Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  Asked whether he regarded his life or his work as more important to him, Robin answered that he desired “a balance of the two. Time is really this delicate thing. Working your tits off during the week, then find time to come home at night and not be so self-involved. ‘So, enough about me. Now, what do you think about me?’”

  In that same interview, Robin drew a striking comparison between himself and Jerzy Kosinski, the author of Being There, who had committed suicide the previous spring, months after suffering a seizure that he feared might be the harbinger of a debilitating stroke. As Robin explained it, he could almost understand the author’s thought process:

  Jerzy Kosinski killed himself; supposedly, the reason was that he just didn’t want to become a vegetable, he didn’t want to lose his sharpness. There’s that fear—if I felt like I was becoming not just dull but a rock, that I still couldn’t spark, still fire off or talk about things, if I’d start to worry or got too afraid to say something. As long as you still keep taking the chances and you’re not afraid to play Peter Pan.… What if it fails? “I don’t care, I’m having a great fucking time.” If I stop trying, I’d get afraid.

  But Robin would not be allowed to drift so easily into domesticity. In November, a San Francisco Superior Court judge denied a motion by his lawyers to dismiss the long-festering lawsuit brought against him by Michelle Tish Carter, the woman with whom he’d had an affair while he was still married to Valerie. With his legal options dwindling, it was increasingly likely that Robin would have to face a trial the following year. The further progress of the case raised the uncomfortable prospect that Robin might be required to testify in court about the details of his personal life and answer questions about whether he and Carter had discussed the subject of sexually transmitted diseases. And it ensured that the lawsuit would remain in the news as Robin was trying to fortify his reputation as a family-friendly entertainer.

  As the year-end release of Hook approached, the drumbeat of anticipation for the movie unexpectedly gave way to a din of antipathy. A week before the film officially opened on December 11, word began to spread of a dismal screening in Los Angeles for professional critics; it was said that the film was too long, too sentimental, and too burdened by the clichés of self-help psychology. “Chaotic, leaden and only sporadically appealing,” one early review read. “This tale of middle-age male loss, redemption and rejuvenation is one we’ve already seen many times this year.” The assessments published at its opening were no better; the Los Angeles Times described it as a film in which “arrogant spectacle smothers gentle magic” and “its very excessiveness squeezes the life and joy out of far too much of Hook.”

  Still, Hook opened in first place at the box office and remained there for four straight weekends, going on to take in nearly $120 million—a figure that was considered underwhelming in relation to its exorbitant cost and the months of hype that had preceded it. Robin, who was guaranteed a portion of the first $50 million of its gross, would still be paid handsomely.

  Though Spielberg had fitfully tried to knock down reports that he was distancing himself from the film, he wrote a letter to Robin in January 1992, apologizing for his absence from promotional efforts and for having been out of contact for several weeks. The director, who had been so contagiously buoyant the previous summer, now sounded deflated; in the letter, which he addressed to “My faithful, compassionate friend and the true Prince of Pans,” Spielberg confessed, “Right now I’m in my ‘I don’t want to know’ phase.” He said he had been ignoring all reviews, news reports, and business messages, avoiding any TV or magazines, and spending time only with his wife, Kate Capshaw, and their four children.

  This kind of willful evasion, Spielberg wrote, “has good and bad results. For one thing, it makes most of my friends mad at me, because they take my running for shelter very personally. But it’s sometimes what I need to do to survive the experience. It’s how I take care of myself, as perverse or unusual as it might seem.

  “The pressure that was on me for the last 18 months was at times intolerable,” he continued. “It must have been for anyone human.” But no matter what, Spielberg assured Robin, the experience of Hook had made them lifelong friends. “I’ll be out of my bomb shelter very soon,” he wrote. “And whether there is still a subdivision up there or not won’t make any difference. We will live on, raising our kids, being good friends and making our movies.”

  Robin gave a teasing acknowledgment to his Hook collaborators when he won a Golden Globe Award for his performance in The Fisher King later that month. Nearing the end of a discursive acceptance speech, he said, “I’m just thanking everybody now—it’s just like [goes into an Exorcist-like convulsion] spewing out, ‘Dustin! I’d like to thank Steven! No, wrong movie!’” Then, with greater sincerity, he added: “Most of all, I think I would like to thank a woman who is my muse, who is my flame, Marsha, my wife.” On-screen, at that moment, she could be seen mouthing “I love you” back to him. And in February, Robin received the third Oscar nomination of his career, once again in the category of Best Actor, for his performance in The Fisher King.

  The film was up for five Academy Awards in all, including nominations for Richard LaGravenese’s screenplay and the performance of Mercedes Ruehl, who played the love interest for Jeff Bridges’s character. The 1992 Oscars show was one of Billy Crystal’s best, beginning with an homage to Silence of the Lambs in which he was wheeled onstage in a Hannibal Lecter–style face mask, and serving him with an irresistible running gag when his City Slickers costar Jack Palance began doing one-armed push-ups in the middle of his acceptance speech.

  Ruehl was an early winner for Best Supporting Actress, but it was the only trophy The Fisher King would take home. The Silence of the Lambs swept the major awards categories, and Robin lost to its villainous leading man, Anthony Hopkins, despite Terry Gilliam’s prediction that he might actually prevail that year. “I said, ‘You’ve got a good chance this time, Rob,’” Gilliam recalled. “It was a pity, because I do think his performance is so good. Maybe for a lot of people, they just felt it was too much like the real Robin Williams. I don’t know what they think. I’ve never understood the mentality of who votes for what in the awards.”

  In an earlier era, it had taken Robin years to land his debut booking on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. But in the spring of 1992, in a powerful confirmation of Robin’s status as a comic and as an actor, Carson chose him to be one of his final guests before he retired from a thirty-year career in late-night television. On May 21, the last night when any guests were booked on the program, Robin was the first of two celebrity visitors to sit across from him on his fabled couch.

  Carson introduced Robin with a solemnity and seriousness he did not often exhibit on the air, saying, “In this business, there are comedians, there are comics, and once in a while, rarely, somebody rises above and supersedes that and becomes a comic persona unto themselves. I never ceased to be amazed at the versatility and the wonderful work that Robin Williams does.” Robin, who was wearing the platinum blond hair of the character he was playing in a new Barry Levinson movie called Toys, entered with a rocking chair that he offered to Carson as a gag gift, and spent much of his segment making fun of the season’s aspiring presidential candidates, to the host’s delight. Carson responded in kind, joking that Jerry Brown’s problem was that—as opposed to Bill Clinton—he never exhaled.

  Robin let out a long and satisfied laugh, to which Carson said, “You like that?”

  “I love that,” Robin replied.

  “Thank you,” Carson said.

  Robin also spoke publicly about his new son, Cody, for the first time, marveling at the size of the six-month-old child’s testicles. “We’re out of here tomorrow night, what do I care?” an unabashed Carson responded.

  The night’s other guest was Bette Midler, who serenaded Carson with a satirical version of “You Made Me Love You,” and then with an achingly sincere performance of “One for My Baby (and One More
for the Road)” that brought visible tears to the host’s eyes. Robin, who initially had been chiming in with his own jokes while Midler and Carson bantered, gradually went quiet as the segment played on. Marc Shaiman, the composer and songwriter who was Midler’s piano accompanist that night, noticed Robin’s uncharacteristic silence as well. “If you watch the show, he at first is jumping in a bit, here and there, the way he normally would,” Shaiman said. “But he became quickly cognizant of the magical thing that was happening between Bette and Johnny Carson that night. Even Robin—which says a lot—knew to step back. Don’t try to add to this. It’s not something you saw a lot of, but he was sensitive enough to know: don’t be Robin Williams for twenty minutes.” Midler later won an Emmy Award for her appearance on the show.

  That August, Robin and Michelle Tish Carter finally settled their long-standing lawsuits against each other, only a week before the case was to go to trial, with Robin paying an undisclosed amount to his ex-girlfriend. In the short term it was an embarrassing resolution to an awkward situation, the sewing-up of a wound that was entirely self-inflicted, but a recognition, too, that any circumstance where Robin might have to answer invasive questions about his sex life, publicly and under oath, would be far worse in the long run. In the fall, Robin, Marsha, and the children went to Rabat, Morocco, so that he could work on the film Being Human, an assignment that would keep him globetrotting from the North African coast to London to New York and back to San Francisco at a time when he especially sought to escape unwanted attention.

  It was during this time that Disney released Aladdin—in limited release on November 11 and widely on November 25—and Robin’s cartoon performance turned out to be one of his quintessential roles. The medium of animation was perhaps the only one that could keep pace with the quickness of his imagination while enhancing his improvisations; untethered from physical constraints, and free to focus on his words and their delivery, Robin was as loose, as relaxed, and as charming as he’d been in any bodily performance. For once, there was no such thing as overdoing it: every silly voice and stock accent he had in his arsenal, every celebrity impression in his repertoire, was welcome and necessary for the whole proposition to succeed.

  The critics agreed. Janet Maslin of the New York Times praised Robin in particular, along with the animators and composers, for making the Genie

  a visual correlative to the rapid-fire Williams wit, so that kaleidoscopic visions of Groucho Marx, Arnold Schwarzenegger, William F. Buckley Jr., Travis Bickle and dozens of other characters flash frantically across the screen to accompany the star’s speedy delivery. Much of this occurs to the tune of “Friend Like Me,” a cake-walking, show-stopping musical number with the mischievous wit that has been a hallmark of Disney’s animated triumphs.

  The film was an instant smash at the box office, skyrocketing to number one and remaining there for the first several weeks of 1993, and grossing more than $217 million by the end of its initial run.

  The same could not be said for Toys, which came out a month later and proved a disappointing cinematic reunion for Robin and Barry Levinson, his director on Good Morning, Vietnam. Anticipation for the film had been unexpectedly stoked by a brilliant teaser trailer Levinson shot that showed Robin standing in what appears to be a grassy wheat field, speaking straight to the camera and largely undermining any notion of what a movie preview is supposed to accomplish. “I don’t know about you,” Robin tells the audience, “but that last trailer, huh, I’ve seen it. You know, fast cutting, big music [sings an orchestra fanfare]—what about a different kind of trailer?” He imagined aloud what he thought the finished trailer might look like, then did so again in a kind of pidgin Japanese, even mocked Fox’s efforts to market it. (“Studio executives in their great insight said, ‘You’ve got a movie about toys—when’s a good time to bring it out? Rosh Hashanah?’”) Perhaps the only thing he didn’t do was leave viewers with the slightest clue of what the movie was about.

  Moviegoers were left baffled and underwhelmed by what they ultimately saw. Toys told the stylized story of Leslie Zevo, a childlike and gently peculiar man attired like a Magritte painting, who seeks to wrest control of his family’s toy factory from his nefarious uncle (Michael Gambon), a general who wants to use it to build implements of war. It was full of story elements that appealed to Robin on a fundamental level. “He loved video games,” Levinson said. “He loved toy soldiers. It had all those things that would make him want to do the movie. He was much more comfortable at that point in time, because it wasn’t like, ‘This is my last chance,’ which is the way he thought of Good Morning, Vietnam. By then, it was like, ‘Okay, I’m established and I can relax a little bit.’” But the vivid palette of its production design concealed more complicated feelings that viewers largely weren’t prepared for. “To me, it was a black comedy that was bright,” said Levinson. “It seemed so primary colored, and light and sweet. All of that was the facade of it. It’s what was underneath it. So, it just got completely misunderstood at the time.”

  Rolling Stone called Toys “a gimmicky, obvious and pious bore, not to mention overproduced and overlong.” It awarded zero stars to the film and added, “No amount of brilliant production design … can disguise the smug hypocrisy of an antiwar tract that decries the killing games of vid-age children and then offers up a climactic battle between hawk toys and dove toys for their movie delectation.”

  Robin did his share of press to help support Toys, but it still flopped. And he had largely sat out of the promotional rounds for Aladdin, a choice he attributed at the time to his commitment to Toys. However, he later acknowledged that his decision not to help its campaign had stemmed from a growing frustration with Disney. At the time he signed up to play the Genie—a role for which he was paid only scale wages and not his usual multimillion-dollar salary—he believed the studio had agreed not to use his voice in the marketing or merchandising of the film. So it came as a shock when he heard himself talking back in Aladdin commercials and toys.

  “All of a sudden, they release an advertisement—one part was the movie, the second part was where they used the movie to sell stuff,” Robin explained. “Not only did they use my voice, they took a character I did and overdubbed it to sell stuff. That was the one thing I said: ‘I don’t do that.’ That was the one thing where they crossed the line.” Disney countered that it had vetted all of the film’s marketing materials with Robin and Marsha, and that nothing it had done violated the studio’s contractual agreement with him.

  Simply put, Robin said, “I don’t want to sell stuff. It’s the one thing I don’t do. In Mork & Mindy, they did Mork dolls—I didn’t mind the dolls; the image is theirs. But the voice, that’s me; I gave them my self. When it happened, I said, ‘You know I don’t do that.’ And they apologized; they said it was done by other people.”

  What he meant by this was: There was only so much Robin to go around. But, Robin being Robin, he had to make the point in his own particular style. So, he invoked a dubious tale about the silent-age film director Erich von Stroheim and a moment when he was supposedly caught getting a blow job on the set.

  As Robin told the tale, “Suddenly he notices that all the crew members are watching. He looks down and he goes, ‘What are you doing, you nasty girl!’ The Disney thing was like that: ‘I swear I didn’t know what my right hand was doing.’”

  14

  HOT FLASHES

  There seemed to be children everywhere you went in the old house at 2640 Steiner Street, one of the elegant Victorian residences that stood squarely on this slanted San Francisco block. The street and its surroundings were filled with exuberant young extras who had come to take advantage of the mobile petting zoo that had been hired for the opening scene of Mrs. Doubtfire, a new comedy that Robin was shooting here. There were also the three child actors starring in the film with him, who played the offspring of a modern couple—thriving white-collar mom, temporarily down-on-his-luck dad—caught in a tug-of-war as their parents heade
d for divorce. And then there were Robin’s own kids: Zak, now ten years old, who visited on days when his dad had custody of him, alongside Zelda, nearly four, and Cody, one and a half, who, along with Eleanor Columbus, the three-and-a-half-year-old daughter of the film’s director, Chris Columbus, conspired to make the set their playground.

  Mrs. Doubtfire, in which Robin played a struggling, soon-to-be single father who assumes the disguise of a golden-haired female housekeeper so he can spend more time with his children, was perhaps the perfect distillation of his life up to that point. It was the cinematic embodiment of the philosophy he’d learned from his own upbringing, through two marriages, and now his own experiences as a husband and father: family is where you find it; all are welcome and no one ever loses their membership. Beneath the movie’s farcical, cross-dressing premise, Mrs. Doubtfire exemplified how intensely Robin loved his family—his children, especially—and the lengths he would go for them.

  “A man is losing contact with his kids, and he seizes upon an opportunity to see them more,” said Randi Mayem Singer, the film’s lead screenwriter. “It has the universal theme of a parent’s love for their children. There are ugly, mean, nasty divorces. Your marriage may not have worked out, but if you have kids, you have to co-parent them for the rest of their lives. And it’s harmful to them to not do it amicably.”

  More than that, the film solidified the special relationship that Robin and Marsha had as personal and professional partners. Mrs. Doubtfire was a project that Marsha had helped to identify and refine until it was just right for Robin; she worked on it as a producer and was involved in every aspect of its creation, while she also drove Zelda to school and ballet classes and toted Cody to the Marina and the Exploratorium in a canvas papoose. The eventual success of Mrs. Doubtfire demonstrated just how well she knew her husband’s tastes and how moviegoing audiences wanted to see him. And its success was staggering: it became, and remained for many years, his highest-grossing film—no other movie in which he played a leading role would surpass it—and it paid him considerable dividends, both the kind that went toward his standing in Hollywood and those that went straight into his pocket. It was a pinnacle that, once he reached it, he would never see again.