Robin
Page 19
That morning, Robin had come to work a little late and a little bleary, as usual, and he told Dawber about his unusual night. “He said, ‘Wow, I was with Belushi last night, and boy,’” Dawber recalled. “First of all, Robin never had judgment, because he was doing a lot of the same stuff, but certainly not what Belushi was doing.” He recounted for her his missed connection with De Niro, his uneasy visit to the bungalow, and how magnificently Belushi had played his guitar, as stoned as he was. “‘He could hardly stand up, and yet he could play the guitar to perfection,’—that’s what he was saying,” Dawber said. “There was some girl there and John was just so stoned. That’s what Robin told me about that, and I went, ‘Wow. Okay.’”
Just as the cast and crew were preparing to break for lunch, they received the news that had been rippling across Hollywood that day: Belushi had died in his bungalow at the Chateau. The producers knew that someone had to tell Robin, but fearing that the information would devastate him, they felt that it was best delivered by a trusted friend like Dawber. “They said, ‘Will you tell Robin?’” she recalled. “I said, ‘Oh, God, Robin was with him last night.’ And they said they knew. I don’t know how they knew.”
Dawber waited for a discreet moment when she and Robin were walking back from the Paramount commissary: “I said, ‘I’ve got something really terrible to tell you, Robin. He went, ‘What? What?’ And I said that John Belushi was found dead last night.” Robin found it incomprehensible to hear this about someone he had seen only a few hours earlier. “He went, ‘What? I was with him last night! I was with him last night!’” Dawber said. She could see that Robin was in pain but wanted to make sure he did not ignore the larger lesson in all of this. “I said, ‘Robin, if that ever happens to you, I will find you and kill you first.’”
By now, she and Robin had made their way back to Stage 27, and they could hear the growing clamor of the studio audience being let in for the taping of that night’s show. Dawber started looking for her script when she saw Robin standing with his hands cupped over his crotch, which for him was a sign of pensive contemplation. He was looking down at the ground, still processing the ultimatum that she had just given him. In a soft, solemn voice, he answered, “That’s never going to happen to me, Dawbs.”
As he grieved for a friend who could have had decades of great work ahead of him, Robin did not need any assistance to see how Belushi’s death communicated an unmistakable message, addressed directly to him and all but hand-delivered to his doorstep.
Robin later described Belushi as “a powerful personality and a powerful physical being, too. When someone like him takes the cab, it wises your ass up really quick.… John was on the frontier; he was out there pushing it.” After his death, Robin said he could not help but look at himself and realize that a drastic change of lifestyle was needed if he wanted to avoid the same destiny: “It was like, ‘Look at you, you little frail motherfucker. You’re small change, Jack.’”
With the understanding that he seemed “to be running, if not as intense a circle” as Belushi, then at least he was motivated by “the same type of drive in terms of ‘be out there,’” Robin made a personal vow to spend even less time in Los Angeles. “I think that was pretty much the bottom rung,” he later said. “You don’t get much lower than that. It was time to leave this unhappy watering hole—time not to wander down this canyon any longer.”
But Robin’s decision to rethink his life, to cut back on drugs and keep himself away from the city that was the single greatest source of these seductions, was not motivated solely by altruism and a desire for personal improvement. It was something he needed to do now that he had been exposed to the world as a cocaine user; first, by the widespread media reports that placed him in Belushi’s bungalow prior to his death, and then in the National Enquirer, where Cathy Evelyn Smith confessed to all the debauched details of Belushi’s final hours (at a reported fee of $15,000) for a feature story published that summer under the lurid headline, “I Killed John Belushi.” Following the tabloid report, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office reopened its investigation into Belushi’s death, and the city’s celebrities lived in fear that their own drug use might draw the attention of law enforcement.
“It was a huge wake-up call,” said Dawber, who did not partake in this aspect of show business. “There was so much investigation going on, that whole crowd had to pull it together. I don’t think people really understood what a devastating drug it was. But it was everywhere. It was like, whoa—you’re at a dinner party, and suddenly someone that you didn’t know would hand you a little vial, like, ‘It’s your turn. You can go into the bathroom.’ It’s like, Ohhhh, okay.”
That fall, Robin testified before a Los Angeles grand jury looking into Belushi’s death, and though he did so voluntarily, it drew more unwanted attention from the tabloids and the paparazzi. (“Your lens is not properly focused,” he wisecracked to one photographer who caught him outside the courthouse.) The ongoing inquiry hobbled his ability to promote Mork & Mindy—a responsibility he did not particularly mind—and in interviews he either backed away from questions about Belushi’s death or gave combative answers.
The scene in Belushi’s bungalow that night, now a permanent and notorious part of Hollywood lore, “was nothing that exciting even then,” Robin later said. “I was there for ten minutes and split. There was no great, wild madness. Nothing there.… I’ve talked about it very openly, and still, people keep going, ‘But what happened that night at the Chateau Marmont?’ Nothing happened. Wanna give me a lie detector test? They keep making it into something else, and it’s not. I don’t know what else they’ll find out.” He even suggested the possibility that the invitation he had been given at On the Rox to seek out Belushi was part of an attempt to entrap him. “Someone sent me there,” he said. “No one seems to know who this guy was who was working the Roxy who said, ‘Go over there. They’re looking for you.’ I got over there, and no one wanted to see me. I have a feeling it was some strange set-up, that they wanted to catch a whole bunch of people and that it didn’t come through.”
Soon he faced the very real risk that there would be nothing for him to promote at all. Despite the highly touted addition of Winters to the Mork & Mindy cast and a brief return to the effortlessly charming story lines that had first made the show a hit, its ratings declined even further, all the way to sixtieth place. Naturally, Robin’s first inclination was to blame himself for its collapse. “For a little while,” he said, “I thought, God, maybe I’m not goosing up like I used to; maybe the old mad energy is gone. But I decided that wasn’t true, because people still liked my performance. I think the show just had a confused base. The combination of that and going up against Magnum P.I. was finally too strong.”
Mork & Mindy had been pulled from ABC’s schedule for the month of March, a sure sign that the network was considering canceling it. In the final episodes of the season, Mork and Mindy are pursued by a malevolent Neptunian named Kalnik who blows up their tranquil home in Boulder and forces Mork to reveal to the world that he is an extraterrestrial; he and Mindy then use a pair of magic ruby slippers to escape Kalnik, but they are accidentally beamed back in time to the dawn of man, where they introduce a tribe of cave people to the invention of fire. For good measure, a portion of this story line was also filmed and broadcast in 3-D.
This abrupt and ill-conceived change of direction was part of a larger, last-ditch plan to persuade ABC to save Mork & Mindy. Its cast and creators hoped to turn it into a children-oriented comedy show, one with some nominal educational value, where the title characters would travel through time and meet famous figures from history. In April, Robin, Dawber, and Garry Marshall recorded a presentation video that was meant to sell this new concept to the network’s executives. But it also called for some supplication on Robin’s part, requiring him to poke self-deprecating fun at his insecurities and deflated self-image. “I know why the show’s shaky,” the script had him say at the outset. “It’s my fault. I spe
ak too fast and they can’t understand me. I should talk more like you—like a Walkman with dead batteries.”
With more desperation, Robin added, “I know we’re not doing well in the ratings, but I’m not going to beg! I may wear baggy pants, but I have my dignity. I’m not going to get down on my knees to these people. Besides, they hate me. I know it.” Strangely, the presentation script also called for Dawber to undo the top button of her blouse, and say—“sexily,” as the stage direction indicated—that “the body is educational, too.” At its end, Robin was to drop to his knees with his hands clasped in front of him and beg outright: “Please, please pick us up. We’ll do anything!”
The misbegotten pitch was not successful, and in May ABC canceled Mork & Mindy after four seasons and ninety-one episodes, replacing it in the fall with a new Happy Days spin-off, Joanie Loves Chachi. The show had already wrapped production, so there were no farewell parties or send-off speeches thanking everyone for their hard work and dedication. On some level, Robin already sensed that the ax was about to fall and he attempted to avoid his representatives’ efforts to inform him that it had happened, as if that could somehow keep the show on the air. “I think they tried to call me the day before,” he said. “I just didn’t return the call, because I kind of knew what it was about. I knew it was coming.”
He learned it for certain when the story made its way into the industry trade publications and daily newspapers, at a time when he was filming an episode of Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre, a Showtime children’s series hosted by his Popeye costar. Playing the lead role in an adaptation of “The Tale of the Frog Prince” for an installment directed by Eric Idle, Robin was in full costume when the news was offhandedly relayed to him, and despite his lack of surprise, he did not handle it well.
“I was so angry and hurt,” Robin said, “and I was dressed as a frog. It hit me hard.”
As Idle described his reaction: “The end of that show wasn’t unexpected, but you don’t think you’ll find out by having someone hand you a newspaper when you’re on a set. Robin gathered the technicians around him and did a routine about TV executives. Everyone was on the floor, and it was behind him. I thought that was the most useful example of comedy I’d ever seen.”
While ABC was dithering over its decision on Mork & Mindy, Robin missed out on the plum opportunity to play Hamlet for Joseph Papp in a Public Theater production of the play—one that would have also starred Carol Burnett as Gertrude. The network still had one more year on its five-year contract with him, which was burnt off by naming Robin a coproducer and consultant on its new fall series Star of the Family, a blue-collar comedy starring Brian Dennehy and produced by Robin’s managers at Rollins Joffe. Robin’s involvement with the show was largely cosmetic, and Star of the Family was canceled after ten episodes.
Robin tried to play off the demise of Mork & Mindy—and the loss of the character that was his most personal creation—as if they were everyday Hollywood setbacks, but Dawber said his reaction was quite the opposite. “No!” she said. “Of course not. Oh, no, Robin was hurt to the quick over that.
“That was typical of show business,” she said. “They just pull the plug. He was so personally offended. I think he felt like he was being abandoned, and we were. Not because of anything the cast did wrong. It was all network idiocy. They just blew a huge opportunity. But he was very, very mad. And really saddened by it. His representation, of course, was thrilled, because now he’s available to go do all these fabulous movies.”
But Robin knew that he was losing the most secure, welcoming work environment he had ever known. “It was a family,” Dawber said. “You’re working with these people every day. He had a place to be. It was a certain stability for him. And then, it was gone. It was very personal for him.”
The only relationship Robin could turn to now was with Valerie, and though their marriage had been neglected for some time, neither of them considered it hopelessly beyond repair. In a Rolling Stone interview, Robin was asked whether the sheer volume of tabloid coverage about his hard-partying ways meant that at least some of it must be accurate. He answered, “Obviously there has to be some truth to it and there probably is.… I was just being an all-around fuckup, which may include other things. I admit it myself. To the charge of Asshole, I plead guilty. To the charge of intent to snort and fuck and cheat—no. I plead Asshole, and cheat—no. Asshole, and leave it at that, my lords.”
Valerie, by way of explaining her side of things, cited her education at Goddard College, which she regarded as a shrine to liberalism and tolerance. There, she said she was taught “that you can guide people; you can make yourself interesting enough and important enough in your lover’s life so that he’ll always come back to you if you just keep growing along with it. If you just be part of their rhythm and give them a lot of freedom and be part of their growth instead of pulling them back from what is titillating and exciting.”
“Let’s face it,” she added, “Robin is a stimulus junkie.”
Valerie was glad to have stood by her husband. “If I had jumped the gun and divorced him,” she said, “I would have lost the most precious thing in my life and it would have curtailed our experience together, which is a lot richer than anything he can get off the street.” After John Belushi’s death, their lives became more complicated but their objectives were clarified; Valerie said the rules by which she and Robin operated from there on could be reduced to a single word: “Enough. Enough. Enough.”
PART TWO
STAR
8
MR. HAPPY
On the sunny lawn of a suburban New York home, Robin battled playfully with two small boys. He was dressed in a hard hat, a garbage can lid, and a welcome mat that, looked at with the proper imaginative spirit, could pass for a medieval hero’s armor. Wielding two plastic swords, he dodged and parried the attacks of the children, who were wearing wrestlers’ chin straps and fought with floppy toy blades of their own. As Robin leapt out from behind a tree, the boys charged at him: he received a stab on his side, through a gap in his armor, and was turned from a heroic champion into an evil warrior; then, with a second slash, he was slain, falling to the ground in mock slow motion, flailing his arms to simulate the gushing of blood from his open wounds.
The scene seemed so real to him: the simplicity of it all, the wonderment of being a parent, the nobility of taking responsibility for children and guiding them through life. After all the extravagant ambitions he had chased in show business and all the self-indulgent itches he had been able to scratch, none of which had led to his finding fulfillment, maybe this was what he truly wanted in life—maybe becoming a father is what would finally make him happy.
It was all an illusion, of course—just another cinematic reverie that he’d been allowed to indulge on the set of The World According to Garp, the director George Roy Hill’s adaptation of the best-selling John Irving novel. The project was only the second feature film that Robin had starred in, having shot it before what turned out to be the last season of Mork & Mindy. When it finally hit theaters in the summer of 1982, it still would not do what he hoped it would for his career. But the experience of getting to live out the entirety of an on-screen life had helped him identify a desire he realized it was now time to satisfy. “One really good thing about this film was tapping into that, working with all those children,” he said. “After doing this movie, I want a family—real bad.”
When the last few episodes of Mork & Mindy came and went in May 1982, Robin, having no other pending commitments, began another cross-country stand-up tour. As he had done with Reality … What a Concept, this latest set of dates was meant to prepare material for a record album and to take his mind off the slow suffocation of his TV show. It had been some time since Robin had taken on a stand-up obligation this ambitious; making even occasional, unannounced club appearances had become exceedingly difficult in the weeks since John Belushi’s death. To get himself back into fighting shape, he had assistance from
David Steinberg, a new junior member of his management team at Rollins Joffe, who traveled with him to his shows and collaborated with him on his material.
Steinberg, a former publicist, brought some much-needed structure to Robin’s scattershot process of assembling and refining his material. In typewritten pages, Steinberg helped Robin wrangle the untamed ideas that roamed free on the range of his mind and steer them into a traditional outline. At the top of the hierarchy, in Roman numerals, were generic subject headings; they said little individually, but taken collectively, they suggested the trajectory of what could only be a Robin Williams routine:
I. Animals
II. Drinking
III. Cocaine
IV. Ethnics
V. Hats
VI. Mork/Performing
VII. Music
VIII. Politics
IX. Sex
The first entry under the topic of (I) Animals was (A) Cats, which was further split into possible jokes like:
1. on valium, cant remember “Meow”
2. LA cat says “MeWow”
3. Ethnic cats: Jewish cat says “Meoy” New York cat says “Me-fuckin’-ow”
4. Cat attacks erection in the morning: “At least I woke you up”
5. Cat disturbed in a litter box
6. Cat impressions (including cat in a blender, cat on puree and the catapult)
and so on. Naturally, the next major subheading to follow (A) Cats was (B) Dogs.
This outline was dated May 12, 1982, and Robin had completely assimilated it by the time he played the Royal Oak Music Theatre in the Detroit suburbs one week later. There, he riffed on the Falkland Islands crisis, Carl Sagan (“Mr. Rogers on Valium”), and Julia Child (“Margaret Thatcher on quaaludes”). He was careful, however, to never let the act get too introspective or reveal too much about himself; when a fan in the crowd offered up a plastic egg—an affectionate tribute to the iconography of Mork & Mindy—he joked that he was no longer that person, saying, “Mr. Mork? Oh, he took a hike.” And when he delivered his four-minute bit about cocaine use, he concluded it with a disclaimer that was meant to make clear he was not talking about his own personal experiences, telling the audience, “I’ve heard it happened to somebody just like that.”