Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  The World According to Garp was released in theaters two months later. Irving’s strange and sizable novel had been a best seller at its publication in 1978; it told the tale of T. S. Garp, an aspiring writer and the son of a proudly feminist mother, a nurse who conceived him by forcing herself on a comatose World War II airman with a permanent erection. The novel had been hailed for its unbridled imagination and criticized for its perceived misogyny and lurid fixations on sexual violence and castration. There was wide agreement that it could never be adapted into a movie.

  Robin had been contemplating the project ever since he read the book while making Popeye in Malta; once again, he was the beneficiary of the caprices of Dustin Hoffman, who passed on the role. As Robin saw it, Garp was an ideal vehicle to show off the full range of his classical training, to finally play a flesh-and-blood human being, and pivot away from the weirdness of Popeye and most especially Mork. “It was like going from Marvel Comics to Tolstoy,” he said. “The hero, T. S. Garp, is like another side of me—the nonperforming side. It was a process for me of mentally stripping away, getting back to what I was doing six years ago when I was an acting student at Juilliard.”

  Hill, a former marine pilot and the cantankerous, Academy Award–winning director of The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, initially had no interest in casting Robin. “I’d seen him as Popeye and didn’t understand a word he said,” Hill explained. “I’d seen him once as Mork and didn’t understand him either.” But after a face-to-face meeting, Hill said, “I felt he had a sense of decency that was important. Garp is an abrasive man, but his underlying decency is a key part of the character, and I felt Robin was the sort of actor who could provide that.”

  Hill kept a tight leash on Robin’s ad-libbed shenanigans; the first time he tried to go off-script, the director simply called a wrap for the entire set. “I thought, okay, you’ve made your point—I won’t do that again,” Robin said. In another scene where Garp learns from his wife, Helen (played by Mary Beth Hurt), that she is pregnant and celebrates by drawing a baby’s face on her belly, Robin began to go too far: “I wanted to say, ‘Oh, looky, our baby has a beard,’” he recalled. Instead, Hill snapped at him: “Hold it, jerk.” But when Robin’s improvisations made him laugh, Hill would encourage him to go deeper. “Okay, that’s a joke,” the director would say. “Let’s go back behind to the next level and find out what’s behind it.”

  For Robin, who was paid $300,000 to make Garp, the movie was an introduction to many Hollywood filmmaking traditions, like shooting his first nude love scene. He later described it as “seventeen lights and fifteen guys and a big boom mike going almost up your ass.” Some similarities between him and the character—the fact that both he and Garp were student wrestlers—were too good to pass up. He even shaved his arms to play the younger incarnation of the character.

  But he also found resonance in the story of a man held in thrall by a trailblazing, idiosyncratic mother (Glenn Close, in her first film role), trying to stand outside her shadow while perpetually seeking her approval. There were whole lives inside of Garp that went well beyond anything Robin had experienced: in a narrative threaded through the movie’s second half, his marriage to Helen is nearly destroyed by a series of events set in motion when Garp has an affair with the family babysitter, who considers him a literary celebrity. At its core, The World According to Garp was about how the things we fear most in life are determined at an early age and amplified, not overcome, as we grow older. Robin liked how the character tested him. “Garp was like an oil drilling,” he said. “I had to dig down and find things deep inside myself and then bring them up. Heavy griefs and joys, births and deaths.”

  The film performed well enough at the box office and had its share of positive notices. Some reviewers felt, as one put it, that Robin was “an appropriate choice for the sometimes bewildered Garp,” but many others remained convinced that a complex dramatic role was still beyond his grasp. Jack Mathews of the Detroit Free Press wrote a particularly devastating pan of the film, blaming Robin for its artistic failure. “I won’t say a thing about the rubbery nature of Robin Williams’ face,” Mathews wrote, “other than this”:

  It is so hard to watch in dramatic close-ups that it spoiled for me The World According to Garp, a movie I would have otherwise placed among the year’s best.… It is hard to look beyond such miscasting when the sympathetic nature of a character is as vital as it is with Garp. He represents the hopes and innocence in each of us, and in a story of such soaring literary ambitions … it must have that central credibility.

  Glenn Close would receive an Oscar nomination for her performance as Garp’s mother, as would John Lithgow, who played a transgender woman who befriends Garp. But Robin would go unrecognized.

  By that time, his life had been radically altered by a far happier piece of news: Valerie was pregnant. The couple learned in the summer of 1982 that they were going to have a child the following year, and they shared their good fortune with the world in September, putting out a press release that stated they had “waited this long to have a baby because Robin felt that while he was doing the series Mork & Mindy, he would be unable to give the attention he should to Valerie and a baby.” The announcement also mentioned that Robin and Valerie were relaxing at home in Napa before he went back out on his comedy tour, and that The World According to Garp had grossed $26 million at the box office so far.

  That announcement did not tell the entire truth. Robin and Valerie’s volatile relationship had been the biggest impediment to starting a family, and their decision to have a baby was made in the hope that it would help reduce friction and inspire them to rededicate themselves to each other and to their child. And that was precisely the effect it had. Asked later if her pregnancy brought a much-needed measure of stability back into the marriage, Valerie said, “It did change, it did. No question. The actual pregnancy was beautiful.” Once his tour was over, Robin became an attentive and dedicated husband, spending less time on the road and more with his wife, doing chores, running errands, and going with her to Lamaze classes in preparation for the birth.

  Impending fatherhood also inspired Robin to recommit himself to sobriety; if Belushi’s overdose and its fallout had not been enough to scare him straight, now he had a truly compelling reason to stay off cocaine and alcohol. And not just a little bit—he had to kick both habits completely. As far as Valerie could see, that was exactly what Robin did: “He was totally sober,” she said. “He stayed totally sober from the minute I got pregnant. No more drugs.” And, she said, Robin didn’t need any form of rehab, twelve-step regimen, or other recovery program to excise these substances from his life; he did so through sheer force of will—“just dry drunk,” Valerie said.

  Robin’s temperance was not achieved all at once. That October, he was in Gainesville, Florida, to perform at the University of Florida’s “Gator Growl” homecoming event for more than sixty-four thousand students and alumni. In his routine, he told the voluble crowd of football worshippers that he did not expect much sympathy after the cancellation of Mork & Mindy: “It’s hard to go around saying, ‘Pardon me, can you spare $40,000 a week?’” he joked.

  His manager David Steinberg, who joined Robin on this trip, said that the raucousness was not restricted to his public appearance, and there was drinking and drug use after the show. “It was the biggest crowd Robin had ever worked with, and we were just out of control,” Steinberg recalled. “We were all abusing everything at the time. At some point they said, ‘It’s for the parents and the kids, so if you can watch what Robin’s going to do—.’ We said, we can’t do that. If that’s what you’re interested in, call someone else. And he just did what he normally feels like doing. Which was great. The kids loved it.” When he and Robin later showed up at a formal dinner after the game, Steinberg said, “We were totally out of control. We were nuts.”

  Two weeks later, Robin was back in San Francisco, appearing at the Great American Music Hall to perfo
rm the stand-up set he’d been refining since the spring. The show was recorded as a ninety-minute HBO special that would air the next year under the title An Evening with Robin Williams; his top managers at Rollins Joffe were credited as executive producers, and Steinberg was cited as a creative consultant. As with Live at the Roxy, the special opened with a pre-taped character piece: here, Robin played a newsstand vendor who works outside the Great American Music Hall, telling passersby that he has known Robin Williams since he kicked off his comedy career in this city, then leads the camera into the venue for the show.

  For all of Robin’s preparation, the first forty-five minutes of his performance feel restless and devoid of structure or content. He spends most of that time riffing on members of the audience and the clothes they are wearing, or equipment he notices onstage (he puts a large amplifier on his shoulder and calls it a “Polish Walkman”), falling back on his stock accents of black and Japanese people. There is a noteworthy section on nicknames for the penis—it can be “a throbbing python of love” for some, he says—and he tells the audience he likes to call his own organ “Mr. Happy,” explaining that “if something’s going wrong, you can go, ‘Oh, look, he’s pouting.’”

  Then, gradually, the show takes a personal turn, almost as if by accident. Robin mentions that his mother, Laurie, is in the theater tonight, and retells her treasured “I love you in blue” poem. He goes into a riff on conception, slipping in and out of the voices of Carl Sagan and an infant delighted by its mother’s breasts, before telling the crowd, in his own voice, “I have good news for you.” Then he slips back into another of his character accents, the Russian man, to tell the audience something truthful about himself: “I am going to be a father,” he says meekly. Before the consequent applause subsides, Robin is once again addressing his penis: “Do you hear that, boy? Yay! He aimed straight and true! I feel like William Tell now.” Then, back to the crowd: “I don’t know who the mother is, but hey, it’s wonderful.”

  Robin mentions that he and Valerie are thinking about naming their baby Christopher (for a boy) or Christina (for a girl) and jokes that its first words will probably be “trust fund.” Then he goes into a bit that imagines what his future relationship with his child will be like. It starts with a scene at the child’s first birthday party, where a somewhat desperate Robin is trying to teach the young guests how to perform stand-up comedy. “No, Father, no!” the child screams, in Robin’s high-pitched kiddie voice. “I don’t want to do any comedy!… Let me give it a break, Father, give it a break!”

  “Come on, now, what do you want for your birthday?” Robin asks as himself.

  “Power of attorney,” the child responds.

  In mock despair, Robin pleads with the child, “‘Ninny-ninny’ isn’t good enough for you? Popeye isn’t good enough for you?”

  The child screams, “Popeye wasn’t good for anybody! Who are you kidding?”

  The scene then flashes forward to a time when the child, now twenty-one years old, has rejected comedy and is leaving home to pursue a respectable career as a scientist (in order to cure herpes). Robin, in his rage and frustration, goes on a drinking spree, requiring the child to come rescue him from his incapacitated stupor.

  “Pop,” the grown child says, “I’ve come to take you home.” He then adds, “Hey, Dad”—and grabs his own crotch as he makes a squeaking sound, proving once and for all that he is a loving, attentive chip off the old block.

  His set continues with a bit about cocaine—“the devil’s dandruff, the Peruvian marching powder”—and its tendencies to induce impotence and paranoia, but never with an explicit acknowledgment from Robin that this wisdom might have been gleaned from his own experiences. And in a pre-taped conclusion, the newsstand vendor from the opening of the show comes face-to-face with Robin (as himself). The two men talk as the Great American Music Hall is being cleaned up, and the newsboy gives Robin a personal memento: an autographed picture of Albert Einstein—a man, he explains, who used to say, “My sense of God is my sense of wonder about the universe.” The newsboy asks Robin to pass it on to his unborn child. “It’s yours now,” the newsboy says. “You’re going to be the keeper of the flame.… You’re a crazy bastard. Good to see the lights are still on.”

  One more professional obligation stood between Robin and the reality of becoming a parent. He was committed to making The Survivors, a farcical comedy about a dental-equipment salesman who is fired from his job and drifts into a series of increasingly absurd misadventures: he accidentally blows up a gas station with a lit cigarette; finds himself at the same diner as the gas-station owner, where the two of them foil a stickup man; then enrolls at an outdoor survivalist camp in Vermont as his newfound enemies are converging on him for a final showdown.

  Directed by Michael Ritchie (The Candidate, The Bad News Bears), the project showed potential but was beset by casting changes and production problems. Weeks before filming was to begin, the film lost its potential costars Jack Nicholson and James Caan, who were replaced by Joe Bologna and Jerry Reed. Then, at the start of 1983, Bologna dropped out and was replaced by Walter Matthau. Making matters even more challenging, the movie needed several days of filming in the snow for its outdoor survival-camp scenes, but the production showed up in rural Vermont just as the state was experiencing a wave of unseasonably warm weather. On one of the rare days that the temperature dropped to five degrees, Reed was hospitalized for accidental carbon monoxide inhalation in his trailer and Robin’s mouth was so frozen he garbled his improvisations.

  With the delays costing the film some $70,000 a day, the production was forced to move to Lake Tahoe to finish the snow scenes—a relocation that was itself delayed when Vermont was blanketed in a blizzard on the day of the planned move—dragging out Robin’s shooting schedule as Valerie’s delivery date drew closer. Matthau passed the chilly downtime listening to football games on a portable radio he stashed in his parka, but Robin was miserable. “Now I know what it’s like to be a dog,” he grumbled, as filming lumbered on into February.

  Even after The Survivors wrapped, Robin found time in April to squeeze in one more TV appearance, on an HBO special celebrating the Comedy Store. In front of a celebrity crowd that included Kris Kristofferson and Mr. T, Robin was introduced by his friend Richard Pryor, who said, with a kind of affectionate animosity, “He asked me to come up and do improvs with him, and I watched him for an hour.” Robin performed for only a few minutes this time, reminding viewers that his wife was about to have a baby—“She’s at home, going, ‘I’ll hold it, I’ll hold it.’” He held forth a bit on deep-breathing exercises and amniocentesis. (“My God, it’s a boy and he’s hung like a bear. The doctor drew me aside: ‘Mr. Williams, that’s the umbilical.’”)

  Then he added, somewhat more sincerely, that he had been thinking about the strangeness of being a carefree and sometimes irresponsible young man who got paid to pretend for an audience, and that reflecting on this subject had a lasting impact on how he planned to behave going forward. “It really does sober your ass up,” he said, “when you realize, you’ll have to—six years from now—be going, ‘Daddy doesn’t really know what he does for a living.’”

  Three days later, on April 11, 1983, Valerie gave birth to a boy she and Robin named Zachary Pym Williams, a name chosen for no other reason than that they thought it sounded good and “kind of Welsh.” The child, who would come to be known as Zak, was delivered by cesarean section when it was discovered he was wrapped up in the umbilical cord, leaving Robin mildly annoyed that he and Valerie had devoted so much time to natural childbirth training that turned out to be unnecessary. “It was like going through flight training and ending up in a glider,” he said.

  The jokes would come later. In the immediate moment, seeing his son in front of him and holding him in his own hands—even before Valerie had the chance to do so—was profound and life-altering in a way that births tend to be. Robin fully understood now that there was a piece of him inside this little
human, and the years-long process of nurturing him to become his own person was going to be an enormously satisfying undertaking. As Robin would later write to Zak, this was when it occurred to him that “suddenly there was a focus, a meaning, a continuity. My newborn baby who looked like Churchill and Gandhi … you. You opened your eyes, and mine!” Then, as Robin held him up, his infant son peed “a long, perfect arc” that landed right on him, almost as if it had been aimed at him on purpose. Simultaneously, Robin burst out laughing and broke down in tears of joy.

  The surge of euphoria that Robin felt at Zak’s birth was something he could share with Valerie, too—a development in their relationship that was so purely positive it seemed to cancel out the mistrust and regret that they had once felt toward each other, and allowed them to start over as father and mother. For so long, they had lived in a state of constant surveillance and anxiety, knowing that their most intimate difficulties were bound to be splashed across the tabloids and shared with millions of strangers—an atmosphere due in no small part to Robin’s own indiscretions and recklessness. Now they had news they wanted everyone to know about, and they joyously proclaimed it wherever they could, in newspaper and trade-publication articles and in personal birth announcements they mailed to family members and close friends, featuring a photograph of the infant Zak dressed up in a baby-size tuxedo, a handmade gift sent to them by one of Robin’s fans.

  Parenthood offered Robin the added benefit of distracting him from the decadent Hollywood party scene that had been the source of so many of his troubles. A few months after Zak was born, Robin and Valerie took him to New York, so that Robin could work on his next film, Moscow on the Hudson. As he liked to do while he was in town, Robin used his free time to make unannounced appearances at Catch a Rising Star, and in these shows, he started bringing Billy Crystal with him as a surprise stage partner.