Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  This afternoon—all by myself—I went to see “Dead Poets Society.” It’s a fine film and your performance in it is superb. I admire you greatly and I thank you for enriching the lives of so many through your art. You certainly contribute many verses as “the power of the play goes on.”

  Gratefully,

  Fred Rogers

  While Robin savored these appreciations, he would soon be celebrating another joyous milestone. On July 31, Marsha gave birth to a daughter they named Zelda Rae. In a gesture of conciliation, and a reminder of the threads that ran through the extended Williams family, her name had been picked out in advance by Zak, her half brother. By now, Valerie was in a new relationship with the journalist and author David Sheff, who had a young son of his own, Nic, a year older than Zak. The two boys regarded each other as siblings and, like most children of the era, spent countless hours playing Nintendo games, a hobby that Robin shared. As Marsha’s due date approached, the boys began to brainstorm names for the baby. If it’s a boy, Nic proposed, he should be named Mario, after Super Mario Bros. Zak, inspired by The Legend of Zelda, suggested that Zelda would be a good name for a girl—and it stuck.

  “Family is what you make of it,” Zak said years later. “For us, it’s the people who you love and trust and are around you. I did play a role in Zelda’s name, and she has very much embraced it as part of her identity. As one does with their name.”

  Six days after Zelda’s birth, Robin sat with Barbara Walters for an ABC television interview, taking Marsha and their new baby girl, who was dressed in a black bow tie dotted with white hearts, out for her first horse-drawn carriage ride in Central Park. Speaking to Walters back in his apartment, Robin excitedly gushed about the joy that Zelda had already brought into his life. “She’s nine pounds, seven ounces,” he said. “Actually, a friend said we gave birth to a woman. She had shoes and a bag.” Though Robin had experienced the elation of first-time fatherhood when Zak was born, he was no less ecstatic to have it happen a second time. “It was amazing to go through it again,” he said. “Just as amazing the second time. Just to look at her is better than any videotape. You can sit and watch this: [he quickly cycled through several contorted baby faces] She checks me out and goes, ‘Will you be buying me things?’”

  His long-term plan for Marsha and Zelda was to move back to San Francisco, where they could begin a proper domestic family life. But he was committed to making several more films in New York that would take him nearly a year to complete. The first of these projects was Cadillac Man, a farcical comedy that cast Robin as its overextended, womanizing title character: a fast-talking used-car salesman who, while saddled with alimony payments to an ex-wife and an unpaid Mafia loan, splits his romantic interest between two mistresses, played by Fran Drescher and Lori Petty; then, during a two-day stretch when he’s been told he must sell twelve cars or lose his job, he is taken hostage by a gun-wielding motorcyclist (Tim Robbins). For the character, anyway, getting a buyer into a car or a woman into bed are just different forms of seduction.

  The movie, which was filmed in part at a working car lot in Queens, held a certain appeal to Robin because the character reminded him of his father and his frenzied, frustrating years in the automobile industry. It was lighter, less substantial fare than some of the other films he’d been making lately, and its director, Roger Donaldson, allowed him to improvise in his scenes with Robbins. He regarded it as “an interesting ensemble piece” but was left frustrated by the feeling that Orion Pictures, the studio behind it, had taken the edginess out of the film in postproduction, well after he had shot his scenes. “They tried it out on test audiences and decided to soften it up,” Robin said, “changing the tone more towards comedy, but that’s the studio’s right. When it’s drama and comedy, they get confused on how to sell it and what audiences will respond to.” Asked point-blank if he should have made Cadillac Man, Robin answered, “I don’t know.”

  That was Robin’s spring and summer; in the fall, he moved on to another film, Awakenings, a comedy-drama adapted from the 1973 nonfiction book by the distinguished neurologist Oliver Sacks. Sacks had written Awakenings based on his work at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, where he treated patients who had survived a pandemic of encephalitis lethargica, a disease that froze them physically in catatonic states but left them conscious as their brains continued to function. By giving these patients L-dopa, a drug used to treat Parkinson’s disease, Sacks was able to revive them, resulting in what he called “an astonishing, festive ‘awakening’ … as they burst into explosive life after having been almost inanimate for decades.”

  The Awakenings screenplay, written by Steven Zaillian, deviated in many ways from the factual record. It replaced Sacks with a character named Dr. Malcolm Sayer, a soft-spoken, bumbling, but brilliant physician, and focused on his relationship with a patient, Leonard Lowe, who contracted the disease while still a child and is resuscitated decades later to find that he has become a grown man. The film was directed by Penny Marshall, Robin’s former classmate at the Harvey Lembeck acting workshop and a sister of his Mork & Mindy benefactor Garry Marshall. Robert De Niro, whose path Robin had crossed on the night of John Belushi’s death, was sent the Awakenings script and offered either the role of Sayer, the doctor, or Lowe, the patient; he chose the patient, whom Marshall considered “the glitzy role,” so she turned to Robin to play the buttoned-down doctor.

  “He’s not thought of as a dramatic actor,” Marshall said, “but I like to juggle things around. I see things that aren’t always apparent.” Robin, of course, had no trouble with roles that straddled the boundary between mirth and sincerity, but he had concerns about appearing with De Niro, who could be a stoic and impenetrable figure when the cameras weren’t rolling and a force of nature when they were turned on. “He was afraid Bobby was going to blow him off the screen,” Marshall recalled. “I said, ‘I won’t let that happen.’”

  Shooting for Awakenings began in October 1989 at the Kingsboro Psychiatric Center, a functioning but underfunded public hospital in Brooklyn that could be a dismal place to visit on a voluntary basis. “It’s depressing,” Robin said of the environs. “Everything is caged. Even the sun room is a big cage.” Many of its patients, including people who had Tourette’s syndrome and schizophrenia, were used as background actors, and Robin could not help but feel like an inmate himself sometimes. “There’s a lot of doors and only five keys,” he said.

  What helped make the experience more bearable was the opportunity to work closely with Sacks, who served as a consultant on the film, and whose erudite, gentlemanly writing style did not fully prepare Robin for the man he was to meet. Sacks, who grew up in London and received his medical degree from Oxford, was also a motorbike aficionado, a well-traveled hitchhiker, and a sometime weight lifter. He stood about six feet tall and, as Robin would later describe him, “He’s like a combination of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Albert Schweitzer. He also looks like Santa Claus, because he’s got this big beard, and usually there’s food in it, that he’s forgotten is there. And the amazing thing is, as big as he is and as strong as he is, he’s this very gentle and compassionate man, who is brilliant.”

  Sacks allowed Robin to study the personal film footage he had made while treating the encephalitis patients, and Robin found it extremely moving to see these people come out of their catatonic states, even temporarily. As he later said, it was like watching “something that seems apparently dead, but yet the human mind and spirit shines through that. They would be like this”—here he affected the frozen face of one such patient—“and he’d say, ‘Watch,’ and all of a sudden they would come back, and you could see they were there. And then they would go out again.… He said he was only going on that faith, that they were there.”

  Sacks also brought Robin with him on his rounds at Bronx State Hospital, where he cared for geriatric patients. Though Sacks had previously helped Dustin Hoffman prepare for his role as an autistic savant in Rain Man, he saw Robin as a unique
case study unto himself, unlike anyone he’d encountered in the realms of medicine or art. After one hospital visit where he let Robin meet with a group of disturbed patients, Sacks observed afterward, “He had absorbed all the different voices and conversations and held them in his mind with total recall, and now he was reproducing them, or, almost, being possessed by them.” Robin, he said, had an “instant power of apprehension and playback, a power for which ‘mimicry’ is too feeble a word (for they were imitations full of sensitivity, humor and creativity).”

  A few weeks later, Sacks was talking with Robin, having bent himself into a pensive pose, when he noticed that Robin was mirroring his stature. “He was not imitating me; he had become me, in a sense,” Sacks said. “It was like suddenly acquiring a younger twin. This disquieted both of us a bit, and we decided that there needed to be some space between us so that he could create a character of his own—based on me, perhaps, but with a life and personality of its own.”

  Sacks could not help but talk about Robin in neurological and somewhat esoteric terms. “Robin has an almost instant access to parts of the mind—dreamlike parts, with phantasmagoric associations—that most of us don’t,” he said. He compared Robin to Theodore Hook, a nineteenth-century British writer and artist whose talents included the ability to improvise entire operas in which he would sing all the roles. “For Hook, as for Robin, the demand never let up,” Sacks said. “But Hook never had a chance for quiet inwardness—he drank heavily, and he died in his fifties. Robin’s brilliance, however, is considerably controlled. He’s not in its grip.”

  Over the five-month shoot, which stretched into the winter of 1990, Robin learned not to be intimidated by the intensity of De Niro, who he said with a single gaze could “clear an eye-line all the way to Tasmania.” When De Niro recoiled in revulsion at a scene that called for an insect to crawl across his table, Robin settled his costar’s nerves by wrapping pipe cleaners around his own ears and pretending to be a cockroach. Their collaboration remained harmonious even when, while shooting a scene where Dr. Sayer had to restrain Leonard during a seizure, Robin’s elbow slipped and caught De Niro in the face, breaking his nose. “My elbow went BAM!” Robin explained, “and it made a noise like a chicken bone breaking. And all of a sudden the entire crew went, ‘I gotta go now.’” De Niro, unbothered, said the accident corrected a similar injury he’d sustained on Raging Bull. “The thing is, my nose was broken once before, and he knocked it back in the other direction—straightened it out. It looks better than it did before.”

  Marshall, too, found her own way of relating to Robin and reining him in, having concluded that one of her most important duties was “to keep Robin from being funny.” As she observed, “Robin could make Bob laugh so hard his face got all red, and Bob was supposed to be, you know, sick.” She developed a shorthand signal on set, to indicate to Robin when his ad-libbing was getting too shticky: she would curl her hand into a fist and hold it against her crotch. “It meant ‘More balls,’” Marshall explained.

  Shooting wrapped in February and the film would not be released for several months. In the meantime, Robin remained in close contact with Sacks, who wrote to say how much he appreciated the actor’s semi-portrayal of him: “You have created a quite new, wholly credible, and very moving figure,” Sacks said in one letter, “and I think you made a perfect twosome with Bob, an odd couple, an improbable coupling, which becomes completely right.”

  In another letter, Sacks rhapsodized about the magic of filmmaking, which he had never seen in quite such vivid detail before, writing to Robin:

  you—as actors, as dramatists—are also making worlds; and though these are ‘illusions’, they are also full of truth. I have never known any actors before; nor have I been much of a theater- or film-goer; but I think these experiences have changed me … (or will).

  Just before the conclusion of the Awakenings shoot, Robin learned that his performance in Dead Poets Society had earned him another Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, the second of his career. He would again be facing formidable competition in his category, up against Tom Cruise (Born on the Fourth of July), Morgan Freeman (Driving Miss Daisy), Kenneth Branagh (Henry V), and Daniel Day-Lewis (My Left Foot), but the fact that he had been recognized once more was itself a significant achievement to him—a sign that the first nomination had not been a fluke, that he was here to stay. When he learned of the honor, he sounded his own barbaric yawp over the roofs of New York, stepping outside to shout a satisfied “Yes!”

  Dead Poets Society had been nominated for four Oscars in total, including one for Schulman’s screenplay, one for Weir’s directing, and one for Best Picture. A large contingent from the Dead Poets team was dispatched to the Academy Awards ceremony on March 26, including Robin and Marsha, who brought Robin’s mother, Laurie, and Steven Haft, the film’s producer, and his wife, Lisa Birnbach. It was also the first Oscars show to be hosted by Billy Crystal, who was riding high on the success of When Harry Met Sally…, and his presence lent an intimate, family feeling to the festivities—one that was further enhanced by the presence of Zelda, who was then almost eight months old, and Haft and Birnbach’s baby daughter, Maisie, who was born just twelve days earlier.

  The extended clan started its morning at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, then moved to the Omni Los Angeles Hotel in the afternoon to be near the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion prior to the start of the ceremony. “The whole idea,” Birnbach said, “was that we were going to leave the Bel-Air in the morning, have some huge suite and spend the day there, with my twelve-day-old, with Zelda, with baby nurses, with parents, with hairdressers, with makeup artists, with stylists, with Billy and Janice Crystal and Laurie Williams. It was a pinch-me day.”

  While the babies were getting their last feedings of the day and the adults were preparing to head out, Laurie was enjoying a final touch-up. “She was not scared of being theatrical,” Birnbach said of Robin’s mother, an avid runner and tennis player who, a few months earlier, had been featured in Silver Foxes II, an exercise video for people over sixty, hosted by the parents of Hollywood celebrities. “She wore hats, she wore turbans, she wore a lot of makeup,” Birnbach said. “She had her hair done and her face done. And then, as she put a kind of turban-snood thing over her gray hair, her last words, before we left to go the Dorothy Chandler were, ‘Let’s be Cuban!’ It was like something Lana Turner would say. I thought that was so charming and so her.”

  The evening showed some early promise for Dead Poets Society, when Schulman won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, prevailing over the likes of Nora Ephron (When Harry Met Sally…), Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing), Steven Soderbergh (sex, lies and videotape), and Woody Allen (Crimes and Misdemeanors). “Every writer should have the kind of support that I had during the making of this movie,” Schulman said in his acceptance speech, going on to thank Robin by name. But that was the only award Dead Poets Society would win that night: to the surprise of many, the Best Actor trophy went to Daniel Day-Lewis, a dark horse, for playing Christy Brown, a writer and artist with cerebral palsy, in My Left Foot. On the television broadcast, Robin was placed in the center of the screen as the nominees were announced for the final time; he could be seen to flinch, ever so slightly, when Day-Lewis’s name was called, then broke into fervent applause for his triumphant rival.

  Following the ceremony, Robin, Marsha, Haft, and Birnbach joined Schulman and his wife, Miriam, at the annual after-party at Spago, hosted by the talent agent Swifty Lazar. The exclusive soiree was open to guests who had won Oscars, making Schulman the A-lister of the entourage and Robin merely a hanger-on. Then, once inside the restaurant, the Dead Poets team was seated with Roger Ebert, who had lambasted the film. “He passionately hated it,” Birnbach said. “He hated it so much that he would remind viewers how much he hated it when he was reviewing other movies. Like, ‘This one’s good—unlike that piece of shit, Dead Poets Society.’ And then we’re seated with him.” Marsha spent much of the evening running
interference to prevent the critic from talking to her husband. “She was a very protective wife,” Birnbach said.

  Marsha, Robin said, was teaching him to separate his life from his work, “like church and state. Marsha makes me happy—she’s an amazing woman, a gentle, great soul, with a deep intelligence. Look how she’s helped my career. Now I have too much work and she’s helping me learn to say ‘No’—the most provocative word in Hollywood.”

  Those lessons did not arrive in time for Cadillac Man, which opened on May 18 to dismal reviews and petered out at the box office. Worse, some critics treated Robin’s celebrated performances in Good Morning, Vietnam and Dead Poets Society as if they somehow stood outside his body of work; well executed as they were, they did not really represent who he was at his core. As the Detroit Free Press wrote in its dismissal of the film, “Robin Williams has a secret dream. He wants to be an actor. He wants to win an Oscar. He wants to not be Robin Williams.” The cuttingly perceptive critique went on to say:

  It must goad him to be in his current Catch-22 situation. Playing intensive or modulated versions of himself in Good Morning, Vietnam and Dead Poets Society won him two Best Actor nominations. But they didn’t lead to Oscars because the Academy won’t give them to actors who are playing themselves.

  Williams is trapped by his own marvelousness. When people go to see his movies, they want to see Williams as Williams. They don’t want to see him slipping three-fourths of the way under the skin of some other character.

  A few months earlier, Robin and Marsha had purchased a house in San Francisco that they meant to be their new family sanctuary and base of operations, and Marsha and Zelda had already started living in a garden apartment in the city that spring as they waited for work on the house to be completed. But Robin had yet to resume his full-time residence in the Bay Area; he still had one more movie to make in New York.