Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  “Not too good,” Robin answered.

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” she said.

  “Not really,” he replied. “You found me.”

  As they spoke, Robin learned that Susan was a lifelong Marin resident who had earned a design degree from California College of the Arts in Oakland, and had two young sons, Peter and Casey, from a previous marriage that had ended in 2001. She was also a recovering alcoholic with twenty-three years’ sobriety; he joked to her, using the falsetto child’s voice from his comedy act, that she must have been an “alcotot” when she was in kindergarten. Eventually they started attending twelve-step meetings together.

  Other members of Robin’s family believed that he and Susan had already known each other from Alcoholics Anonymous before they had their Apple Store encounter. “I knew that they had met at AA,” Zak said. “I learned that they met because Dad told me. They might not have spoken directly prior but I do know that they had attended the same meetings. And I knew that they moved very quickly in terms of their relationship.”

  Amid the anxiety and uncertainty of whether Robin would even survive the surgery or his recovery from it, his children were concerned that Susan was monopolizing their father. In a particularly awkward moment, Robin’s surgeons offered his family a pager to hold on to during the procedure, which could be used to summon them on a moment’s notice if any problems occurred. While Zak and Cody hesitated, each expecting the other to take the pager, they were startled when Susan claimed it for herself.

  “We were hurt, as a family, that we weren’t able to spend time with Dad,” Zak later said. “As far as we knew, he wasn’t going to make it out of heart surgery. It would be her last time with him as well. But we were worried and we had met her for the first time, and she had explicitly expressed a disinterest in getting to know us as people. Which is hard, because we’re really into being supportive of family and community.”

  All of this was transpiring without Robin’s awareness. When he woke up from his surgery, he was in the intensive care unit, attached to machines. Looking down at his shaved chest, he could see electric wires sprouting up as bountifully as the hair that previously grew there. He spent the next ten days connected to these various devices, including a morphine drip that he, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, could activate whenever he was in pain—but only up to a point. “They do have a cut-off,” he said, “so you can’t just fall asleep going, ahhhhh. You can’t just start wanking yourself.” His intake of pain medications for his recovery would also have to be carefully monitored. “A lot of the drugs they give you are opiates,” he said, “and your body goes, ‘I know this shit. Let’s go back on the train.’ And you have to go, ‘No.’”

  For many years, Robin and Crystal had a custom of calling each other in various characters and guises and doing long riffs over the phone. “They used to be restricted to late at night, when he knew I was up, because we’re both registered insomniacs,” Crystal explained.

  It was a tradition that Crystal modified slightly for Robin’s recovery period. “I started leaving these messages as a guy named Vinny,” he said, adopting a Brooklyn accent. “‘I’m Vinny, the valve guy. I’ve got your valve. I hope it’s the right valve. Because the order number, I couldn’t make out if it was a 652-C or a 652-G, so I brought both. Let me know what you need.’ [beep] ‘Hey, I haven’t heard back from you. It’s Vinny, the valve guy.’ So that when he woke up, he’d have ten or twelve messages from Vinny the valve guy.”

  “Once he got out of all the anesthesia,” Crystal said, “I got a call from him, just crying with laughter. ‘My ribs hurt, boss, but oh my God, the valve guy.’”

  He could already sense how his friend had emerged from the ordeal a new man. “When you go through a death scare,” Crystal said, “you realize what he’s realized: how short things are. They’re not clichés, they’re real. When you experience that, it just changes your point of view about life.” In Robin’s case, Crystal said it made him “be so much more attentive to friends and the kids, and needing that more. And wanting it more.”

  Once Robin was discharged from intensive care and returned home for further convalescence, he realized he felt different, too. What he desired most of all was human interaction, in whatever form he could receive it. “That’s the weird thing after the heart surgery is, you appreciate every fucking connection with a person,” he said. “It’s so fucking amazing. Human contact after you’ve had heart surgery is pretty fucking valuable. You appreciate little things, like walks on the beach with a defibrillator.”

  18

  THE TIGER IN WINTER

  When David Letterman was recuperating from his quintuple bypass operation in 2000 and needed a prescription-strength dose of levity, Robin was the comedian he turned to. Nine years later, it was Letterman’s time to return the favor, bringing him onto the Late Show for his first major post-surgery appearance. Robin was ostensibly there to promote his appearance in the comedy sequel Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, but really, he wanted the world to see him healthy, restored, and exuberantly embracing existence. Dashing onto the stage of the Ed Sullivan Theater on the evening of May 12, 2009, in a neat gray suit, Robin threw open the jacket to reveal underneath a black T-shirt with a large white heart drawn on it. He playfully thanked Letterman “for the ambulance ride” and observed that they were both now members of the “brotherhood of the zipper chest,” then broke into tears as he thanked by name the doctors who had overseen his surgery.

  As they swapped war stories about their recoveries, Letterman started to say to Robin, “It’s sort of thrilling to have that project, to bring yourself back.” But Robin found his inspiration in something simpler: “To be alive!” During a commercial break, the host turned to Robin and privately asked him, “You ever get emotional after the open-heart surgery?” Robin felt his eyes welling up with tears once again as he answered, “Fuck yeah.”

  “It was very much like shorthand between two survivors,” Robin later said. “You really do get weepy, like, ‘Oh, a kitten.’ ‘Oh my God, did you see that flower?’ Butch up, motherfucker.”

  He could only speculate as to why he was more receptive and sentimental in his postsurgical state. “I think, literally, because you have cracked the chest,” he said, explaining that men, in particular, clad themselves in a layer of armor, but once it is pierced—here he mimed his rib cage being broken open—“It’s like, ‘Babies! My babies!’ You are vulnerable, totally, for the first time since birth. You’re heavily medicated and the only thing you’re missing is a tit. If they had that after surgery, a lot more people would go, yeah. ‘You want more drugs?’ No, a tit.”

  Friends like Eric Idle and Bobcat Goldthwait, who spent portions of the summer visiting Robin at his Napa ranch while he rested and regained his strength, felt they saw a new spirit sweep over him. Comedy had never been a mere occupation for Robin; it was always an expression of some inner need to spread joy and please people. But now it had become even more important; it was a mechanism for survival, to remind himself that he was lucky to have survived and that he should savor every moment of his latest act.

  “Comedy is life-affirming,” Idle explained. “Better to be here and funny than not. It’s all inevitable, so it’s about optimism in the face of inevitable disaster.” Robin, he said, “was back, but he was calmer, it seemed to me. He wasn’t frenetic. He was mellower.”

  Goldthwait agreed he had seen “a bit of a rebirth in Robin” and that his friend seemed “the happiest I’ve seen him in years.” “I guess almost dying will give you a sense of gratitude,” he said.

  “Most comedians are wired with a sense of self-loathing,” Goldthwait said, and what he and Robin had in common was that neither of them could readily accept “that we are enough that people will be happy with that. We always have to be on, or working. And people are happy when he’s not on, which, with the amount of self-loathing we have, is really hard for us to accept.”

  Given the spate o
f suffering that Robin had experienced in recent years—the descent into alcoholism, the divorce from Marsha, the openheart surgery—Idle said, “If you come out, you realize you’ve been given a gift, and that it can’t all be about you. He’s always been a good dad, a loving dad, tried hard to be a good father, a good husband. It’s not easy.”

  One of Robin’s next post-recovery appearances was in a movie that Goldthwait wrote and directed called World’s Greatest Dad, whose title was hardly intended as a compliment. In this scathing black comedy, Robin portrayed Lance, a high school English teacher with frustrated literary ambitions and a monstrous teenage son. When his son accidentally dies by hanging himself in an act of autoerotic asphyxiation gone awry, Lance forges a suicide note to cover up the circumstances of his death. That note, once obtained by the students and faculty at Lance’s school, becomes a kind of viral sensation, and Lance gains the opportunity to build a prosperous writing career with further forgeries published under his dead son’s name—so long as he never reveals that he is the true author of these works.

  World’s Greatest Dad was the first movie Robin had made with Goldthwait since Shakes the Clown, Goldthwait’s 1991 directorial debut about a down-on-his-luck birthday party entertainer, in which Robin had a cameo as an aggressive mime instructor. Like its predecessor, World’s Greatest Dad was a low-budget independent feature—one shot before the halted Weapons of Self Destruction tour, and which would receive only a limited theatrical release in the summer of 2009—and Robin’s decision to take the lead role was one that Goldthwait interpreted as a significant gesture of trust and friendship. “He’s always acted like we’re peers, which, clearly, we’re not,” Goldthwait said.

  As far as Robin was concerned, he was simply supporting an artist he respected and a script he genuinely responded to. “I wanted to play it,” he said. “It was not like, ‘Oh, this’ll be a favor—help little Bobby.’ No, it’s actually a part that I went, ‘I like this.’ I joked with him after the movie, it’s like Dead Penis Society. I liked the fact that it deals with the relationship between a boy and a single father. Their relationship is so strained, and everything that the parent does isn’t working.”

  Naturally Robin could not help but take the opportunity to reflect on his relationships with his own children, all of whom were now young adults. He did not deny that these bonds had been tested at times, but he believed that his sobriety had strengthened them. “Sometimes it’s Lord of the Flies and other times it’s, ‘Ooh, they’re angels,’” he said. “There have been phases with all of them where it’s been rough, and they come through it. I’m totally a work in progress. I’m learning and trying. But right now I’m at a point where I can go, ‘Yeah, I love them. Everything about them. The good and the bad.’ I think they say the same about me. As an alcoholic, that’s a great gift.”

  Zak, who was now twenty-six years old, in the first year of his marriage to Alex and living in New York, felt connected to Robin in ways he never had before—less like a traditional parent and child than like peers who could apply an unsparing eye to each other’s lives and offer candid advice.

  “There’s no expectation for you to be a father figure,” Zak would tell him. “You’re relinquished of your duties as such. I’m here as your friend.”

  At times, Zak found himself playing the role of guardian and caregiver to Robin, offering him support and encouragement in his moments of insecurity. “Dad’s happiness was correlated very much to how he was doing, career-wise,” Zak said. “When there were films that would be less successful, he took it very personally. He took it as a personal attack. That was really hard for us to see.”

  Robin was afraid of disapproval and rejection, and at a certain point his need for acceptance led to a prohibitive excess of caution.

  “I think it was hard to take a leap into things, because validation was so important for him,” Zak said. “There’s a challenge there, when people validating the projects know what they want for you, and that leads to a specific way in which your business gets done. His team was great at giving him latitude to work on the projects he wanted to work on. But the industry was changing. I used to joke with Dad, ‘Al Pacino wouldn’t make it as a celebrity today. A small, mousy Italian?’”

  Robin also recognized that “he was no longer the leading role that he wanted to be,” Zak said, but his fears that he couldn’t navigate the complexities of contemporary entertainment inhibited him from branching out into other disciplines.

  “Dad was extraordinarily intimidated by the business side of the biz,” Zak said. “That broke my heart. Because he was brilliant. He was a polymath. He could put things together. He could do anything. But I think that he felt that there was a side to the movie business that he didn’t want to touch, that kept him in front of the camera. That was challenging for me, because I always wanted to push him to do more things: Write, direct, produce. He felt that it wasn’t for him. He was an entertainer at heart.”

  By the fall of 2009, Robin was ready to resume the Weapons of Self Destruction tour he’d had to postpone, with an itinerary that revisited all the cities he’d missed, running from September 30 in Bloomington, Indiana, through December 5 in Las Vegas. His Washington, DC, performances on November 20 and 21 would be taped for an HBO special to air in December.

  Robin seemed to be motivated by an urgent need to talk to audiences about everything he’d experienced. “It would be insane not to talk about it,” he said. “‘So what happened?’ ‘Nothing.’ It’s what’s happened, and everyone knows.”

  Billy Crystal saw this compulsion in him, too. “From our intense conversations and experiences over the last couple of years, especially with his divorce and the illness, and the pain that he’s gone through, his brain is the one thing that’s kept him buoyant,” he said of Robin. “I think he needs the stand-up in a different way than he did before. It’s still a safe place for him to be, but he can talk about things and make himself feel better, not just everybody else.”

  In truth, the ninety-minute set, whose central onstage image was a photograph of Robin’s face with a piece of tape across his mouth labeled “DANGER,” still featured a fair amount of shtick. From its opening, in which Robin, dressed entirely in black, would take the stage to the thunderous rumble of the aggressive Kid Rock anthem “Bawitdaba,” the performance retained much of the truculence and coarseness of his 2002 tour; the stock voices he used for gay, black, Jewish, Asian, and Southern people were still flaunted like faded college T-shirts; and there were one-liners about Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Sarah Palin, and George W. Bush, attempts at topicality that still felt alien to Robin’s act, but which could be easily revised and interchanged from show to show.

  As David Steinberg, his manager, explained, all he had to do was glance at a newspaper or TV show, feed Robin a headline, and the material practically wrote itself. “I lob him softballs, and then he makes them Robin,” Steinberg said. “It’s a pretty good job.”

  Occasionally, Robin made use of other writers, including Mason Steinberg, David Steinberg’s son, a resource that some members of his team did not feel he necessarily needed. Cyndi McHale, who had been in charge of Blue Wolf and worked as a travel coordinator on Weapons of Self Destruction, said that David Steinberg persuaded Robin to bring Mason on board by leaning on Robin’s fear of irrelevance. “He got that by saying, ‘You’re not reaching out to kids, the younger generation. They’re just not getting it. You need fresh, new material,’” she explained. “And then he installed his son to do it. To me, Robin never needed a writer. He’s brilliant. How do you tell Robin what to say or do? You leave him alone and let him. He’s just a genius. But everybody comes at it from their own perspective.”

  Beneath its calcified outer shell, however, the show contained an inner core of confession, a deeper layer of truthfulness that Robin was trying to work into his act. As he later said, he had faith that an audience well versed in his recent woes would turn out for the resuscitated tour, just to see if he
was still standing. “And you’re alive,” he said, with a satisfied laugh, “and you’re not like, [pretending to speak through an electrolarynx] ‘Thank you for coming. Nice to be here. Wonderful audience.’ It’s a bit of that, and then, ‘Whaddaya got? What’s new?’”

  Beyond that, Robin wondered, “How much more can you give? Other than, literally, open-heart surgery onstage? Not much. That’s about it. But it is actually cool to talk about this shit.”

  About fifteen minutes into the set, Robin offered the first real window into his life, with a long riff on his open-heart surgery. He talked about the symptoms and examinations that led up to it: “An angiogram is where they go through your groin to your heart,” he explained, “and who knew that the way to a man’s heart was through his groin? Many women are going, we’ve known that forever.” And he explained why he had been tempted to choose a porcine replacement valve: “Because you’re already inoculated for swine flu. And one of the side effects is you can find truffles, which is kind of cool.”

  He was clear-eyed, too, about the many missteps he’d made lately in his film career, joking in a bit about his car’s GPS system: “I was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge. I was halfway across, and all of a sudden, the car went, ‘Take a right turn.’ What? No can do, HAL. Not that depressed, really. And the car went, ‘Really, Robin? I saw Bicentennial Man.’ Shut the fuck up! Damn you.”

  He was more circumspect about making reference to his divorce, never mentioning Marsha by name and quipping only obliquely, “In marriage, I’ve learned this: There’s penalties for early withdrawal and depositing in another account. Remember that.”

  But when, at the show’s one-hour mark, Robin turned to the subject of alcoholism, he went in with a vengeance, delivering a fiery comic jeremiad that made an angry mockery of the kind of misbehavior he’d engaged in at the height of his addiction. He ridiculed the wanton selfishness of the compulsive drinker and gave a brief but vehement recitation of the warning signs of alcoholism, such as, “After a night of heavy drinking, you wake up fully clothed, going, ‘Hey, somebody shit in my pants!’”