Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  Robin’s last film of 1995 was Jumanji, the director Joe Johnston’s adaptation of Chris Van Allsburg’s picture book about a children’s board game that comes to life and overruns a family’s home with wild animals and jungle pitfalls. Robin played the film’s protagonist, Alan Parrish, a boy who was sucked into the game in 1969 and emerges twenty-six years later as a full-grown man with a long mane of hair and a feral beard. Of the film’s $65 million budget, $15 million went to Robin’s salary, but he said he was drawn to the movie because it reminded him of his lonely, mansion-bound childhood in Bloomfield Hills, and because he believed that it was a necessary film at a time when brutality had become too commonplace in entertainment and in real life.

  “The world frightens me a lot, the world as it exists,” he said. “This is an action movie, it has a certain type of violence, but I can’t do a movie where all of a sudden I’ll blow things away and make a joke about it. Because we live in a world where that’s a reality.” As a performer, and one with a family, Robin said he had a special obligation to think about how he was portrayed on-screen and to choose films that reflected his values. “You have a responsibility to yourself, whatever your level of consciousness is, about what you do,” he explained. “Would you show this to your own children? What are you putting out there? What do you want to say?” That said, Jumanji proved to be too scary for Cody, who had just turned four at the time of the film’s release.

  The role was not that much of a stretch for Robin; it fell neatly within an archetype he had played before: savvy and self-educated but sensitive; denied a proper childhood and forced too hastily into an unfamiliar adult world; a man-child who yearns to be a father and still needs one himself. And the reviews for Jumanji seized upon its failure to innovate or challenge its leading man: in the Baltimore Sun, Stephen Hunter wrote that the film “represents a typical movie victory, the triumph of literalism over interference, the conviction that more is always much better than less, the crushing idea that spectacle trumps imagination every time.” Its creators, he said, took Van Allsburg’s peculiar gothic story and “turned it into a sprawling, vulgar, bloviated mess designed skill-lessly to frighten the young and bore the old. They’ve managed something quite amazing: They’ve made Robin Williams uninteresting.”

  Not that Robin was in any way penalized for it at the box office. Jumanji opened at number one and went on to gross more than $100 million domestically during its release, making the film another milestone for Robin and one due largely to his involvement. He was as big a star as he had ever been, and he seemed untouchable.

  PART THREE

  SUPERNOVA

  15

  THE GOLDEN DUDE

  In Deconstructing Harry, a Woody Allen movie released at the end of 1997, Robin played the small but memorable role of an actor whose name is given only as Mel. When we meet him, he is running through a movie scene at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, while a befuddled crew tries to film him.

  The cinematographer peers into the camera and angrily declares, “This goddamn lens—there’s something wrong with it.”

  A camera assistant is surprised to hear this. “This one too?” he asks. “I changed lenses.”

  “What are you talking about?” the cinematographer snaps back. “The focus is off.”

  More crew members inspect the equipment, unsure of why they cannot produce a clear picture of Mel. Then they look at him—with their own eyes, not through the camera—and realize that Mel himself is out of focus. The world around him is crisp and defined, but he is blurry. “You’re soft,” his director tells him, before sending him home. His wife wonders if he ate anything strange at lunch; his daughter is concerned; his son taunts him: “Daddy’s out of focus!”

  When Allen wrote to Robin several months earlier in hopes of persuading him to take the part, he said, “I can think of no one who could make the character of Mel funnier in this little skit within my movie. It depends on the actor’s ingenuity plus a special effect added later. If you hate it, no problem—we’ll do something else one day but I do think this bit—and a payoff bit later in the finale is special.” (The punch line being that, while Mel’s family members must all wear prescription glasses to see him correctly, he is not required to adjust his life or behavior in any way.)

  Allen just wanted an actor who would have some fun with the role, but he had chosen aptly: Robin was out of focus. Something was off with him, and its cause could not be easily diagnosed. His family life was happy and harmonious, and his career was in the best shape it had ever been. His movies were making money, and he, in turn, was making more money from them. He was on the verge of a crowning achievement, one that he’d spent years striving for, and which he believed would validate all the work he’d done up to that point, ensuring his longevity, prosperity, and admiration in the motion picture industry. For a time, it did. And then nearly everything he’d built just seemed to evaporate.

  Robin’s first movie of 1996 was The Birdcage, an Americanized remake of the French film La Cage aux Folles. In that 1978 comedy (adapted from the Jean Poiret play), a gay couple—one, the star performer at a popular drag nightclub, and the other, its owner—are drawn into a series of farcical scenarios when they meet the conservative parents of their son’s fiancée. Written by Elaine May and directed by Mike Nichols, The Birdcage was the heralded comic twosome’s first creative reunion since they split in the 1960s and pursued separate careers. Nichols, who had previously directed Robin in his stage version of Waiting for Godot, cast him as Armand, the proprietor of the Birdcage nightclub in Miami’s South Beach; the role of Albert, the flamboyant drag performer who is Armand’s live-in lover, went to Nathan Lane, a Tony Award–winning Broadway star. May’s script reconceived the fiancée’s conservative father as a Republican US senator (played by Gene Hackman) whose moralizing legislative coalition is threatened when another of its members dies in bed with an underage prostitute. Even so, Nichols contended that the film’s message was ultimately one of unity and reconciliation: “Reconciling a family, a country, right and left,” he said. “People are more alike than everybody thinks.”

  Robin relished the idea that The Birdcage was pushing back against the sort of reactionary demagogues he so despised in national politics. “Every so often, that sense of righteous indignation gets blown apart when some of these guys are found wearing rubber panties or something,” he said. “You know, they say, ‘I was just diving.’” With a presidential election on the horizon that year, Robin said, “There’s again this whole issue of trying to deny the existence of a whole group of people. This movie tries to equalize that a little and get through to Middle America.”

  The confluence of a Democratic president, Robin’s long-standing reputation as an outspoken liberal, and the extraordinary wealth he was now reaping from his hit movies had made him an increasingly desirable figure in Washington circles and provided him with access to some of its most powerful players. He and Marsha had been personally invited to President Bill Clinton’s first inauguration in 1993, and Robin had performed a stand-up set for the Clintons at Steven Spielberg’s home in Los Angeles when the president visited California in the spring of 1995. “You were in the tippiest top form,” Kate Capshaw, the director’s wife, wrote to Robin in a thank-you note. “Your mojo was ‘big and hard, baby.’”

  On his birthday each July, Robin could look forward to a dutiful congratulatory letter from the White House. “Hillary and I send our best wishes for a joyous celebration and a year filled with great happiness and good health,” the president wrote to him in 1996. And when heavy hitters like Al Gore or John Kerry were planning fund-raising events, they would invariably ask Robin for his participation, or simply his money.

  Not every elected official saw Robin merely as a motormouthed checkbook. Ann Richards, the Democratic firebrand and former governor of Texas, continued to write affectionate letters to Robin and Marsha even after she was voted out of office, thanking them for their kindness and generosity. “I
am working like a field hand,” she told them in one dispatch from 1995. “One of these years I am going to get out of this hamster wheel but no time soon.” In another letter a few months later, she wrote, “Life for me is good and I am ranting and raving against the right wing wherever they will provide a podium.”

  Robin’s devotion to liberal causes stemmed not from a desire to ingratiate himself with politicians but from a personal sense of community. Being a longtime San Franciscan made him acutely aware of the ongoing challenges faced by gay people and, he thought, gave him a particular insight into their world. He had been attached to play Harvey Milk, the openly gay San Francisco politician, in a biopic called The Mayor of Castro Street, though the project did not come to fruition. And he could cite by name the gender-bending members of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the city’s campy, street-performance protest group. He had lived in the Castro district when he and Marsha started their relationship, and, as Robin said, “It’s a neighborhood. Yeah, there are a lot of gay men and gay women, but it has the same values as your neighborhood. They want peace and quiet. They want to live their lives, and they do have children—[here he slipped into his redneck voice] ‘It’s a frightening thing. Tell me no!’—from previous marriages, artificial insemination, a hundred different ways. It is family-oriented. People don’t acknowledge it, but that’s the reality.”

  For The Birdcage, Robin had originally been approached to play Albert, the more manic half of the gay couple, but he felt he had already done his share of cross-dressing in Mrs. Doubtfire. Lane, his costar, said that during the first few weeks of filming, it dawned on Robin that there was another actor able to go even wilder than he could. “It was hard for him to watch me go off,” Lane said. “But then he said he found the comedy in his character. I think we understand each other very well. I remember, at one point, the two of us standing there and saying to [Nichols], ‘Can we, can we do it again? Can we, can we try that again?’ And I said, ‘We are the two most insecure, neediest people I’ve ever seen in my life.’”

  Nichols also appreciated the challenge for Robin in playing what he called “the relatively still center” of the picture. “I knew there would be great humor in suppressing his desire to shriek,” the director explained. He does a lot of real acting here in which the comedy is in the small things, not the madness.”

  Though people did not expect stillness from him, Robin had a quiet side, too, and he said it should not be mistaken for sadness. “When people see me that way, they think something’s wrong,” he said. “No. ‘You’re on something.’ No. I’m just recharging. In down times I do things like go for a long bike ride or run. The other thing I’m doing in that quiet time is just observing.”

  He was like this in his home life, too, where in moments when he might have seemed silent and withdrawn, he was actually in a highly receptive, information-seeking mode. “You’d just be talking to him over the breakfast table—‘what’s going on in the world?’—and he absorbed things,” said Cyndi McHale. “I’d be reading the New York Times, and he’d ask a couple questions. And then that night, all that would come out onstage in his stand-up. I’m struggling to get through the story and he, meanwhile, that night, nails it completely onstage without even reading it.”

  Peter Asher, the musician, producer, and husband of Robin’s friend Wendy Asher, became close with Robin and Marsha in this period. He observed, as many of Robin’s friends did, that there were “multiple Robins.” “Yes, you would see the quiet, intellectual, curious Robin,” Peter Asher said. “And then occasionally, you’d be at a dinner and he’d morph into the genius comic commentator, inventor of words and situations and people, which was a whole other animal. They both coexisted and shared the same voracious and stunningly fast intellect.”

  When their schedules overlapped, Robin and Asher spent their free time doing nothing more taxing than going to a movie or shopping for loud clothing. “We both liked the kind of clothes that you would see in the window and go, ‘Who would wear that suit?’—and the answer was, ‘We would,’” said Asher. “Of course, he was always the one who’d get a big discount, because they knew he might wear it on The Tonight Show or something. So I would end up slipping him some suit I wanted to buy and saying, ‘You buy it—I’ll pay it back.’ Because that way he’d get the celebrity discount.”

  Sometimes he and Robin would have “heart-to-heart” conversations, but, Asher explained, “when I say heart-to-heart, I don’t mean, sharing your innermost feelings. I mean male heart-to-heart conversations,” he said with a laugh. “Which is, did you read the science section of the paper this morning? Because the answer would always be yes, we both had. We would have conversations about stuff. Not about us, more likely.”

  And when Robin feared that his mile-a-minute imagination had gotten too far out of his control and had trampled on someone else’s feelings, he was quick to make amends. “When he’d make fun of you, it was always really nice,” said Wendy Asher, who had been Robin’s friend since the 1970s. “We’d be out to dinner, and he’d thought he’d said something wrong, and he’d have Marsha call up and say, ‘Oh, Robin thinks that he upset someone,’ and we’d all go, ‘No!’ He really was caring. It was really more that he wanted to entertain everyone.”

  Robin’s insecurities about his comic talents ran much deeper. He continued to see a therapist and continued to fear that his position in the comedy world could be usurped at any moment by a younger, up-and-coming star. “He was a great appreciator of people’s work,” Billy Crystal said. “But I think there was a chipping-away, sometimes, and he would feel like he was losing his reign. If, suddenly, there was a new guy, he would be the first to say how great they were. But I could sense the driving question was, ‘What about me? That’s my thing.’”

  Lately, Robin had been fixated on Jim Carrey, the stand-up comic and actor who had attained some fame for the panoply of wacky characters he played on the TV sketch show In Living Color and was finding unexpected success in films like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. After boasting publicly that he expected to play the villainous Riddler in an upcoming Batman sequel and then passing on the role, Robin was chagrined to find that the part had gone to Carrey. When he and his children saw Dumb and Dumber (a massive hit for Carrey that grossed more than $127 million) on a Christmas vacation in Hawaii, Robin paid a series of compliments—some sincere, and some backhanded—to the actor, whom he called “funny in a physical” way.

  “He chose the thing to do and he’s the master of it,” Robin said of Carrey. “To do that just straight out. When it works, it just hits you.” More acerbically, he added, “But when he starts being honored in France, we’ll know we have to worry.”

  But Robin’s concerns ran deeper than he let on. Cheri Minns, a makeup artist who began working regularly with Robin on The Birdcage, said that he “got completely freaked out about Jim Carrey, that he was going to take over. Marsha had to step in and tell him, ‘There’s room for other people. You don’t have to freak out. There’s room.’ Because he was having a complete mental breakdown about it. Robin had more talent in his little finger than Jim Carrey ever had. But Jim Carrey started making big movies and making a good salary, and then Robin was like, ‘Oh my God.’ Robin did that to himself. He just got himself consumed with worry about things like that. It was total consumption with his career.”

  When The Birdcage was released in March 1996, it received some appreciative reviews. The Washington Post noted how unusual it was for Robin not to play “the white-hot center of a picture. Armand is the subdued one of this couple, and, for the most part, Williams plays straight man (if that’s the word) to Lane’s inspired hormonal spritzing.”

  The film drew praise from advocacy groups like the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, which said that it went “beyond the stereotypes to see the characters’ depth and humanity,” but other viewers were troubled that it seemed to indulge many negative clichés of gay people, portraying them as mincing, effeminate tra
nsvestites. The gay critic Bruce Bawer called The Birdcage a prime example of how “homosexuality continues to bring out the worst aspects of the [film] industry: its timidity, banality and subjection to formula.” Watching Robin’s and Lane’s characters trying to make themselves more palatable to Hackman’s, he said, “It is chilling to see Armand and Albert debase themselves before this stand-in for Pat Buchanan, to see Armand sweating bullets in terror of blowing his cover, and to see Albert, finally unmasked as a man, obsequiously offering reassurances that he believes in family values.”

  From his earliest days as a stand-up, Robin had included a stock gay character in his act, and he believed his history in San Francisco gave him permission to do so. “I used to do a choreographer character on Comic Relief,” he said, “and some people loved it and some were offended by it,” he said. “People who knew choreographers like him said, ‘That’s it!’ and others said, ‘That’s a cliché and a stereotype.’ It wasn’t done out of anger.” The criticism he took for doing essentially the same thing in The Birdcage caught him off guard, though Robin tried to meet his detractors halfway. “It’s not a homophobic thing. But I understand their feelings,” he said. The Birdcage was another commercial smash for Robin, ranking number one at the box office for the first month of its release and grossing nearly $125 million. But the debate around it had exposed a vulnerability: the times were starting to change and Robin wasn’t keeping up with them.

  He was shown little mercy for his next film, Jack, an improbable comedy-drama in which Robin played a boy with a condition that causes his body to grow at four times the normal rate; at age ten, he already has the developed physique (though not the mature mind) of a forty-year-old man. Despite its offering Robin an opportunity to work with the director Francis Ford Coppola, Jack was the most banal iteration of a character he’d played several times before, not to mention a knockoff of the hit Tom Hanks comedy Big. “Someone deserves a timeout for letting this mawkish misfire get to the screen,” USA Today said in a half-star review. “Bad movies happen. But when bad movies happen to good people, it’s worse.”