by Dave Itzkoff
Then, with more sincerity, Robin acknowledged his three children, all of whom were with him that night. He thanked Cody, now thirteen, whom he called “the ninja poet”; Zelda, fifteen, “photographer, actress, big fan of Hello Kitty”; and Zak, twenty-one, “the linguist … he’s going to open up a syntax repair shop.” Each of them abided their brief on-camera moment with a kind of aw-dad humility, wanting to support their father while seeming to wish they could be anywhere but there. Robin went on: “I also want to share this award,” he said, “with a very special woman—a wife-time achievement award—with Marsha. I would like to give you the Croix de Guerre for living with a comedian. It’s an interesting job, isn’t it? We’re a tad moody.… We’re a little rough. But thank you for offering me a shelter in the midst of schadenfreude.”
Marsha kissed her fingertips and waved them at Robin. But something about her gaze seemed intense; she had been through a lot of pain, and only a few other people in that room knew its full extent. This was a family in crisis, and it was not going to make it through the ordeal intact.
Robin was drinking again, and they knew it, not that he was making much effort to disguise it from them anymore. Even as he tried to persuade himself that he could avoid the pitfalls of excess if he wanted to, he knew just how bad things had gotten. “You keep thinking, ‘I can handle this—I got this under control,’” he later explained. “Yeah, for a day. You go a week. And I didn’t drink for a week and then bang. And then the next week I’d be back at it. And then the next.”
Robin thought he had dealt long ago with his dependencies on alcohol and drugs, back when Mork & Mindy was canceled and Zak was born, and that he had kicked these addictions completely. But having done so with no special help or treatment, without ever considering the underlying factors that might have steered him toward substance abuse, perhaps made it worse for him when he fell back on bad habits. “I went twenty years clean,” he said. “But there was still, in the background, this voice like, ‘Psst.’ So when I relapsed, I went back hard.”
Robin knew, too, that his drinking was doing real and lasting damage to his relationship with his family, the kind that would not be healed even if he got sober again and made amends for his wrongdoing. “I was shameful,” he said, “and you do stuff that causes disgust, and that’s hard to recover from. You can say, ‘I forgive you’ and all that stuff, but it’s not the same as recovering from it. It’s not coming back.”
By this time, his movie career had run aground in the way he always feared it would. Nothing had come of The Final Cut, which was used as an early experiment in digital distribution and released in only about 115 theaters before it vanished. He was given a critical drubbing for House of D, a 1970s-era period piece written and directed by David Duchovny, in which Robin played a mentally handicapped janitor (“another of his almost sickeningly lovable weirdos,” one reviewer said) and Zelda had a small supporting role. The Big White, the film whose creation had provided a bleak arctic backdrop for him to squander his sobriety, disappeared just as hurriedly. The MBST firm, the latest incarnation of the management company that had been guiding his career for nearly three decades, was acquired in July 2005 by CKX, Inc., an entertainment conglomerate that owned, among other properties, the name and likeness of Elvis Presley, the Graceland estate, and the American Idol TV series. Robin remained an MBST client, but to CKX he was just one more asset in its portfolio.
Amid the misery, though, his wicked sense of delight about the world—that ability to take mischievous pleasure in things that polite people were not supposed to find funny—had not been snuffed out; he just had to find different outlets for it. After Ronald Reagan died in the summer of 2004, Billy Crystal was watching a television broadcast of the funeral services. His phone rang, and on the other end was Robin, speaking not as himself but in Reagan’s dry whisper, as if calling from the afterlife. Crystal just went with it. “We started doing these weird interviews,” he recalled. “I said, is it beautiful up there? And he would go, ‘Well, yes, but it’s awfully hot.’ It’s not supposed to be hot. ‘Oh. Maybe that’s why Nixon’s balls are on my nose.’ It went on and on and on. It was so funny. We’d talk about going into a studio and just letting it go with the dirty side of both of us.”
But then the losses in Robin’s life became more personal and devastating, and they just kept coming. His dear friend Christopher Reeve died on October 10, 2004, after slipping into a coma and succumbing to a particularly severe type of pressure wound that affects people in wheelchairs. In the nine years since the riding accident that had paralyzed him, Reeve had never given up hope that he would walk again someday, and as he gradually reclaimed control of regions of his body—an index finger; his lungs—he had represented to Robin an embodiment of hope, heroism, and the power of the human brain.
For Robin, who had often seen Reeve contend with and recover from complications of his paralysis, his death was sudden and shocking, a blow that would be compounded several months later when Reeve’s wife, Dana, was diagnosed with lung cancer; she died in 2006. But what hit Robin hardest, even after Reeve had been robbed of so much of his strength and vitality, was accepting that his friend’s unyielding determination could not defeat his injuries.
“I never knew he was on borrowed time,” Robin said after Reeve’s death. “Many people told me he lived a lot longer than they thought possible, and I said I never knew he was on the clock—other than the same clock we’re all on. There was a part of him that just seemed so indestructible.”
Then, a year later, Richard Pryor was gone—Robin’s comedy mentor, his unattainable benchmark for onstage candor, and a cautionary example of what happened when that single-minded passion is taken too far. Pryor had been debilitated by open-heart surgery in 1991 and the years-long onset of multiple sclerosis. He died on December 10, 2005, after a heart attack, another personal idol with whom Robin had remained close through a long, degenerative process.
As Robin recalled, “It was tough to see him near the end, with MS, where he was there, but slowly but surely, the body was shutting down on him. That was fucked up, that was the hardest part in the world to see, knowing that he’s in there. But even then he’d kind of joke about it. He’s the type of guy that would talk about his addictions, the crack pipe going, ‘Richard, they don’t know you like I know you.’ He was brutal that way.”
It would have been easy and understandable for Robin to say that his heartache had driven him back to drinking, but he denied that this was the case. “It’s more selfish than that. It’s just literally being afraid. And you think, oh, this will ease the fear. And it doesn’t.” His list of fears consisted of a single entry: “Everything,” he said. “It’s just a general all-round arggghhh. It’s fearfulness and anxiety.”
There had been a Thanksgiving dinner with his family in 2005 where Robin had gotten so drunk that he had to be brought upstairs and put to bed. But that was not enough to get him to change his ways. Then there had been the AIDS charity dinner that Robin attended at the Cannes Film Festival in the spring of 2006, looking ruddy and wobbly, his eyes hidden behind a pair of designer sunglasses, where he paid $80,000 for a performance by Wyclef Jean and another $40,000 for an Armani diamond necklace. (“I just bought a $40,000 coke vial,” Williams said at the time.) That day, Robin thought for sure his personal humiliation was about to be exposed to the entire world: “I realized I was pretty baked,” he said, “and I look out and I see, all of a sudden, a wall of paparazzi. And I go, ‘Oh well, I guess it’s out now.’” But that had not convinced him that he needed to seriously reevaluate his life, either.
When he finally did hit rock bottom, Robin contemplated taking his own life—but only for an instant, at which point he immediately talked himself out of it. He later recounted this moment for Marc Maron, the podcaster and a fellow comedian, in a darkly comic scene he depicted as a conversation between himself and his conscience:
When I was drinking, there was only one time, even for a moment, wher
e I thought, “Oh, fuck life.” Then even my conscious brain went, Did you honestly just say, ‘Fuck life?’ I went, You know you have a pretty good life as it is right now. Have you noticed the two houses? Yes. Have you noticed the girlfriend? Yes. Have you noticed that things are pretty good, even though you may not be working right now? Yes. Okay, let’s put the suicide over here, on ‘discussable.’ Let’s leave that over here, in the discussion area. We’ll talk about that. First of all, you don’t have the balls to do it. I’m not going to say it out loud. I mean, have you thought about buying a gun? No. What were you going to do, cut your wrist with a Waterpik? Maybe. So that’s erosion. What are you thinking about that? So, can I put that over here in the ‘What the Fuck’ category? Yes, let’s put that over here in ‘What the Fuck.’ Because—can I ask you what you’re doing right now? You’re sitting naked in a hotel room with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Yes. Is this maybe influencing your decision? Possibly. Okay, we’re going to put that over here.… Possibly for therapy, if you want to talk about that in therapy, or maybe a podcast two years from now.
And then, as his family members saw it, Robin sunk even lower still. “It got to a point where he wasn’t really functioning anymore, on any meaningful level,” Zak said. “Honestly, it wouldn’t have taken long for things to get really bad, really quick.” It required an intervention—really, an ultimatum—from the other members of his family for Robin to accept that he needed help for his alcohol addiction, and that it was more than any of them could provide. He would have to check into a residential treatment facility and get clean there.
Robin later took ownership for this decision, saying, “It was me, but it was also everyone in the family saying, ‘You’ve got to go.’ I went, ‘You’re right. I can’t bullshit you. I know I need help.’ Thanks to family and friends, you go.”
But some of Robin’s friends felt that they had not been allowed to see the full extent of his problem until it had already reached a dangerous stage. “He kept things from me,” Billy Crystal said. “Then he broke down and told me about the drinking and that he had started again. He explained that he had screwed up and hurt everybody and that he was going to go into a place to recover. It was very hard for him to accept the rage that was coming toward him at that time, but he understood that he had just shattered something and that’s the price you pay.”
Crystal said it was never a question that he would be there to lift Robin up when he fell down. “A sickness is a sickness, which is what his alcoholism was,” he said. “It’s not excusing it. And we were there for Marsha and the kids, too.”
“It was a test of our friendship,” Crystal added. “We loved the family, we loved the kids, and they got hurt. That was the darkest time.”
In the summer of 2006, Robin began a stay at a Hazelden Foundation center in Newberg, Oregon, a peaceful campus where he lived soberly while detoxing under a doctor’s care and attending support meetings with other recovering addicts. “You’ve got to sit back and go, okay, you’re separated, with others,” Robin said. “You start going, ‘Oh fuck.’ You think, ‘I’m fucked up. I’m a badass.’ And there are stories you hear in rehab that make you go, shit, I’m a little Catholic girl.”
Still, he tried to find comedy where he could. As he said a fellow patient told him, “He tried to commit suicide, and he put a little tube in his car to pump the fumes in. But only had a quarter tank of gas. It’s a bit of a gallows humor.”
In his sessions at Hazelden, Robin was taught for the first time to follow the tenets of the twelve-step program, which directs its followers to accept that their addictions have taken control of their lives, to turn themselves over to a higher power, to acknowledge how they have wronged other people, and to make amends for this behavior. For Robin it proved to be a comforting and potent philosophy, requiring him to reevaluate every aspect of how he lived his life. As Zak, who had known several other friends and loved ones who had previously been to rehab programs, said, “Unless you fully give yourself over, it’s not going to be successful—people are all keen on the bottoming-out aspect. For different people that means different things.”
Cruelly, details of Robin’s rehab stay were published in the National Enquirer even before he had finished the program, a violation of the center’s anonymity policy that forced him to make a public announcement that he was undergoing treatment. But he just took it in stride. “When I was in rehab,” he explained, “somebody got out of rehab, and shared what I had told to a tabloid. Which was fucked up, and everybody in rehab got angry. I went, ‘Hey man. It’s out there. Somebody’s going to make money off that shit.’ But it was weird.”
After he checked out of Hazelden that fall, Robin spent several subsequent weeks in a sober-living home, a transitional step between rehab and returning to his day-to-day life with Marsha and his children. A long road of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and a constant self-scrutiny of his behavior lay ahead for him, but, as Zak pointed out, Robin also had a ready-made support system of fellow comedians waiting for him. “It’s my estimation that community is really important in the recovery process, and comics—at least in my experience—are disproportionately more prone to using substances, and then recovering,” Zak said. “He has a huge community of sober and active people, the comic community, there to support him.”
Equipped with a new set of guiding principles, Robin was a changed man, but not entirely for the better. His relationship with Marsha could never be the same again: his return to drinking, which he had kept secret, was a fundamental deception—a catastrophic breach of faith inflicted by the person she was supposed to be able to trust completely and who was supposed to keep no secrets from her. The revelation of his relapse poisoned their marriage and caused her to question everything she knew and took for granted about him. If he could lie to her about this, what else could he lie to her about? After Robin’s drinking was out in the open, and his episodes of blatant drunkenness were called out for what they were, Marsha was left to feel that the bond between them was a fragile tether he could break again if it suited him.
“I’ve had various friends who have fallen off the wagon in dramatic ways, and he was one of them,” said Peter Asher. “For whatever reason, Robin was one of those people who, when he fell off the wagon, did it quite dramatically. And also, of course, you have the problem that if you’re a celebrity, inevitably, you end up doing it publicly. You can’t get away with away with a regrettable night on the town without it becoming a thing. Which must be very annoying. We all have indiscretions and they don’t all get blasted all over the place.”
For his part, Robin wasn’t sure that he wanted things to go back to the way they used to be. Marsha was intertwined in every aspect of his life: she managed their household, attended to Zelda and Cody, ran their social calendar, helped choose his movies and the people he worked with, decided who got past her filter and who was kept away—maybe he saw himself differently than she did and desired other things for himself.
What he wanted, Zak surmised, was just to explore: “He had been married most of his adult life and wanted to just explore other things out there,” he said. Perhaps this stagnant phase of his career was not an entirely bad thing; Robin could use this opportunity to take stock of himself in a way he hadn’t been able to for a very long time. “When fame hit, it hit really hard,” Zak said. “It was nonstop from twenty-seven years old, onward. It was just a ride. It’s only when things slowed a little bit that he could assess the situation.”
The decision that Robin and Marsha reached—gradually, over a period of many months, and with considerable reluctance—was that they should split up. They separated at the end of 2007.
It was how Robin had been taught to live since childhood: nothing is permanent, transition is constant. Anywhere can be home and anyone can be family, and you can always start over again in new places, with new people. Though it might seem a strange, even insensitive attitude to some, it reflected the essential way Robin saw the world. Reality w
as a medium that he could shape and manipulate, not some fixed and rigid thing; the temperament that made him spontaneous and capable of astonishing comic insight also made him unconcerned with traditional boundaries and accepted norms. In the words of the journalist Lillian Ross, who wrote extensively about Robin for the New Yorker and befriended him and became close with his family, “Robin was a genius, and genius doesn’t produce normal men next door who are good family men and look after their wives and children. Genius requires its own way of looking at and living in the world, and it isn’t always compatible with conventional ways of living.”
Robin’s choices had profound consequences for the people closest to him, and his separation from Marsha felt like another wound to a family that had already been hurt so much, the culmination to a series of problems that he alone had caused. Alex Mallick-Williams, who was Zak’s girlfriend at the time and would marry him in 2008, said that in the years prior, “We were all in this warm glow of Marsha. She made everything perfect and beautiful. And when he fell off the wagon, it was almost like the light was turned out and went away.”
His films from this period were unremarkable, an illustration of just how divergent and disconnected the strands of his career had become. Some were big, broad studio movies that paid him million-dollar salaries, like RV, a comedy that cast him as the head of a family on a slapstick cross-country journey; others were lower-budget dramas like The Night Listener, based on Armistead Maupin’s novel about a radio host searching for a young memoirist who may or may not exist. None of these films was working, critically or commercially; even Man of the Year, a satire in which Robin played a comedian who is persuaded to run for president, and which marked his third collaboration with Barry Levinson, was a dud.