Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  “Men,” he said to the crowd, “you know you have a tiny creature living between your legs that has no memory and no conscience. You know that. You know you have no control over this tiny beast.

  “We have lust,” Robin continued. “Lust permeates our soul sometimes. Men, we are so driven by this lust that we have a violent streak that comes along with it. If we can’t fuck it, we’ll kill it, you know what I’m saying?”

  As he moved on to a bit about a penis being called to testify as a witness in a divorce trial, Robin had just offered an oblique glimpse into his own life—an accounting, of sorts, of what had happened in the months leading up to this performance. It was a window into his own personal shortcomings, in what would be his most personal routine to date. But few watching him knew just how honest he was being.

  For a time after Zak was born, it seemed that Robin and Valerie had finally set their relationship on the right path. “The first year and a half, couple of years, it was beautiful,” Valerie said. “And then it just started again, the same old thing.” The alcohol and drugs that Robin renounced had stayed out of his life, but these were not the only temptations he wrestled with. He could not completely stay away from Los Angeles, the throbbing heart of the entertainment industry and the town whose approval he was determined to win. He could never resist the lure of the stand-up stage, the adulation of a crowd that came just to see him—or better yet, had no idea he would be there—and the satisfaction of sweating for an hour to live up to their every expectation. And he could not completely kick his desire for all the attendant pleasures that, in his mind, went hand in hand with a successful show.

  One night in 1984, Robin showed up at the Improv in Los Angeles, where he caught the attention of Michelle Tish Carter, a cocktail waitress there. Carter, of course, knew who Robin was and considered herself a fan, but she was too starstruck to strike up a conversation, so she asked a friend to introduce them. Though she was only twenty-one, Carter was more accomplished than her age and job might have suggested; she was a skilled musician who had toured the country in her teens and earned a college degree before coming to Los Angeles to further her own dreams of stardom. She and Robin hit it off and began an affair. Robin did not bring Carter to his premieres or other industry functions, did not invite her to spend time among his friends, and likely did not consider their relationship anything more than a fling, but it would continue for nearly two years.

  Valerie could never quite bring herself to condemn Robin for his infidelities; she seemed to accept them as an occupational hazard of stardom. “Very attractive women throw themselves at men in his position,” she said. “You’d have to be a saint to resist.” But now that they were parents it was not so easy to look away; after they had Zak, she said, “neither of us was prepared for the sudden life shift. I admit the other women were harder to take after I’d had a child.”

  Professionally, Robin’s reputation as a viable leading man was faltering, laid low by two movies that were made, released, and dismissed in quick succession. The first was The Best of Times, a comedy in which he and Kurt Russell played former teammates on a high school football squad who are still smarting from their loss, years ago, in a championship game. Robin’s character, now a buttoned-down bank executive with wide-rimmed glasses and a sensible haircut, still can’t forgive himself for bobbling what would have been the winning pass, and he has become obsessed with re-creating the fateful match, to the exclusion of everything else in his life. Eventually, he is thrown out of his house by his wife (Holly Palance), who no longer has the patience for his boyish fixations.

  Directed by Roger Spottiswoode, an editor for Sam Peckinpah and a screenwriter of 48 Hrs. (as well as Palance’s husband), and written by Ron Shelton (the future filmmaker of Bull Durham and White Men Can’t Jump), The Best of Times was filmed at the start of 1985 in Taft, California, just outside Los Angeles. Its themes of youthful glory and athleticism had some appeal to Robin, harking back to his days as a high school and college wrestler and track runner, and to Russell, who’d been a child actor and a minor-league baseball player before establishing himself as a film star in adulthood.

  When The Best of Times was released in January 1986, Robin acknowledged that he needed it to be a hit. Though the reviews were positive if polite, the film’s box-office receipts were abysmal. Robin was becoming the kind of celebrity who got written about in the where-are-they-now newspaper columns that filled space alongside TV listings and word jumbles. As one reader wrote to ask around this time, “What’s happened to Robin Williams? I haven’t heard much of him since Garp.” The column’s scolding reply read that perhaps Robin’s recent films “didn’t fare too well because even fans like you missed them.”

  He followed The Best of Times with Club Paradise, a farcical comedy in which he played an injured Chicago firefighter who uses his disability money to buy property on a Caribbean island and set up a shabby resort. The movie had a promising pedigree, beginning with its director and cowriter, Harold Ramis, who was coming off the runaway success of Ghostbusters in the summer of 1984. (The project had initially been intended for Bill Murray, who turned it down.) Its impressively eclectic cast included Peter O’Toole as the island’s elegantly dissipated governor, the fashion model Twiggy as Robin’s love interest, the reggae star Jimmy Cliff as his partner in the resort scheme, and a smattering of SCTV cast members including Rick Moranis, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, and Joe Flaherty.

  Ramis, whose own estimable comedy résumé included SCTV and films like Animal House, Stripes, Caddyshack, and Vacation, seemed like an ideal filmmaker to take advantage of Robin’s improvisatory gifts. “I felt that Robin has never been seen as himself in films,” Ramis said. “He’s not as quirky as he was in Garp or Moscow on the Hudson, nor is he a schlemiel, as in The Survivors. In Popeye he was hidden. Trying to get an actor to be himself is tough. They much prefer to play other roles.”

  On location in Jamaica, Ramis struck a deal with Robin: if Robin shot one take as it was written in the script, he was then allowed to ad-lib in his further takes. When Robin told O’Toole in rehearsal that he planned to deviate from the script from time to time, the Lawrence of Arabia star replied, “Dear boy, go ahead. This is a bizarre way to make a fortune.”

  But an uneasy air seemed to hang over Club Paradise. In the midst of filming, a Jamaican soldier who performed in a parachute jump scene disappeared from the set and was presumed killed in a shark attack. Before the movie was released, Robin’s costar Adolph Caesar died of a heart attack. And when Club Paradise opened in July 1986, the reviews were withering. As one critic wrote, “Robin Williams’ latest movie, Club Paradise, was shown exclusively in some cities last week; it should not be run again. It should be turned in to the Better Business Bureau for deceiving Williams’ fans into thinking this is a funny movie.” Another said: “Like a vacation during which everything goes wrong, the movie fizzles. There are funny moments, but they’re all too few and this is another case of jokes looking better in a script than on screen.”

  Robin later acknowledged that the film had not been what he hoped for and that he’d taken it on for the wrong reasons. “They waved a lot of money at me,” he said. “And then I tried to convince myself it would really be a political film. But slowly and surely it turned into just another beach movie.” The one-two punch of The Best of Times and Club Paradise was a bitter lesson that he could not make a movie good all by himself, no matter how much improv he was allowed to do. “I took on slight projects, thinking, ‘I can fix this,’” he said. “I got suckered into a couple films like that.… I thought, ‘Well, they’ll give me the freedom to do my thing,’ but it turned out they didn’t.”

  What he needed was for someone to write him a movie character that was madcap in moderation—the film equivalent of Mork & Mindy—but after so many misfires, it had become increasingly difficult to imagine what that role was. “God. It’s out there somewhere,” he said. “It’s got to be. Something with spirit, a character who
doesn’t drive people crazy. Mork was like that—Mork had total freedom, and yet people still found him sweet enough that they could tolerate the madness. It’s a fine line. There has to be a story that’s simple enough and strong enough to keep people going.”

  His stand-up was still the one part of his life where Robin could have control over every element, and by reinvesting himself in his craft, he was about to have a year of extraordinary creative fulfillment, one that would help make up for his cinematic disappointments. The past few years had seen a rapid increase in the number of stand-up clubs across the country, and the explosive growth of cable television gave stand-up comedy a national platform.

  The 1980s had also witnessed a faddish rise in large-scale celebrity benefit events, where seemingly all the artists in a given field assembled to raise money for a charitable cause. It started in Great Britain with the hit 1984 Band Aid single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” to benefit starving children in Ethiopia. Then 1985 was the year of well-intentioned behemoths like USA for Africa, which gathered some fifty musicians and singers to record “We Are the World,” and the Live Aid concerts, where dozens of bands played at simultaneous concerts in Philadelphia and London. Now, in 1986, it was comedy’s turn to get into the act.

  That January, HBO committed to broadcasting a benefit concert, one that would gather top comedians to raise money for organizations that helped the American homeless population. The event, called Comic Relief, would be held at the end of March at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles and aired as a four-hour telethon, encouraging viewers to call in with donations. At a press conference in Beverly Hills, HBO announced that Comic Relief would be hosted by Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, and Whoopi Goldberg.

  There was not too much rhyme or reason behind HBO’s choice of headliners for the event; as John Moffitt, an executive producer of Comic Relief, later explained, “Basically, they were under contract or they were people that they had relationships with.” But there was a certain ad hoc logic at work. Robin and Crystal were now fast friends who displayed an easy onstage give-and-take in their improvised sets, though their shenanigans had not been widely seen beyond the clubs.

  Goldberg was the wild card of the group. Born Caryn Johnson and raised in a New York housing project, she had fleetingly crossed paths with Robin at the Comedy Store in San Diego when they were trying to establish themselves as stand-ups in the 1970s. It had taken her nearly another decade to break through, time she spent raising a daughter as a single mother, working in the avant-garde theater scene in Berkeley, and developing a one-woman act she called The Spook Show. Playing a variety of imaginative and deeply felt characters—a pregnant Valley girl who gives herself a botched abortion; a Jamaican nurse who attends to an elderly white American man; a junkie with a PhD in literature who visits the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam—she certified her comedic and dramatic talents all at once. In 1984, she brought her show to New York’s Dance Theater Workshop, where it was seen by Mike Nichols, who brought it to Broadway, where it was seen by Steven Spielberg, who cast her as Celie in The Color Purple. She had recently won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance.

  As a black woman, she brought some diversity to the top of the Comic Relief bill, though her reasons for wanting to participate in it were more personal: as recently as two years earlier, she had been on welfare and living with friends, and she never wanted anyone to fear homelessness as she did. “I want to cover my back in case I need help,” she said. “It’s hands across the street, boys and girls. It could be me tomorrow. It could be you tomorrow. It could be Mr. R.”—by whom she meant Ronald Reagan.

  The founder of the Comic Relief USA organization was Bob Zmuda, a veteran stand-up performer and a friend and former roommate of the HBO programming executive Chris Albrecht, a relationship that was crucial to setting up the benefit. Zmuda was best known as the longtime collaborator of Andy Kaufman, having occasionally played the role of the comic’s disagreeable alter ego Tony Clifton—thus helping to perpetrate the ruse that Kaufman and Clifton were two different people. Zmuda’s own sense of humor could sometimes be brusque: at the press conference announcing the HBO broadcast, a reporter asked if homeless viewers would have their own opportunity to watch the program. Zmuda bluntly answered, “No.” After a few seconds of stunned silence, he told the room he was making a joke. Crystal rescued the awkward moment by wisecracking, “They get to see it only if they’re subscribers to HBO.”

  Robin’s involvement in Comic Relief was a natural outgrowth of his blossoming political consciousness, one that was unapologetically left-leaning and philanthropic. Of all the values he had been exposed to in the wanderings of his youth, he had embraced the altruistic liberalism of San Francisco, his adopted hometown, rather than the conservatism of the wealthy suburban automobile enclaves where he’d been raised. Robin made no secret of his revulsion for the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whom he mocked relentlessly in his stand-up, and the tone-deaf, inhumane lack of empathy that the Republican government represented to him.

  It was a philosophy that put Robin at odds with his own upbringing, which was prosperous and comfortable, not to mention his newfound wealth from show business. He had begun to look for ways to give back, not only through outright donations but also with contributions of his time and comedy at benefit events. These took the form of appearances at well-intentioned if wonkish events like The Night of At Least a Dozen Stars, a 1984 fund-raiser for the National Committee for an Effective Congress, a political action group that had been founded decades earlier by Eleanor Roosevelt. This might have been an otherwise unremarkable night, if not for the fact that it was where Robin and Whoopi Goldberg first reencountered each other as established performers and faced off in an improvised routine of “dueling Valley people.”

  Comic Relief had the potential to reach further and to do more good, and Robin seemed genuinely touched by its purpose. At the press conference announcing the telethon, he explained how his coast-to-coast travels had opened his eyes to the burgeoning problem of homelessness and its harmful effects on families in particular. In a constant, nearly quavering voice, he said, “You ever see people, like a family of eight, living in a station wagon, have you seen that? Have you seen a sixteen-year-old wino wandering around Venice Beach? Have you been to Chicago and seen, like, a guy living in a paper box? Have you been wandering around New York and seen some of the people from the mental institutions that have been turned out, wandering around there? Guys talking to themselves? [leans into his shoulder and speaks gibberish] Just walk around any city, you’ll have a good time. You’ll catch it.”

  That winter, he began visiting homeless shelters around the country, partly to educate himself about the cause he would be supporting and partly to help promote the telecast the following month, though these appearances did not always lead to positive press coverage. When he and Tom Bradley, the mayor of Los Angeles, showed up together at a mission in the city’s destitute downtown area, their news conference had the unintended effect of delaying meal service for about three hundred people who relied on the facility. Robin, it was reported, “smiled and waved as the homeless men waited patiently for the news conference to end so they could receive a free lunch.” But when he, Crystal, and Goldberg appeared together at a shelter in Washington and then later at a press conference with Senator Ted Kennedy, there was a sense of a budding camaraderie among the three comedians, a playfulness that in time would grow into total, anarchic freedom—an unpredictability that could be thrilling and even dangerous.

  On their trip to Washington, the hosts were warned not to make any wisecracks to Kennedy on one particular topic: Chappaquiddick. As Goldberg recalled, “We’re on the plane and they say to us, ‘Look, no jokes, you three. No jokes about cars. No jokes about driving off—nothing.’ We all go, ‘OK.’ We’re not going to mention anything. And we got off the plane, and we weren’t going to mention anything.” Upon arriving at his office, they were told by Ke
nnedy: “Okay, I’m going to drive you to the next building.” The three hosts could only gasp quietly and shake their heads at each other.

  While the clock was ticking down to the big show and its organizers were racing to book as much talent as they could find, Robin was presented with another prominent opportunity: he was asked to cohost the Academy Awards, which would be held on March 24, only five days before the Comic Relief broadcast. He could hardly turn down this invitation, coming from the ceremony’s producer, Stanley Donen, the venerated director of On the Town and Singin’ in the Rain, in a rare instance where a comedian other than Bob Hope or Johnny Carson was invited to be an emcee of the Oscars. This year, Robin would share the stage with two more traditional cohosts, Alan Alda and Jane Fonda.

  Yet Robin was oddly underutilized during the Oscars broadcast. In its opening minutes, he appeared in a brief comedy sketch that kicked off the program, where he teasingly tried to persuade two accountants from Price Waterhouse that they should open their envelopes right away and reveal the night’s winners so that everyone could get to their after-parties. Soon after, he turned up alongside Alda and Fonda, translating their introductory remarks into what was supposed to be Chinese, Hindi, French, and “Filipino.” Then he vanished for nearly two hours, returning at the program’s midpoint for a brief routine of more ethnic jokes. Imagining viewers watching the show in China, he quipped, “Quick, Bing-Wa, Irving Thalberg award. We can’t miss that.”

  He got off one good ad-lib on the night, after accidentally describing the Harrison Ford thriller Witness as being the story of “an Amish cop”: “Oh, that wouldn’t be too good,” Robin said, chuckling at his own error. “‘Dost thou know thy rights?’” By the following morning, all that anyone could seem to remember about the show was that The Color Purple had won none of the eleven Oscars for which it had been nominated.