Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  “There’s a voice that tells alcoholics that we can drink,” Robin said in the routine. “It’s the same voice that you hear if you go up to the top of a very large building, and you look over the side—there’s a little voice that goes, [small, squeaky sound] ‘Jump! You can fly!’” Even the tour’s promotional materials featured self-flagellating jokes that sounded as if they’d come straight from a twelve-step meeting, like his one-liner, printed across the official Weapons of Self Destruction tour program, that describes an alcoholic as someone who “violates their standards faster than they can lower them.”

  Under closer examination, these were not routines where Robin actually talked about himself. “It’s like me,” he explained, “but not totally me. It’s based on what happened, but is it the actual incident? No. To protect others? Maybe. I haven’t had the balls to talk about it full-out. In a room full of alcoholics, I can.”

  Robin was especially pleased with one bit, clearly based on personal experience, in which he talked about the process of bottoming out. Alcoholics, he said, “can’t wait to shit on everybody, family, friends.” Throwing up his middle fingers like they were sharpened blades, he exclaimed, “We’ll be like, ‘Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! Go fuck yourself! Fuck you! Fuck you!” Then, unexpectedly, he pointed his middle fingers back at himself. In a quieter tone, he said, “I’m fucked.”

  After having performed that scene a number of times on the road and hearing it silence his crowds, Robin later explained, “There was a moment where the whole audience went, ‘Ohhh.’ And I went, that’s the moment.”

  In his experience, Robin said, “You have to give up. That’s the time when you finally do have hope. That’s that weird thing when you’re totally fucking alone. That’s the moment when the help begins.”

  The honesty that Robin expressed onstage inspired a mutual openness in his fans, like the one who gave him a hand-written note after a performance in Atlanta that read:

  Thank you for saving me. You are a great person and you give so much of yourself to others. My son died of cancer and without you I would not have made it thru.

  Just remember I would go to Hell to bring you back. If you need me. I love you!! I know you hear this all the time—But you were there for me.

  That kind of adoration flattered Robin, but it frightened him, too—not that he worried these people would want too much from him, but that he would inevitably let them down. “What’s your credibility?” he asked himself, after letting out a loud, delighted cackle. “Why are you looking to me for advice? You come to me? Isn’t there someone more qualified?”

  It made him reflect on his friend Richard Pryor, whose personal suffering he could perhaps finally match but whose truthfulness he could never seem to equal. “The most honest person I ever knew in comedy was Pryor,” he said. “He literally would talk about dying, being in the hospital after burning himself alive. He’s covered in ice, steam is coming off of him, and he’s got an orderly going, ‘Hey, Richard, how about that last autograph?’ He basically made fun of the fact that he died and came back from it.”

  Honesty could also be a danger, as Robin knew: “Relentlessly honest people, they’re almost frightening to be around,” he said. “‘You’re fat.’ Thank you.” But as he continued to chart a course back to sobriety and integrity, he felt he had to embrace a policy of total candor: “That’s the only cure you have right now, is the honesty of going, ‘This is who you are.’ I know who I am.”

  As the Weapons of Self Destruction tour reached its conclusion at the end of 2009, Robin seemed to have found a new sense of calmness and order. Even though his movies were entering and exiting theaters with little notice or impact, he was happy in Tiburon and able to reconnect with people who had been absent from his life for many years. “Our relationship started up again after he divorced Marsha,” said Valerie. “And we had a rich texting relationship. It was very sweet, but guarded, in that there was no romance. There was just a deep love and caring. He could let the love flow again, I guess, which is a hippie way of putting it.”

  He remained a fixture at the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley, where sometimes he’d go out and perform comedy if the mood struck him, or just sit up in the lighting booth and make quiet whistling noises to himself and his pals as he watched other stand-ups fumble their way through their sets. “I’d be onstage and he’d be up in one of the boxes,” said Marc Maron. “Any time a joke would not do as well as I anticipated, I’d hear him up there, going, ‘Ohohohohoho.’”

  “Even if you were trying out new stuff and the crowd stared at you, they liked you,” said Steven Pearl, another Throckmorton regular. “And even Robin got stared at there. He’d do some joke, it wouldn’t go over—‘Ooh, needs work. Needs work.’ But the crowd, they’re just good, friendly people.”

  Though his star had dimmed, Robin was still a vastly more recognizable performer than the journeyman comics who played there regularly; they treated him like an equal and tried not to be awed by his celebrity, but deep down they knew that his presence there was special. “His face was as known as the Coca-Cola logo, and he had zillions of dollars,” said Pearl. “It was like Muddy Waters walking into a blues club in Chicago. ‘Hey, the old man’s here!’”

  Robin didn’t come to the Throckmorton to be idolized, but he did benefit emotionally from his visits. When he was at the theater, Pearl said, “He was one of the guys. We were just a bunch of crazy people hanging out and making each other laugh. And that’s what it was. He was like any of my other friends—I didn’t love him any more or any less.”

  Many of the Throckmorton comics were also introduced to Susan Schneider, who was now in a serious committed relationship with Robin; they saw her as a positive, healing influence in his life. “I met Susan in the green room,” said Mark Pitta. “For three months I called her Cindy and she never corrected me. I thought that was cute. When she was out of the room, I would tell him, ‘Man, she’s like a bright light when she walks in here. So tall and smiley. She had really good energy.’ One time, when she came back in the room, Robin looked at her and he says, ‘He says you’re a bright light!’ But that was sweet.”

  Other longtime friends of Robin’s, who had known him through his nearly twenty years of marriage to Marsha, saw Susan as a very different woman from his second wife. She was more focused on her own art and not interested in being Robin’s professional collaborator, which was perhaps what Robin needed at that moment. “She loved taking him to her yoga studio for her gallery openings and things like that,” said Cyndi McHale. “Susan was warm and friendly and inclusive for quite a while. She didn’t want anything to do with his business. She just wanted to paint.”

  “Robin wasn’t a guy that entertained,” Billy Crystal said. “As a couple, Marsha did all that—Thanksgivings and big functions—so it was different with Susan. It was an adjustment to get to know her, because we were and still are so close with Marsha. What do you do in those situations? We got to know her a little bit.”

  Marsha had first come into Robin’s life as an employee before she was his romantic partner or spouse, but Susan did not have the same preparation, and she approached their relationship differently. As Wendy Asher explained, “Marsha worked for him for a while. Before they were even together, she knew Robin really well. She traveled with him. So she knew exactly what she was getting into. And she also knew how to take care of Robin. Robin needed someone to take care of him, and it wasn’t that difficult, if you’re aware of things. Marsha organized every single thing. She’s an organizer. And Susan wanted people to take care of her. Things were just not the same.”

  Privately, Robin told Susan that he had been diagnosed with depression and was taking medication to treat it; as he put it to her, he had been on enough Effexor “to cheer up a whole army of elephants.” But he was also working with a psychiatrist to get off of prescription drugs, and over time, she said, “I watched a happy man emerge.”

  But as Robin stopped using antid
epressants, Susan also became familiar with the fuller spectrum of his emotions and the fears he had about his professional standing. “The line of work he was in bred anxiety and self-centered concerns,” she said. “He would always say, ‘You’re only as good as your last performance.’ Some insecurities were just hard-wired into him from childhood, or genetic, or he’d picked them up in reaction to bad experiences in life.”

  McLaurin, his half brother, had been making occasional trips to the Bay Area from his home in Memphis to spend more time with Robin. They talked about science, math, and military history and visited bookstores: Robin gave him gifts of rare and antique editions that included experimental proofs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy from 1721 and an original edition of Mark Twain’s Sketches New and Old from 1875. McLaurin, too, saw Robin grapple with a fluctuating sense of his self-worth. “He was very modest about his career,” McLaurin said. “We were having lunch somewhere and he said, ‘You know, that waiter, he has as much talent as I do.’ He said, ‘I just had a bunch of breaks.’ And that was his attitude: I don’t know why I’m so famous. I don’t do anything particularly special. He actually thought that.”

  In the spring of 2009, David Steinberg learned from his wife about a play she had seen at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City called Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. Written by Rajiv Joseph, it was a bleak, existential comedy-drama set in Iraq during the early, chaotic days following the US-led invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Its principal characters included the Tiger, who in the first scene is shot to death by American soldiers after he bites off a Marine’s hand. He wanders as a ghost through the rest of the play, offering sarcastic commentary on the nature of being and not being; when he sees his own dead body from the outside, he muses:

  So that’s what I look like. You go your whole life never knowing how you look. And then there you are. You get hungry, you get stupid, you get shot and die. And you get this quick glimpse at how you look, to those around you, to the world. It’s never what you thought. And then it’s over. Curtains. Ka-boom.

  Later in the play, when another character joins him in the afterlife and asks him what happens next, the Tiger responds, “I’ll tell you what happens: God leans down just close enough and whispers into your ear: Go fuck yourself. And then He’s gone.”

  The Tiger is portrayed by an actor who walks upright and wears no special costume; as an author’s note from Joseph indicates, “The Tiger can be any age, although ideally he is older, scrappy, past his prime, yet still tough. He can be any race except Middle-Eastern. His language is loose, casual; his profanity is second nature.” In 2010, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and a Broadway transfer was put in motion; when an established star was needed to play the title role in this production, Robin’s name was at the top of that wish list.

  The play had Steinberg’s approval and soon Robin’s as well. Once he was able to review the script for himself, Robin said, “It just hit me hard, it was so powerful.” He responded to what he called “the Buddhist nature” of the story: “It’s all these ghosts wandering around, talking and gaining more consciousness as they continue through the play.” (And, he said, “I’m hairy enough to be a tiger, so that’s good.”) In an acting career that spanned more than three decades, he had yet to make his Broadway debut (his 2002 stand-up performance notwithstanding); the closest he had previously come was his role in the problematic 1988 run of Waiting for Godot with Steve Martin. By comparison, Robin said Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo was “like Beckett but even darker, which is hard to do.”

  Moisés Kaufman, who had directed the play’s productions in 2009 and 2010 and would direct it on Broadway, introduced himself to Robin in a telephone call. Kaufman had grown up in Venezuela watching dubbed reruns of the popular sitcom Mork y Mindy, and he expected to be intimidated by Robin but found him humble, open-minded, and eager to get to work. “Before I hung up,” Kaufman recalled, “he said, ‘Okay, boss. I’ll read the play again, let’s meet and we’ll talk.’ He called me boss. It was very moving.” In a face-to-face conversation at his home in Tiburon, Robin explained to Kaufman that his USO trips to the Middle East had strongly influenced his decision to take on the role. “He had been spending a lot of time with soldiers,” Kaufman said. “He would go and perform for them, and he would see what these kids were going through. And he felt that this is the only piece of writing he had seen that spoke to him about the experience of the kids over there. Because these characters both suffered so much.”

  Robyn Goodman, a lead producer of the Broadway production, had also gotten to know Robin and Susan in the process of recruiting him, and she believed his interests in the play ran even deeper. What Robin connected with, Goodman said, were its underlying themes: “the pressures of war, which are a little bit like the pressures of mortality, or exactly like it, in some cases. The play was about defining your moral constructs under pressure, and I think Robin always felt under pressure. There was something in that play, and that part, that was asking the big questions about why we’re alive and how we behave, morally, in situations.” Now that Robin had his sobriety, his heart surgery, and Susan, “finally he was making good choices in life,” said Goodman. “He was taking care of himself.”

  Goodman came to feel that Susan was an essential match for Robin at this stage of his life—a friend, a fellow traveler, and a creative talent in her own right. She found Susan’s paintings so fascinating that Goodman eventually bought one for herself, an oil work that Goodman described as a “very tumultuous, dark setting of a sea and a storm. There was something wild about it that I really loved. There’s an emotion in her painting that I respond to.”

  The play was a risky proposition for Robin: it required a commitment of at least five months in New York, from rehearsals to opening to its hopeful inclusion in the Tony Awards, during which time he could not make a movie or appear in other projects that required substantial amounts of his time. There was a chance the play could run longer if it succeeded and much shorter if it failed; despite his Juilliard training, he knew nothing about the business of theater, particularly as it was practiced on Broadway in 2011.

  But accepting the challenge gave him clarity about what he wanted to be doing as an actor, what he wanted his life to look like going forward, and the people he wanted around him. Knowing that he and Susan would be separated for much of the time he was in New York, he proposed to her just before he left Tiburon; they did not immediately set a wedding date but planned for Susan to come out and visit him every week while he did the play.

  That February, Robin began his work in earnest. As Kaufman recalled, “When the costume designer came in, as he was taking his measurements, Robin said to him, ‘Okay, thank you, boss.’ I was like, ‘Dude, you call everybody boss! There’s nothing special about boss!’ I always teased him. I said, ‘I’m going to call you boss, too.’ It became a running joke.”

  In the rehearsal room, the director and the cast observed that the Robin who showed up was not a self-important superstar but a curious craftsman who was eager to put in the hours. “He was interested in the beat of the play and very collaborative,” Kaufman said. “Any note that I gave him, the first words out of his mouth were, ‘It sounds very interesting. Let me try it.’ That didn’t mean he always agreed! But we had conversations about it, and we were both on a journey of discovery. He was so willing to try anything and so excited by the process. He was having the life of a working actor and that gave him so much joy.”

  When previews of the play started at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on March 11, Robin was ready and off-book, with his ad-libbing impulses bound and gagged for the duration of the run. “He never improvised,” Kaufman said. “It was always the text that Rajiv wrote. Every single word. There was never any question of improvisation. That was never even discussed. He always did the text, and he always did it perfectly, to the letter.” Susan, who watched him work rigorous eight-show weeks with two pe
rformances each on Wednesdays and Saturdays, was astonished by his capacity to assimilate and retain the material. “He was always on top of it,” she said. “The show schedule was intense and his memory skills herculean.”

  Little by little, Robin began to open up to his costars, including Arian Moayed, who played an Iraqi translator who works for the US soldiers, and whose dressing room was opposite Robin’s. During intermissions, Robin would occasionally slip into his room, close the door only partway, “and he’d be like, ‘How do you think it’s going tonight, boss?’” Moayed recalled. “And I was like, ‘Good.’ ‘Did you notice something I was trying in that first scene?’” Eventually, Moayed realized what Robin was really asking for in these moments: “I was like, of course, he’s just like us—he needs the validation,” he said. “In the grand scheme of the audience, if you saw this show two times, back to back, you would not notice the difference. But for us, it’s monumental. Those small, minute things are what we all try to do in the game of making art. We try to perfect and perfect and perfect. And it’s never perfect.”

  As performances continued, Moayed gained glimpses into Robin’s world beyond his work, and a values system in which sobriety and charity had become inextricably connected. After one show, Moayed said, “a guy came up to me, with tattoos and a Mohawk and he must have been, like, twenty-seven. And I was like, ‘Hey.’ I didn’t know who he was. He was very kind, and I was like, ‘How do you know anyone here?’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, Robin’s my sponsor. And he flew me out.’ I was like, ‘Shut the fuck up.’” Later on, Moayed mentioned this encounter to Robin, who seemed unsurprised by it. “Robin was like, ‘Yeah, I had to put him in rehab,’” he said. “I was like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me with this right now? Who are you?’”