by Dave Itzkoff
If there was a lesson he had learned from his work up to this point, he said, it was “not to rush off and do things. If I have to wait for something, I’ll wait. There have been times when I rushed into things. Sometimes it was pure greed, sometimes it was, ‘we’ll make it better.’ I don’t believe ‘we’ll fix it’ anymore. Don’t ever go that way.”
When his father, Rob, had died, it was both abrupt and slow—the unexpected onset of illness followed by a gradual decline that left Robin just enough time to make peace with him before he passed away. His mother, Laurie, had remained a continual presence in his life every day since, a reliable companion for Sunday brunches, teatimes, and tennis matches, an enthusiastic exerciser and an inveterate pack rat. Then, suddenly, she was gone, too: she died in her Tiburon home on September 4, 2001, at the age of seventy-eight. The official cause given was heart failure. Zak, her grandson, later said that she had lived a full life, one in which “she wore mini-skirts till the day she died.”
In a remembrance she shared shortly before her death, Laurie said she enjoyed being both social and solitary. “I enjoy my own company,” she explained. “I get along very well with me. I don’t like being alone on a constant basis. I’m not a recluse. I love parties and being with people. And then I love getting home. It’s like being in your castle, crossing the moat and pulling up the drawbridge.” Though she had seen some difficulties in her life, “all in all, it’s been a kick in the shorts,” she said. “I really think we were put on earth to know great joy.”
Robin had learned many memorable verses from Laurie over the years, and her obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle contained a poem said to be one that he’d written for her.
Think young and you’ll never grow old,
The years will pass you by,
Birthdays are for merrymaking,
Present giving and birthday caking,
Age is the state of your mind
As the days of your years unfold,
Don’t live in the past,
Right up to the last
Think young and you’ll never grow old
Like her husband before her, Laurie’s body was cremated and the ashes were scattered off the coast of Marin County. The family had only a few days to mourn before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, an event that the entire world would grieve and whose full impact on Robin would not reveal itself immediately.
For several years, Robin had been vowing an official return to stand-up comedy; aside from the sporadic unannounced club pop-in, Comic Relief special, or talk-show appearance—which was usually more of a one-man whirlwind than a formal, practiced routine—he had not put out a stand-up TV special or record album since his storied Metropolitan Opera show in 1986. His explanation for what finally got him back into the game varied from telling to telling. Perhaps it was the thrill of participating in a tribute to Whoopi Goldberg when she received the Mark Twain Prize at the Kennedy Center, which had helped shake off a post-9/11 delirium: “People treated it like we had just lifted the siege of Richmond,” he later said of the tribute event. “People were just like, ‘Wow,’ and it was like they had not had any entertainment.… People needed it.” Or perhaps it had taken this long to find a six-month stretch on his calendar that he could devote to the endeavor. In any case, it was a homecoming he had been promising publicly for at least three years, and some of his colleagues sensed that his desire to do it ran deeper and had been brewing longer.
Eddie Izzard, the British comedian, monologuist, and actor, had met Robin in 1996 when they worked together on The Secret Agent. He considered Robin an idol and an influence; the two became friends, and Robin and Marsha helped produce Izzard’s show Dress to Kill when he brought it to San Francisco in 1998. Despite their mutual passion for stand-up, Izzard said he and Robin didn’t share notes or discuss technique. The championship pugilist was far from his fighting weight.
“I was surprised he didn’t go back and do more stand-up,” Izzard said. “He got into that place, that multimillion-dollar film place, but then I don’t think he wanted to be there. It’s when you get stuck in that place where you have to do something for the finances.” When you’re performing on a regular basis, Izzard said, “you develop systems of how to create new shows, which might have been difficult for him. Because it is quite tricky when you have your fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth show. The trouble of repeating, the trouble of going through areas that interest you but you might have attacked before—you can go into those same subjects but you’ve got to go into them a different way. I think everyone must have this problem, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to work out how to do it.”
In December 2001, Robin played a series of shows at Bimbo’s 365 Club, a small, sit-down nightspot in San Francisco, where he tried out a new set that could sometimes run two hours or more and which he eventually pared down to about ninety minutes. Then, during the first half of 2002, he took the set on a national tour where, at each stop, he and David Steinberg fine-tuned the material while Peter Asher recorded the performances for an album. The set was customized only slightly from city to city: “He would do ten minutes about wherever he was,” Asher said, “which was information he would glean on arrival from the limo driver, from the baggage guy at the hotel, from people at the desk. He would find out about the local sports scandal or the mayor who’d been indicted, whatever the big stories in town were, and incorporate them into a whole new bit.”
Early assessments of the tour were not encouraging. Checking in on a performance in Philadelphia, one critic wrote, “To say Robin Williams’ act … was all over the place would be an understatement.” Though the review praised Robin’s “timing and wildcat energy,” it also observed that his “African American and Latino characters were occasionally cringe-inducing (especially in front of a lily-white audience).” The review concluded, “Two hours with him is exhausting, but his style has a distinct advantage: By the time you realize the last joke wasn’t funny, Williams has told two more.”
Death to Smoochy was similarly savaged when it opened on March 29, 2002. The Washington Post called it Robin’s penance for every “earnest, life-affirming movie he’s done in the past decade” and “a particularly toxic little bonbon, palatable to only a chosen and very jaundiced few.” It was a colossal bomb, grossing slightly more than $8 million, and after barely three years with Artists Management Group, the talent firm his agents Ovitz and Menchel had founded, Robin left the company and rehired CAA to represent him.
Insomnia fared better when it was released on May 24, and though it was regarded principally as a tour de force for Pacino, Robin also received widespread praise. “Robin Williams is a shockingly effective counterweight,” said Slate. “The key is what he doesn’t do: Those rubber features remain rigid, that madcap energy harnessed.”
By the time he came onstage at the Broadway Theatre in New York on July 14 for a live HBO broadcast of his stand-up show, Robin was in a combative mood. He had something to prove. He wore a short-sleeve Southwestern-style shirt, and the set was sparsely decorated, with a table full of water bottles that he would constantly gulp from. An image of one of his eyes hovered over everything. Despite the setting, Robin told the audience, “This is not going to be your normal night of the-a-tuh. This will be Shakespeare with a strap-on.” What followed was an angry, scattershot performance, uncharacteristic in its lack of focus and its absence of charity.
He shouted his way through sarcastic criticism of President George W. Bush (“Him talking about business ethics is kind of like having a leper give you a facial—it doesn’t really work”) and recycled one of his old lines about Ronald and Nancy Reagan to say that “W. doesn’t speak while Cheney’s drinking water.” There were predictable potshots at Bill Gates, Martha Stewart, Mike Tyson, and the New York Yankees, though he praised women in general for dressing skimpily in the warm weather: “The titties are out today.”
His observations about the aftermath of 9/11 had uncomfortable strains of ant
i-Arab and anti-Islamic sentiment, as when he joked that “you can’t bomb the Afghanis back to the Stone Age, because they’ll go, ‘Upgrade!’” Proposing a plan to share Jerusalem among religious groups, Robin said, “Jews will get Hanukkah, Passover. Christians will get Christmas and Easter. And Muslims will have Ramadan and that other holiday, Kaboom.” Even an anecdote he told about an unexpectedly intimate encounter he shared with Koko, a silverback gorilla who communicates in sign language, felt cynical and harsh. As Robin recounted their embrace, “When an eight-hundred-pound gorilla’s got you by the tits, you listen.”
Nonetheless, the record that Asher produced from the tour, Robin Williams Live 2002, would go on to win a Grammy; as he held his latest trophy up to his ear, Robin declared, “Oh my God, listen! You can actually hear careers ending.” The album included a bonus track that Robin and Asher created, called “The Grim Rapper,” in which Robin, playing the personification of Death, delivered rhymes like:
You’ve lost all your fluids, your vital sap
It’s time to get ready for the big dirt nap
Critics identified a similar strain of morbidity in One Hour Photo, which finally opened at the end of the summer, but somehow it seemed to suit Robin. “Oddly, when he’s playing serious roles, he tends to trust the audiences more than when he’s doing comic work,” Elvis Mitchell wrote in the New York Times. “He’s not sweating to ingratiate himself through the damp excesses that can mark some of his other work.” In One Hour Photo, Mitchell said, Robin “is so good here it’s almost painful to watch.”
By then, Robin was not really chasing positive reviews or constructive feedback. In October, with no fanfare, he turned up at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, flying into the country on a thunderous C-130 turboprop transport plane, and crossing long expanses of dusty, treacherous desert to arrive at the protective shelter of the base. Once there, on an itinerary arranged by the USO, he roamed the grounds in a backward baseball cap, Oakley sunglasses, and cargo shorts; offered encouragement, photos, and autographs to the soldiers; and bellowed at the top of his lungs, as they surely hoped to hear, “GOOO-OOOOD MORNING, BAGRAM!”
As the son of a veteran, and as an actor whose most beloved roles included one particularly unruly airman, Robin felt an obligation to support his country’s fighting forces in whatever ways he could. “I wanted to go over there specifically to Afghanistan and to those bases, to let them know people at home haven’t forgotten them and also, when I get back, to tell people don’t forget the people there,” he explained.
It was his first visit to an active battlefield, and while it did not change his feelings about the moral grotesqueness of war, when he saw the people who volunteered to wage it, he was struck by how young they were. “You go and you see this youth,” he said, “and that’s why you think, ‘war—how insane.’ This youth, these people, and this incredible energy and intelligence and dedication is getting chewed up.”
He traveled light, accompanied only by his assistant, Rebecca Erwin Spencer, and when he felt like performing some stand-up comedy, all he needed was a riser, a microphone, an amplifier or two, and a roomful of grateful soldiers, which was never hard to come by. These were quick and dirty—very dirty—sets, ten or fifteen minutes at a clip, full of jokes about masturbation, Viagra, getting drunk off only two beers, and his undiminished distaste for President Bush. (“Things are still the same at home,” he told the troops. “George is learning to speak. We’re trying to help him.”)
Many of the same qualities that had made his live Broadway set so off-putting—the vulgarity, the fatalism—played perfectly in front of battle-weary troops who had no use for delicacy or euphemism. “I know that this isn’t the end of the world,” Robin told one crowd, “but you can fuckin’ see it from here.”
This was just the first of many trips that Robin would make to the Middle East with the USO over the next several years. He traveled to Afghanistan again in 2003 and made his first visit to Iraq that December, just in time for the capture of Saddam Hussein. He returned to both front lines in 2004, added Kuwait to his itinerary in 2007, and made a grand circuit of Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bahrain in 2010. But that initial tour of Bagram, and the astonishing freedom it offered, would always be special to him. “There were no restrictions,” he said. “The shows were the shows. And it was just me.… In terms of a performance, it’s some of the best audiences you’ll ever get in your life.”
There was something about the atmosphere of pervasive, maximum danger, where the threat of death was so omnipresent that you just had to laugh at it, that Robin needed to see for himself. On that maiden trip to Bagram, his plane had to make combat landings and takeoffs—a perilously steep descent or ascent, to avoid possible enemy fire—which he described as feeling “like a weird ride except you realize the consequence of the ride is if someone shoots at you that maybe you go down.” Making that fateful first landing, he recalled, “You start seeing the whole flight crew strapping in Kevlar and helmets and guys getting up by the doors.… The moment you get off the plane, they say, ‘Please sir, stay on the path.’ ‘Why? What’s on the other side?’ ‘It’s still mined.’ I went, ‘Thank you.’”
Robin seemed to be oscillating from one blinding wilderness to the next, from blazing hot sand to freezing cold snow, and he found himself north of the border again in the spring of 2004 to make The Big White. It was a modestly budgeted independent movie, nothing like the big studio features he’d been accustomed to, about a down-on-his-luck travel agent who tries to cash in his missing brother’s million-dollar insurance policy using a dead body he found in a dumpster. The production was based in Winnipeg, Canada, with intermittent expeditions into Alaska and Yukon, and Robin, who had traveled there only with Spencer, his assistant, and Minns, his makeup artist, found the emptiness of these locales unsettling.
“Winnipeg is one of the most dismal places, as far as I’m concerned,” Minns said. “There’s nothing to do there. Nothing. Robin would say, ‘You can just ride your bike forever. You can watch your dog run away for a week.’”
One day, for lack of anything better to do, Minns and Spencer decided to attend the grand opening of a local drugstore, and when Robin got wind of their plans, he pleaded to go with them. On the drive over, Minns noticed a curious phenomenon: sometimes, when their car was stopped in traffic, pedestrians and passengers in other cars would look over, recognize Robin and get extremely excited; at other times, people seemed not to notice him at all.
“What’s going on?” Minns asked Robin. “He says, ‘I turn it on, and I can turn it off. I can make them see me, or I can make them not see me.’ It was kind of bizarre, but it was really funny, because then I said, ‘Show me.’ So he would do it, and I would be like, ‘Oh, my God, those people totally looked right at you and they didn’t see that it was you.’ And then the next car would be like, ‘Robin Williams, oh my God!’ It was too funny.”
By now, it was no secret to these two close coworkers that Robin had started drinking again. It had never been entirely possible for Spencer or Minns to babysit Robin on his location shoots, and the task became a lost cause when he would decide to go out at night, on his own, and make a guest appearance at a comedy club. After these shows, Robin would be left to his own devices, when his intense likability was his most valuable asset and his greatest danger.
“He makes everyone around him feel like they’re his best friend,” Minns said. “So when people see him—and, of course, know him and know that he’s so fucking funny—they want to hang out, they feel like they can. Because Robin makes them feel that way. He makes a total stranger feel that way. It’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m with Robin.’ No, you’re not with Robin. We were doing that constantly. Rebecca and I had a thing that we’d say: ‘Ugh, his new best friend.’ ‘Oh, there’s another new best friend.’ And we’d have to get rid of them. He just didn’t want people not to like him.”
Usually in these encounters, Minns said, “He was getting drinks. They’re o
ffering him every drug imaginable. Everything, and if he wasn’t sober, he was taking anybody he could up on what they were offering. It was awful.”
Then it all went off the rails. “He was drinking in a big way on The Big White,” Minns said, “He was drinking big-time. That’s his touchstone of where he fell off the wagon. He had to have fallen off the wagon before that. But that’s when he started doing it out in the open and didn’t care who saw it.”
In Robin’s own recounting, his first misstep on the sober path he’d successfully walked for nearly two decades occurred while the production was in Skagway, Alaska. Having nothing but time and empty space to contemplate, Robin had retreated into an unhealthy obsession with his own résumé, revisiting loss after loss, tallying up failure after failure, and convincing himself that this time he was done for good. “My film career was not going too well,” he later recalled. “One day I walked into a store and saw a little bottle of Jack Daniel’s. And then that voice—I call it the lower power—goes: ‘Hey. Just a taste. Just one.’ I drank it, and there was that brief moment of ‘Oh, I’m okay!’”
The instant he took that first sip, he said, “You feel warm and kind of wonderful. And then the next thing you know, it’s a problem, and you’re isolated.”
“Within a week,” Robin said, “I was buying so many bottles I sounded like a wind chime walking down the street.”
Sometimes Robin cracked jokes because they helped defuse uncomfortable situations. Sometimes he resorted to them when he was angry. And sometimes he told them because he was terrified.
17
WEAPONS OF SELF DESTRUCTION
For all the awards that Robin had won in his career, this time was different. When he was presented with the Cecil B. DeMille Award—a lifetime achievement prize, bestowed on him at the age of fifty-three—at the Golden Globes, on January 16, 2005, he’d had time to prepare his speech. He started out in a fake foreign accent, offering his appreciation to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in various languages and thanking them “for, number one, having an open bar”; he gave an on-the-spot assessment of his new statuette “with the little nipply thing on the top,” then held it to his chest, pointed outward, and called himself Janet Jackson.