Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  For many years he and Crystal had moved on parallel career paths, and they shared the same managers. While Robin was blasting off in Mork & Mindy, Crystal was gaining national attention on the ABC sitcom Soap. Their breakthrough shows had ended within a year of each other, and Robin had made a guest appearance on one episode of The Billy Crystal Comedy Hour, a short-lived 1982 NBC sketch program, playing Ed Norton to Crystal’s Ralph Kramden in a punk-rock update of The Honeymooners.

  But there was something more fundamental that drew them together. Crystal, a Jewish Long Islander and New York University graduate whose grandfather had founded the independent jazz label Commodore Records and whose father helped run the specialty music shop that had spawned it, had an authenticity that Robin could never duplicate. No matter how Robin tried to distort his own personal history, cover up his Waspishness, or compensate for his affluent upbringing by incorporating ethnic accents and characters into his routine, Crystal came by his outsider’s perspective honestly, for the simple fact that he’d been born into it.

  Crystal felt that Robin’s fascination with him was even simpler, rooted in the fact that Robin, who led a chaotic, unpredictable life, saw Crystal as a paragon of stability: his marriage was secure, his life was free of vices and addictions, and his family was paramount. “We were a close-knit group,” Crystal said of his relatives. But he also felt a kinship with Robin. “I lost my dad young; he lost his dad younger”—metaphorically speaking. “Even though his dad was still alive, there was a distance there,” he said.

  Their attachment grew stronger over many more sessions of improv at Catch a Rising Star, which Robin believed could cure all woes and rinse the gloom out of any bad day. On one such night, Crystal was in a dour mood, having whiffed a Broadway audition earlier in the day. “I’m done,” he said. “I’m nobody. My career is over. I’m not any good. I’m going nowhere.”

  “C’mon,” Robin said, “let’s go play”—his invitation for Crystal to come with him to Catch a Rising Star. They were joined on their walk to the club by Greg Phillips, Robin’s saxophone instructor on the film, who feared for Crystal’s safety that evening. “All he needs, when the guy is so down in the dumps, is to get up there with Robin Williams,” Phillips said. “Nobody can stay with Robin. He’ll be blown off the stage, he’ll be an entire failure and he’ll take his life. He’ll jump into the Hudson River.” Instead, Robin hit the stage to his usual applause and acclaim, which grew even louder when he brought out Crystal as his guest, and the pair joyously ad-libbed a scene pretending to be old Russian men in a cemetery. After that, Phillips said, “We walked back across town and Billy was feeling better. And I was thinking: wow, he dodged a bullet.”

  After one such show, Robin invited Crystal back to the Upper East Side brownstone where he and Valerie were staying so he could meet Zak for the first time. When they arrived, the baby was crying inconsolably and Robin, still a rookie parent, found himself unable to calm the child. But Crystal, who was the father of two daughters, was undeterred and had a battle-tested soothing strategy ready to deploy. “I said, ‘Robin, let me,’” Crystal recalled. “I was a Dr. Spock fan, and I remembered it said, like on page seventy-eight or somewhere: ‘Use your index finger to effleurage’—which is a fancy word for massage—‘the base of the baby’s skull to calm it down.’ Within a few minutes it worked, and Zak stopped crying. And Robin started. ‘You’re a miracle man.’ And the three of us hugged.”

  This marked a new phase in their friendship where, whenever Robin and Crystal could stop goofing around long enough, their silliness gave way to more meaningful conversations, often about Robin’s concerns about fatherhood. “Once we stopped making each other laugh and playing whoever we were going to play, it was always about the kids,” Crystal said. “He would ask me, ‘If this happened, what would you do? And then what would you do?’ I already had footprints in the snow, you know?”

  By now, Robin had withstood the release of The Survivors, which received a very subdued reception. Those reviewers who hoped, as the Los Angeles Times’ critic did, that the film might generate heat from the friction of its two comic stars, “Walter Matthau’s soulful deadpan against Robin Williams’ Gatling-gun bursts of improvisation,” found instead that the film “does not so much disappoint our hopes as dissipate them. Both actors are at the top of their form, but the comic premise of the first 15 minutes begins to come apart.”

  Others were brutal in their scorn; Gene Siskel, in the Chicago Tribune, called The Survivors “one of the most confused and repellent films of the year.” Robin, he wrote, was “exhausting—not because one laughs so hard but because he runs on and on unchecked.” The Survivors was crushed at the box office, too, and closed after a month.

  In the summer of 1983, Robin was well into the shooting for Moscow on the Hudson, a film that was the brainchild of Paul Mazursky, an iconoclastic director who specialized in closely observed character studies (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, An Unmarried Woman), not blockbuster smashes. Mazursky, who wrote the screenplay with Leon Capetanos, wanted to tell the story of an émigré from the Soviet Union who defects to America on a visit to New York; the idea had come to him while riding in taxi cabs around the city. (“I met rear admirals from Leningrad driving taxis,” he explained.) The film’s protagonist, who announces his change of allegiance in the middle of Bloomingdale’s, was originally supposed to be a ballet dancer, and Mazursky had hoped to cast Mikhail Baryshnikov in the role. But when Baryshnikov passed, Mazursky rewrote the lead as a saxophonist in a Moscow circus, making it a better fit for Robin. “There’s not a long list if you decide to go with somebody who’s 30 to 35, with a sense of humor, who can act and is willing to learn Russian,” Mazursky said.

  Robin threw himself into his preparations, in a way that went beyond the character work he had done for his previous movies. He let his hair and beard grow, and spent five months studying Russian through a Berlitz language course. The subterfuge was not totally convincing, however. When he traveled to Munich, which stood in for the portion of the film ostensibly set in Moscow, he found that most Europeans were unconvinced by his accent. “They said I sounded Czech,” Robin explained. “I sounded Polish. I sounded Georgian. A lot of Russians see the film and go, ‘Who iz ze Polish boy in ze lead?’”

  But Mazursky understood why Robin was so attracted to this immersive character work, and why he sought opportunities to create entirely new identities, just as he had done in his stand-up act: it was so much easier for him to be other people than it was to be himself. “He’s really very modest,” the director said. “He really hates talking about himself or his background. He doesn’t like strangers to get too close. He protects himself by adopting this disguise.”

  Before he left California to start filming, Robin had Greg Phillips teach him to play the saxophone for scenes like the one where his character performs “Take the ‘A’ Train” for a stable of circus animals. For hours each day they would practice at the Napa ranch, in a small concrete pool house away from the main residence, where baby Zak was sleeping. Phillips was astonished at how quickly Robin took to it.

  “He had never played a musical instrument at this point,” said Phillips, who also traveled with Robin to Munich and to New York. “The only thing he’d ever done was dabble on the harmonica.”

  Like many of his colleagues, Phillips believed that Robin had a photographic memory. “Even though I insisted that he learned to read music,” he said, “his mind was so fast that we would—I thought—be reading a piece, and he would memorize it as quickly as we had played through it. So then, when I would say to Robin, why don’t we go back to Bar 15 or 16, he would go, ‘Uh, yeah, where’s that?’ Because he had it in his head, but he couldn’t tell on the music where it was.”

  During the New York portion of the shoot, Robin and Mazursky went to see the documentary Unknown Chaplin, in which Charlie Chaplin’s movie outtakes and other personal footage had been carefully compiled to give a unique and detailed window into
the silent comedy master’s filmmaking process. Robin was blown away by a simple scene where Chaplin wordlessly illustrates to the camera that he has eaten an apple with a worm in it by taking a bite out of the fruit and then ever-so-slightly wiggling his index finger. After the three-hour screening, this was all he could seem to talk about: “Boy, can you believe that thing with his finger? Half a second, and he shows you there’s a worm in the apple, and the look on his face?” This, to him, was the essence of comedy—the subtlety, the precision, the warmth—a Platonic ideal that he sensed was still miles away from his talkative, high-energy approach.

  Robin’s expressive, fragile character in Moscow on the Hudson—who speaks almost no English for the film’s first half-hour, and who suffers a breakdown in an American supermarket when he sees the sheer number of coffee brands he can now choose from—may have seemed to viewers like he was outside the spectrum of what Robin was known for, possibly even beyond the realm of his capability as an actor. But Robin said he felt compelled to make more “strange films,” as he called them—motion pictures that didn’t align with his audience’s expectations and seemed unlike anything he’d done before—for those precise reasons. “I hope I can keep doing more,” he said. “I think I chose them because I didn’t want to do what was easy.” Then, almost immediately, he added: “I’ll probably end up, next day you’ll see, ‘Look, it’s Mork & Mindy! He’s back and he’s crazier than ever!’”

  Robin sensed that a running tally was being kept of the ticket sales generated by his movies; there was an exact number that could be assigned to the worth he provided, which could be used to measure him against the value of other actors, and if that number dropped below a certain threshold, he wouldn’t be able to make movies anymore. “If I have a couple more that don’t do too well,” he said, “they go like, ‘Robin, you’re so daring.… We’ll get back to you.’ ‘A very daring movie you did—and a little stupid. But we love ya!’”

  This was not some imaginary scenario that played out only in Robin’s head; it was reinforced to him by his managers, who reminded him that, at some point soon, he needed to make a picture that added substantially to this bottom line. Yet he felt he had their support to pursue unconventional opportunities, too. “Sometimes my managers get worried, but they’re sort of like parents saying, ‘Well, if you really want to do these we’ll stand with you,’” he said. “Which is nice. Sometimes you do feel that pressure. ‘You haven’t made a film that made any money. There’s no big box office yet.’ I say, ‘Yeah, I know. I know there’s not a lot of Survivors dolls around.’”

  He was especially unnerved by the success of Trading Places, a hit comedy from that summer of 1983. Directed by John Landis, it starred Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy as a wealthy commodities trader and a streetwise beggar who swap stations in life. The comedy marketplace, as Robin saw it, was a zero-sum game: for someone to rise, it meant that someone else had to fall, and if Aykroyd and Murphy were in ascendance, what did that mean for him? Murphy, in particular, seemed to be making the transition from television to movies so effortlessly, with an ease that eluded Robin. “Eddie is ideal—he knows exactly what he does and how to get it out on film perfectly,” Robin said. “I don’t—I keep trying different things.”

  Late one night that summer, Bennett Tramer, his friend and collaborator, got a phone call from Robin. As Tramer recounted the conversation, “He said, ‘It’s Robin—have you seen Trading Places?’ And I said, yeah I have. And he said, ‘How is it?’ I didn’t know what to say. And I said, I think it’s Landis’s best movie, it’s much more sophisticated than his other stuff. And he said, ‘How’s Danny in it?’ I said, he’s good, it’s good. It’s hard to compete with Murphy but they’re both good. He said, ‘All right, just wondered.’”

  Though Robin did not come out and say it, Tramer knew what he was really asking. “It wasn’t like he rooted for other people to fail—he was a classy guy,” Tramer said. “But it was kind of weird. Maybe not weird. Maybe it makes total sense. He was very happy for them and really liked them, but it was like, When’s my turn coming? When’s my turn going to come to have a hit movie?”

  When Robin’s second comedy album had been released earlier that spring, there was a similar sense that, for all its feverish energy and ingenuity, the performer at the heart of it was oddly absent. The album, defiantly titled Throbbing Python of Love as a sort of preemptive rebuke to anyone who might dismiss his dick jokes as juvenile, had been recorded during the same San Francisco club dates that yielded the HBO special An Evening with Robin Williams. It consisted of mostly the same bits in a different running order, and with more of his off-the-cuff interactions with audience members. When one person in the crowd is heard calling on Robin to do some improv, he teasingly shouts back, “What do you think the fuckin’ last thirty minutes has been?”

  Reviewing the album for the Los Angeles Times, Lawrence Christon wrote that “of the three major comedic talents who matured in the ’70s”—the other two being Steve Martin and Richard Pryor—Robin was “the only one to get out alive as a stand-up.” (Martin, the perception went, was more focused on his film career now, and Pryor was struggling to make the transition in this new decade.) Undoubtedly, Robin had “the fastest timing and the sharpest improvisational skills of anyone on the scene these days—there’s probably never been anybody who has brought more pure theater to stand-up comedy.” But Christon also felt obliged to acknowledge that Robin was “not a sympathetic performer.” In those moments when Robin did share personal details about himself, like the fact that he was going to become a father (and already had by the time the album was released), they were “delivered in the spirit of comic outburst” rather than some act of intimate confession.

  Unlike Reality … What a Concept, which had been a Top 10 hit, Throbbing Python of Love did not have the engine of a popular TV sitcom to keep Robin visible and drive its sales. It debuted at number 180 on the Billboard sales chart, peaked at 119, and dropped off the charts after nine weeks. Still, it was among the nominees for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album the following winter, along with Eddie Murphy: Comedian, the second stand-up record from that upstart twenty-two-year-old star of Saturday Night Live and Trading Places.

  As it happened, Robin was invited to host Saturday Night Live for the first time on February 11, 1984, a little more than two weeks before the Grammys ceremony. He and Murphy acted opposite each other in only one sketch, a parody of the public affairs show Firing Line, in which Robin played the erudite William F. Buckley Jr. and Murphy played an academic type discussing why black entertainers were suddenly so hot. (“Because of pigment,” he explains, the “black man is becoming more flammable every day.”) In this brief confrontation of language and tone, the contrast between their two styles could not be sharper: Robin, in a gray-haired wig, getting wound up in the nuts and bolts of Buckley’s upper-crust stammer and the racial provocations scripted for him (“N-n-n-now surely you’re not implying the phenomenon i-i-is more prevalent among entertainers than a-a-among other blacks, ah, Afro-Americans, ah, whatever phrase is current among you coloreds”); Murphy, coolly gliding his way through the segment, even when his character begins to spontaneously combust. Naturally, it was Eddie Murphy: Comedian, not Throbbing Python of Love, that would win the Grammy.

  Moscow on the Hudson was not to be the movie that elevated Robin’s artistic or commercial standing when it was released in the spring of 1984. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote that though Robin and his alter ego were “most engaging characters—spirited, skeptical, but still capable of wonderment,” the film itself “doesn’t seem to know what to do with them. They are men without a movie.”

  New York magazine was more appreciative; David Denby wrote that Robin was “securely grounded; he has a real character to play, and he’s extraordinarily touching. Bearded, and hairy as a Russian bear, he’s a small, nearly innocuous figure in the Moscow scenes, clutching himself against the cold, grimacing at the sight of a thre
e-hour waiting line for toilet paper.” Commercially, Moscow on the Hudson had a respectable run but, once again, it was not a star-making turn.

  Amid all the work he was doing, Robin always tried to find ways to acknowledge Zak and celebrate the newly happy home he and Valerie had created. He claimed that the opening of Moscow on the Hudson had coincided with the day that Zak took his first steps, and he used his closing minutes on Saturday Night Live to wish a special good night to his son: “He’s at home right now going, ‘Get off! You’ve done too much. Go home, take the money, let’s go back to California.’”

  Back in Napa, Valerie was considering bringing in more help at home to raise their rambunctious one-year-old son. Though the Williams family had previously employed a nanny, she had left the job, and in their search for a replacement they reached out to their friend Taylor Negron, who in turn suggested they consider a candidate named Marsha Garces. Marsha, who was in her late twenties, was practically overqualified for a caregiver’s position; having grown up in Milwaukee, she had studied art at the University of Wisconsin there, and after moving to the Bay Area she continued to take art classes at San Francisco State College while working as a waitress by night.

  “I interviewed her at a fish restaurant,” Valerie said of Marsha. “And she took the job.”

  9

  TOUGH LOVE

  “Lust!” Robin Williams intoned with an evangelist’s fervor, speaking to nearly four thousand people in the vast orchestra and far-flung balconies of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Over the years, this opulent theater had been the setting for any number of tales about the irrevocable consequences of our human passions. On this night it was as good a place as any for Robin to get a few things off his chest, too.