Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  Two days later, Robin was in rehearsal for Comic Relief. Along with Crystal, Goldberg, and himself, the lineup included up-and-comers like Howie Mandel, Bobcat Goldthwait, and Paul Rodriguez; stars like Garry Shandling, Martin Short, Madeline Kahn, George Carlin, and Gilda Radner; and enduring legends like Jerry Lewis, Carl Reiner, Sid Caesar, and Minnie Pearl. The stage had been built to look like a shantytown of cardboard boxes, and the full script, encompassing ninety-five different comedy sketches, ran a total of 227 pages. Cuts were being made constantly, for time as well as sensitivity: a bit where the three hosts would have performed an advertisement for a product called the Sony Poorman—essentially a group of homeless singers who perform for people who can’t afford a home stereo—felt in the end like it was not in the spirit of the evening. As Robin explained, “You can’t make fun of the thing you’re trying to help. So it was that fine line of, how much are you using it for humor, and how much were you helping it with it? It was a dangerous line.”

  The other members of the creative team were wary to ask the hosts to cut down their own material, largely out of respect for their talents and their stature. The show’s opening routine had been budgeted at nine minutes in the script but ran nearly thirty minutes in rehearsal; it came down to seventeen minutes for broadcast. “They each made an entrance, individually, and then they played off each other,” said Moffitt, the executive producer. “At that point we were so happy to have them do it, we weren’t going to mess around with them, by saying, oh, you’ve got to cut that. You’ve got to cut that. We basically let them do what they wanted to do.” As Crystal explained it, “We’d make these pretty interesting playbooks, and then not do them, because something else would pop up.”

  Comic Relief commenced with the trio’s rotating character bits: Goldberg emerged from a cardboard box as a homeless character and observed, “I did a little time, got caught in another neighborhood. This is like a real hip place to live.” Robin came out of the next box, dressed in a trucker cap and denim jacket, and delivered a familiar line: “I’m so happy to be here I could drop a log.” He said he’d lost his farm but built himself a new home from government cheese with “a little brie for windows, gouda doorknobs.… Up came spring, phew, you didn’t want to stand downwind from our little home. I miss it, though. Casa Velveeta.” Crystal entered as an old black jazz musician; Goldberg returned, now as a window-display designer for Bergdorf Goodman; Robin played a street flasher and then Ronald Reagan inside the frame of a TV set: “I understand what it’s like to be homeless because many of my friends are in escrow right now,” he said. “Won’t you please help little Baby Doc Duvalier and Ferdinand Marcos? Because we’re trying to establish a thing called Club Fled.” When the three hosts finished their opening act and went backstage for the first time, Pat Tourk Lee, one of the show’s executive producers, told them, “The phones are ringing.” At that moment, Crystal said, “We all started to cry. We knew we were doing something good.”

  And on and on and on it went. They riffed between the stand-up sets and the pre-taped segments; at times they even riffed on top of each other. When Robin and Crystal caught themselves talking over each other for the umpteenth time, Crystal joked, “Oh, in stereo.” In another transitional segment, Robin appealed to the viewers for their contributions: “You’ll feel great, we’ll feel great, and the homeless will feel grateful, because you cared,” he said, slipping inexplicably into the basso voice of a stereotypical black man: “We know where you live, man.” Goldberg, in her own self-parodying patois, said to Robin, “I like the way you do them colored people.” There was not much Robin could say in response, except for a deeply chagrined “a-ha.”

  Throughout the night, the three hosts were learning how to work together as a group—even Robin and Crystal, who had performed together many times before but continued to discover new dynamics in their partnership. “We’re testing our abilities against each other,” Crystal said, “feeling out, How can I work with him? How could he work with me? And I realized, don’t compete—set up, let him do his thing, and then counterpunch. We’d be sparring, and he’d have a look in his eye, like, I’m going to throw a left, a right, a right, and a left, and you’re not going to see it coming.”

  In their final sketch of the night, Robin and Crystal played “Betty’s Boys,” the two backup singer-dancers to an unspecified, aging former theater star as they rehearse their Las Vegas show in her absence. It was mostly an excuse for the two of them to sing, dance, and clown around in aerobics outfits and mincing gay voices while poking impish fun at each other. (“What’s happening under your arms there?” Crystal asked Robin, who as usual was glazed in his own sweat. “It smells like Eau de Alex Karras.” “I like to call them my little Smith Brothers,” Robin answered.) Then the show—which ran so long, it would have to be rebroadcast in smaller ninety-minute chunks—concluded with all its cast members singing a “We Are the World”–style anthem of their own.

  There comes a time, when the world is split in half

  And you seem to be knee-deep in grief

  There comes a time, when you sure could use a laugh

  That’s the time when we call for Comic Relief

  It was not, perhaps, the funniest number, but at least it was over. A few days later, the New York Times wrote that the show had “faced and never quite surmounted, a split-personality problem.… But comedians are notoriously resilient performers, always determined to triumph over seemingly impossible odds. And the evening, while uneven, did manage to salvage a respectable quota of invigorating laughs, most of them from predictable sources. The three hosts did their turns capably, singly and together.” Much more than that, the program had helped establish Robin, Crystal, and Goldberg in viewers’ minds as the nation’s ambassadors of improv comedy, a unit so tightly interwoven (if not always on the same page) that it would soon become impossible to see any two of them together without wondering where the third team member was. And the broadcast had raised nearly $2.5 million in donations, an outright success that would make Comic Relief an ongoing HBO tradition. The experience had helped fan the flame of a humane ember that was already inside Robin, and for years afterward, he would even try to find jobs for homeless people on the sets of his films.

  No sooner had Robin finished Comic Relief than he was back on the road, undertaking another stand-up tour that would take him to twenty-three cities, from New Haven to Los Angeles, in a ten-week span over the spring and summer of 1986. His manager David Steinberg, who had become a valuable collaborator in the process of shaping and editing his material, traveled with him on this trip, as did Marsha Garces, whom the Williamses had hired as Zak’s nanny and who had now been promoted to the position of Robin’s assistant for the itinerary.

  The relationship between them was strictly professional, Marsha said. “He was too screwed up and I wasn’t interested in being sucked dry,” she explained. So she mostly gave him tough-love pep talks: “You’ve got two great careers, you’re really intelligent, you’re healthy, you’re strong, you’re handsome, you have a great son—and you’re totally depressed. You’re an adult, Robin; pull it together!”

  Whatever he had left in him after the Oscars and Comic Relief, Robin poured all of it into this tour: he played his scheduled, sold-out performances, of which there were one or two each night, then hit a local comedy club in each town for an additional after-hours appearance. By his own reckoning, he was getting about three to five hours of sleep a night, but at least he could now say honestly—and publicly—that the alcohol and cocaine benders that once figured prominently in these nocturnal sprees had been eliminated from his life.

  That past era, Robin said, “was just a madhouse. A time when you didn’t want to stop. It got to the point where people said I’d go to the opening of an envelope. I felt like the top of a roulette wheel.” The drinking had made him bloated and overweight, and the drug use had inhibited his hallmark quickness. “It’s a nerve deadener,” he said of cocaine. “You totally w
ithdraw yourself. It basically removes your ability to make connections, your synapses are frying.… Now I realize it was the most boring time in the world. I was doing so many things I could never really stop and enjoy one moment.”

  “Cocaine is one of the most selfish drugs in the world,” he said. “The world is as big as your nostril.”

  There was almost nothing else for Robin to focus on but his work, because his personal life was in tatters. He had ended his extramarital relationship with Michelle Tish Carter, the waitress and musician he had met at the Comedy Store, but with considerable acrimony. She had told him initially that she was carrying his child and that she expected him to help support her financially. But when her pregnancy claim turned out to be false, Robin refused to pay her anything. Carter also said she told him the previous fall that she had contracted herpes from him, a contention that Robin said was impossible since two separate blood tests had shown he had no sexually transmitted diseases. She then sued Robin for more than $6 million, and though it would take many more months for this case to play out fully in the courts, this was time that he spent afraid that Carter’s lawsuit would be discovered by the press.

  When Robin was asked, in an interview from this period, what kept Valerie interesting to him, he answered, “The accountant.” Then he laughed and added, “She’s tried to support me as much as possible. She finds the public aspect very hard.” But in truth, his marriage to Valerie was all but finished, done in not by any one particular betrayal or transgression but by the erosion of trust between them that occurred each time she forgave him for an act of wrongdoing. “I’m not a controlling person,” Valerie said. “I wanted him to be free, and he wanted me to be free. And in that process, I think we got more separated than I would have liked.”

  As Robin explained it, “Ultimately, things went astray. We changed, and then with me wandering off again a little bit, then coming back and saying, ‘Wait, I need help’—it just got terribly painful.” He started seeing a therapist, as a way to help him come to terms with their separation without writing it off as a failure. “It’s not disappointing,” he said of their breakup. “That’s why therapy helps a lot. It forces you to look at your life and figure out what’s functioning and what isn’t. You don’t have to beat your brains against a wall if it’s not working. That’s why you choose to be separated rather than to call each other an asshole every day.”

  Through this difficult time, it was important to Robin that he continue to have a strong presence in the life of his son, Zak, who had just turned three and was becoming more attuned to the real person submerged within all the characters his father played. “You suddenly have a malleable little creature that picks up on everything you do,” Robin explained. “If you are not together, he’ll notice it very quickly. I don’t get too manic or crazy around him. I’ve learned that I can turn off the voices very easily. It’s becoming more comfortable to stay a few more seconds as myself. You have to be somewhat straight with your son so that he recognizes your voice as the ‘basic Daddy voice.’”

  In the eyes of his lifelong friend Christopher Reeve, the bond between Robin and Zak was crucial in helping Robin reconnect to his own childhood. “When you see Robin play with any child, you see the child immediately understand him,” Reeve said. “The child in Robin is so open and approachable and immediately apparent.” As Reeve observed, Robin’s humor was rooted in his youth, the sense of solitude he felt and the voices and stories he created to entertain himself. “He’s very aware, real grown up, but still in touch with the child in him,” Reeve said. “Throughout his life, he’s always felt alone with his imagination.”

  But Robin was not entirely ready to give up on his family. Even in the midst of a tour stop in Orange County, California, he flew back to Napa to plead with Valerie that they stay together. By night his frustrations were spilling over into his stand-up act. “Maybe that’s why there’s a certain vehemence in my show, an intensity,” he said. “One of the foundations of your life is about to change and you’re going, ‘Yeah, let’s play, ladies and gentlemen, let’s have a GOOD TIME!’” He said he had even cut back on the amount of spontaneous interaction he allowed himself with his audience members, for fear that he might accidentally snap at people. “I’m just going to have to try and stay very calm,” he said. “The tendency is to overact at this point and just get crazy. It’s a pretty raw time for me.”

  Still, he felt as if something was holding him back in his stand-up—that he still could not be completely honest about himself in front of an audience and tell them what was happening in his life. “Maybe that’s the next step, to talk about really personal things,” he said. “Soon I think I’ll be ready to do that. Because I’ve never been able to do that in my life. I’m in a transitional phase. I feel like I’m like sixteen or seventeen in terms of the way it’s about to mature.”

  It was against this turbulent emotional backdrop that Robin prepared for the most important stop of his tour: two nights at the Metropolitan Opera House on August 9 and 10, where he would be the first solo comedian to perform there. By this point in the trip, he was raring to open up a vein and engulf an audience that included celebrity guests like Robert De Niro, Sean Penn, and Madonna.

  The concerts, which were taped for an HBO special and a record album, began with Robin speaking over the Met’s public address system to say, “There’ll be a minor change in the program tonight. Tonight, the part of Robin Williams will be played by the Temptations.” Then, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, he rushed into the concert hall and said, in a Western twang, “Howdy!” After the laughter subsided he added, “Wrong opera house.”

  He approached a large La Bohème–type stagecoach that dominated the set and serenaded it with the song “The Wells Fargo Wagon” from The Music Man. Then he imagined how the Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry might fare as a ballet coach before settling into a bit about drinking. It was subject matter he had previously covered in Throbbing Python of Love, only this time Robin made clear he was not making broad jokes about the familiar plight of overindulgence; he was talking about himself and his own decision to go sober. “I had to stop drinking alcohol,” he said, “because I used to wake up nude on the hood of my car with my keys in my ass. Not a good thing.”

  Not that this choice had made him a fundamentally better person, he explained: “I realized when I became a reformed alcoholic—I said, hey, ‘I’m the same asshole. I just have fewer dents in my car.’ And then there are your friends who smoke marijuana, going, [stoner voice] ‘Yeah, man, alcohol’s a crutch.’ Really, Captain Herbalife? You just macramé-d your ass into the couch and you’re giving me shit?”

  Robin returned, too, to the topic of cocaine, though here he did not acknowledge his personal expertise on the matter. (“Here’s a little warning sign if you have a cocaine problem,” he said. “First of all, if you come home to your house, you have no furniture and your cat’s going, ‘I’m out of here, prick’? Warning.”) Then came riffs on gun control, the Reagan presidency, and other political topics, followed by Robin’s sermonizing on lust, sex, and the male libido. His long speech about sex culminated, as such acts often do, in childbirth. “You’ve just created a tiny creature that’ll eventually quit college on you, too,” he said. “And now that you have a child, you have to clean up your act.”

  Then Robin uncharacteristically opened up and started talking about his life with Zak. “My son is three years old,” he said. “It’s an amazing time.… It’s an outrageous time, when they ask you about everything. It’s like, [child voice] ‘Why is the sky blue?’ Well, because of the atmosphere. ‘Why is there atmosphere?’ Well, because we need to breathe. ‘Why do we breathe?’ WHY THE FUCK DO YOU WANT TO KNOW? A year ago, you were sitting in your own shit—now you’re Carl Sagan?”

  He went on to tell a story about how the impressionable young Zak was already learning some dubious lessons from his unmannerly dad:

  I was driving in traffic, someone cut me off, I went, “Fuck it.�
�� From behind me, in his little rocket seat, a voice went, “Fuck it.” All day long, he followed me around the house, going, “Fuck it.” [smiles] “Fuck it.” [waves] “Fuck it.” “Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckit.” A sweet little old lady walked up and said, “Oh, what a beautiful child.” “Fuck you!” “Oh, it’s the Williams boy.”

  Then, after a brief aside about Jack Nicholson running for president, Robin revisited this idea at the end of the set:

  There are times my son looks at me and gives me that look in the eyes, like, “Well? What’s it going to be?” Hey, Zak, uh. Hey, it’s, um, I don’t know. But maybe along the way, you take my hand, tell a few jokes and have some fun. Hey, how do you get to the Met? “Money!”

  Extending his hand as he would to Zak, Robin said, “Come on, pal. You’re not afraid, are you?” In Zak’s voice, he answered himself: “Nah. Fuck it.” Then he raised up his hand, as a child might to a parent, and toddled off the stage.

  Years later, Zak would say he was proud to be portrayed this way in his father’s routines. At the time, he said, “I wasn’t too aware of it.” But as an adult considering what the material meant to Robin, he said, “It was good for him and it was cathartic for him, so that’s what was important.”

  More immediately, the Metropolitan Opera shows were greeted euphorically, as a return to form for Robin, perhaps even the best stand-up set of his career. Reviewing the HBO broadcast for the Village Voice, Andrew Sarris called it a “virtuoso comedy hour” that put Robin “on a different planet from every other stand-up comedian.” “I doubt that any other mere mortal can think and perform with such machine-gun rapidity and still be on target so much of the time,” Sarris wrote. “Whenever anyone is that good, nobody but nobody should tamper with the inspired ravings of his unconscious.”