Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

Terry Gilliam, the anarchic American member of Monty Python, had known Robin through their mutual friend, Eric Idle, and worked with him for a short time on Gilliam’s 1988 fantasy film, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. The movie, about an eighteenth-century nobleman with a propensity for tall tales, had run into financing problems that could be assuaged if Gilliam secured a recognizable Hollywood name to play the small role of the King of the Moon, a monarch who exists as a floating head on a silver platter. With Idle’s help, Gilliam convinced Robin to do the role (bumping out Michael Palin, another of his Monty Python collaborators).

  “It did rescue the film,” Gilliam said of Robin’s generous performance. “At least half of his dialogue, if not more, was him ad-libbing. It’s a small part, but it’s such an essential part.” It was also a role that Robin accepted over the objection of his managers: “At the time,” Gilliam said, “his managers, I don’t think really were overjoyed to have him jumping out of other, higher-paid jobs to do this.” The compromise they reached was that Robin would not be billed in the movie under his own name; instead, he would go by the pseudonym Ray D. Tutto, a play on the character’s name, which in Italian can be translated as “king of everything.” The awkward bargain, Gilliam said, “was his managers saying, ‘We don’t want you pimping his ass.’ They thought we would sell the film on Robin Williams’s name. That’s what they were frightened of. And we never, ever advertised Robin. Had more people known he was in it, it probably would have done better business when it came out.”

  For his next film, Gilliam had chosen The Fisher King, a script by the writer Richard LaGravenese that blended medieval Arthurian fantasy with the self-regarding reality of America at the dawn of the 1990s—at once a whimsical comedy about unlikely buddies and a heartbreaking tragedy about personal loss. It told the story of Jack Lucas, an outrageous radio shock-jock who is driven from the airwaves after goading one of his listeners into committing a mass shooting; and the awkward but genuine friendship he forms with a street vagabond named Parry, who believes it is his duty to seek the Holy Grail, and who hallucinates that he is being stalked by a sinister red knight. Eventually, Lucas learns that Parry is, in fact, a former teacher named Henry Sagan, who lost his mind and created his identity as Parry after his wife was murdered in the shooting incident that Lucas provoked.

  LaGravenese said he wrote the screenplay as a reflection on the rampant selfishness he saw in the Reagan era. “I thought the ’80s were an awful period in New York, and pretty much the country too,” he said. “By the ’80s, everyone went, ‘Well, fuck it—we’re just going to make money.’ I wanted to write a story about a narcissistic man who, by the end of the story, commits a selfless act.” He also took inspiration from a book by Robert A. Johnson called He: Understanding Masculine Psychology, in which the author, a Jungian analyst, explores the male mind through mythological figures like the Fisher King: a character who has been mortally injured but cannot die, and is told that he will be healed when an innocent fool arrives in his court and asks a specific question.

  As they search for meaning in the world, LaGravenese explained, “Men in our society do that through high-paying jobs or women or cars or power. What they don’t do is go inward, to the archetype of the fool—the part of ourselves that will leap into the unknown, that will take the journey, that will lead to the grail.” With men, especially, LaGravenese said, “We lose that innocent part of ourselves, that just takes risks and leaps forward with faith that we’ll find our way, as opposed to being sick with experience—being paralyzed by knowing too much how things work.”

  It was obvious to Terry Gilliam that Robin should play the role of the wildly imaginative but deeply wounded Parry; it made sense on face value, and was further confirmed by an experience Gilliam had with him during the making of Baron Munchausen. One night, while the two of them were out to dinner, Robin began to slip into one of his spontaneous characters: he spoke in a Southern rustler’s accent and started off calmly, speaking of what a good, loving person he was—“And then there was the time in the bathtub—well, I held a person underwater a little bit—and uh, okay, I mean they died—but it wasn’t my fault.”

  “He was, in fact, a total, psychotic, probably serial killer,” Gilliam said. “But he was the most sweet, charming, voluble character you’d ever want to talk to. I just was in tears, it was so funny.” A couple of days later, he and Robin were again having dinner, this time in a larger group that included Marsha and Eric Idle. At one point, Gilliam asked if he could conjure up the character from the earlier meal: “I said, ‘Rob, can you bring that guy to the table again, the one we did the other night?’” Gilliam recalled. “And he started doing it, but it had changed. He had already edited the jokes but dropped the residual parts of the character.” In one sense, Gilliam said, Robin was just doing what a stand-up comedian does: “He ad-libs a lot of stuff, and then immediately says, ‘That worked, that’s a good joke,’ and files them away. But to me, it wasn’t as wonderful as the complete character he had done with me a couple of nights earlier. It was just jokes, as opposed to a brilliant character realized. Those are two different things.”

  The appeal of The Fisher King was undeniable to Robin: he was eager for another opportunity to collaborate with Gilliam, and he understood clearly why the material resonated with him. “It is about damaged people, trying to find redemption and connection,” Robin said. Playing a character as broken as Parry gave him permission to explore a very dark but valid part of himself as an actor and performer: the side that creates falsehoods—however fanciful—to shroud yourself from harsh truths.

  “If you have to think of something so horrifying, and then if you wanted to totally deny something, how would you create that?” Robin said. “Which I did for a little while. Performing and doing all these things, we never acknowledge anything negative—and if you do, it gets very violent.… It is freeing to create that character because you can really explore where you’ve been, and the aspects of why you would want to deny. Performing for the sake of avoiding.”

  Through his work on Comic Relief and his visits to homeless shelters, Robin had already encountered many people who were very much like Parry and had been badly hurt in their own ways. “Not that there aren’t moments that, for them, are funny,” he said. “But you see that it’s pretty painful stuff. And also people, most—a large majority in major cities are former mental patients. They come someplace with some severe problems.” In the days before shooting started, Robin immersed himself in research, as he often did for his more multifaceted roles; he pored over Bulfinch’s and Malory’s retellings of the King Arthur legends and studied portfolios of candid pictures of homeless people around New York City.

  What the film also needed was an anchoring actor to play Lucas—“the one who was going to keep Robin and me from floating off into the stratosphere,” Gilliam said—and improbably, that person turned out to be Jeff Bridges, the carefree Hollywood scion and actor who was, by this point, a three-time Oscar nominee for The Last Picture Show, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, and Starman. The big, bearish, likable Bridges “was the thing that pulled Robin back,” said Gilliam, “because Robin was so in love with Jeff, and admired him so much for being such a wondrous actor. And that really was the key to it. It allowed Robin not to carry the whole weight of the film on his shoulders.”

  Bridges, who knew Robin only from his wild comedy work, was equally endeared to him but also noted his intensity. “He had maybe a touch of a dire, dour quality to him,” Bridges said. “But he was very gracious and open at the same time. As I got to know him, I saw that this zany quality, the comic end, was really just a tool he had in his kit bag. He was a trained actor who approached the part with that seriousness, and of course he had that wonderful comedic brain in him that he used at will. But he knew what was up.”

  The making of The Fisher King, which began in May 1990 and ran through early August, was sometimes a strangely serendipitous experience. Its filming locations around New York we
re often visited by Radioman, a good-natured vagrant who roamed the city with a boom box, hoping to encounter celebrities and talk his way into cameo roles on their movies. With his pointed nose, narrow eyes, wide smile, and thick beard, Radioman was a dead ringer for Robin, particularly when the actor was in character as Parry, and on several occasions he was allowed to wander the set freely before anyone realized he wasn’t Robin.

  Robin was often beset by crises of confidence during the project. “His problem was—and this would happen once a week, probably—he was feeling his fans were going to be let down, because they weren’t getting the full, comic Robin,” Gilliam said. “And I would have to keep reassuring him that, no, that’s not what we’re doing. This is better. The script is much lighter, in many ways, than the finished film. I just knew it had to be as painful as it is, for the character to become what he had become.”

  Gilliam did not need to push Robin hard, if at all, for the scenes in which Parry breaks down and becomes disconnected from reality. In one sequence that was filmed in a series of overnight shoots, Parry believes he is being chased by the red knight and sprints through the streets of Manhattan, where he finally collapses on a tenement doorstep. “That’s where he pushed and pushed, further and further,” Gilliam said. “I did this shot where his face splits in the bevel of the glass in the door. And then he just—ahhhh!—bent over in this horrible agony. Robin was grasping a bit too closely to his own heart, I thought, but he was going for it.”

  Other portions of that sequence—close-ups on Robin’s face sweating and limbs pumping as he fled—were filmed at a studio where he ran on a treadmill, forcing himself to match or exceed the energy he had put forward in the location shoot. “Again, it was late and he kept running and running,” Gilliam said. “He wanted to do more, and I said, ‘Rob—you’ve peaked. You peaked about five minutes ago. And now you’re just pushing it. It’s not real.’ ‘I know it is real, and there’s more, there’s more here, I know. There’s more pain I can show’—that’s what he was saying to me. And I said, ‘We’ve got to stop, come on. This is bad for you.’”

  By the time he completed this part of the film, Robin was riled up, exhausted, and surging with adrenaline. As he headed into the final portion of the sequence—in which Parry, who believes that he is surrendering himself to the red knight, is stabbed and beaten by a gang of street toughs—Robin came to feel that he was being rushed through the scene and denied the time he needed to focus his performance, and he exploded with uncharacteristic fury.

  “He felt that, in the course of having to shoot a lot of other stuff at night, we had somehow not allowed enough time for the most important moment for the character,” Gilliam said. “The stuntman and the first A.D. couldn’t even approach Robin—the anger coming off him just frightened them. I had to do it. I had to go hold him and say, ‘Robin, come on, trust me. If it doesn’t work now, we will do it again. But I’m not going to steal that from you.’ The muscles inside his body were all so tense.”

  Despite these outbursts, Gilliam felt that Robin should be allowed the freedom and flexibility that he needed for the role. “It touched something inside him,” Gilliam said. “He’s a comic, and all comics want to be Hamlet, come on. You want to show that you’re not just a clown—that inside that clown is a profundity, a deepness, a darkness. You suffer. And I think all comics always end up writing their autobiography, and trying to show how much pain they went through in their life.”

  Bridges had entered into The Fisher King expecting Robin to be an incorrigible cut-up, and he appreciated the tenderness and sensitivity that his costar showed in Lucas’s most sensitive moments. In one such scene, Bridges had to deliver a monologue to Robin’s character as he lies comatose in a hospital bed, recovering from the earlier beating he sustained. “Before I knew him better, I thought, oh, shit, here’s this crazy comic,” Bridges said. “While I’ve got this serious monologue, he’s going to try to crack me up and wink at me. And it turned out to be the antithesis of that. He had no words or anything. He just gave me this quiet, meditative support, the way you imagine someone who you love being in a coma, and you’re talking to them. You imagine that, in some way, you know they can hear you.”

  Not every day of filming on The Fisher King resulted in Robin’s complete physical and emotional depletion. Some days he got to strip off his clothes and run around naked. In early June, the production traveled to the Sheep Meadow in Central Park for a pair of scenes in which Parry goes nude: once by himself, as a lesson to Lucas, urging him to share in the same freedom that he enjoys; and once for the film’s closing shot, in which both he and Bridges go au naturel. Though Robin was somewhat nervous about these scenes—not because of the nudity, per se, but because he was so hairy—he also discovered a certain power in baring it all.

  “He was turned around so his back’s to the camera, so he’s wiggling his ass and there’s the whole skyline of New York there. He’s flashing the entire city!” Gilliam said with a satisfied cackle. “He could be so ecstatic. Richard had written some wonderful stuff, but Robin took the ecstasy to even a higher point. If you’re going to have to go to that dark, like Parry did, it was great that Robin could go in the other direction, to that joyous innocence, to escape Parry’s nightmare.”

  Bridges found these scenes—the first of which was shot late at night, and the latter at daybreak—somewhat hectic: “We got started late and had a lot of work to do in a small amount of time,” he said. “Then there’s this weird guy on a bicycle that was circling our crew and wouldn’t let us get the shot. That was maddening.” But in that frenzy, Bridges said, “Robin came up with some of his great improvs, like rubbing his ass on the grass. ‘You know why dogs do this? Because it feels good!’ And then ‘Let the little guy flap in the breeze,’ shaking his dick in the wind. He had this wonderful freedom, of just letting his hairy body be exposed to all the elements and all the people. He was brave in doing that.”

  And then sometimes, when Robin and Bridges were at their weariest, the universe would open up to them in ways they could never imagine. After working overnight on a scene under a bridge, the two utterly exhausted actors were at last allowed to step away from the cameras at around four a.m. “We were fucking bushed, man,” Bridges said. “It was very hard to smile, and any jokes that were coming out of Robin were dim. I look over and I see a couple of crates under this bridge. And I tap Robin and motion to him, and we sit on these crates. And as soon as our asses hit the crates, a whole bevy of pigeons—there must have been about twenty of ’em up there on the bridge—decide to just unload on us. They shit all over us. And it goes on and on. And then it goes on a little bit more. That was it. And we just looked at each other, and we didn’t smile or laugh. It was like fucking Jack Benny, man. We both looked straight ahead, covered in pigeon shit.

  “It’s a weird comment to make, but the universe just kind of trumped Robin on this,” Bridges said. It was, he added, “the only time that I remember Robin being at a loss for words.”

  13

  FATHER MAN

  Robin and Marsha took their slow dances wherever they could fit them in. And if one had to happen in the middle of a downtown Manhattan photo studio, to the sounds of the blaring funk music that was supposed to be motivating Robin for another Rolling Stone cover shoot, so be it. While a studio crew was immersed in preparations—fiddling with equipment, popping flashes, refreshing the supply of complimentary sushi—husband and wife were a portrait of serenity. They were all they needed in this world. But what Robin wanted more than anything else was time: time to appreciate the fruits of his labor, time to enjoy the home he had back in San Francisco, time to be with Marsha, Zak, and Zelda.

  “You have to pull back and recharge,” Robin told the magazine. “You have to meet people outside the movies—there’s a whole other world. Not everybody is promoting a script. Not everybody is worrying about grosses and points.” When you’re immersed in the entertainment industry, he said, “you’re confronted b
y your career every five minutes.” But when you’re living real life, he said, “you’re confronted by other things—like no heating. The furnace breaks, and I become Father Man, the man who goes down and changes the fuse, and it still fucks up.” Maybe if he could just slow down the pace of his life enough, there might even be time for another baby. Only with this one, some new rules would have to be observed. “Marsha says if we have another child, it’s no more Zs,” he explained. “We’re going to another letter.”

  This was Robin’s chance to get things right, an ambition he yearned to fulfill even more so now that he was being honest with himself about how he’d brought down his first marriage. When he was with Valerie, he said, “I’d go off and run around because I didn’t know what the fuck I wanted. I’d be a schmuck, and she’d respond in kind. And then we’d try to stop and deal with it, and it wouldn’t work. Finally, I had to say, ‘I can’t do this to myself anymore.’”

  “And then,” he said, “I became involved with Marsha.”

  Marsha dismissed the idea that she had somehow been Robin’s savior. Still, she said, “He needed stability. I think most people need one person in their life that they know they can rely upon. I’m Robin’s safety net. He knows I’m strong.”

  Robin, however, was categorical about how she had changed him for the better: “I stopped running around with all this madness,” he said. “I started to go, ‘Wait, I can live a life. I don’t have to live and die in my own sweat.’ I slowly pulled myself up. I started to create and to work—kind of like the phoenix that rises out of its own ass.”

  The only obstacles standing in Robin’s way were his commitments to the work he had already done and to all the new work he had agreed to take on.

  Awakenings opened in limited release on December 22, 1990, and the response was a disappointing contrast to Robin’s experience making the film. The reviews were generally unwelcoming and especially hostile to Robin’s performance. In the Chicago Tribune, Dave Kehr wrote that Awakenings “takes a powerful subject and, by reducing it to a series of insistent emotional climaxes, betrays it almost completely.” Robin, he wrote, was “an immediate problem, pushing himself forward in an ingratiating, showbiz manner that completely undermines the supposed shyness of his character.” Over the span of Good Morning, Vietnam, Dead Poets Society, and now this film, Robin, he said, “has become our contemporary embodiment of the beating heart of humanity, whose appeal rests on his ability to project his own sensitivity, his own compassion—at which point those qualities turn into demagoguery.”