by Dave Itzkoff
A lone exception was the last movie he had made before entering rehab, the family-oriented adventure Night at the Museum, which starred Ben Stiller as a watchman at the American Museum of Natural History, where the exhibits and models come magically to life after hours. Robin played an animated statue of Theodore Roosevelt, who roams the hallways on horseback and punctuates his pronouncements with shouts of “Bully!” Released at Christmas in 2006, Night at the Museum took in more than $250 million in the United States, surpassing Mrs. Doubtfire as the highest-grossing film that Robin had ever made. But it was hardly a project that owed its success to Robin’s involvement, or that could be considered a starring vehicle for him; it was just another role, and he was merely a player in the ensemble.
Robin had given his assurance, in the weeks before his treatment started, that he would join Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg in a 2006 edition of Comic Relief; it was the first time that the comedy benefit was being held since 1998 and it would now raise funds to aid the victims of Hurricane Katrina, which had struck New Orleans the year before. With the event scheduled for November 18, there were some concerns, around late September, that Robin might not attend, having only just completed his rehab stay. But sure enough, he was there to help kick off the show at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, looking slightly diminished in a harlequin costume as he sang “When the Saints Go Marching In” and danced with a Mardi Gras parade. At the end of the trio’s traditional opening remarks, Crystal began to introduce the show’s first stand-up performer, Ray Romano: “He’s tall, he’s white, he’s Italian, everybody loves him—”
“Is it pinot grigio?” Robin asked. (“You’re close,” Crystal said, under his breath.) “You know, it’s so great to get out of rehab and come right to Las Vegas,” Robin continued. “Highballs and hookers and strippers, oh my.”
“But it must be comforting to know that there really is an Eiffel Tower,” Crystal told him.
“That’s really good, I’m not hallucinating,” Robin said in a mock-quavering voice.
Even after months of inactivity for Robin, his reliable give-and-take with Crystal had not lost its velocity, and he showed no hesitation about turning his personal difficulties into grist for their routine. But the rest of the show focused largely on a new generation of comics—Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Sarah Silverman—who did not take any particular inspiration from Robin, Crystal, or Goldberg, and whose voices were better attuned to a cynical, self-aware moment. It was the last Comic Relief special that Robin would participate in.
Having put his career on pause so he could attend rehab, Robin had to take what films were available to him when he started working again. These included trifling comedies like License to Wed, in which he played an overenthusiastic reverend advising a young couple who are about to get married; and August Rush, a drama that cast him as a Fagin-like figure who trains young homeless musicians in Washington Square Park. It was a sign of just how far Robin had fallen professionally, and how toxic his name had become, that critics felt no hesitation dismissing these movies with maximum scorn. One writer said of License to Wed, “There are few things that can make some viewers run screaming from a comedy faster than footage of Robin Williams hamming it up”; another said that Robin “is at his most annoying here.”
The summer 2007 release of License to Wed coincided with the one-year anniversary of Robin’s sobriety (at which point, he joked, “You get a small chip redeemable for one drink”), and he welcomed the occasion to promote the film and answer questions about his rehab experience. He fully accepted that his addiction would remain a lifelong responsibility and that he would never be able to say he had completely overcome it: “It’s always there,” Robin explained. “You’ll always have a little bit of fear. You have to just keep at it.”
He was understandably less forthcoming about what was happening behind the scenes between him and Marsha, while they were still grappling with the question of whether they could keep their partnership alive. When one TV host innocuously asked him what the secret was to maintaining an eighteen-year marriage, Robin answered, “A wonderful wife. As a comedian, it’s always difficult to say—a wife who’s not afraid of me being free-range, in terms of having to perform so much. And also who’s just extraordinary. Without that, I would be doomed. I think she is a gift.” Asked later in the same interview to name someone who did not find him funny, Robin reflexively answered, “My wife.”
What might have been a summer of renewal and reflection was overcast with sadness when Robin’s half brother Todd died of heart failure on August 14. He was sixty-nine years old and had stood in Robin’s mind as an adventurous, larger-than-life, seemingly immortal figure; as one of his colleagues at the winery he ran said of him, “The man essentially drove his life at ninety miles an hour until it went off a cliff. He enjoyed every minute he had on earth, and he’s probably in heaven right now having a BLT with extra bacon and laughing his head off.” Robin agreed, saying that Todd, a conspicuously heavy drinker in his day, was a man who “left a big footprint with a cork, or as a friend said, he left a great trail.” For days and weeks afterward, Robin received letters of condolence from old friends of Todd’s who knew him from the various bars he’d tended, and even from Valerie, who remembered Todd as someone “who loved sucking the juice out of life.” She told Robin, “I hope you are enjoying your life more now that the addiction beast is at bay.”
At the end of the year, Robin moved out of the San Francisco home that Marsha had helped design for the two of them. Zelda, who had turned eighteen the previous summer, was already living in Los Angeles while pursuing an acting career; Cody, who was sixteen, remained with Marsha. On March 21, 2008, a few days after the family returned from a final trip to Paris together, Marsha filed for divorce from Robin, citing irreconcilable differences.
They broke up their Blue Wolf production company, which, by this point, “was pretty much just an entity with nothing going on,” said Cyndi McHale, who ran the company. “We had already closed the L.A. office, and then I closed the San Francisco office. They had fifty bins of joint storage, so I just weeded my way through that.” Even as these connections between Robin and Marsha were being dissolved, McHale said, “They were still on good terms and they would still have lunch together. I think that they both were missing what they had. They were very supportive of each other, and they still did have a great deal of affection for each other.”
In some part of Robin’s mind, their marriage was not yet a lost cause. That summer, when he traveled to New York to make Old Dogs—another corny studio comedy in which he and John Travolta played business partners trying to raise twin children that Robin’s character has only just learned that he fathered—he continued to call Marsha in San Francisco, in hopes of reconciling. “He was still wanting to come home,” said Alex Mallick-Williams. “He was still wanting to go back to Marsha. Obviously, we wanted them to get back. But it was too much.”
Even the hope that their divorce would be completed quickly and with as little acrimony as possible was dashed when Gerald Margolis, the Williams family’s attorney, who had been Robin’s lawyer since the dawn of his career, died from complications of pneumonia that September; he had been diagnosed with progressive muscular atrophy, a degenerative neurological disease, some years earlier. “He was going to mediate because they both trusted him, and they each had their own lawyer,” said McHale, Margolis’s widow. “And then he died and everything fell apart for about a year.”
So Robin returned to Tiburon, where he’d started over once before some forty years earlier. It was where everyone knew him and knew also to give him his space, to let him run or ride his bike in peace, to treat him like an ordinary human being, even if their first impulse was to regard him as anything but. He bought himself a house on Paradise Cay, a small waterfront community where many of the homes have their own docks and the yachts to go with them; his residence, on a quiet stretch of road undocumented on Google Maps, was a comparatively simple, single-l
evel dwelling marked only by a black fence, behind which sat a pair of comical simian gargoyles, one playing a panpipe and the other a flute.
As with many of Robin’s past homes, its most cherished feature was hidden from view. As his friend Lisa Birnbach described it, “He had a huge room that was like a safe room—a bunker, no windows—with the most meticulously kept collections of soldiers from every war that soldiers were made. Historic ones. Glass ones. Metal ones. Gold ones. Lead ones. From Japan, from Germany. From the Boer War, the Spanish-American War. And then a lot of Star Wars-y stuff, too. I don’t think he let people in that room much. And it was spotless. I think if you moved a soldier at all, he would know it. People wondered, why is he collecting them, still? But I think they were his friends.”
In the serene surroundings, Robin attended his regular AA meetings and performed stand-up occasionally at the Throckmorton Theatre, a charmingly tumbledown three-hundred-seat space in nearby Mill Valley that offered him an island of visibility in a sea of anonymity. “When he dropped by, it’s because he felt like going on or he just felt like hanging out, so we never put pressure on him to do a performance,” said Mark Pitta, who had been a comedian with Robin in San Francisco in the 1970s and now hosted a weekly Tuesday night stand-up showcase at the theater. “Sometimes Robin would be in the green room hanging out, and we would love for him to go on. Lucy Mercer, who runs the theater, would always go, ‘Would you like a Coca-Cola?’ Just to get him some caffeine. And then when the headliner was about ten minutes from ending, I would say to him: ‘Do you feel like playing today?’ That’s how casual it was.”
It didn’t take long for the community to become aware of Robin’s affinity for the Throckmorton, and for theatergoers to turn out for the chance of catching one of his surprise appearances. One evening after ending his weekly show, Pitta recalled, “I said, ‘Thanks, good night,’ and the audience left, and I go in the wings and Robin is standing there. He goes, ‘Can I play?’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, sure.’ And I didn’t reintroduce him. He just walked out and the audience started coming back in. Afterward, he said, ‘You know, I needed that.’ Sometimes he’d get his creative juices out just by holding court in the green room. But sometimes he needed to be onstage. Like we all do.”
At the Throckmorton and at the Napa Valley Opera House near his ranch home, Robin started developing a new stand-up set that would consolidate all the suffering and woe he had lately experienced into a single, cleansing monologue; as if there were any doubt about who he held responsible for his spate of troubles, he titled the show Weapons of Self Destruction. He made no secret of the fact that a new tour would also help him fulfill the fiscal commitments of his day-to-day operations and to the two ex-wives he was now pledged to support. “Initially,” Robin said, “I was going to call the tour Remember the Alimony. And they went, ‘Maybe not.’”
“It was a financial thing of going, no movies are on the horizon, so I’ll go back and make money the old-fashioned way—just go back out,” he explained. “As a comic, it’s one tool I have that I can use. And I’m not strapped. So much was happening, it was like, you’re coming through some hardcore shit. When times are scary or weird, go and have a good laugh.”
The national tour was announced in the summer of 2008 and got under way in the fall, but it did not get very far. At the start of 2009, as Robin reached Florida, he was hounded by a nagging cough he could not seem to shake; it grew worse, and, more worryingly, he also began experiencing spells of dizziness. With help from his manager David Steinberg, who was with him on the road, Robin was brought to a series of doctors in Miami who determined he had an irregular heartbeat, a damaged mitral valve in need of repair, and a broken aortic valve that would have to be replaced.
“I kept thinking it was a pulmonary thing,” Robin recounted. “I had one doctor thinking it was a respiratory thing. I took these respiratory tests, I went no. And then when they finally did the angiogram, the angiogram just showed this valve that was like, pffffffft,” he said, making a raspberry noise. “It was just blown. It was crazy-ass. And then, what do we do?”
“They said, ‘Ho, ho ho, he’s not leaving here. Just hold on, we’re going to operate tomorrow,’” Steinberg recalled. “I said, ‘Relax. This is a pretty big decision. You don’t just hop into it.’”
Robin also wanted to take a moment to consider his options before undertaking the dangerous but necessary procedure. “It wasn’t like when Letterman went in with five blocked arteries, they said we have to do this tomorrow,” he explained. “It was more like, you have time, but you don’t want to push it. You don’t want to gamble.”
Friends said that while Robin was weighing his options, he was also reckoning with just how close he had come to dying and how very near to him this terrifying possibility still lingered. A few days before he arrived in Florida, Robin had been in Austin, biking with Lance Armstrong, the champion cyclist. “We went for a short, easy, flat ride,” Armstrong said. “He mentioned to me that he hadn’t been riding that much, and wasn’t in great shape. But he was really struggling on the bike. I just chalked it up to, he hadn’t been on a bike in a while. Then a couple days went by, and he had those other symptoms that led him to the doctor, and then they found the bigger issue.
“It’s pretty scary to think about,” Armstrong said, “that you’ve got a bad valve, you’re out on a ride and anything can happen out there. You wait a day or two and you come across that really stressful moment, either physically or emotionally, or a combination of all that, and it’s over. You literally fall down, and if you’re not around someone who can help, you’re done. And that is a very profound thing to think about, and it changes you. There’s just no telling, on a day like that, what would I have done? I’m not trained. It would have been—ugh.” He did not finish the thought.
Dana Carvey, who had undergone multiple angioplasties and a double bypass operation to unblock a coronary artery in the late 1990s, said that Robin reached out to him from Miami, seeking his advice. “He was extremely vulnerable that night he called me,” Carvey said, “which is totally understandable, because he wasn’t on his home turf. He was on tour and he’s being told all these things. I was glad to talk to him. It was cathartic for me, I knew exactly where he was, emotionally, that night. Like, what’s going on? And I was glad to be, like, no, this is an area I really know a lot about, and I have great context for it.” After consultation with Carvey and his heart surgeon, P. K. Shah, Robin flew to the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio to make his final decision about the valve replacement.
“They said, ‘Okay, here’s the drill,’” Robin recalled. “‘You can go with a bovine valve, which we may have to replace, maybe not, in twenty years. Or if you get a mechanical heart, you never have to replace the valve, but you have to take a blood thinner, and if you don’t get the dosage right, it can cause clotting.’ Okay, I’ll go bovine valve. I’ll take door number one, Bobby, bovine.”
Asked whether he considered the possibility that the surgery itself might be fatal, Robin replied, “I don’t think you have time. If that’s there, it’s so deep in the back. It didn’t really come up.” Then, slipping into a booming, God-like voice: “Hey, this may not go well. Once you’ve made the decision, it’s pretty much full-speed.”
But friends said Robin was grappling with a fear they’d never seen him express before. “He was really wobbly and getting scared,” Crystal said. “When he got to Cleveland for the surgery, we had these talks. He told me what the repairs were, and it was much more complicated than just doing a bypass. I said to him, this is like when astronauts go on the far side of the moon and they lose communication for like forty minutes. You want to make sure that they come back around the other side, and then you hear the static, and then, ‘Hello, Houston.’ So, I’ll be Houston. When you come back from the far side, I’ll be there.”
From across the country, Robin’s family members gathered at the hospital to be with him before the operation on March 13, 2009. Marsha, in the
midst of the divorce proceedings, flew out from San Francisco; Zelda and Cody came, too, as did Zak and his wife, Alex, even though they felt they had been discouraged by Robin’s managers. “His people were like, ‘No, you shouldn’t come,’” Alex said. “And we were like, ‘Of course, we’re going to come. We’re not going to not be there if he needs heart surgery.’” No one was trying to prevent her and Zak from seeing Robin, she said, but the confusion was symptomatic of a power struggle that was always happening around Robin and which had grown more acute as the risks to his health intensified. “People always wanted to be Robin’s Number One,” she said. “I mean, I get it. He’s a magnetic man. You would want to be his Number One. But he has a family, guys.”
McLaurin Smith-Williams, Robin’s surviving half brother, also came to Cleveland from his home in Memphis. One night before Robin’s operation, the two of them went to dinner at a popular barbecue restaurant called Hot Sauce Williams—the name alone was irresistible—where Robin’s unexpected presence quickly created a stir. “I think they must have called every cousin and relative in the city, because pretty soon the place filled up,” McLaurin said. “One of the ladies in there, who was apparently a family member, she comes over to Robin and said, ‘I’m going to be in the operating room—I’m one of the surgical nurses. I’ll be there with you when they cut you open!’”
Even though Robin and Marsha’s divorce was not yet finalized, his family knew that he had started dating other women again. They knew and had met his girlfriend Charlotte Filbert, a twenty-seven-year-old artist from New York whose paintings he had bought; and at the Cleveland Clinic, they were introduced to Susan Schneider, a forty-four-year-old artist and graphic designer who had been on tour with him when his heart problems became apparent. Susan had met Robin in October 2007 at an Apple Store in Marin, spotting him in camouflage clothing but, of course, immediately recognizing who he was. “How’s the camo working for ya?” she teasingly asked him.