Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  By the time filming began in the spring of 1993, Robin had all the usual apparatus in place needed to run a prosperous film-acting career. To replace Marsha as his full-time assistant, he had hired Rebecca Erwin Spencer, a friend and fellow comedy aspirant at the Holy City Zoo, which she had managed during the 1980s. He had three prominent agents at CAA, Michael Marcus, Michael Menchel, and Michael Ovitz, known collectively as “the Mikes”; and he had his longtime team of Rollins Joffe managers, simply nicknamed “the boys,” whose configuration had changed considerably since they started representing him in the 1970s. Jack Rollins, the cofounder of the company, had sold his stake to its junior associates; now the firm and its clients were the responsibility of Buddy Morra, Larry Brezner, David Steinberg, and a new partner, Stephen Tenenbaum, who had joined the group at the start of 1993. As independent producers, Morra, Brezner, Steinberg & Tenenbaum (often abbreviated MBST) had a first-look deal with 20th Century Fox and offices on the studio lot, where the company developed its own slate of film and television projects.

  Robin and Marsha had their own production company now, too. The couple hired Cyndi McHale, the wife of Robin’s lawyer Gerald Margolis, to be Marsha’s assistant and run this new company, which they called Blue Wolf. As to why they chose that name, all the knowledgeable sources were somewhat cryptic on the subject. “Use your imagination,” McHale said. “And remember Robin’s sense of humor, which was rather dirty.” At the time of the company’s founding, Marsha said simply, “It’s him, because he’s the blue wolf.” “I’m hairy,” Robin explained. “Furry,” Marsha added.

  The most basic goal of Blue Wolf was to harness Robin and Marsha’s voracious cultural appetites and allow them “to pursue things that were of interest to them, as opposed to just the studio blockbusters,” McHale said. As the couple saw it, they were formalizing a relationship that had existed as far back as Good Morning, Vietnam, where Marsha read the scripts Robin was considering and offered her opinions on them, though he was of course free to choose or pass on what he wanted. “She has the patience to discuss a problem for hours and hours,” Robin said. “I have to be busy preparing for my part. Anyway, I tend to be direct. I’ll just say, ‘That sucks!’”

  The arrangement gave Marsha a further degree of oversight to protect Robin, largely from himself. Sometimes his intense desire to work led to bad choices; if he couldn’t get started on a project right away, or knew deep down that he would have to let a good script go, he could drive himself to unhealthy fixations. “He can sometimes obsess over something he would have liked to have done but couldn’t because he had a conflict,” she said. “This way, if we have control and I know a project was developed for Robin, I don’t have any secret agendas for him—and frankly, I’m probably the only person in his life who is just for him. It doesn’t have anything to do with any of the other things that can get in the way. I can say, ‘We’ll wait a year and a half.’”

  As Robin explained, “Sometimes I have this kind of sentimental side that will go for—‘Oh, it’s about a puppy’ or ‘Ahhh, the nice lady died, and the kids…’ and she’d look at it and go, ‘No, it doesn’t work.’ That’s why I need her opinion.”

  “You don’t need to be a latter-day Christ figure,” she told him.

  Their first official collaboration as a husband-and-wife producing team began with Alias Madame Doubtfire, the 1988 children’s novel by Anne Fine. The book tells the story of Daniel Hillard, a divorcé who, by inventing the title persona, is able to slip under the watchful eye of his ex-wife—though not past his observant children, who agree to keep his secret for him. As a father, Daniel is fiercely loyal to his kids and pleads his case to them that he has just as much right to them as their mother does.

  “You’re not just her children, you know,” he tells them:

  You’re mine, too. She has no right to treat us this way. I was an adequate father.… No, I’d go further than that. I was a very good father. I made sure she remembered her vitamin tablets when she was pregnant. I fed her good, wholesome food and made her stop smoking. I did all the heavy shopping, and cheered her up, and brought her endless cups of tea. And whenever she lost her nerve and said that the last thing in the world she wanted was a baby, I promised to take you to the nearest orphanage the moment you were born, and leave you on the doorstep in a box. What man could do more?

  The film rights to Fine’s novel had been acquired by the producers Matthew Rushton and Frank Levy, who brought it to Elizabeth Gabler, then an executive at United Artists; when Gabler left that studio to work at Fox, she brought the property with her. It was at Fox that Marsha first learned about the project, in a conversation with Robin’s managers; she liked the novel but not an early draft of the screenplay, which she felt was too broad. Fox offered her a producing role, and she supervised the rewriting process, sifting through revisions of the script in the predawn hours when she rose with Cody in the earliest months of her son’s life. When Christopher Columbus, the screenwriter of Gremlins and The Goonies and director of the Home Alone franchise, became available to direct the movie, Robin and Marsha were told they had a green light.

  The appeal of Mrs. Doubtfire was simple to Marsha, residing almost entirely in the premise of Robin having to portray a believable female character. “I liked the idea that a man would have to play a woman and do it well enough to pass,” she said. “I looked at things, at that point, more in terms of the range that it would require of Robin as an actor, and I figured that we could make the rest work around that. I was just purely interested in the idea of Robin playing this woman, more than anything.”

  For Robin, the joy of the role was getting to play “someone totally unlike myself,” he said. “It isn’t just drag. It’s the fact that it was like, to be, to have this character that really had a life of her own. No longer does it look anything like myself, and you’re free to be this woman, and create her and to make her as funny as you can, but yet still be in character.” Yes, there were certain unfamiliar boundaries that came with “this sweet, blue-mouthed old woman,” Robin said. “And sometimes I would cross over them. But most of the time I could stay within her, who she was.”

  Columbus said that what he and Robin both connected to in the material was the guilt they felt at having to be away from their families in order to do their jobs. “In our hearts, we’d love to be Robin’s character in the movie—to be the ultimate father twelve hours a day, to stay home and play with the kids,” the director said.

  But at the time he signed on to make the film, Columbus still had misgivings about the script, which he felt lacked humor and heart, and especially about its conclusion. “The biggest problem was Daniel Hillard and Miranda got back together at the end of the picture,” he said.

  Marsha agreed that an ending in which Daniel and Miranda patched up their marriage would make Mrs. Doubtfire “a Cinderella kind of story” and would “take it away from what we feel is the reality in the world, and in the country, in terms of divorcing families and what ultimately happens.”

  Their vision of the film, which would end with the characters on good terms but nonetheless accepting that their marriage was over, was one that Robin and Marsha had to fight for. “Everybody—our managers, our agents, people at the studio—said that the audience would want Daniel and Miranda to get back together or, at least, to leave their situation up in the air,” Marsha said. More pointedly, she added, “When two people are harmful and wrong for each other, they do not belong together.”

  Robin had addressed some of these issues in therapy when his marriage to Valerie was unraveling, and he felt especially strongly that it would ring false to reunite the film’s parents. “That’s the one fantasy most psychiatrists will tell you is perpetuated by children of divorce who are in therapy—and it’s the one thing that professionals don’t want to perpetuate,” he said. “They’ll ask kids, ‘Ever have a memory of your mom and dad together?’ The kids say no, but it’s the grand concept. ‘They’re together.’ Sold to yo
u by Norman Rockwell. The family, at the table … even though they’re all armed.”

  Mrs. Doubtfire, he argued, should be “about real family values. After a divorce, how many fathers just give up? The tendency is to say, ‘I love my son,’ and then pull away. If you’re lucky, the father becomes an uncle. But the weird thing is, he needs his kids as much as they need him.”

  Over the course of making the movie, which spanned the late winter, spring, and early summer of 1993, Robin spent forty-one shooting days in the camouflage of Euphegenia Doubtfire, a sweet but no-nonsense widow with a Scottish lilt in her voice and a recognizable gleam in her blue eyes. On these occasions, Robin got two entries on the call sheets: the first (1) for Daniel Hillard and the second (1A) for Mrs. Doubtfire.

  Transforming Robin’s face into hers—a mask made from eight overlapping pieces of foam-latex appliances created by the makeup effects artist Greg Cannom and decorated with multiple layers of pink- and flesh-colored paint and makeup—took about four hours. (As production continued and the artists became more practiced at it, the process was shortened to about three hours.) More makeup was then applied to Robin’s hands and he was zipped into a body suit made of “spandex and beans,” as he described it, that made him feel “like a walking bean bag chair.”

  In the earliest on-camera makeup test of the character, on March 8, Robin is seen playing with his pantyhose and garter even before the scene starts, scratching at his leg and the strange garments he’s been asked to wear, then looking at the camera as if he’s been caught in the act. He is not yet wearing the oversize eyeglasses that would become part of Mrs. Doubtfire’s look, and her face appears bloated and severe. Robin starts to speak in an accent that is softer and more authentic (that is, less cartoonish) than he would ultimately use: “Helloooo,” he declares. “Nice to meet you. I’m Euphegenia Doubtfire and I’m very—excuse me—” at which point his dentures fall out of his mouth.

  Robin improvised short scenes with the actors playing his children and with Sally Field, the Academy Award–winning actress who played Daniel’s estranged wife, Miranda. He also claimed to have taken the character out for a test drive in a San Francisco sex shop. “I tried to buy a double-headed dildo,” Robin said. “I was going, ‘That one, right there, the big one. Do you have anything without veins?’ … Finally the guy realized it was me, and went, ‘Get out of here, Robin, you asshole!’”

  As Robin later explained, “I started doing a voice that sounded like Margaret Thatcher, and I realized that would scare the shit out of a kid. ‘Go to bed or mommy’s going to fire a cruise missile.’” Drawing on recent and immediate experiences, he began to borrow vocal traits from Marit Allen, his soft-spoken costume designer on Mrs. Doubtfire, and Bill Forsyth, the Scottish filmmaker who directed him in Being Human, to arrive at the character’s familiar tone.

  This was all the preparation Robin needed to fashion an alter ego that could fool even Marsha, who sensed how completely invested he was in the character. “He’s instilled with the spirit of a sixty-five-year-old woman, that’s all I can say,” she explained. “He no longer becomes the person I know. He becomes this woman. I really feel like I’m not talking to him anymore, even when he uses his own voice.” The illusion, however, did not pass muster with Robin’s youngest child: as the journalist Lillian Ross wrote of one of her visits to the Mrs. Doubtfire set: “With the mysteriously accurate perception of infants, one-and-a-half-year-old Cody Williams would respond to Mrs. Doubtfire’s accent and greet his father with a loud ‘Da-da’ of recognition.”

  Naturally, Robin made ample use of his freedom to ad-lib on the film, both as Mrs. Doubtfire and as Daniel Hillard. He tried more than a dozen different takes of a scene where Daniel, in trying to clear a path for Mrs. Doubtfire to be hired, calls Miranda while pretending to be a series of increasingly unacceptable candidates for the nanny position (“I was in a band called Bloodlust, and after that I worked for a tattoo artist on Market Street”; “I used to work for a pharmaceutical company. If your kids have trouble sleeping, I’ve got things to help them”; “I was an embalmer for a while, and after that I was a lady wrestler”). He also tried a few different punch lines for a scene where, in his ignorance of female anatomy, he accidentally sets fire to Mrs. Doubtfire’s padded chest while leaning over a stove: “I burnt my funbags.” “I should change my name to Mrs. Catchfire.” Then, finally, the line that stuck: “My first day as a woman and I’m getting hot flashes.”

  Robin reworked the script in places, making its language more natural for his voice and its themes more reflective of his feelings. Near the end of the film, Miranda confronts Daniel in court after his deception as Mrs. Doubtfire has been exposed, arguing that he should now forfeit even his once-a-week visitation rights. As a portion of Daniel’s response reads in the script,

  I wish I could tell you I was sorry for my behavior. I really do. But they’re my kids.

  Robin made an annotation to delete the lines that immediately followed:

  I mean. I was never an obsessive type about anything, you know? But then all of a sudden there’s this child. And it’s like somebody tears out your heart, and puts it in a bassinet.

  Then, in his own handwriting, he jotted a few fragmentary ideas, adding, “I plead insanity with an explanation,” that his children were an “addiction” on which “I was hooked the moment they were born” and that he was “crazy about them from the day they were born.”

  His speech continued:

  I was the one who changed their diapers, untangled their mobiles, iced their birthday cakes. I was the Mommy in the “Mommy and Me’s.” I was the one who sat through those tedious, gossip-infested neighborhood playgroups. I took them to the dentist. Held them down when they got stitches.

  Robin cut the word damned from the next line, “I was the damned tooth fairy,” and wrote a few possible alternate phrases for himself, contending that he “stayed up with them all night when they had the flu” and “I would have breastfed them but they would have gotten hair balls.”

  In the script, this portion of the scene called for Daniel to say, in a “heartfelt” tone, “I beg of you. Please. Don’t take them away from me.” To which Robin added: “They need me as much as I need them.”

  Robin became a kind of surrogate father to his on-screen children; he laughed knowingly when Mara Wilson, the precocious five-year-old who played his younger daughter, boasted to him that she knew what sex was; and he wrote a passionate letter on behalf of Lisa Jakub, who played his older daughter, when she was expelled from her high school for spending too much time making the film. “A student of her caliber and talent should be encouraged to go out into the world and learn through her work,” Robin wrote. The school’s principal hung the letter in his office but he did not allow Lisa to return.

  Into even the tiniest cracks of Mrs. Doubtfire, Robin and Marsha slipped their friends and relatives, turning the movie into a personal Rosetta stone, if you knew where to look. Behind the scenes, the film employed Marsha’s niece Jennifer Garces as a production assistant, while on camera, Dan Spencer, the husband of Robin’s assistant, Rebecca, appeared as a chef; Rick Overton, a stand-up comedian and actor pal of Robin’s since the 1980s, played a maître d’; and Robin’s half brother Todd popped up in a bit role as a poolside bartender, getting billed in the closing credits under the pseudonym “Dr. Toad.”

  After each ten-hour day of filming wrapped and another hour was spent removing Robin’s mask pieces and makeup, he and Marsha returned home, where Zelda and Cody awaited them. The living room of their rental house was populated with a menagerie of pet rabbits, guinea pigs, an iguana, and a chameleon, and furnished with miniature upholstered couches for the kids. Its dining-room table was covered in catalogs and construction-paper projects, while the den had been taken over by a giant plastic children’s fort, with some space set aside for a computer console where Robin would play flight simulators and other video games when Zak visited. Robin’s personal study had been turn
ed into a shrine for the collection of toy soldiers and action figures he now gathered as an adult, a plastic and metallic horde of spacemen, samurai, knights, and robots. This grown-ups’ playroom was also where Robin kept his Hook pinball table, a personal gift from Steven Spielberg, on which Marsha held the top score of 175 million points.

  These well-lived-in quarters were only a temporary measure until later that year, when the family could finally move into the home that Robin and Marsha had purchased two years earlier, a twelve-thousand-square-foot stucco house on the San Francisco Bay, with a tiled roof, an exercise room, a media den, and a master bedroom whose panoramic view stretched from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Pacific Ocean. Its ongoing remodeling was a project that Marsha had planned and executed in tandem with her duties on Mrs. Doubtfire, much to Robin’s astonishment. “It’s going to have what she calls ‘all of your stuff and all of my stuff’ right in it,” he said. “It’s a warm, interesting home.”

  One piece of decor that Robin and Marsha could not quite figure out what to do with was a Picasso painting—a self-portrait of the artist in which he depicted himself as a one-eared Vincent van Gogh—that they had reluctantly hung in the living room but whose garishness, they sensed, felt out of place there. The unusual painting, valued at more than $1 million at the time, had been a gift from the Walt Disney company, which was still trying to make amends with Robin after his frustration at how he had been used in the promotion of Aladdin. The studio was also trying to lure him back for other projects, including a direct-to-video Aladdin sequel in which it was hoped he would reprise the role of the Genie, but Robin steadfastly refused these offers. When Joe Roth, the former Fox chairman who had greenlit Toys and Mrs. Doubtfire, approached Robin about a new film that Disney was planning to finance, Robin sent back the script, unread, with a polite note that explained he had a problem with Disney.