Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  In the meantime, the Picasso presented a vexing problem for Robin, who did not know if he should have accepted it, let alone be displaying it. His friend Eric Idle semi-jokingly suggested he should destroy it in a public display. “If you’re pissed off, go on TV, say it, and torch the Picasso—everybody’s wanted to see that,” Idle said. “He said, ‘No I’ll have it copied and burn the copy.’” (When Robin later aired some of his grievances with Disney in a cover story in New York magazine that November, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the studio’s motion picture chief, wrote him a contrite letter saying, “Thank you for not ‘whacking’ me. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your generosity in this difficult + uncomfortable set of circumstances.”)

  Though Robin had always intended to come back to San Francisco, this was the first significant stretch of time in several years that he had been able to spend in the city, and he found that it suited him. “Having grown up here, in San Francisco, it was very much a quiet place for him,” Zak later said. “He appreciated the privacy that it afforded him, and everyone knew to give him his space. He could spend time with his family and not be harassed. He could run, go on long bike rides, do things he loved.” Even if they could not be together every day, Zak felt Robin’s presence in his life in a way that he had not before. “The childhood that he afforded me was a really great one,” Zak said. “He always made time—not just in terms of providing material things, the clothes on my back—but as a dad he was very present. He always spent time and energy. I always knew that. I felt connected to him.”

  But not everyone felt included in this arrangement. Valerie, who shared custody of Zak with Robin, did not believe that she was afforded the status of a full-fledged family member, an estrangement that she said was created by Marsha’s desire to keep Robin and the children to herself. “Marsha just did not want me around, period,” she said. “Just didn’t want me around. And created a schism between me and my son and created a schism between Robin and me.”

  “She took my son, and wanted my son part of her family,” Valerie said. “And very much, it was the three of them.” Robin, she said, was “her husband.”

  Valerie still had her own time with Zak, but when he was with Robin and Marsha, she felt she was not invited to participate. Even on those occasions when she went to Robin and Marsha’s home to pick up Zak, Valerie said, “I wasn’t allowed in the house. I just did what I was told. I had another family. And poor Zak. It just wasn’t pleasant. I don’t feel like spewing poison. I just knew that if I were to just disappear, it would have been easier for everybody. So I disappeared. And for a very long time.”

  Mrs. Doubtfire was released on November 24, 1993, the day before Thanksgiving, and its reviews were consistent for the now-established genre known as the Robin Williams comedy. The Detroit Free Press was among the publications that gave the movie an outright rave, writing that where Robin’s early movies gave him either “too free a rein with his improvisations, letting his manic energy rocket him into dizzy and exhausting orbit, or corseted him in nobility or pathos, leeching out his subversive wit,” Mrs. Doubtfire “makes neither mistake.” The paper said the film “indulges his talent for mimicry” while requiring him to perform “an impression that keeps a lid on his antics—that of a prim but bighearted old maid, Mary Poppins on estrogen replacement therapy.… The tension between Williams’ natural exuberance and the constraints of his drag creation gives Mrs. Doubtfire an edgy, tipsy charge.”

  But the broader range of responses more closely reflected those of the New York Times, which praised Robin’s performance but was left cold by the movie. “If this film creates as good a showcase for the Williams zaniness as anything short of Aladdin, it also spends too much time making nice. And not enough time making sense,” wrote Janet Maslin. Roger Ebert said that Mrs. Doubtfire could not stand up to films like Tootsie, the 1982 comedy that starred Dustin Hoffman as an underemployed actor who cross-dresses to land a role on a TV soap opera. Tootsie, he wrote in a two-and-a-half-star review, was “more believable, more intelligent and funnier. Tootsie grew out of real wit and insight; Mrs. Doubtfire has the values and depth of a sitcom. Hoffman as an actor was able to successfully play a woman. Williams, who is also a good actor, seems more to be playing himself playing a woman.”

  These nuances did not discourage audiences from turning out to see Mrs. Doubtfire in the largest numbers that any of Robin’s films had enjoyed. The film opened at number one and remained in first or second place for the next ten weeks, taking in $100 million even before the year was over, $200 million by the end of February 1994, and nearly $220 million by the end of its initial run.

  As producers of the movie, Robin and Marsha were entitled to a portion of the royalties it earned, and these came quickly and abundantly. That May, Peter Chernin, the chairman of 20th Century Fox, wrote to thank them for the film’s accomplishments and for the enjoyable working experience: “I have no doubt that the movie would not have been as good, would not have gone so smoothly and would not have been as much fun without your involvement as producers.” Enclosed with the letter was a check for $2 million, profits that Chernin said might not be payable for another year, if not several years, but which he wanted the couple to have immediately. “It’s too quiet around here without both of you,” he said. “Let’s find something to get you back here soon.”

  Within a few weeks, Chernin wrote to Robin again. “In recent memory,” he said, “I can think of no actor who was so singularly responsible for the success of his or her film as you were.” He added, “You are completely deserving of these advances and we couldn’t be happier sending them to you.” This time the enclosed check was for $8 million.

  The runaway box-office returns of Mrs. Doubtfire had shown the studios that Robin was a hot commodity again, and Fox was hardly the only one competing for his services. Walt Disney had unwisely gone ahead with its home-video Aladdin sequel, in which he had been replaced as the voice of the Genie by the Simpsons actor Dan Castellaneta; sales were strong but reviews were dismal, and audiences just did not accept any other performer as the character. But a reconciliation between Robin and Disney became possible that fall, when Jeffrey Katzenberg left the company and was replaced at its motion-picture division by Joe Roth, who had been Robin’s benefactor at Fox. Among his first official acts at Disney, Roth apologized to Robin, publicly and unequivocally, for how the company had treated him in the Aladdin dispute. “Robin complained that we took advantage of his performance as the Genie in the film, exploiting him to promote some other businesses inside the company,” Roth said. “We had a specific understanding with Robin that we wouldn’t do that. [Nevertheless] we did that. We apologize for it.”

  Robin accepted Roth’s apology, calling it “a decent thing.” “It’s like a country re-establishing diplomatic relations,” Robin said. “It’s a good feeling because I’ve done good things there. I wasn’t trying to shake anybody down.” He and Disney promptly set about discussing new projects for him, including a direct-to-video Aladdin sequel in which he would return to the role of the Genie.

  Not all of Robin’s movies from this period were received as warmly as Mrs. Doubtfire. Two years earlier, he had filmed Being Human, a fantasy drama in which he played a man—a soul, really—who is reincarnated in five different eras of history, from the rudimentary existence of a caveman to the overdetermined life of a divorcé in modern-day New York, while at each stage trying to reunite with his wife and children from that time. It was an ambitious effort from the film’s Scottish writer-director, Bill Forsyth, who was better known for small-scale, independent comedy-dramas (Gregory’s Girl, Local Hero) and had never made a studio motion picture before. In this case, Warner Bros., which financed the movie, quickly asserted itself when Forsyth’s overlong rough cut received poor responses at test screenings, and ordered him to shorten the film, add voice-over narration, and change its ending.

  These alterations wreaked havoc on the film, and the reviews were catastrophic: Enterta
inment Weekly gave it a grade of F, asking, “Is there anything in movies more precious—and less convincing—than Robin Williams, with his little downturned mouth, trying to act mild and sheepish and vaguely unhappy?” In its first weekend of release, in May 1994, the film grossed only $764,000 and crashed in thirteenth place. The biggest hit of Robin’s career had just been followed by his biggest bomb.

  Still, the disastrous results of Being Human were largely papered over by the mammoth success of Mrs. Doubtfire, and Robin had long since moved on to other, more unexpected, and more satisfying opportunities. Earlier that year, he appeared in his first proper television role in more than a decade, this time in a dramatic series. He had been recruited to appear on the NBC crime drama Homicide: Life on the Street by Barry Levinson, who served as one of its executive producers. The show, a police procedural set in crime-ridden Baltimore, had struggled to find an audience in its first year and NBC had renewed it for a second season of only four episodes, after which the network would decide whether to move ahead with further installments; it was hoped that Robin’s star power would increase the likelihood of a third-season renewal.

  The show’s second-season premiere, which aired on January 6, 1995, and was titled “Bop Gun,” focused on a family of four visiting the city, who are accosted by a stickup crew who shoots the mother dead at point-blank range. Robin was cast as the family’s father, who variously spends the episode grieving the death of his wife, tending to his two young children, suffering the bureaucratic indignities that befall the survivor of such a crime, and coping with his feelings of cowardice after having been unable to prevent his wife’s murder.

  David Simon, the Baltimore Sun crime reporter from whose book the series was adapted, and who wrote the “Bop Gun” episode with David Mills, happened to be visiting the set when Robin was filming some of his scenes at the city morgue. From their first glancing interaction, Simon said that Robin was hardly the person that his work suggested: “The crazed, manic stand-up routines, the machine-gun witticisms and impersonations—all of it was on hold as he tried to live in the shattered soul of a husband and father who had just lost his wife to sudden, implacable violence.” And yet, Simon observed, “He was, I found, the most in-character actor on that film set.”

  Simon gave Robin an impromptu tour of an unsettling exhibit at the morgue called the Nutshell Studies, a collection of crime-scene dioramas built on the miniature scale of dollhouses. Simon watched as Robin analyzed each of the displays and tried to deduce the ghastly crimes they depicted. “He guessed at a seemingly accidental death that was in fact a murder, then guessed again at a kitchen suicide by a young girl that seemed at first glance to be a stabbing,” Simon said. “I could offer solutions to most of the displays only because I’d learned the answers, years before. The actor took it all in, clicking the buttons to light each diorama and then staring at all of the morbid goings-on until the P.A. told him he was needed back on set.”

  Robin, as always, passed time between takes entertaining the cast and crew members with brief, impromptu stand-up routines: he “readied himself to shoot another painful scene of grief and guilt, and then, in manic desperation, reached out for as much human comedy as ten minutes will allow,” Simon wrote.

  Before Simon left the set, he caught sight of Robin in a hallway, “using the few remaining minutes before filming to face the wall and reacquaint himself with whatever horror he was trying to channel. He was sweating, too, as if it had taken all he had to rise to that warm summit and provoke such laughter. To my great surprise, his face was that of an unhappy man, and I retreated, saddened and surprised by the thought.”

  Robin’s other appearances that year included small roles in Nine Months, a romantic comedy by his Mrs. Doubtfire director Chris Columbus, in which Robin portrayed an antsy Russian obstetrician; and in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, which cast him as the extravagant patron to a trio of drag queens. But perhaps the most significant part Robin would play was one that took place beyond the view of any cameras.

  Over the Memorial Day holiday in 1995, his friend Christopher Reeve traveled to Culpeper, Virginia, to ride his horse, Eastern Express, in a combined training event. He was well practiced at equestrian sports for nearly a decade, ever since he learned to ride a horse for a 1985 TV-film adaptation of Anna Karenina, and he had carefully mapped out his route for the cross-country course that awaited him. That Saturday afternoon, Reeve was riding Eastern Express during a warm-up when the horse approached a fence and prepared to jump it, then stopped without warning. Reeve was sent tumbling off the horse and landed on his head, breaking the first and second vertebrae in his neck. The accident left him paralyzed in all four limbs and unable to breathe without the help of a respirator.

  As Reeve recovered in the intensive care unit of the University of Virginia Medical Center and awaited a highly risky operation to reattach his skull to the top of his spine, he was surrounded by his family—his wife, Dana, sons Will and Matthew, and daughter Alexandra—as well as extended family members and a handful of close friends. One visitor, in particular, stuck out in his mind from this harrowing period. As Reeve recounted:

  At an especially bleak moment, the door flew open and in hurried a squat fellow with a blue scrub hat and a yellow surgical gown and glasses, speaking in a Russian accent. He announced that he was my proctologist, and that he had to examine me immediately. My first reaction was that either I was on way too many drugs or I was in fact brain damaged. But it was Robin Williams. He and his wife, Marsha, had materialized from who knows where. And for the first time since the accident, I laughed. My old friend had helped me know that somehow I was going to be okay.

  Robin described his private routine for Reeve slightly differently. Slipping into his Russian accent, he recalled, “I said, ‘If you don’t mind, I’m going to have to put on a rubber glove and examine your internal organ.’ And I said, ‘Oh, look at the size of this baby.’”

  Regardless, the performance had achieved its desired effect: to remind Reeve that no matter how dire his circumstances may have seemed, he still had people in his life worth holding on to and a capacity to experience joy that was undiminished. “I saw he started to laugh because his eyes lit up and he knew it was me,” Robin said. “He said that was one of the things that made him realize he wanted to try and stick around. That, his wife, his children and laughter, and all the other things that make it worthwhile. He’s got a great sense of humor about it. You have to.… That’s how you survive in those situations.”

  There was no question that Robin was going to do everything he could in return for the man who had been his ally since their days together at Juilliard, and a constant source of moral support throughout their careers—the friend he called Brother Reeve, and who in return called him Brother Rabinowitz. “When Chris got hurt, right away, he and Marsha were on the plane, taking things to his hospital room,” said Cyndi McHale, who ran the Blue Wolf company. While Reeve remained in the hospital, Robin and Marsha provided him with interesting and varied visuals to focus his attention on, “since he couldn’t look around,” McHale said. “Whatever they could put in his line of sight. They would buy him a nice piece of artwork or something. Just very thoughtful and considerate.”

  Robin and Marsha helped the Reeves pay for the costly medical equipment that Christopher would now need to use for the rest of his life, and installed an elevator in their Napa ranch home for his use whenever he came to visit. This was just one facet of the philanthropy Robin sought to provide for the people closest to him, and he could do so more easily as his personal wealth grew. “They had a driver, nannies, housekeepers,” McHale explained, “and they would put their kids through school, because public schools in San Francisco are terrible. They would actually pay for their employees’ kids to go to school. Sometimes it would just be a friend—it wasn’t just family members, although they did that as well.”

  When Reeve wanted to travel to New York just five months after his acci
dent, to participate in a fund-raising event for the Creative Coalition (an arts advocacy group he had helped found) and present an award to Robin for his involvement in Comic Relief, Robin gave Reeve the use of his own private security staff for the visit. And when Robin took the stage at the Pierre Hotel to receive his honor from Reeve, who was transporting himself in a wheelchair he controlled with a careful system of sips and breaths, he joked that Reeve should use his new chair for a tractor pull and quipped, “He’s on a roll, literally.” For Reeve, the good-natured teasing and taunting he took from Robin was just what he needed. “He took the curse off the wheelchair,” he later said.

  The following summer, when the Reeve family traveled to Puerto Rico for one of its first vacations since Christopher’s injury, Robin went on the trip, too, to keep his friend entertained and in good spirits. “The weekend would have been so much harder for me without you there,” Reeve wrote to him afterward. “Everybody got a great tan from your sunshine.”

  These displays of support would give rise to an apocryphal and often-repeated tale of a secret pact that Robin and Reeve had supposedly made during their Juilliard days, that whoever found fame first would take care of the other. But Robin denied that there was any truth to this story and said it was only natural to help a friend in need. “It’s not like we said years ago, ‘If one of us shall not make it, the other shall be there—where shall we write it in blood?’” he explained, affecting a mock medieval tone.

  “This whole idea that I’m going to take care of him—it’s kind of demeaning to him to think he might not be able to take care of himself,” Robin said. “I’ll be there for him, but he’s got plans to be able to sustain himself, to find ways to work and be a functioning person.”