Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  Good Morning, Vietnam went into wide release three weeks later, on January 15, 1988, in about eight hundred theaters, grossing more than $16 million that week. For the first time in his career, Robin had a number one movie at the box office.

  “It was a huge relief for him,” Levinson said. “He had never made a movie that had done well. He was feeling like, ‘Well, this is it. Am I just going to be a television guy and a stand-up comic? Is that it?’ All those things are going on in his head. And all of a sudden, there’s this gigantic opening and the movie explodes, and he’s a darling in Hollywood. That was a huge moment for him. He was just beside himself. He had broken through.”

  “For a guy who always had these insecurities,” he added, “to finally be praised and all of a sudden to have made it, that was a great moment for him.”

  When it was clear that the film was going to be a commercial smash, it was like an artery of feeling and emotion, clogged for years, had finally burst open. Robin did not have to wonder any longer about which face he had to show in order for the public to accept him; he now had proof that he would be embraced if he just acted like himself. He could relax, open up, and share parts of himself that he had previously held back, without fear of what an audience might think.

  In interviews, Robin talked about the real benefits he’d been seeing from psychotherapy—“open-heart surgery in installments,” he called it—which he’d now been enrolled in for a year, and how he believed it had helped his performance in Good Morning, Vietnam. “It allowed me to show more vulnerability,” he said, “and I think the camera can catch that. I think therapy has helped me to bring out a deeper level of comedy.”

  He was cagier, however, on the question of whether the process was making him feel more sane—“They bought it,” he said through a grin—and doubted that he’d ever achieve something akin to inner peace.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever be the type that goes, ‘I am now at one with myself,’” he said. “Then you’re fucking dead, okay? You’re out of your body. I do feel much calmer. And therapy helps a little.… I mean, it helps a lot. It makes you reexamine everything: your life, how you relate to people, how far you can push the ‘like me’ desire before there’s nothing left of you to like. It makes you face your limitations, what I can and can’t do.”

  Still, Robin had been here before, and he wondered how long this latest surge of interest in him would last. When his first flirtation with fame had evaporated to his surprise and disappointment, he had learned that he was at the mercy of external forces that could take it away a second time. He realized now that he was also susceptible to bouts of bad judgment that could halt his current ascent. “The secret is to be able to turn things down, to not take on projects like The Best of Times or Club Paradise just because they say they want you,” he said. “If they can’t get you, they’ll get anybody, so wise up. They’ll take Gary Coleman.”

  When Oprah Winfrey asked him, in an interview on her daytime talk show, if he had any insecurities, Robin became quiet and contemplative. “Oh, why do you ask?” he said, to laughter from the studio audience. Then he got serious: “A few things. That the muse will leave. All of a sudden, that you’ll sink back and”—his voice grew slower, lower, and less coherent—“Just. Become. Almost. Just. Like. This. And eventually run as a Democratic candidate.”

  On January 23, 1988, when Robin could have been in Los Angeles, receiving the Golden Globe he won for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for Good Morning, Vietnam, he was instead in New York, hosting Saturday Night Live again. In a curious sketch that aired late in the show, Robin was cast as a future, sixty-year-old version of himself, with white hair and a matching mustache. This senior Robin is a bitter curmudgeon who lives alone in a threadbare apartment, sitting in a Barcalounger and yelling at his TV set. He is visited by a grown son played by Dana Carvey—the sketch takes pains to make clear that the character is not meant to be Zak—who dresses in a variation of Robin’s old Mork & Mindy costume and minces around the room, pathologically riffing on everything he sees.

  “Where did it all go wrong?” the elderly Robin asks as he bemoans his fate. “Maybe it was all those sequels to Good Morning, Vietnam. Maybe Bon Jour, Beirut was too much.”

  “I don’t have it anymore,” says sixty-year-old Robin. “I just can’t do it like I used it to. I’m too old. Besides, nobody cares. Nobody remembers me.”

  Carvey, as Robin’s fictional son, can muster up only a thin encouragement. “That’s where you’re wrong, Father,” he says. “They do remember you. Popeye’s still the number one film in Budapest.”

  11

  O CAPTAIN!

  The praise for Good Morning, Vietnam kept coming and coming. In the days and weeks that followed its opening, Robin received effusive notes of congratulations from Michael Ovitz, his powerful agent at Creative Artists Agency, hailing his Golden Globe nomination (“Your film is creating an unusual amount of word-of-mouth excitement and critical acclaim.… PS Do you ever stop? I couldn’t stop laughing when I watched you on the Tonight Show”) and eventual win (“It was your week, and this will be your year”). Friends from every corner of his life were reaching out to express their admiration, including his old comedy mentor, Jonathan Winters (“Now you know … it pays to be a disc jockey. Stay away from John Houseman and listen to me. Have I ever steered you wrong? It’s your turn now for me to be your Lewis Stone. Okay Andy Hardy?”), and the science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison (“Paul Muni and I are delighted you got nominated. He told me so today, in a burning bush. I’d tell you myself, but whoever hears from you? Don’t let the guilt make you crazy. Go, be a star.”) When Steven Spielberg wrote to thank Robin for impersonating him in a video made to celebrate the director’s fortieth birthday, he opened the letter, “Hey, movie star!!” adding that he was “available to sub for you on HBO, Showtime, the Comedy Store and Good Morning Vietnam II (which I haven’t seen but will once the lines go down sometime in 1989).”

  While these tributes were uplifting, the financial success of Good Morning, Vietnam was staggering. It remained the number one motion picture at the box office for the first nine weekends of its wide release, and by the end of March 1988 it had grossed over $100 million. When its national run came to an end that June, it had taken in more than $120 million, making it the fourth-highest-grossing movie of the year. The film also yielded a companion soundtrack album, containing short excerpts of Robin’s DJ routines from the movie as well as some of the period songs played on Cronauer’s show, and that became a hit, too: it spent thirty-five weeks on the Billboard chart, put the Louis Armstrong single “What a Wonderful World” back in the Top 40 for the first time since its original release in 1967, and sold more than one million copies, before winning Robin another Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album the following year.

  These were great windfalls for Robin, and also for Rollins Joffe, where an important generational shift was taking place. Charles Joffe decided to retire from the business he helped create, and Robin’s comanagers Buddy Morra and Larry Brezner became partners in the company, now called Rollins, Morra & Brezner. They were younger, hungrier, and savvier than their predecessors, and eager to leverage their ability to produce and package movies that showcased their clients. They and Jack Rollins were credited as producers on Good Morning, Vietnam, assuring them substantial fees paid up front, and further royalties paid later as the movie continued to rake in profits. These were strong incentives for them to create more of their own films for Robin, and for Robin to keep working steadily on their behalf.

  On February 16, Robin secured one of the greatest honors of his career. The nominations for the Academy Awards were announced that morning, and the five contenders for the Best Actor trophy were Jack Nicholson for Ironweed, Michael Douglas for Wall Street, Marcello Mastroianni for Dark Eyes, William Hurt for Broadcast News, and Robin Williams for Good Morning, Vietnam. This was the only Oscar nomination that Good Morning, Vietnam would receive, and a rare distin
ction for a performance in an essentially comedic film (though the same could be said of Hurt’s role in the satirical Broadcast News). The distinction vaulted Robin into the first rank of film actors and ended any lingering concerns about his meandering artistic compass.

  There was not much opportunity for Robin to revel in his good fortune. In the same week that his Oscar nomination was announced, he was the subject of a feature article in People magazine in which he spoke candidly about his personal life, revealing the full extent of his relationship with Marsha and describing her as “the one who makes my heart sing.” But the magazine’s cover told a different story. A small photo of Robin and Marsha appeared beneath a dramatic block of text that described him as caught up in “the emotional challenge of his life” and “entangled in a love affair with his son’s nanny that has left his wife embittered—and Zachary, 4, in the middle.” It was clear that People intended to present this story in a salacious light.

  The article, titled “A Comic’s Crisis of the Heart,” began by commending Robin for stand-up skills that were as sharp as ever and for resuscitating his career with Good Morning, Vietnam. But it then took an abrupt turn, going on to say that Robin was “caught up in a private turmoil of passion and anguish,” torn between Valerie, “the wife of nine years he deeply respects but no longer wants to live with,” and Marsha, “the mistress he madly adores.” It described Marsha as “sloe-eyed” and “elegantly slender,” and having become a part of Robin’s life “when Valerie (as she grimly acknowledges) hired her as a live-in nanny for baby Zachary.”

  Marsha declined to be interviewed for the story, and the People writer was unable to turn up much information on her (“When did their affair begin? Nobody’s talking”), though the story spent a paragraph describing Robin backstage at Saturday Night Live as “he cupped her buttocks and pulled her in close for the kind of kiss usually exchanged in a bedroom.”

  Robin was open about the shared custody agreement he and Valerie had made for Zak and said that their son had been handling it well. “He’s amazingly adaptive,” Robin told the magazine, “and we all try hard to make the arrangement work. We all love Zachary, and Zachary loves us all. Also, we’re all in therapy, and that’s helped a lot—Jesus, I should get a discount! Valerie and I have a good understanding too. The separation was difficult, but it was also gentle. Better to do that than to go at each other’s throats.”

  Valerie, who acknowledged that she was now in a relationship with another man, said that this arrangement was best for all of them. “Robin has been conducting himself very well,” she said. “We’re acting together in Zak’s interest. We separated to reexamine our lives. It’s a time for personal growth for both of us.… I live alone, and I like it that way.”

  Though Robin had given the magazine his full and honest cooperation, the article had the overall effect of scandalizing him and Marsha. Through implication, omission, and misunderstanding, as well as the use of loaded words like “mistress,” it suggested that their relationship was inappropriate and something they should be ashamed of. Robin and Valerie had made it clear that their marriage was over and had been over for some time when he and Marsha became involved, but the People feature seemed to suggest that Marsha was a home wrecker who had used her position as Zak’s caregiver to infiltrate the Williams home and seduce Robin away from his loving wife. That could hardly have been further from the truth, but millions of readers didn’t know that. Robin and Marsha found the article embarrassing and hurtful, and it left a misperception about their relationship that would linger for a very long time.

  “I was so angry and horrified that the interview turned this way, it was like being mugged,” Robin would later explain. “I sat down and talked to the reporter very personally and said, ‘This is what’s up, this is the truth.’ And they didn’t put any of it in. They made it seem exactly what they wanted to do from the very beginning: Marsha broke up the marriage. Which is total horseshit.”

  “It was really a hatchet job, a setup, an ambush. A very low blow,” he said.

  Robin and Marsha’s friends ignored the People article, while other unexpected allies emerged to offer them words of comfort and support. Gene Siskel, the Chicago Tribune film critic and cohost of the television program At the Movies, who was hardly a reliable admirer of Robin’s movies, wrote to him and encouraged him to put the incident out of his mind. “In case you are feeling low about the People magazine cover,” Siskel said, “realize that I saw the magazine—they send it to me—and I was so disgusted by the invasion of privacy that I tossed out the issue without reading it. It wouldn’t surprise me if other fans of yours and other journalists did the same. Your talent and love for your family remain unscathed in the real world.”

  On April 1, Robin and Valerie publicly announced in a statement that they were ending their marriage and that Valerie had made the initial filings that would begin their divorce process. Days later, on April 11, Robin made his first visit to the Academy Awards ceremony as a nominee, bringing Marsha with him as his date. But when Marlee Matlin stepped up to the lectern to reveal the winner of the Best Actor trophy, she announced Michael Douglas’s name. At that instant, on the television broadcast, Robin could be seen tensing up ever-so-slightly and exhaling; it was as if, until then, he was still holding on to the belief that he could prevail in a highly competitive category, and against Douglas’s searing performance as the morally compromised Gordon Gekko. As a consolation prize of sorts, Robin got to take the stage later in the show, to humorously bemoan his loss—“That award was so close! All those calls to Entertainment Tonight at fifty cents a pop, damn!”—and to bestow the trophy for Best Director. Addressing the nominees, none of whom were American, he said, “The Academy, along with the Oscar, this year is giving out a green card,” before proclaiming Bernardo Bertolucci the winner for The Last Emperor.

  Later that spring, Robin and Marsha relocated to New York so that he could begin work on a series of projects there. The first was a Lincoln Center Theater revival of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in which he and Steve Martin would play the existentially beleaguered hobos Estragon and Vladimir. The play, directed by Mike Nichols and with a cast that also featured F. Murray Abraham and Bill Irwin, was Robin’s first major theater piece since achieving fame; it was sometimes billed as his professional stage debut, overlooking the handful of plays he had performed in San Francisco before turning to stand-up comedy. Though not technically a Broadway show, Godot was as highly anticipated as a New York theater production could be—one that would put Robin right back in the same storied arts complex where he had studied at Juilliard more than a decade earlier, and in a work that could take full advantage of his comic gifts and show off his intellectual heft.

  The previous summer, Nichols had met with his two lead actors at Martin’s house in Los Angeles for a private reading of the play. Satisfied with what he had seen, Nichols wrote to Robin a few weeks later to tell him, “Our hours with Godot were as happy as any I have spent around the theater. Thank you for your talent and your generosity. This is just to say count on it.”

  As a dutiful drama student, Robin devoured the Godot script, poring over its contents and filling his copy with enthusiastic annotations. On the first page he jotted down his initial thoughts on how Estragon would be presented: “real life! (make up: bruises, cuts, dried blood) beaten, no sleep.” Underneath the character’s famous first line, “Nothing to be done,” which accompanies his fruitless effort to remove a boot, Robin added a few thoughts on how he might deliver it: “‘Ah well.’ To audience? Throw away to self. (it’s hopeless).” A few lines down, beneath a bit of dialogue—“Not now, not now”—spoken to Vladimir, he wrote, “Pity me. Help me!” Robin continued on like this for the entirety of his script, as if he had been assigned a term paper.

  Robin was fascinated by the play’s willful abstraction and its indifference to efforts to make it comprehensible. As he’d been told about its original 1956 Broadway production, in which
his role was played by Bert Lahr, “they asked him, ‘What are you doing in this play?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know.’ And then I heard that Beckett was real happy with that.” He loved the rhythms of his give-and-take with Martin (who was appearing in his first play in twenty-five years), inventing all kinds of evocative similes to describe it: “It’s like having sex in a wind tunnel.” “It’s like water skiing in quicksand.” “Or putting together a jigsaw puzzle in a hurricane.”

  Of course the play came with a certain risk. What risk? “Of never working on the stage again!” he said. “Oh, no! You’re ruined! It’s like you’re ruined socially in Tustin. Oh, no! You’ll never be allowed back there again!” And more seriously, the fear of failing in a live setting, in the medium that drew him to acting in the first place.

  But, as Robin was accustomed to asking for and receiving, Nichols gave him permission to improvise during the show and to update Beckett’s text; not extensively, but even in small doses these ad-libs added up and helped contribute to the downfall of the play. Robin would sometimes deliver a line in the voice of Rod Serling, John Wayne, or Sylvester Stallone; he would pretend to wield an imaginary remote control or a microphone, and ask Irwin’s character to “thank the Academy”; when Irwin spoke the strange phrase “Essy-in-Possy,” an invention of Beckett’s, Robin interjected with a line that was most assuredly not the author’s: “Did he say pussy?”

  Not every critic regarded Robin’s taking of liberties as a literary felony; “the play has not been abused,” the New York Review of Books said of the production when Waiting for Godot opened in November 1988. George Roy Hill, Robin’s no-nonsense director on The World According to Garp, wrote to him to tell him, “I have seen any number of productions of Godot including the one with Lahr, and for me this was the best by far. It was also the most accessible and as a result the most moving of all of them, not in the least because of your work in it.”