with his nose. “What makes you say that, in any way?” By now, he was swiping at his nose and mouth more furiously. “No!” he answered emphatically, adding a line that had recently become part of his act: “Because I believe that cocaine is God’s way of saying you’re making too much money.” As the audience cheered and Johnny laughed at the quip, Robin continued, “No, I wouldn’t take any medication. You couldn’t. You see the girls at the Rainbow Bar & Grill taking one too many quaaludes, going, ‘Is my lipstick on?’” Here he mimed the act of encircling his entire face with a lipstick tube.
Robin’s customary position in his interviews from this time was to say that he did not really use recreational drugs. As he told the permissive readership of Playboy, “I never will. I mean, someone once gave me a Valium and it stayed in my blood for a couple of days.… Most times, anything I try, I have the opposite reaction to what I’m supposed to have.” He claimed he avoided cocaine in particular, because it did not deliver its promised invigorating effects and instead, he said, “I get passive and just hold back.… I don’t like doing any of the heavies, because normally my energy is just up when I’m performing.”
But none of this was true. By now, Robin’s cocaine use had become an ingrained part of his nightly post-work routine at Mork & Mindy, as much a part of this ritual as his stops at the Hollywood comedy clubs. “I’d go from doing the show,” he later explained, “and then come to do the Comedy Store, and then go to the Improv, and then you’d go hang out at clubs, and then end up in the Hills, at some coke dealer’s house. [Knocking on a door] ‘Angel, it’s Robin.’ And then you’d wake up the next morning, going, ‘Ohhh.’ Not even wake up—you haven’t gone to sleep. You’re like a vampire on a day pass, going, ‘How are you?’ Hissssssss.”
Robin never seemed to take pleasure in the stimulative properties of cocaine, and it certainly did not make him a more social person. “I did cocaine so I wouldn’t have to talk to anybody,” he said. “For me it was like a sedative, a way of pulling back from people and from a world that I was afraid of.”
Around the Mork & Mindy set, it was no secret that Robin had been abusing drugs and alcohol to the point where it was interfering with his work on the show. “He was running like a mad man,” Dawber said. “And of course drugs were playing into it. And I’d get mad at him and he’d deny it. It was just classic. But he’d still be at the Comedy Store at two in the morning and just running all over when he had to be at work the next day. He was exhausted. We’d be sitting on the couch at noon while Howard’s giving us notes, and Robin would be asleep on the couch.”
Storm, too, saw through Robin’s deceptions and knew what was causing him to take multiple midday naps and miss his morning call-times. “When he would show up an hour later, he’d look like a wreck,” said Sto
rm. “He hadn’t slept all night. He was snorting coke, and if you snort coke, in order to come down, you drink booze. He was out all night and screwing everybody in town. It was like a smorgasbord for him. It was all laid out there.”
Robin realized his weak attempts at feigning sobriety weren’t fooling anyone. “You’d come in the next day,” he said, “and people would say, ‘Oh, pardon me. Refried shit?’ Looking like, you know, a big human tostada walking around.”
But even when he was recovering from a round of carousing, he could skate by on his extraordinary memory skills. “I remember after one night of partying, he was late,” recalled costar Jim Staahl. “The stage manager actually called Robin’s manager and said, ‘Where’s Robin?’ ‘I dunno.’ Robin came stumbling in, unwashed, tired, blown-out-looking. And they said, ‘Did you get the script?’ ‘Script?’” His revised script for the day had been left at his Hollywood apartment, but because Robin had never come home that night, he had not received it.
“We’re doing the run-through for the network,” Staahl said. “It’s a lot of pressure, because it’s Wednesday and we’re trying to lock the script. They hand him the script, Act I is completely rewritten. I’m sitting there going over my lines, Robin reads it through, hands it to Marty Nedboy, who was our dialogue coach. And then he goes, ‘Okay, guys, let’s do it.’ We do the run-through and Robin does it without holding the script. I’m like, ‘Huh? How did you do that?’”
“He was so good that he could just phone it in, and the audience bought it,” said Storm, who eventually confronted Robin about his out-of-control conduct. “I said to him, ‘You know you’re not working at 100 percent, Robin. You’re probably at 75 percent. But I know you, and I know what you can do. You’re not really working full-out, and consequently the show becomes mediocre, and my work becomes mediocre.’ So I said to him, ‘Either you start to give 100 percent or I’m out of here. I don’t want to be around someone who’s not working full-blast.’”
Robin hung his head and gave Storm a meek reply of regret. “Okay, Papa. Okay,” he said. But Storm eventually did leave Mork & Mindy to become a director on Taxi.
Some colleagues suspected that Robin was chasing not the high of cocaine so much as the comforting sense of belonging he got from being around other working comics. “He was addicted to performing,” said McRaven. “And he would go out every night after work and go to all the clubs and stay out late. If a place was open till four o’clock, he’d stay there till four o’clock. And in the mornings, he was always hungover.” But his drug use was not the problem, per se—“that was just something he did when he was performing,” McRaven said. “I think he was also trying to prove to the other comics that he hadn’t changed. He was just trying to be one of the guys.”
The problems created by Robin’s misconduct spilled out of his private life and into his workplace, eroding the boundaries between them. The gossip columns were again taking note of Valerie’s public feuds with other women, and Robin’s coworkers found themselves in the awkward position of having to cover for him. “When we’d find out Valerie was coming to the set, we’d hide the woman that was dating him,” Storm said. “We’d have to say, ‘Get her out of here.’ To protect Robin.”
But Valerie knew what was going on, and the couple’s friends were warning them that a greater reckoning was coming if they did not act soon to salvage their relationship. “We got hit hard by the drugs and the women,” Valerie later recalled. On one night when she and Robin were out together, Valerie was taken aside by Richard Pryor, who warned her that they were headed for serious calamity. “You’ve got to get out of town,” Pryor told her. “You guys are not like this. You’re not them”—here Pryor indicated the revelers not only in their immediate vicinity but anywhere they went in Los Angeles. “You are disintegrating. This is not good.”
Pryor, who two years earlier had barely survived a horrible incident in which he’d badly burned himself after a days-long period of freebasing cocaine, delivered a similar lecture to Robin. He gave Valerie the watch he was wearing, for some reason, and he later presented the two of them with an unusual gift: a pair of wooden African fertility statues. At this point the couple decided to heed his advice: “We went and got out of town,” Valerie said. A few days later she and Robin were flying in a helicopter above Napa Valley, looking for land to buy, and for $750,000 they purchased a ranch on a 640-acre plot in what Robin called the “rose-smelling, deep-breathing, waterfall country” north of San Francisco. The ranch became their gated getaway, where they could fish, swim, ride horses, or water plants. It was a place of solace and relaxation but also a fortification to keep Robin away from Hollywood, where he would habitually be tempted into bad behavior or feel pressure to further his career. Or, as Eric Idle would put it to him, “Look, that’s a flower, asshole. You don’t need to talk into a microphone when you can smell a flower.” But the couple did not give up Hollywood altogether.
In January 1982, Robin welcomed the latest celebrity visitor to the Mork & Mindy set: John Belushi, the husky, hell-raising star of Saturday Night Live, The Blues Brothers, and Animal House. Belushi had been talking to Paramount executives about a new film project, and in his downtime he dropped by Stage 27 to watch Jonathan Winters ad-lib a scene about a World War II veteran who realizes the Japanese soldiers who shot at him at Okinawa are now tending his garden back in America.
Belushi had hung out with Robin a few previous times in New York, where Robin sang backup to his peerless Joe Cocker impersonation at Catch a Rising Star, and Belushi took him on a tour of the city’s punk rock clubs. Robin said the experience was “like being on a tour with Dante, if Dante were James Brown. I was like Beaver Cleaver in the underworld.” When Belushi was in Los Angeles, the two of them sometimes got their drugs from some of the same people.
On this visit, Robin was mourning the loss of Harvey Lembeck, the influential Los Angeles improvisation teacher who had helped him find his way to sitcom stardom, and who had died of a heart attack after falling ill on the Mork & Mindy set, where he’d been filming a role. Robin was still hurting, too, from his experience with Popeye, racked with self-loathing about the declining fortunes of Mork & Mindy and questioning whether he was anything more than a one-hit wonder. Even a throwaway item in a local magazine’s In and Out column, which decreed that being at a party attended by Robin Williams was henceforth Out, had gotten under his skin. He thought frequently of the giant billboards and posters along Sunset Boulevard that advertised the hot new movies and albums, which elevated the stars featured in them to the status of gods. But Robin had never been depicted in one of these promotions, and it ate at him. “They’re fifty feet tall and I’m only five foot eight,” he thought. “I’m nothing.”
Robin was lifted out of his funk when he watched Belushi observe Winters on the set; Belushi’s quiet admiration for this legendary comedian seemed pure and sincere, to the point where he would shush anyone who tried to talk to him while Winters was playing his scene. Robin and Belushi did not say much more that day, but they made vague plans to see each other again soon.
On the night of March 4, Belushi was staying in Bungalow 3 at the Chateau Marmont, the shadowy gothic hotel that loomed over the Sunset Strip, while he continued to negotiate with Paramount about his next film project. Around midnight, Belushi ran into Robert De Niro and Harry Dean Stanton at On the Rox, an elite nightclub above the Roxy Theatre, and at two a.m. Robin, having wrapped up another therapeutic early-morning set at the Comedy Store, came by to find that the club had just closed. A bouncer told him that De Niro and Belushi had been looking for him, so Robin drove over to the Chateau. At the hotel, Robin first phoned De Niro, who told him he couldn’t make it down from his room. So he headed over to Belushi’s bungalow, where he was let in by Derf Scratch, the bassist from the punk band Fear, and waited for its primary resident to return.
When Belushi came back, he was joined by Cathy Evelyn Smith, a singer and drug dealer who had dated musicians like Levon Hel
m and Gordon Lightfoot, and her presence made Robin deeply uncomfortable. She seemed gaunt and worn down, and the room itself was disheveled and strewn with empty wine bottles. Belushi took out a guitar and strummed a few chords; subsequent accounts of the evening would later state that he and Robin did some cocaine, though Robin himself denied this.
As Belushi grew groggier—he said he’d taken some quaaludes earlier—Robin realized it was time to go. He told Belushi he was welcome to visit him at his new ranch in Napa Valley, then he made the drive alone to his home in Topanga Canyon, where Valerie was waiting for him. He told her that he’d just been to see Belushi but could not put the image of Cathy Evelyn Smith out of his mind. “God, man,” he told Valerie. “He was with this lady—she was tough, scary.”
Sometime later that morning, Smith prepared two speedballs—powerful mixtures of cocaine and heroin—injecting herself with one and Belushi with the other. He complained of feeling cold, so she turned up the thermostat and tucked him into bed, where he fell asleep. In his sleep, he died of an overdose, from the toxic quantity and combination of drugs he had taken. His physical trainer discovered his lifeless body just after twelve noon. He was thirty-three years old.