Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  “They’re not that different from you, are they?” he asks them.

  Same haircuts. Full of hormones, just like you. Invincible, just like you feel. The world is their oyster. They believe they’re destined for great things, just like many of you. Their eyes are full of hope, just like you. Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable? Because you see, gentlemen, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils. But if you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in.

  As the boys dutifully follow his instructions, Keating whispers to them, “Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.”

  The sequence called for quiet contemplation, and Robin knew just how to play it—not over-the-top but understated. “He’s not playing on obvious emotions,” Weir said. “He’s a rather good storyteller, or mood-invoker, in that scene. He gets you in.”

  Around the set, Robin could be his usual, playful self—on days when paychecks were handed out, he would tell the young actors, “Carpe per diem”—but he was also a figure of immense power and inspiration. His presence alone was often enough to inspire his young costars to take chances and improvise in their own performances; if he could do it, why not them? When Keating brings his students out to a school courtyard and encourages them to walk around at whatever pace they wish, Robin happened to catch sight of Gale Hansen standing still, and he quipped, “Mr. Dalton—you be joining us?”

  In that moment, Hansen said he decided, “I’m going to challenge him—see how well he’s paying attention. And I was like, ‘Exercising the right not to walk.’ It was an improvised line, which I didn’t do much of.” Hansen was standing behind the camera as he delivered the line, and Weir, from behind the camera, shot him a glare that seemed to say, “What? What?” But when the take was completed, Weir turned the camera around so he could film Hansen’s side of the exchange.

  “It was very liberating for the rest of the shoot,” Hansen said. “As long as I was behaving truthfully, working off something that existed in the moment between us, there was a little leeway there to catch fire. And that was Robin—Robin going, ‘Let’s play. Bring me what you have.’ He wanted everything, and he could handle anything. The guy was a lion. He lay down with all these young actors and just let you play all over him.”

  During their time together, the Poets bonded over hang sessions and pool parties at their hotel, and took a group field trip into New York when several of them were asked to audition for the same role in Dad, a comedy-drama with Ted Danson and Jack Lemmon. (The part would eventually go to Hawke.)

  Robin, who continued to employ Marsha as his assistant on the film and who stayed with her at a separate hotel, in some ways lived up to the cast and crew’s anticipation of him. When there were large audiences available to him—say, a field full of actors and extras for a scene set at a soccer game—he often liked to break away and entertain the crowd. “The only times he acted up were when he was bored or a little nervous,” said Andy Weltman, who was Weir’s assistant on the film. “And when I mean act up, I mean not in a bad way. He’d start spinning off his thing.”

  But to these young men, Robin seemed very different from the persona he had cultivated in his acting work and stand-up appearances. “I expected him to be completely manic and all over the place and funny, a little edgy,” Weltman said, “and he wasn’t that way at all on our film. He was very quiet and self-effacing and generous. I remember there was one time he said to me, ‘I’m just here to introduce the world to these boys.’”

  Though his relationship with Marsha was now public, the two of them could be protective of each other, which sometimes made them seem aloof when they did not intend to be. “Robin and Marsha at that point were pretty hot and heavy,” said Schulman, “so he spent all of his time with her. Not necessarily a comfortable fact.” When she was not assisting Robin on set, she kept to herself, though Hansen, who was closer in age to her than any of the other Poets, found ways to connect with her; he discovered that they were both reading The Dancing Wu Li Masters, Gary Zukav’s best-selling book about quantum physics, explained with the language and symbolism of Eastern spirituality. “We started talking about stuff like that, rather than other things,” Hansen said. “She was a sweet, generous person, and their relationship was very open and loving and inclusive.”

  Lisa Birnbach, a coauthor of The Official Preppy Handbook and a consultant on the film, also became friendly with Robin and Marsha. Then married to the film’s producer Steven Haft, she and her husband spent time with them as a couple and got to see them in a different light. “He and Marsha were very private while they were there,” Birnbach said. “Let’s say I’d be talking to Marsha, and suddenly Robin would come up and start really kissing her. ‘I think I gotta go.’ There was a lot of public demonstration of great affection for her.” As the four of them grew closer, they became regulars at an old-fashioned Italian restaurant in Wilmington, where each after-hours dinner, following a shoot or a review of that day’s footage, customarily ended with the waitstaff making a showy display of the dessert options, including a beverage they called “Café Diablo—coffee of the Devil.”

  “That was intoned every night,” Birnbach said. “‘Café Diablo—coffee of the Devil.’ And we always wanted to say, ‘Hey, don’t you remember us? We were here last night and you did the presentation. And we were here Tuesday also? We were here last Sunday?’ Not because it was so fancy, but because the food was good and it was open late. Every night, ‘Café Diablo—coffee of the Devil.’ Robin never stopped saying that to me, ever. By the way, never once did any of us order it.”

  While the making of the movie proceeded smoothly, the filmmakers found themselves waging an unexpected battle with Disney to preserve the integrity of its title, which Schulman had given it at its conception. During shooting, Haft got a call from David Hoberman, a Disney executive, to tell him that they had market-tested The Dead Poets Society and were concerned about the results. As Haft recounted the conversation, “Dead was a bummer, Poets was too effete, and nobody knew what Society meant, actually.” When he conveyed this to his director and his leading man, neither of them was willing to change a word. Haft said, “Peter’s lips are pursed and Robin’s jaw is jutting out, as close as you can find to a cat ready to leap. There was a moment they talked about whether to stop shooting that day. They just wanted to send the strongest possible message.” If their side had any leverage in this fight, it was the conviction that they were making a good movie, and that Disney was impressed with the dailies they had seen thus far. “They must have liked the footage, too,” Haft said. “If they hated the footage, they’ve had told us to go stuff it. But they must have liked what they were seeing as well.”

  In the middle of a winter snowstorm, Disney dispatched its head of worldwide marketing, Robert Levin, to Delaware to meet with the insurgent Poets squad and negotiate a truce. Over a dinner with Robin and Marsha; Peter Weir and his wife, Wendy; and Steven Haft and Lisa Birnbach, all gathered in matching unisex parkas, Levin reiterated the results of the studio’s testing, which further frustrated the group. “You watched Peter backing away from the table, as if he wanted enough room to jump over it,” Haft said. “Robin adored working for Disney. But he knew words like ‘Mauschwitz.’ That stuff started coming out. And it was getting ugly.”

  Pressed further, Levin revealed that the studio had already registered several other possible titles, all benign and Disney-fied: The Amazing Mr. Keating. Keating’s Way. The Unforgettable Mr. Keating. “If they had anything we thought they would actually go forward, it would have been such a different response,” Haft said. “But they were such stupid ideas that we just concluded this was never going to happen.” He, Weir, and Robin broke into a round of laughter at the suggestions, and told Levin, “Call us when you have something better. We’re a unit.”

  Schulman was not part of this argument, but he feared that his screenplay had an Achille
s’ heel that could have allowed Disney to give it any name it wished. “I thought, ‘Oh, if somebody realizes all they’ve got to do is change the name of the club, they can retitle the movie,’” he said. “But I didn’t tell them that.” Disney gave in to the protests of the creative team and left the title mostly intact, removing only the word The, so it stood as Dead Poets Society. (“They took that off—like Facebook,” Schulman said.)

  “It was a tremendous bonding experience for us all,” Birnbach said. “Because we all hung tough, and obviously prevailed.”

  Days 28 and 29 of the shoot, on December 16 and 17, were devoted to Scene 138 of the film: the concluding moments when Keating, who has been dismissed from Welton, makes a last appearance in his former classroom, where the Poets pay him a final tribute by standing atop their desks and proclaiming to him, “O Captain! My Captain!” As Schulman described it in the script, the introverted Todd is the student who initiates this demonstration. The stage directions read:

  Keating turns to look at Todd. So does everybody else. Todd props one foot up on his desk, then stands up on it. He stands atop his desk, holding back tears, facing Mr. Keating.…

  One by one and then in groups, many others in the class follow suit, standing on their desks in silent salute to Mr. Keating.… Keating stands at the door, overcome with emotion.

  Keating stammers out his final line—“Thank you, boys. I … Thank you”—and looks into each boy’s eyes before giving a nod and exiting. The film’s final shot is of Todd “holding back tears but standing proud,” as the screen goes black.

  Weir often played music on his set before the cameras rolled, to establish atmosphere and to get his actors in the corresponding frame of mind. Throughout the shoot, he’d been piping in his selections on a small boom box, but for this occasion he chose Ennio Morricone’s main theme from The Mission, the Roland Joffé film about a Jesuit evangelist in eighteenth-century Central America. It is a gentle and elegiac score, with an oboe at its center; a fitting accompaniment for Keating’s farewell. Though a handful of shooting days still remained before the Christmas holiday and after the New Year, it felt like the right way to say good-bye to a character who everyone already seemed to know would never entirely leave them.

  12

  DREAMLIKE PARTS, WITH PHANTASMAGORIC ASSOCIATIONS

  For more than two years, Marsha had been Robin’s companion and ally, his love, his fan, and his advocate. She was his guarantee of comfort, stability, and security wherever he traveled—and there had been a lot of traveling in these past months. He had a home as long as she was with him. And now, finally, she could become his wife. Following the completion of his divorce from Valerie, Robin and Marsha got married on April 30, 1989, in a small ceremony in Lake Tahoe. Robin and Marsha exchanged rings shaped to look like wolves, animals chosen for their mythical reputation of mating for life. About thirty people attended the wedding, all close friends of the couple, including Billy and Janice Crystal; Barry and Diana Levinson; the Good Morning, Vietnam producer Mark Johnson and his wife, Lezlie; and the comedian Bobcat Goldthwait.

  Among those who did not come to the ceremony was Zak, who was six years old at the time. Marsha was six months pregnant, and this was her and Robin’s opportunity to start fresh and establish very clear boundaries between what had existed before the marriage and what they wanted their lives to be going forward. Robin also felt the wedding might be too perplexing for Zak to understand. “He kept that marriage very separate,” Zak later explained. “I wasn’t at the wedding, by design, so as not to get confused for myself. I think the idea around it was to keep me apart from those types of ceremonies, as a way of not confusing me.”

  Deep down, Robin trusted that there was love among all his family members, that the bonds of old relationships would be preserved and new ones would be created. “Zak loves Marsha and Marsha loves Zak,” he told an interviewer two years later. “So for Valerie, along with the feeling that Marsha took me away, there was the threat that Marsha might replace her in Zak’s affections. But that won’t happen. Valerie’s a very good mother, and nothing would shake Zak’s love for her.… A relationship as long and close as ours can’t be brushed aside. I expect to have Valerie in my life until I die.”

  Robin and Marsha went back to New York, where they had stayed following the run of Waiting for Godot and the filming of Dead Poets Society. Through the spring. Robin continued to play unannounced one and two a.m. stand-up sets at Carolines and Catch a Rising Star, where at the end of the night Marsha and her growing belly would be waiting in a limousine to whisk him off to bed.

  The approaching summer movie season was filled with big-budget franchise entertainments: a third Indiana Jones, a second Ghostbusters, a fifth Star Trek, another Lethal Weapon, another Karate Kid, and another James Bond movie. Looming over it all was the release of Batman, the gothic comic-book blockbuster, for which Robin believed he’d been offered the plum role of the Joker only as an enticement to force Jack Nicholson to commit to making the movie. “I replied, but they said I was too late,” Robin later explained. “They said they’d gone to Jack over the weekend because I didn’t reply soon enough. I said, ‘You gave me till Monday, I replied before the deadline.’ But it was just to get Jack off the pot.”

  Into this thunderous carnival of bullets, laser beams, and bat-shaped boomerangs, Disney opened Dead Poets Society in limited release on June 2, 1989. The initial reviews were respectful if occasionally bemused. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby called it a “dim, sad” movie in which “although John Keating is the most vivid, most complex character in it, he is not around long enough.” He nonetheless praised Robin’s “exceptionally fine performance.” A largely positive review in the Los Angeles Times said that Robin “may be the most exciting performer in American movies, perhaps less for what he does than for what the audience, by now, knows he can do. Good Morning, Vietnam soared when it used his genius for the maniacal, cross-media, multi-referential spritz. In Dead Poets Society, he spritzes only occasionally.” Roger Ebert gave the film just two stars in the Chicago Sun-Times, calling it “a collection of pious platitudes masquerading as a courageous stand in favor of something: doing your own thing, I think.” He acidly remarked, “When his students stood on their desks to protest his dismissal, I was so moved, I wanted to throw up.”

  For the film’s opening weekend, Disney brought the Poets and Tom Schulman, the screenwriter, to New York for an appearance on The Phil Donahue Show and other promotional opportunities. That Friday night, they gathered at a midtown restaurant with Robin and his close friend Christopher Reeve, who wanted to take a walk to some of the nearby movie theaters after dinner to see how Dead Poets Society was faring. Robin, out of nervousness, tried to beg off.

  “I don’t want to do that,” he said.

  “Come on,” Reeve persisted. “We’ll just stand in the back. They won’t recognize you.”

  “I don’t want to do it,” Robin maintained. “I’m just going to stay here.”

  So Reeve and Schulman went without him to find a theater, where they were let into a screening of Dead Poets Society and they waited at the back.

  “It was the last scene of the movie,” Schulman recalled, “and after the boys stood on their chairs, when the music started, the audience got up and applauded, gave it a standing ovation. And I went, ‘Whoa. I’ve never seen this before.’ Chris turned to me and was crying. He said, ‘I’m so happy for Robin.’ It was so sweet. So I had some sense that something interesting was happening. And certainly, as a writer, that was a thrill.”

  What the early critics had missed about the movie were the many layers of resonance it offered to a mass audience. For younger viewers, Dead Poets Society presented a stylized vision of a rarefied prep-school experience as it might have been in a different era. For adults, it was a gauzy lens through which to look back on their own educations and coming-of-age experiences, the rebellions they fought for and the issues that seemed to matter to them in their ideali
stic youths. Viewers felt compelled to reflect on their lives and wonder who had been their Mr. Keating—that person who had provided crucial instruction or encouragement at an impressionable age, helping to make them the person that they became—or to await the arrival of such a figure at some future time.

  The acting work of the Poets was irresistible, establishing a new generation of young heartthrobs and starting several of them on long and prosperous careers. But at the film’s center was Robin’s warm, understated, and carefully distributed performance as Keating, which balanced the actor’s energy and intellect in perfect proportion and ended with the character’s unexpected defeat.

  In its opening weekend, in just eight theaters, Dead Poets Society took in about $340,000. The following weekend, it was expanded to nearly seven hundred theaters and the box office rose to more than $7.5 million, enough to place third behind Star Trek V and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The movie played all summer long, growing to more than a thousand theaters at its peak, until by mid-September it had taken in almost $90 million, becoming one of the ten highest-grossing films of the year and the second most lucrative that Disney had released. (The studio’s top earner was the Rick Moranis comedy Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, which Schulman also helped to write.)

  As with Good Morning, Vietnam, Robin found himself inundated with praise for his performance from admirers all over the country, including the usual retinue of Hollywood figures. He also heard from people who had no connection to him, yet who felt as if they knew him from his compassionate portrayal of Keating. Among the more unexpected letters of congratulations was one from Fred Rogers, the gentle broadcaster and educator who hosted the PBS children’s program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. His note to Robin read: